Heidegger: Jews wanted their own extermination
example · Heidegger ·
retold in 4 talks
Žižek cites Heidegger's most extreme claim: that antisemitism (killing Jews) was actually what the Jews themselves wanted, and the Germans were merely manipulated by them to do it, Žižek calls it 'breathtaking.'
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026
As told 4
“anti-Semitism which means killing the Jews is the Jews themselves who wanted it and we were just we Germans were just manipulated by them to do it”1:59:11 Why Radical Politics Needs Philosophy? A Masterclass With Slavoj Zizek. Day 12023-11-21 · 2:21:23
“he says that in concentration camps, they were just in an industrial way producing corpses. people were not really dying there.”
“Jews are of course not biologically inferior but they are condemned because they embody a certain spiritual stance which is the stance of technological manipulation exploitation.”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
contents · one story, 3 jobsuses
displacement of antisemitism
×1
subject suffers from the symbolic
×1
second death
×1
Its cast and sources
populated by
Jean-Luc Nancy2Kyle MacLachlan1Jean-Paul Badiou / Badiou reading of Genet1Jerry Brown1Reiner Schürmann1Joseph Campbell1Emmanuel Faye1King Faisal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud1
alongside works
Every retelling 4
1:59:11 Why Radical Politics Needs Philosophy? A Masterclass With Slavoj Zizek. Day 12023-11-21 · 2:21:23
Žižek cites Heidegger's most extreme claim: that antisemitism (killing Jews) was actually what the Jews themselves wanted, and the Germans were merely manipulated by them to do it, Žižek calls it 'breathtaking.', illustrating displacement of antisemitism
Žižek cites Heidegger’s horrified statement that in concentration camps, corpses were produced industrially and people were 'not really dying.' Žižek argues this reveals Heidegger’s failure to grasp the subject being 'tortured by language' (symbolic death), as the victim did not feel like a mere technological object., illustrating subject suffers from the symbolic,position in between the two deaths
Heidegger replaced biological racism with a spiritual-metaphysical one: Jews are not biologically inferior but embody the nihilistic technological spirit (Machenschaft) of Western modernity. His defenders note he rejected biological racism, but Žižek shows this substitution makes his anti-Semitism more systematic and more philosophical., illustrating transcendental racism,Machenschaft,Heidegger
Heidegger claimed in his Black Notebooks that the Holocaust was ontologically the Jews' own self-annihilation because the principle of technological manipulation they introduced was simply applied to themselves by the Germans as unwitting instruments., illustrating Selbstvernichtung,autonomous truth of art/theory,anti-Semitism