A small point of correction:
> As you say _it is the technological organisation of killing that
> is noteworthy, not the identity of the victims (or the perpetrators)_
What I was saying was that this is what *Heidegger* found noteworthy,
as if it was neither here nor there that this was a crime with
specific perpetrators and victims: the character of the injustice
(Lyotard, elsewhere, says "tort": a wrong done by one party to
another) qua injustice is effaced.
I won't go over Levinas' critique of Heidegger, or the rest of what
Lyotard says in "Heidegger et 'les juifs'" right now, but suffice to
say that both Levinas and Lyotard think that Heidegger's culpable
silence on the matter of the extermination was not broken by this
comment, in spite of appearances, because of what it passed over in
silence.
In the rectorship speech Heidegger gave as the Nazi-appointed rector
of Heidelberg university, he had said that the "inner truth and
greatness" of the Nazi "movement" consisted in "the encounter between
global technology and modern man". The later, reprieved, de-Nazified
Heidegger's comment on the death camps was also focussed on that
"encounter" - on the "Gestell" of technoscientific rationality, and
the "forgetting of Being" that it enacted. There is, as Levinas tried
to show, something rather autistic about this focus on ontological
enclosure, given the circumstances. The best one can say is that when
it came to ethics, Heidegger had somewhat of a tin ear.
(And, if this account - http://www.spikemagazine.com/0900celan6.php -
of his proudly showing copies of Celan's _Todtnauberg_ to visitors to
his cottage is to be believed, a bit of a tin ear when it came to
poetry also).
Dominic
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