Michel Onfray Interview | Alexandre Gilbert #275

Michel Onfray is a french philosopher. He published L’autre collaboration (Plon) in 2025.

Your latest book deals with the barely concealed antisemitism of post-war French philosophers, from Sartre to Beauvoir and the French Theory, most of whom were staunch Heideggerians. What did you take away from the Black Notebooks, now that we’ve just learned of the upcoming publication of three previously unpublished volumes of the Gesamtausgabe (103, 104, 105), to everyone’s surprise?
Michel Onfray: When you’re dealing with believers, nothing can shake their faith. Everything that might cast doubt on their belief is rejected, dismissed with the help of reason—which, in this case, is not an instrument of rationality but of justification for anything and everything, irrationality included. For centuries, reason was used by scholasticism to legitimize all kinds of nonsense—such as the belief that the body of Christ could be present in a piece of bread, and the blood of Christ in a glass of wine, for instance.

With Heidegger, you can point to his Nazi party card, show that he wrote in favor of Hitler, mention his famous “beautiful hands”—which, according to the philosopher, could get him anything—bring out his notebooks in which he expresses the most virulent antisemitism: and yet the Heideggerians will come and explain that he wasn’t a Nazi, or not like the others, or not for long, or that he was misled—especially, in a stunningly phallocratic argument, by his wife—or, even more magically, that he was actually anti-Nazi! Among the Heideggerians who deny the obvious fact of his Nazism, there exists a kind of Nazi rationality.

One could have added a chapter to your book about the roles of Noam Chomsky, Jean Beaufret, and Jean-François Lyotard at the time of the publication of Robert Faurisson’s book Mémoire en défense, which discusses the gas chamber at Struthof in Alsace—a work that later influenced Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority. Isn’t Noam Chomsky an heir to the phenomenon you describe?
Michel Onfray: Yes, but I focused solely on 20th-century French philosophy. There could certainly have been a chapter on the Italian Vattimo or on others like the Slovenian Žižek, for example. But I couldn’t cover global or even European philosophy, simply because I can’t read a dozen languages in the original.

As for Jean Beaufret—though he was never on the left, to say the least—I do dedicate a chapter to him, because this man, who made negationist remarks, trained a whole generation of French philosophers in the cult of Heidegger. They showed no concern about this and even cloaked it all in a veil of modesty—I’m thinking, for example, of Derrida.

Jean-Pierre Faye, whose centenary will be celebrated in two days, was the only one to rise up against this impending disaster. Isn’t he, like Hans Blumenberg, one of the great philosophers of our time whose work will one day be rediscovered?
Michel Onfray: You’re right. I think of his Letter on Derrida, which hits the icon of deconstruction with formidable precision. I would also add the excellent work of his son Emmanuel. I’m thinking of Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy, a book about the seminars Heidegger gave between 1933 and 1935, which shows—beyond any possible dispute—how Heidegger was a Nazi. Those who attacked him in disgraceful ways, often with ad hominem arguments, only reveal how their fascination with the Nazi philosopher leaves traces in their methods…

You yourself became “Ashkenazi Jewish” later in life following a shocking event, confirmed by DNA tests. (Which means we’re likely cousins!) What does Alsace mean to you—the land of Gutenberg, of the ancestors of Marx and Léon Blum, long before the birth of the Strasbourg School?
Michel Onfray: I don’t believe the Strasbourg School deserves that much attention, especially if one is to compare it with Gutenberg! The latter invented the printing press. What did Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe invent? They exemplify psittacism in philosophy—that is, the art of parroting—in their case, parroting Derrida’s work like whirling dervishes… Commenting on the commentaries of commentaries under the gilded ceilings of academic institutions, using taxpayers’ money—this doesn’t impress me much. Blum and Gutenberg, that’s something else entirely.