Self-Hating Nazis

Gabriel Noah Brahm

The community is more powerful than the individual in all but

one area: thinking.
—Simone Weil

Jean-Luc Nancy, The Banality of Heidegger. Translated by Jeff Fort. New York:
Fordham Univ. Press, 2017. Pp. xvi + 90.
Jean-Luc Nancy, Excluding the Jew Within Us. Translated by Sarah Clift. Cam-
bridge: Polity Press, 2020. Pp. viii + 78.

From Heidegger’s portentous “Letter on Humanism” (written in 1946

and published in France the next year) to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and
Jean-Luc Nancy’s trend-surfing 1980 conference “The Ends of Man” (in-
spired by Jacques Derrida’s celebrated 1969 essay of the same name),
the dereified human subject was over and again cast by leading think-
ers of mid-century Europe as a relic of Western metaphysics in decline,
on its way out with logocentrism, late capitalism, and liberal democ-
racy. In between, there was Michel Foucault’s “Death of Man,” Roland
Barthes’s “Death of the Author,” and, in a similar spirit, Louis Althusser’s
“anti-humanist” interrogation of the constitutively benighted “subject of
ideology.”
Indeed, for a time, in the heady atmosphere of postwar France, among
the cognoscenti, only the renegade psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (though
also greatly influenced by Heidegger) and his loyal followers seemed able
to resist the lure of an excited potlatch, enacting the subject’s repeated, rit-
ualized deconstruction—offering instead merely to decenter the ego, but
not sacrifice it entirely. For that, readers so inclined would need to turn
to the Freudo-Nietzschean-Marxists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

Telos 197 (Winter 2021): xxx–xxx

© 2021 Telos Press Publishing • ISSN 0090-6514 (print) 1940-459x (online)
www.telospress.com

1
2    Gabriel Noah Brahm

Moreover, as these currents in radical thought became entrenched in

the American academy, they entwined with insistent calls for “diversity,
equity, and inclusion,” culminating (for now) in debates over Critical Race
Theory (CRT).1 Ironically, having set out to liberate Being from scientism,
Heidegger’s thought—misinterpreted or not—actually wound up play-
ing a not insignificant role in the bureaucratization of the human spirit by
woke technocracy.
Given the intensity of the rebellion against CRT in the American
public square of late, the problem of Heidegger’s Nazism takes on addi-
tional, renewed significance. While opponents of CRT correctly see it as
anti-democratic and un-American, few have explored its authentically
totalitarian roots. In fact, as a late efflorescence of “post-Marxism,” it par-
takes richly in a postmodern tradition as Heideggerian as it is anything
else. CRT’s Marxist inspirations should continue to be investigated, but its
properly fascist provenance deserves attention too.
A pair of recent books by a leading left Heideggerian provides an
opportunity to begin shedding light on such matters. Both works con-
centrate on subtly mitigating—while profusely lamenting—Heidegger’s
well-documented anti-Semitism. So if CRT derives also, in part, from
Heidegger (as I maintain), might it not transmit some of his prejudices?
Political correctness, more broadly—of which CRT forms a conspicuous
manifestation—has, in fact, begun to be seen this way by at least one per-
ceptive critic, who observes, in the case of BDS, what one might term
PC’s “systemic” or structural anti-Semitism.2

Marx, Mao, Marcuse, and Me: Six Degrees of Separation?

What the postwar French thinkers, following in Heidegger’s wake, shared
in common was a mood of darkly exultant, vague if intense anticipation of
1. Christopher Rufo, “Battle over Critical Race Theory,” Wall Street Journal, June 27,
2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/battle-over-critical-race-theory-11624810791.
2. Martin Kramer, “The Unspoken Purpose of the Academic Boycott,” Israel Affairs
27, no. 1 (2021): 27–33. As Kramer observes, “The debate [in U.S. academia] over Israel
and the Palestinians is mostly a proxy fight for the real fight. Some have argued that Israel’s
conduct is prompting anti-Semitism. In the case of American academe, the opposite is true:
rolling back the ‘disproportionate’ Jewish presence [in American universities!] is served
by the disproportionate inflation of Israel’s supposed crimes. Israel in Gaza becomes a use-
ful stick with which to beat the local Jews. The boycotter who isn’t an Arab wants a boy-
cott, not to keep Jews out of the faraway West Bank, but to keep Jews out of the downstairs
faculty lounge—to make room for someone else” (ibid., p. 32). Needless to add, BDS is
not the only tool to enforce anti-intellectualism on campus in the name of “social justice.”
 Self-Hating Nazis    3

