I.5. Arendt, Heidegger et le « déluge » d’Auschwitz

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This article offers a critical analysis of the ways in which Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt elaborated a “revisionist” rereading of modernity that reversed the assignment of true responsibilities. They linked National Socialism to the modern subject, reason and the Enlightenment, all of which it had targeted, rather than linking it to the extermination-based vision of the world that laid the groundwork for and implemented the destruction of the European Jews. Moreover, Arendt raises the camps to the level of paradigms of our modern egalitarian societies. She does so without seriously accounting for the distinction between the concentration camps and the extermination camps, despite the fact that this distinction was specifically documented as early as 1946 in The Black Book, which she critiqued in oddly negative terms in a published review. In a letter to Karl Jaspers published in Germany in 1948, she speaks of Auschwitz as a “flood” and maintains that it is necessary to leave the factual territory in order to overcome the Jewish people’s “blind hatred” of the Germans, which was “created in the gas chambers.” Hatred is no longer ascribed to the exterminators but to the exterminated people! Lastly, the article challenges interpretations that hold that we need Heidegger in order to “conceive the Shoah.”