Heidegger and Literary Studies 1009071785, 9781009071789

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Heidegger and Literary Studies Martin Heidegger is one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, and a key philosophical resource for literary critics. Not only has he written about poetry, generations of poets have engaged his writings. And yet, for Heidegger, poetry and literature are separate. An essential part of the project of this book therefore is to show how both the distinction and connection between literature and poetry are staged within Heidegger’s thought. It offers Heidegger’s perspective on a range of key themes, topics, poets, and writers, including poetry and poetics, Ancient Greek theatre and tragedies, and then specifically Friedrich Hölderlin, Thomas Mann, Paul Celan, Euripides, and Sophocles. As the chapters comprising this book make clear, Heidegger’s work remains indispensable for any serious engagement with either literature or poetry today. Andrew Benjamin is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Monash University.

Cambridge Studies in Literature and Philosophy Editor Anthony J. Cascardi, University of California, Berkeley Tracing the impact of philosophy on literature in both content and form, this series shows how a philosopher’s thinking filtered thematically and substantively into literature, as well as into the generic evolution of creative writing. Cambridge Studies in Literature and Philosophy also provides a summation of the state of twenty-first-century knowledge on what impact a philosopher or theme has had on literature. Books in this Series: Robert Chodat and John Gibson Wittgenstein and Literary Studies Andrew Benjamin Heidegger and Literary Studies Forthcoming Books in this Series: James I. Porter Nietzsche and Literary Studies Claudia Brodsky Kant and Literary Studies Kate Stanley and Kirsten Case William James and Literary Studies

Heidegger and Literary Studies Edited by

Andrew Benjamin Monash University

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781316513101 DOI: 10.1017/9781009071789 © Andrew Benjamin 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2023 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Benjamin, Andrew E., editor. Title: Heidegger and literary studies / edited by Andrew Benjamin. Description: Cambridge ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2023. | Series: Cambridge studies in literature and philosophy | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2023014016 (print) | LCCN 2023014017 (ebook) | ISBN 9781316513101 (hardback) | ISBN 9781009073011 (paperback) | ISBN 9781009071789 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976–Criticism and interpretation. | Literature–Philosophy. Classification: LCC B3279.H49 H34175 2023 (print) | LCC B3279.H49 (ebook) | DDC 193–dc23/eng/20230424 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023014016 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023014017 ISBN 978-1-316-51310-1 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of Contributors

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Heidegger and Literature: An Introduction to the Question

1

Andrew Benjamin

I Literature and Poetry

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1

15

Heidegger’s Literary Secret Joseph Cohen

2

The Event’s Foreign Vernacular: Denken and Dichten in Heidegger

29

Krzysztof Ziarek

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Shared Habits: Love, Time, and The Magic Mountain in 1925

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Ben Morgan

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From Tool to Poem: The Emergence of the Antagonism between Technics and Poetry in Heidegger’s Work

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Justin Clemens

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Heidegger’s Use of Poetry

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Christopher Fynsk

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contents

II Heidegger and Greek Literature 6

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Heidegger and Sophocles: Antigone’s Ethos of Intimating and Waiting

119 121

Sean D. Kirkland

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Playing with Shadows in Heidegger’s Reading of Greek Tragedy: Encountering Oedipus, Antigone, and (Absent) Medea

150

Silvia Benso

III Heidegger and Literary Works 8

Places of Pain: Heidegger’s Reading of Trakl

183 185

Claudia Baracchi

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The (Im)possibility of Homecoming: Heidegger, Celan, and the Aporia of Language

214

Charles Bambach

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Heidegger and Blanchot: “Wherefore Poets in Time of Distress?” (Hölderlin, Rilke)

253

Leslie Hill

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Thomas Mann and Martin Heidegger: Two Distinct Paths of the “Conservative Revolution” in Germany

278

Ingo Farin

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Travels in Greece: Heidegger and Henry Miller

319

Andrew J. Mitchell

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Hölderlin’s Heidegger, Heidegger’s Mourning

336

David Ferris

Heidegger, Index of Works General Index

359 364

Contributors

Charles Bambach is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas Dallas. Claudia Baracchi is Professor of Moral Philosophy, Università di MilanoBicocca. Andrew Benjamin Monash University.

is

Emeritus

Professor

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Philosophy

at

Silvia Benso is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Women’s Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Rochester Institute of Technology. Justin Clemens is an Associate Professor in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Joseph Cohen is Associate Professor (School of Philosophy, University College Dublin, Ireland). Ingo Farin is an independent researcher. He taught philosophy at various universities in the United States and Australia. David Ferris is Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Christopher Fynsk is President of the European Graduate School. Leslie Hill is Emeritus Professor of French Studies at the University of Warwick. Sean D. Kirkland is Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, DePaul University.

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list of contributors

Andrew J. Mitchell is Professor of Philosophy, Emory University. Benjamin Morgan is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford, and Fellow and Tutor in German at Worcester College. In 2019, and 2020–1 he was also Visiting Associate Professor of German at Harvard University. Krzysztof Ziarek is Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Heidegger and Literature: An Introduction to the Question Andrew Benjamin

1 What if the formulation Heidegger and Literature were turned into question? What if, rather than asking about an assumed relation, the relation was problematized? Rather than linking Heidegger to the proper names of literature – as though such names as Mann, Trakl, Hölderlin, Sophocles etc., had an assumed and already determined status – what would then endure in each moment would be the presence of that relation as a question. Retaining the question would open up fields of genuine investigation. Hence the point of departure would be less Heidegger and Literature and more Heidegger and Literature? A question to which responses were not just awaited, more significantly each response would have a transformative effect both on how ‘Heidegger’ then figured and ‘Literature’ was itself understood. In other words, allowing for the endurance of the question – Heidegger and Literature? – undoes the possibility that there is a singular Heidegger that is then connected and reconnected to differing instances of the literary. Part of the significance of the chapters comprising this volume is that not only does the question of literature (and its complex relation to poetry) continue to be reconfigured, it is also the case that those processes of reconfiguration reposition Heidegger; again, a repositioning that allows for a type of plurality to attend the proper name. A cautionary word needs to be introduced here. This is not a plurality that refuses the possibility of judgement. On the contrary, it is a conception of plurality that demands that the stakes of judgement be allocated an exacting precision. There is Heidegger the figure within German cultural history; equally as present is Heidegger the reader of both literature and poetry. Heidegger the philosopher continues to figure, as does Heidegger the 1

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maker of political interventions. Heidegger(s) continue(s). These positions – and each one allows as much for its own nuanced presentation as it does continual forms of mutual overlap – are examined and allowed to emerge within the confines created by the demands of literature. Literature becomes therefore a setting. Each chapter of this book presents its own form an analysis. Taken as a whole rather than advance a unified project, which would have had the effect of singularizing both ‘Heidegger’ and ‘Literature’, what emerges, as noted above, is a plurality of possibilities. ‘Literature’ can have a literal presence; equally it can be contrasted to ‘poetry’. Literature can be assumed, or it can remain present as a question. Literature, in eschewing an essential determination, opens up the possibilities of different construals and evaluations of Heidegger (and equally of literature itself). On the one hand, an approach of this nature is consistent with Heidegger’s own identification of ‘thinking’ and ‘poetry’. Equally it might be remarked that such a possibility – resisting essentialism – has often been thought as the unique province of literature. (Though then, it might be argued, the latter was, in fact, a specifically philosophical claim about literature.) At every moment decisions need to be taken and positions both justified and expanded. The difficulty here – and it should be acknowledged from the start – is that there cannot be a single summary position that can be stated in advance, one which would then provide a synthesis of the project as a whole. Nonetheless, while each chapter is a study in its own right, and needs to be assessed as such, given the particularity of individual projects, there are still important forms of complementarity between them. Equally there are points of disassociation and resistance as well as assimilation and connection. All emerge, in part, as the consequences of what can best be described as the radicality of Heidegger. Whether the actions, be they philosophical, cultural or political, that form part of that radicality can be deemed a success or a failure continues to endure as one of the great interpretive questions. (Indeed, it should be added that Heidegger is one of the very few philosophers whose limits actually matter philosophically. Discovering those limits creates further openings rather than announcing the end of a project.) Specifically, here, what the openness of the interpretive question maintains is the fact that literature emerges – and again that emergence has to be positioned in relation to Heidegger’s own conception of poetry – as an integral part of Heidegger’s attempt to reposition what counts as the philosophical. What this means is that for Heidegger the philosophical comes to be aligned with ‘thinking’ rather than the history of metaphysics. That history is the way

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philosophy, as conventionally construed, has conceived of itself thus far. For Heidegger, it is a conception that is premised on the refusal to identify and allow for the potentialities incorporated with the history of philosophy. Moreover, for Heidegger, it is the failure to note that both philosophy’s current form, as well as its history, is in the gift of that potentiality, even if the latter is systematically effaced. Heidegger’s work aspires to provide the philosophical with what might be described as an abyssal grounding. Again, such a move would be linked to the overcoming of metaphysics. If there is a way of particularizing the latter – metaphysics – then two of its defining elements are the following. Firstly, the philosophical is thought in terms of the calculative with the concomitant reduction of language to the purely instrumental or the conventionally communicative. The second is the identification of philosophy with both presence and immediacy and thus the differing forms that the immediate can take. In his Afterword to “The Origin of the Work of Art” Heidegger described the ‘task’ of that essay thus: The foregoing reflections are concerned with the riddle of art (‘das Rätsel der Kunst’), that riddle that art itself is. They are far from claiming to solve the riddle. The task is to see the riddle (‘Zur Aufgabe steht, das Rätsel zu sehen’). (GA5: 67)

For Heidegger what is named here in this passage as ‘art’ is not to be understood in terms of the immediacy of its presence. It is neither the giveness of the object nor the object’s presence within the conventions of art history. Equally, there is no attempt within this formulation to view the work of art – and this position could be extended to cover all objects of interpretation (thus both art and literature as conventionally conceived) – as that which can be reduced to a singularity. Once this were to occur, then the work of art could be given a complete description. One that would either be coextensive with an interpretation or form the basis of an interpretation. In both instances, though the degree would vary, description and judgement would then coincide. For Heidegger there is a cost. The propriety of the work of art is refused. What stands against both immediacy and presence is the identification of the work of art with the ‘riddle’. Again, what matters here is how to respond to the ‘riddle’. It can never be a question of resolving it. Any attempt to force a resolution onto the riddle would be to refuse the work of art by seeking its closure. Closure would be a form of presence. It would that interpretive move which insisted on establishing the coextensivity of the signifier and the signified. Heidegger distances both closure and presence. His position is

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not to solve it but ‘to see the riddle’ (‘das Rätsel zu sehen’). It should also be noted, again, that this is described as a ‘task’. The latter can be understood as the repositioning of the philosophical by stemming the hold of metaphysics. That stemming, and the concomitant opening, would be a form of grounding, an abyssal grounding. (Remember that the abyssal in Heidegger’s German is the Abgrund.) Part of the significance of art is that it is already the staging of one of the dominant aspects of Heidegger’s philosophical project. In sum, that aspect is the revealing and concealing of Being. A position that accords importantly with the distinction that Heidegger establishes between the ‘sayable’ and what he designates in a number of contexts as ‘the unsayable as such’ (‘das Unsagbare als solche’). For Heidegger, the latter is not just linked to poetizing either as a literary form or as general abstraction, but to worldly being. Hence the line from Hölderlin that he continues to cite and that can be viewed as orientating a great deal of his thought: ‘dichterisch wohnet der Mensch auf dieser Erde’ (‘Poetically men dwell on this earth’). Already in this line it is clear that whatever ‘poetry’ is allied to or describes, there is an ineluctable link to the question of the being of being human. At its most straightforward, the line can be understood as claiming that ‘dwelling’ is that which occurs beyond the hold of calculation and instrumentality. The further and utterly central implication is that poetry opens the space in which the propriety of human being can be thought. It is not merely located and specified in the poem: it is poetry, and thus the poetic, that is already there allowing that which is proper to human being to appear. And yet, precisely because language can always be incorporated within the calculative and thus function purely instrumentally, what is then lost once the calculative prevails is any insight into the nature of dwelling. It needs to be noted that, for Heidegger, being and dwelling have an important comparability. Moments of illuminating interconnection are central. What predominates is, of course, the positioning that stems from the centrality of the revealing and concealing of Being. In terms of its affirmative positioning, poetry, for Heidegger, has at the very least a double register, insofar as it allows for the truth of human being whilst at the same time naming that which is proper to Being; the latter is the affinity between poetry and dwelling. (Just to reinforce the claim; it is this affinity that the line from Hölderlin has already identified.) Once poetry always comes to name more than the activity of the poet or the history of the genre of poetry, an important question then arises: what then of both that genre and literature itself? The question cannot be viewed abstractly. It only has real force once it is located within the

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project of Heidegger’s overcoming of metaphysics. It is a question therefore that is posed not just at the limits of Heidegger’s philosophical writings, it is also the question that allows these limits to be investigated and Heidegger’s philosophy to be delimited. Again, both of these measures have to be viewed as openings and therefore as ultimately productive.

2 As noted at the outset, the chapters comprising this book do not create a synthetic whole aspiring to be a complete, let alone exhaustive, account of Heidegger and literature. The relation that has been created is viewed as a locus to be explored resulting from the relation’s presence as a question having been maintained. Indeed, the projects of some chapters can be read against those of others. Two elements of the impossibility of unity are important. The first, as noted above, is that the occurrence of this divergence at the heart of the interpretive project is productive. The second is that it harbours an inner truth. Namely, the divergence in question is that which the proper name ‘Heidegger’ demands, and as significantly it is what the interplay of literature and poetry allows. Joseph Cohen is concerned with the way in which ‘literature’ as a separate domain seems to fall outside Heidegger’s philosophical project of the thinking of Being. He takes the ineliminable presence of literature and Heidegger’s refusal to attribute to it an essential quality as the basis of then going on to argue that it is literature’s presence that allows Heidegger’s thinking of the essence to be questioned. The implications of this questioning are as much directly philosophical as they are implicitly political. Literature becomes linked to the invocation of a ‘plurality of worlds’ that is unavailable to Heidegger’s thinking. (As will be seen, this theme has a certain constancy within the volume as a whole.) What emerges here is that literature works in the context of Cohen’s study to delimit Heidegger. Both Ben Morgan and Ingo Farin’s chapters take the relationship between Heidegger and Thomas Mann as their point of orientation. Heidegger did not write on Mann explicitly. Mann figures most significantly in a number of Heidegger’s letters to Arendt. There is therefore in the Mann–Heidegger relationship the presence of a figure whose own writings on the world and her thinking of the affective plays a role in understanding Heidegger’s response to Mann. For Morgan, the

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importance of Mann is that he presents a lost opportunity. It is as though Heidegger read Mann almost purely as a literary distraction. And therefore not as the creator of works in which there were ‘experiments’ on how to live. Mann provided, but Heidegger ignored, modes of life that brought current developments within literary practices, as well as scientific discoveries, to the fore. Heidegger’s insistence on Dasein as the way in which human life was to be thought failed to take up the resources – imaginative resources – made possible by literature. In the case of Mann this would have demanded that Heidegger shift his philosophical thinking in order that Mann’s literary work be accorded the significance that was attributed to Hölderlin. Ingo Farin uncovers an affinity between both Heidegger and Mann in terms of what Farin describes as a commitment to a form of ‘conservative revolution’. Farin’s important contribution is to situate Heidegger’s writings of the 1930s and 40s, recently published, then translated as the Black Notebooks, in terms of a political positioning that has an affinity with Mann’s. Here the question of Heidegger’s politics has been expanded. Again, what becomes central is the way that Mann’s engagement with the question of life as it occurs within the form of the novel opens up the difficulties, the complexities, more generally the openness that comes from worldly engagements. Again, the question is, had these been the object of Heidegger’s reflections, even though that would not have diminished his commitment to a conservative revolution, that commitment may have led in directions other than the one taken. The important conclusion here is that Heidegger should have been as attentive to literature as he was to poetry. Andrew Mitchell takes up the question of the possibilities of literature within the Heideggerian corpus through an examination of Heidegger’s fleeting encounter with Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi. Mitchell’s chapter is as much an engagement with questions of description and the connection it has to Heidegger’s development, at the time of the Zollikon seminars, of the ‘phenomenology of the inapparent’, as it is a return to Heidegger’s politics. That return is occasioned for Mitchell by a reflection on Heidegger’s use of literature. It might be argued here that both Heidegger and Miller are concerned with modes of description that, while allowing for the presence of the described, significance (perhaps in every sense of the term) lies equally in the fact that what forms of presence also announce are sites of absence. Presence and absence both have to figure within acts of description. The real is ‘supplemented’ by traces of the absent, thus reconstructing what counts as the real. This

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occurs in Miller’s writings on Greece. Equally, they can be noted at work in Heidegger’s own travel writings. Heidegger gives philosophical expression to the position in his development of a ‘phenomenology of the inapparent’. Krzysztof Ziarek demonstrates the care with which Heidegger’s overall conception of poetry needs to be approached. Ziarek keeps returning to the way the distinction between poetry as a literary genre and poetry and poeticizing in Heidegger’s writings is presented. The significance of this move is to show how the nature of the relationship between thinking and poetry/poeticizing – that is, between Denken and Dichten – defines Heidegger’s larger philosophical project. Moreover, it is this connection that demonstrates that Heidegger’s work will always overcome any attempt to reduce it to that which is simply preoccupied with art (the latter taken broadly). Poetry, in being in excess of the generic determination, is, Ziarek argues, that which opens up Heidegger’s domain of philosophical thinking. What is opened up as a result is the question of the ways in which a return to poetry might equally be that in relation to which the limitation of that ‘thinking’ might then be uncovered. Christopher Fynsk addresses the question of poetry both in relation to Hölderlin and in its own right. Justin Clemens is equally concerned with poetry, while David Ferris uses Heidegger’s writings on Hölderlin in order both to clarify and to delimit further the Heideggerian project. Fynsk reintroduces, via the body and the body’s implication within the poetic, the relation that Heidegger’s philosophy has to death. While the preoccupation with death is thought to have ended with Heidegger’s move from Being and Time, Fynsk demonstrates that as late as Building, Dwelling, Thinking (1954) what marks human being is that it is the only entity ‘capable of death as death’. What becomes important therefore is the nature of the relation between the ‘use’ of poetry, a use which can be defined in terms of its capacity to stage the truth of human being while simultaneously allowing the truth of language to appear, and the ineliminability of death. What is poetry’s relation to death? The question has force precisely because both the relation of human being to language and the relation to death involve different but related senses of propriety. Clemens uncovers the emergence of the way in which poetry is presented by Heidegger. In order to do this, he approaches poetry through an interpretation of the ‘tool’ in Being and Time. What is of interest therefore is the undoing of utility. He argues that the broken tool, in its becoming ‘unhandy’, opens up the need to think that which can no longer be defined by use. The resources of Being and Time will not allow a sustained

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engagement with the consequences of the critical distancing of utility to occur. It is possible then to read the move to poetry and the subsequent involvement with language as occurring in the space opened by the impossibility of maintaining the effective presence of that which is ready-to-hand. And yet, given Heidegger’s own interpretations of the poetic, one important consequence of the move to poetry is that part of what still remains – perhaps pace Heidegger – is the project of the mobilisation of poetry’s continual possibilities. In other words, what Clemens maintains as fundamental is the attribution of a future to poetry. Ferris focuses directly on Heidegger’s interpretation of Hölderlin. His chapter can be read as responding to two prompts. The first is to account for why Hölderlin figures in the way that he does within Heidegger’s writings. Part of answering that question, while making clear the ways in which way Heidegger interprets Hölderlin, also demands an explanation of who Hölderlin is for Heidegger. What is important therefore is recovering the Hölderlin that figures within Heidegger’s texts. The second prompt follows. Is there another Hölderlin? Another figuration of the poet? Responding to the question of the status of Hölderlin, Ferris quotes from Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry. Heidegger writes that “Hölderlin’s poetry is for us a destiny” (GA4: 195/224). What emerges here, and Ferris pursues this question with the care and the detail it demands, is the status of this ‘us’. The interplay of ‘we’ and ‘us’ is pursued through Heidegger’s Hölderlin interpretations and equally, and this in part in response to the second prompt, in Hölderlin. What that means is that the limitations of Heidegger’s positioning of Hölderlin are recovered from Hölderlin’s poetry itself. Not only does Ferris demonstrate the presence of another Hölderlin, he uses that Hölderlin to critique Heidegger’s. Were this position to hold, then it is the work of poetry that undoes that way in which poetry and the figure of Hölderlin occur in Heidegger. Sean Kirkland and Silvia Benso write on Heidegger’s relation to Ancient Greek theatre, specifically works by Sophocles and Euripides. Kirkland’s project begins with a sustained discussion of ‘place’ in order to develop an interpretation of ‘ethos’ within Ancient Greek philosophical and literary texts. He then goes on to use Heidegger’s reading of the first stasimon of Sophocles’ Antigone to develop a philosophical interpretation of the figure of Antigone which, while not Heidegger’s, is nonetheless deeply informed by Heidegger’s thinking. His interpretation depends upon an understanding of her ‘ethos’. For Kirkland, Antigone moves from a

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position in which she has a place within a clearly demarcated world, to one in which she is no longer at home. She has been radically displaced. Kirkland traces the movement of Antigone from her having a place to her having become dis-placed. He notes that this is also the possibility that always attends human being. The latter is signalled by Heidegger in his analysis of ‘das Unheimliche’ (‘the uncanny’) which is his translation of the Greek – ta deina/to deinon. Human being is the being who is ‘unhomely’. One of the important conclusions that can be drawn from Kirkland’s chapter is that Antigone is not a tragic figure in any conventional sense. It is rather that she exemplifies the plight of human being as such. For Heidegger what prevails, even now, is a fundamental ‘homelessness’. One so severe it is not even noticed. To read the Antigone, and to focus on the figure, is for Heidegger to note another fundamental truth concerning human being. Silvia Benso offers a sustained interpretation of home and ‘strangeness’ through an analysis of both Sophocles and Euripides’ Medea. What marks out Benso’s interpretation is that the figure of Antigone is not presented as the absolute other, and thus the counter position to being at home. Rather she is, in Benso’s terms, ‘the other within the house’. She is condemned to suffer precisely because the unhomely and the homely work together. The difference that she has to live out is a difference from which there is neither escape nor reconciliation. In order to dramatize the way in which her presence as the unhomely is to be understood, Benso contrasts her to Medea. Heidegger did not write about Medea. She did not figure. Benso argues that she too is unhomely, though in a radically different sense. Medea’s actions are the refusal to be the subject of fate. Moreover, to refuse her, Medea, dignity elicits a response. Benso argues that what she stages is the fraught recognition that ‘the power to give birth also has the ability to give death’. The way out is the overcoming of conflict in the name of the shared. What Benso is doing can be interpreted as allowing literature to present, delimit and limit Heidegger’s project. This occurs in the context of this chapter not by denying the necessity to take up the link between human being and the unhomely, but rather by an analysis of the Medea that suggests that the unhomely is a more complex position than Heidegger had initially recognized. Claudia Baracchi’s ostensible area of investigation is the conception of place that emerges from Heidegger’s ‘reading’ of Trakl. Poetry and language are central in this context insofar as Heidegger argues in Der Sprache, the first of his two texts on Trakl, that it is in and through

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language that the human becomes what it is. This recognition occurs, of course, within the already noted distinction between the equation of language with the calculable and the instrumental on the one hand, and, on the other, the presence of the properly human. Here there is an appearing that is language’s other work. This other work is poetry. And yet at this precise moment a complicating factor emerges. For Baracchi, there is a ‘striving’, a coming to language. Were this to occur there had to be an attendant sense of coming to be placed. This sense of place, she argues, stands in stark opposition to the nomadic. It announces what she describes as an ‘aversion to the allos – the other’. This positioning of Heidegger is not brought from the outside. On the contrary, it forms part of his interpretation of Trakl. The force of Baracchi’s analysis is to show that while Heidegger continues to distance the possibility of alterity, and thus a pluriverse that works in concert with the multilingual, a position that is premised on the continual effacing of other aspects of Trakl’s poems, the possibility of an affirmation – one both affective and potentially geographical – remains. For Baracchi, the move away from Heidegger is not the result of abandoning poetry and a concern with language. Rather, it is to attribute to both a different quality and thus to envisage a different conception of human being. Language and human being remain interconnected. It is rather that language reveals the primacy of both ‘dissemination’ and ‘peril’. Charles Bambach locates an affinity between Heidegger and Celan. In part it is based on the possibility of identifying in Celan’s writings a systematic engagement with Heidegger. Hence the interpretive question is, in part, reversed. Instead of looking into Heidegger’s interpretation of poetry, the force of Bambach’s analysis is that it concerns poetry’s (here Celan’s) engagement with Heidegger. Obviously, what has to endure is the presentation of Heidegger’s thinking of poetry and of poetic language. However, that presentation is undertaken in order to trace poetry’s relation to thinking. Or perhaps, more emphatically, poetry as a site of thinking. That relation is the work of poetry. These connections are not abstract. After a biographical study demonstrating the personal connections between Celan and Heidegger, Bambach embarks on a detailed reading of Celan’s poem “Schliere.” What emerges is an interpretation that highlights the way the poetry works through Heideggerian ‘topoi’. This is not to claim that Celan simply incorporated Heideggerian themes within his poetry. Rather, the work of language that is the work of poetry continues to reference the impossibility of completion and thus to allow for the resounding presence of what has already be identified as the

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‘unsayable’. Bambach locates in the measure of Celan’s poetic language, coupled to formulations at work in Celan’s Meridien speech, an ethical dimension. In Bambach’s terms, for Celan ethics ‘is abyssal’. The impossibility of mastery and closure is the inscription of an already present sense of alterity – the other – within the work of language. It may be therefore that ethics, for Heidegger, if the direction indicated by poetry were taken, is not a topic but the structure of thinking itself. The indication that this might be the case is evident in poetry. In Celan’s work. There are few writers on literature that have had the same degree of significance for both literary studies and philosophy as Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003). Blanchot was an exceptional reader of Heidegger, albeit a critical one. His response to Heidegger did not, however, take the form of an academic article or book. The counter to Heidegger was not located within the realm of academic philosophy. Blanchot’s response was to read the same poets. However, he reads them differently. Blanchot’s encounter with Heidegger can be located in the nature and the detail of those differences. Leslie Hill concentrates on Blanchot’s reading of Hölderlin and Rilke. The setting is the place of poetry in the ‘time of distress’. What, in such times, do poets do? Hill’s project is initially to trace the points of connection between Blanchot and Heidegger. For example, both demonstrate a refusal of presence. Both, in Hill’s terms, ‘confer on poetry a foundational, metahistorical function’ after having encountered the ‘abyss’. More generally, both took death as a fundamental motif that had a philosophical as well as a literary register. However, what Hill demonstrates is that these moments of affinity and proximity – and their insistent reality should not be doubted – are equally moments of separation. Hill locates in Heidegger’s interpretations both a pervasive anthropocentrism as well as a form of nostalgia. Both are held by the problematic evocation of a ‘destiny’. In opposition to what is identified as Heidegger’s anthropocentrism Blanchot maintains the primacy of the animal within the ‘open’. Equally, rather than the ‘abyss’ becoming the ground, the ‘abyss’, for Blanchot, endures. Blanchot allocates to poets the task of registering the exigency of this overall condition. Hill positions Blanchot as both delimiting and departing from Heidegger. As should be clear from these summaries, working on the relationship between Heidegger and literature, where that work insists on holding to the relation as a question, continues to establish the limits of Heidegger’s thinking. Those limits, however, are the points at which there is the invitation to go further. That invitation has two elements. Firstly, opened up as a result is the nature of Heidegger’s contribution and the possibility

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for a continual reassessment of the Heidegger that figures within this process. Heidegger becomes of more or less value as a result. The second element of the invitation concerns literature. While the summaries here have had to truncate what in the context of the actual chapters are nuanced, scholarly and deftly argued positions, what should be clear is that literature, time and again, sets the measure. Literature can be that which is there moving towards Heidegger’s conception of poetry. Or it can be literary texts themselves staging imaginative worlds that call on thought. As much as it is possible to reposition Heidegger, the additional value in holding to the question of literature – of continuing to ask What is literature? – is that if the question is approached via engaging with Heidegger it remains open.

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Literature and Poetry

1

Heidegger’s Literary Secret Joseph Cohen

It remains surprising and incongruous to never see Heidegger pose the question What is literature? Our interrogation will thus revolve on this surprise and incongruity: why Heidegger never applies explicitly and openly the “fundamental question” to the singular logos at play in literature. And, furthermore: why does Heidegger never think the heading which literature could perhaps give to the “History of Being”? This question, What is literature?, could perhaps have been set forth and explicated in Heidegger’s “thinking” and “saying,” emerging from the “History of Being.” Could perhaps have been set forth and explicated, as Heidegger attributes a specific status to poesis and, in the concluding lines of the 1943 Postscript to the “What Is Metaphysics?” lecture, marks the poet as the thinker, albeit differently (the thinker “says Being”; the poet “names the holy”) and from “mountains most separate” “dwell near to one another.”1 Is there something in literature – a secret – which impedes its grasp in the ontological horizon of the “History of Being”? Certainly, our interrogation will have to take oblique ways to perceive the status and role of literature in Heidegger’s topology of the “History of Being.” Our entry into Heidegger’s literary secret will therefore seek to reveal what is left “un-said” and remains “un-thought” at work in the relation between the thinking of Being and literature. After having approached the “un-said” and the “un-thought” of ontology held in reserve in literature and which we already suspect contain a deeper unsayable and unthinkable, we shall engage in showing the point, the instant, the event where the “history of Being” actively betrays its own-most “truth” and, as if it incessantly operated against itself, leaves open another thinking irreducible to the history of Being and expresses

1

GA9: 312/237.

15

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wholly other signifiers than those circumscribed in and by the horizon of the truth of Being: singularity and justice. Allow this formulation to begin our investigation into Heidegger’s literary secret : The history of Being gives, deploys and expresses itself through the incessant withdrawal and concealment of its inner and own-most essence. Otherwise said, the gift of Being, its manifestation in history, always and already supposes its constant veiling and concealment. Such is therefore the Law persistently at work in Heidegger’s philosophical gesture: giving always and already implies a retraction from its gift; and by extension, saying always and already supposes a secret yet un-said within the said. The modality of this “dispositive” lies on the active rereading of “onto-theology” of “metaphysics” which, as Heidegger remarked in the opening pages of Being and Time, has persistently reduced the “foundational question” of philosophy – what is Being? What is the meaning and truth of Being? – to a “directing question” resolutely confined to understanding and grasping the grounding entity whereby entities as a whole find their identity and recollect their signification. In this sense, and by re-instating and reformulating the essence of the “ontological difference” between Being and entities, Heidegger seeks to deploy the meaning, the truth and the history of Being irreducible to the order of entities as a whole. Irreducible and yet entirely consumed – betrayed and perjured – in the history of its presentation. As just marked, the irreducibility of the gift of Being, however, ought not signify its simple transcendent abstraction in relation to the general sphere of entities and the history of its presentation – as if the meaning and truth of Being constituted an independent domain removed from the effective and actual phenomenality of entities. Rather, Heidegger marks how the order of phenomenality is always and already tributary of an unthought and un-present gift originating from yet another source than that of its phenomenality. Indeed, such is the fact of onto-theology, of metaphysics, of the philosophical tradition since its Greek beginning: the meaning and truth of Being gives itself within the history of its onto-theological and metaphysical deployment and manifestation as that which it is not yet and therefore as that which remains always unthought. The Saying of Being remains yet unsaid in its being said. The letter of Being remains yet concealed in its expression. The call of Being remains yet unheard in its resonance. The gift of Being remains yet withheld in its gift. The pulsating heart of this philosophical “dispositive” persistently straddled between the unthought essence of a gift which always and already gives itself as that which it is not yet, symbolizes the active and

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apocalyptic modality of a turning point, a Kehre, where one “sees” and “hears” – beyond the seeing of things or the hearing of sounds – the very duality of this essential double donation. And Heidegger never ceases to mark and commemorate this pivoting element at work within the essence of thinking. To think the history of Being always means to think the other of its manifest historical deployment. To think the other means: to think otherwise than how, why and where Being has deposed itself in its manifest and manifested history. The deployment of the “History of Being” is thus entirely riveted to an unthought source, origin, essence where the thinker and indeed the poet are called to “see” and “hear” within the manifest, the present, the presentation of its own-most meaning and signification. Hence the question: which writing is here in play? According to which Law does this writing of the other express itself? Heidegger does not pose the question in this specific manner. However, by framing the question in this manner, we are not yet unfaithful to the modality informing Heidegger’s re-writing of the “History of Being.” We seek here to pose the question to Heidegger’s own-most question by revealing what secret lies at the heart of Heidegger’s writing and rewriting of both philosophical thinking and poetical saying. Indeed, within thinking and saying, in philosophy and poetry, for Heidegger, lies the secret of Being, that is, the event of a determined donation. Such a unique determination of donation affects both the “uttering” of the thinker and the “saying” of poet. And although Heidegger retrieves the classical distinction between poetry and literature, a distinction marked by Baudelaire2 – poetry speaks within the totality of the real by letting its actuality articulate itself through the poetical saying, whereas literature verbalizes singular objects present in reality by maintaining their particularity from the verb – the appropriation of both philosophical thinking and poetical saying through this determined donation opens to a particular logos whose primary responsibility is to retrieve and recover the unthought Other within the essential movement of its own-most truth. The determined donation of this own-most truth occurring through the event where is appropriated the unthought Other is nothing other, nothing more and nothing less than the interplay which both veils and unveils itself, conceals and reveals, that is, ultimately unveils its veiling, reveals that it is always and already concealing itself. Heidegger points and marks the origin and source of philosophical thinking and poetical 2

Cf. Gerhard Goebel, “‘Poésie’ et ‘littérature’ chez Baudelaire et Mallarmé: Analyse du changement d’un concept,” Romantisme 13, no. 39 (1983).

