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Last update - 14:34 24/11/2008 Between place and no-place By Adi Schwartz Tags: Martin Heidegger, Nazi  By the time Rafael Zagury-Orly was born, in 1967, Jean-Paul Sartre had been editing the philosophical journal Les Temps Modernes (Modern Times) for over 20 years. Back then, nothing about the boy from Haifa suggested that he would grow up to become a philosopher, or that 40 years later he would himself edit an issue of one of French philosophy's most sacred publications. On the contrary, Zagury-Orly says today: He was a mischievous child who wanted to become a policeman, or at most a firefighter. At age 12 he moved with his family to Canada, and when the time came to choose a major at university, his parents, Moroccan-born Jews, urged him to pick a useful profession. You can always read books for pleasure on the weekends, his father said. It took him four years to summon up the courage to tell them that he was not studying in law school and would never be a lawyer. After completing his undergraduate studies and a graduate degree at the University of Montreal, Zagury-Orly moved to France in 1994 and enrolled in a doctoral program in philosophy at the Sorbonne. One day, he decided to sign up for a seminar at L'Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales in Paris, where philosopher Jacques Derrida was teaching. He went with his friend, Joseph Cohen, and they found a lecture hall crammed with hundreds of students. Zagury-Orly, then in his 20s, caught Derrida's attention and became one of the philosopher's favorite students. In 2000, he and Cohen co-edited the book "Judeites" (Judaisms), based on papers from an international conference on Derrida that they had jointly organized. The event focused on the link between Deconstruction and Judaism. Advertisement Zagury-Orly returned to Israel in 2003, after having completed his doctoral studies, but his intellectual life remained divided between Tel Aviv and Paris. He helped Claude Lanzmann, who made the film "Shoah" and is the editor of Les Temps Modernes, when the latter was working on the documentary "Sobibor," and thus also gained a foothold in the journal. Established after World War II, Les Temps Modernes has published works by the world's leading authors and philosophers, including Simone de Beauvoir, Raymond Aron, Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus and Alberto Moravia. Now, at only 40, Zagury-Orly has had the honor of editing a special edition of the journal devoted to German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), and thus of being the only Israeli member of the prestigious journal's editorial team. "Two young philosophers, Joseph Cohen and Rafael Zagury-Orly," Lanzmann wrote in the introduction, "proposed to the editorial board that Les Temps Modernes devote an entire issue to Heidegger. We agreed, due to the high quality of the proposal as well as to its clear theoretical standing. And for this we thank Cohen and Zagury-Orly." The special issue, which appeared last month, features 20 essays, including two by the editors themselves. Zagury-Orly and Cohen decided to publish an article by Heidegger himself as well, "Remarques sur art-sculpture-espace" ("Remarks on Art-Sculpture-Space"), which had never before appeared in French, as well as articles by philosophers Karl Lowith and Alphonse de Waelhens that were published in Les Temps Modernes in the late 1940s. Lowith and de Waelhens knew Heidegger personally and began to address the complexities of his thinking and work immediately after the war. The issue also includes new essays by France's leading contemporary phenomenologists: Didier Franck, Jean-Francois Mattei and Rudolf Bernet. In his essay "Insomniaque a Ephese," noted German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk tries to analyze Heidegger through a perspective other than that of Nazism. Historian Jeffrey Andrew Barash, meanwhile, argues that a reading of texts Heidegger wrote between 1933 and 1945, and especially during his year as rector of the University of Freiburg, shows that he completely embraced racial theory. Hiding a fantasy So why Heidegger? And why now? Zagury-Orly: "Heidegger is without a doubt one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. French philosophy of the last 50 years - including Sartre, Foucault and Derrida - has been engaged in a lively and creative dialogue with Heidegger. In fact, it is hard to think of it without him. And still, every time Heidegger comes up, the discussion focuses on the fact that he was a member of the Nazi party. The constant preoccupation with this topic recently led some French intellectuals to declare that he should not even be taught in France and that his books should be removed from the shelves. "The discussion of Heidegger's Nazism is very important and should not be abandoned. Heidegger was a Nazi, that much is clear. My colleague Joseph Cohen and myself have no intention of absolving Heidegger or arguing that he was innocent, and we certainly don't mean to rescue him. Our aim is to try and pose other questions about his philosophy, which remains of utmost importance, and as philosophers we are still committed to it. Beyond the tendency to present Heideggerian philosophy as Nazi philosophy hides a kind of fantasy of returning to traditional definitions of man as having free and autonomous choice. There are also populist reasons for the condemnation - when the publicity for a Heidegger book mentions the Nazi aspect, it is sure to sell well. We tried to put a stop to a kind of mechanical movement that has stopped the reading of the texts themselves. We felt it was time to find another tone and to elicit a more complex discourse on Heidegger. That is why we made the question of 'place,' and not of Nazism, the focus of the issue." What do you mean by "place"? "We tried to locate in Heidegger's texts an indecision between, on the one hand, the 'place' fixed by national and even nationalist content, a distinctly German content, which falls under a clear political, historical and national definition; and, on the other hand, that 'place' Heidegger leaves undefined, a place free of fixations and distinct from any content, which makes it possible to question the definitions that are overly fixed