Andrew J. Mitchell and Peter Trawny (eds), Heidegger's Black notebooks

Megan Altman

pp. 717-723

Review of:

Trawny Peter, Mitchell Andrew J, Heidegger's Black notebooks: Responses to anti-semitism, Columbia University Press, New York, 2017.

Heidegger’s Black Notebooks: Responses to Anti-Semitism contains original and responsibly measured reflections on how to approach the polemical and inexcusable anti-Semitic passages in the recently published volumes of Heidegger’s black-bound, personal notebooks. By bringing together scholarship from professors of history, literature, philosophy, psychiatry, and African American studies, this book is an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary achievement that opens up a promising new direction for the discussion of the forms of moral blindness and invisibility in Heidegger’s work. This new direction is practical, modest, honest, attentive, sensitive, and invaluable for anyone open to recognizing the challenges that unjust, violent, racist, and perverted histories pose to us. In order to see why this is so, it will be instructive to sketch out the twists and turns of the so-called Heidegger affair.