Philosophers have long struggled to reconcile Martin Heidegger's involvement in Nazism with his status as one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century. The recent publication of his Black Notebooks has reignited fierce debate on the subject. These thousand-odd pages of jotted observations profoundly challenge our image of the quiet philosopher's exile in the Black Forest, revealing the shocking extent of his anti-Semitism for the first time. For much of the philosophical community, the Black Notebooks have been either used to discredit Heidegger or seen as a bibliographical detail irrelevant to his thought. Yet, in this new book, renowned philosopher Donatella Di Cesare argues that Heidegger's "metaphysical anti-Semitism" was a central part of his philosophical project. Within the context of the Nuremberg race laws, Heidegger felt compelled to define Jewishness and its relationship to his concept of Being. Di Cesare shows that Heidegger saw the Jews as the agents of a modernity that had disfigured the spirit of the West. In a deeply disturbing extrapolation, he presented the Holocaust as both a means for the purification of Being and the Jews' own "self-destruction": a process of death on an industrialized scale that was the logical conclusion of the acceleration in technology they themselves had brought about. Situating Heidegger's anti-Semitism firmly within the context of his thought, this groundbreaking work will be essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy and history as well as the many readers interested in Heidegger's life, work, and legacy.

Table of Contents:
Foreword page vii I Between Politics and Philosophy 1 1. A Media Affair 1 2. A Nazi by Chance . . . 3 3. Biographical Detail, or Philosophical Nexus? 4 4. Heidegger, an Anti-Semite? 6 5. What Has Been Left Unsaid about the Jewish Question 8 6. The Black Notebooks 9 7. Reductio ad Hitlerum: On the Posthumous Trial of Heidegger 11 8. A Calling to Account? 13 9. From Derrida to Schürmann: Toward an Anarchic Reading 14 10. Taming Heidegger 18 11. The Exclusion of Nazism from Philosophy 19 12. Philosophical Commitment and Political Decision 20 II Philosophy and Hatred of the Jews 22 1. Luther, Augustine, and “the Jews and Their Lies” 22 2. The “Jewish Question” in Philosophy 26 3. Kant and the “Euthanasia of Judaism” 32 4. Hegel and the Jew without Property 36 5. “Anti-anti-Semite?” Nietzsche, the Antichrist, and the Falsification of Values 46 6. Lies and Fakery: The Non-being of the Jew in Mein Kampf 59 III The Question of Being and the Jewish Question 65 1. The Night of Being 65 2. In An Esoteric Tone . . . 68 3. Anti-Semitism and Never-dispelled Doubts 69 4. Metaphors of an Absence 75 5. The Jew and the Oblivion of Being 77 6. The Greeks, the Germans – and the Jews 80 7. The Rootless Agents of Acceleration 84 8. Against the Jewish Intellectuals 88 9. Geist and ruach: The “Original Fire” and the Spectral Breath 93 10. Machination and Power 96 11. The Desertification of the Earth 99 12. The Apocalyptic and the “Prince of This World” 101 13. The Deracification of Peoples 103 14. Race or Rank? 106 15. The Metaphysics of Blood 110 16. “My ‘Attack’ on Husserl” 115 17. Heidegger, Jünger, and the Topology of the Jew 123 18. The Enemy: Heidegger versus Schmitt 129 19. Polemos and Total War 142 20. Weltjudentum: The Jewish World Conspiracy 148 21. Judeo-Bolshevism 154 22. Weltlos – Without World: The Jew and the Stone 161 23. Metaphysical Anti-Semitism 164 24. The Jew and the “Purification” of Being 169 25. “What Is It about No-thing?” 172 IV After Auschwitz 175 1. Bellum judaicum 175 2. To Abdicate to Silence? 178 3. “The Production of Corpses” and Ontic Indifference 184 4. The Ontological Massacre: Parmenides and Auschwitz 188 5. “Do They Die? They Do Not Die, They Are Liquidated. . .” 191 6. Positionality, Technology, Crime 193 7. The Northeast Wind: Heading Toward Defeat 196 8. Selbstvernichtung: The Shoah and the “Self-Annihilation” of the Jews 199 9. The Betrayal of the “German Essence” 202 10. If Germany is a Lager, Then Who Is the Victim? 206 11. The “Question of Guilt” and the Crime Against the Germans 211 12. The “Note for Jackasses”: Against the Jewish Prophecy 212 13. World Democracy and the Dictatorship of Monotheism 218 14. “An Old Spirit of Revenge Makes its Way upon the Earth” 220 15. Whether It Is Possible to Forgive a Rabbi 223 16. Cousin Gross and Cousin Klein: Jews and Family Resemblances 224 17. The Oblivion of the Jew: The Hidden Debt 229 18. Where Paul is Hidden 233 19. The Future of Being and the Hebrew Name 238 20. A Pagan Landscape 240 21. The Other Beginning, the Beginning of the Other: Anarchy, Birth 241 22. An Angel in the Black Forest: Apocalypse and Revolution 243 Notes 248 Index 303