the Other. The dawning of the Age of Aquarius. An upsurge of neopagan-

ism that would recover, in order to celebrate, the Dionysian discontents of
two thousand years of Apollonian tyranny.
Like Thomas Pynchon’s hippie-chick protagonist in his iconic sixties
meta-allegory The Crying of Lot 49, the “poststructuralists” of the 1960s
and 1970s everywhere detected signs of an elusive yet inescapable revolu-
tion in progress all around, the circumference of which was nowhere and
the center of which was everywhere. Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man,
published the same year as Pynchon’s satirical novella, was likewise so
typical of this attitude that the students of May 1968 in Paris held up signs
reading “Marx, Mao, Marcuse.” The last, of course, had been a student of
Heidegger in Europe, before the war, and remained throughout his life “a
Heideggerian Marxist.”3 Marcuse’s own most famous student, of course,
was Angela Davis. Would any credible CRT theorist disown her seminal
influence?4
On a side note, by the late 1990s, this preoccupation with the herme-
neutics of everyday life was briefly routinized in the American academy
and rebranded as “cultural studies” (and of late more accurately rede-
scribed as “cultural Marxism”). For a time, there wasn’t a TV series, comic
book, or Madonna video that didn’t present, to the trained eye of the semi-
otician, sublimated utopian longings for a qualitatively different and better
future (albeit inherently unknowable and indescribable as such). Even-
tually, this “Heideggerized” Marxism morphed into the BDS movement
to—once again—boycott the Jews. Coincidence?5

3. Paul Piccone and Alexander Delfini, “Marcuse’s Heideggerian Marxism,” Telos 6

(Fall 1970): 36–46.
4. “I believe that Marcuse’s ideas can be as valuable today as fifty years ago,” Davis
writes in the foreword to Nick Thorkelson’s Herbert Marcuse: Philosopher of Utopia (San
Francisco: City Lights Books, 2019), p. ix.
5. See my discussion of Cary Nelson as a representative figure in the ups and downs of
this influential subdiscipline and its “Jewish problem,” in Gabriel Noah Brahm, “Canceling
Israel?” Telos 195 (Summer 2021): 165–73. In his important coedited book with Law-
rence Grossberg, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Champagne-Urbana: Univ.
of Illinois Press, 1988), Nelson published both Fredric Jameson’s “Cognitive Mapping”
and Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” among a host of other agenda-setting
items. While personally and professionally taking his distance from some of the excesses
of the whole endeavor from the start, he himself was influenced both by Althusser, through
the work of Stuart Hall, and Derrida, to whom he—as a careful parser of words—remains
loyal. The net result however was a decline in academic standards in favor CRT-style activ-
ism, from which the humanities never recovered.
4    Gabriel Noah Brahm

The Subject of Heidegger: Let It Be?