in a political, historical and national sense. Appropriate thought is conditional on that kind of indecision." Is this indecision also present in your own life? "To some extent, yes, but it is not exactly the same indecision. Levinas claimed that thought begins in trauma. Apparently it does not begin in rumination or theoretical observation. In my case, clearly, being torn away from Israel at age 12 involves a certain trauma. The experiences that left their mark on me were emigration and exile, but also everything they signify with regard to striking down roots in a place. I soon became preoccupied with issues of identity and the lack of it. All those places where something remained unresolved, open, not limited to two dichotomous options. Maybe that is why I became interested, of all things, in Derrida's Judaism, which lacks clear marks of identity and refuses, due to a biographical event, to take on any clear contents of identity." The latest issue of the journal, Zagury-Orly says, has caused quite a stir in France. The popular press has yet to run articles relating to it, but dozens of people have already called the offices of Les Temps Modernes and Zagury-Orly at home. Reactions, he claims, have been mixed: Colleagues have congratulated him on the issue, saying it was high time for Heidegger to be seriously discussed, also outside the context of his Nazi involvement. Others, however, attacked him sharply for even raising that subject. One of the latter was Jean-Pierre Faye, a specialist in Nazi history and rhetoric. "He was very angry that we did not invite him to take part in the issue," explains Zagury-Orly, adding that as far as he knows, there is a sizable group of philosophers who want to publish responses in other journals. In keeping with the changing times, some of the debate is being waged in blogs devoted to French philosophy, where, according to Zagury-Orly, "there is now a sharp, harsh dispute." Burying the hatchet This is not Zagury-Orly's first engagement with German philosophy. In 1999 he was involved in what was hailed as a historic turning point in the relations between French and German postwar thinkers, when he helped arrange a meeting between Derrida and German philosopher Jurgen Habermas. "At the time, a world war was being waged between German and French philosophy," he recalls. "In Germany they considered all the French philosophers - Foucault, Levinas, Deleuze and Derrida - as a single whole, a group of postmodernist nihilists. Derrida, by the way, found the latter definition very distasteful and produced a philosophy with an extraordinary social and political commitment. The Germans, who saw themselves guided by the idea of social and political responsibility, believed that the French leaned toward an irresponsible relativism." Zagury-Orly and Cohen managed to persuade Habermas to come to Paris, and later they convinced Derrida to give a lecture in Germany. "This was, in effect, a renewal of the dialogue between the two philosophical streams, and in the course of it Habermas admitted that his criticism of Derrida was not based on reading his texts, but rather came from the American mediation [of his ideas] and from reading the criticism of Derrida in the United States. These were intensive and very exciting days, philosophically speaking." Despite all of his accomplishments and his meteoric rise in the field of philosophy in France, Zagury-Orly has not found a place for himself in Israeli academia. "Using civil terms, I could say it is because of the academic situation in Israel," he says. In the meantime, he is teaching philosophy at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. One reason for that, perhaps, is that his views do not fit neatly into any preconceived scheme. Why did you choose to return to Israel, when you could have been more successful in France? "I couldn't handle being the Diaspora Jew who tells the French, 'See how a Jew is treated in the French Republic.' I see the Zionist political project as something that is worth the risk, despite the enormous difficulty and the everyday proximity to disaster. I must say I have strong reservations about the nostalgic longing for exile and the lyricism of the nomad life. Keeping the term 'Zionist' - and sometimes terms like that need to be preserved - I consider myself a hypercritical Zionist, tied to a question. I am certainly not a philosopher [who believes in] romantic settling into a place, but also not [in] a systematic lack of identity. Maybe you don't even need to decide between the two, but can rather think exile, foreignness, within the place itself. "In Israel I am required to rethink the political every day. I think that sometimes Israelis forget the critical and revolutionary movement that opened up with this space called Israel. My friends are surprised when I tell them that in Israel there is actually very sharp and positive criticism of the religious establishment and of the concept of traditional Jewish identity. During my childhood in Montreal we treated the religious establishment with awe. The sharp criticism of religion in Israel is important, and it should be maintained." As a philosopher who savors nuances of, and the constant attempt to live with paradoxes, he dislikes political discourse and the way it is reduced to two dichotomous possibilities. "In these days, when many would like to ignore philosophy studies, it is important to save a place, small and fragile as it might be, for complexity, for difficulty, for patience and nuance," he explains. "Somewhere there should be people who know they can ask all the questions about everything. Do we need intellectuals to legitimize the existing discourse? No. We need them to preserve criticism, to preserve the question marks. Someone has to stay a bit longer in that indecision between place and no-place; the answers and decisions should be delayed a bit longer." Zagury-Orly's next project, incidentally, is editing another issue of Les Temps Modernes, slated to appear later this year. The topic - what else? - is Israel's 60th anniversary. Bookmark to del.icio.us   Trailblazer Haula Abu-Bakar named first Arab female professor in Israel. Hills of hostility A stranger coming to Hebron Saturday would be confused.

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