ABSTRACT
The way we understand history is inevitably intertwined with the way we interpret everything else. The way we understand history is also commonly understood to influence the way in which we understand ourselves, which influences in turn our understanding of history. The field of hermeneutics builds its model of interpretation on this apparently unproblematic exchange, often conceived of as a circle. Recently, poststructuralist writers have claimed that there is something fundamentally wrong about the way in which thinkers such as Gadamer connect the subject to the tradition, and thus also to history. It appears that a large gap exists between Gadamer’s ‘The problem of historical consciousness’ and a text such as Heidegger’s notorious speech made upon accepting the Rectorate of the University of Freiburg in 1933. Yet if we are to take Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe at his word, it seems that the gap is an illusion. Speaking of Heidegger’s complicity in Nazism, Lacoue-Labarthe says,
from the moment that one considers the idea that Heidegger, and before him the entire great German tradition (Marx, on the one hand…included), had of the historical destiny of the West, we are not dealing with a mistake…. It is not a mistake, but it is a consequence.1
