The publication of the Black Notebooks by Martin Heidegger, between the years 2013 and 2015 in Germany, caused a deep stir in the philosophical panorama. A debate, often reductionist, was reopened thereafter. The greatness of the philosopher and the pettiness of the Nazi constituted an unacceptable paradox: "if he was a great philosopher, then he was not a Nazi; If he was a Nazi, then he has not been a great philosopher ». But both positions are rhetorical and deeply antiphilosophical, as Donatella Di Cesare has shown us in this stimulating essay.
The reason for the scandal that has shaken the world of the Heideggerians and continental philosophy is that the Black Notebooks show a philosopher conscious of his political decisions, attentive to historical vicissitudes. His political commitment during the years of Nazism was neither an accident nor an error. It was, rather, the result of a political election consistent with one's own thinking. If they are disturbing, it is because they dynamite the schemes with which Heidegger had been interpreting so far.
But Donatella Di Cesare's fine analysis also shows us how Heidegger's metaphysical anti-Semitism fits into a long Western tradition that he addressed, not without hostility and without complicity on the part of the philosophers, the Judenfrage or Jewish question, as well as a question, because Judaism seemed to escape a definition, or as a problem that had to be "resolved".