Heidegger and "the jews"

by Jean-François Lyotard, Andreas Michel (Translator), Mark Roberts (Translator)

German (translation)Original French

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, France

144 pages, Paperback

First published September 17, 1990

About the author

Jean-François Lyotard (DrE, Literature, University of Paris X, 1971) was a French philosopher and literary theorist. He is well-known for his articulation of postmodernism after the late 1970s and for his analysis of the impact of postmodernity on the human condition.

He went to primary school at the Paris Lycées Buffon and Louis-le-Grand and later began studying philosophy at the Sorbonne. After graduation, in 1950, he took a position teaching philosophy in Constantine in French East Algeria. He married twice: in 1948 to Andrée May, with whom he had two daughters, and for a second time in 1993 to the mother of his son, who was born in 1986.

Reviews

[Alixandra Gould]

read this if you want a better understanding antisemitism or aggression in general.

[Mariam Rawwas]

Lyotard has been accused of troping the figure of "the jew" in this text, but isn't his point precisely the fact that the Jewish people are subjected to scapegoating because of this mechanism of troping, this uncanny doubling in which they symbolically figure both as a specific category and a general "type"? Nevertheless, the entire first section is a reading of Freud on repression in relation to memory, while the latter is a short excursus on Heidegger in the wake of Farias' 1987 publication which largely takes its cues from Lacoue-Labarthe on the same topic.

[Sam Bolton]

Read for class.

[Corey]

Normally I don't count books on GR that I only intended to partially read in the first place, but I'm behind on my "reading goal," so alas.

Lyotard takes the Holocaust to psychoanalysis in the first essay. Ideally the reader here would be very well-versed in Freud, which I am not. Also helpful to have read Wiesel, who Lyotard spends a lot of time on. All in all a pretty compelling essay. David Caroll's introduction is also pretty fantastic.

[Amarpal]

To sum it all up, history is doomed to repeat itself and the Nazi's were bad guys. Nice little reality check there.