So it was that, with Pynchon’s ontologically liberated heroine, Heidegger’s
followers and their followers’ followers read in amazement the archi-
écriture on the wall, concluding that the prison house of Western civiliza-
tion was “like [one’s] ego only incidental: that what really keeps [anybody]
where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from out-
side and for no reason at all.”6 A generation had heard the mysterious call
of Being, which they’d apparently forgotten to remember to forget (thus
refuting Heidegger’s pessimism about modern man’s unfortunate “forget-
ting of Being”). In keeping with Heidegger’s thoroughgoing Historicism,
in other words, everything was a contingent social construction—except
the irreducible possibility of Dasein’s (human being’s) carefully disclos-
ing the “essence of action,” once it’s understood that “only what already is
can really be accomplished.”7 Releasement (Gelassenheit) was in the air.
This largely seems to have meant attentively waiting with eyes and
ears open for chances to participate in alternative lifestyles, as opposed to
charting a set course for another world or muddling through with piece-
meal reforms in this one. And who can say that this “negative capabil-
ity” has not been rewarded—in our own age of gender equality, gender
neutrality, cyborgs, transgenderism, demi-sexuality, neo-racism, renewed
interest in aliens and space travel, post-truth, the collapse of liberal edu-
cation into identity politics, QAnon, and a global anti-Semitism no longer
confined to Europe? A thousand flowers bloomed! Now what?
Moreover, as the Canadian political theorist Ronald Beiner explains,
in a heated response to the Heidegger revival of our own day—this time
back where he belongs, on the right—Heidegger’s “core thought,” which
continues to find an audience across the decades, could sound rather silly,
or even, as Jean-Luc Nancy has come to believe, “banal”:

Life as we ordinarily live it is a kind of “sleepwalking.” We live in obliv-

ion of what confers depth and drama on the human condition. “Being”
calls out to us to be properly aware that we live on the edge of the abyss
of utter nothingness, an abyss any of us could tumble into at any moment,
and somehow we live as if the abyss isn’t there. Isn’t that in itself the

6. Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (New York: Harper Perennial, 1965),
pp. 11–12.
7. Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell
Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 217.
 Self-Hating Nazis    5

most profound existential condemnation of the modern/liberal/bourgeois

mode of life? Don’t we require a cultural revolution of epic proportions
in order to shake us out of this condition of existential sleepwalking?8

It’s true, we are mortal. Granted, life in prosperous liberal democracies

can feel at once both too regimented and too comfortable; and these “dif-
ficulties,” ironically, produce new maladies, strange monsters, and fake
attention-seeking malaise in sensitive adolescents. Whoever invents a cure
for boredom, someday, will have done a lot. No, we don’t require any sort
of epic revolution, however. Not in the 1930s or 1960s, and not now.
Revolutions are destructive, murderous, hideous upheavals that have
only ever increased the power of the state.9
Thus, Heidegger’s celebrated concept of “being-toward-death” has got
to be one of the least interesting, most cowardly responses to our shared
finitude in a world of so many fascinating people supported by miracles
of material abundance. By dreaming himself uniquely awake, isolated in
contrast to those stupefied creatures around him, the revolutionary nihilist
puts the rest of us to sleep—in more ways than one. What, in short, could
be more mundane at this point than a rehash of the Nietzschean myth of a
heroic encounter with the void?
Time and again, twentieth-century revolutionaries have taken us to the
void—in Russia, Germany, China, Cambodia, North Korea, Iran, and Iraq.
There was nothing there.
By any reasonable accounting of “what is living and what is dead” in
Heidegger for the twenty-first century, therefore, it will not be his political
thought that anyone sane would choose to palpitate in order to preserve,
let alone resuscitate. Instead, why not debate the contribution to phenom-
enology made by his “existential analytics” (for what it may be worth)
while rejecting his notion of “historiality” and unwholesome penchant for
heroic mass movements opposed to individual rights and liberties? If there
is, presumably, an “outside” to phenomenology, perhaps we really don’t
know what it is. In light of our ignorance, surely the ethics of Emmanuel

8. Ronald Beiner, Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far
Right (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), p. 84.
9. The exception, of course, in some ways (concerning hideous mayhem at least),
was the American Revolution. Speaking of Heidegger, see Hannah Arendt, On Revolu-
tion (New York: Viking, 1963). Reacting against her master (and in contrast to Marcuse),
Arendt, the conservative, celebrates the moderation and reasonableness of the American
founding as extraordinary, an “oasis” of political freedom in the desert of human history.
6    Gabriel Noah Brahm

Levinas (the Heidegger student who most profoundly turned away from
the master thinker) is a better, more wholesome guide here.10

National Socialist Philosophy: A Reconsideration!

