Well I've not had time to read much of late. I'm still finishing up that book of Lawlor's on Derrida and Ricoeur. The difference between différance and distantiation is a subtle one. I'm almost finished and will write up a few things on it hopefully this week. However an other book came in the mail that I'd forgotten about and now have on my ever increasing pile of books to read. It is Marlène Zarader's book The Unthought Debt: Heidegger and the Hebraic Heritage. Jim Faulconer had suggested it to me some years ago but it wasn't then available in an English translation. (I'll confess my French is very rusty and certainly not up to the nuances French decontructionists use) The argument basically is that while Heidegger's thought is primarily "Greek" (after a fashion) with some Christian influences he never deals with the Hebrew. This is odd since he often talks about the historic origins of western thought. Yet clearly the only group as close to being as influential as the Greeks are the Hebrews. As many have noted western culture has its origins in both Jerusalem and Athens. Zarader in the introduction quotes Riceoeur on this.
What has often astonished me about Heidegger is that he would have systematically eluded, it seems, the confrontation with the block of Hebraic thought. He sometimes reflected on the basis of the Gospels and of Christian theology, but always avoided the Hebraic cluster, which is the absolute stranger to the Greek discourse. . . . This misprision seems to me to run parallel to Heidegger's incapacity to take a "step backward" in such a way that might permit us to think adequately all the dimensions of the Western tradition. Does the task of rethinking the Christian tradition by way of a "step backward" not require that one recognize the radically Hebraic dimension of Christianity, which is first rooted in Judaism and only afterward in the Greek tradition? Why reflect only on Hölderlin and not on the Psalms, on Jeremiah? There lies my question. (As quoted in The Unthought Debt, 8)
Now I have a suspicion that this lack of reference has a lot to do with anti-semitism in Germany. It is interesting though that Heidegger's mentor was Husserl, a Jew. Many of the prominent Heideggerians were Jews. (Notably Derrida and Levinas) Certainly in Derrida one finds a kind of Heideggarianism that is extremely Jewish. (One need only read Caputo's The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida to see the role Jewish thought plays in Derrida's philosophy.
The lack of engagement still is quite interesting. Jewish neo-Platonism offers many obvious parallels to Heidegger's thought. One can also argue that the way Jewish thought approached "intellectualization" tended to avoid the issue of presence that characterized Greek thought. Further in the history of philosophy one can't help but think of famous Jewish philosophers like Maimonades, Spinoza or others. Even in Heidegger's own time, especially after the war, there were thinkers like Einstein making contributions to how we think of existence itself.
So this "lack" is significant. And definitely worthy of investigation.
I should add that while I've not read the book yet, it does appear to be a deconstructive type of reading. That is it isn't doing a straightforward reading of Heidegger with appeal to clear quotes. That's somewhat unfortunate and was, I must admit, what I was hoping for. Which isn't to say the book might not be valuable. But I think the issue is that such texts just aren't there. This is a whole avenue of Heidegger that is explicitly unsaid. It is present only in traces and not a clear presence.
Quoting from her introduction:
In clear language: if we limited ourselves to what Heidegger says about the Hebraic heritage in order to follow its traces in his work, then our inquiry would be finished quickly. To be sure, we can enlarge teh perspective by search for bits o information in what Heidegger says about Christian theology. And I will not fail to do so. But this can only be an element within a much vaster inquiry: for Heidegger's explicit elaboration of theological questions (or, of what he considers as the theological question) in no way exhausts that which, from theology, plays out in his work; simply, it is played out in other sites, under other aspects. It is these aspects that are worth listing and question. If Heidegger, who observed such a striking silence on the subject of the Hebraic cluster, is nevertheless in relation with it, then this relation is necessarily secret, caricatural. (13)
its true that Blake's nondual theology is evident.
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and Theology
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