more Žižek on Heidegger

In connection with a few posts I made yesterday about Žižek, someone gave me the link to a recent post where Enowning has some choice excerpts on the topic. HERE.

There is still the following strange fact. Žižek says here that everyone in our time has to define their position in some ways in relation to Heidegger. Badiou, in the Deleuze book, says that Heidegger is the last really universal great philosopher, or however he worded it.

And yet, neither Badiou nor Žižek really spends all that much time explicitly distinguishing their positions from that of Heidegger. It’s a rather remarkable phenomenon that lies between two extreme options.

Option A: Sartre, Levinas. Here are two authors, among many others, who are rather blunt about their debt to Heidegger and quite detailed in their treatment of him. They not only hail Heidegger as a great philosopher, but grapple in public with their intellectual debt to him.

Option B: Deleuze. He barely mentions Heidegger, but this isn’t so surprising, since he doesn’t seem to feel much of an intellectual debt to him. And in fact, I don’t think Deleuze is very indebted to phenomenology or Heidegger at all, so his self-conception on this point is not inaccurate.

But then there is the strange middle case of Badiou and Žižek, who will unashamedly tell you how great Heidegger is, and yet still leave us somewhat in the dark as to the nature of their debt to him. You can work it out for yourself, but it takes some labor.