French Interpretations of Heidegger: An Exceptional Reception (review)

The topic addressed underpins much of contemporary French thought, from existentialism to politics and technology, and from deconstruction to the literary. Interventions such as the current one should therefore be applauded for privileging particular questions or approaches. In this light it is a shame that this volume’s fourteen essays, many of them excellent, should be preceded by an introduction which is barely more than a consecutive summary of them. Most of those essays address a single issue or thinker in relation to Heidegger: the exceptions are the instructive overviews provided by Dastur and Janicaud (Pettigrew and Raffoul are preparing an eagerly-awaited translation of the latter’s important work Heidegger en France [2001]). Beyond this distinction, one can perhaps see that the essays intervene in three arenas. The first is the confrontation between French philosophies of consciousness (Cartesian subjectivity and its inheritors) and philosophies of existence (phenomenology, ontology, existentialism). This means that the fundamental role this confrontation played in Heidegger’s thinking can be fruitfully explored by French thinkers who have an intimate knowledge of the former metaphysical system. Essays in the current volume on the positions of Foucault, Levinas, and Sartre in relation to Heidegger pick their way through these debates with varying but often considerable success. The second arena is Heidegger’s thinking of the suspensions and framings (in all senses) that take effect between the world, work, or truth on the one hand, and literature or poetry on the other. The essays addressing the relation of Heidegger to Deleuze, Derrida, Irigaray, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Merleau-Ponty gravitate around this aspect (the penultimate particularly impressively). Not only does Heidegger seek to go beyond metaphysics, then; it seems that he also allows a swathe of literary-critical approaches to go beyond and revitalise themselves. It should be said in passing that the volume makes little or no mention of an older generation of writers such as René Char or Maurice Blanchot. This is a particular shame in the latter case, given that Heidegger referred to his writing as that of ‘la meilleure tête pensante en France’. The third and last arena, where a rejuvenation of language is also explored, is the increasingly theological aspect of Heidegger’s later work, as well as of recently-available earlier texts. Several essays in this book address these developments. Two of them, by important figures Jean Greisch and Jean-Luc Nancy (the latter’s chapter appearing somewhat unnecessarily for the fourth time in as many years) provide insightful discussions of Heidegger’s ‘last God’; a third addresses Heidegger’s relation to Judaism and hermeneutics as it is played out between factical and textual dwelling. This volume, then, moves across these overlapping areas, and as such it will be of interest to many readers, especially (but not only) those in French studies. The few exasperatingly overblown essays are more than matched by the many valuable or even brilliant interventions.