Akbar Jabbari, Heidegger and the Crisis of Modernity VII

The notes in question are the Schwarze Hefte, the Black Notebooks: thirty-three small black-covered booklets in which Heidegger recorded his thoughts from the early 1930s to the early 1970s. Their publication in the Gesamtausgabe from 2014 reopened the Heidegger affair. Iran is no bystander in it. Heidegger’s hold on Iranian thought, from Ahmad Fardid to Reza Davari Ardakani and Bijan Abdolkarimi, is the subject of earlier installments of this series, and one reason for it is that he is read as the most radical critic of Western modernity. The Notebooks ask what that critique says when it speaks about Jews. I put the same questions to Jean-Luc Nancy in June 2018, as a new volume of the Notebooks was about to appear in Germany, and again in December 2020. This inquiry also started to a wider series of conversations and interviews with Barbara Cassin, Maurice Olender, Peter Trawny, Emmanuel Faye, Bernard Stiegler, Joseph Cohen, Raphaël Zagury-Orly and François Fédier among others.

Three antisemitisms, one metaphysics

The host, Mr. Zamani,said Nazism cannot be deduced from Heidegger’s philosophy, nor can that philosophy be reduced to his politics. Drawing on the Lacanian notions of act and acting out, he asked whether Heidegger’s entry into politics suspended an existing order or placed him, unwittingly, on the very ground he claimed to cross. He also noted what he called structural similarities between National Socialism and Zionism.

“We are all Jews”

The center of the lecture was Weltlosigkeit, (worldlessness.) Jabbari read a passage from volume 95 (p. 97) that speaks of a tenacious skill at calculating, profit-seeking and mixing, and ties it to the “worldlessness of Judaism.” “World,” he explained, is for Heidegger not the earth or a set of physical objects but a horizon of meanings in which things and human actions become significant. When beings are treated merely as resources to be calculated, stored, exchanged and consumed, that horizon collapses. Jabbari took the term not as a geographical description of a stateless people but as a name for an existential homelessness, a break with the horizon of meaning. Heidegger also connected it, he added, to the historical experience of the Jewish people, the question of land and their transnational presence, one of the most controversial aspects of the notes.

The same logic governs Machenschaft, which Jabbari glossed as calculation, manipulation, profit-seeking and the will to dominate beings. “Metaphysical Judaism,” he said, is Heidegger’s name for a pervasive form of calculative thinking that Muslims, Christians or atheists can inhabit as much as Jews. Hence the sentence the report records: “In a Heideggerian sense, we are all Jews.” A passage from volume 97 (p. 20), in which historical self-destruction peaks when “the Jewish in the metaphysical sense” fights “what is Jewish,” shows in his reading that even the Nazis, while fighting Jews, were caught in a technical, instrumental logic. Biological racism would then be not an alternative to the technological world but one of its most violent manifestations.

“The notebooks have been emptied”

After the lecture, Jabbari’s comments on Instagram sharpened the interpretation he had presented in Tehran. He recalled the story that Heidegger once told friends he had “not yet emptied his notebooks.” If the remark referred to the private notebooks that his literary executor was to publish as the final part of his collected works, Jabbari suggested, the publication of the Black Notebooks now allows us to say that Heidegger has “truly emptied his notebooks.”

Jabbari also singled out a passage from volume 97 of the Gesamtausgabe, the fourth volume of the Black Notebooks, describing a historical “self-destruction” that reaches its peak if what Heidegger calls the metaphysical meaning of “Judaism” comes into conflict with what is Jewish—provided that “Judaism” has prevailed everywhere, so that even the struggle against Jews, and that struggle itself, falls under its sway.

For Jabbari, this is the key to the notebooks’ treatment of “Judaism.” He connects the passage to Machenschaft, a Heideggerian term often translated as machination, but which in this context also evokes calculation, planning, manipulation and the reduction of beings to objects that can be managed. From the late 1930s onward, Heidegger used the term to describe what he regarded as the essence of modernity and the culmination of Western metaphysics, before switching to Gestell (framework).