Before the end of the last millennium, indeed, the clichéd apocalypse had
stalled. The final decade of the twentieth century actually brought a full-
throated reconsideration of Heidegger and his influence, spurred by the
publication of Victor Farías’s sobering Heidegger and Nazism.
If some eager reactions to facts already in evidence, gathered there,
were nearly as zealous as certain obscure defenses of the German philos-
opher were unconvincing—Derrida implausibly claimed Heidegger never
fully supported Nazism, while Lacoue-Labarthe asserted that Nazism was
still too caught up with humanism, thus insufficiently Heideggerian—the
simple realization that during the early 1930s the German philosopher had
been a fervent supporter of Nazism began to set in.11
Subsequently, Emmanuel Faye’s Heidegger: The Introduction of
Nazism into Philosophy, relying on unpublished seminars, followed soon
after by the scheduled release of Heidegger’s own disgusting Black Note-
books, rife with vulgar Jew-hatred, completed the picture of a mad project
to overturn humanist norms not just theoretically, speculatively, but in
practice.
In view of the vile bombast found there, as the editor of the Note-
books (Peter Trawny) put it, Heidegger’s proposed “question of the mean-
ing of Being” had been brought down to earth by a more mundane query:
“What future is there for a thinking that sees in ‘world Judaism’ a destruc-
tive power of history—a form of destruction that ultimately destroys his-
tory itself?” Some asked, too, what it meant that the chief inspiration of
the postmodern academic left was someone who had never in his life

10. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso

Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univ. Press, 1969).
11. Thomas Pavel, “The Heidegger Affair,” in The Feud of Language: A History of
Structuralist Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 146–47. Individual citations to this
work cannot adequately acknowledge my debt to its author, to whom this small effort of
my own on adjacent ground is warmly dedicated. I also wish to thank these friends for both
critical and supportive comments, as well: Russell Berman, Bob Meister, Peter Minowitz,
David Greenberg, Gregory Lobo, Forrest Robinson, and Elhanan Yakira kindly consented
to read earlier drafts. Any errors that remain, despite generous attempts to help, are either
mine alone or else attributable to Being.
 Self-Hating Nazis    7

apologized for actively supporting Adolf Hitler, whom he passionately

believed in, pledged allegiance to, and called on his students to follow.12
However complex and debatable the details would have to remain for
biographers and scholars of German philosophy, sorting through the pre-
cise connections between the man, his work, and his milieu, the connec-
tions were there.

Chicken Soup for the Holocaust: Canceling Heidegger?

And so today, Jean-Luc Nancy’s late contributions to this morbid inquest
finally reach the bitter end of it—not by foreclosing or forestalling our
interest but by making the last, least bearable excuse on behalf of the phil-
osophical “master of disaster.”
In a pair of closely linked short volumes (so much so that they can
only be read as chapters of the same “text”), Nancy in effect asserts—ad
nauseum—that Heidegger was a self-hating Nazi, who “had recourse to
anti-Semitism . . . because his thought remained profoundly riveted to the
self-detestation that has never ceased to characterize the West.” In sum, if
“[we] do not like the Jews, or technics, or money, or commerce, or ratio-
nality,” it is because, after all, “[w]e do not like ourselves” (Banality 39).
With this in mind, “The West’s self-hatred . . . unfolded as anti-Semitism”
(35). “The old hatred of self, the old rancor of the West against itself” (44),
“the worst and most atrocious vulgarities of a hatred of self” (47), meant
that “the Jew will have been the name and the index of [the West’s] failure
to identify itself, to recognize itself, and to accept itself” (20).
It accepts itself enough, however, to plead this way, on behalf of its
worst exemplars—the Nazis—as merely “banal.”
And yet, so it is with the East, as well! For, likewise, when it comes
to the specifically Russian tradition of anti-Semitism, “Within the consti-
tution of Orthodox Christianity . . . it is possible to discern a certain ten-
dency to reject a Judaism that was considered all the more loathsome the
closer it was” (Excluding 20). More recently (closer still?), “intensified,
through the introduction of a Muslim anti-Semitism . . . anti-Semitism cir-
culates all around the Mediterranean—and more widely throughout the
world” (12). West, East, North and South—thanks to “globalization,” the
sort of metaphysical anti-Semitism that fueled the introduction of Nazism