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saying as the opening of a unique possibility to appropriate the incessance in thinking and saying of the unthought and the un-said, that is to appropriate the incessant concealing of the essential. There are two figures that mark this unique possibility in the “History of Being” to appropriate the unthought Other: Nietzsche and Hölderlin, the thinker and the poet. For Heidegger, the diagnosis posed by Nietzsche frames the entirety of the history of onto-theology. Indeed, Nietzsche represents the thinker of the “accomplishment” of metaphysics, that is, the proliferation of nihilism as movement and modality of our historical destiny. Nihilism here means, according to Heidegger’s active re-reading of Nietzsche, the perpetuation of the forgetfulness of the meaning of Being, its truth and essence, and thus the substitution and replacement, the translation and the betrayal of the initial question pertaining to the source and origin of thinking. Substitution, replacement, translation and betrayal of the initial question of thinking – that question forgotten by the very history which sought to pose and advance it – into the production of an enframing (Gestell) where thinking is entirely reduced to avoiding and sidestepping its essential task. What is meant here? The essential task of thinking is demoted in its historical engagement. Rather than resolutely affirming and expressing its co-belonging within the meaning and truth of Being, it has left its initial task unengaged. It has left its questioning power and force towards the unthought otherness of Being and let it be subjugated to the ordering and enframing of entities. This nihilism unleashed as thinking, constantly replacing the question towards the meaning of Being by the interrogation of the ground and foundation on which the presence of entities is ordered and enframed, for Heidegger, nonetheless reserves within itself a possibility of turning, of re-turning, remembering (Andenken) and recalling the initial and essential task of thinking. Certainly, this opening of a possibility beyond metaphysics, beyond onto-theology, and therefore beyond the technological enframing of entities indicates, yet again for Heidegger, how the meaning of Being is never reducible to the history of metaphysics and why this very meaning remains unapproached, and thus unquestioned, by the history which has, nonetheless, incessantly ventured and willed its comprehension. And furthermore, how the history of metaphysics in thinking towards the meaning of Being has repeatedly missed and persistently forgone the question, exposing thinking to the meaning of Being itself. In this sense, for Heidegger, to forgo the question pertaining to the meaning of Being constitutes the very identity of the history of metaphysics. Thinking how and why this question

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remains, in this history, the unthought space where the no-thing within our onto-theological tradition yet remains and persists to be thought. To “remember” the unthought in thought and throughout its history reveals another possibility for thinking, an “other beginning” of thinking – other than the Greek, onto-theological, event of metaphysics. The possibility of this “other beginning” remains, for Heidegger, initiated by an incessant Auseinandersetzung with Nietzsche, and therefore through a persistent confrontation with the diagnosis of nihilism which resumes our destiny. Which marks how the “acerbity of the explication (Auseinandersetzung) is possible only because it is supported and maintained by the most intimate ‘yes to the essential’.”3 Through Nietzsche, we are engaged in a “strife towards the essential”4 and thus, always according to Heidegger, enjoined towards the exigency to “hear” and “see.” in its utmost force and in the extremity of the “danger.” “the shimmering of a crepuscular glory.”5 “Yes to the essential” means therefore affirming and acting out a certain approach of the metaphysical and onto-theological tradition. This approach marks a confirmation of this very tradition, whereby to confirm means at the same time to reverse and, through a gesture of repetition, to recover the unthought essence which has produced it. In this sense, this confirmation inhabited and worked by the recovery of its unthought also stipulates and instructs a determined recalling of its initial source and origin where is cleared and opened an “other beginning” of thinking, a poetic address of the source of our tradition. Ultimately, thus, affirming, against and beyond the onto-theological and metaphysical tradition, a “yes to the essential” implies and supposes an affirmation of a certain compliance and assumption of its deployment. However, through a resolute struggle against the nihilism this tradition has deployed, it also means the announcement and call for the necessity of a passage or a transition (Übergang). This transitory passage, Nietzsche himself had inscribed it in the existential action of the human being – indeed, the human being is both a “task” and a “bridge.” And Heidegger incessantly retrieves this Nietzschean figure whilst inscribing it within the existential aperture and engagement, decision and destiny of the Dasein. As a mark of our present epoch and situation, this necessity is precisely marked: our present situation needs the decision towards an alteration 3

4

Cf. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: Volumes One and Two, trans. David Farrell Krell (HarperCollins, 1991), 32. 5 Ibid., 32. Ibid.

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from the end of the onto-theological and metaphysical tradition to an apocalyptic, novel beginning for thinking. This novel beginning for thinking expresses itself, as just noted, in the poetical. Why the poetical? For the poetical deploys in its difference the essential task of thinking. Indeed, the poetical is a “saying” which, in and within the said, remains and reserves itself as yet un-said, as yet to be said, and thus witnesses and testifies of the futurity of another event than that which we have seen and heard throughout our metaphysical and ontotheological language and tradition. Heidegger inscribes this poetic supplement in thinking and through language. Indeed, if the “thinker utters being” – that is, when the thinker expresses both the manifestation and presentation of Being through its onto-theological and metaphysical reduction in embodying the ground and foundation of entities, and thereby utters the proliferation of danger, peril, technological manipulation and ordering of entities in the forgetfulness of the meaning of the truth of Being and calls for the need to overcome, to pass and move elsewhere, then it is in the planetary devastation of technology – the “poet” “hears” and “sees” the “that which saves.” and therefore “says” the translation of the Greek beginning into the German appropriation of that which was left unthought in this first beginning. The “poet” says the unthought truth of Being, sees and hears the hidden secret beyond its manifest perjury within the onto-theological and metaphysical tradition. Which means the “poet” embodies another language, that of the unthought, covered and dissimulated essence of the truth of Being. What lies in this reserved unthought? What occurs within this preserved un-said? Which unique word appears in the “saying” of the “poet” which carries the revelation of the unthought and the clearing of the unsaid within the history of the truth of Being and which, at the same time, exceeds the danger and the peril of its technological, metaphysical, ontotheological proliferation and enframing? It is Hölderlin who expresses this revelatory and apocalyptic supplement in thinking through which is discovered the response to the central question within Heidegger’s history of the truth of Being: according to which disposition are we to surpass and exceed the same in its barbarous form into the same in its saving form? And, of course, Hölderlin’s poetical word is not only, not uniquely, saying where and how “grows the saving power” from “where the danger is.”6 The poetic word also exceeds thinking by speaking to the human being’s

6

GA7: 32/QT: 333.

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responsibility, the existent’s response and decision, task and resolution as a poetics of sacrifice. Indeed, Opfer as ontological Aufgabe marks and concentrates the “saying” of the “poet” where poesis incessantly retrieves and recalls thinking beyond its abandonment in the technological, ontotheological and metatphysical deployment and into the liberation of an “other beginning.” In this sense, the sacrificial recovers, keeps and safekeeps the utterings of the thinker by showing, through the operation of its offering and of its gift, the same as thinking, where this sameness leaves its barbarous form, escapes its technological and onto-theological nihilation, and begins anew the expression of its saving form. Why sacrifice? According to which Law does Heidegger conceal within the “saying” of the poet the sacrificial as the word and the operation of the “other beginning” incessantly exceeding the utterances of the thinker? Why is the sacrificial the poetic word for the showing of the history of the truth of Being and the engagement of Being for Being? Why is the sacrificial the essence of this poetic language finding itself in its own-most essence as language of Being, its truth and history? These questions contain a profound political resonance. And point towards a certain determination which constitutes the entirety of Heidegger’s philosophical thought. Foremostly, these questions mark and point to the central disposition in what we could call here Heidegger’s idea of responsibility in the deployment of the history of the truth of Being: “proximity of owning (Eignen) and propriating (Ereignen).” that is, proximity to that which we always and already own, and, at the same time, belong to, co-belong with and appropriate as that which remains our own-most, and yet concealed, essence. This idea of responsibility formulates itself as a decision towards that which is already inhabiting our language. To offer an answer to these questions is to respond to that which unifies, at the summit of Heidegger’s meditation, the history of the truth of Being. This unification supposes the operation of sacrifice, one which, according to Heidegger, Germanity (Deutschtum), and thus the German language, is always and already called to engage. Again, the bipolarity here set lies between Nietzsche and Hölderlin, the thinker and the poet. On the side of Nietzsche is revealed the “will to power” and its “nihilation” extended and maximized to its planetary dimension in the oblivion of Being through the proliferation of technology. On the side of Hölderlin, however, lies the apocalyptic possibility of the poetic appropriation of the history of the truth and essence of Being. Nietzsche: the effective destiny of our humanity. Hölderlin: the reserved possibility

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within and beyond this destiny. We see Heidegger here point yet again to the saving power of poesis. For this duality offers the very measure of a perhaps in which always and already lies the possibility of the transformation in our kinship with language. That is the possibility of a turn and therefore a certain re-turn to that which adjoins thinking and poetry within their essential co-belonging: the opening and clearing where “every thinking that is on the trail of something is a poetizing, and all poetry a thinking. Each coheres with the other, on the basis of the saying that has already pledged itself to the un-said, the saying whose thinking is a thanking.”7 Heidegger incessantly returns to the operation of sacrifice as that poetical event of appropriation, capable of retrieving and recovering, through its donation and offering, the Greek event of onto-theology and metaphysics and open towards an “other beginning” for thinking. This return is not fortuitous, or unexpected. Certainly, Heidegger is conscious of the theological, as well as metaphysical,8 resonances of this term, which are far too profound and charged for Heidegger to clearly and distinctly affirm the role and essence of the sacrificial in the “task of thinking.” But despite these resonances, Heidegger clearly resorts to the operation of sacrifice as that essential disposition of humankind in guarding and safeguarding the “appropriating event” through which the co-belonging of Being and Time shows itself and in which the modality of the truth of Being constitutes its own-most dispensation in its history. For, through the operation of sacrifice is revealed, for Heidegger, nothing less and nothing more than the double movement of “essential thinking.” at the heart of the history of the truth of Being, where the essence of its gift shows itself as the offering of its own-most essence.9 That is, through the operation of sacrifice is disclosed at once and simultaneously the retraction, concealment, withdrawal and the affirmation, confirmation, ratification of the truth of Being. This is why sacrifice tolerates no calculation or machination, nor is it structured and framed in a predetermined teleological finality and therefore is never

8

9

GA12: 256/WL: 425. For example, in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, where sacrifice plays the essential role of the Aufhebung and therefore as the operation capable of carrying phenomena to logos, the immediate “sense certainty” to the speculative mediation of “absolute knowledge.” Cf. Joseph Cohen, Le Sacrifice de Hegel (Galilée, 2007). GA9: 311/237. Cf. Joseph Cohen, “Le Sacrifice de l’etre: Note sur la pensée du sacrifice chez Heidegger,” Bulletin heideggérien 2 (2012), https://uclouvain.be/fr/instituts-recherche/isp/ bulletin-heideggerien.html. ˇ

7

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assimilable or reducible to the technological ordering and enframing of entities. In a certain manner, this sacrifice is entirely removed to any theological determination. And indeed, for Heidegger, this sacrifice without telos or theos commits the human being to its own-most historical responsibility where is revealed the essence of its freedom, that of securing and safekeeping its engagement towards being for being in the “guardianship” of and the care for10 the truth of being. Heidegger signifies this operation of sacrifice beyond onto-theology and metaphysics yet again in the Postscript to “What Is Metaphysics?” The thinker reveals how and why “a particular humankind” – which always means for Heidegger that humankind who already speaks, sees and hears the concealed, hidden, secret and “silent voice of being.” the “speechlessness of the realm thus cleared” and whose “provenance” is the “the same” as that of the “poet” – deploys its freedom in the sacrifice where language first arises and where, as always for Heidegger, the Germanic recalls and recovers that which Greek logos has forgotten and ultimately lost in its inaugural event: philosophy. As we mentioned above, the political resonance – ought we to say here “meta-political” significance? – of this sacrificial engagement is profound. It means not the Germanic sacrifice of the Greek – as if what was required was here the simple negation of the “Greek beginning” in the clearing of the “other beginning” in thinking – but rather the sacrificial appropriation of what the “Greek beginning” had reduced to calculation and organization in its planetary technological development. Indeed, the sacrificial engagement marks for this “particular humankind.” the essential Germanic retrieval of the Greek beginning. Or, otherwise said: the “poetical thinking” of that which philosophy had consumed and expended in its onto-theological and metaphysical event and becoming. Heidegger, in the end of the passage we are to quote, marks precisely how this sacrificial appropriation is not only a matter of responsibility for that “particular humankind.” but also why its “courage” signifies entering within the realm of that which remains, and which Heidegger marks as “the” unique and indivisible, originary “word” sourcing all possible “words”: That thinking whose thoughts not only cannot be calculated, but are in general determined by that which is other than beings, may be called essential thinking. Instead of calculatively counting on beings by means of beings, it expends itself in 10

On the ontological disposition of “care” in Heidegger’s topology of sacrifice, most particularly in Being and Time, cf. Joseph Cohen, “On the Possibility of Sacrifice,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 22, no. 4 (2014).

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being for the truth of being. Such thinking responds to the claim of being, through the human being letting his historical essence be responsible to the simplicity of a singular necessity, one that does not necessitate by way of compulsion, but creates the need that fulfils itself in the freedom of sacrifice. The need is for the truth of being to be preserved, whatever may happen to human beings and to all beings. The sacrifice is that of the human essence expending itself in a manner removed from all compulsion, because it arises from the abyss of freedom – for the preservation of the truth of being for beings. In sacrifice there occurs [ereignet sich] the concealed thanks that alone pays homage to the grace that being bestowed upon the human essence in thinking, so that human beings may, in their relation to being, assume the guardianship of being. Originary thinking [Das anfängliche Denken] is the echo of being’s favour, of a favour in which a singular event is cleared and lets come to pass: that beings are. This echo is the human response to the word of the silent voice of being. The response of thinking is the origin of the human word, which word first lets language arise as the sounding of the word into words. Were there not at times a concealed thinking in the ground of the essence of historical human beings, then human beings would never be capable of thanking – granted that in all thinking of something and in every thanking there must indeed be a thinking that thinks the truth of being in an originary manner. Yet how else would a particular humankind ever find its way into an originary thanking unless the favour of being, through an open relation to such favour, granted human beings the nobility of a poverty in which the freedom of sacrifice conceals the treasure of its essence? Sacrifice is the departure from beings on the path to preserving the favour of being. Sacrifice can indeed be prepared and served by working and achievement with respect to beings, yet never fulfilled by such activities. Its accomplishment stems from that inherent stance out of which every historical human being through action – and essential thinking is an action – preserves the Dasein he has attained for the preservation of the dignity of being. Such a stance is the equanimity that allows nothing to assail its concealed readiness for the essential departure that belongs to every sacrifice. Sacrifice is at home in the essence of the event whereby being lays claim upon the human being for the truth of being. For this reason, sacrifice tolerates no calculation, which can only ever miscalculate it in terms of utility or uselessness, whether the ends are placed low or set high. Such miscalculation distorts the essence of sacrifice. The obsession with ends confuses the clarity of the awe, ready for anxiety, that belongs to the courage of sacrifice which has taken upon itself the neighbourhood of the indestructible.11

Sacrifice always retains and preserves, in its offering and gift, the essence of the offered and the given. Such is its inherent Law: sacrifice protects, keeps and safekeeps the grace of the gift, the thankfulness of the

11

GA9: 309–10/236–37.

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offering, and thereby the originary truth and source of donation. It is here that the poetical and the sacrificial ally each other in coveting, as its concealed secret, the “saying” of the truth of Being as the “name of the holy.” Certainly, when Heidegger marks this concealed secret as the “name of the holy” he also indicates how and why this “holy” is wholly other than what was as such determined in onto-theology. He signifies this “holy” as the other of the Greek beginning which needs and requires humankind to “see” and “hear” the “unforeseeable arrival of the unavoidable.” That is, in Heidegger’s thought of Being, that which Germanity is yet to think and thus recall as its own-most essence. Again, the word from Heidegger’s Postscript to “What Is Metaphysics?” marks the cadence and shapes the rhythm and the verse: Thinking, obedient to the voice of being, seeks from being the word through which the truth of being comes to language. Only when the language of historical human beings springs from the word does it ring true. Yet if it does ring true, then it is beckoned by the testimony granted it from the silent voice of hidden sources. The thinking of being protects the word, and in such protectiveness fulfils its vocation. It is a care for our use of language. The saying of the thinker comes from a long-protected speechlessness and from the careful clarifying of the realm thus cleared. Of like provenance is the naming of the poet. Yet because that which is like is so only as difference allows, and because poetizing and thinking are most purely alike in their care of the word, they are at the same time farthest separated in their essence. The thinker says being. The poet names the holy. And yet the manner in which – thought from out of the essence of being – poetizing, thanking, and thinking are directed towards one another and are at the same time different, must be left open here.12

The sacrificial is also given in what Heidegger will call the “community.” And yet again, it is the poet Hölderlin who leads here what Heidegger calls “essential thinking”: With soldiers, the camaraderie of the front does not come from the need to assemble because other persons who are afar have left us, nor from an accord to be enthusiastic together; its most profound, its unique reason is that the proximity of death as sacrifice has firstly brought each one to identical annulations [Nichtigkeit] which has become the source of an absolute belonging to each other. It is precisely the death that each man must die for himself alone and which isolates to the extreme each individual, it is death and the acceptance of the sacrifice it obliges, which creates the space of the community from where surges camaraderie. If we do not integrate in our Dasein forces which bond and isolate as

12

GA9: 312/237.

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absolutely as death as sacrifice freely consented, that is that do not take hold of the very roots of the Dasein of each individual and which reside as profoundly in an authentic understanding, there will never be a camaraderie: at most a particular form of society.13

Heidegger incessantly situates the operation of sacrifice within the realm of freedom, and therefore in the Dasein’s decision to keep and safekeep its own-most responsibility as guardian of the truth of Being. The “freedom of sacrifice” retrieves the existential disposition of Dasein’s “being-towards-death” where is recalled and recovered the ontological privilege of the Dasein’s resolution towards the deployment and appropriation of the truth of Being. Such an importance is therefore given and attributed to sacrifice as ontological disposition, since the existential analytic in Being and Time and throughout what Heidegger calls “essential thinking.” for the operation of sacrifice, “freely consented.” reflects the very modality of the gift and donation, through the appropriating event (Ereignis) of Being and Time. Hence the operation of sacrifice is not foreign or exterior to Dasein’s existential disposition. It rather belongs to its own-most Jemeinigkeit as it marks the co-belonging of humankind to the truth of Being. Which means, ultimately for Heidegger, that it marks history itself. Indeed, the operation of sacrifice shows itself to deploy the co-historizing of humankind, the mortals, and the truth of Being. The operation of sacrifice structures and constitutes the meaning of the deployment of this co-historizing where both humankind and the truth of Being correspond. At the heart of this structuration and constitution lies the determined dynamic of the turn (Kehre) whereby always and already each historical event occurring in and within the ontological drama between humankind and the truth of Being are contained within the umpteenth power of recovering and appropriating its origin, source, essence. Within this determined dynamic, each historical event is always and already testifying to the historical relation between humanity and the truth of being. Indeed, each historical event is contained within the unfolding of this relation. Heidegger always stresses this point: history is of Being and thereby is always called and re-called to the meaning of Being. Without ever stipulating a universal reason of history, Heidegger insists nonetheless on recalling each historical event and epoch, to testify to the withdrawal, the retraction, the concealment of the truth of Being. Always and already, each historical event and epoch marks the secret of

13

GA39: 72–73/66, translation modified.

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that which is still unthought in the history of the truth of Being. This claiming of the unfolding of history within the secrecy of Being means for Heidegger to already think poetically about history itself. It signifies a certain poetization of historical events – and thus, the possibility to see and hear at work in each singular historical event the sacrifice of its singularity in the name of its consecration within the sphere of its presumed origin and source. Our question: according to which Law and from which place does this poetics of sacrifice inscribed in a poetical language of history operate and ultimately function? Which “dispositive” – supposedly animated outside or beyond or before the technological arrangement of historical events – haunts the Heideggerian appropriation of the history of the truth of Being? Where lies the singularity of historical events, and furthermore, the historical responsibility in the testimony of singular historical events, when always and already inscribed in the situation of this ontological and sur-determined poetics of sacrifice? Or, and following in the vein of our question: what of literature? What of the possibility of suspending and interrupting the determined poetics of sacrifice in history, of dismantling the unicity of the poetical “saying” and of disassembling the pretention it appropriates for itself to give or offer the secret of the said and of the multiplicity of words in its ownmost word? To mark and introduce this question at the heart of Heidegger’s poetics of sacrifice as language of the history of the truth of Being is to engage in showing not only how and why this poetics – capable of appropriating each singular historical event within the scope and sphere of the essence of a truth always and already dictating the source and origin of all which is manifest in history – is entirely determined, and ultimately caught up and captured, by a hyper-technicity it had never as such foreseen. It also spurs against the poetics of a sacrifical history, and thus against death,14 the wholly other desire to see and hear countless other multiple words occur in the “word of Being.” Other multiple words irreducible to the unity of the co-belonging between poesis and thinking and wholly heterogeneous to the unicity of the source or of the origin contained and expressed within the history of being. Perhaps it is

14

Leaving this topology of what is supposed and implied in this against death as a singular attention towards the singularity of historical events, and thereby as a singular dismantling of the poetics of sacrifice as deployment of the history of the truth of Being, for a further study, we recall here the title of E. Canetti’s posthumously published notebook: Elias Canetti, Das Buch gegen den Tod (Carl Hanser Verlag GmbH & Company KG, 2016).

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of literature, and the possibility in literature of speaking the plurality of words, and thereby of witnessing the irreducible singularities acting through each singular historical event and heterogeneous to any oneword poetically charged in and by the meaning of Being, that Adorno was pointing towards as he absconded thinking from poetry, as he abstracted out the singularity of Auschwitz as a singular historical event from the grasp of the sacrificial language always and already capable of conveying the essence of the truth of Being. Perhaps what is left for thinking to express is a literary secret which, without recourse to the unity of a poetics and irretrievable by the univocity of a sacrificial poesis, is inhabited by the unsacrificiable spectres of each historical event, the unthinkable deaths of each death in history. Perhaps what is left for thinking to express is the literary secret of “a novel horror that is death in the camps: since Auschwitz, death means fearing something worse than death.”15

Bibliography Adorno, Theodore W. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1993. Canetti, Elias. Das Buch gegen den Tod. Carl Hanser Verlag GmbH & Company KG, 2016. Cohen, Joseph. Le Sacrifice de Hegel. Galilée, 2007. “Le Sacrifice de l’etre: Note sur la pensée du sacrifice chez Heidegger.” Bulletin Heideggérien 2 (2012): 4–43. “On the Possibility of Sacrifice.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 22, no. 4 (2014): 552–68. Goebel, Gerhard. “‘Poésie’ et ‘littérature’ chez Baudelaire et Mallarmé: Analyse du changement d’un concept.” Romantisme 13, no. 39 (1983): 73–84. Heidegger, Martin. Nietzsche: Volumes One and Two. Translated by David Farrell Krell. HarperCollins, 1991. ˇ

15

Theodore W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1993), 364.

2

The Event’s Foreign Vernacular Denken and Dichten in Heidegger Krzysztof Ziarek

Ist Denken ein Dichten und Dichten ein Denken? Sind beide, Dichten und Denken, je auf ihre Weise beides? Eins – oder Keins? Oder gibt es ein Drittes, darin und daraus her beide zusammengehören?1 Is thinking a poetic composing and poetic composing a thinking? Are both, poetic composing and thinking, each in its own manner, both? One – or none? Or is there a third, in which and from which both belong together? (My translation)

Heidegger’s approach to Dichtung (“poetry,” “literature”) is unprecedented and unique. The way Heidegger reworks this term in texts and remarks on art, poetry, language, or thinking, reaches clearly beyond aesthetic and literary concerns. The above epigraph from the ending of the Kieler version of Die Bestimmung der Sache des Denkens poses a series of rhetorical questions, which convey the innate interweaving of thinking and poetry. In their own characteristic manner, thinking is poetic and poetry is a way of thinking, to the point that they may be in fact “one” and have no genuinely separate identities. Most important here is the last cited question about the possibly of “a third,” neither thinking nor poetry, but an idiom – a way of bringing the event (of Being) to word – where both poetry and thinking belong and to which they owe their proximity. It is from this “third” idiomatic mode that their distinctive manners of saying and scripting unfold. This third mode is to bespeak the very matter (Sache) of thinking, thinking whose possibility, even necessity, emerges in the epoch which Heidegger diagnoses as “the end of philosophy.” Yet this

1

GA80.2: 1284.

29

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third idiom, which Heidegger calls, in a preliminary and exploratory fashion, Besinnung (“meditative thought”), and which breaches the confines of philosophy, undoing the separation of Denken and Dichten, has not been afforded sufficient weight, as responses and critiques of Heidegger still largely follow the accepted parameters and forms of philosophical inquiry. Its challenge to philosophy has been for the most part recast back into philosophical language, its edge blunted, its Sprachwerk reformulated into customary terms. Already the tenor of the remarks in “The Origin of the Work of Art” leaves no doubt that Heidegger’s view of Dichtung cannot be categorized under the rubrics of philosophical aesthetics, hermeneutics, phenomenological theory of art, or literary interpretation. This becomes evident when Heidegger explicitly alters and broadens the sense of this German noun, writing that: “All art, as the letting happen of the advent of the truth of beings, is as such, in essence, poetry [Dichtung].”2 In addition, he makes clear that Dichtung is not limited to poetry (Poesie) or to literature broadly speaking. “But poesy [Poesie] is only one mode of the clearing projection of truth, i.e., of poetic composition [Dichten] in this wider sense.”3 These comments show that the necessary translations of Dichtung as “poetry” and of Dichten as “poetic composition” or “poetizing” are ineluctably misleading in English, because the distinction between the narrow sense of Dichtung as poetry (Poesie) and the broader sense of Dichtung becomes the linchpin of Heidegger’s understanding of the letting happen of truth in this essay and of the event (Ereignis) later on. At a crucial point in the essay, Heidegger uses the verbal substantive Dichten, translated as “poetic composition,” to underscore the event-like momentum of the unfolding of truth in artworks. Combining the verbal and the nominal, Dichten frays the syntactical distinction between subject and predicate, a move redolent of Heidegger’s characteristic collapsing of the syntax of statements in quasi-tautological phrases like: “Die Welt weltet,” “Die Sprache spricht,” “Das Ereignis ereignet,” etc. These comments indicate why Dichten – which henceforth I will leave mostly untranslated – cannot be grasped or explained in aesthetic, literary, or poetic terms sensu stricto. Even though Heidegger affirms that language work (Sprachwerk), that is, Dichtung taken as poetry (Poesie), holds a special and outstanding position (“eine ausgezeichnete Stellung”)4 among arts, the overarching sense of Dichten in arts and beyond cannot be accurately

2

GA5: 59/197.

3

GA5: 60–61/198.

4

GA5: 61/198.

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elucidated – let alone exhausted – through aesthetic concepts or literary terminologies. Dichten is not an essentially literary/poetic “composition” of an artwork, as juxtaposed with distinctive organizational techniques of philosophical texts, arguments, or treatises. Nor is it confined to the matter of a “style” – more poetic or literary – of philosophical writing. On the basis of Heidegger’s remarks in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Dichten names the mode of the “working” of the artwork, in the sense both of letting truth arise in(to) the artwork and of safeguarding – holding it in the material manifestation of the artwork – its event there. Dichten thus names the way of art’s working, showing how the event (Ereignis) takes place as art. “The Origin of the Work of Art” accentuates three facets – all of them originative – characteristic of this working of art-event. First, the already mentioned “letting happen of the advent” of truth. For Heidegger, it is not the art piece that is original but the mode in which the working of art lets truth transpire. In the very same paragraph from which the quotations above come, Heidegger demonstrates that this letting happen has a transformative force: the clearing opened in the artworks alters the measure of Being and gives a new one. By virtue of the projection set into the work of the unconcealment of beings, which casts itself toward us, everything ordinary and hitherto existing becomes an unbeing [wird zum Unseienden]. This unbeing has lost the capacity to give and keep Being as measure . . . The working of the work does not consist in the taking effect of a cause. It lies in a change [Wandel], happening from out of the work, of the unconcealment of beings, and this means, of Being.5

Dichten describes the “working” of the transformation in how beings manifest, the shift in the way entities come to be. It is thus an amendment in how Being exhibits its sense, in the very measure of Being. Beyond aesthetic features and literary effects, Dichten is the transformation of how what is – “everything . . . hitherto existing” – reveals itself and can be said to be in being, so that it can be seen as present/absent and comprehended on this basis. This crucial change ripples out of the artwork, suffusing everything and altering the very sense in which “all that exists” is. Dichten marks the opening of a novel clearing in which “everything ordinary and hitherto existing” is being figured anew as the nonordinary and the non-habitual. In this openness “everything is other than usual [alles anders ist als sonst].”6 Dichten is less a matter of producing literary images than of opening to otherness and the transformation 5

GA5: 59–60/197.

6

GA5: 59/197.

