Jacques Derrida, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Heidegger's spirit-discourse — Geist in the Rectoral Address (1933), in the texts on Trakl, in the late thinking on language and Versammlung — cannot be cleanly separated from the political commitment of 1933 and after.1 The privileging of the German language, of Versammlung (gathering) as the structure of the proper, of Geschlecht (sex, race, genus, family, generation) as the unmarked condition of authentic Dasein, all bear the marks of the politico-historical moment.2
The Geschlecht series traces this through the Trakl reading and the question of the human; Of Spirit (1987) reads the Rectoral Address together with the texts before and after, showing how spirit (Geist) is the concept that organizes the rest. The relation to Heidegger is faithful-but-distinguishing: continuous with the Destruktion of metaphysics, the question of being, the ontico-ontological difference; sharply distant from the politics-of-spirit, the privilege of the German Volk, the silence about extermination after 1945.345
The situation he is attempting is not inscribed or included—no more than the site, the place of Trakl's Gedicht—in the Platonic or Christian tradition, despite appearances and signs that might lead us into temptation. In both cases, what is at stake is spirit, the spiritual, the manner of thinking and [reanimating] the spiritual, das Geistliche. A.Geschlecht III, Sex Race Nation Humanity, pp. 59–60
The German idiom will always be, even in its silence, the force that gathers even the most opposite ends of the philosophico-political spectrum together around a language believed to have an "elective affinity" (Adorno's Wahlverwandtschaft) and an exclusive privilege vis-à-vis philosophy, humanity, and the universal.Geschlecht III, Sex Race Nation Humanity, pp. 21–22
At a certain point, this last no longer allows of translation into the first two. "Tell me what you think about translation and I will tell you who you are," recalls Heidegger on the subject of Sophocles' Antigone.s In this title De l'esprit, the Franco-Latin de also announces that, in the classical form of the enquiry, and even of the dissertation, I wish to begin to treat of s p i r it -the word and the concept,…Of Spirit, Heidegger and the Question, p. 11
Whence its privilege, still scarcely visible, for what are called the questions of the political or of politics which are stimulating so many debates around Heidegger todaydoubtless in renewed form in France, thanks notably to La- coue-Labarthe-at the point at which they tie up with the great questions of Being and truth, of history, of the Ereignis, of the thought and unthought or, for I always prefer to say this…Of Spirit, Heidegger and the Question, p. 13
We ¢ going to speak then of Heidegger. We are also going to speak of monstrosity. We are going to speak of the word Geschlecht. | am not going to translate it for the moment. Probably I will not translate it at any point.Psyche, Inventions of the Other Vol II, pp. 28–29
The Heidegger relation has been one of the most heavily contested areas of my reception, especially after the Faye controversy (1987 and again 2005). Lacoue-Labarthe's La fiction du politique (1987) and Nancy's collaborative work develop the careful reading of Heidegger's politics that Of Spirit extended. Faye's Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy (2005) and Trawny's work on the Black Notebooks (2014) push toward a stronger break than I myself drew. The Geschlecht series, with III only published in 2018 in French and 2020 in English (edited by Bennington and Crépon from the lecture notes), is now the central corpus on Heidegger's sexual-political thinking.