On this reading, the target is not Jewish people alone. Anyone—Jewish, Christian, Muslim or atheist—can participate in the calculative logic that Jabbari identifies with “metaphysical Judaism.” This is the reasoning behind his provocative formulation, recorded in the lecture report: “In a Heideggerian sense, we are all Jews.” He argues that the Nazis’ own campaign against Jews could itself be caught within the same instrumental logic, and thus become an expression of the very historical destruction it claimed to oppose.

But this interpretation leaves the central difficulty unresolved. To universalize the figure of the “calculating Jew” is not necessarily to remove its antisemitic charge. The question is not only whether Machenschaft names a general condition of modernity; it is also why Heidegger repeatedly attaches that condition to “Judaism,” and whether the historical stereotype continues to shape the supposedly universal concept.

A philosopher is not a saint

Jabbari did not deny the error. Heidegger accepted the rectorate of Freiburg in 1933 and placed his hopes in National Socialism, thinking it might stand against global technology, Americanism and Bolshevism and open the way to a spiritual renewal. He soon resigned, Jabbari said, once he saw that Nazism was itself caught in the logic of technology and Western nihilism. “A philosopher is not a saint,” and Heidegger’s support for Hitler is a mistake to be acknowledged; but it must also be studied in the context of the 1930s. Jabbari warned against anachronism, the temptation to judge the actors of that decade by an image formed afterwards by the war, the Holocaust and decades of cultural representations. He also voiced doubts about the motives and standing of Victor Farías’s book, which in the late 1980s made Heidegger’s relation to Nazism a central public subject again.

Land, roots and homelessness

Rootedness is where Jabbari’s lecture turned next. Cosmopolitan thinking, in Heidegger’s eyes, can sever human beings from land, language, history and tradition. “Land” here means not geographic soil or political nationalism but the historical and linguistic ground in which a person makes a home and finds meaning. Citing Ehsan Yarshater, Jabbari observed that one can live far from Iran and still dwell in the “Iranian world” through language and culture, while another can live in Iran with no tie to its intellectual heritage. For that gap he invoked dâd o dahesh in the Shahnameh, the rend in Hafez and the ney in Rumi, a heritage that should be not only a source of pleasure or consolation but material for thinking and living. Contemporary man, he added, craves peace yet cannot bear silence, solitude or slowness; the pace of the technological world does not let him rest “in the vicinity of Being.”

Here the lecture meets the questions of this series. Fardid’s Heidegger called for a return to an authentic, pre-Western essence, and Abdolkarimi has argued that a secular Heidegger is not the true Heidegger. Jabbari’s “land” is more careful than Fardid’s essence, since it names a context rather than a purity.

What the session left open

The report is candid about its limits. It calls Jabbari’s reading defensive, or at least moderating, and notes that the interpretation of critics who find in expressions such as “world Jewry,” “worldlessness” and “talent for calculation” the carriers of historical antisemitic stereotypes was not presented independently and in equal detail. Its conclusion states the open question: whether a people’s name and historical stereotypes can be turned into a philosophical metaphor without the political and moral weight of those names settling in the argument like sediment. Nancy’s answer, for Heidegger’s text at least, was that it does.

In the question period, a participant observed that negative images of Jews were common in Western culture before Heidegger, from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice to Pound and Eliot, and asked why Heidegger draws so much attention. Jabbari replied that Heidegger’s founding place in contemporary philosophy, and his influence on those who followed, Derrida among them, heightens sensitivity to his past. This sensitivity highlights a broader pattern in how Iranian thinkers engage with Western intellectual provocations. Years earlier, Jabbari had already unmasked the reactive nature of certain Western radicalisms, noting that “Žižek’s defense of religious fundamentalism is not out of love for Ali, but out of hatred for Muawiyah” (2009).