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underway in the opening cast forth by the artwork. This centrifugal force is not limited to the work of art or circumscribed socially and culturally within the interaction between the audience and the artwork but alters, albeit invisibly, the manner everything is. Using the key terms in Heidegger’s discourse in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, the transformation figured as Dichten alters the “meaning” (Sinn) of Being and enacts a shift in the projective sending of Being, that is, in its Geschichte (“history”). The emphasis Heidegger consistently places on the momentum of letting, happening, opening, etc., draws attention to the emergent or inceptive sense of Dichten, articulated in later texts in terms of the way of language. Within the projective force of the clearing emanating from the artwork, Dichten alters the manner in which everything comes to last in its momentary existence, in how it stays or bides its allotted while. This singling-out of poetry – of Dichtung in its narrow view as Poesie – also makes sense when we realize that at stake in Heidegger’s discussion of art is the Stimmung: the tone or the disposition, enacted through the projective clearing opened by art. Stimmung is tied etymologically to Stimme (“voice”) and thus implicates essentially the work of language (Sprachwerk) discussed in “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Perhaps even more significant is the fact that the resonance between Stimmung and Stimme foregrounds the tone and melody in language, moving away from the primacy of meaning, signification, or truth-value of statements. It draws attention specifically to how language tunes thinking, how it determines its course, sets its tone, and disposes its movement – and thus attunes what thinking yields. In German, as Heidegger is fond of pointing out, determination (Bestimmung) derives from and follows – that is, gets its disposition from – the Stimmung, the tuning or tonality, the Stimme, resonant through all words and workings of language. Any perceptual or intellectual determination, as well as conceptual grasp, is not only made possible but also bears the indelible yet resonant, we might say, mark of the tonality within which it unfolds. This resonance is “deeper” than meaning and more pervasively formative for the working of language. It sets the pitch and the temperament of thought, disposing its momentum, and echoing through all thoughts in their respectively determined formulations and insights. In this context, one might picture the clearing, the projective opening actuated in Dichtung as a resonating chamber, wherein everything existing comes to be transformed so that it reverberates in accord with the rhythm and strength – the chord – of the Stimmung. The word “chord” accentuates the joining and assembling underway in setting the tone of thinking so that thought can be attuned

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to, in accord with, its matter (Sache). Such tuning is at the center of Heidegger’s preoccupations, specifically the way in which it predetermines – which might be one way of seeing the relation of Stimmung to Be-stimmung – thinking and meaning. To what extent can we understand Dichten as setting the pitch of thinking? The plethora of musical or sound terms and references in Heidegger places Dichtung, in fact all language work, in close proximity to music, emphasizing musical, both harmonizing and dissonant, qualities of language and composition. What comes to mind in this context is terms like tone poem (Tondichtung in German) or symphonic poem (“symphonische Dichtung” or “symphonisches Gedicht”), which conjoin the poetic and the musical. In order to appreciate the nuanced and innovative way in which Heidegger pitches thinking (Denken) in his works, especially the texts from mid 1930s onward, one needs to underscore precisely the tonality in which such thinking is disposed, and whose qualities come to the fore in the figure of a Tondichtung: the poetic in its quality as the momentum of composing – not only of poetry or music but also of thinking, with its rhythm, tone, melody, resonances, the weave of cross-references, inventions, etc. In Heidegger, these features are never just aesthetic or literary qualities of writing but charter the vectors and the momentum of thinking itself. While musical qualities of language feature more readily in discussions of literary works, and of poetry in particular, what gives a unique direction to Heidegger’s interest in the proximities between thinking and poetry is his insistence on the formative role for thinking of its inceptive tone. The tonality of thinking disposes – in the sense of Stimmen – how thought thinks and thus decides what comes to be thought. What thinking says, what it announces in its statements and propositions, takes place in attunement with its tone, as Heidegger remarks in What Is Called Thinking? : “By ‘way,’ or ‘how,’ [die Weise] we mean something other than manner or mode. ‘Way’ here means melody, the ring and tone, which is not just a matter of how the saying sounds. The way or how of the saying is the tone [Ton] from which and to which what is said is attuned [gestimmt].”7 At issue is not the discursive mode or the manner of saying but the way of thinking that it can remain in tune – on the same language wave, as it were – with its matter (Sache), with what thought is to think and from where it springs. This attunement is so crucial because

7

GA8: 39/37.

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thought happens always already in response, as Entsprechen, to what the event (Ereignis) manifests as its saying: The saying is the mode [die Weise] in which propriation [das Ereignis] speaks. Yet mode is meant here not so much in the sense of modus or “kind”; it is meant in the musical sense of the melos, the song that says by singing. For the saying that propriates [die ereignende Sage] brings what comes to presence out of its propriety [Eigentum] to a kind of radiance [Scheinen]; it lauds what comes to presence; that is, allows it in its own essential unfolding.8

It is the event, and therefore language, that speaks first, that in fact has always already spoken. Thinking thinks by (co)responding to and saying after (Nachsagen) the saying that unfolds from and resonates within the event. In order to think, in the sense Heidegger has in mind, thinking needs to remain resonant with(in) the event. Not distanced from or opposed to, or in a meta-position with respect to the event, from which it could attempt to comprehend or explain the event, but in tune with(in) the Ereignis. The emphasis on the tone makes clear that this thinking cannot be distilled into propositional statements or provide a conceptual grasp without incurring the neglect or even the loss of its attunement with the event’s vernacular. The focus on meaning and the premium put on comprehension and conceptual control, on what thought can assert in propositions or grasp as knowledge, lead to delimiting the melos of thinking to aesthetic features or stylistic idiosyncrasies, implying that any other approach is merely an eccentric take on matters that could be expressed using more conventional prose. Dispelling these mischaracterizations, Heidegger makes it repeatedly clear that it is precisely the tone (Stimmung) that disposes and gives voice to thinking (Stimmen, Stimme), only thus letting what comes to presence unfold in its essence. The tonality concerns the matter of letting everything existing manifest and say itself essentially, that is, in its very being, in terms of its essential unfolding. Without maintaining the proper tone, without remaining in tune with the event and in accord with its saying, thinking does not allow beings to show themselves, and instead proceeds to grasp them forcefully, pressing beings into corresponding modes of thought and knowledge: philosophical, scientific, calculative, computational, informational, etc. Encountering what exists in its proper unfolding (Wesen) is not possible without this originative “letting show,” which stays attentive to the clearing, that is, to the projective opening of 8

GA12: 255/424.

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the event. Only in this way, heeding its formative melos, can thought aspire to take place as Besinnung, which, as Heidegger writes, is more and other in its unfolding (Wesen) than consciousness, imagination, or cognition, not to mention scientific thought or calculative/computational procedures. To strike out in the direction of the way that something [eine Sache] has, of itself, already taken is called, in our language, sinnan, sinnen [to sense]. To let oneself onto sense [Sich auf den Sinn einlassen] is the essence of Besinnung. This means more than a mere consciousness of something. We are not yet in Besinnung when we are only conscious. Besinnung is more. It is the releasement [Gelassenheit] to the question-worthy.9 (translation modified)

What is distinctive in Besinnung, and in sharp contrast to grasping thought and (re)presentational modes of understanding, is the gesture of freeing and opening up, intimated in the German verb lassen: to let, which in the noun Gelassenheit marks a release, a letting loose and a freeing from the traditional modes of conceiving Being and from a conventional, subject-oriented stance toward beings. An indispensable momentum of this letting/freeing is staying close to the non-binary “sensing” which Heidegger inscribes in Besinnung. In a short, explanatory passage omitted in the English translation of “Language in the Poem,” Heidegger underlines the direction or directedness resonating in the German sinnan: “‘Sinnan’ bedeutet ursprünglich: reisen, streben nach . . . eine Richtung einschlagen; die indo-germanische Wurzel sent und set bedeutet Weg.”10 (“‘Sinnan’ means originally: to journey, to strive for . . . to strike out in a direction; the Indo-Germanic root sent and set means way” [my translation].) Heidegger then enriches this overlap between (Be)Sinnen and Weg by showing how the increased degree of mindfulness corresponds to the measure of stillness and silence: “more mindful [sinnender] because it is more still, more still because it has itself a greater power to still.”11 Besinnung thus calls for silence and stillness as the tonality in which it can unfold. Its way-making is that of stillness, which, as the Grimm dictionary explains, is “äuszere und innere ruhe; sanfte, gelassene bewegung.”12 Stillness can refer to outer and inner calm or quiet, to a gentle, tranquil, composed movement, which marks the way Besinnen draws its direction, tracing its hardly perceptible momentum. Like in English, the etymological sense of the German prefix be- is that of “near” or “by,” indicating

9 12

10 11 GA7: 63/SR: 180. GA12: 49. GA12: 51/174. “Vernetzung,” accessed September 24, 2020, http://woerterbuchnetz.de.

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that Besinnung proceeds by remaining close, by staying near the quiet tracing of the direction, of the difficult “sensing” toward the matter (Sache) at stake. The demand here is for thinking to quietly “sense” the direction imparted by the thing/matter itself, and not to force access or precipitate an intellectual grasp that all too easily conforms to accepted modes and established forms of thought, perpetuating what Heidegger regards as the metaphysical grasp of Being. The sense of silence and stillness at the core of Besinnung contrasts decisively with the frenetic grasping and calculation that characterize modern thought. Furthermore, these calculative modes and forms are grounded upon the separation between the sensible and the intelligible, which bifurcates the originative sensing implied in Heidegger’s reference to sinnan, and disallows remaining close to such “sensing”; in short it makes Be-sinnung impossible, failing to stay near to the non-binary “sense” indicated by the German verb sinnen. As David Kleinberg-Levin shows, Heidegger’s manner of writing, if we are to attend to it seriously, with its emphasis on sensible aspects of language, especially sound and tone, as well as on other musical elements, undoes the old binary between the sensible and the intelligible.13 In Heidegger’s writing, the intelligible sense – meaning and signification in their complex resonances – arises from and keeps in tune with the sensible sense. Only in this way can thinking keep (near) the direction imparted by the Sache itself, which lets both the approach and the unfolding relation chart their course accordingly, in the manner of Entsprechen. Nearness to the direction, to the saying or “dictation,” imparted by the matter itself, in tune with the clearing as it unfolds of the event, is the mark of Besinnung as an originative way of thinking in attunement (Stimmung) with what Heidegger calls the “voice” (Stimme) of the event. This evidently soundless “voice” indicates the disposition or the direction in which the unfolding event sends thinking, pre-determining (Stimmen) experience, and thus allowing for the possibility of differences, distinctions, and determinations. This non-binary (neither sensible nor intelligible) Stimmung is “poetic” in the unique sense that Dichten comes to bear in Heidegger. It is important to recall here that one of the etymological

13

David Michael Kleinberg-Levin, “Abyssal Tonalities: Heidegger’s Language of Hearkening,” in Hermeneutical Heidegger ed. Michael Bowler and Ingo Farin (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2016), 222–61. Another essay underscoring the importance of writing in Heidegger is Gregory Schufreider, “Heidegger’s Hole: The Space of Thinking. Nihilism in the Text (of Philosophy)” (in English), Research in Phenomenology 31, no. 1 (2001): 203–29.

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explanations of Dichtung is by way of the Latin dictare. Dichten as a literary text or as thinking composing itself underway to its matter (Sache) is in response (that is, as Ent-sprechung) to the saying, in accord with the “dictation” imparted to it by the matter itself. It is (at)tuned (gestimmt) to and by the event’s unfolding, within which the matter presents itself. The poetic in the singular sense I have been tracing here with Heidegger is at the very heart of how thinking takes place, of how it makes its way by keeping near the originative, non-binary sense tracing (Be-sinnen) of the event. As numerous essays by Heidegger show, the determination (Bestimmung) of such thinking entails keeping near the tonality (Stimmung) imparted from the event. To call such thinking “poetic” is not a matter of aesthetic sensibility or investment in a more literary manner of philosophical writing but of recognizing the priority of a thinking that unfolds by listening to its essential call, and thus (co)responds (Entsprechen) to the matter at hand. For Heidegger, Being and the event (Ereignis) call forth and call for thinking to proceed in this “poetic” way. Any thinking deserving to be called by that name needs to be called forth in this manner (here the double meaning of the German heissen remains continually in play) and to trace its path of Be-sinnen in the manner of Dichten, that is, “poetically.” To elaborate the import of and to foster this idiomatic deployment of “poetry,” three late Heidegger essays should be foregrounded: the already cited “Science and Reflection,” “The Provenance of Art and the Destination of Thought,” and, most important, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking.”14 These essays address the preparatory character of the thinking Heidegger diagnoses as necessary in the epoch of what he terms the end of metaphysics or, more provocatively, the end of philosophy. Sketching this thinking against the backdrop of the then most current techno-scientific developments, whether in cybernetics, physics, or genetics, Heidegger insists on its preliminary scope and preparatory character, suggesting that thought remains far from being ready for a “revolutionary” change. This thinking is to prepare for a possible transformation, while not being itself of a transformational force or rank. It is a forerunner for the transformation, a prelude or a preface – a step which is, nonetheless, absolutely necessary because of what Heidegger sees as the completion of philosophical modes of inquiry and their inability to alter and free themselves from their metaphysical 14

Martin Heidegger, “The Provenance of Art and the Destination of Thought (1967),” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 44, no. 2 (2013): 119–28. GA14: 69–90/431–49.

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underpinnings. Even though Heidegger continuously searches for new terms and keeps inflecting and re-scripting existing words – either by crossing them out, using archaic spelling, or hyphenating and re-building them – the thinking he qualifies as preparatory is not to offer new concepts or provide assertions. Rather, the preparation takes place specifically and uniquely on the level of the tonality or tuning (Stimmen; Stimme; Stimmung). It concerns the capacity of thinking to let itself be attuned to and inscribed in the momentum of the event’s unfolding, in the Ereignung of das Ereignis, to use Heidegger’s German. Without such readiness, thought – whether philosophical or cybernetic for Heidegger or computational in contemporary terms – will continue to be undergirded and oriented by its metaphysical roots. It will keep changing and advancing, producing more sophisticated and correct procedures, without altering anything essential. To see how and why this preparatory thinking is to be oriented by what Heidegger calls Dichtung requires attentiveness to the implications of the “end of philosophy” announced in the essay bearing this phrase in its title. While the statement can be taken to be hyperbolic and intentionally provocative, in the manner redolent of another deliberately incommodious claim Heidegger makes, namely that “science does not think,” it has not been accorded its proper weight or given sufficient consideration in the responses to Heidegger’s work, whether in the philosophical and phenomenological explorations that followed in its wake and appropriated it, or those that critiqued or rejected it. To begin, the end of philosophy announced by Heidegger is not understood negatively, as the failure or cessation of philosophical reflection or the endpoint of philosophical knowledge. Rather, it indicates the continuing fulfillment of philosophical inquiry within the boundaries outlined by the beginning of philosophy as a metaphysical venture in ancient Greece. This is why “the end of philosophy means the completion of metaphysics.”15 This achievement, however, does not imply perfection. “The end of philosophy is the place, that place in which the whole of philosophy’s history is gathered in its uttermost possibility. End as completion means this gathering.”16 The end of philosophy means that its legacy is at the peak of its powers, propagating and reinforcing the highly effective modes of calculative thought brought to fruition in modern techno-sciences: “Philosophy turns into empirical science of man, of all

15

GA14: 70/432.

16

GA14: 70–71/433.

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that can become for man the experiential object of his technology, the technology by which he establishes himself in the world by working on it in the manifold modes of making and shaping.”17 The end of philosophy spells the confirmation of the productive and creative power of scientific thought, suggested by Heidegger through the interplay in German between Machen, Macht, and Machenschaft. Dating from the mid 1960s, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” unequivocally points to cybernetics and information science as the main legacy of philosophy’s computational drift and the global force organizing contemporaneous and future developments of world civilization. “No prophecy is necessary to recognize that the sciences now establishing themselves will soon be determined and regulated by the new fundamental science that is called cybernetics.”18 What Heidegger diagnoses as the “essence of technology,” namely the “enframing” (Gestell), finds its then most current and efficient articulation in cybernetics, or, in today’s parlance, in broadly conceived calculative thought, manifested most proficiently in information science, computation, algorithmic processing, and data science. What (not only) Heidegger saw keenly as evident in the 1960s is today palpable everywhere and to everyone in the extent to which information and computation have come to shape – and make, that is, produce and proliferate – contemporary reality. Whether this shaping happens through the pervasive presence and infiltration of information science and its associated technologies, or through its marked absence and deprivation of access, whether it creates wealth or perpetuates, even causes new, poverty, it owes its power to the way the world is framed, positioned, and set as open to calculative grasp, informational reduction, and computational processing. The global world today comes to be formed, powered, and regulated through further intensified flows of what Heidegger called the essence of technology, working today expressly and efficiently in its informational/digital/data modalities. “The end of philosophy proves to be the triumph of the manipulable arrangement of a scientifictechnological world and of the social order proper to this world. The end of philosophy means the beginning of the world civilization that is based upon Western European thinking.”19 The “end of philosophy” marks the completion of logic in logistics, and the fulfillment of philosophy in calculative thinking. If thought proceeds by way of ideas and concepts, it works on the principle of grasping and disclosure, of

17

GA14: 72/434.

18

GA14: 72/434.

19

GA14: 73/435.

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certainty and clarity, which today culminate in the reduction or even replacement of thought and judgement by computation and its algorithmic procedures. Global civilization, which has developed on the basis of Western European thought, operates as the increasingly manipulable arrangement of existence, whose contemporary signature manifestation is the production and regulation of data, whether for historical chronicling or for prediction. Philosophy, as well as arts, literature, and culture overall – become part of this scientific–technological arrangement, regulation, and predictive planning within the global world. They become subjected to organization and evaluation according to the criteria and demands dominant at the “end of philosophy”: reduction to information, numerical calculation, algorithmic procedures. These cybernetic or informational categories prescribe the modalities and manners for thought to proceed – in order to be seen as “effective” and thus as “actual,” and hence as productive and valuable to the management of existence, whether on the local level or on the global scale. While remarking that this “end of philosophy” is not negative, Heidegger indicates that philosophical and modern techno-scientific modes of “calculative” thought derived from it cannot transcend their own boundaries, since they cannot elude the (re)capture within philosophy’s own first beginning. This beginning, which Heidegger sees as the origin of the metaphysical constitution of philosophical thought, prescribes the ways in which Being and beings come to be experienced, grasped, manipulated, etc. Cast within these bounds, philosophy cannot be transformed; it can only continue fulfilling or completing its ways of thinking and knowing. In short, it can only keep ending, that is, continually reinvent and modify its ends. The provocation contained in the formulation announcing both “the end of philosophy” and the task of preparing for the possibility of a novel thinking, perhaps patterned after a Besinnung attuned to the event (Ereignis), has been largely reaccommodated, even somewhat blunted, within philosophy curriculums, rebranded as “new” modes of doing philosophy that can still pass for philosophy: (post)phenomenological, hermeneutic otherwise, “deconstructive” (of metaphysics), new “transcendental,” critical phenomenological, etc. Yet if we let this provocation cut to the quick of our thinking, it genuinely not only disturbs how one does philosophy or undermines disciplinary boundaries and margins. It calls differently for thinking and it calls for a distinctively novel thinking, for thinking otherwise – certainly for thinking otherwise than philosophy, and otherwise than the sciences it has given rise to. Thinking

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obviously not only does not end with the end of philosophy but finds itself pointed to its proper beginning (“eigentlichen An-Fang”).20 Besinnung “thinks” but in new sense(s) of thinking. It is no longer simply Denken, or a different(ly) philosophical thought. The thinking Heidegger points to is no longer philosophical in part because it does not aim to yield knowledge or provide a grasp of reality – most broadly speaking, an understanding of Being – whether philosophical or techno-scientific, whether conceived on the basis of the “meaning of Being” or based on the comprehension of beings. Its aim is preparatory, its scope preliminary. It is “less” than philosophical or critical thought, since it does not yield “anything,” but it is also “more” – as it prepares thinking to get underway otherwise. As Heidegger puts it, “the thinking in question remains unassuming, because its task is only of a preparatory, not of a founding character. It is content with awakening a readiness in man for a possibility whose contour remains obscure, whose coming remains uncertain.”21 This thinking is preparatory because it needs yet to learn how to think, because it still seeks its element, and through such learning “It prepares its own transformation in this learning.”22 More precisely, it is to learn how to begin thinking, to begin otherwise and perhaps even in an element distinct from the ancient Greek beginning. In other words, to begin to think otherwise than metaphysics has always already begun to think. This is why the inherited modes of thought – philosophical, technoscientific, calculative, etc. – remain insufficient here. The crucial contrast here comes with the modes of thought dominant today, forms that are calculative and predictive in essence: “The preparatory thinking in question does not wish and is not able to predict the future.”23 Not wishing to predict or direct and pre-organize the future means that this preparatory thinking lets go of the manipulative and calculative power of grasping thought which tries to gain control of time proleptically. Such “poetic” Besinnung thus appears, by calculative standards, to be ineffectual, since it seems not to do anything, that is, not to control, manipulate, or otherwise exercise power. In other words, its preparatory task appears invisible or meaningless from the perspective of contemporary benchmarks of predictive analysis and comprehension of the global flows of power, 20

21

“Das Ende der Philosophie ist nicht das Ende des Denkens, das die Anwesenheit, das Sein, zu denken hat. Am Ende der Philosophie sieht sich das Denken in seinem eigentlichen An-Fang verwiesen.” GA80.2: 1215. 22 23 GA14: 75/436. GA14: 75/436. GA14: 75/437.

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power that remains manipulative/regulatory, whether its practice is creative or repressive. In fact, the very descriptive “poetic” appears, by such standards, to cast this thinking as being out of step with the industrious operations of the global civilization and its dominant modes of comprehension. The preliminary thinking goes counter to all productive movement of the global civilization, whose making and manipulation are fueled by data and geared toward prediction of the future in order to manipulate and control, and thus profit from – in terms of money or power – the flows of capital or social developments. For the only matter (Sache) of this thinking is how to begin thinking, that is, how to begin thinking of and from the event. Thus, the matter of thinking is the opening/clearing (Lichtung),24 where everything comes to exist, continually emerging into disappearance or passing.25 How to begin thinking, so that thinking follows the path-marks brought to light by the clearing, thus staying attuned to the event. This attunement is the matter of thinking, because light and visibility, presence and absence, possibility of comprehension and calculation all arise in the openness which is being freed into the clearing. The matter of thinking is preparing to become and to remain attentive to the clearing, to how it opens always uniquely one-time. This descriptive “one-time” crucially marks the otherwise to (philosophical) thought Heidegger is looking for. At issue is maintaining the one-time non-repeatability of the clearing, which is obscured and forgotten in different manners of thought oriented toward repeatable and reusable grasp. It is only from the perspective of this otherwise to thinking that due significance can be given to Heidegger’s recasting of Dichtung in terms of the neighborhood of Denken and Dichten, that is, of the originary nearness between thinking and poetry. This otherwise to thinking – never to be confused with lack or absence of thinking, or with thoughtlessness – is not a matter of aesthetic, epistemological, or moral concern for art or aesthetic sensibility. It is also not limited to seeking a different understanding of artworks or a novel appreciation for arts and literature. As I suggested earlier, Dichten speaks directly to the “way” of thinking: to how thinking opens its way, and traverses this path while staying underway, and does so without being concerned with arriving or non-arriving, with achieving a goal. Charted or oriented poetically, reaching a destination is no longer a crucial parameter here for thinking: there are only

24

GA14: 79/441.

25

GA14: 80/442.

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signposts accompanying the way, and even those are not fixed or unchanging, way-markers which are neither passed by nor passing by, strictly speaking. They too are only while underway. Dichten thus has everything to do with preparing for what, for the sake of perspicuity, might be called, following Heidegger, a Besinnung, an otherwise to thinking pattered by proximity – indicated by the prefix be- – to the direction given by the matter of thinking itself, and oriented by its moving signposts. Dichten, which Heidegger traces through engagement primarily with poetry, and on occasion also with visual arts and architecture, has to do with shifting the pattern and the direction of thinking, with dislodging it from the primacy of logic – and the techno-scientific dominion of calculative thought and logistics – and sketching or delineating – as in Riss, the rift-design, at work in arts – an alternate unfolding. Dichten then is nothing short of an outline for a preparatory shift in how thinking can get underway “at the end of philosophy.” How important such a change and, more broadly, the openness to alternate patterns or ways, how momentous it can be today, has been precipitated by the spreading application of computational (non)thinking – not only its notorious black-box character but also its lacunae, arbitrary or culturally skewed choices, presumed evident digital transparency – with all the multiplying deleterious effects. The simplest way of signaling the crucial role of the “poetic” for what Heidegger projects as the task of thinking at the end of philosophy is to recognize Dichtung as the leading vector for the preparatory shape of the transformation in thinking, transformation which is to open an otherwise to thinking beyond philosophy and its modern technoscientific offspring. The importance of Dichten in Heidegger’s work, especially its role in taking Besinnung toward an otherwise to thinking can only be properly appreciated when we give its due to the “poetic” valence of Heidegger’s texts, which includes innovative textual composition, the syntactical and lexical texture of writing, its typographical experiments and verbal inventions, etymological explorations, the inventive use of hyphens or quasitautological syntactic phrasing. These traits all become hallmarks of a dichtendes writing idiom, characteristic especially of Heidegger’s works after the mid 1930s. These features appear at their most radical or experimental in the manuscripts that were withheld from publication during Heidegger’s life and that have been published as part of the collected edition of his works. Dichten working across arts and thought rapidly gains significance in proportion to the galloping reduction of language to information and data, to numerical quantification and algorithmic

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processing. “Cybernetics transforms language into an exchange of news. The arts become regulated—regulating instruments of information.”26 This Dichten emphatically re-energizes language, its panoply of devices and plays, against distilling or containing practices, begun in antiquity through the rules of logic and reaching their apparent completion today in informational processing. Part of its “pattern” is to undo the oversimplified, reductive, and recursive patterns characteristic of calculative thought and computational procedures. Exposing the destitution of existence and thinking promulgated through reductive and manipulative procedures efficiently functionalizing data, Dichten marks the possible pivot which may give direction to the preparatory thinking envisioned by Heidegger. This is why the scripting inventions and graphs in Heidegger’s writings are more momentous than the question of style or the vagrancies of idiosyncratic philosophizing. They prepare to re-pattern thinking, to rescribe the way in which thinking transpires truly only while being “underway,” never limited to or contained in its conclusions, statements, or conceptual formulations. In short, they aim to inscribe the “waymaking” (Be-wëgung) of thinking into the very formation of the text, which tends toward the fixity of expression and the inertia of statements. Here again the resonance of the prefix be- drafts the trajectory that keeps near to the path opened for thinking by and within the clearing. The attempts to map an otherwise to thinking through the Dichten, inherent and core yet often suppressed or glossed over in thought, gain their intended resonance when one keeps in mind Heidegger’s forceful critique of the form/content distinction. This critique has been taken to be applicable to aesthetic reflection and the experience of the artworks, but largely neglected or played down when it comes to philosophical analyses of Heidegger’s own texts. In fact, the form/content distinction keeps being replicated in Heidegger scholarship, where the question of Being becomes predominantly the question of the meaning or of a new understanding of Being. In other words, it becomes a matter once more of philosophical “ideas,” the affair of the intelligible, while the idiom of writing becomes cast as an apparently separable issue. As such it can be contained under the rubric of Heidegger’s “style” or relegated to the dustbin of philosophical idiosyncrasy – and more readily so, since thinking cloaked in this garb appears to “do” nothing – not even yield

26

GA14: 72/434.

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determinable or stable meaning – according to the contemporary criteria of efficacy or critical force. In the end, the language of Heidegger’s thinking becomes subordinated to its meaning, to its intellectual/philosophical content/message, no matter whether such themes are deemed to be primarily ontological, transcendental, hermeneutical, or postphenomenological. Yet Heidegger’s numerous texts make indisputably evident that the language of thinking, especially its fore-saying, sets the tone for its very modus operandi. It is not the expression of its meaning or a “literary” cloak for its innovative ideas. The language is emphatically the way Heidegger’s thinking moves, passing by its signposts, directing its traversal, en route secreting meaning to which its “being underway” can never be condensed. Since the way-making is always constitutive of and more important than any garnered meaning, concepts, or insights, the appetite for the finality of statements or the transparency of language becomes repeatedly, and intentionally, frustrated in Heidegger’s texts. It is in this sense that Heidegger’s work can be said to be “poetic”: what it says remains sayable only within the singular idiom, or, to put it more emphatically and more perspicaciously, it says only while saying. It withdraws from its own expressed statements. Dichten emerges as a complex formative force, which we can read in Heidegger’s work as interwoven at its core with thought, as he intimates by writing repeatedly both “dichtendes Denken” and “denkendes Dichten.” Perhaps a way to think about this interlace would be to see Dichten in its verbal resonance (as poetic composing) as the momentum which preparatory thinking needs to achieve in order to disaccustom thought from its metaphysical predilections and to disown, or at least put a check on, its grasping and calculative habits. Perhaps the path-marks, the pointers for the way Heidegger mentions, are marks of Dichten in the sense of dictare: as a dictum or a saying that pre-scribes, pre-writes, the path of thinking. One of the synonyms enumerated for dichten is vorsagen, to be read literally here as vor-sagen, as fore- or pre-saying. Not forcibly as a command or a law, but in the sense of opening pathways and directing the momentum of thought – in short, as tracing (sinnen) in a way that calls for(th) Be-sinnung specifically as a thinking called for(th) to stay near the originative opening of the event’s clearing. I called them moving signposts earlier deliberately in order to underscore the ample spectrum of their resonance: moving as in motion, advancing, transporting, or pulling (Bewegen) but also as in affecting or setting the tone and giving voice (Stimmen), and further as changing and shifting/transforming (Wandel), as well as stirring, provoking, influencing (taken in the sense of Lassen, not Machen).

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In German there are two principal senses of the verb dichten: 1) to seal, to close and 2) to write, to compose. Dichten can be synonymous with schreiben, to write, but in some phrases its resonance is that of Sinnen: that is, thinking and meditating.27 In this case, Dichten can be said to always already resound in Besinnen, which implies that the thinking unfolding there has the momentum of Dichten, and not of Denken understood as philosophical comprehension and conceptual grasp. In “The Way to Language,” Heidegger explicitly links thinking as Sinnen with Dichten, asserting in the same breath, as it were, that such “poetry” is likewise a thinking: “Alles sinnende Denken ist ein Dichten, alle Dichtung aber ein Denken.”28 The second sense of Dichten related to dicht (dense, thick) points to sealing or making dense, which conceals or holds back. For those reasons, confining Dichten to poetry or literary composition forecloses the resonances with pre-scribing, thinking, and writing, which appears to be given at least equal weight in Heidegger’s texts. Although Heidegger prefers to use the phrase “topology of Being,” the site implicated in his references to topos is not envisioned in terms of logos seen as knowledge or reason but rather in terms of bringing the site to word, while scripting or saying it. Since writing, including graphing and drawing, as well as the use of hyphens and crossing out of words, is so crucial to charting Heidegger’s way of thinking, his later works can be engaged in terms of a topography of Being. His thought is preoccupied with graphing the topos, the site or region (Ort), which comes to be opened free as the clearing (Lichtung). This perspective explains Heidegger’s predilection for graphing the relations he associates with the event, the world, or the fourfold. The “topography of Being” refers to the marking, drawing, or carving of nothing other than the path of thinking while attuned to the event.29 Heidegger repeatedly renders the boundary between philosophical writing and poetic writing permeable, moving toward what in the epigraph above he called “a third” way of bringing to word: the event’s vernacular. The possibility of speaking and writing comes out of this graphing of the site where thought can respond to the event. While maintaining crucial resonances with poetry, literature, and arts, Dichten, especially as a verb, needs to be maintained in close proximity to Sinnen 27 29

28 “Dichten,” accessed September 24, 2020, https://en.langenscheidt.com/. GA12: 256. On topography and writing in Heidegger, see Schufreider, “Heidegger’s Hole.” Schufreider offers interesting remarks on drawing/writing of the crossed-out Sein or Seyn by Heidegger as an “auto-graph of nothing” which crosses two graphic systems: writing and drawing (211–14). On topology in Heidegger, see also Jeff Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).

