Betraying the own-most: Heidegger and pitfalls of being-there

The kind invitation of Benedikt Korf to make a contribution to the Heidegger debate, which once again burst out after the publication of the “Black Notebooks”, was at the same time welcome and challenging. The debate had already ignited a discussion among us, the ones co-authoring this commentary, as most of the reactions to Heidegger’s scandalous politics seemed to follow quite familiar paths. Ever since the book of Victor Farias Heidegger and Nazism (1989) came out in the end of the 1980s, Heidegger’s political engagement, its relation to his philosophical corpus in particular, has been one of the long-running disputes in the fields of philosophy, social sciences and beyond. Heidegger’s engagement with National Socialism has been revealed to be much more profound than Heidegger himself had led us to believe, as evidenced by the posthumously published Der Spiegel interview (Heidegger, 1981). The amount of commentaries is overwhelming. On the one hand, are the scandalous readings poorly engaging with Heidegger’s philosophical thinking, while on the other, the philosophical commentaries separating “Heidegger the man” solely from the “Heidegger the philosopher”. It hardly comes as a surprise that this ambiguity can be found also in the reception of Heidegger in the geographical literature(See Harvey, 1996:299–302; Massey, 2004; cf. Elden, 2005; Paddock, 2004; Rose, 2012). The critiques in particular have presented confusing readings from time to time, that have framed Heidegger’s political engagement during the 1930s as an outcome of the concepts Heidegger actually developed much later on(Malpas, 2006:17–27; Joronen, 2013a:629).