Marlène Zarader's the Unthought Debt: The Obfuscation of Heidegger's Jewish Sources

Summary

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Bergo examines the thought of Marlene Zarader that challenges Martin Heidegger's understanding of the Greek origin in light of what she calls the Hebraic tradition, meaning biblical, Talmudic, midrashic, and philosophical Judaism. Zarader's interest is not in amassing examples of Heidegger's negligence. On the contrary, she is creating a composite structure, whereby the sheer accumulation of borrowings and expropriations, the explicit denial of any attention to the biblical prophetic structure, and the characterization of the poet create in effect a silence around the other beginning of the West.

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Marlène Zarader's the Unthought Debt: The Obfuscation of Heidegger's Jewish Sources

We know Marlène Zarader from her first work, Heidegger et les Paroles de l'origine (Vrin, 1986), in which, as she puts it, her "only ambition was to read Heidegger . . . taking up his work in its entirety from an angle that appeared preeminent.... the question of the origin." Zarader has now turned to the second stage of her engagement with Heidegger, notably the question about his sources. She challenges Heidegger's understanding of the Greek origin in light of what she calls the "Hebraic tradition," meaning biblical, Talmudic, midrashic, and philosophical Judaism. Zarader is revisiting philosopher, Otto Pöggeler's question, "Is Heidegger's way of taking the itinerary of Western thought in charge required by his thinking, or not?"1 To that question Pöggeler himself answered "yes"-Heidegger's interpretation of the history of Western thought is required for his thinking of Being. Zarader will answer "no" to the same question. Working out the justification of her "no" is the stake of her book, The Unthought Debt: Heidegger and the Hebraic Heritage.2 Her task: to show that we do not have to construct the metaphysical, and ontological, traditions in Heidegger's way in order to follow his path of thinking. Better, it is encumbent on us to set in a clear light the influences on his thought that he could not acknowledge.

Heidegger's Gifts to Philosophy or: Why He is "Unavoidable" Today

Heidegger's philosophy, Zarader argues, is unavoidable-for philosophers-today, for essential reasons. She writes, at stake is knowing "what it is that allows Heidegger's work to occupy this position, recognized today as unavoidable."

Zarader argues that Heidegger has given philosophy four signal gifts:

"First, Heidegger's work allows the philosopher to reread the great texts of the Western tradition in light of one overarching question; we can read these texts this way even if the question is not fully developed in them." She means the fundamental question of Being, which Heidegger (re)identified.

Of Heidegger's second gift, she writes: "beyond the diversity of Heidegger's texts, to focus on the question that shapes them [tex...

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