In 2025, a year before the passing of the philosopher and writer Jean-Pierre Faye, a conversation brought together his son, Emmanuel Faye, and the philosopher Vincent Cespedes. Jean-Pierre Faye, known for his work on political language and totalitarianism, engaged in major debates on Martin Heidegger’s legacy and co-founded the Collège international de philosophie with Jacques Derrida, later diverging from him intellectually. 

What intrigued me, when I was 15 or 16, was that I had never studied philosophy. Jean-Pierre Faye did not talk to me much about philosophy; he spoke mainly about revolutions in history, about moments of crisis, and he worked a great deal on the question of economic crises. I heard about Keynes, Michelet, and so on, even before we later came to discuss philosophers. But I knew that he had had this past as a philosopher: he had passed the agrégation in philosophy, he had taught philosophy at the Lycée des Bons-Enfants in Reims, and he had even made a rather mythical film called The Philosophy Teacher, in which he played a philosopher in a small provincial town—he was, in a way, playing his own role.

So for me, philosophy was a kind of mysterious past that had to be rediscovered. In that way, I was able to fantasize a little, or dream about this philosophy that remained in the background. Then there was indeed a rather curious moment: my final year of high school. I found myself at Henri-IV with a philosophy teacher who came in with his briefcase, put it down, and said to us: “You see this briefcase—it is a pond; ‘table,’ ‘pond’… where is Being?” In short, we understood nothing—what was he talking about? This teacher was completely Heideggerian, as you will have understood—a close associate of Fédier, a former disciple of Jean Beaufret. He later taught at khâgne and trained a whole generation of Heideggerians—Catherine Malabou, Lancelin, Johann Chapoutot, very diverse and talented people, Mazarine Pingeot, and so on—who became thoroughly Heideggerian under his teaching.

So there was this presence of Heidegger, but never as an explicit object. Heidegger was behind everything, but he never took a text by Heidegger to teach us directly. We could have analyzed it, said what we thought—no. Heidegger was the presupposition, and one had to learn how to think—that is, in the end, to think in a Heideggerian way. As for me, I resisted as best I could. To resist, since we had a course on Nietzsche, we read a text by Nietzsche that I like—I am not Nietzschean—but also that bilingual Philosophenbuch, and Klossowski’s book on Nietzsche, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, which works on Nietzsche’s valetudinary states, somewhat in the manner of Lou Andreas-Salomé, who had been Nietzsche’s fantasized woman. So I opposed to Heidegger’s Nietzsche the Nietzsche of Klossowski. And very cleverly, Jacerme, instead of opposing me and saying, “No, no, forget Klossowski, you must read Heidegger,” said: “Ah, you are interested in that? Do a presentation on it.” And he let me give a six-hour presentation—three times two hours. I think of my poor classmates: he practically gave me an entire week. I spoke for six hours about Klossowski’s book, which is quite peculiar, because Klossowski’s truth is that Nietzsche revolves around madness as around his axis.

So you can imagine that after six hours on this subject, I thought: “Well, I’m going to crack, I’m going to go mad.” And so I was led to turn back toward Heidegger’s “nest,” which I found scholastic and heavy—I did not have a feel for his prose—and I told myself I still had to get into it. So I began to speak a little about it, and with Jacerme my grades went from 14 to 18, because I would write two lines on Heidegger’s truth—I laugh about it now.

At a certain moment, I turned to my father, who in 1961 had published the first of Heidegger’s troubling political writings, such as the profession of faith to Adolf Hitler in November 1933. What struck me at the time, when I was moving toward Heidegger almost in spite of myself, was that with Jacerme it was impossible to talk about these texts. It simply could not exist. It was not even possible. One could not. It was very strange—a kind of omertà that gripped you so tightly that nothing could be said. There was an absolute denial, a sort of diffuse negationism that made discussion impossible.

With Jean-Pierre Faye, my father, in the evenings we would talk about it. I would probably, as a Freudian might say, try to “kill the father” by defending Heidegger, by taking the opposing view. So I had allowed myself to believe that Heidegger—yes, 1933–34 is absolutely indefensible—but afterward he moves beyond the metaphysics of the will, beyond technology, he enters into the letting-be, he becomes almost a kind of German Lao Tzu of the Black Forest. I believed in that myth for a time. And with my father, we discussed it freely—he disagreed, but he was not scandalized that I did not follow his critique of Heidegger to the letter.

Later I thought: it is strange—on one side, I can discuss freely; on the other, it is impossible. So I began to think there was something wrong with Heidegger: there is no debate, no Socratic element, no agora, no place for discussion. If one disagrees, it is because one has not learned how to think.

Vincent Cespedes: You also met, through your father, philosophers who were critical of Heidegger.

Emmanuel Faye: Yes, there was also an interesting episode: at the time I was writing what we would now call a master’s thesis on Heidegger and language. I had poet friends; we were working on Celan, and I was interested in a non-objectifying relation to language. At one point I believed Heidegger helped us better understand the poetic act—now I have completely abandoned that view. For me, it is a kind of sacralized destruction of the poetic, a dehumanization, a devitalization. Heidegger is at least as disastrous for poetry as for philosophy, I think—but that is another question.

At that time, I believed in it. Then, in the winter of 1977–78, Gilles Deleuze came to lunch—an old university friend of my father. Before we sat down to eat, I was sitting on the sofa in my father’s office, which doubled as a living and dining room. Deleuze, rubbing his hands with a slightly ironic air, leaned toward me and asked what I was doing. I said I was writing a thesis on Heidegger and language. He laughed and said: “Ah, the Nazi druid.” It was a bit harsh on druids, but quite well put.

There were several such moments. Marcuse also came to lunch—he had been a Heideggerian but had moved away from it. He even did a short interview with my father, still unpublished, explaining his critique of Heidegger. So there were a few markers.

But what really made me leave that mirage, that Heideggerian bog, was when I read the Spiegel interview, published after Heidegger’s death in 1976. I did not read it in German at first, I admit, but later in French translation. The famous phrase “Only a god can save us”—from Hölderlin—what no one understood, in my view, is that for Heidegger, that god was himself.

There are two striking passages. First, he says that National Socialism was moving in the direction of a satisfactory relation between man and technology. If Heidegger’s whole critique serves to rehabilitate Nazism as a way out of technology, then the whole myth of a Heidegger who breaks with the philosophy of the will in 1936 collapses. And then there is another passage where he says he is not sure democracy is the solution for Europe—today that might appeal to some, but in 1978 it did not.

At that moment, it was like a stained-glass window shattering. I thought: this is impossible—he has made his confession, he fooled us, he waited until after his death to avoid accountability. I closed the book, so shocked and disgusted that, somewhat excessively, I stopped reading German philosophers for twenty years. I turned toward humanism, toward humanity, and worked on Latin authors, becoming a specialist in Renaissance philosophy.

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