For the past three decades, debates on Martin Heidegger's work have been dominated - and seriously obscured - by an obsessive return to two questions that had long been answered in the affirmative: the question of the philosopher's active participation in the National Socialist movement, and the question of the affinity between Heidegger's thought and the ideology of the party of which he became a member in May 1933. The aim of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's lectures was to focus on the possible systematic value of Heideggerian philosophy for our present ("Can Heidegger be avoided?") and on the historical and institutional reasons for its survival to the present day ("Why Heidegger has not been forgotten"), starting from the - no doubt painful - certainty of his commitment to and intellectual affinity with Nazism.
If our epistemological present is above all characterized by the inability to overcome the progressive estrangement between the Cartesian subject as observer of the world and the world of things as object of observation, a process that clashes each time with the desire - reputedly "naive", but nonetheless powerful - to return to the referential regimes of truth ; and if it's true that the probably exponential growth of our knowledge is accompanied by the dramatic accumulation of essential practical problems that resist solution, it's easy to understand the enduring fascination with Heidegger's thought. It lies in the openly anti-Cartesian - and hence anti-modernist - tendency of his fundamental epistemological presuppositions. First and foremost, this tendency is represented by the notion of " Dasein ", which replaces a notion of subjectivity based exclusively on the cogito by adding a spatial dimension and a primary proximity to the things of the world; but this anti-mernist tendency is also confused with the notion of " Sein " ("Being"), which is different from that of "sense" insofar as it participates in the dimension of substance; and also different from the notion of "object" insofar as it exchanges the object's passivity, its epistemological inertia, for the initiative that Being takes towards its "self-disclosure".
On the historical side, one of the central conditions for the survival of Heideggerian thought has been an intellectual habitus of reception which, instead of binding itself to the (perhaps impossible) obligation of an overall reading of his work, has taken the liberty of isolating certain philosophies from it, letting itself be inspired by them, and even combining them in a free and associative way. This is typical of the intense and extremely varied reception of Heidegger's writings among a large number of French philosophers, from Alexandre Kojève in 1933, through the particularly productive assimilation of his texts in the early works of Jean-Paul Sartre, to the books of Jacques Derrida. If no single coherent trend dominates the various French readings of Heidegger, it is nevertheless true that they have been the strongest reason for the persistence of his intellectual presence.
Finally, a question posed by Jacques Derrida - whether Heidegger would have been able to rank among the most important philosophers of the twentieth century had it not been for the proximity of his thought to National Socialist ideology - leads us to a solution to the enigma represented by the obsessive return to his biography. Without a doubt, the notion of " Dasein " is close to the "blood and soil" (" Blut und Boden ") values of fascism and the S.A., but in a cultural moment such as ours, which has returned to the habit of reading the texts of the classics in an existential or even existentialist way, i.e., by establishing a relationship between the texts and the problems of the individual, in such a moment, biographical fates - even if they are guilty fates - increase the fascination for certain works, including philosophical works.
If Heidegger's thought is inevitable for us, this is because it would be irresponsible to deprive ourselves of his inspirational energy. But in order to benefit from this energy, we must be willing to pay the price of a proximity that risks contaminating us. It may be an acceptable price - but it's a heavy one, and never without problems. At the same time, this price, this risk of contamination, has the ability to put us at a distance and keep us there. In this way, we can expose ourselves to Heidegger's philosophy without running the risk of losing ourselves in it.