A few things in passing:

An article in the Guardian refers to Dr Gary Day, whom I remember as leftier-than-me by quite a long shot, as a “right-wing De Montfort University don”. Some mistake, surely? Gary is, amongst other things, the author of the introduction to the Harper Collins edition of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists…

Other than that, the article’s the same old tired stuff about the “social confidence” that enables public schoolboys to pass themselves off as brainier than they actually are. This is really a bit weak, because:

• a) nobody’s actually fooled for a minute: public school-educated ninnies betray themselves the instant they open their mouths, although I admit that this is no impediment to their gaining admittance to a nice Oxbridge college to study PPE, and
• b) it is perfectly possible to be staggeringly intellectually conceited, as I was at 18 and arguably still am today, and profoundly socially ill-at-ease at the same time.

The roots of that sort of intellectual confidence (which is what the interviewers at Oxbridge are really after, much of the time) are quite distinct, it seems to me, from the roots of the “social confidence” of people with serious money and status behind them. (It is, still, a sort of confidence trick, which depends somewhat on the ability to keep multiple rhetorical plates spinning simultaneously - a talent which should not be mistaken for other, potentially more useful, kinds of ability).

That was Thing One. Thing Two is the Was Derrida A Nazi-Sympathizer-Sympathizer? “debate”. We have Richard Wolin - and, I suppose, David Lehman - to thank for this one. The story goes something like this: Derrida didn’t perform what some people consider to be the necessary rites of exorcism over Nazi-tainted thinkers like Heidegger and Paul de Man (very different cases, incidentally) and is therefore tainted himself and should be exorcised with maximum expediency (or “extreme prejudice”, let’s say).

Relatively few of the hacks promulgating this spiel bother to mention Derrida’s lengthy discussion of “Nazi theologian” Carl Schmitt in Politics of Friendship, maybe because they’re ignorant of its existence and maybe because everybody always knew Schmitt was a Nazi and there were no “revelations” to suggest that ideas that had once been taken in good faith had been secretly tainted with Nazism all along. The play here is for someone like Wolin to argue that if the “postmodernists” hadn’t been so seduced by relativist irrationalism they would have known what Wolin and Lehman, undoubtedly, knew all along, even prior to the “revelations”: that Heidegger’s philosophy was pure Nazi apologetics, that de Man’s deconstruction was a way of evading certain rather pressing issues of historical guilt.

Heidegger was actually a Nazi, in the sense in which, say, no socialist has ever actually been a Socialist (since True Socialism, according to its adherents, has never once in the history of mankind left the daintiest footprint in the soil of the wretched earth): he committed what we might call “Nazi acts”, mostly of a low and shameful rather than spectacularly hideous nature. As a card-carrying party member, he did speak up for Nazism on occasion, most infamously affirming the “inner truth and greatness” of the Nazi “movement” in an address he gave as Rector of Freiberg University. He was not severely penalized during the period of German “de-Nazification”, although this is not necessarily because his crimes were not severe. After the war, he maintained a unbroken silence about Nazism and the crimes committed in its name, refusing even the approaches of his Jewish admirer, the poet Paul Celan.

Heidegger was also actually a philosopher, and the question is whether these two actualities coincide to any significant extent. It should be noted that Derrida thought, and said, that they did: that while they are not the same actuality, while there is a remainder of the philosophy that is not given to Nazism (and, no doubt, an un-philosophized remnant in the Nazi affiliation), there is nevertheless a dimension of Heidegger’s work that supports and affirms Nazi ideology even while the rest of his philosophy would tend to undermine it. Even while Heidegger sought the de-struction (Ab-bauen, “unbuilding”) of the edifice of Western metaphysics, he exempted a certain kernel of meaning from that de-struction. Derrida argued that it was this exemption, this special pleading on behalf of certain concepts, that connected Heidegger’s philosophy with Nazi ideology. It is an affair of two blindnesses: the self-blinding of Heidegger’s Abbauen with regards to “spirit” (Geist) and the self-blinding of his Nazi affiliation, which required that he fail to recognise the self-blinding movement of ideology and instead identify Nazism with the “essential” conflict between the German/Aryan “spirit” and the corrosive force of modern technological rationality.

(What was perhaps most “blind” about this identification was that it failed to recognise how Nazism, as a totalitarian ideology that had captured the entire productive apparatus of a modern European state, embodied in the most lethal way possible the “corrosive force of modern technological rationality”. Mechanized infantry, loftiest of Civilisation’s goals!)

Whatever this argument is (and I don’t think one has to find it persuasive to acknowledge this), it is not apologetics. Derrida is doing the very opposite of making excuses, trying to limit the damage caused by the “revelations” of Heidegger’s Nazi affiliation, or covering up his own Heideggerian affiliation (as the vulgar genealogists would have it: Nietzsche begat Heidegger begat Derrida). What Derrida attempts to do is to locate the very point where Heidegger’s philosophy fails in its own commitment to truth, the point where an inner falsity and meanness betrays itself.

The case of Paul de Man is, as I said earlier, quite a different one. I think it would be worthwhile to revisit what-de Man-said and what-Derrida-said-about-what-de Man-said, but I’ve already taken more time and space than I meant to talking about Derrida and Heidegger (and I don’t even have a copy of Of Spirit), so I’ll take a rain-check on that.

I have forgotten what Thing Three was, but it was probably about pushchairs.