Overview
Heidegger and “the Jews” is a short book of two interrelated essays by Jean-François Lyotard, translated from the French by Andreas Michel and Mark S. Roberts and published with a foreword by David Carroll. The two essays are distinct in focus but share a single set of preoccupations: the relation of the West to what it cannot assimilate, the meaning of the extermination of the Jews for philosophical thought, and the problem of how to read Martin Heidegger once his adherence to National Socialism is taken as established rather than as rumour.
The first essay bears the title “the jews,” and the second, simply, “Heidegger.” Both respond to a specific conjuncture: the French publication, in the late 1980s, of previously unavailable speeches, lectures, and letters by Heidegger, and the violent intellectual quarrel that followed, in which commentators either vindicated or condemned him. The book is not a biography of Heidegger, nor a history of Nazism; it is a philosophical intervention concerned with how thought should conduct itself before these materials.
“the jews”
The opening essay works by way of a deliberate typographic and conceptual displacement. Lyotard writes the term in the lower case, in the plural, and inside quotation marks. This is not a stylistic flourish but the argument itself: “the jews” so written do not designate an empirical people, a religion, or a nation, but a position — that of the outsider whose very existence is a disturbance to the West’s image of itself.
Lyotard assembles around this term a series of figures who are similarly unassimilable: the artist, the anarchist, the black, the homeless, the outsider of every description. What these figures share is that they cannot be integrated into the West’s dream of development and fulfilment, into its project of realizing itself completely, without remainder. “The jews” name the remainder. They are the disruptive, alien force that reminds the West of what it has not mastered, cannot master, and wishes to forget.
The essay draws heavily on psychoanalytic motifs. The “jews,” in Lyotard’s usage, are bound up with the immemorial and with the forgotten — with that in thought and in the psyche which is older than any recollection and which no anamnesis can fully recover. The unconscious, on this account, is itself the “jew” within; Freud’s account of the psyche as something never fully present to itself becomes one of the ways in which the figure is articulated. Lyotard also engages with the question of the debt, of election, and of the obligation to bear witness to an otherness that cannot be represented — themes that place him close to, though not identical with, Freud’s late writing on Moses.
Crucially, the essay insists that the term is not a definition of the Jews. Lyotard is explicit that not all Jews are “jews” in his sense, and that one need not be Jewish to occupy that position. The Jews are, however, the historical instance in which the West encountered this otherness most violently and named it most persistently; they are, so to speak, the privileged witness to what the West wishes to forget. The extermination is thus approached not merely as an atrocity among others but as an attempt to eliminate the very reminder of the immemorial — to solve the problem of otherness by destroying its bearer.
The essay’s mode is deliberately unsystematic: it proceeds by fragments, aphorism, and allusion rather than by a single continuous argument, refusing to deliver a positive doctrine of what “the jews” are. That refusal is itself part of the book’s position. To define the term, to convert it into a concept with determinate content, would be to repeat the gesture the essay is written against.
“Heidegger”
The second essay turns from the figure to the case. Taking as its occasion the controversy over Heidegger’s Nazism — the notorious rectoral address, the political speeches, the statements about the “inner truth and greatness” of the movement, and above all the question of his silence about the extermination — Lyotard sets out to establish how the “Heidegger affair” ought to be thought.
He formulates a set of rules for interpreting the affair. Most of them call for close textual reading rather than moral pronouncement: the texts must be read in their own idiom, in their context, and with attention to what they say as well as to what they withhold. Lyotard’s objection is to a criticism that contents itself with indignation. Denunciation of Heidegger, he argues, can itself be a way of not reading him — a way of settling the matter so that nothing further needs to be thought. What is required instead is a patient working-through, a labour of remembering that does not permit the affair to be filed away.
Across the essay Lyotard considers the character of Heidegger’s political engagement: whether his involvement was an accident of circumstance or bound up with the most intimate tendencies of his thought; what it means that a thinker of Being should have placed himself under a Führer; what the relation is between Heidegger’s thinking of history, destiny, and the West, on the one hand, and the political catastrophe on the other. He asks how to read Heidegger’s silences — the failure to speak of the extermination, the evasions of the post-war texts — as something other than mere evasion, without excusing them. And he asks what it would mean to take Heidegger’s thought seriously enough to turn it against his politics: whether the resources exist within that thought for thinking what Heidegger himself did not, or could not, think.
Running through the essay is the question of address. To whom does philosophy speak, and in whose name? Lyotard is alert to the fact that the “affair” is not only a matter of Heidegger’s texts but of the intellectual community that reads them, and of the demands for judgment that community makes. The demand to condemn or to acquit is, for Lyotard, a demand to close the question; the essay resists it in favour of keeping the question open, so that the wrong done is not sealed over by a verdict.
The two essays are thus connected by more than juxtaposition. The “jews” of the first essay are the figure of what cannot be represented and cannot be forgotten; Heidegger, in the second, is the thinker whose silence about the extermination exemplifies the West’s relation to precisely that figure. To read Heidegger after the affair is to be placed in the position the first essay describes: confronted with an otherness that the text does not master, and obliged to decide whether to forget it, denounce it, or think it.
Character of the Book
The volume is brief and compressed, written in an allusive and often fragmentary idiom that offers few concessions to the reader. It presupposes familiarity both with Heidegger’s texts and with the terms of the French debate into which it intervened. Its concern throughout is less with establishing facts about Heidegger’s life than with the ethical and philosophical question of what it means to think after the extermination — how to remember what the West wished to forget, and how to read a thinker whose thought is indispensable and whose politics are unforgivable.
The Figure in Quotation Marks
Lyotard’s title places “the jews” in quotation marks for a reason. The phrase is not a sociological description of Jewish people but the name of a position in Western discourse: the other that the West cannot assimilate, represent, or remember without doing violence to it. The book treats this figure as internal to the tradition Heidegger inherits, not external to it. The West’s memory of its own origins—Greek, Christian, philosophical—is constituted by what it excludes; “the jews” mark that exclusion. The extermination is thus not merely an event that philosophy must judge from outside; it is an event that exposes a limit internal to philosophy’s own economy of memory and representation.
Memory Without Mastery
The volume distinguishes between a memory that appropriates and a memory that remains obligated to what it cannot master. Heidegger’s silence about the extermination is read in this light: not simply as a moral failure of an individual, but as a symptom of a thought that could not include the extermination without subordinating it to a narrative of Being, destiny, and the West. Lyotard asks whether thinking can bear witness to what it cannot represent, and whether philosophy can remember without turning the other into an object of knowledge. The book’s ethical demand is not to forget and not to absolve, but to keep faith with what resists representation.
Philosophy and Politics
Lyotard refuses both the separation of Heidegger’s thought from his politics and the reduction of his thought to his politics. The book examines how a thinking of history and destiny could make the political catastrophe thinkable in the wrong way, or leave it unthought. It does not acquit Heidegger by distinguishing the man from the thinker, nor does it dismiss the thought as merely Nazi. Its wager is that the relation between the two must be thought, and that this thinking is itself a task of memory.
Significance
The volume’s contribution lies less in a factual account of Heidegger’s involvement than in its demand that philosophy confront its own limits. It treats the extermination as an event that cannot be assimilated into a philosophy of history without betrayal, and it treats Heidegger as a thinker whose silence must be read rather than merely condemned. The book thus belongs to the literature on philosophy and politics, but its distinctive demand is ethical and methodological at once: to read without absolving, to remember without mastering, and to think the other without reducing it to the same.