12. Peter Trawny, Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 2014), p. ix.
8    Gabriel Noah Brahm

into philosophy “designates the Jew not as a stranger so much as a perni-

cious agent within the group and the civilization to which the agent—the
Jew—belongs” (23).
Thus, anti-Semitism is deemed “historial” and “spiritual,” meaning
that “[t]he Jew will have served as the scapegoat for everything that, for
a very long time, [Western] history experienced or at least adumbrated as
an impasse. The Jew will have been to blame for everything that modern
Europe or the West hates about itself and continues to brood over: for its
hatred of money, hatred of power, hatred of democracy, hatred of technol-
ogy” (54). Why the Jews? Why the bicyclists!13
Put yet again another way, “Anti-Semitism is inseparable from the
self-hatred of the subject because this phantasmic subject, ‘the Jew,’ repre-
sents very precisely the inverted figure of the Subject,” or what the French
prime minister once called, “a people sure of itself and domineering” (59,
italics in original). Lastly, with the final paragraph of the second book
under review here, “In an unexpected, even bewildering and yet intelligi-
ble way, anti-Semitism—the self-hatred of the West—spreads its poison”
across the globe (74, italics added). Europe infects the Arab world, then.
Which in turn reinfects Europe.
Presumably, though the author does not say so explicitly, this means
that an ashamed Europe will rally to the aid of not only its remaining Jew-
ish citizens but Israel, the Jewish state, locked in struggle with Islamism.
Further discussion of plans for reparative social justice along these lines
form a notable lacuna (absent presence) in the book, therefore.
Until then, as with today’s CRT, only certain grudges count. The truth
is, we all suffer “microaggressions” from passive-aggressive colleagues,
customers, clients, and poorly trained waiters every day. When accidental,
they used to be called faux pas. It’s part of life.14
In sum, as the Holocaust historian Peter Kenez recounts, philosophy
seems to have had access to “Hitler’s vague talk about ‘the Jewish spirit,’

13. “Round up all the Jews and bicyclists!” the old joke begins. “Why the Jews?,”
ask the soldiers. “Why the bicyclists,” replies the commander. While there is certainly
something to this notion of sheer absurdity, as an explanation—historical or philosoph-
ical—it’s inadequate. To be sure, Nancy adds that the Jews “heteronomy” offended the
Western metaphysical drive to eliminate “basically anything that is not force and domina-
tion” (Excluding 50). Still, the bicyclists, too, are traditionalists, no?
14. For a comprehensive overview of how the Israeli–Arab conflict is weaponized
against Jews, see Donna Divine-Robinson, Miriam Elman, and Asaf Romirowsky, “Word
Crimes,” a special issue of the journal Israel Studies 24, no. 2 (Summer 2019).
 Self-Hating Nazis    9

his notion that the Jew is within all of us.” Yet this derangement by itself,
Kenez notes, “would not alone have provided a solid basis for taking
action against specific individuals.”15 It required a leadership class with
evil intentions that were far from banal—pace Hannah Arendt’s naive
misreading of Adolf Eichmann, which Nancy’s elaborate retake in effect
applies to Heidegger. As a German philosopher, he was really “just doing
his job”? Or Being’s? Not according to historians.16

