Reexamining the case of one of the most famous intellectuals to embrace fascism, this book argues that Martin Heidegger’s politics and philosophy of language emerge from a deep affinity for the ethno-nationalist and anti-Semitic politics of the Nazi movement.
Himself a product of a conservative milieu, Heidegger did not have to significantly compromise his thinking to adapt it to National Socialism but only to intensify certain themes within it. Tracing the continuity of these themes in his lectures on Greek philosophy, his magnum opus, Being and Time, and the notorious Black Notebooks that have only begun to see the light of day, Heidegger’s Fascist Affinities argues that if Heidegger was able to align himself so thoroughly with Nazism, it was partly because his philosophy was predicated upon fundamental forms of silencing and exclusion. With the arrival of the Nazi revolution, Heidegger displayed―both in public and in private―a complex, protracted form of silence drawn from his philosophy of language.
Avoiding the easy satisfaction of banishing Heidegger from the philosophical realm so indebted to his work, Adam Knowles asks whether what drove Heidegger to Nazism in the first place might continue to haunt the discipline. In the context of today’s burgeoning ethno-nationalist regimes, can contemporary philosophy ensure itself of its immunity?
The book offers a sweeping examination of the evolution of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of language, with a special focus on his treatment of silence—a theme that undergoes significant transformation from his early work in Being and Time to his later engagements with Greek philosophy, particularly Aristotle’s Metaphysics. In his early writings, Heidegger characterizes language primarily as the vocalization of discourse, where discourse is understood as the meaningful structuring of the way beings disclose themselves. In this framework, silence is defined in negative, oppositional terms: it is essentially the absence or withdrawal of speech, a counterweight to the “idle talk” of everyday existence. Heidegger’s notion of the “call of conscience” in Being and Time exemplifies a mode of reticence that withdraws the individual from the noisy public sphere, suggesting that in order for authentic understanding to emerge, one must distance oneself from superficial chatter.
However, it argues that this early conception of silence is limited. Although Heidegger insists that one must have something meaningful to say in order to be silent—that is, silence is always predicated on a capacity for speech—this formulation still relies on a dichotomy between speaking and not speaking. The silence that is celebrated in Being and Time is presented as a kind of negative quietude, which, while opposed to mere noise, does not yet capture the ontological richness of silence as a positive, generative force.
A turning point in Heidegger’s thinking appears in his later work, especially in his 1931 lecture course on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Here, he revisits and revises key concepts such as logos, discourse, and language. Whereas in Being and Time logos is taken to mean primarily discourse—the structured, meaningful unfolding of being—Heidegger begins to reinterpret logos in terms of gathering. In his reading of Aristotle, he emphasizes that the Greek term for “to speak” (legein) carries connotations of gleaning, harvesting, and collecting. This shift moves the focus from a static “vocalization of discourse” toward a dynamic process in which language functions as a gathering or assembling of manifold voices. In this process, language is no longer simply the medium for transmitting preformed meanings; it becomes an active, creative, and communal force that reconstitutes meaning.
Central to this later approach is the idea of withdrawal (sterēsis), a concept Heidegger adopts from Aristotle’s treatment of force. For Aristotle, force (dunamis) is always bound up with its contrary, a withdrawing or “robbing” that introduces a form of non-being into the equation. Heidegger finds in this insight a way to articulate a more positive ontology of silence. Instead of viewing silence as merely the lack of vocalization, he comes to see it as an essential process—a withdrawal of language that, paradoxically, enables the emergence of a deeper, worded silence. This silence is not empty; it is the necessary condition under which the fullness of being may be gathered, articulated, and ultimately understood.
Thus, the work traces how Heidegger’s early emphasis on the oppositional nature of silence gradually gives way to a more nuanced vision in which language, through its polyvocality, both reveals and conceals being. By reorienting logos from mere discourse toward the act of gathering and by integrating the concept of withdrawal, Heidegger opens up the possibility for a “handicraft of writing” in which silence is rendered as a positive, generative element in philosophical language. In this way, the evolution of his thought not only transforms the understanding of language and silence but also lays the groundwork for a new political and ontological project—one that seeks to overcome the limitations of modern, calculative modes of communication and to restore a primordial, authentic mode of being.
Simon Gros 
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