In 2025, a year before the passing of the philosopher and writer Jean-Pierre Faye, a conversation brought together his son, Emmanuel Faye, and the philosopher Vincent Cespedes. Jean-Pierre Faye, known for his work on political language and totalitarianism, engaged in major debates on Martin Heidegger’s legacy and co-founded the Collège international de philosophie with Jacques Derrida, later diverging from him intellectually. 

What intrigued me, when I was 15 or 16, was that I had never studied philosophy. Jean-Pierre Faye did not talk to me much about philosophy; he spoke mainly about revolutions in history, about moments of crisis, and he worked a great deal on the question of economic crises. I heard about Keynes, Michelet, and so on, even before we later came to discuss philosophers. But I knew that he had had this past as a philosopher: he had passed the agrégation in philosophy, he had taught philosophy at the Lycée des Bons-Enfants in Reims, and he had even made a rather mythical film called The Philosophy Teacher, in which he played a philosopher in a small provincial town—he was, in a way, playing his own role.

So for me, philosophy was a kind of mysterious past that had to be rediscovered. In that way, I was able to fantasize a little, or dream about this philosophy that remained in the background. Then there was indeed a rather curious moment: my final year of high school. I found myself at Henri-IV with a philosophy teacher who came in with his briefcase, put it down, and said to us: “You see this briefcase—it is a pond; ‘table,’ ‘pond’… where is Being?” In short, we understood nothing—what was he talking about? This teacher was completely Heideggerian, as you will have understood—a close associate of Fédier, a former disciple of Jean Beaufret. He later taught at khâgne and trained a whole generation of Heideggerians—Catherine Malabou, Lancelin, Johann Chapoutot, very diverse and talented people, Mazarine Pingeot, and so on—who became thoroughly Heideggerian under his........

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