New Narodniks: Derivative Nations, Authentic Peoples,

and Hitler’s Philosophers
So, if self-loathing projected onto others is obviously a fairly common-
place motivator of unpleasant human behavior—and yet, equally obvi-
ously, inadequate as an explanation of either the Holocaust or anti-Zionism
today—are there signs of the more active, imaginative kind of intellectual
complicity with totalitarianism abroad today?
Two contemporary populist thinkers, one Russian, Alexander Dugin,
and one Israeli, Olga Kirschbaum-Shirazki, are becoming known for their
overlapping theories of the “ethnosocial” as “basic and fundamental”
to what it means to be human. Each denies that he/she is talking about
“races” per se, in the biological sense; but each can be (and has been,
in Dugin’s case) seen as neo-racist. I feel the need to mention them here
because these radical pluralists symptomatize the contemporary irreden-
tist struggle in thought for a post-humanism that is anti-liberal, anti-uni-
versalist, and anti-Western.
15. Peter Kenez, The Coming of the Holocaust: From Antisemitism to Genocide
(New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013), p. 106.
16. For the case that evil dictators are crucially aided by irresponsible elites, acting
creatively and willfully out of equally malign motives, see Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the
Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2011), and Paul Hollander, From Benito
Mussolini to Hugo Chavez: Intellectuals and a Century of Hero Worship (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 2016). As Hollander explains, educated Nazis “were not merely
unthinking careerists, or bureaucrats, of the Eichmann stereotype who merely obeyed
orders, but believers in what they were doing who related these activities to Nazi doctrines”
(Hollander, From Benito Mussolini, p. 97, emphasis added). As Bauer demonstrates, “In
a society that had willingly accepted the absolute leadership of a ruling elite and espe-
cially its head, the intellectuals became the chief transmitters of murderous orders. And
if the people with social and intellectual status led the way in executing such orders more
efficiently, recruiting ordinary murderers from the lower ranks of society became very
easy—insofar as the intelligent did not do the murdering themselves” (Bauer, Rethinking
the Holocaust, p. 35). Or, as Heidegger, the rector of the German academy, put it, on more
than one occasion, “Heil Hitler!”
10    Gabriel Noah Brahm

As Michael Millerman explains of Dugin:

The key idea in a nutshell is that Dasein exists völkischly or als Volk. The
notion of the people (Volk, narod) is thus placed in the broader context of
Heidegger’s philosophy, which includes both the existential analytic of
Dasein and the idea that history is the history of being, or rather, to use
the proper jargon, of “beyng” (Seyn, Seynsgeschichte).17

Or, as Kirschbaum-Shirazki puts it herself, in less forbidding technical-

sounding language, her own theory of “derivative imperialist nations” is
important because:

It contradicts the liberal perspective in that it shows that states have, by

virtue of a legal system, official languages, and political customs, an in-
herent collective dimension with a cultural or ethnic character.18

In an inversion of Barack Obama’s famous creed, there is no United

States of America, there is only white America and Black America, for
Kirschbaum-Shirazki.
No surprise, then, to learn that Dugin rejects the deracinated liberal-
ism personified for so long in the figure of the Jew:

For Dugin, the Heideggerian interpretation of the people serves as a sort

of “metaphysics of populism,” providing the inchoate longings of anti-
liberals with “strategy, consciousness, thought, a system, and a plan of
struggle.”19

Yet for Kirshbaum-Shirazki, too, the Jew does not escape this dichot-
omy of rooted/rootless. Rather—in a precise inversion—the Jew becomes
essentially comparable to the Inuit, the Armenian, the Yazidi. Primordial
not derivative. Good not bad. Under the Arab settler colonialism of the
middle ages, they,

[l]ike the Maya in the Yucatan and the Cree in Manitoba and Alberta,
the Berbers in Morocco and Algeria, the Assyrians in Syria and Iraq,

17. Michael Millerman, “The Ethnosociological and Existential Dimensions of Alex-

ander Dugin’s Populism,” Telos 193 (Winter 2020): 106.
18. Olga Kirschbaum-Shirazki, “Derivative Imperial Nations,” Tel Aviv Review of
Books (Winter 2020), https://www.tarb.co.il/derivative-imperial-nations-a-new-political-
designation-for-the-americas-and-the-middle-east/.
19. Millerman, “The Ethnosociological and Existential Dimensions,” p. 106.
 Self-Hating Nazis    11

and the Copts in Egypt did not disappear. They persisted with a common
identity, defined in some cases by ethnicity and religion (the Copts, and
Maronites, and Jews), and others by ethnicity and language (the Kurds
and Berbers) and others by all three (Assyrians).20

