Reading Heidegger, I felt like going out on the street and striking the first human being I met. Exasperating! And very funny the reaction, especially because of my enormous tolerance to what I dislike. Just before Heidegger, I had faced several of the most detestable pages I have ever read without a single violent impulse, without ever feeling the urge to tear up the book and physically assault a fellow man. What is the difference? The difference is that, in Rousseau’s pages, a man incapable of conceiving what would be honor or personal dignity, there was at least sincerity. And more than sincerity: there was style, conciseness, vigor in a prose that is undoubtedly one of the best in the French language. In it, reading the infamous is almost pleasurable. Rousseau knows how to build periods, to chain them, to make the logical progression of thought, and to expose it in a frank way. Heidegger did not. Heidegger hides behind a stupidly abstract language, whose most significant role is to make the banal look important. Heidegger affects methodical accuracy through ridiculous circumlocutions, typical of the one who does not have much to say, and an attentive reading captures the farce. Heidegger fools the reader. But why the comparison? I almost forgot. Rousseau, whose main work could be subtitled “The supreme foundation of demagogy,” whose lines are nothing more than dictating rules and saying how others should behave, still seems to me less vain than the one who, in ostensible linguistic imposture, builds an illegible work in order to impress.
The Infamous Is Pleasant in Front of the Cunning
