The Unthought Debt: Heidegger and the Hebraic Heritage

(review)

Michael Fagenblat

Common Knowledge, Volume 15, Issue 3, Fall 2009, pp. 507-508 (Review)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/316393

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and children. Kommunalka, the communal apartment — with its atmosphere of

5 07
squabble and mutual denunciation among families who used the same kitchen
and bathroom — turned out to be the best approximation, and simultaneously

Lit tle Rev iews

a hysterical parody, of a communist society. There is no better way to define
the nature of family, personhood, and privacy than via the history of their most
systematic destruction. Though this book is the result of painstaking histori-
cal and documentary research, it also offers an “apophatic” description of those
quintessential moral ideas and qualities that had been severely tested by Stalin
and eventually triumphed over Stalinism.
— Mikhail Epstein
doi 10.1215/0961754x-2009-032

Marlène Zarader, The Unthought Debt: Heidegger and the Hebraic Heritage,
trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 255 pp.

Zarader’s striking assertion is that Heidegger is the thinker who, more than any
other, “restored to Western thought the determinations central to the Hebraic
universe,” even as it is he, more than any other, who “effaced” Hebraism “from
thought and, more broadly, from the West itself.” In what sense does Heidegger
covertly or inadvertently Judaize philosophy? His idea that time is not a homog-
enous sequence of nows but is instead tensed toward an unforeseeable event — the
idea is curiously Hebraic. Likewise his ideas that words are not merely signs but
bear the presence of things themselves; that thinking is not foremost logic and
representation but thanking and memory; that truth is not correspondence but
revelation and concealment; that poetry is best understood as prophecy and
prayer; and that thought is saturated with interpretation so that philosophy itself
is an endless hermeneutic (or midrash). At almost every point that Heidegger
turns away from metaphysics and epistemology, he pivots on the Hebraic heri-
tage. When the old Nazi lectured in France at the Cerisy Colloquium in 1955,
Paul Ricoeur confronted him with a question to that effect. But Heidegger mis-
prized his interrogator, shrugged his shoulders, and simply reasserted that what
he was uncovering in the premetaphysical heritage of the Greeks had nothing to
do with “biblical dogmatics.”
It has fallen to Zarader, a Heidegger scholar with impeccable credentials,
to expose the profound extent of his “unavowed dependence” on the Hebraic.
She demonstrates that Heidegger’s return to what is unthought and unapparent
in the Greek tradition appropriates some of the most blatantly apparent features
of the Hebraic tradition. As she pithily concludes: “I am not doubting that such
experiences might be attributed to the Greeks’ unthought, to that which they had
 not thought. I have simply sought to show that these experiences were present
508

elsewhere. In clear terms, I in no way assert that these experiences could not be
found, between the lines, among the Greeks. I am simply recalling that they
Common Knowledge

were set down, in letters black on white, among the Jews.” In addition to Heideg­
ger scholars, anyone interested in modern Jewish thought will be indebted to
Zarader, for her work indirectly demonstrates why post-Heideggerian philoso-
phy is so amenable to Judaization. They should also be unnerved by her book,
whose conclusions must at some stage cut both ways. For if Heidegger betrays an
unthought debt to the Hebraic tradition, this indiscrete affinity is also painfully
manifest in the proximity between undeniable strains of Jewish thought and his
account of the political, with its emphasis on the heritage, language, and authen-
tic destiny of the Volk.
— Michael Fagenblat
doi 10.1215/0961754x-2009-033

Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil:

A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 724 pp.

Declaration of interest: Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term genocide, hired me
as a teenager to write a chapter for his projected encyclopedia of genocide. Kier-
nan, an expert on the mass murders in Cambodia, covers much of the territory,
from ancient Greece and Rome to modern Iraq, describing in sober prose the
efforts of human beings to exterminate their fellows. Why do we do it? Kiernan
offers four motives: “Racism, expansionism, agrarianism, and antiquity” — that
is, the dream of a pure past. Farmers wipe out pastoral societies to obtain their
land, supposing that agriculture equals civilization. Racism is relatively modern,
though with roots in Aristotle’s justification of natural slavery. History plays an
active role in normalizing genocide: Cortés exhorted his troops in Mexico to
imitate the Roman armies. Kiernan concludes: “The modern era and modern
genocide both began with a revival of interest in the ancient world. . . . Al-Qaeda
still sees itself as refighting ancient battles . . . to establish an ethnically pure,
agrarian utopia.” Palestinians do not earn a mention, and resentment as a motive
is played down. But Kiernan’s four reasons recur with deadening frequency.
— David Konstan
doi 10.1215/0961754x-2009-034