Abstract

Why does such a relevant part of the Italian Left Wing intelligentsia keep regarding Heidegger's legacy as a necessary key to understanding Modernity, in spite of more and more indisputable proofs of Heidegger's involvement in Nazism, and of the roots of this involvement in Heidegger's philosophical thought? Why does the deeply illiberal root of Heidegger's thought still captivate some of the best known representatives of what has been called «Italian Thought»? The ongoing publication of Heidegger's "Schwarze Hefte", and a recent book by Donatella Di Cesare on them, tracing back the responsibility for totalitarianism to the whole Western philosophical tradition, yield the topics for an analysis aiming at an answer to these questions.