Emmanuel Faye

Emmanuel Faye (born in 1956) is a philosopher and historian of French philosophy.

A specialist in the Renaissance and Descartes, he has also published several critical studies on Heidegger and his reception.

He is the son of the writer and philosopher Jean-Pierre Faye.

Agrégé in philosophy in 1981, doctor of the Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University in 1994, authorized to direct research by the Paris Nanterre University in 2000, and an associate professor there from 1995 to 2009.

In 2005, Heidegger, the introduction of Nazism into philosophy, was followed by a study by Sidonie Kellerer published in Sens Public, on its reception in Germany.

Since 2009, he has been a professor of modern and contemporary philosophy at the University of Rouen Normandy.

In Philosophy and the Perfection of Man, from the Renaissance to René Descartes, Emmanuel Faye sought to show that the Cartesian thought of the perfection of man was part of the continuity of the humanist philosophies of the Renaissance.

In 2014, he edited with Beauchesne, in the collection "Le Grenier à sel", an international collective work entitled Heidegger, the soil, the community, the race.

In 2016, he published a study on Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, in which he argues that she “develops a Heideggerian vision of modernity.

Justine Lacroix and Jean-Yves Pranchères criticize him for "listing the errors (of Arendt) and his uncritical references to Heidegger".

Guillaume Plas considers that certain arguments would go "against not only the spirit of Arendtian texts, but also of their letter".

Plas however modifies Faye's text, making him say what he did not say; while Faye writes that Heidegger's "Arendtian apologetics" are today in ruins (Arendt and Heidegger, p.510), Plas makes him say that it is “Arendt's apologetics” which would be in ruins.

On 21 September 2020, the philosopher and Talmudist Ivan Segré published an autobiographical article in the online weekly Lundimatin, where he examines, with regard to his own work, the rigor and relevance of his reading of Heidegger and Arendt.

He criticizes Emmanuel Faye for not grasping the substance of Heidegger's metaphysics, as well as for reducing the problem of the Heideggerian comparison (between the Shoah and industrialized agriculture) to a negation of the genocide.