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17 Chapter 1 Interpretations of Heidegger and Marx K A R L M A R X A N D Martin Heidegger are each in their own right among the most commented-on and discussed thinkers of the recent period. Each has had a formative influence on not just one, but many, schools of thought, interpretation, and in Marx’s case, political practice. Even among those who would bear the name “Marxist,” we find vastly differing interpretations of Marx. On the other hand, those who have attempted to place Marx and Heidegger side by side or put them into dialogue of any kind have been few. Philosophically, both thinkers stand in a strong tradition of writing after Hegel—and of the self-conscious repudiation of Hegel, although for Marx and Heidegger this takes quite different forms. Both are strongly influenced by Aristotle (as indeed, was Hegel), although this book will only glimpse, and only very much later, the confrontation with Aristotle that underlies the dialogue between them. Heidegger apparently only rarely, and then never systematically, engaged with Marx, but as we shall see later, there are constant intimations that his reading of Marx (and other Marxists, Lenin included) ran far deeper than is commonly supposed. This chapter begins with Heidegger’s most publicly visible commentary on Marx (a commentary he makes in other places in the same decade)1 before examining how other thinkers have sought to bring Marx and Heidegger together. This provides the preliminary backdrop of the contrasting understanding of the “productive dialogue” that the following chapters will develop, a dialogue which (to my knowledge) has not been attempted on this scale before. To bring Marx and Heidegger into proximity in this way immediately brings before us the common language that they share. Marx and Heidegger both inquire into, and take up, the range of terms that was established before them, especially in the tradition of German idealism, beginning with Kant, and more fully developed in Hegel and Friedrich Schelling. Marx and Hei1 . See for just two examples Martin Heidegger, “Zeichen” (GA13), 211; “Kants These über das Sein” (GA9), 447. Chapter 1 18 2. See the discussion of this on 130. 3. The interview with Richard Wisser was broadcast on the German television channel ZDF on September 24, 1969, and again the day after Heidegger’s death, on May 27, 1976. 4. Karl Marx, “Thesen über Feuerbach” (MEW3), 7. degger both speak of the nation or people (Volk), but also Dasein (existence, presence), which immediately throws into relief much of the commentary on these two terms in subsequent literature (some of which we will examine) that has understood Heidegger’s use of the term Volk in Being and Time in 1927 to be evidence of his proto-Nazism, or Dasein to have been a term unique to Heidegger. It is worth recalling how recently the German language had become a philosophical language—arguably only with Kant. Kant’s immediate predecessors, the Silesian Christian Wolff, the Berliner Alexander Baumgarten, and before them the almost pan-European Gottfried Leibniz, had all written the burden of their philosophical work in either Latin, or in Leibniz’s case, Latin and French. German had, until the Enlightenment in which Kant, and to a lesser extent Gotthold Lessing, were such central figures , been a demotic, rather than technical, speech. When Marx speaks in 1843 of how Germany assumed only theoretically (and so in its philosophy) the progress that other Western nations had made in practice (and so in fulfilment of their history),2 he is speaking of a Germany that is itself at the time a theoretical rather than geographical unity (attaining its greatest size only in 1870 under Bismarck), and a philosophy that was truly articulated in the German language only within living memory. The freshness and promise of all Marx names with this statement is barely visible to us now, and yet is itself for Marx the very evidence of an upsurge of possibility of vast import, proportion, and vitality. In 1969 Heidegger raised the question of Marx, as if spontaneously, in a television interview with Richard Wisser.3 Taking Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” from a bookshelf adjacent to where he was seated, Heidegger proceeded (without looking up the place) to read the eleventh (last) thesis and to comment on it:4 The question of the demand for world change leads us back to Karl Marx’s frequently quoted statement from his “Theses on Feuerbach.” I would like to quote it exactly...

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