Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism"

Kent Palmer (kdp.me) is hosting a reading and discussion of "Letter on Humanism". We will use the version of this essay from the Basic Writings book during the discussion, but you can read the essay in other books or online. Please read the essay beforehand and share your observations and questions.

The famed “Letter on ‘Humanism’” was a response to French philosopher Jean Beaufret, who wrote to Heidegger on November 10, 1946 posing a number of questions relating to the issue of humanism and asking what role, if any, remains for humanism in Heidegger’s thinking. The response, initially entitled “On ‘Humanism’: Letter to Jean Beaufret, Paris,” was Heidegger’s first publication after the Second World War. … As such, the “Letter” provides Heidegger with a forum for presenting himself and his thinking anew, something of which Heidegger takes full advantage. The letter is at great pains to read Heidegger’s current thoughts as continuous with what has gone before … the letter has provided new avenues for appreciating Heidegger’s thinking.
— Andrew J. Mitchell, Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger

[O]pened up a trans-humanistic or posthumanistic era, one in which a considerable portion of the philosophical consideration of man has taken place ever since.
— Peter Sloterdijk, Rules for the Human Zoo

[W]ithdraws the question of Being from the metaphysical or ontotheological horizon of classic humanism: Dasein is not the homo of this humanism.
— Derrida, Geschlecht II

[Humanism] is only a recent invention … [that] will disappear again as soon as our knowledge has discovered a new form.
— Foucault, The Order of Things

[A]t issue here is the original opening of Dasein…[the letter's] importance here cannot be overestimated.
— Agamben, The Passion of Facticity.

[A]t the origin of … humanism we find once again an impasse that is the same as Hamlet's, except strangely enough it is even more radical.
— Lacan, Seminar VII

[W]e are still in the dark. It is not always easy to be Heideggerian.
— Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?

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