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and Be-sinnen, to indicate its formative force for the trajectory which the preparatory thinking takes. In short, Dichten in its originative resonance is not aesthetic or literary but “topographic.” It is in relation to this topography of Being that “poetic dwelling” should be approached. While translating Heidegger’s phrase “das dichterische Wohnen” as “poetic dwelling” is correct, the forceful literary and aesthetic connotations of “poetry” obscure the nuance and import of the German term, the resonance which is supported both semantically and etymologically. Furthermore, the etymological link to poiesis as production or making looms large in the English term, while it is not resonant as such in the German Dichten. By contrast, dichten and dichterisch are deployed by Heidegger in association with Lassen and thus become expressly contrasted with Machen: with production or making, and with the power (Macht) coursing through them, including the creative yet grasping power of concepts. Instead of going in the aesthetic direction with Dichten, it is important to emphasize the distinct sense of measure it provides. This measure has to do with multiple and incessantly shifting relatedness, which Heidegger signals in the strife of earth and world in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in the gesturing of the things toward the world, in things bearing world in “The Thing,” or in the multiple elaborations of the fourfold, with the emphasis on the point of relational crossing, which in different places in Heidegger’s work becomes designated as “world” or “event.” Bearing in mind the poetic force of Dichten, its linguistic and compositional valences, what needs to be amplified is the pointedness of the measure of the site it discloses. The uncertain etymology of German Ort emphasizes its likely origin from Indo-European etymons indicating narrowing and pointedness, proceeding to the point of piercing, jabbing, spearing but also engraving or cutting. It thus maintains a relation to marking or scribing evoked in the term “topography.” Most important, this etymological resonance points the German Ort specifically with regard to timing, that is, with a view to the while of its opening. The site, associated with the breaking open of the clearing, gives a singular measure, which Heidegger marks with the words Weile (“while”) and weilen (“to while,” “to abide”). In “. . .Poetically Man Dwells. . .,” the measure of the dwelling is said to be pointedly taken in one swoop or, more precisely, all at once.30 This measure for what Heidegger describes as the 30

“That requires a measure which involves at once the whole dimension in one.” GA7: 202/ PMD: 221.

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“breadth” of Being, as its “proper” dimension, occurs not in terms of calculative measurements but through the prism of the while. Most characteristic of this measure is precisely its “once”: Einmaligkeit as a spatio-temporal singularity, to which Heidegger devotes substantial attention in his Ereignis manuscripts (1936–44) and related texts.31 The while is emphatically not a unit of time or a span of duration, and its “poetic” measure is explicitly counterposed to techno-scientific measurements, which proceed by numerically quantifying an unknown quantity by using an established and unchanging standard, say minute or hour as standard measurements of the “passing” of time. By contrast, the poetic measure questions the known through the unknown and the foreign (“das Fremde”).32 The while is not merely non-standard but rather a non-repeatable singular, like no other. In a way, the while, as the poetic measure of Being, has no other. Its abiding is only one-time (einmal), and any attempt to grasp it, for instance in terms of identity and difference, fails: it remains “still one time,” as one can read the German phrase “noch einmal.”33 The while brooks no repetition or difference since it is the non-spatial site (Ort) in the topography of Being, which marks the opening of time–space as the conduit for presence and absence, difference and repetitions, beings and non-beings, etc. The while’s “at once” is pointed against the permanence or regulative force of ideas and the grasping power of concepts. At issue in the while is not grasping or presenting but freeing attuned to the event: a corresponding or an achording (Entsprechen) to the tonality exuded by the free open of the clearing, an attuned (gestimmt) response to the Stimmung moving the event. It becomes evident that Dichten plays a crucial part in whether thinking proceeds in consort with the event (Ereignis), attentive to its vernacular and on the same wavelength, or whether it falls out of tune, as it were, and strikes a “false” note or chord in its effort to comprehend. The grasping power of concepts and the calculative efficiency of thought may be correct, yet their notes, and the notations they produce – statements, equations, procedures, computations, etc. – remain questionable, 31

32 33

The so-called Ereignis manuscripts refer to seven principal texts (GA65, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, and 72 (this last one still remains to be published), and the companion volumes GA73.1 and GA73.2. GA7: 204/PMD: 223. For more reflections on the import of einmal and Einmaligkeit, see Krzysztof Ziarek, “On Heidegger’s Einmaligkeit again: The Single Turn of the Event,” Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual 6 (2016): 91–113.

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since they are incapable of staying attentive to the while as the idiomatic measure of the event. Thinking is “poetic” in Heidegger’s sense of Dichten not because of the literary/poetic language or compositional form it sometimes uses. It is also not a replay of the Greek poiesis as making and production. Instead, it marks the altered momentum of thinking as the while, as the one-time singular, vernacular to the event. What has gone unnoticed in the Heidegger literature – at least to my knowledge – is that etymologically German Weile and English “while” come from the Proto-Indo-European etymon, *kweie-, which means “to rest, to be quiet.”34 This is evident in English, as the same etymon has given rise to the word “quiet.” Thus Weile and “while” are not a measure of time to begin with, but instead indices of tonality, (path-) marks of the event’s Stimmung, which disposes the play of time–space. “While” resonates the quietness (of voice: Stimme), spelling out an attunement of listening and repose. The German Akkord, both a musical chord and an accord or an agreement, suggests how one might delineate the scope of the term Weile here. At issue is the sensing and the graphing of how every “while” comes to be singularly grained and textured: a kind of proto-topography of the while as it drafts open and oscillates as space–time. Thus “while” is directly connected to, and perhaps even instantiates, the very modality of Lassen and Gelassenheit for which the preparatory thinking aims to get ready. If “now” indicates a moment of time, the “while” sets the tone for the clearing and thus time–space to unfold. In this notion of the “while” as “quiet” and “rest” one can easily note the concatenation of musical and sound terms so pivotal not only to Heidegger’s writings on language and poetry but also those devoted to thinking. The while is a moment of stillness (Stille), in which the attitude of listening and attentive response obtains. In this context, if we still want to translate Dichten into the idiom of poetry and poetics, we need to stay mindful of its core bond with the measure of the “while,” with all that this cardinal jointure entails for language and thinking, as illustrated above. Heidegger draws Denken and Dichten into nearness precisely so that Dichten would not be set aside in distilling the (presumably non-poetic) meaning and defining the intellectual import of thought, forsaken for comprehension and traded for the preferred clarity of philosophical insights, relegated to the category of “literary” style, or else confined under the rubric of Heidegger’s

34

“While,” accessed September 24, 2020, www.etymonline.com.

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“philosophical aesthetics.” Ideas, essences, forms, or concepts, let alone numbers and calculations, remain incapable of disclosing the momentum of Being, and thus persist in the inability to keep pace with the event and/or stay in accord with its vernacular Stimmung projecting open the play of time–space. As the “measure” of the while, Dichten sets the pace of the morphing path that is thinking, giving thought suitable tonal amplitude, so that the while of its way stays yet singular. The while cannot be grasped, only traversed by staying attentive to its path-marks. This relationally complex and momentous “traversal” unfolds its singularly quiet/ still while in the manner of Dichten. Without attunement to this Dichten, there is no preparatory thinking, no Be-sinnung, no Gelassenheit.

Bibliography Heidegger, Martin. “The Provenance of Art and the Destination of Thought (1967).” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 44, no. 2 (2013): 119–28. Kleinberg-Levin, David Michael. “Abyssal Tonalities: Heidegger’s Language of Hearkening.” In Hermeneutical Heidegger edited by Michael Bowler and Ingo Farin, 222–61. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2016. Malpas, Jeff. Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Schufreider, Gregory. “Heidegger’s Hole: The Space of Thinking. Nihilism in the Text (of Philosophy).” [In English.] Research in Phenomenology 31, no. 1 (2001): 203–29. “Vernetzung.” Accessed September 24, 2020, http://woerterbuchnetz.de. “While.” Accessed September 24, 2020, www.etymonline.com. Ziarek, Krzysztof. “On Heidegger’s Einmaligkeit again: The Single Turn of the Event.” Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual 6 (2016): 91–113.

3

Shared Habits: Love, Time, and The Magic Mountain in 1925 Ben Morgan

1

Reading in Practice

This chapter returns to Arendt and Heidegger’s joint reading of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924) in the summer of 1925 while Heidegger was working on the final draft of Being and Time (1927). The handful of letters that Heidegger wrote to Arendt on the subject of Mann’s novel reveals a reading practice that is strikingly at odds with the model for reading literary texts that he went on to develop in the 1930s. I will show how an alternative, pluralistic, but nevertheless Heideggerian model of reading literature can be derived from this encounter with a novel from the Weimar Republic that, as A. S. Byatt has claimed, ‘changed the shape and possibilities of European literature’.1 Heidegger started elaborating what would become his later model of aesthetic experience, guided by a motto from Hölderlin’s ‘Andenken’, – ‘Was beleibet aber, stiften die Dichter’ (GA39: 3) – in the lectures on Hölderlin’s hymns ‘Germania’ and ‘The Rhine’ during the winter semester 1934–5. These were followed by the first versions of his lecture on ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ in November 1935 and January 1936, the first public lecture on Hölderlin in April 1936, a seminar on Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795) in the winter semester 1936–7, and the second drafts of the ‘Origin’ lecture in November and December 1936.2

1

2

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. John E. Woods (London: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), xxi. Further references to this translation will be given parenthetically in the text. For the development of Heidegger’s aesthetics from the lectures on ‘Germania’ and ‘The Rhine’ to the final version of ‘Origin’, see James M. Magrini and Elias Schwieler, Heidegger on Literature, Poetry, and Education after the ‘Turn’: At the Limits of Metaphysics (London: Routledge, 2018), 36–47. The Schiller seminar is not included in GA since only student notes survive: Martin Heidegger, Übungen für Anfänger: Schillers Briefe über die ästhetische

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The tenor of his developing aesthetics is captured in the first public lecture on Hölderlin where poetry is given a privileged role, grounded in the ability of the poets to found – stiften – that was also highlighted in the motto chosen for the 1934–5 lectures. Poetry, in 1936, opens up language for being and being through language: ‘poetry is the founding naming of being and of the essence of all things [Dichtung ist das stiftende Nennen des Seins und des Wesens aller Dinge]’ (GA4: 43). The model worked out in the mid 1930s established the framework for Heidegger’s explicit engagements with aesthetics to the end of his career.3 It is a defensive account of literature which marks out a special domain for literary enunciation while at the same time suggesting that this special zone alone gives us a proper view of a human being’s place in the world. For this model, the discourse of the aesthetic sphere turns out to be the one place humans can fulfil their destiny. In making this claim, Heidegger follows the template influentially articulated by the Schiller text on which he taught his class in the winter semester of 1936–7. In On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Schiller’s version of art and literature is grounded in a concept of play, which, in its autonomy, functions as the special realm in which humans can be free, and therefore properly human, in a universe otherwise determined by Newton’s laws of motion: ‘man plays only when he is a man in the full sense of the word, and he is only a complete man when he plays’.4 Heidegger might avoid the anthropocentric terms of Schiller’s chiastic epigram. But he would nevertheless endorse the idea of poetry as a privileged form of human, or more than human, activity. For the later Heidegger and for Schiller alike, we can be most properly what we are through the special offices of the aesthetic. However, unpacking what we might mean by the word ‘offices’ is difficult since it is hard to avoid returning in some way to recognizable human practices (being trained, for instance, at university as an expert reader of a narrow canon of literary texts), in other words, to practices of a determinate, socially saturated sort, which ‘play’ and the aesthetic (in Schiller’s

3

4

Erziehung des Mensch, ed. Ulrich von Buulow (Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 2005). See for instance the discussion of Heidegger’s readings of Rilke, Trakl, and George from the 1940s to the 1950s in Andrew J. Mitchell, ‘Heidegger’s Poetics of Relationality’, in Interpreting Heidegger: Critical Essays, ed. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 217–31. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Keith Tribe (London: Penguin, 2016), 56–7 (letter 15).

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vocabulary) or poetry (in Heidegger’s) were specifically intended to exclude. Markus Wild’s recent account of Heidegger’s engagement with Trakl in the 1950s brings out this tension very clearly. On the one hand, poetry is a place where language can speak as nothing more than language: ‘When we abstract from implications, intention, purposes, special knowledge about a domain, and general knowledge about persons, language, and the world we inhabit, we encounter speaking as language. Thus, language speaks when it speaks purely. And according to Heidegger, we encounter language as language in poetry.’5 On the other hand, we want to encounter language as language for a reason, and thereby put pure language back in a wider context. In Wild’s account of Heidegger, our engagement with literature is both a re-education, and a chance to transform our habitual ways of encountering the world around us: Reading becomes a way of being socialized a second time around, with assistance by a poet’s linguistic world and the solidarity and community with the literary characters and figures of speech as well as with the creators and specialists of this world of language. [. . .] We start to describe the smaller and larger events that happen around us in the terms of this world. [. . .] Most of all, we start discovering our own environment and ourselves through these descriptions.6

Heideggerian poetic language, for Wild, is purified of habitual commitments, but at the same time takes us back to those commitments anew. It is autonomous in a very extreme sense (to the point of tautology: die Sprache spricht) and, at the same time, an engaged re-imagining of current concerns. This tension need not be seen as an artefact of Wild’s reading of Heidegger. Rather, his essay unpacks with exemplary clarity conflicting impulses that are the core of Heidegger’s later aesthetics as well as of many theorists of aesthetic autonomy since Schiller’s influential formulation of the problem in 1795. Versions of autonomous art need simultaneously to permit and to disallow the everyday practices of literary engagement that make them possible in the first place: bookshops and ereaders; classes on literature at secondary school and university; radio, television, and YouTube discussions; agents, translations, and prizes; conversations with friends, acquaintances, or family, and the leisure

5

6

Markus Wild, ‘Heidegger and Trakl’, in Paths in Heidegger’s Later Thought, ed. Günther Figal et al. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2020), 45–63 (here 54–5). Ibid., 56–7.

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and inclination to read and to have such conversations in the first place – to name but a few.7 The tone of Heidegger’s letters to Arendt on The Magic Mountain is very different. Heidegger makes no attempt to separate reading the novel and engaging with the fictional world it portrays from his own current concerns or from the practicalities of reading. He admires the text but is also irritated by Mann’s trespassing on what, in 1925, is his favourite area of technical expertise: the philosophy of time.8 More importantly, the novel is said to vividly capture ‘how Dasein does not live its own life but is rather lived by its environment [wie das Dasein von seiner Umwelt gelebt wird und nur vermeintlich selbst lebt]’ (Briefe, p. 40). This same phenomenon of social conformity was discussed in the lectures that Heidegger gave in the summer semester of 1925 around the time that he started reading The Magic Mountain (GA20: 325–45). It returns again as a key aspect of the arguments of Being and Time, particularly in §27 on ‘Everyday Being-one’s-Self and the “They” [das Man]’ (GA2: 168–73/163–8) and in §35 on ‘Idle Talk’ (GA2: 233–9/211–14). Heidegger’s reading of the novel thus connects to his philosophical thinking, and does so on the very issue of shared habits and attitudes. Indeed, as we shall see, although he would later seem to suggest the opposite, the picture of reading habits which emerges from Heidegger’s letters seems surprisingly well described by the discussion of the literary habits of ‘the They [das Man]’ in Being and Time: ‘we read, see, and judge about literature and art as they see and judge [wir lesen, sehen und urteilen über Literatur und Kunst, wie man sieht und urteilt]’ (GA2: 169/164). Heidegger’s lived literary practice in the 1920s does not match the invocations of poetic specialness that the philosopher theorizes from the mid 1930s onwards. In this chapter, I will be arguing that this is a good thing, since, as he articulates his more emphatic model of poetry, Heidegger becomes increasingly oblivious to the degree to which shared patterns of cultural judgment, or of what in Being and Time he calls ‘the public way in which things have been interpreted’ (GA2: 225/213), shape his own supposedly primordial or autonomous ways of reading. Heidegger chooses not to notice the degree to which he is a very average 7

8

For a genealogy of such practices, see: Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Prineton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012); Abigail Williams, The Social LIfe of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home (New Have, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, Briefe 1925–1975, ed. Ursula Ludz, 3rd ed. (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 2002), 45. Further references will be given parenthetically in the text.

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reader of Hölderlin, or that reading Hölderlin, for a particular generation of educated, middle-class man, is a very average thing to do. As Joseph Suglia has argued, Hölderlin was constructed by the critics associated with the poet Stefan George (1868–1933) as a poet who prefigured and indeed gave special access to the concerns of the early twentieth century.9 Heidegger’s mobilization of Hölderlin follows in the well-trodden footsteps of the George circle. By contrast, his reading of The Magic Mountain follows a different path. When it is read alongside the arguments about the constitutively social nature of human Dasein in Being and Time, Arendt and Heidegger’s engaged, identificatory, and situated reading of Mann’s novel offers a productive way of thinking about literature which mobilizes different Heideggerian conceptual tools from those of the poetics Heidegger himself developed from 1934. Indeed, their joint reading of The Magic Mountain allows us to imagine a counterfactual development for which Heidegger’s ‘turn’ or Kehre to his later philosophy was not necessary (and certainly not inevitable), because Heidegger and/or Arendt found a more pluralistic, self-ironizing, Mannian way of responding to ‘das Man’ that was neither the individualizing route of Angst of which Heidegger himself was later a perceptive critic (cf. 1941 Schelling critique of Being and Time), nor the personified Ereignis, which Arendt would criticize and historically situate in her Gifford lectures on The Life of the Mind during the 1970s.10 As Christopher Prendergast has argued, counterfactual approaches can help us question what was ‘given’, ‘thinkable’, or even ‘unthinkable’ at a particular historical moment.11 They can give us a new and wider sense of the cultural tradition of which we are the inheritors. Heidegger and Arendt’s shared reading of The Magic Mountain reveals resources they directly engaged with but, in the case of Heidegger, chose not to incorporate into their developing methodology.12 The model of reading which emerges from my analysis of the resources these two thinkers subsequently side-lined offers a counterfactual alternative to the Kehre. It also has implications for other debates, in particular 9

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Joseph Suglia, ‘On the Nationalist Reconsturction of Hölderlin in the George Circle’, German Life and Letters 55, no. 4 (2002): 387–97. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 2 vols., ed. Mary McCarthy (New York: Harcourt, 1978), vol. II, 153–87. Christopher Prendergast, Counterfactuals: Paths of the Might Have Been (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 14–16. Tracing Arendt’s response will be a task for a chapter in my forthcoming book, Opportunities Past.

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discussions over the interrelations between the natural sciences, literature, and philosophy since the 1920s, including Einstein’s encounter with Bergson in 1922, which formed part of the immediate context in which Heidegger was writing Being and Time and which, as Jimena Canales has shown, became foundational for the further development of scientific and philosophical discourses throughout the twentieth century.13

2

Heidegger and Arendt’s Non-academic Reading of The Magic Mountain in 1925

In her recent book, Karolina Watroba draws attention to the impact that Mann’s novel has had outside the academy: in the responses of a vast array of writers, from Erich Kästner to Alice Munroe and Haruki Murakami, and filmmakers from Vittorio de Sica to Hayao Miyazaki; in the co-opting of the novel by the Davos tourist board and the World Economic Forum; or in numerous book club discussions on the internet.14 It should not be thought that this impact was unwelcome for Mann, nor should the novel’s popular resonance be detached from scholarly considerations of the text. The novel’s success ensured the financial security of the Mann family. But the text’s infiltration into cultural practices far beyond the academy was not an accident. It was carefully prepared for by the narrative’s vivid portrayal of the sanatorium and the characters that populate it, which Mann wrote with a view to being widely read, and is reflectively prefigured in the way in which the encyclopaedic erudition of the text is at once thematized and ironized, for instance, in Hans Castorp’s sometimes interested, sometimes perplexed, often critical responses to the set-piece intellectual discussions included in the novel.15 Thus, when listening to the communist Jesuit Naphta, declaring that ‘we’ combine politics with theology to move beyond a Rousseau-style social contract, the protagonist responds: ‘“We”?, Hans Castorp thought, listening intently. “Who is ‘we’?”’ (Knopf ed., p. 475/GKFA vol. 5.1, p. 605). The primary conceit of the self-contained world of the sanatorium is actually a way of engaging with the world 13

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Jimena Canales, The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed our Understanding of Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). Karolina Watroba, Mann’s Magic Mountain: World Literature and Closer Reading. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Watroba discusses in particular the attention given the cake as Settembrini and Naphta disagree on questions of pedagogy, individualism, and obedience in the section ‘Von Gottesstaat und von übler Erlösung’ (GKFA vol. 5.1, pp. 584–621).

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beyond the novel. The Alpine environment may be removed from the ‘Flatlands’, and Hans Castorp’s reading may change from the practical, anglophone tome Ocean Steamships gathering soot on the journey from Hamburg to Davos (GKFA vol. 5.1, p. 12) to other inquiries less directly related to his professional projects, such as metaphysical and biological speculations on the origin of life, or astronomical speculations on the interrelations between different scales of time (GKFA vol. 5.1, pp. 414–34, pp. 558–9). Nevertheless, the novel uses the removed setting to bring into conversation with each other key elements of European culture both from the era before the Great War in which the novel is set and from the Germany of the Weimar Republic in which it was published and in the context of which it was read by Heidegger and Arendt: psychoanalysis, democratic politics, medical technologies, understandings of the ‘European’, the concept of time, and also, as Watroba specifically emphasizes, the economics of health and culture, the politics of erudition, and the pleasures of immersive reading.16 Despite Arendt and Heidegger’s subsequent status as key figures in twentieth-century philosophy, their joint reading of the text in 1925 can productively be understood as just such an immersive, nonacademic reading. The Magic Mountain was first published in a two-volume edition which Arendt owned, and which Heidegger borrowed (Briefe, p. 41). Arendt’s reactions to the novel haven’t survived, but her own productive literary activity at the time is evidently coloured by the clandestine relationship with Heidegger. Four poems by Arendt survive from the summer of 1925, the period during which Heidegger read the novel, that begin by registering the difficulties of the covert relationship (Briefe, p. 376); show an openness in response to these difficulties (Briefe, p. 376); the shock of parting at the end of the summer semester (Briefe, p. 377); and a subsequent sense of estrangement from the earlier openness and vulnerability (Briefe, p. 378). Something of the situation in which the poems were written is conveyed by Heidegger’s instructions as to where their next assignation might take place (on one occasion to take the tram following the tram he’ll get into; on another with a final instruction ‘Destroy this note’) (Briefe, p. 21, p. 33). Heidegger’s reading of Mann’s novel and his comments about the text to Arendt, in particular his imaginative, or as we will later see, counterfactual, embellishment of the relationship in the novel between Hans Castorp and Claudia

16

Watroba, Mann’s Magic Mountain.

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Chauchat (Briefe, p. 45) can similarly be read in the context of the love affair. Heidegger and Arendt’s engagement with the novel reflected on and indeed contributed to their own passionate entanglement. The Magic Mountain’s love story resonated with Heidegger’s situation, and his being ill himself and in an Alpine landscape also shaped the reading. Heidegger reports to Arendt on 9 July 1925 that he has started reading the novel (‘Ich habe den Zauberberg angelesen’, Briefe, p. 40). Eight days later he adds that, having not been able to work, he devoured the first volume, and asks to borrow Arendt’s copy of the second: ‘In den Tagen, als ich nicht arbeiten konnte, habe ich Band I in einem Zuge gelesen’ (Briefe, p. 41). Having confessed to this immersive bingeing, he adds that of course it’s a novel that deserves ‘study’ (‘Freilich müßte man das Buch »studieren«’ (Briefe, p. 41)). Once the semester is over, he travels to Todtnauberg, his Black Forest retreat (Briefe, p. 273) from where ‘the whole chain of Alps from the Bernese Oberland to Montblanc was visible’ (Briefe, p. 44), and where he plans to work on the manuscript for Being and Time (Briefe, p. 274) but falls ill (Briefe, p. 44) and instead of writing his manuscript finishes volume two (Briefe, p. 45). Again, we have the pattern of an immersive reading, followed by the sense that he should re-read key passages: ‘Das Kriterium für das Werk liegt für mich darin, daß ich es bald wieder lesen werde – wenn auch nur in einzelnen Partien. Und diese muß man studieren’ (Briefe, p. 45). Heidegger thus records a two-step reading. An intense devouring of the text and then the longer-term processes of reflection: re-reading, writing letters, ‘studying’ the novel. This approach suggests a continuity between an identificatory, immersive ‘reading for pleasure’ and more academic analysis, showing indeed that the re-reading and ‘study’ are precisely a product of the intense personal engagement. Moreover, the letters record how a reader of The Magic Mountain lives with the text for weeks, even when they take it in in big gulps. In 1925, reading is not the stylized process constructed by Heidegger in his interpretations of Trakl in the 1950s where in a timeless encounter we grasp the repeated Ur-poem that every Trakl poem articulates: ‘Every great poet writes out of a single poem [Jeder große Dichter dichtet nur aus einem einzigen Gedicht]’ (GA12: 33). In 1925, his reading is instead scrappy, engaged, epistolary, entwined with lived experience, replete with disapproval and unfulfilled promises – it’s not clear whether Heidegger ever did return to ‘study’ the text. Arendt and Heidegger’s encounter with The Magic Mountain thus offers us the kind of ‘midscale perspective’ Rita Felski has recently explored in Hooked: Art and Attachment (2020). Neither close reading nor sociological re-contextualization, ‘midscale interfaces between

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work and persons’, Felski argues, ‘are nonetheless key to clarifying why literature and art are worth attending to. People become attached to novels or films or songs because of how they are made to think or feel, because their sensibility is reattuned or their mental coordinates are shifted.’17 In the case of Heidegger’s response to The Magic Mountain, our attention to the ‘midscale perspective’ will additionally invite reflection on how mental coordinates fail to shift, despite or because of intense affective engagement with the novel.

3

Dissecting the Soul

Heidegger’s immersive engagement with the text can be explained in part by the degree to which its themes resonate with his philosophical work and with his reflections on his relationship with Arendt. As we shall see, the effects of the novel pervade their interaction as it is recorded in Heidegger’s letters. The novel can also be said to have left traces in Being and Time itself. The most obvious effect is the way in which Heidegger’s theoretical account of the forces of social conformity, or ‘the They [das Man]’, is transformed as it develops from the lectures on the philosophy of time Heidegger delivered in the summer semester 1925 to its final, published form. Along the way, it gains a phrase that precisely captures the sanatorium as both a withdrawing from the world and a standardized product of the wider social context from which it is withdrawn. In the earlier formulation from the 1925 lectures, we read: ‘We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as one takes pleasure and we read and judge about literature as one judges, we hear music as one hears music, we speak about something as one speaks’ (GA20: 338/245). This text supplies the basis for the final draft that Heidegger proceeded to work on over the summer break. However, something is added: ‘We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as one [man] takes pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as one sees and judges; likewise we withdraw from the “great mass” as one withdraws from it; we find “shocking” what one finds shocking’ (GA2: 169/164, translation amended). The additional phrase seems especially apt, given the reading of Mann’s descriptions of the isolated, but nevertheless socially saturated, environment of the sanatorium. Indeed, both the withdrawing from the mass of people and the exploration of the limits of the socially acceptable are portrayed and ironized in Mann’s novel, a combination comically captured by the unease of Settembrini, the 17

Rita Felski, Hooked: Art and Attachment (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020), 144.

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enlightened pedagogue, when he hears his educational charge, Hans Castorp, relish and re-work the image of the bed of contemplation and erotic mystical union that Naphta has cited from Bernard of Clairvaux: Contemplation, retreat – there’s something to it, sounds quite plausible. One could say that we live at a rather high level of retreat from the world up here. At five thousand feet, we recline in our lounge chairs – and remarkably comfortable they are – and look down on the world and its creatures and think things over. To tell the truth, now that I stop and think about it, my bed – and by that I mean my lounge chair, you understand – has proved very beneficial over the last ten months, made me think about more things than I ever did in all my years down in the flatlands, I can’t deny that. (Knopf ed., p. 447/GKFA vol. 5.1, p. 569)

The sanatorium provides one model for the way, in Being and Time, forms of retreat are themselves understood to be social practices. This in turn reinforces the wider argument that a less conformist way of social living must be achieved, not by a mythical and itself in fact socially conditioned escape but by taking over the habits and purposes of one’s culture in a different way; or what Heidegger terms ‘an existentielle modification of the “they”’ (GA2: 173/168).18 If Mann’s novel helps to nuance Heidegger’s account of social conformity, echoes of The Magic Mountain can be heard both in Heidegger’s correspondence with Arendt and in Being and Time, which highlight the limitations of Heidegger’s critique of das Man. The echo in question involves the languages available for talking about emotional life in the 1920s, and in particular psychoanalysis. The novel features a caricatured psychoanalyst, Dr Krokowski. Exactly how much psychoanalytic literature Mann had read before he created the character is unclear; his serious engagement with the texts of Freud and Jung did not begin until the later 1920s.19 Nevertheless, the question of Mann’s relationship to psychoanalysis, particularly in the light of the character of Dr Krokowski, was of sufficient interest to his contemporaries to prompt a brief article in the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse in 1925.20 The novel’s relation to psychoanalysis was clear to readers in the mid 1920s.

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Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 157. Leslie Y. Rabkin, ‘A “Relationship as Complicated as It Deserves”: Thomas Mann and Psychoanalysis’, Imagination, Cognition and Personality 15.1 (1995): 3–16. Anon., ‘Thomas Mann und die Psychoanalyse’. Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse 11, no. 2 (1925): 247.

