Heidegger was no ordinary philosopher, then, but a fatal career move on his part during the 1930s has called his work into question ever since. He became a member of the Nazi party, that notable extinguisher of freedoms, academic and other. As late as the 1970s, it was possible for commentators to suggest that "Heidegger's own association with the Nazis may be put down to political naiveté, in which he was certainly not alone in the 1930s" (John McQuarrie, Existentialism, 1972). In the 1980s, it emerged that Heidegger's membership was far from passive.

Hence rejections and warinesses from the left, and occasional excuses from the liberals. In our supposedly postmodern era, we now find Heidegger invoked as a powerful resource for those striving to rid us of stale ideologies and essentialisms. Yet this occurs at a time when mutant strains of Nazism persist and resurface across Europe and beyond. Is it not obvious enough that some postmodernists are showing worrying signs of amnesia, to put it charitably?

The plot thickens:

"We deal, then, with quite a difficult conundrum: how texts by a philosopher who advocated Nazism might lend themselves, even in seemingly paradoxical torsion, to political struggles that resist Nazisms of all kinds." (p.9)

Collins goes on to try to explain, within the confines of this miniature book, how Derrida contrives to condemn Heidegger's political record without slinging out his thinking. This involves showing how familiar concepts and boundaries in political philosophy can be undermined and destabilised by the gambits of deconstructionism. This entails, as Collins puts it, a "dangerous game" of jeopardising our very means of condemning Nazism.

"Derrida advances no programmes, methods, goal-orientations, techniques or the like. What deconstruction offers, rather, is an awareness of the limiting powers and trajectories of the usual political discourses, their turn away from responsibility. And it offers strategies that punctuate that turn." (p.59)

Needless to say, it is even less feasible to neatly wrap up these vexed questions in this review than it is for Collins in his pocket guide, but for those concerned by the puzzles involved this is a thoughtful account that provokes re-reading and further reading. Some final discouraging words from Heidegger himself:

"The need is for the truth of being to be preserved, whatever may happen to human beings and to all beings."