Janicaud, Heidegger en France, 2 vols.

Once upon a time there was a poor child in Swabia. By the sheer force of his thought and the relentlessness, of his personal work, he became world famous and conquered the intelligentsia of the "hereditary enemy", France. How was Heidegger able to occupy, for more than half a century, the privileged position of fashionable philosopher and master of thought in Paris, capital of intelligence and culture? Despite the abundance of translations, interpretations and polemical interventions, no attempt had ever been made to write in French the complete history of the reception, singularly eventful and unpredictably fertile, of what is undoubtedly the most original thought of the 20th century. Narrative and analysis are combined to retrace the main phases of a multifaceted intellectual adventure that is by no means reducible to passive reception and in which we find the great intellectual figures of the last half-century, from Sartre to Ricoeur, from Lacan to Char, from Levinas to Derrida. A document and testimony, this historical and philosophical fresco also intends to offer critical tools to enrich the debate on the scope of a thought that is still controversial. The interviews conducted here by Dominique Janicaud complete his Récit, the first volume of Heidegger in France. Initially collected as documentary contributions, these dialogues have revealed their own interest, their lively diversity, their historical and philosophical scope.