ABSTRACT
I come here with the assurance that we will speak freely about everything, like last year. But what everything? Everything that is attached to the name of Germany for a French philosopher of my age: a language, a way of being and thinking, acquired as well as can be expected as a child, through Schiller, Heine, Rilke, as an adolescent through Hofmannsthal and Storm; spat out, interrupted by the occupying forces; the moan of a young dying soldier, “Mutter,” on a stretcher in the aid station at the Passage Saint André des Arts, July 1944, Paris; taken up again as a dead language from Husserl, Marx (1844 manuscripts, ‘44 once again, my twenties), from Hegel, Freud, Frege, Nietzsche, later Kant, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Adorno. Throughout my life, Germans on my bedside table.