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One key aspect of Mann’s treatment of dynamic psychotherapy in the novel is the defamiliarizing term he coins, translating the Greek building-blocks of the word ‘psycho-analysis’ to produce the German term ‘Seelenzergliederung’ that causes Hans Castorp to dissolve into laughter when he’s first introduced to it by his cousin Joachim Ziemsen on his arrival in Davos: ‘And then there’s Krokowski, his assistant – a very savvy character. They make special note of his services in the brochure. He dissects the patients’ psyches [Er treibt nämlich Seelenzergliederung mit den Patienten].’ ‘He what? Dissects their psyches? That’s disgusting!’ Hans Castorp cried, and now hilarity got the better of him. He could no longer control it. Psychic dissection had finished the job, and he bent over and laughed so hard that the tears ran out from under the hand with which he had covered his eyes. Joachim laughed heartily, too – it seemed to do him good. (Knopf ed. (1996), trans. John E. Woods, p. 10/GKFA vol. 5.1, pp. 20–1)

Heidegger picks up the word in his first Magic Mountain letter to Arendt even before he tells her that he has started reading the novel, as he apologizes for the inadequate way in which he reacted to her low mood when they last met: ‘Let’s not “dissect” what happened [»Zergliedern« wollen wir das Geschehene nicht]’ (Briefe, p. 39). Heidegger puts the verb ‘to dissect’ in guillemets, marking it as a quotation, whether directly of Mann’s novel or indirectly of the sort of ways of talking that Mann’s novel itself registers is not clear. Heidegger also explicitly invokes terms from the novel. For instance, there’s a direct quotation in a later letter from October 1925, when Heidegger writes that he’s come back down to ‘the people who live in the flatlands [den »Flachländern«]’ (Briefe, p. 49). In the case of »Zergliedern«, matters are not so clear-cut, but the difference between direct or indirect quotation is not important; or rather, the important point is that there is no difference. The novel and the letter alike show how the verb ‘to dissect’ is available to be invoked and/or ironized when discussing unsatisfactory interactions and their concomitant emotions. The word ‘Zergliederung’ and its cognates go on to make four appearances in the finished draft of Being and Time. Understanding how the term is used in Heidegger’s philosophical writing will help us see ways in which The Magic Mountain continues to echo in Being and Time. More importantly, it will help us see the challenge that Mann’s approach poses for Heidegger’s, a challenge he chose not to confront. Two of the occasions in which Being and Time takes up the idea of ‘Zergliederung’ occur because Heidegger is engaging with Dilthey’s

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1894 essay ‘Ideas concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology [“Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie”]’ (GA2: 277, 527/253, 451). Here ‘analysing’ or ‘analytic’ (zergliedernd) is Dilthey’s positive term for a psychology which acknowledges that ‘the nexus of psychic life constitutes originally a primitive and fundamental datum. We explain nature, we understand psychic life’ (‘Ideas’, p. 27). ‘This psychology is thus the description and the analysis of a nexus which is originally and continuously given as life itself’ (‘Ideas. . .’, p. 35). By the 1920s, Dilthey’s usage of ‘analysis’ (Zergliederung) to mean the careful unpacking of an originary psychological givenness has been replaced by connotations of a more distanced relationship to affects and emotions, and it is this latter usage that we find on the two other occasions where the word crops up in Being and Time. ‘Self-dissection’ turns out to be one of the ways of distancing oneself from an authentic self-relation by overanalysing or misconstruing one’s reactions. For Heidegger, it is thus associated with the inevitable but deficient state of being dragged into the involvements of the everyday world that he terms ‘falling’: Falling Being-in-the-world is not only tempting and tranquillizing; it is at the same time alienating. Yet this alienation cannot mean that Dasein gets factically torn away from itself. On the contrary, this alienation drives it into a kind of Being which borders on the most exaggerated ‘self-dissection [Selbstzergliederung]’ tempting itself with all possibilities of explanation, so that the very ‘characterologies’ and ‘typologies’ which it has brought about are themselves already becoming something that cannot be surveyed at a glance. (GA2: 236/222)

Jung’s Psychological Types was first published in 1921. The linking of ‘selfdissection’ and ‘typology’ suggests that Heidegger here, like Mann in The Magic Mountain, is drawing on popularized versions of psychoanalysis and analytic psychology. The same can be said of the second instance of psychological dissection in Being and Time, which occurs when Heidegger is exploring the call of conscience. The call of conscience is a key moment in Heidegger’s argument. Dasein, ‘primarily and for the most part’ as Heidegger phrases it, lets itself be ‘lived’ by the shared understanding of the culture into which it has been socialized (GA2: 259–60, 396/240, 345), just as, in Heidegger’s reading of The Magic Mountain, Dasein, aka Hans Castorp, is ‘lived’ by its environment (Briefe, p. 40). The call of conscience potentially transforms Dasein’s relation to its everyday social, intellectual, and emotional habits. The particular passage where, like Thomas Mann’s Joachim Ziemsen, Heidegger uses the word Zergliederung comes at a vulnerable point of his

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argument as he justifies why the ‘call of conscience’ cannot be identified with specific lived interruptions in one’s life.21 Mann’s novel stands as a refutation of this claim. Going to a sanatorium, sharing the routine of his sick cousin, encountering a young woman whose eyes and voice remind him of the eyes and voice of a boy he admired and loved from a distance at school, listening to lectures on psychoanalysis, reading about astronomy, biology, and the anatomy of the human body, discovering that he himself has a tubercular moist spot in his lung, all contribute to the transformation of Hans Castorp’s way of relating to his former habits and values. For Heidegger, however, any examples of the sort Mann explores in his novel are contingent; they are, in the vocabulary of the philosopher, of ontic rather than ontological significance. So his argument includes nothing of the sort. Instead, Heidegger hopes to attain a more general level of analysis and to describe the deep structures of Dasein and not just the happenstance of an individual life. He has earlier suggested that, insofar as affect, understanding, and discourse (Befindlichkeit, Verstand, and Rede) are ‘equiprimordial’ elements of human engagement with others and with their environment, we move in a world that has always already been disclosed in the particular way in which our culture understands itself: it has an emotional tone, a set of shared purposes, and ways and degrees of addressing those purposes and making them explicit. He gives an illustration using the example of the – in the 1920s relatively new – phenomenon of a car signal: an arrow telling drivers behind that a vehicle is about to turn. Such a sign can only be interpreted because we already share the wider background of habits and assumptions of which it is a part (GA2: 104–5/108–9): the driving, the cityscape, the social cost of individual accidents. In this context, the indicator helps us achieve ‘an orientation within our environment’ (GA2: 106/110). Against such a background of normal ways of doing things, the ‘call of conscience’ names a Gestalt or aspect switch when some or all of the things we do appear unexpectedly in a new light: ‘If the everyday interpretation knows a “voice” of conscience, then one is not so much thinking of an utterance (for this is something which factically one never comes across); the “voice” is taken rather as a giving-to-understand. In the tendency to disclosure which belongs to the call, lies the momentum of a push – of an abrupt arousal’ (GA2: 360–1/316). The effect of this Gestalt switch is, for Heidegger, almost magical: we escape the shared patterns of behaviour to

21

William Blattner, Heidegger’s Being and Time (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 155–8.

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be confronted with what we authentically have the potential to be. ‘And because only the Self of the they-self gets appealed to and brought to hear, the “they” collapses’ (GA2: 362–3/317). The argument here relies on word play. Heidegger has created a neologism to describe the way we are when we conform to what is generally expected of us, or to the pressures of social conformity he calls ‘the theyself [das Man-selbst]’: ‘As they-self, the particular Dasein has been dispersed into the “they.” and must first find itself’ (GA2: 172/167). Having declared that the ‘abrupt arousal’ or Gestalt switch of the call of conscience appeals only to the ‘self’ bit of ‘they-self’, the ‘they’ can conveniently ‘collapse’. Concealed in this sleight of hand are the difficult processes of successful self-transformation of the sort detailed in Mann’s thousandpage novel. Just as Heidegger hasn’t got a developmental story to tell of the way human beings grow into, and are indelibly shaped by, their social environment, so he also doesn’t have a narrative of how we change our relationship to these inherited patterns. Indeed, he makes a virtue of not being explicit about what key moments in the development of Dasein positively entail. Nevertheless, he is good at listing the options he is ruling out, one of which is our now familiar friend, unproductive selfdissection: When the they-self is appealed to, it gets called to the Self. But it does not get called to that Self which can become for itself an ‘object’ on which to pass judgment, nor to that Self which inertly dissects its ‘inner life’ [Zergliederung seines »Innenlebens«] with fussy curiosity, nor to that Self which one has in mind when one gazes ‘analytically’ at psychical conditions and what lies behind them. (GA2: 363/318)

The association of dissecting inner life with a futile analytic gazing at psychical conditions suggests, once again, that, as with Mann in The Magic Mountain, Heidegger’s target is a popularized version of psychoanalysis. But Heidegger’s attitude to ‘dissecting the soul’ is wholly negative, using a rhetorical sleight of hand to replace any more direct exploration of the sort of positive habits, shared practices or changing circumstances that might assist an individual as they come to terms with their predicament. Mann’s scepticism about psychoanalysis is more nuanced. As was noted by the psychoanalytic community in the 1920s, he ‘deals directly with psychoanalysis and lets it speak through the mouth of a representative – who is not a little caricatured’.22 Despite the satire, in Mann’s novel, the 22

Anon., ‘Thomas Mann und die Psychoanalyse’, 247 [my translation].

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elements caricatured are situated in a richer portrait of Hans Castorp’s endeavours: his conversations with his cousin Joachim and with the impoverished democrat and man of letters, Settembrini; the changes in his physical well-being, from repugnance at the taste of his favourite brand of cigar, Maria Mancini, to a thumping heart and unexpected nose-bleeds. Indeed, the caricature of psychoanalysis is embedded in a narrative whose structure is itself like that of a self-reflexive case history.23 In the section entitled ‘Analysis’, Hans Castorp finds himself staring at the vividly portrayed neckbones ‘visible above the collar line of her white blouse’ (Knopf ed. p. 147/GKFA vol. 5.1, p. 191) of the captivating Clawdia Chauchat during the first of the soul-dissecting lectures by Dr Krokowski that he attends. Only minutes before, in a moment of faintness occasioned by altitude and overexertion, he has just understood Mme Chauchat to be the uncanny repetition of his boyhood idol, Pribislav Hippe. And just as the culmination of his relationship with this object of his youthful adoration was plucking up the courage to borrow a pencil from him, so the consummation of his relationship with Clawdia Chauchat will depend on a borrowed writing implement and his being invited to return it later that night: ‘Don’t forget to return my pencil [N’oubliez pas de me rendre mon crayon]’ (Knopf ed., p. 408/GKFA vol. 5.1, p. 520). The processes of remembering, repeating, and working through that Freud set out in his famous paper on technique published in 1914, while Mann was himself writing The Magic Mountain, find their narrative equivalent in Mann’s novel. Yet it remains ambivalent, in the novel, what exactly might constitute the working through of resistances that, for Freud, ‘effects the greatest changes in the patient’.24 Hans Castorp is, troublingly for his cousin Joachim Ziemsen, himself observed to be having analytic sessions with Dr Krokowski (Knopf ed., p. 436/GKFA vol. 5.1, pp. 555–6). Nevertheless, if he is transformed by his extended sojourn at the sanatorium, it is not by therapy alone: his encounters, his conversations, his reading, his medical treatment all contribute. Moreover, the changes are both indistinct and comic: he has perhaps learned nothing when we see him for the last time unconsciously singing

23

24

The novel is indeed used to frame a recent case history: James M. Herzog, ‘Time Paternity and The Magic Mountain’, Psychoanalytic Inquiry 36, no. 5 (2016): 379–87. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Vintage, 2001), vol. XII, 145–56 (here p. 55).

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fragments of Schubert’s Winterreise as he limps out of view on a battlefield in the Great War (Knopf ed., pp. 852–3/GKFA vol. 5.1, p. 1084). One climax of the peculiar combination of newly acquired erudition and bathos that becomes his trademark in the course of the novel is his declaration of love to Frau Chauchat on Shrove Tuesday, when he can take advantage of the carnivalesque convention of overturning conventions and address her informally as ‘du’ or ‘tu’ (he speaks in a mixture of German and French), call her by her first name, and, at the same time, display his new and detailed knowledge of human anatomy: Let me touch in devotion your pulsing femoral artery where it emerges at the top of your thigh and then dives farther down into the two arteries of the tibia! Let me take in the exhalation of your pores and brush the down – oh, my human image made of water and protein, destined for the contours of the grave, let me perish, my lips against yours. (Knopf ed., p. 408/GKFA vol. 5.1, p. 520)

Hans Castorp has been transformed: his vocabulary has been enriched and his manners, on this occasion, throw off the Hanseatic decorum that he otherwise observes. Something radical has happened. But imagining exactly what is left up to the reader. Where Heidegger refuses to give us more details of how Dasein’s transformation might happen, Mann gives us lots of details, but refrains from telling us directly how to evaluate the change that has occurred in Hans Castorp. The narrator remains ironically inscrutable: ‘Which brings us back to our previous question about his mediocrity or more-than-mediocrity, to which we do not wish to give a conclusive answer’ (Knopf ed., p. 39/GKFA vol. 5.1, p. 57). As a non-academic, immersed reader of the text, Heidegger uses the space left by the narrator’s inscrutability to fashion his own response: die Geschichte der Madame Chauchat ist glänzend geführt – weil es ein Ende ohne Ende ist, und so denke ich mir, daß Hans Castorp, wenn er später im Felde im nassen Graben mit seinem Gewehr lag, an sie »denken« mußte, und daß irgendwo – sie an ihn »dachte«, und daß sie das heute noch tun. Was so unausgesprochen im Ganzen steht, ist wirklich das Positivste. (Briefe, p. 45)

The guillemets have here moved from ‘dissection’ to ‘thinking’, and the distance they mark is an attempt to capture an act of imagination, indeed Heidegger’s own imagining of Hans Castorp’s and Madame Chauchat’s imagining; his own counterfactual account of how the two lovers honour a connection that cannot be directly expressed. He sketches a way of being, not towards death in the manner of his philosophical texts of the period (emphatically not, since in his version the two lovers are still

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thinking about each other in the present of 1925). Instead, he imagines how they inhabit the customs of their environment (Hans Castorp has gone to war; Madame Chauchat has not left her husband), but in a way that is still directed towards the other; they still ‘think’ of each other. In Heidegger’s later philosophy, ‘thinking’ will become a freighted term, in the same way that ‘poetry’ is. Indeed, poetry and thinking will become tightly interlinked: ‘All meaning-making thinking is a writing of poetry, all poetry, on the other hand, a thinking [Alles sinnende Denken ist ein Dichten, alle Dichtung aber ein Denken]’ (GA12: 256/136, translation modified). Writing to Arendt in 1925, Heidegger’s counterfactual ‘thinking’ is of a different kind. In a letter to his beloved about the lovers in Mann’s novel, he goes beyond the explicit narrative to imagine a way of being with others and of doing what one does that nevertheless honours what cannot be directly articulated: a counterfactual, relational authenticity.25

4

Science and Literature in the 1920s

Heidegger’s epistolary reaction to the novel allows us to see one of the possible ways the book functions. The rich portrayal of setting and character allows an affective engagement, which the text structures but does not finally determine, and which grants readers a way of thinking with and beyond the discourses the novel cites and satirizes. In Heidegger’s case, it allows a negatively coloured ‘dissection’ to be transformed into a positively inflected ‘thinking’. How has Mann’s text enabled this transformation? The novel responds to a heterogeneous mix of contemporary discourses philosophical, political, literary, and scientific available in the 1910s and 1920s; sketches a specific setting in which they might be encountered, processed, and reflected on (the privileged space of the sanatorium); and creates a ‘mediocre’ central character who, by the standards of the life he has left behind in the Flatlands, talks to the wrong sort of men and sleeps with the wrong sort of women. This process, saturated with conflicting vocabularies, with technological procedures of measurement and medical self-management, with memories and 25

For an account of relational authenticity that uses Heidegger to push beyond the model of authenticity articulated in Being and Time, see Shaun Gallagher, Ben Morgan, and Naomi Rokotnitz, ‘Relational Authenticity’, in Neuroexistentialism: Meaning, Morals, and Purpose in the Age of Neuroscience, ed. Gregg D. Caruso and Owen Flanagan (New York: Oxford Univeristy Press, 2018), 126–54.

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mis-rememberings, leaves Hans Castorp automatically and impotently humming Schubert to himself on a Great War battlefield, but is simultaneously an occasion for Heidegger to imagine a concrete way of being with another in the constraints of the environment into which the characters have been thrown. Heidegger’s engagement with Mann’s novel is short-lived. The text does not become one of the models he uses for thinking and lecturing with, in the way, for instance, that Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) briefly features in his lecture course on Basic Problems of Phenomenology in the summer semester of 1927. In these lectures, literature is not yet removed from our everyday engagements in the way it will be in the 1930s but, rather, helps us re-engage with those very engagements. A writer helps us re-imagine our involvement (GA24: 244). A passage from Rilke’s novel is cited as an example. Quotations and thought experiments of this sort link literary works practically to other ways of acting and thinking. They supply models for exploration in the same way that, as Donna Haraway argues, experimental models like the drosophila, zebra fish, or mouse ‘are stabilized systems that can be shared among colleagues to investigate questions experimentally and theoretically’.26 For Haraway: ‘A model is a work object; a model is not the same kind of thing as a metaphor or analogy.’27 A literary text can similarly become a model: used in seminars, classrooms, articles, and public discussions as common ground. Although he does not describe his invocations of his favourite poets in this way, Trakl, Hölderlin, or Rilke function for Heidegger as ‘stabilized systems that can be shared among colleagues to investigate questions . . . theoretically’. By contrast, Thomas Mann does not, and never features in Heidegger’s lists of writers who shaped his thinking, such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Hegel, Schelling, Rilke, Trakl, or Dilthey, to give the names Heidegger invoked in 1957 looking back on his intellectual awakening in the years between 1910 and 1914.28 A possible reason for this is the very different attitude Mann and Heidegger have to rival discourses. Mann’s narrative voice is forged by absorbing, ventriloquizing, parodying, or staging the habits of speech of his contemporaries. This pluralistic approach creates a literary space that, as

26

27 28

Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke Universirty Press, 2016), 63. Ibid. Thomas Sheehan, ed., Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2010), 22.

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Karolina Watroba has shown, generations of subsequent readers occupy, revise, and re-appropriate. By contrast, Heidegger follows his mentor, Husserl, in hoping to articulate a perspective that could be the grounding for all other branches of knowledge; as Husserl puts it: ‘the very foundations of all sciences whatsoever’.29 Or as Heidegger insists in Being and Time: ‘The existential analytic of Dasein comes before any psychology or anthropology, and certainly before any biology’ (GA2: 60/71). As a consequence, Mann’s playful and polyvalent explorations of time – the time of habit, the time of the stars, the time of medical measurement, the time of pickling jars, and so the list goes on – seem to Heidegger simply to be bad philosophy. Commenting on the first volume, he writes to Arendt: ‘was ich bislang von der »Zeit« zu lesen bekam, ist nicht überwältigend – aber es wäre lächerlich, wollte ich daraufhin das Werk absuchen’ (Briefe, p. 40). His opinion doesn’t improve having read the second volume: ‘Die »Zeit« wird man nicht allzu hoch in Rechnung stellen. Aber vielleicht ist Kritik hier überhaupt sinnlos’ (Briefe, p. 45). Mann’s text can’t become a working model for Heidegger because of the way it absorbs and ironizes philosophical vocabularies and so resists Heidegger’s attempt to establish a single philosophical master vocabulary: the very language of Being itself. Die Sprache spricht. We saw earlier how Heidegger’s interest in Hölderlin is mediocre. The same can be said of his interest in the philosophy of time. Both his and Thomas Mann’s concern with temporality is one that they shared with many of their contemporaries. After the announcement that Arthur Eddington’s eclipse exhibition had confirmed Einstein’s predictions about the bending of light in November 1919, relativity and the dilation of time became topics of general debate, with Einstein’s face appearing on the cover of the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung in December 1919.30 Einstein and Bergson debated the rival claims of the time of the physicist, the time of the psychologist, and the time of the philosopher in April 1922.31 Bergson’s book-length engagement with Einstein, Duration and Simultaneity, appeared the same year. Ernst Cassirer’s Substance and Function and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity appeared in 1923; Bertrand 29

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Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1931), 28. Matthew Stanley, Einstein’s War: How Relativity Conquered Nationalism and Shook the World (London: Viking, 2019), 304–5. For Bergson’s comments, see Henri Bergson, ‘Remarks on the Theory of Relativity (1922)’, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 28, no. 1 (2020): 169–72. For a major study of the debate and its cultural and philosophical consequences, see Canales, The Physicist and the Philosopher.

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Russell’s ABC of Relativity appeared in 1925.32 Mann himself was not directly engaging with either Einstein or Bergson; he attributed his interest in time during the 1910s and 1920s to a seismographic sensitivity to wider cultural concerns, although he was not above taking note of a newspaper article on Einstein in 1920 (GKFA vol. 5.2, pp. 61–2). In contrast, Heidegger explicitly criticizes Bergson in Being and Time (GA2: 24, 35, 63, 570–1/39, 49, 73, 500–1). In the lecture on ‘The Concept of Time’ that he delivered before theologians in Marburg in July 1924 (GA64: 105–25), he similarly engages directly, if briefly, with Einstein (GA64: 109). Heidegger aims to refocus debates on time by articulating the unchallengeable way in which Dasein itself is primarily and fundamentally time (GA64: 118). Mann, in contrast, playfully pluralizes different ways of measuring, accounting for, understanding and experiencing time. Mann’s interdisciplinary, catholic, self-ironizing literary engagement with temporality seems closer to twenty-first-century approaches than Heidegger’s urge to monopolize the one true theory of time. For instance, the neuroscientist Dean Buonomano has recently surveyed the different types and scales of biological timekeeping in the human body. Like Heidegger, he emphasizes anticipatory involvement in our environment, a looking towards the future grounded in past experience, but his version of the human experience of time is a situated, evolutionary account of the sort Hans Castorp might have read on his balcony in Davos, not a once and for all ontological framework.33 It serves as an example of what Michael Wheeler has called a ‘domesticated’ transcendental: an investigation of enabling preconditions that is also aware of evolutionary and cultural contingency, and so always open to challenge and revision.34 In a similar vein, the theoretical physicist Sean Carroll has recently explored possible cosmological models for explaining how we come to live in a universe with steadily increasing entropy and hence with an arrow of time.35 Mann’s novel is more able to stay in dialogue with these temporally conditioned, 32

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Henri Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity, trans. Leon Jacobsen (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs Merrill, 1965); Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, trans. William Curtis Swabey and Marie Collins Swabey (New York: Dover, 1953); Bertrand Russell, ABC of Relativity (London: Routledge, 1997). Dean Buonomano, Your Brain Is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time (New York: Norton, 2017). Michael Wheeler, ‘Science Friction: Phenomenology, Naturalism and Cognitive Science’, in Phenomenology and Naturalism, ed. H. Carel and D. Meacham, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 135–67. Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time (London: Oneworld, 2010).

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developing scientific hypotheses than Heidegger’s attempts to claim priority over the historically situated vocabularies of empirical investigation. Underpinning the different approaches of Heidegger and Mann is a different attitude to scientific discourse and the practices of technology. Mann’s novel observes how technology transforms the way his characters relate to each other and themselves, an insight graphically condensed in the episode in which Hans Castorp improvises new forms of etiquette appropriate to the situation of seeing his cousin’s heart beating in a live X-ray image: ‘Good God, it was his heart, Joachim’s honor-loving heart, that Hans Castorp saw’ (Knopf ed., p. 259/GKFA vol. 5.1, p. 331). The novel intensifies the clash of vocabularies by insisting upon honour as well as on the technologically mediated medical assessment of Joachim’s anatomy. It doesn’t resolve the clash, to say that either honour or technology is the more ‘originary’ than the other. Hans Castorp’s experience of medical practices, from X-ray to psychoanalysis, and his reading, from cell biology and human anatomy to astronomy, enrich his vocabulary and his thinking, as do his conversations with Settembrini and Naphta about politics, theology, and literature. Mann, in The Magic Mountain, developed an intellectually capacious yet ironic citational style that shouldn’t be called encyclopaedic, not only because, in a section entitled ‘Encyclopaedia’, Settembrini’s pride at contributing to the multi-volume Sociology of Suffering is gently satirized (Knopf ed., pp. 292–3/GKFA vol. 5.1, pp. 373–4), but because the synthesizing ambitions of an encyclopaedia can’t be directly equated with the juxtaposition of perspectives that the novel achieves. The productive way Mann’s novel transcends the mere citation of existing discourses is illustrated by the moment when Joachim, frustrated at being unable to pursue his military career, resolves to leave the sanatorium to join his regiment against medical advice. As the cousins take their leave on the station platform, Joachim unexpectedly addresses Hans Castorp by his first name, something the narrator himself, even though he often calls Joachim Ziemsen Joachim, has studiously avoided doing with the central character. The shock is thus one we as readers directly share with Hans Castorp: They shook hands. Hans Castorp managed a vague smile; his cousin’s eyes were serious, sad, urgent. ‘Hans!’ he said – Good God! Had the world ever known a more embarrassing moment? He had called Hans Castorp by his first name. Their whole lives long they had used informal pronouns and phrases like ‘my man’, and now, in defiance of all cool, reserved custom, in a moment of the most embarrassing exuberance – a first name. (Knopf ed., p. 503/GKFA vol. 5.1, p. 640)

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The moment captures an instance of early twentieth-century North German manners and complicates an approach to the novel, such as that of Peter Gordon, for whom the engagement with the wider cultural context is constrained by Mann’s use of intellectual allegory. By contrast, this scene highlights the sensitive and funny way discursive positions are situated in the context of human interaction. Gordon emphasizes the symbolism: The consequences of this symbolism were ambivalent at best, for it may be the greatest failing of Mann’s allegorical style that the figures in his novels often serve as representative types, with a correspondent loss of verisimilitude. Both Settembrini and Naphta are little more than ventriloquists’ dolls for distinctive ‘worldviews’ that lack intellectual precision but are therefore all the more vulnerable to Mann’s withering irony.36

But the novel is also full of moments of psychological observation and social comedy which touchingly return to the frail human vessels of protein and water who live with, and as Heidegger observes, are ‘lived by’, the discourses and habits available to them. The text pluralistically and eclectically cites discourses but also insistently returns to the question of how we might humanely accommodate ourselves to these discourses or them to us. The combination of intellectual curiosity and humanizing irony still successfully negotiates a recurring problem of twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury culture, namely, how to live with the at once enabling and disempowering effects of the increasing technological mediation of our everyday lives. Indeed, Mann’s social comedy both registers and transcends the point that Bergson hoped to make in relation to the scientific models of the measurement of time in the 1922 encounter with Einstein, offering an alternative model for interactions between scientific and other cultural discourses. Einstein’s model of special relativity suggests that, depending on velocity, time can pass at different rates in different frames of reference so events that seem to be simultaneous in one frame of reference cease to appear so in another. Countering this, Bergson insists that something like the human inner experience of the continuous unfolding of life that he calls ‘duration’ or durée is necessary if this lack of simultaneity is to be measured and noticed in the first place. We need duration to assess simultaneity or its absence. At the April 1922 discussion, the experimental psychologist Henri Piéron further complicated the argument by citing experiments which

36

Peter Eli Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 90.

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empirically demonstrate the unreliability of human judgments of simultaneity. Nevertheless, Bergson insisted on the priority of duration and human observation: ‘in order to establish this point by laboratory experiments, it is to psychological observations of simultaneities – however imprecise – that we must resort; without them, no reading of the device would be possible’.37 Humans must still be interpreting the dials and doing the science. Heidegger, like Bergson, makes the human experience of time fundamental (albeit with a different attitude to the way in which our involvements in the world necessarily spatialize our experience and our relation to ourselves). For all their differences, both philosophers assume there is one, primary experience of time from which all others are derived and on which all others are dependent. In contrast, Mann emphasizes the human, and necessarily situated, aspects of philosophical discourse and scientific practice, but he doesn’t resolve these into a single model of the human or a single model of time. Even the narrator doesn’t have the final word, as we have seen. His inscrutability rather offers the text as a model for reflection and re-appropriation: a tool for juggling and interrelating the competing claims of scientific practices, philosophical and ethical discourses, and our attachment to, and questioning of, the lived habits through which we encounter them.

5

Conclusions: Heidegger’s ‘Desk’ Re-imagined

In the letter to Arendt that conveys Heidegger’s response to The Magic Mountain, having finished the second volume, and in which he speculates counterfactually about a way of ‘thinking’ that inarticulately but powerfully captures what the novel communicates, Heidegger also mentions another novel: ‘Zu den wenigen Büchern auf meinem »Schreibtisch« gehört Hölderlins Hyperion. Das mag Dir sagen, daß Du und Deine Liebe mir zur Arbeit und Existenz gehören’ (Briefe, p. 46). Now it is Heidegger’s ‘desk’ that is in guillemets: his transferable set of intellectual tools, whether he be writing in Marburg or in Todtnauberg, his retreat with Alpine views. As we have seen, Hölderlin would become one of Heidegger’s models for thinking and lecturing during the 1930s and 1940s, whereas Mann would not, so it’s fitting that, even in his last letter on The Magic Mountain, Hyperion should already have replaced Mann’s novel in Heidegger’s intellectual apparatus. My argument has aimed to show what is lost by this change of 37

Bergson, ‘Remarks on the Theory of Relativity (1922)’, 172.

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focus. Mann’s novel, as a model to think with, re-contextualizes ‘thinking’, and emphasizes the exchange with others and the competing discourses that can’t be tidily grounded in a more fundamental viewpoint. At the same time, it allows us to identify with and care about the characters, to ‘think’ their predicament with and beyond them. I have suggested that Mann’s approach engages more productively with a key challenge of the early twentieth century than the approach Heidegger eventually adopts and that we can already, in 1925, observe as he stumbles against Mann’s very different way of engaging with changes in the understanding, investigation, and experience of time. To Heidegger, the portrayal of Hans Castorp, his environment, and his love story seem ‘magnificent’, and emotionally engaging. But the attachment is not enough to change his ‘midscale’ practices: the sorts of conversations he has about novels, and the sorts of other books he is willing to put it alongside. As Mann’s narrator himself suggests, a change of habits can be a longterm process – ‘For God’s sake, surely it cannot be as long as seven years!’ (Knopf ed., p. xxxvi/GKFA vol. 5.1, p. 10). It will be supported and frustrated by other habits in which we have an emotional investment, and there will be cases where reading a novel and falling in love are still not enough to facilitate the ‘abrupt arousal’ that lets our familiar commitments show up in a new light. Nevertheless, what we have seen of Heidegger and Arendt’s joint reading of The Magic Mountain helps us imagine a different Heidegger, who no longer hopes to trump, forestall, or outbid science. As Michael Wheeler observes: ‘Science – and that includes cognitive science – is part of our social world, and part of our social world-making. That’s why a properly historicized transcendental phenomenology is not insulated from it.’38 Heidegger, like Bergson, hoped somehow to maintain the insulation. Mann – curiously, voraciously, ironically – instead incorporated a wide variety of social discourses without trying to trump or hierarchize them. Heidegger might have learned more from Mann’s example. The philosophical insights that drew Heidegger to The Magic Mountain – ‘how Dasein does not live its own life but is rather lived by its environment [wie das Dasein von seiner Umwelt gelebt wird und nur vermeintlich selbst lebt]’ (Briefe, p. 40) – do not lead inevitably to the poetics Heidegger would eventually adopt. Looking back from the vantage point of 1942, Heidegger suggested the problem with his formulations in the 1920s was that they allow an over-individualistic reading of how Dasein comes to terms with its 38

Michael Wheeler, ‘The Rest Is Science: What Does Phenomenology Tell Us about Cognition?’, in Phenomenology and Science (spring, 2016), 87–101, here 00.

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situation, even though he would now emphasize the supra-individual aspects of ‘withstanding being beyond oneself as one is delivered up to the openness of the world [das Innestehen in der der ekstatischen Ausgesetztheit in das Offene]’ (GA49: 53). But Mann had already said that, albeit it more wryly, and with jokes and laughter thrown in, in the early 1920s. Hans Castorp, as a character, was carefully and self-consciously crafted to juxtapose the individual relating to his context with the broad range of discourses empowering and inhibiting him. Moreover, as Watroba has shown, Mann did so in a way which creates a model for readers to work with as they themselves experiment with techniques for living and dying well. Had Heidegger’s encounter with Mann’s text been more generous, it could have contributed to a different route for philosophy, one which acknowledges existential concern for re-appropriating the discourses and habits we factically are confronted with, but without the need to confront, ignore, or unquestioningly embrace the plurality of scientific practices, or, to give those options names, without being confined to the responses of Bergson, Heidegger, or Russell. This approach would encourage us to put Mann, Heidegger, and Arendt in different company, alongside writers and thinkers who use the tools of philosophy and literature to think pluralistically with scientific discourse; alongside, say, Isaac Asimov and the Three Laws of Robotics he first formulated in the story ‘Runaround’ in 1942, the year after Heidegger re-appraised the arguments of Being and Time; or alongside Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, and Ursula Le Guin.39 The Magic Mountain as science fiction. In any case, the unexpected effect of dwelling on Heidegger and Arendt’s encounter with Mann can only be as productive as the afterlife it produces, and the new combinations it inspires. ‘And with that, we begin’ (Knopf ed., p. xxxvi/GKFA vol 5.1, p. 10).

Bibliography Anon. ‘Thomas Mann und die Psychoanalyse.’ Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse 11, no. 2 (1925): 247. Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind. Edited by Mary McCarthy. 2 vols. New York: Harcourt, 1978. Arendt, Hannah, and Martin Heidegger. Briefe 1925–1975. Edited by Ursula Ludz. 3rd ed. Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 2002. 39

Isaac Asimov, Robert Visions (New York: ROC, 1990), 113–34; Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Polity); Haraway, Staying with the Trouble; Ursula Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thought on Words, Women, Places (New York: Grove Press, 1989).

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Asimov, Isaac. Robert Visions. New York: ROC, 1990. Bergson, Henri. Duration and Simultaneity. Translated by Leon Jacobsen. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs Merrill, 1965. ‘Remarks on the Theory of Relativity (1922).’ Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 28, no. 1 (2020): 169–72. Blattner, William. Heidegger’s Being and Time. London: Bloomsbury, 2006. Buonomano, Dean. Your Brain Is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time. New York: Norton, 2017. Canales, Jimena. The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. Carroll, Sean. From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time. London: Oneworld, 2010. Cassirer, Ernst. Substance and Function and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Translated by William Curtis Swabey and Marie Collins Swabey. New York: Dover, 1953. Dreyfus, Hubert L. Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. Felski, Rita. Hooked: Art and Attachment. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020. Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated by James Strachey. 24 vols. London: Vintage, 2001. Gallagher, Shaun, Ben Morgan, and Naomi Rokotnitz. ‘Relational Authenticity.’ In Neuroexistentialism: Meaning, Morals, and Purpose in the Age of Neuroscience, edited by Gregg D. Caruso and Owen Flanagan, 126–45. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Gordon, Peter Eli. Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke Universirty Press, 2016. Heidegger, Martin. Übungen für Anfänger: Schillers Briefe über die Ästhetische Erziehung des Mensch. Edited by Ulrich von Buulow. Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 2005. Herzog, James M. ‘Time Paternity and The Magic Mountain.’ Psychoanalytic Inquiry 36, no. 5 (2016): 379–87. Husserl, Edmund. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Translated by W. R. Boyce Gibson. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1931. Latour, Bruno. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Polity, 2017. Le Guin, Ursula. Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thought on Words, Women, Places. New York: Grove Press, 1989. Magrini, James M., and Elias Schwieler. Heidegger on Literature, Poetry, and Education after the ‘Turn’: At the Limits of Metaphysics. London: Routledge, 2018. Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain. Translated by John E. Woods. London: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.