Opposing “assimilation” as equally terrible in all instances, she makes her

case on principle. Both U.S./Canadian imperialism in North America and
Arab imperialism in the Middle East will have to make way, on principle,
for the multitudes of indigineity in their midst. It doesn’t seem to occur to
her that the “Jewish and democratic” State of Israel owes its legitimacy as
much to the latter as the former term.
With the role of the intellectual in mind, especially, it is vital to note
that the narod, not the individual, is that which thinks. The philosopher’s
task, therefore—or the job of those Dugin terms the “single ones” and
Kirschbaum-Shirazki appears to imagine as the rebbetzin speaking for
all “formerly enslaved and/or indigenous peoples”—cannot be to impose
abstract concepts of justice from outside. Spiritual guides, rather, should
lead the people from within, toward the authentic fulfillment of its inher-
ent, territorial limited destiny.21 Millerman again:

[T]he narod [subject of populism] is understood not only ethnosociolog-

ically but also philosophically. Heidegger is the master philosopher for
this approach. . . . Dugin does not treat Heidegger’s philosophy as a spe-
cies of the third political theory (fascism/Nazism). Rather, he thinks Hei-
degger offers resources for a fourth-political-theoretic conception of the
“people.”22

As with Dugin, so with Kirschbaum-Shirazki, who frankly proposes her

new paradigm as just such a novel resource, “a template for resolving con-
flicts practically and conceptually” in both the Americas and the Levant.
This is because Tel Aviv is so much like Nunavut.23
In sum, no one who examines these ambitious ethnosocial thinkers
side by side can fail to be impressed by the resemblances. Both oppose the
unassimilable tribe to all modern deforming abstractions.

20. Kirschbaum-Shirazki, “Derivative Imperial Nations.”

21. Millerman, “The Ethnosociological and Existential Dimensions,” p. 107.
22. Ibid., p. 106.
23. Kirschbaum-Shirazki, “Derivative Imperial Nations.”
12    Gabriel Noah Brahm

The End of Beginning with Heidegger: Is CRT Fascist?

Lastly, as commentators have aptly noted, Heidegger’s tortured thought,
forged in the wake of the First World War’s calamities, participated heav-
ily in the anxious interwar disorientation that afflicted a generation. His
megalomania meshed well with that of his hero, Der Führer. If the contor-
tions of the postmodern Heideggerian left—brought to a depressing anti-
climax by Jean-Luc Nancy’s last two books—weren’t enough, then the
parodies of Dugin, Millerman, and Kirschbaum-Shirakzki, it seems, may
have to be entertained. Briefly.
But let it be noted how oddly PC these otherwise daring thinkers are.
Both Dugin and Kirschbaum-Shirazki insist that the world was made to
share, free of enmity between competing interpretations of Being. Their
thought meshes, in other words, with today’s CRT, which likewise abhors
as “arbitrary,” for example, all test standards suited to whites (and Asians)
but not others (including math), and sees all differences in a free soci-
ety (including violent crime rates) as evidence of group-based “inequity.”
However “neo-Marxist” such schemes for redistributing wealth and power
may appear, “Marcuse’s children,” in their racial essentialism, are as Hei-
deggerian as Jean-Luc Nancy. Or Dugin. Or Kirschbaum-Shirazki. While
the far-left roots of CRT have been widely discussed, more work remains
to be done to uncover the extreme right-wing rhizomes feeding the new
narods nodes.24

Gabriel Noah Brahm is Senior Research Fellow at University of Haifa’s Herzl

Institute for the Study of Zionism. In 2016 he founded Michigan’s Center for Aca-
demic and Intellectual Freedom (CAIF), at Northern Michigan University, where
he also teaches English. His forthcoming book is Israel in Theory: The Jewish
State and the Cultural Left. Follow him on Twitter @Brahmski.

24. See my “Marcuse’s Children” (forthcoming).