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" I shall speak of ghost, of flame and of ashes." These are the first words of a lecture on Heidegger. It attempts a new crossing: neither an" internal" commentary nor an indictment on the basis of" external" documents, however necessary they remain within their limits.

It again has to do with Nazism-of what remains to be thought of Nazism in general and of Heidegger's Nazism. But also with" politics of spirit," declarations on the" crisis of spirit" and on'freedom of spirit," which people thought then, and still want today, to oppose to the inhuman (Nazism, fascism, totalitarianism, materialism, nihilism, and so on). It is starting with the" Rectorship Address"(1933) that Heidegger raises a hymn to spirit. Six years earlier, he had decided to" avoid" this word, and then surrounded it with quotation marks. What happened? Why has no one ever noticed? Just like today, the invocation of spirit wanted to be a meditation on the destiny of …