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Mitchell, Andrew J. ‘Heidegger’s Poetics of Relationality.’ In Interpreting Heidegger: Critical Essays, edited by Daniel O. Dahlstrom, 217–31. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Prendergast, Christopher. Counterfactuals: Paths of the Might Have Been. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Price, Leah. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. Rabkin, Leslie Y. ‘A “Relationship as Complicated as It Deserves”: Thomas Mann and Psychoanalysis’, Imagination, Cognition and Personality 15.1 (1995): 3–16. Russell, Bertrand. ABC of Relativity. London: Routledge, 1997. Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Translated by Keith Tribe. London: Penguin, 2016. Sheehan, Thomas, ed. Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2010. Stanley, Matthew. Einstein’s War: How Relativity Conquered Nationalism and Shook the World. London: Viking, 2019. Suglia, Joseph. ‘On the Nationalist Reconstruction of Hölderlin in the George Circle.’ German Life and Letters 55, no. 4 (2002): 387–97. Watroba, Karolina. Mann’s Magic Mountain: World Literature and Closer Reading. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Wheeler, Michael. ‘The Rest Is Science: What Does Phenomenology Tell Us about Cognition?’ In Phenomenology and Science (spring, 2016): 87–101. ‘Science Friction: Phenomenology, Naturalism and Cognitive Science.’ In Phenomenology and Naturalism, edited by H. Carel and D. Meacham. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 135–67. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Wild, Markus. ‘Heidegger and Trakl.’ In Paths in Heidegger’s Later Thought, edited by Günther Figal, Diego D’Angelo, Tobias Keiling and Guang Yang, 45–63. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2020. Williams, Abigail. The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017.

4

From Tool to Poem The Emergence of the Antagonism between Technics and Poetry in Heidegger’s Work Justin Clemens

Martin Heidegger’s writings on poetry – or, more precisely, on certain poems and poets – continue to exert their influence today not only upon so-called continental philosophy but across a wide range of academic disciplines in the humanities and beyond. Notably, such an influence has often itself been mediated by commentators who are expressly postor even anti-Heideggerean. Yet, although it remains monumental, this influence now also seems residual. At the close of the second decade of the twenty-first century, in a radically transformed geopolitical, technical, and institutional context, the great transnational ‘dominant’ and ‘emergent’ research programs in the humanities no longer seem very much concerned with the Heideggerean intervention in regard to the poem, nor even with the innovations of his inheritors on the subject – including Jacques Derrida, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault – in any serious fashion.1 If one thinks of some current prevalent buzzwords that Heidegger is often (rightly) recognised as being decisive in reinvigorating for philosophy and beyond – for example, the use of such clumsy and capacious tags as ‘being’, ‘affect’, and ‘care’ – these are now predominantly examined with methods and references that almost entirely ignore the role of the poem and poetry in life and thought, let alone Heidegger’s own rigorous questioning of the essence of technology. The currently regnant digital humanities, for instance, may be very concerned with all three of these

1

We should also stress that this opening remark presumes an addressee – a university addressee – that has itself been put into radical crisis in the contemporary situation. As we know, not least due to his own compromised institutional decisions, Heidegger himself was from very early in his career extremely critical of the structures of the university of his time.

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tags, but in almost no cases does poetry seem a significant factor in its discussions.2 Let us take three recent instances. In the first, Aaron Tucker discusses the rendering, by means of a sequence of technical modulations, of the author’s own written poems into striated 3D cubes: ‘Loss Sets asks its audience to consider the tactile experience of a poem, the potential three-dimensional scale of a poem, and how a poem melds with, influences, and is influenced by the technologies around it, pushing that original poem beyond its semantic value.’3 In this case, a personal experiment with refracting poetry (in one dominant received sense of that word) by modulating words into other kinds of materials through new technical means is adduced as one example among others of the intermodulability of contemporary artistic practice. Both the process of making and the products of the process are submitted to deliberate, precise, technical distortions, all of which are in principle and practice able to be presented to and reproduced by any third parties with comparable equipment. The second instance is the only other mention of ‘poetry’ I could find from the same volume. There, Jana Millar Usiskin et al. mention the name of one of the most famous English-language modernist poems to explain some of the operations of digital ontology: Ontologies are generally first organized as a collection of nested categories, called classes and subclasses, that are arranged in a hierarchical order similar to that in a taxonomy. Classes comprise subclasses and individuals: for example in the Casaubon ontology, ‘The Waste Land’ would be an individual in the class Poem. Production is a class that contains the subclasses Artifact, Event, and Concept.4

One can immediately see how such an ontology is at once expressly contingent – it is itself constructed with regards to some already existing collection of objects which will provide the materials upon which the computations will subsequently go to work – and entails a certain nonnegotiable commitment to the technical requisites of constrained 2

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See, inter alia, A. Lagerkvist (ed.), Digital Existence: Ontology, Ethics and Transcendence in Digital Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2019); M. K. Gold and L. F. Klein (eds.), Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019 (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2019); C. Crompton et al. (eds.), Doing More Digital Humanities: Open Approaches to Creation, Growth, and Development (London: Routledge, 2019). Aaron Tucker, ‘Beyond “Whiz-Bang”: 3D Printing and Critical Making in the Humanities’, in Crompton et al., Doing More Digital Humanities, pp. 119–20. Jana Millar Usiskuin, Christine Walde, and Caroline Winter, ‘Ontologies for Digital Humanists’, in Crompton et al., Doing More Digital Humanities, p. 186. Bolding in original.

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nomination, demarcation, and order. The nominations are drawn from a set of received determinations, which themselves presume and project in advance certain predicates and structures that thereafter implicate the demarcations and orders that are under investigation. The third instance concerns the explicit marking of an absence. If lewis levenberg, Tai Neilson, and David Rheams’ volume Research Methods for the Digital Humanities contains no substantial reference to poetry at all, the chapter by Mark Alfano, ‘Digital Humanities for History of Philosophy: A Case Study on Nietzsche’, enunciates the following renunciation: ‘In keeping with standard interpretive practices, I refrain from using Nietzsche’s unpublished works, or poems . . . Future work can easily supplement this chapter by including the letters, the poetry, and the kitchen sink.’5 No dithyrambs of Dionysius, then, but a flattened data set whose criteria for inclusion and exclusion are at once absolutely crystalline and fundamentally pragmatic, entailing no real judgement or evaluation of generic demarcations, affirming an in-principle inclusion that may be effected at some other date. To sum up the lessons of these instances in turn: the reduction or neutralisation of semantics or sense as part of the creation of contemporary poetry in the name of its proximity to technical objects and the extension of its sense into materials hitherto considered essentially different from it; the subordination and integration of all cultural phenomena to mutable, non-definitional but fundamentally hierarchical operations of nominated sets for data ontologies; the pragmatic contingent exclusion of a marginal part of a corpus, with no projected significant consequences for the findings. In other words, experimental modulation, nested fixation, and indifferent exclusion are three distinct-yetcompatible possibilities for the treatment of poetry under the conditions of contemporary technology. One might easily and reasonably extrapolate from these instances that poetry itself – whatever that might mean – no longer has any significant cultural, technical, economic, or political import. There are still poets and poetry, presumably – possibly even more today than ever before in human history – but what is produced, transmitted, received, or affirmed as such has no particular priority or claims on the status of knowledge, nor on the methods, operations, and institutions that establish, stabilize, classify, 5

Mark Alfano, ‘Digital Humanities for History of Philosophy: A Case Study on Nietzsche’, in l. levenberg et al. (eds.), Research Methods for the Digital Humanities (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), p. 89.

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archive, filter, and transmit such knowledges. As Alain Badiou laments in an essay entitled ‘What Does the Poem Think?’, which itself necessarily takes up the legacy of Heidegger’s struggles with poetry: ‘Poetry, alas, is receding from us. The cultural account is oblivious to poetry.’6 Poetry, if it subsists at all, then, is just one non-essential practice among others, which can be treated and studied just like any other practice. Perhaps paradoxically, however, this contemporary technical treatment of poetry may not be tantamount to its simple ‘exclusion’, ‘marginalization’, or ‘suppression’. Quite to the contrary, poetry is not excluded in any pathological sense; it is rather absolutely included in principle (if not necessarily in practice), as equal in every way to any other phenomenon. But is this very principle of inclusion, then, not precisely the problem, insofar as it amounts to a neutralisation of the specificity and singularity of poetry? Which suggests another twist: that, despite appearances, poetry is not thereby merely neutralised, but perhaps continues to provide the fundamental orientation of technics towards worldly phenomena. After all, in order for anything whatsoever to be rendered ‘communicable’ – taking this signifier in the broadest possible sense – in a way that breaks with (or is at least irreducible to) every prior tradition of communication, ‘poetry’ in ‘an original sense’ might be said to be at work. The limits of the sayable have been disrupted and shifted. Just as in the sequence of examples adduced above, ‘poetry’ would then constitute the undisclosed matrix of the indissociable triplet of naming, cutting, and transforming that conditions every technical operation, underwriting the radical contemporary fusion of naming, knowing, and doing in computational technology. Yet even if we could accept such a redescription – that poetry is, despite appearances, not marginal but regnant – would it not remain the case that something about poetry becomes, accordingly, attenuated and obscure in the situation of its utter triumph? As such, would something essentially in and of poetry also then withdraw from phenomena, untouchable, unrecognised, unrecognisable, even unactionable? This might not only mean that ‘poetry’ recedes as something inaccessible to knowing, but as something inaccessible to doing and saying. Which brings us back to our initial worry in what is perhaps an even more severe bind: what if the contemporary technical treatment of poetry designates a poetic apocalypse, simultaneously revelatory, triumphant, and disastrous, above all for ‘poetry’ ‘itself’? 6

A. Badiou, The Age of the Poets, trans. B. Bosteels, intro. E. Apter and B. Bosteels (London: Verso, 2014), p. 42.

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This might then induce us to re-draw on Heidegger’s own famous analyses to confirm that this situation should indeed be considered, in some fundamental way, to be constituted by entirely expected and banal features of the ‘essence of technology’ – which cannot not take up or consider poetry in any other fashion. It will indeed be necessary to make several further comments about these analyses below, but I will begin by presenting a slightly simpleminded reconstruction of Heidegger’s own turn towards the poem against technology in the course of the 1930s and beyond. It is indeed one of the crucial aspects of Heidegger’s work that he returns to the received divisions between poetry and technology in a singular and striking way. Nonetheless, he does not do so immediately in his own thought, nor in any straightforward fashion. Rather, it is on the basis of a kind of ‘philological’ rethinking of the problematic of the coming-to-thinking that Heidegger comes, as if by necessity, to reinscribe the roles played by poetry and technology. Indeed, Heidegger’s return to ontology in Being and Time is marked by the way in which he links the question concerning Being to the question concerning technology as absolutely codependent phenomena, even if the question of technology is thereby considered in a number of unfamiliar senses. At once within and against the tradition of the transmission of the forgetting of the forgetting of the meaning of Being, Heidegger proposes a certain destruction, deconstruction, or ‘abuilding’ (Abbau) of this tradition. Such an abuilding is itself in solidarity with his fundamental attempt to reopen philosophical questioning from within the singularity and immanence of a historical situation. One of the most famous early moments of the analysis engages the ‘damaged tool’, which, for Heidegger characterises our very ‘first’ apprehension of a world-qua-world. The key arguments are relatively brief yet decisive: among other aspects, this account suggests how, from out of ordinary everydayness itself, Dasein has the chance of beginning to adopt a different relationship to things in the world; indeed, to the world and to worlding as such. For it is through tools or equipment (das Zeug) that we primarily encounter things, not just as material or abstract entities, but as inextricably bound up with our own concerns. Such tools are the means by which we get things done, and hence they exhibit an ‘in-orderto’ (um-zu) structure. This further entails that in ‘the “in-order-to” as a structuring of our relationship to things in the world there lies an assignment or reference [Verweisung] of something to something’.7 A tool is 7

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), p. 97.

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therefore at once a manifold (there is never a single piece of equipment that doesn’t presume others), a mediator (each tool serves to do something else), and something invested with our interests (our affects) in a practical fashion (we do things with it). Hence the famous distinction between the ready-to-hand (Zuhandenheit) and the present-at-hand (Vorhandenheit): we don’t encounter tools in the mode of detached observation, but of pragmatic investment, of implicated manipulation. One of the paradoxes of such pragmatic investment is that a tool only shows itself properly in its use (‘hammering with a hammer’), but, in such use, the tool is not itself thematically understood as such. One has to forget something fundamental about what one is using and doing in order to use and do it properly. In doing so, the very milieu, the context in and for which one acts, is also occluded while still being everywhere presupposed. In Heidegger’s words: ‘The peculiarity of what is proximally ready-to-hand is that, in its readiness-to-hand, it must, as it were, withdraw in order to be ready-to-hand quite authentically.’8 And yet something of the world as such – the human and environmental context – necessarily remains already operative and at stake, at once accessible yet obscure, in this ‘withdrawal’. How, then, can Dasein in this pre-ontological, non-reflective, non-thetic, relation to tool-use ever come to apprehend something other than its inculcated embodied forgetfulness in its very actions? Heidegger’s examination here is justly famous. One cannot simply think oneself out of such a situation; there is no point at which one spontaneously becomes a thinker of (one’s own) life and being without some kind of intervention. It is through particular kinds of disruptions – perhaps themselves only the most minor of quotidian frustrations – that such a possibility can become an actuality. ‘The tool turns out to be damaged’, Heidegger states, ‘or the material unusable.’9 In other words, though the tool is at once there – it is no longer there for use. The readiness-to-hand of the tool suddenly becomes an unreadiness, an inaccessibility or unavailability for use. And, then and there, in this punctual unusability, the obtrusion of this obstacle functions as a goad to a kind of beginning of thinking, a revenge of the ‘present at hand’ in the midst of beings: the alarm of a divisive proto-conceptual distancing at the very heart of proximity. If it is only through such a disturbance, through the sudden becomingun-handy (broken, missing, displaced) of equipment (i.e., das Zeug, the

8

Ibid., p. 99.

9

Ibid., p. 102.

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familiar technologies of our everyday use), that the already-yet-only-now character of our own ‘world’ is revealed – and we must be careful not to reduce the subtlety of the paradoxes which Heidegger’s phenomenological descriptions always seek to expose to us – this already-yet-only-now character of constitutive belatedness has a number of potential consequences. First, the tool materially obtrudes in becoming-unusable, alerting us to the fact of its materiality-beyond-us-with-us. Unreflective familiarity becomes unusable materiality becomes estranging unavailability. Second, in this material event of the advent of materiality that de-tools the tool, the in-order-to structuring of our own world simultaneously becomes apparent. The punctual, accidental un-handiness of the tool alerts us to the limits of our world, as it evinces a certain instability and contingency of that world. A world, our world, always has an aspect of handiness to it in the web of practised familiarity, and it is to these ‘facts’ we have the chance of attending when such basic familiarity is thwarted. Let us at once note three important linked components of this analysis. First of all, it is not simply that the properties of the thing, nor that our orientation towards the thing, have themselves suddenly entirely changed. All that is required for Heidegger’s analysis is that a single element (a ‘key property’?) of the interaction does not function as intended, that it not go according to plan. That plan is thereby interrupted – even if only momentarily. There is a variety of ways in which this might happen (e.g., one thing may be missing, another may emerge as in excess), but what is determining is that the becoming un-ready-to-hand of the putatively ready-to-hand becomes tormenting: the thing is now conspicuous, obtrusive, and obstinate, an obstacle to success. Moreover, the sense of its presence-at-hand emerges at the heart of the ready-to-hand: the latter is not abolished, but subsists in its frustration; the former is not inferred, but arises as an alienating apparition in the midst of the world of action. We are not quite yet at an ontological questioning – but a vital crack has been opened towards the ontological from within the ontic itself, trapped between presence and readiness. Second, one should point to such little occurrences as models of an event in general: not necessarily big, world-historical events, but as proffering several (non-total, non-exhaustive) requisites for the thinking of any event whatsoever: a minimal material disruption or interruption that occurs contingently, surprisingly, from within the normal course of things, inhibiting or derailing plans and projects, tasks and desires. Such events are potentially revelatory of certain aspects of the context itself, for instance, aspects of our behaviour and its situation that we had

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taken for granted without ever properly interrogating; nonetheless, they do not thereby compel or necessitate a full investigation of their causes, and are therefore eminently able to vanish back into the usual course of irritations, annoyances, petty frustrations of everyday life. Third, we need to underline that it is the referential structuring of context that Heidegger sees as one important possibility that emerges from this experience-of-contingency. The disruption, by breaking with pragmatic referential contexts, precisely thereby illuminates something about their structures of referring, not only, for example, the what, the with, and the for of tool-use, but also the question of the whole, and of the links of such parts to the whole. The possibility of totality per se is ‘lit up’ – but so too the question of the relationships of the components to each other and to the whole, not to mention to other Daseins as well. Given this triple aspect of Heidegger’s analysis as it depends upon the cracking of the ontic as the model of an event that discloses an alreadythere of context as such, it is no wonder that Heidegger then immediately turns to the question of ‘reference and signs’. Such signs are understood in a sense that is wider than the usual acceptations of language, given that ‘Being-a-sign-for can itself be formalized as a universal kind of relation.’10 All that I would like to underline of this complex analysis is that: first, Heidegger is here, by a kind of ‘necessity’, identifying the realm of signs with a regime of universality; second, that this identification links language in some way with tool-use; third, at this point, it is not poetry that is in question. Language is precisely something that we tend also to encounter as ready-to-hand, and so we can generally assert that language remains in Being and Time in the train of, and continuous with, the analysis of the broken tool (there is an ‘essential equiprimordiality of structures’). Certainly, Heidegger poses the question of language’s relation to equipmentality explicitly (i.e. what kind of Being does language have?), and it is language that opens the question of Dasein’s understanding through a series of inauthentic modes – ‘idle talk’ and ‘curiosity’ and ‘falling’ – until we can resolve through Dasein’s ontological structure of care ‘the question of the meaning of Being in general’.11 Yet it remains the case that, at least in the order of demonstration, that the analysis of equipmentality bears a significant practical priority. As Mark Sinclair comments:

10

Ibid., pp. 107–8.

11

Ibid., p. 227.

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the analysis of equipment in Being and Time is already more than a simple description of experience insofar as it serves to gain access to the structure of worldhood by radicalising the phenomenological conception of intentionality . . . the analysis has another, more profound and more historical ‘purpose’, in that it seeks to reappropriate, and provide a birth certificate for, the Greek inception of metaphysics.12

Yet it is also crucial that the tool-event and the operations of language are not the end of the story. If their chance events may proffer an inkling of thinking, such an inkling remains enmeshed in nests of relations without an encounter with the question of context as such, that is, the experience that there is world. For if ‘the ready-to-hand is always understood in terms of a totality of involvements’, ‘this totality need not be grasped explicitly by a thematic interpretation’.13 The explicit revealing of the totality by a thematic interpretation is (also very famously) reserved for the affect of anxiety. As Heidegger announces: Being-anxious discloses, primordially and directly, the world as world. It is not the case, say, that the world first gets thought of by deliberating about it, just by itself, without regard for the entities within-the-world, and that, in the face of this world, anxiety then arises; what is rather the case is that the world as world is disclosed first and foremost by anxiety, as a mode of state-of-mind. This does not signify, however, that in anxiety the worldhood of the world gets conceptualized.14

So it is with anxiety – an affect which literally nihilates all handiness – that a decisive revelation occurs.15 The little breach in pragmatic day-today activity first announced by the damaged tool, its ontic disruption of handiness, is here torn utterly asunder by an affect, anxiety, that in corroding all the things of the world, reveals world as such: a properly ontological disclosure.

12

13 15

Mark Sinclair, Heidegger, Aristotle and the Work of Art: Poiesis in Being (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 70. 14 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 191. Ibid., p. 232. As Giorgio Agamben glosses the role of anxiety: it is only after the apparent primacy of familiarity has been swept aside thanks to anxiety that care can appear . . . as the original structure of Dasein. That is to say, the primacy of care has been rendered possible only by means of an operation of annulling and neutralizing familiarity. The originary place of care is situated in the non-place of handiness, its primacy in making the primacy of use disappear. The Use of Bodies, trans., Adam Kotsko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), p. 43.

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We have here an exemplary staging of the asymmetric pincermovement of analysis characteristic of Heideggerean phenomenology: on the one side, the ontic interruption of an action that contingently apprises us both of the materiality of things and of totality, announcing an intimation of ‘world’ as a referential context that suspends the necessity of our entire way of life; on the other side, the affective interruption of anxiety within and against such a totality, which exposes world itself as such through its dissolution of the claims of objects; the aporia opened by these sudden suspensions of acting and knowing is thereby staged in the starkest and most stringent manner, whereby, from both ‘outside’ and ‘inside’, materiality and affect effect a disruption that may induce a thought to reopen the question of the meaning of being. Heidegger’s enterprise here simultaneously constitutes a form of first philosophy, as well as a kind of ordinary philosophy. It seeks to give answers to such fundamental philosophical questions as how does one come to thinking?, can anyone come to thinking?, how can thinking as such emerge in the first place?, what is thinking?, what is thinking such that it is possible to come to thinking? and so on, doing so not from a position of exteriority or transcendence, but out of the minimal unfortunate happenstances and affects of the everyday itself. We moreover see Heidegger’s own argument following the tracks it establishes: the experience of the broken tool and of anxiety bear respectively upon particular and general, familiarity and uncanniness, ontic and ontological, emerging from the necessity to ‘follow the hermeneutic circle’ without presuming one can simply volitionally position oneself exterior to it without deleterious consequences for thought (this is part of Heidegger’s rejection of the present-at-hand as the primary modality of questioning after being). Furthermore, Heidegger’s thinking proceeds by means of forms of ‘negation’ that cannot be considered either Aristotelean or Hegelian: neither contradiction as falsity nor contradiction as the motor of the true is at the centre of the arrhythmic movement of thought that will authentically attend to the question of the meaning of being; for that, it is rather necessary to affirm disjunctive experiences of breakage, rupture, and dissolution, that is, whatever has the destructuring potential of an event, as well as the resolve to follow through the consequences. The only problem is that it doesn’t work. It’s not that Heidegger isn’t already fully concerned with the questions that will dog him throughout his life, but that the enterprise as it is presented in Being and Time fails to find their effective articulation, both in the matter of the concern of the treatise, as in the language and structuring of the treatise form itself. The

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brilliant schematic which establishes the insuperable claims of equipmentality, language, affect, and destruction-of-metaphysics in the questioning after the meaning of Dasein’s being is unable to resolve the questions that it has itself opened, ending in impasses. For instance: how can Heidegger evade an oscillation between Vorhandenheit and Zuhandenheit that, despite his best efforts, still can only be located and find its terms in the very tradition it seeks to ‘destroy’? Or, again: how can he account for the emergence of the modern sciences to ancient metaphysics in an immanent way without misrepresenting the genuine novelty of the former but without losing the link to the history of metaphysical becoming? What sort of an account can bind equipment, language, affect, and metaphysics without ‘rational gaps’? These questions are even more pressing given that the following requisites are non-negotiable for Heidegger: the question of the thinking of being; the question of how one comes to thinking since such thinking cannot be necessitated; the priority of the question of situatedness, at once immanent and historical. In one sense, all the elements that Heidegger will elaborate throughout his life are already there in Being and Time, but in another sense they are still lacking their key. Hence the great treatise remains unfinished: it has hit an impasse which derails the project. The following decade will accordingly see the emergence of several new motifs in Heidegger’s work that seek to resolve or reconfigure the impasse. What emerges? Telegraphically: truth rather than meaning; earth as differentiated from world; art rather than equipment; event as inseparable from being; language as prior to any other site. One of the consequences of this shift is that Heidegger has to break his own analyses of the broken tool in two. On the one hand, he seeks to retain the revelatory nature of unexpected differentiated interruptions on which his procedures in Being and Time depend, immanent shocks that disclose hitherto unnoticed aspects of inculcated practice; on the other, he realises that equipment itself is integrated with knowing and know-how in ways that cannot simply be disclosed by this or that individual equipmental failure per se. Poetry proves key in this shift. It is not simply through a repudiation of Being and Time that Heidegger seeks a way around his impasses, but by a fundamental reconfiguration of its elements. As William Allen notes: It is thus significant that Heidegger’s only real reference to poetry in Being and Time occurs in a discussion of the way in which language expresses itself

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(Sichaussprechens) through Dasein, such that Dasein is thereby ex-pressed through language as its ‘being-outside’, and in doing so poetry is marked (uniquely) as a form of this disclosure of existence, the only example of the disclosive nature of language.16

Poetry, in Being and Time only a very minor reference, will move more and more centrally into Heidegger’s thinking, partially – and this is my claim here – by being articulated with some aspects of his thinking that emerge from the analysis of the broken tool that Heidegger could no longer legitimately assign to equipmental breakdown. The same decade also witnesses, of course, the determining moments in Heidegger’s commitment to Nazism.17 Indeed, we cannot separate the shift from equipment to poem outside the vicissitudes of this commitment. As Miguel de Beistegui puts it: ‘The year 1934 does not only mark Heidegger’s resignation as Rektor of the University of Freiburg. It is also the year in which, for the first time in his philosophical itinerary, and in a gesture that initiates a decisive turn in his thought, Heidegger decides to devote an entire lecture course to poetry.’18 As Beistegui underlines: is this a turn away from politics after an embarrassing failure? An attempt to raise the question of politics in a way that goes beyond previous understandings? Or something other again? While there is evidently no place in the current chapter to discuss the details, motivations, or difficulties of Heidegger’s appalling decisions – given that this chapter seeks only to discuss some aspects of the turn to the poem following his humiliating political failure – it is crucial to note that those years also see the emergence of a notion of ‘machination’ as rootlessness, of the organisation of equipment as deracinating deracinated forcing, and, with it, an implicit (and sometimes very explicit) link to the Jews as integrally part of such. As the notorious Black Notebooks put it: ‘How far removed from nature must natural science be, such that it considers one of its successes the raging of technology, a raging grounded

16

17

18

William Allen, Ellipsis: Of Poetry and the Experience of Language after Heidegger, Hölderlin and Blanchot (Buffalo: SUNY, 2007), p. 32. As Stuart Elden puts it: ‘All of the Hölderlin lectures post-date the explicit political career, but they are all written by a card-carrying Nazi, as he remained in the Party until 1945’, Speaking against Number: Heidegger, Language and the Politics of Calculation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), p. 34. See the now classic work by Philippe LacoueLabarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, trans. C. Turner (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990). Miguel de Beistegui, Heidegger & the Political (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 87.

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on that science?’19 The ‘irrevocable tyranny’ of such technology is therefore essentially at odds with any thinking out of situated immanence, and is thus an epitome of the abandonment of being. Now in Being and Time, das Zeug has little to do with such considerations. Yet if it is not yet what he will stigmatize under the heading of modern technology, it is also clear that such tools are not altogether foreign to the latter’s tyranny. One immediate consequence of Heidegger’s new concerns about the latter is it means that not every piece of equipment can be held to function in principle as tied to situatedness; another is that the experiential possibilities of equipment cannot guarantee in themselves any beginning of thinking. So Heidegger is forced to locate a different place, a different kind of place, from which to relaunch his questioning. This ‘place’ that he locates is, as we know, nothing other than ‘language’ itself. As he puts it early in the Black Notebooks: Being is to be set more deeply into Dasein through the actual question of the essence of language. Thus with Dasein a transformation of truth and being is to be compelled. That is a happening of history proper; for this history the ‘individual’ is inconsequential and counts only inasmuch as he secures for himself in effective work a possibility of repeatable impulses.20

But the problematic of the priority of language for thought does not of course implicate just any language. For Heidegger, it cannot be a metalanguage, for isn’t this what mathematics, logic, and the sciences purport to provide, a purified and deracinated language of objects? What in what language will enable the saying, the staging, even the saging of truth? It has to be a ‘natural’ language, the language of the everyday. But we don’t think in just any natural language, no matter how many languages we might know, or however well we know them. In fact, the language into which we are originally thrown is what is often called our mother tongue, our Muttersprache. And therefore we must think out of and through such language if we are to come to a deeper questioning of being. Precisely because we do not have several or multiple mother tongues, but really only ever one, then that will have to be the place

19

20

Martin Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI: Black Notebooks 1931–1938, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), section 176, p. 54. Ibid., section 16, p. 9.

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through and by which – Heidegger himself notes the ‘ambiguity of the “through” (“Durch”) – ‘we’ proceed. Moreover, because of this ‘fact’ of language that establishes particularity as such, we cannot simply speak in an abstract and propositional fashion in that language about our own position on being, nor about any other potential revelations of being that others (might have) had. Simply essaying ‘to think’ ‘through’ ‘our’ ‘own’ ‘language’ is still struck by insuperable difficulties, for such a language is – as Being and Time already thoroughly described – saturated with forms of what were there called ‘inauthentic’ or what, in another optic, we might also denominate as ‘metaphysical’ modalities. So what we need is something in our own language that disrupts the inheritances of metalanguage in order to give the possibility of a thinking that is not simply propositional or referential or volitional, but is not thereby merely ungrounded or arbitrary. We will require something like a broken tool for language to be able to suspend our routines of action and speaking in order to apprise us of something that is already there if not seemingly there. But what could that be? Perhaps the decisive place in which this question receives an answer is ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ essay in which Heidegger, while not entirely abandoning his attention to the problematic of das Zeug, supplements the question of equipment with that of the work of art. If this extraordinary essay contains immense resources for thinking, I will focus only upon the key arguments it makes vis-à-vis equipment as these bear upon the work of art. First, Heidegger underlines that while every work of art must be in excess of just a mere thing, it is nonetheless still necessarily a thing. Traditional interpretations of the thing have rendered it the support for a bundle of predicates, the unity of an affective manifold, or an aesthetic adhesion of form and matter. For Heidegger, this third option is the one that makes clearest the intermediary zone between the natural and the cultural thing insofar as it is there that the problematic of form is itself imposed by functional and teleological requirements: Both the design and the choice of material predetermined by that design – and, therefore, the dominance of the matter–form structure – are grounded in such serviceability. A being that falls under serviceability is always the product of a process of making. It is made as a piece of equipment for something. Accordingly, matter and form are determinations of beings which find their true home in the essential nature of equipment.21 21

Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 10.

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Note that it is no longer the breaking of the tool but what seems to be its antithesis, its serviceability – and whence its reliability – that is at stake here. Moreover, this very normality of a state of affairs that takes the matter–form distinction as read, can be shown to have an ancient provenance, emerging in Greece, being transmitted by Christian theology, and retained in modernity by Kantian transcendentalism. The tool, that which sits between nature and culture, or, more precisely, between the thing and the artwork, is nonetheless itself still traduced by the very conception of it as formed matter. So rather than ask about the thingliness of the thing through our apprehensions of equipment, let us ask about the equipmentality of equipment . . . but by what means? Here Heidegger (infamously) has recourse to ‘a pair of peasant shoes’, whose description he supplements by way of an invocation of ‘a well-known painting by Van Gogh’. Whatever the difficulties that commentators have discerned in Heidegger’s invocation, we shall emphasise only a few suggestive aspects of his mode of description. For what he attends to is not the making of the shoes, not their being used, nor even by looking at the shoes themselves. Rather, his use of Van Gogh’s ‘representation’ is tied to the shoes when they are precisely not even there at all. In the painting Heidegger invokes, the shoes are unused shoes – or, rather, represented-as-not-presently-in-use – and separated from their very context of use. And whatever sad nostalgic fantasies one might discern in Heidegger’s subsequent elucubrations regarding the toils and tribulations of the ‘peasant woman’ who nominally owns them, it is crucial that he add: ‘perhaps it is only in the picture that we notice all this about the shoes’.22 It is now not the breaking of equipment in itself that is crucial, or its use, but the breaking of its use and contexts of use in a work of art that enables equipmental reliability to be disclosed. For better or worse, our putative peasant woman will know nothing of this. On the contrary: ‘The artwork let us know what the shoes, in truth, are.’23 For while the shoes are used by their owner, they are literally the mediators between the earth and the peasant’s world. And they can only be so in their reliability, although this very reliability conceals their essence from their user (which remains continuous with the Being and Time demonstration that tool-use occludes both materiality and context of meaning). Yet when they are represented in their utmost particularity

22

Ibid., p. 14.

