Badiou, Zizek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change Book

'The German language speaks Being, while all the others merely speak of Being.' - Martin Heidegger.

How anyone could've read that declaration & not clued into the nationalistic chauvinism that runs through the totality of his thought seems comical now. German fascism probably stopped seeming progressive to regular bombed-out Berliners sometime between 1943 - 1945, but taking Heidegger seriously as a man of good intellectual judgment was considered sane in academic circles for another 60 yrs or so (even tho it was usually accompanied with concern trolling & hand-wringing about his 'unfortunate' Nazi membership). I guess ideas die a much slower death than people. Now, with the publication of the last part of the Black Notebooks & the embarrassing, crude, stormfront-quality musings about 'World Jewry' contained within, it is impossible to read MH naively ever again-- & good riddance to all that. Reading Faye's commentary on the previously unpublished seminar material, alongside the Black Notebooks, I am more convinced now than ever that maybe, just maybe, the 20th century is finally over. The last decade of new Heidegger revelations has represented a sea change in the history of Western philosophy and I feel like the step has been taken to truly, if staggeringly & painfully, let go of the old bad ideas that seemed the height of thinking just a century ago. Maybe we can all finally stop defending him with the same disingenuous call to find out ~~~how~~~ someone could become a Nazi, because talking to the new generation of humans born in years as ridiculous as '1992' and '1995', it seems like no one cares about that question anymore, no more than any of us care why some other people some other time thought that the Earth was flat. As Heidegger fanboys fold their hand and walk away from this round of academic poker, the best case scenario I can predict for MH in the 21st century is to be superficially invoked by right-wing nutjobs in the same way that Ayn Rand is, and the worst case is to become the butt of presentist jokes for the rest of history-- and rightly so. I am just excited to have had the privilege to live through a genuine watershed moment for Western philosophy.