From: "Stuart Elden" <stuartelden-AT-btconnect.com>
Subject: RE: Heidegger's Bravery
Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2003 08:22:22 +0100


Jud -

The volume of new messages makes it difficult for me to keep up with the contours of this increasingly diverse discussion.

All I would say here is that you really should read Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life. I find it incredible that you haven't already. It's a pretty dry document based historical study, very critical, largely accurate. It seems to me that it's essential reading for anyone who is interested in this topic. It's far too vastly detailed for me to post details up here, but of course I discuss a range of these questions in my book Mapping the Present, and a couple of other papers. One of the reviews of the book said this:-

"It is scrupulously fair in its treatment of Heidegger's politics, never shying away from his creepier side and especially his longing for a place where it would all come together (though this was decidedly not Los Angeles) and yet also showing how Heidegger's thought often ran exactly and knowingly counter to such (un)wholesome desires" (Nigel Thrift, Antipode: A Journal of Radical Geography, 2002).


Moving on, briefly, and probably for the last time...

How you can possibly say there is no evidence for anything strikes me as incredible on two counts:- 

1. you haven't read everything (nor have any of us), but equally you've not read very much (the internet is a very poor, at best crude, research tool) and there are some very important, careful, critical books and articles out there

2. in the same post you parade something which is not based on evidence at all. you list a number of dates and then a paragraph beginning 'my theory' for which you cannot provide evidence.

And then, and this makes me very angry, you add to my last line

> > Much more can/will be said, but...for now the cover-up goes on. WHY?

If you can't recognise that I am not trying to cover-up but to actually do some of the detailed work in investigating the relation between Heidegger's thought and politics that you are unable or unwilling to do, then there really is little point in attempting any kind of conversation.

Stuart



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