23

Ibid., p. 15.

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by an artwork, their severance from their context, their world, and their earth brings forward their essence qua reliability. Not the tool, but the tool as presented in art, neither working nor broken, but in its own unworking: the shoes are absent and empty at once. If we ourselves came across such shoes in, say, a museum or a private collection – city-dwellers, perhaps, personages very far from the earth on which such shoes were used, and with only the most attenuated understanding of the world for which they were things of use – we would poorly apprehend them only as meagre things, and the equipmentality of their character would be lost. For Heidegger, if equipment remains crucial to his analysis, and, moreover, equipment that is precisely held to mediate between earth and world, it is in such a way that this mediation is also shown not to be transmissible beyond that world itself. As if that were not enough, Heidegger very quickly adds that the work of art in which such equipment was able to be shown in its truth also thereby reveals that formed matter is not the essence of the thing as such, but rather only of equipment; thus the artwork also reveals that the positing of a thingly substructure to the work is not of the work of art as such. Our presumptions lie broken. So Heidegger begins again, under pressure of the emergence of yet another impasse. Part of the problem is that, as his analysis has already indicated, there is no restituting the loss of a world. The analysis even suggests that the same goes for art as it does for equipment: how can artworks function as truthful when the worlds in which they were made have gone? Yet, as we see consistently in Heidegger, one recurrent procedure of his thinking is to push his own analysis to the point where its own presuppositions break down, thereby forcing him to start the analysis again from a point that neighbours that impasse, in his quest for a paradoxical construction that can rearticulate the impasses in a new way and with new affordances. It is at this point in the essay that we find the great analysis of the Greek temple, a non-representational work of art. Unlike a mere piece of equipment, it is not simply a mediator for its users between earth and world, but (allegedly) is itself crucial in establishing a world at all, that is, a general context of practices; moreover, in doing so, it establishes such a world against an earth which it thereby also enables to appear as what withdraws from appearing. It is this difference, this strife, between earth and world that the artwork sets up that enables it to transmit truth, beyond the world and earth in which it was made, beyond whatever it might represent. The artwork stands in the rift between earth and world, showing in what it reveals

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also what must remain concealed. It is now not simply through the breaking of a thing that something of world is revealed but through an artwork’s very working of and in this rift of world and earth itself – a situation which furthermore enables the preserving of this working of the work of art beyond its ‘original’ earth and world. The work of art is what retains transmissibility beyond the earth of its setting and the world of its use, precisely because ‘by setting up a world and setting forth the earth, the work accomplishes this strife. The work-being of the work consists in fighting the fight between world and earth.’24 A complex play of concealing and clearing, obstruction and refusal, directs us towards the essence of truth as that ur-strife, Urstreit, in the midst of beings. A few further remarks. Although there is no question that Heidegger was concerned with the legacy of ancient Greek thought to the point of obsession, his incessant return to the great Greek thinkers and writers can only be misunderstood if it is held to be as a kind of glorification. Quite to the contrary, Heidegger is explicitly attempting to find a way out of the Greek destiny, not simply to reaffirm it. The movement of his thinking is often at once: to establish a crucial distinction; to investigate the historicity of that distinction; to locate the grounds on which such a distinction and decision were originally made; to set out what other possibilities were available that that making of the distinction occluded; and to construct the intimations of an as-yet unapprehended way that points beyond the impasses of that deadlock and its consequences. In quite a straightforward sense, one can see how these exigencies might be fulfilled by ‘great’ poetry, which (supposedly) deploys language in such a way as to suspend the usual processes of address, reference, sensemaking, rationalisation, history, and so on, but without ever simply negating the words that it deploys or the things of which it speaks; indeed, by adding something to what’s speakable or sayable in a language. This is where the turn to Hölderlin in particular proves so crucial. As Heidegger himself asserts: I did not choose Hölderlin because his work, as one among many, realizes the universal essence of poetry, but rather because Hölderlin’s poetry is sustained by his whole poetic mission: to make poems solely about the essence of poetry. Hölderlin is for us in a preeminent sense the poet’s poet. And for that reason he forces a decision upon us.25 24 25

Ibid., p. 27. Martin Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, trans. K. Hoeller (New York: Humanity Press, 2000), p. 52.

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As I have been suggesting, not only is it poetry that brings all Heidegger’s philosophical desiderata together – the simultaneous world-breaking, world-revealing, and world-making qualities of historically significant poetry – but Hölderlin in particular enables, as Beistegui among others strenuously underlines, the maintenance of a certain nationalistic particularity in the strongest possible way. After all: Hölderlin is not only the poet of the poets and of poetry for Heidegger. He is also the one destinally decisive voice in the history of the West after Sophocles. A German voice! Not that we would know what ‘German’ means before or outside of Hölderlin’s poetry: it is precisely in this poetry that the German being comes to be constituted as such.26

For a poem by Hölderlin cannot pose the question of its essence philosophically, for instance, that is, propositionally or hypothetically. Such a poem has to resolve the question it poses as itself – actually. This must mean that the discourse of poetry – or the poem – on its own being, on being, cannot be separated from its own existence. Moreover, since Hölderlin is entirely consumed with the question of the German people and their destiny, their history, and territory, this means that land, language, and people are indissociably entwined in his poems. Such poetry’s ‘ontic’ and ‘ontological’ status is not only utterly indiscriminable, but, as a primordial form of techné that survives into the epoch of modern technology precisely because it is the disavowed root of such technology itself, it retains, if in a seriously attenuated form, a resistance to the present, a power of truth that, in its anachronistic otherness to the present, perhaps might aid in a questioning that leads beyond our current enclosure. What is at stake in poetry is precisely a use of language that, made from language itself, breaks with the very language from which it is made in order to remake that language otherwise. As such, a poem is not just a product but an ‘event’, in which the distinctions between ‘empirical’ and ‘transcendental’, ‘ontic’, and ‘ontological,’ etc., are no longer operative or viable. Yet, since it is only through language that there is any opening of being in the first place, it is only in poetry, in its constant reopenings of language, that the thinking of being can survive in our time of cybernetic command and control. It is this latter consideration that becomes more and more apparent in Heidegger’s later work; it also, whatever its other impressive benefits for thinking, remains strenuously nationalist and particularist, the German revelation in verse. The enemy is, still and above all, 26

Beistigui, p. 94.

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deracinated earth-destroying technology and culture; poetry resists by being bound to a people and a place. This is why I have attempted to show that what first emerges in the analysis of the broken tool in Being and Time – the possibility of anybody coming to a thinking of the question of beings by means of a minor event of disruption within the ordinary everydayness of modern activity – comes to be repurposed by 1935 by Heidegger as a crucial power of the poem itself. If the poem comes to be reassigned this key power, it does so in order to suture the segments that Being and Time could not quite articulate: after all, great poems in Heidegger’s later work necessarily implicate the question of being with the question of technology with the question of language with the question of affect with the question of metaphysics, inseparably and all at once. In doing so, the poem and modern technology are furthermore shown to share the same root, to be fundamentally implicated – but now antithetically disposed. But it is precisely because of this co-implication that I wish to repose the question with which I began: what if the disaster, the destitution, of the present age did not simply signal the near-obliteration of poetry in our time, but was in fact the outcome of the dominance of poetry as such in the epoch of the cybernetic fold? What if the essence of technology was poetry ‘itself’? What if, to save poetry, we would have to find a non-poetic language for being today? These questions perhaps suggest the need for an exit from some of Heidegger’s most fundamental convictions.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. The Use of Bodies. Translated by Adam Kotsko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016). Alfano, Mark. ‘Digital Humanities for History of Philosophy: A Case Study on Nietzsche.’ In L. Levenberg et al. (eds.), Research Methods for the Digital Humanities (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Allen, William. Ellipsis: Of Poetry and the Experience of Language after Heidegger, Hölderlin and Blanchot (Buffalo: SUNY, 2007). Badiou, A. The Age of the Poets. Translated by B. Bosteels, introduction by E. Apter and B. Bosteels (London: Verso, 2014). Beistegui, Miguel de. Heidegger & the Political (London: Routledge, 1998). Crompton, C. et al. (eds.). Doing More Digital Humanities: Open Approaches to Creation, Growth, and Development (London: Routledge, 2019). Elden, Stuart. Speaking against Number: Heidegger, Language and the Politics of Calculation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006).

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Gold, M. K. and L. F. Klein (eds.). Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019 (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2019). Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macqaurrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008). Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry. Translated by K. Hoeller (New York: Humanity Press, 2000). Off the Beaten Track. Edited and translated by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Ponderings II–VI: Black Notebooks 1931–1938. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political. Translated by C. Turner (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990). Lagerkvist, A. (ed.). Digital Existence: Ontology, Ethics and Transcendence in Digital Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2019). Millar Usiskuin, Jana, Christine Walde, and Caroline Winter. ‘Ontologies for Digital Humanists.’ In Crompton et al., Doing More Digital Humanities, p. 186. Sinclair, Mark. Heidegger, Aristotle and the Work of Art: Poiesis in Being (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Tucker, Aaron. ‘Beyond “Whiz-Bang”: 3D Printing and Critical Making in the Humanities.’ In Crompton et al., Doing More Digital Humanities, pp. 119–20.

5

Heidegger’s Use of Poetry Christopher Fynsk

The title of this chapter may evoke for some readers a familiar path of enquiry. For several decades, a significant amount of academic research devoted to the topic of Heidegger and literature has been devoted to a form of rescue. Critics have felt compelled to release the poetic text (Hölderlin’s, first of all) from the hold of what is perceived as a philosophical or ideological program of a profoundly conservative form. The topic somehow calls for a special form of critical display, and the field of deconstruction has provided some impressive examples, ranging from the pained to the triumphal.1 There are certainly grounds for complaint or reservation with respect to Heidegger’s use of Hölderlin (which will be my primary focus). While Heidegger would appear to have served the reception of Hölderlin’s writings in vital ways over several decades in the twentieth century, his

1

In referring to the “pained,” I think, first, of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, whose important struggle with Heidegger on the topic of poetry became increasingly pronounced in his last years of active thinking and writing. I have taken up this topic in Christopher Fynsk, “The Exigency of the Figure,” MLN 132, no. 5 (2017): 1236–53. As for the triumphal, one example, which merits the epithet “impressive,” is provided by the posthumous publication of Werner Hamacher, Two Studies of Friedrich Hölderlin, ed. P. D. Fenves and J. Ng (Stanford University Press, 2020). Hamacher conforms to a tendency in North American deconstruction to seek to push Heidegger back into the metaphysics he diagnosed, committing a significant error when he claims that there is no allowance for Verstellung in Heidegger’s notion of Lichtung (p. 40). He offers, however, a superb reading of Hölderlin that would be interesting to take up with reference to a more searching reading of Heidegger. I touch here on a corner of a literature devoted to our topic to which some of my own past work belongs. The broader field of secondary literature is vast, however, and I cannot be certain that my own approach on this occasion will not have been anticipated by other readers. My hope is that I am offering something of a new perspective on what Heidegger was undertaking in his approach to poetry.

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interpretative gestures have been found wanting from the perspectives of literary and critical theory. His own apparent disdain for those perspectives has not helped.2 The fact that Heidegger’s turn to Hölderlin in 1934 served a critique of the nihilistic and technicist elements of the Nazi movement has never sufficed to alleviate the concern about his testimony to “the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism.”3 What could readers make of Heidegger’s effort to appropriate Hölderlin’s poetic ambitions for a new articulation of German destiny in the light of that statement? In the context of the continuing revelations regarding some of the attitudes informing Heidegger’s commitments in the period before and during the war, the story of Celan’s disappointment in his appeal to Heidegger has been almost enough to close the chapter on Heidegger studies devoted to the topic of philosophy and literature. Of course, to endorse this closure, one must turn aside from the question of why Celan turned to Heidegger in that late appeal. One must neglect what Heidegger had meant for his poetic project and for a broad range of writers and thinkers from the post-war period concerned with the question of literature, many of whom with inclinations that could hardly be described as conservative (in any sense). One must consider the questions that informed his turn to poetry largely settled or unworthy of further attention, and one must abandon the legacy of those questions. From the context of a history of thought, such decisions are not easily justified, even if they are widely accepted in the field of critical theory, where a decline in the ability even to assess such decisions is now sadly evident. It is hard to be confident of significant renewal of the path of questioning relating to this legacy in any near time, at least as regards Heidegger’s name. The reservations that gripped Heidegger studies at the end of the last century following the publication of his Notebooks have substantial grounds. But we do have good reason to be troubled about a lapse in awareness of the questions that he helped open for modern thought, among them, the question of language, the question of the human, and the question of the meaning of a human “dwelling” on the earth – all 2

3

David Nowell-Smith has been particularly alert to this question and has provided a rich and productive response to Heidegger’s readings of poetry in critical writings that include David Nowell-Smith, Sounding/Silence: Martin Heidegger at the Limits of Poetics (Fordham University Press, 2013). The statement was initially published in An Introduction to Metaphysics in 1935 and allowed to stand in the reprinting of this text in 1952.

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three of which oriented Heidegger’s turn to art and poetry. In the face of the ecological crises we face today, a casual dismissal of the thought of finitude he pursued can only be read as a troubling form of denial. We should not be surprised when we hear from critical voices inspired by various materialisms or computational promise that too much weight has been given to the topic of language. But the remarkable way in which contemporary thought has veered from this topic and what it offered to thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan should provoke some critical concern. There are broad socio-political and institutional factors to be addressed here, to be sure. And every time has its manner of defining and addressing its fundamental needs, or avoiding them. What is troubling is that the needs of our time are not unrelated to the ones Heidegger addressed as he undertook his diagnosis of the final unfolding of Western metaphysics, which has proven quite prescient. It may appear that I have wandered quite far from the matter of this chapter’s title, but the motif of “need” actually draws me back to it, inasmuch as the societal and ecological exigencies (the “Not”) Heidegger sought to confront in the mid 1930s would point him toward the need for poetry for which he argued in this moment. It is this context, and through his critical engagement with Hölderlin, that Heidegger would begin to make the motif of usage central to his thought of the relation between being and human being. The argument I summarize here (linking need at societal and ontological levels) is made explicitly in An Introduction to Metaphysics and is present in the lecture series on Hölderlin of 1934–5, in which Heidegger envisions a turn to poetry as vital for a new beginning for the West in a time of devastation. The notion of usage, nominalized as “der Brauch” (the infinitive, brauchen, means both “to need” or “to use”), would become a guiding term in Heidegger’s own attempted turn in this moment (in and through the thought of Ereignis) from a still latent hold of a metaphysics of subjectivity and production. Heidegger’s use of Hölderlin would certainly not be without misuse; some of its purposes and some of the investments involved were certainly interested (politically and personally). In this respect, many of the efforts at “rescue” have not been without virtue. But the fundamental design at work in this turn to poetry quite exceeds any appropriation of Hölderlin or other poets for the purposes of some “national aestheticism,” to the extent that the phrase is understood in traditional terms. His thought of the poietic essence of artistic practice deconstructs the founding categories of the aesthetic, and the thought of dwelling he takes from Hölderlin

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obliges a profound rethinking of the site of human being. When Heidegger evokes the “beautiful” with reference to the endeavours of the fine arts in the concluding paragraphs of “The Question concerning Technology,” he has not retreated to the realm of aesthetics, or some mystified version of it, either for latent political purposes or in some form of flight from the political (not to speak of the philosophical). His rapid words here are returning to the question of the relation between being and human being as it is engaged by art in its specific mode of aletheic disclosure. He is seeking, ultimately, the conditions of what Hölderlin named a “free use of the proper” in all realms of human practice. In this brief chapter, my aim will be restricted to following aspects of the motif of usage in order to return, by this means, to some of the basic lineaments of Heidegger’s turn to poetry.4 Only from an appreciation of the fundamental questions at work in Heidegger’s engagement with a poet like Hölderlin can we come to assess issues of “misuse” in a fully consequent way, or consider, with reference to Heidegger’s interpretative efforts, what a poet like Hölderlin might offer to a new project of thought (or even a new approach to Heidegger) in our own “dürftiger Zeit.” I propose to take my point of departure from those pages of “The Question concerning Technology” to which I have referred above, and will then attempt to follow, in the essays on language, an important instance of Heidegger’s use of poetry for his path of thinking.

Poetry’s More Primal Disclosure It is understandable that the turn to art in the concluding pages of “The Question concerning Technology” should only reinforce a general misapprehension or suspicion regarding Heidegger’s repudiated reactionary stance with regard to technology. They are obscure in their brevity, and they follow extremely difficult pages in which Heidegger entertains the notion that a thinking experience with the essence of technology might draw forth what Hölderlin named in “Patmos” a “saving power.”5 No less 4

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I will not try to cover the entirety of Heidegger’s thought of usage in this context. The term pertains to every dimension of the relation between being and human being, as Heidegger attempts to think it. With “usage,” we are touching upon the grounds of human dwelling and moeurs, the ethical relation, and the “proper” human relation to a thing in its essence. Of course we are also touching upon the use of language. I take up the range of these “applications” of the term in Christopher Fynsk, Language and Relation: . . .That There Is language (Stanford University Press, 1996). GA7: 35/QT: 340.

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challenging is the suggestion that art and technology have the same provenance, and that art, thought in its essence as poiesis, might afford a more original relation to the power that lies in all destinal granting, possibly aiding us thereby in finding a new relation to technology. The possibility of a passage through Technik afforded by a thought of its essence lies in what Heidegger terms its ambiguity. The order of Technik obscures its own character as a form of truth (giving what is as something that can be commandeered as a standing reserve), and drives humanity thereby to a form of oblivion, even as it preserves the essence of human being by the manner in which this essence is used (in Ereignis) for the accomplishment of this perilous mode of revealing. In discovering and becoming more experienced in the usage which defines the human “share” in the destining of truth, humankind, Heidegger suggests, could conceivably find a freer relation to technology. Is art essential to that discovery? Heidegger suggests as much when he tells us that a recovery of the Greek understanding of technē, which embraced both art and technology, could lead us to glimpse “a more primally granted revealing that could bring the saving power into its first shining forth in the midst of the danger that in the technological age rather conceals than shows itself” (GA7: 35/QT: 339). But he also suggests that art, and the form of thoughtful reflection that it both embodies and lends itself to, are essential to a “decisive confrontation” (“entscheidende Auseinandersetzung”) with technology (GA7: 36/340). A “free” relation to technology would presumably imply a fundamental transformation in our relation to it that requires the work of art. The counterplay to which Heidegger points here in juxtaposing poiesis and Technik is quite characteristic of the writing of this period. As Heidegger proceeds in the turn to which I referred above (“die Kehre,” which involved attempting to think from the event of appropriation, Ereignis), the appeal to poiesis belongs increasingly to the way of thinking Heidegger undertakes in his later work. Poetry (and with it art in general) does not constitute a regional field of enquiry among others for onticoontological research, even in its quite privileged status as a distinctive site for the advent of truth. And it serves far more than an illustrative function for his thinking. In some of his most important later essays, Heidegger actually undertakes to think by way of poetry. This path becomes particularly important for Heidegger as he seeks what he names “an experience with language,” and a relation to thought itself as a use of language. Before hastening to the texts where this way of thought is explicitly developed, we should stay a bit longer with Heidegger’s claim, in “The

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Question concerning Technology,” that art “could bring the saving power into its first shining-forth in the midst of the danger” (GA7: 35/339). It is notable that Heidegger does not suggest how art might reveal that granting in which humankind is used for the advent of truth, be this in the challenging forth of Technik, or the distinctive showing that occurs in art. Of course, the appeal to art is brief, and the claim seems entirely consonant with the extensive enquiry into art undertaken from the time of Heidegger’s lectures on Hölderlin from 1934 to 1935. We will find in the Addendum to “The Origin of the Work of Art” a clear link between “The Question concerning Technology” and this earlier essay (from 1935–6) devoted to the aletheic character of art (GA5: 72/OWA: 209). But even though the motif of the use of the human for the advent of truth may be traced back to those Hölderlin lectures (almost all of the terms used to think the apportioning of the human share in the destining of truth appear there), Heidegger is not quite able to carry his reflection on the use of the poet from those lectures into a satisfying account of the role of the creator in “The Origin of the Work of Art.” The problem of the relation between being and human being remains, in Heidegger’s words “unsuitably conceived” there: “a distressing difficulty, which has been clear to me since Being and Time” (GA5: 74/OWA: 211). It is an astonishing admission that shows just how tenuous Heidegger’s thinking was in respect to the question of the human in this moment of his “turn” (“die Kehre”). There is no sure “program” in place as Heidegger turns to Hölderlin in this early moment of his turn to poetry; he is searching, however magisterial or arrogant he may appear in these heady years of the mid 1930s. In the Addendum from which I have cited, Heidegger will go on to say that the proper context for the wanting treatment of the question concerning being and human being is indicated in his artwork essay when he takes up the essence of language and poetry. He is pointing thereby to work to be presented later in the same year (“The Essence of Language,” which dates from 1957). But before approaching this material, we do well to consider Heidegger’s initial treatment of the problematic of usage in the first essays on art. As so often in Heidegger, the first ground-breaking steps – the first cutting of furrows, as he might put it – remain essential. The lectures of 1934–5 – Hölderlin’s Hymns “Germania” and “The Rhein” (GA39) – turn quite insistently to the role of the poet, in large part by reason of Heidegger’s attention to the way Hölderlin thinks and poetizes the essence of poetry itself from the ground of his experience as one called to a singular use of language. The readings of the river hymns thus

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take their orientation from the motif of the poet’s Stimmung, a motif that will not surprise the reader familiar with Being and Time (GA2: 179/173). Here, the defining Stimmung is “holy mourning,” that attunement of which Hölderlin speaks in his diptych, “Sophokles” (cited at GA39: 130/ 149): “Many tried in vain to joyfully say the most joyful, | Here finally it speaks to me, here within mourning.” It is in fact from this context of Hölderlin’s tragic thought that Heidegger draws the most dramatic appeal to the notion of the “use” of the human. In the eighth strophe of “The Rhein” we read what Heidegger identifies as Hölderlin’s “ascent to one of the most towering and solitary peaks of Western thinking, and at the same time of beyng” (GA39: 269/244): Yet of their own Immortality the gods have enough, and if one thing The Heavenly require, Then heroes and humans it is And otherwise mortals. For since The most blessed feel nothing of themselves, There must presumably, if to say such a thing Is allowed, in the name of the gods Another participate in feeling. Him they need (GA39: 268/243)

I cite a good part of this remarkable strophe in order to give a context for Hölderlin’s reference to “feeling,” which is undefined here, but would have its ground in Stimmung, from a Heideggerian perspective. By an earthly Stimmung made possible by their relation to death, mortals afford the gods a knowledge of beings (and themselves) they could not otherwise have in their surfeit of immortality (which is apparently not a feeling!). They provide for the gods what will become in the poem a figure of beyng (as Heidegger writes the term at this moment) as they reach into the abyss borne by the earth and bring about a new destinal configuration. Heidegger cites in this context lines from Hölderlin’s “Mnemosyne”: . . . the heavenly Are not capable of all. Mortals rather Reach into the abyss. Thus things turn With them. (GA39: 106/96)

One might have expected Heidegger to focus on the potentially revolutionary character of this turn (given the moment and his own ambitions),

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or how it links with Hölderlin’s reflections on historical decline and renewal. He evokes only the “great pivotal times of the peoples” that draw their impetus and in some measure their shape from the relation to the earthly abyss that opens to humans in their mortal being. Quite a bit is unsaid or undeveloped here, and Heidegger’s attention will move essentially to the poetic act of bringing this turn to language through an engagement with the earth’s own need for the poet, given to the poet most immediately in the movement of the rivers. . . . Not in vain do Rivers run in the dry. Yet how? Namely, they are To be to language. A sign is needed. (GA39: 149/131)

In the extraordinary enigma presented by these lines from “The Ister,” we hear faintly of a need (and use) that is no less human than earthly, or of the origin. It appears again in lines from the same poem to which Heidegger will return in his 1942 lecture course on Hölderlin’s “The Ister,” and then in What Is Called Thinking? when he seeks to convey the meaning of “Es brauchet” as he reads it in Parmenides. It is useful . . . for the rock to have shafts And for the earth furrows It would be without welcome, without stay (GA8: 193/190)

In What Is Called Thinking?, Heidegger will draw out in commentary what remains still somewhat latent in the presentation of 1934–5 (though fully available). Thus he writes: ‘It is useful’ says here: there is an essential community between rock and shaft, between furrow and earth, within that realm of being which opens up when the earth becomes a habitation. The home and dwelling of mortals has its own natural site. But its situation is not determined first by the pathless places on earth. It is marked out and opened by something of another order. From there, the dwelling of mortals receives its measure. (GA8: 194/191)

But in the lectures of 1934–5, Heidegger nonetheless pushes quite far in exploring the poetic enigma involved in the relation between earth and mortals (where human dwelling is at stake) when he demands of his auditors that they entertain the manner in which poets and rivers must be thought as the same in their poietic essence (the demand will be sharpened in the lectures on the “The Ister” of 1942). Usage – which always involves difference – would name the same in that set of relations

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by which something like a dwelling on earth (and within what Heidegger will call the fourfold) is possible. I move extremely rapidly here, giving only a hint of the topology envisioned by Heidegger in his manner of reading the divine use of the human (for “feeling”) and the earthly need of the “sign” from the context evoked in Hölderlin’s celebration of the rivers. But perhaps these few words will suffice to shed light on fascinating developments in Heidegger’s thinking on art and poeisis that appear in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” shortly after the lectures on Hölderlin. “The Origin of the Work of Art” addresses the artwork as one of the five essential sites for the occurrence of truth, carrying forward an imperative for thought named in the lectures of 1934–5 when Heidegger names the conditions for a “new, fundamental experience of beyng.” “Such an experience,” he says, “entails, first, a transformation in the essence of truth; and second, a transformation in the essence of labor” (GA39: 196/ 179). These words underscore the fundamental importance of the problematic of work in the artwork essay (where art is described as “the setting into work of truth”) and give us a frame for glimpsing how the motif of usage is serving to displace the notion of production (and more broadly the notion of human “activity”) as it is defined within the metaphysics of subjectivity. The essay, it should be underscored, is resolutely an exercise of thought, as the epilogue addressed to the challenge from Hegel, and opening remarks on the “craft” of thought, make clear (GA5: 3/OWA: 144). The reader is quite easily side-tracked if they respond to it as an instance of art theory or history of art, something that leads inevitably to a preoccupation with the quality of the art criticism displayed in the treatment of its various examples. The use of art has to be assessed with respect to what Heidegger is trying to convey about the way art is used and needed for an event of truth wherein the very fact of this event is brought forward. Truth needs art and is drawn to art (more precisely, the work of art), in order to disclose itself as truth – even at the risk of an essential dissemblance (Verstellung) and “untruth.” Humankind is no less in need of this drawing event of manifestation if it is to recover the possibility of a founded, earthly dwelling. But what is the human share in the becoming of art? Heidegger will be expansive on the meaning of poietic founding for those to whom the work is addressed (GA5: 63–5/OWA: 199–202), and he will not hesitate to recall core themes of the existential analytic in sketching the nature of the act of preservation to which those who receive this address are called.

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Something similar, though less developed, occurs in the description of the creative act (which is clearly an instance of “thrown projection”). But his words on this act of creation are actually quite spare. Only one, very indirect reference to the topic of Stimmung (GA5: 9/OWA: 151) appears in the essay (which is quite remarkable after the place accorded to this topic in the lectures of 1934–5). The creator’s role is addressed significantly only with respect to their response to the event that unfolds in the setting forth of the work. The accomplished work that awaits the act of preservation will not be distinguished by the creator’s signature (GA5: 52–3/ OWA: 190). In short, the artist’s role is reduced to answering the event that is occurring in the work: drawing forth and drawing out what is required by truth in its “Zug zum Werk” – its impetus toward the work. They set up world, just as they set forth earth, because the work requires it (GA5: 31/ OWA: 171). As soon as a visual or acoustic field starts to emerge in its design and its boundary, or language, by some draw or interruption turns (every writer knows this moment), as soon as a rhythm takes (in whatever medium), the artist will know, obscurely, that they have begun to answer to what is demanded of them by the event occurring in the work. The artist’s role is not a negligible one, of course – the act is in no way a mere following. With reference to what is entailed in the setting up of world, Heidegger is calling upon everything proposed in the existential analytic of the 1920s with respect to the “worldhood” of the world; there is a casting of an order of meaning and a spatio-temporal measure, just as in the earlier accounts. But this project is now defined more clearly by commitments of an ethico-political order (I refer here to the Heraclitean and Nietzschean motifs) and an acute grasp of human finitude informed by a knowledge of mortal belonging to the earth. The meditation on earth itself marks a fundamental advance in Heidegger’s thinking. Heidegger will emphasize insistently this dimension of creative act, offering the use of the earth as one of the key points of the text.6 Artistic creation emerges thereby as an extraordinary assumption of the enigma of being wherein every line drawn, every limit, both defines an opening and marks a resistance brought by an earthly withdrawal. Scientific analysis cannot capture what is revealed in this disclosure of the conditions of a human dwelling (a human ethos), and the accomplished work itself will not fully

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Christopher Fynsk, “El uso de la tierra,” in Heidegger y el arte de verdad, ed. Félix Duque and Cathedra Jorge Oteiza (Cátedra Jorge Oteiza, 2005).

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yield to any critical or scientific (be this social) account. To the extent that this is art, a dimension of enigma endures. So again, from the basis of this account, we will be prepared to entertain the assertions of “The Question concerning Technology” concerning art’s more primal disclosure of truth and human finitude. But there is in fact no clear basis for the suggestion that art would provide fuller access to the use of the human for the event of “revealing,” as he describes it in that later essay. That usage, as Heidegger himself recognized in his “Addendum,” is still not adequately thought (or brought forward) as such in the writings of the 1930s on art. Heidegger would have to take another step in thinking and engaging the use of poetry to justify the claim made in the technology essay.

