Director: Geoffrey Waite, Professor of German Studies, Cornell University
Debates about whether Nietzsche was ‘responsible’ for Italian Fascism and German National Socialism had begun already by the 1930s (including among the Fascists and Nazis themselves) and have been only partially superseded in polemic intensity, philological sophistication, and historical significance by more recent debates about the relationship of Heidegger, one of Nietzsche’s most obsessed and profound readers, to National Socialism – specifically the debate about whether Heidegger’s commitment to that movement was a merely contingent or instead a necessary feature of his extremely influential work.
In both cases, these debates involve academic disciplines (e.g. aesthetics and rhetoric, literary and cultural studies, philosophy and theology), but they have also extended into the global public sphere (e.g., Heidegger’s influence on political dissidents in the former East Bloc, on architects and city and regional planners, and on the deep-ecology movement). The general theoretical problem, also in both cases, is the precise nature of the relationship of philosophy (and art) to politics and society at large. The participants in all these debates include, implicitly when not explicitly, the most significant intellectuals and creative talents of the last and current century. Indeed, concern with Nietzsche and Heidegger in just this regard is the tertium quid that links otherwise often very disparate analytic tendencies: German philosophical hermeneutics and critical theory, French deconstruction and neo-Marxism, Anglo-Saxon pragmatics, and Straussian neo-liberalism. But none of these (with the only partial exception of the latter) have ever dealt with the specific problem addressed by this DAAD seminar.
After adumbrating a genealogy and map of those debates, we will locate Nietzsche and Heidegger (singly and together) within what I call the question of esoteric political philosophy. This is to say that we will locate them precisely as they (more or less tacitly, but then explicitly enough) locate themselves, namely, within the great tradition of esoteric writing-and thus its requirement to be ‘read between the lines.’ This ancient and trans-cultural tradition extends (in its Western version alone) from Pythagoras and Plato, as well as from the Talmud and Jesus’ employment of parabolic speech, to practitioners such as Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Boethius, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, Bodin, Bayle, Toland, Rousseau, Lessing, Gramsci, Althusser, and Leo Strauss-to name only a very few (and not to name, here, creative writers, artists, architects, and filmmakers).
Our reinsertion of Nietzsche and Heidegger into this, their own Affirmed tradition, has the effect of problematizing the entire debate about the relationship of (their) philosophy to politics insofar as the distinction between public or exoteric expression ‘for the many’ and private or exoteric expression ‘for the few’ logically and methodologically precedes our ability to ascertain any ideological ‘content’ in this time-honored way of writing, including, but only most notoriously, any ‘proto-Fascist’ or ‘pro-Nazi’ content in the seminal case of Nietzsche and Heidegger.
The DAAD seminar will thus not only discuss Nietzsche and Heidegger (including Heidegger’s peculiar Nietzsche) and their current influence on the humanities, social sciences, and political spheres, as well as the subtending esoteric tradition. For, and perhaps most important, we will also develop the techniques required to read, analyze, and criticize all those in our current situation of globalization. Finally at stake, then, is whether ‘Left-Nietzschean’ and ‘Left-Heideggerian’ are contradictions in terms (or at least exceptionally premature concepts), given the constitutively esoteric dimension of their thinking, writing, and mostly unwitting legacy.
Application deadlines : March 1, 2006.
For further information about the seminar content, to request an application, or to apply, please contact Robin Fostel at:
Cornell University
Institute for German Cultural Studies
726 University Avenue
Ithaca, NY 14850
Phone: (607) 255-8408
Fax: (607) 255-6585
e-mail: rtf8@cornell.edu
DAAD awards a small number of grants of $3,200 to cover tuition, travel and room and board during the seminar. The duration of the seminar is typically four to six weeks.
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