Abstract

The publication of the Black Notebooks has raised again the well-known querelle on “Heidegger and politics”, or more precisely “Heidegger and Nazism”, or even better “Heidegger and the Jews”. However, if we accurately read the Notebooks, we can notice that they do not add any new information to what we already knew about Heidegger’s controversial political relationship with Nazism. Rather, in the Notebooks, we can find Heidegger’s ontological disengagement from reality, which does not have a political character. Heidegger’s tone became increasingly apocalyptic, and the degeneration of power of the Reich was progressively becoming clearer to his eyes during the 30s. In Heidegger’s historical-ontological perspective, the Reich, which for him had to represent a counter-power to the European crisis, was transforming into a mere version of machination, another version of that technological operative enframing calculation which was metaphysically penetrating the “present”. Heidegger’s assessment condemns the entire aeon of the present time – the world, life, history and the humankind – to a pure abyss of a gnostic anathema. Within this anathema, there is no hope: the only one left is confided to the mystical knowledge of those few, chosen prophets able to foresee a new beginning for the Being to come. Hence, in the Black Notebooks, we assist to the crisis of the question concerning the meaning of Being as it was presented in Being and Time, in which Being was highly characterized by the concrete, historical and existential nature of its phenomenology. But in the Notebooks, we cannot find anything that can serve us as an authentic “custody” for Being.