Toward an Experience of Usage The step will be made when Heidegger begins to approach the question of the human relation to language through a meditation on the possibility of an “experience” with language in his essay “The Essence of Language.” The way into such an experience, offered by language itself, Heidegger tells us, would indicate how it is that humankind finds “the proper abode of its existence in language,” and would touch upon the inner constitution of that existence (GA12: 149/57). The path undertaken would challenge fundamentally our understanding of the subject of representation and representation itself, be this in its everyday, scientific, or philosophical construction. Of course, such challenges are announced routinely in the academic world, and very little changes. But what Heidegger is in fact seeking is a transformation in our very relation to language and our language usage. As Heidegger will put it openly at the start of his subsequent essay from On the Way to Language, “The Way to Language”: “Should we, however, experience the way to language in the light of what happens with the way itself as we go on, then a supposition could awaken by which language henceforth strikes us as strange and our relation to it indicates itself as the relation” (GA12: 229/111). Only here, as we will see, does the human share emerge distinctly in what Heidegger termed “the destiny of revealing.”7 Let us begin by attending to the first 7

The last clause in this sentence is omitted in the English translation offered by Peter Hertz. Unfortunately, this is not the only important omission in the translation of the essay, whose title in German is Das Wesen der Sprache. (“Essence” is not ideal, I believe, but it is preferable to “Nature.”) I have discussed what is at stake in this problem of translation in

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emergence of that “supposition” through Heidegger’s use of poetry in the course of “The Essence of Language.” The essay deploys and interweaves three paths of reflection. One of these, offered to us in Stefan George’s poem “Das Wort,” is properly poetic, and will end, for the thinker, in obscurity, even though its path constitutes in itself a form of thinking. But it affords Heidegger a kind of setting for a quite far-reaching meditation on the nature of the relation between word and thing.8 This second path of reflection with and by way of the recounted poetic experience does not, however, constitute an experience with language – or cannot yet be such an experience in its first steps, inasmuch as such commentary produces statements about language that do not assume their own relation to language. Thus, when Heidegger comes to define the “word” of which the poet speaks with respect to that call (Geheiss) by which humankind is summoned to the commandeerings of Technik, producing the marvellous example of the way a term like “Sputnik” can name a thing in our time, he will immediately draw us up with the sardonic suggestion that the poem has offered an excellent confirmation of his dictum from the “Letter on Humanism,” namely that language may be thought as “the house of being.” We have here a nice example of Heidegger’s manner of staging an argumentation, and a sharp illustration of the limits of philosophical reflection with respect to the problem of language and any interpretative act such philosophy (or any “theory”) might inform. Philosophical reflection on language that does not come to terms with its own use of language is already necessarily abstract; when such reflection turns to poetry without reflecting on its relation to the language of that poetry, it cannot avoid reducing the poetic text to a form of documentation or illustration, what

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Fynsk, Language and Relation, 68. Hertz’s omissions indicate a profound misunderstanding of Heidegger’s thinking about language and are quite indicative of the overall quality of the translation. I use this word, “setting,” in a provisional way that calls for some explanation. I am thinking, first, of what Heidegger develops in his various meditations on the Greek legein in his attention to the word logos. Heidegger defines legein in terms of a laying out or laying forth from which we can begin to grasp the presence given in the phrase “there is” (“Es gibt”). From here, we may perhaps begin to rethink the German Darstellung (a term normally used to distinguish literary or artistic representation from that of understanding, Vorstellung). I believe that more work is called for by Heidegger’s intriguing way of turning to poetry to evoke what is conveyed in “Es gibt.” Of course, a kind of landscape is evoked in George’s poem, and an action, to which Heidegger is always attentive in his readings of poetry, so there is a setting in a more traditional sense. But even here, what must be thought in the setting is what it gives of a “countering” backdrop, or region (Gegend), as we will see going forward.

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Heidegger describes as the role of a servant. It is quite possible that Heidegger’s manner of citing his dictum from the “Letter” at this point marks some allowance that such a “fault” is actually unavoidable by virtue of established usage in the field of philosophy and even an inherent quality of language itself.9 The point cannot be forgotten and must be given its full weight in what unfolds, inasmuch as we will be asked to entertain Heidegger’s claim that he actually begins to leave a standard mode of philosophical argument and representation (and, for that matter, literary interpretation) as he advances along a way given by language itself. So, how is thought to engage the poetic experience with language if the latter is to be taken as something other than a resource for philosophical knowledge? Heidegger’s answer is abrupt. He reaffirms the propriety of seeking such an experience by underscoring that no reserve of thought is called for in thought’s approach to poetry, inasmuch as poetry, in itself, resonates in thought, and any experience with language is a thinking experience (for poetry, no less than for thought). Moreover, poetry and thought actually need each other when it is a matter of limits (in the extreme: “das Äusserste” [GA12: 163/70]). When they turn back to think their proper relation to the essence of language (their source in language), they will always encounter their neighbor, and they require the “countering” of this other to achieve their turn. Thought should therefore push the “sounding” of the poem as far as possible, entering its field of resonance and movement, and apprehending, in this very movement, the distinctive character of what thought, of itself (but by way of the other), can properly hear and engage of the speaking of language. For this latter form of self-reflection, however, the second path will have to be supplemented by a third, which Heidegger now abruptly sketches by recalling a hermeneutic exigency that takes a quite distinctive form in the case of a thought of language. Any questioning after essence, he tells us, presupposes the prior grant of that essence. Accordingly, “for any question we ask of language regarding its essence, it is needful first of all that language vouchsafe itself to us. If it does, the essence of language becomes the grant [Zusage – a promise or ‘committing

9

This is a topic to which Heidegger gives considerable attention in the lectures of 1934–5 on Hölderlin. The fact that language lends itself to an average understanding of its “signified” constitutes an essential danger to which Hölderlin was acutely attentive. Of course, this means that Heidegger’s own effort to transform a thinking use of language (as we will see in his meditation on his essay’s title) is similarly endangered.

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to’] of its essence, that is, the essence language becomes the language of essence” (GA12: 166/72). Heidegger thus proposes a transcription of his title that says what is for thought a primal granting, a “primal writ,” that will lead thought, by echo he tells us, back toward an experience with language that has already begun to occur in the neighbourhood of poetry. The weave now undertaken by Heidegger as he returns to George’s poem after his first development of the guideword defies summary and grows increasingly dense as Heidegger proceeds with a meditation guided by a challenge or exacting demand (Zumutung) made upon thought by what has occurred in the transformation of the title, and the supposition (Vermutung) made by him regarding the neighbouring relation between poetry and thought. Heidegger’s daring, his presumption, will become increasingly marked (“We must push our supposition further” [GA12: 175/81]) and then reaches its most extreme point when he advances the supposition that philosophy has actually been unable to think what speaks (and withholds itself ) in the term “logos” because it has failed to think the relation between poetry and thought, a nearness that has its source in saying. Failing (from at least the time of Plato) to think saying in this manner, it has failed to think relation itself (GA12: 177/83), which Heidegger will do in the closing part of his second section with a reflection on what he terms a “word of thought” (a properly thinking locution): “Es, das Wort, gibt.” Then, remarking upon a now apprehensible difference between poetic song and what thought produces for itself in poetry’s proximity (which certainly isn’t a singing, he suggests), he will make the additional step – another quite demonstrative performance – of naming what sounds (silently) in the difference that draws and is drawn out in the relation between these two modes of saying: Aufriss (a founding design). The gesture is worth some meditation in itself. Can one, in the name of language, speak for the silent saying from which the name comes to speak? Heidegger is cognizant of the problem and is clearly inviting us to confront this difficulty and become aware of the kind of writing (and performance) required for such a course of reflection. It is clear that one must get beyond any notion of “jargon” for understanding what he is doing here. But, for our purposes, what should be underscored is Heidegger’s discreet signal that a way has now opened from this account of an originary tracing of the relation between the two most distinct (ausgezeichnete) modes of saying that allows for the thinking step back into the proper place of human being in its relation to saying (GA12: 179/85).

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The second section of Heidegger’s essay thus concludes with a paragraph that names the use of humankind by and for language: But if the nearness of poetry and thinking is one of Saying, then our thinking arrives at the supposition that Ereignis governs as that Saying in which language avows its essence to us [zusagt]. Its promise is not empty. It has already struck – and whom else but man? For man is man only insofar as he is given over to the address of language, because he is needful to language [gebraucht ist], that he may speak it. (GA12: 185/90)

The third section of Heidegger’s essay will then begin to approach the meaning of this assertion that Ereignis holds sway in that Saying (Sage) in which language speaks in its essencing. Saying itself will be grasped as defining the region (Gegend) of the fourfold, whose “design” has been indicated by the counterplay of poetry and thought just staged and named. Saying will thus come to be described, as Heidegger approaches his conclusion, as the “relation of relations” (GA12: 203/107): the unifying, freeing clearing in which earth, sky, mortals, and gods find their gathered articulation. Once more, Heidegger will draw from poetry, indicating Hölderlin’s own thought of this fourfold play, and effectively repeating an important part of the demonstration from “The Origin of the Work of Art” regarding the use of the earth. Again, Heidegger is not illustrating his thought with Hölderlin; the rapid sequence of citations (only briefly commented upon here) points to an ongoing accompaniment. Read carefully, we can see that the lines cited are actually in advance of Heidegger’s own progress at this point. Heidegger will also return again to the guideword for thought, according it now a key role in directing us toward the way to be undertaken with respect to what the neighborhood of poetry and thought has revealed of Saying. In the “nearness” of the neighbourhood toward which the guideword hints, we will find access, he suggests, to what enables thought in an experience with language. The way of this meditation, as afforded by the relation between poetry and thought, thus remains in play as Heidegger begins to engage what draws into relation at that limit that is marked with the silent sounding of the difference between these two modes of Saying, which is nothing other than Saying itself. Of the sway of Ereignis, implicitly indicated as what “moves” in the regioning of Saying, we actually hear little; Heidegger’s words are quite allusive. But two anticipatory steps are made that bear on the relation of language and human being, named in the citation that concluded the second section (cited above). First, in linking the way of his meditation to

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the way-making proper to Saying in the freeing and clearing movement of regioning, Heidegger is able to suggest how the human engagement with the essence of language becomes the proper matter of thought’s concern. From this claim upon thought, we can begin to understand how the way afforded to and in language empowers, and we can begin to glimpse how the engagement with language Heidegger is now describing could be conceived as transformative. An indication about this empowering comes with a startling reference to Laotse’s use of the “Ur-wort,” Tao. Tao, Heidegger writes, “could be the way that sets underway all ways, that from which we are first enabled to think what reason, mind, meaning, and logos properly, which is to say from their proper essence, seek to say.” He will continue by surmising that “the enigmatic power” of method as deployed in contemporary science in the era of the sway of Technik is in fact derivative: a “mere runoff” of the streaming that moves all things (GA12: 187/92). Clearly, we are touching upon that power to which Heidegger referred in “The Question concerning Technology.” With this advance into the topic of what draws and moves in the essence of Saying, and the turn to the question of the human, Heidegger must also step back to address more precisely how the “propriation” of language in Ereignis concerns human being. It is not enough to underscore the displacement for thought implied in thinking Saying as “the relation of relations” and thereby the necessity of situating our own being within the fourfold configuration brought into being by Saying. To think the use of the human, Heidegger must ask in what manner Saying requires us (for its articulation in speech), and he must address the additional question of how humankind can be given to such usage. How is humankind distinguished in the play of the fourfold for the saying of that play? Again, the step is anticipatory, but passing now from a reference to humans as “die Menschen” to “die Sterblichen” as he approaches the concluding words of his essay, Heidegger observes that only mortals speak and suggests that this is the proper place to address the question of death: “The essential relation between death and language flashes up before us, but remains still unthought. It can, however, hint toward the way in which the essence of language draws us into its concern and thereby holds to itself, in the case that death belongs together with what reaches out for us, summons” (GA12: 203/107–8). The relation evoked here is indeed unthought as yet, and would require at least a separate essay. But for our purposes, it may suffice to note how Heidegger deals with the import of this statement in “The Way to Language,” where he attempts to think the manner in which Ereignis uses

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humankind for the advent of language. In this event, wherein Ereignis finds its own “proper mode,” there is something like a movement of coappropriation: humankind is appropriated to language (used in and by Ereignis) for the speaking of language (where it is used by language itself ). Usage, in other words, occurs by way of a kind of “double articulation,” and the joint of this articulation is “death.”10 It is essentially with the acknowledgement of this dimension of the facticity of the human that Heidegger is led to displace his concluding statement from “The Essence of Language” about Saying as the “relation of relations” with the suggestion, at the start of “The Way to Language,” that attention to what happens with the “way” to language (whereby language becomes strange) requires us to entertain the thought that the relation of humankind and language is “the relation” (“das Ver-hältniss”: the article is written with italics [GA12: 229/111]). The “distressing difficulty” named in the “Addendum” has thus resurfaced – appearing, effectively, in that hyphen. But we know now that it has to do both with the bodily dimension of human being, and with the human “capacity” for death. The latter topic that will cast its pallor over the entire attempt in “The Way to Language” to think the structure of the use of the human for the advent of language, even if it is evoked only 10

I touch here upon the most difficult step in Heidegger’s essay (apart from his evocation of what he will refer to as its “unthought,” namely death). Let me restate in an attempt at clarity. By “double articulation,” I refer to the complex way in which humankind is appropriated to language (in Ereignis) for the speaking of language. Both belong to the movement of appropriation in Ereignis and must be thought together. For the latter speaking, where language uses humankind for its articulation, the human is used bodily. A telegraphic footnote to “The Way to Language” in the Gesamtausgabe (GA12: 249) defines how the human is used: “Lauten und Leiben: Leib und Schrift” (translated literally: “Sounding and Bodying: Body and Writing”). I have discussed the implied reference to the hand and the voice in this note in Fynsk, Language and Relation, 99–107. But in this essay, I want to emphasize how this latter usage presupposes properly (which is to say, as thought from Ereignis) a more original use of the mortal essence of human being. These two forms of usage in the appropriation of language to its “own” are both required for its setting underway. But when we accede to that more original usage, we begin to grasp what is “peculiar,” or “strange” in this way. In other words, acceding to the engagement of the mortal essence of the human leads Heidegger to “articulate” anew the notion of relation itself, hence “das Ver-hältniss.” We hereby reach the proper “limit” of language and touch upon its finitude. We also glimpse here how “the human” in Heidegger cannot be understood from within the metaphysics of subjectivity. Or at least we reach the point where this question can be properly addressed, which is to say with respect to Heidegger’s understanding of the human “capacity” for death as death. I take this up in a reading of Heidegger’s use of the figure of Antigone and her relation to death in my forthcoming book, Heidegger’s Turn to Art: The Uses of Rhythm (Bloomsbury Press).

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indirectly in Heidegger’s introduction of the concluding citations of Humboldt’s tractate on “The Diversity of the Structure of Human Language,” “written near a grave” (GA12: 256/136). As it happens, these citations concern a possible transformation in our relation to language that could be “a lasting fruit of a people’s literature, and within literature especially of poetry and philosophy.” In “The Way to Language,” Heidegger will not strongly thematize the path offered in these last words, which recall so beautifully our volume’s topic. He will call upon literature, Novalis, and Hölderlin, in particular, but he will not undertake quite so concerted a use of it in the way of his meditation as what we have seen in “The Essence of Language.” He nonetheless pushes farther into the thought of Ereignis and the way humankind is used for the saying of language, seeking to think in the “formula” he provides for the “way” of his title (“die Sprache als die Sprache zur Sprache bringen”) what he names a “releasing bond” that runs through it and belongs to what moves in it. The “freeing” he names here releases humankind to the usage required by language for its articulation and sounding. This is the ground of human Gelassenheit (releasement) and what releases language itself to grant the movement of showing. The freeing bond contracts the relation between humankind and language (das Ver-hältniss) that enables language to be the proper mode of Ereignis itself, for which Heidegger will again revert to the phrase “the relation of relations” once he completes the meditation. Why this suspended articulation of the privative “Ver” and “hältniss” (which may well mark usage itself, in that this notion is always thought by Heidegger with respect to a form of releasing and holding)? What is marked in that dash? A clue is offered, perhaps, when the “flash” that arrives toward the end of “The Essence of Language” to illuminate the relation between death and language occurs once more with the supposition of a dawning “glimpse” that would issue from Ereignis itself (GA12: 253/133), removing what is from the hold of Technik (disappropriating its commandeerings, so to speak), and returning it to its own. The recovery envisioned involves natural language itself, threatened in our time by the spectre of formalization. A language so appropriated in Saying to its own might then appear, Heidegger tells us, in what Novalis sought to describe as its “peculiar property,” its character as “monologue.” Rescuing this formulation from the metaphysics of subjectivity governing Novalis’s thinking, Heidegger declares that language alone speaks authentically, and speaks in this way alone: einsam. The declaration does not now deny the use of the human for the speaking of language. On the contrary, it

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says the need of Saying for human speech, the absence of a “common” being (in that “relation of relations”) which creates the requirement of human speaking, and a bond between humankind and language. What distinguishes language, therefore, is a wanting, a lacking (“der Fehl des Gemeinsamen” [GA12: 254/134]), to which humankind, in its relation to death, is singularly brought. The hyphen in Ver-hältniss marks the almost unthinkable difference, the lacking in this relation between language and humankind, a difference always at play in usage.11 Heidegger heard in George’s statement of “renunciation” in the last lines of “The Word,” his acceptance of the “breaking off of language,” the gift of a saying that defined his later poetry. Does Heidegger perhaps follow George’s lead once he names the “lack” in language and then proceeds to suggest that the refusal of language to representation actually holds a gift? That we cannot know the essence of language – know it according to the traditional concept of knowledge defined in terms of cognition as representation – is not a defect, however, but rather an advantage [Vorzug] by which we are favored with a special realm, that realm where we, who are needed and used for the speaking of language, dwell as mortals. (GA12: 255/134)

0ur “inability” to represent the essence of language, in any case, is something quite different from a blindness; it might in fact save us from the blinding created by the delusion of technical mastery by revealing a quite different form of knowledge, which is to say, here, experience. Let me now summarize the steps made toward the “saving power” via the relation with poetry. It is clear that we “know” the unformalizable, the “enigmatic,” in natural language precisely in and from the bodily engagement with it required of us (in our essential being) for the speaking of language: “Lauten und Leiben – Leib und Schrift.” We know it, in other words, in usage, and first of all in practices that are forms of answering reflection, or thought (in relation to which cognitive representation remains derivative). Such an experience with language in its “proper” being is explored in the most original fashion by poetry (to which Heidegger attributes a thinking), though philosophy itself is open to it by reason of its own 11

I should note here that Heidegger gives significant (almost amazed) attention to the motif of lack in the lectures on Hölderlin of 1934–5. There is, of course, Hölderlin’s famous reference to the help of “God’s lack” in “Poet’s Calling” (cited at GA39: 211). Consider also the line from “The Departure”: “Yet the world’s meaning thinks a different lack” (cited at GA39: 236).

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original exposure to poetry and to what properly engages thought in the speaking of language (as we saw in Heidegger’s “guideword”). But, thought at a more fundamental level, language can only “use” us (bodily) for its speaking because we are released to this usage in the freeing bond contracted by Ereignis that involves the relation between language and human being. The possibility of this “freeing bond” is given by the way humans are bound to death. When Heidegger affirms – as he does throughout his career – that humans are distinguished by the fact that they are capable of this death, he evokes an assumption of finitude that is presumably rendered possible by the contraction of that bond and then assumed in a form of usage, a “becoming-experienced” that will be the ground of any “free use of the proper.” As Heidegger will tell us in “Building, Dwelling, Thinking”: “Mortals dwell in that they initiate their own essential being – their being capable of death as death – into the use and practice of this capacity, so that there may be a good death” (GA7: 145/352). All other acts serving the fourfold, including “saving” the earth, require this usage. Let us leave open, at this point, what Heidegger may have understood regarding this phrase, “a good death” (all the while recalling Heidegger’s commitment to Hölderlin’s phrase, “poetically man dwells”). Here again, the gesture of rescue becomes tempting. But perhaps we should first heed the tear marked by the hyphen (Ver-hältniss), and refrain from closing the path to the next step (back) indicated, which follows the unthought in that relation between language and death.

Bibliography Fynsk, Christopher. “El uso de la tierra.” In Heidegger y el arte de verdad, edited by Félix Duque and Cathedra Jorge Oteiza, 223–53. Cátedra Jorge Oteiza, 2005. Fynsk, Christopher. “The Exigency of the Figure.” MLN 132, no. 5 (2017): 1236–53. Language and Relation: . . .That There Is Language. Stanford University Press, 1996. Hamacher, Werner. Two Studies of Friedrich Hölderlin. Edited by P. D. Fenves and J. Ng. Stanford University Press, 2020. Nowell-Smith, David. Sounding/Silence: Martin Heidegger at the Limits of Poetics. Fordham University Press, 2013.

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Heidegger and Greek Literature

Heidegger and Sophocles ˇ

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Antigone’s Ethos of Intimating and Waiting Sean D. Kirkland

In opening his Theogony, Hesiod seems to present us with something like the ur-instantiation of Heidegger’s conception of Greek poetry. After a prooimion imploring the Muses of Mount Helicon to inspire in him honeyed words and pleasing song, Hesiod begins the story of the genesis of the gods thus: First of all, Chaos came to be, then after Broad-breasted Earth, an unfailing dwelling place for all, always (ἤτοι μὲν πρώτιστα Χάος γένετ’ · αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα Γαῖ εὐρύστερνος, πάντων ἕδος ἀσφαλὲς αἰεὶ) (Theog. 116–117)1

To be clear, Heidegger never undertook a substantive interpretation of Hesiod2 and, as we shall see, it is Sophocles among Greek poets who represents for Heidegger the pinnacle and the defining moment. Nevertheless, I believe these two lines of the Theogony display with maximum force and clarity what for Heidegger “essentially prevails as that which is to be poetized” by the Greeks (GA53: 150/120).

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All translations from the Greek are my own, unless otherwise noted. There is a discussion of the Greek term chaos in the second volume of the Nietzsche lectures, and there Heidegger does cite Hesiod’s Theogony, after remarking, “Chaos, khaos, khainô means ‘to yawn’; it signifies something that opens wide or gapes. We conceive of khaos in most intimate connection with an original interpretation of the essence of aletheia as the self-opening abyss” (GA6.1: 312/91). In a note on this passage, David Krell remarks, “I know of no detailed discussion of Hesiod in Heidegger’s works, but suggest the khaos might be interpreted along the lines of the Timean khôra, the ‘receptacle’ of ‘space,’ namely, as the open region in which beings can first appear and be in being” (David Farrell Krell, “Introductory Essay to ‘The Origin of the Work of Art,’” in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell [New York: Harper & Row, 1977], 91–92). ˇ

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For, although Hesiod is singing here of Gai or ‘Earth’ as the hedos or ‘seat, abode’ specifically of the generations of divinities on whom the Theogony is focused, he is also by extension poetizing the basic site in which we humans find ourselves, carry out our lives, and encounter anything at all.3 What is more, Hesiod situates this site for human dwelling in an essential relation to an ontologically prior chaos. Now, it is crucial to understand that this term does not indicate in the first instance a ‘disorder’ or a ‘confused condition’, as its English cognate might suggest. Rather, chaos most originally would have referred to a ‘chasm’ or a ‘gap’ between two surfaces. For instance, standing atop one wall of a canyon and looking across toward the other, chaos is what confronts one as an intervening emptiness or lack. By substantivizing precisely this experience, Hesiod converts it into an explicitly abyssal ground, a subtending non-space located nowhere on earth and serving as the primordial cosmological arche or ‘principle, source, beginning’. According to the logic of this cosmogonical account, this absence is posited as grounding or supporting the Earth itself, though it would as such be inaccessible to direct experience.4 ˇ

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I do not mean to suggest that Hesiod’s Gei can simply be mapped onto Heidegger’s Erde or ‘earth,’ as he conceives it either in its relation to Welt or ‘world,’ in (e.g.) “The Origin of the Work of Art,” or much less in its relation to the other three elements of the Geviert or ‘Fourfold,’ Himmel or ‘sky,’ Sterblichen or ‘mortals,’ and Göttlichen or ‘divinities,’ in (e.g.) “Building, Dwelling, Thinking.” However, for a brief discussion of the early Greek notion of Gaia that does connect it to Heidegger’s conception of Erde or ‘earth,’ see Krell, “Introductory Essay,” 144–147. Krell suggests, “Perhaps the Ursprung of Heidegger’s notion of ‘earth’ must be sought in poetry,” and then turns to the Homeric hymn “To Earth, Mother of All” (146). And in his discussion of earth in the context of the Fourfold, Andrew J. Mitchell speaks of its “abyssal bearing,” writing, “Fundamentally, the earth is a bearer (die Tragende) . . . [but] bearing names a ‘groundless’ grounding, and the paradox in this is that each time such a groundless bearing takes place upon the earth” (Andrew J. Mitchell, The Fourfold: Reading the Late Heidegger [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015], 74). In the relation of the first two divinities in the Hesiodic cosmos, Gei and Chaos, I would suggest that we might find a poetizing of something like this abyssal bearing or a groundless grounding. To my knowledge, it was Francis M. Cornford who first insisted on the significance, for the interpretation of Hesiod’s cosmogony, of the fact the root cha- in chaos should be understood by way of its relation to the verbs chaskein or chainein, ‘to yawn’ or ‘to gape.’ Cornford argued this in a 1941 paper entitled “A Ritual Basis for Hesiod’s Theogony” (published in Francis Cornford, The Unwritten Philosophy and Other Essays [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950], 95–116). Based on this etymology, and his recognition of the rationally explanatory character of the cosmogonic section of the Theogony (Theog. 116–133), Cornford finds that, given this understanding of chaos, the whole process of generation can be seen as one of “separation or division, out of a primal indistinct unity, of parts which successively became distinct regions of the cosmos” (100). Mitchell Miller, ˇ

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Hesiod then proceeds to add a whole host of other divinities according to their order of birth: Tartaros (an underworld within the Earth); Eros (a force that will bind the Earth to the next god she herself births, Ouranos, in a fateful reproductive relation); Ouranos (that Earth-born god and the heaven above); also then the gods Night, Darkness, Day, Aether, etc. Drama and intrigue are introduced as Hesiod leads his listeners through the overthrow of Ouranos by his son Kronos and on to the Gigantomachia between the Titanic siblings of Kronos and the Olympians led by Zeus, a sequence of events that ultimately produces and indeed explains the cosmic order that Hesiod surely saw as, in effect, organizing his own historical present. Had he taken up the Theogony in any depth, I would suggest, Heidegger would have focused his interpretive eye on what happens just before that narrative begins. For it is there that we find Hesiod poetizing in the simplest and most direct terms the dwelling place of human life as a stable, familiar, supporting site which emerges out of, or at least stands

accepting the above, nevertheless resists Cornford’s further claim that chaos should be identified with the separation of Ge from Ouranos, earth from sky, and argues instead that the gap Chaos introduces is first and foremost that between Ge and Tartaros. Mitchell shows, based on suggestive textual evidence, that Hesiod was in truth faced with a decision as to what should play the role of the initiating arche of the cosmogenesis, between Chaos and Tartaros (or in the plural, Tartara, as Hesiod first introduces it), and his choice of the former over the latter reflects both semantic and ethical considerations – first, Tartaros as essentially undifferentiated and unintegrated is unthinkable, and, second, by rejecting Tartaros’ claim to be the “parent of the world,” Hesiod casts a vote in favor of difference over identity and homogeneity, and for a just and non-violent order among the various distinct parts of the whole (a position Hesiod seems unambiguously to advocate for at, among other places, Works and Days l.40). See the entire careful and illuminating argument in Mitchell Miller, “‘First of All’: On the Semantics and Ethics of Hesiod’s Cosmogony,” Ancient Philosophy 21.2 (2001): 251–276. Others have asked how a gap between two entities can exist prior to the two entities themselves, whether these are earth and sky, or earth and underworld. I believe I avoid this logical obstacle with the suggestion that Hesiod’s Chaos is a quasi-substantivization of the absence or gap between two entities, which then as such is joined to Earth and thus to the hedos or ‘seat’ of divine and human life as a kind of subtending but not directly accessible source or ground. And this, I argue, presents a paradigmatic instance of what Greek poetry strives to bring to language, according to Heidegger. Drew A. Hyland argues along similar lines, insisting that Chaos in Hesiod names the ontological difference itself: “The ontological difference, the difference between beings and the coming-to-be of things is hardly ‘forgotten’ in Hesiod: it is at play in his thinking and at play precisely where Heidegger has taught us it belongs: first of all” (Drew A. Hyland, “First of All Came Chaos,” in Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays, ed. D. A. Hyland and J. P. Manoussakis [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006], 16). Finally, on Heidegger’s general approach to early Greek poetry, see the excellent treatment of Heidegger on Homer in Michael Naas, “Keeping Homer’s Word: Heidegger and the Epic of Truth,” in The Presocratics after Heidegger, ed. David C. Jacobs (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), 73–100. ˇ

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in essential relation to, a dark and mysterious subtending abyssal source. And according to Heidegger, as we shall see, bringing to language the uncanny grounding of our familiar human dwelling place is the proper and exclusive task of genuine poetry since the dawning of the West among the ancient Greeks. Why is poetry necessary in order to properly relate to our human dwelling place, for Heidegger? How precisely does Greek poetry perform this task? And how are we ultimately to think and act in relation to what is poetized in such poetry? These are the questions this chapter addresses.

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The Human Ethos in Aristotelian Metaphysical Ethics In an oft-cited remark from the 1946 essay “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger claims that the “tragedies of Sophocles . . . preserve [bergen] the ethos in their saying more primordially [anfänglicher] than Aristotle’s lectures on ‘ethics’” (GA9: 354/LH 256, trans. modified). The central term here is ethos, but, as we shall see, it proves under Heidegger’s interpretation to be a synonym for the term hedos or ‘seat, abode,’ used by Hesiod in the Theogony above to characterize Earth. Heidegger says no more about Sophocles in the letter, but he goes on immediately to suggest that Heraclitus is likewise able to shelter this ethos in his thinking, in part apparently because he is operating prior to the emergence of traditional philosophizing, and specifically prior to the division of thinking into sub-disciplines like metaphysics, physics, moral philosophy, and political philosophy, which we find first with Aristotle. Heraclitus is consequently able to speak in such a way that “the essence of the ethos immediately comes to light” (GA9: 354/LA 256) even in a threeword aphorism: ethos anthrôpô(i) daimôn (DK 22B119). This is often translated along the lines of ‘Character is fate for the human,’ though Heidegger dismisses any such translation, for it “thinks in a modern way, not a Greek one” (GA9: 354/LA 256). In order to think what the fragment indicates in a Greek way, one must recognize that: ˇ

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Ethos means abode, dwelling place. The word names the open region in which man dwells. The open region of his abode allows what pertains to man’s essence [Wesen], and what in thus arriving resides in nearness to him, to appear. (GA9: 354/LA 256)

According to Heidegger, then, what Sophocles’ poetizing is able to bergen, to ‘shelter and protect from loss,’ and what Heraclitus’ aphoristic, poetic thinking allows to come to light, is the ethos of human being. But this is not to be understood as some fact about or feature of human life, for ˇ

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instance the proper moral code that humans should follow. Ethos is to be understood rather as the abode in which human beings live and the site where what pertains to their Wesen, their ‘essence’ or ‘essencing,’ is allowed to appear to them. Our question has thus become: why is poetry required in order to preserve this ethos or this hedos, this dwelling place, in a more primordial or original way? And why will even the greatest example of traditional philosophizing, which Aristotle’s work certainly represents for Heidegger, inevitably fail to bring this ethos properly to light? Surely this stated preference for Sophocles over Aristotle can be situated in the context of Heidegger’s generally recognized Kehre or ‘turn’ in the 1930s, following the 1927 publication of his unfinished magnum opus, Being and Time. This decisive shift in part involves Heidegger’s becoming dissatisfied with Being and Time’s unambiguously analytic and quasiscientific phenomenological approach to clarifying the fundamental temporal structures of Dasein, literally, our mode of ‘being-there’ in the world.5 Beginning almost immediately after that publication,6 Heidegger seems more and more convinced that only a poetic, more evocative and less analytic, indeed a quite daringly experimental language could succeed in the task he had set for himself, namely the raising of the question of Being and thinking Being otherwise than according to the constraints of the tradition he inherited.7 In Being and Time’s introduction, Heidegger makes the historical claim that, in the thought of Plato and Aristotle,8 a first answer to the question ˇ

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For the most thoughtful and painstaking account of Heidegger’s evolving relation to the method, the vocabulary, and the fundamental aim of phenomenology, see William McNeill, The Fate of Phenomenology: Heidegger’s Legacy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019). From the early 1930s on, Heidegger can be seen clearly reassessing how he might respond thoughtfully to the demands of his late-modern historical moment. And over the course of less than a decade, from 1934 to 1942, Heidegger offered three major lecture courses on Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) and three major lecture courses on Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), as well as penning a number of essays on both. Surely his Auseinandersetzung with Nietzsche and his deep engagement with Hölderlin’s poetry were the two most important touchstones for his later thinking. See William McNeill, “The Hölderlin Lectures,” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger, ed. François Raffoul and Eric S. Nelson (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 223–235. Heidegger’s most radical experiments with language in the attempt to think Being otherwise take place in the unpublished volumes of the mid 1930s, Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) (GA65), Mindfulness (GA66), The History of Beyng (GA69), etc. For an introduction to Heidegger’s approach to Greek philosophy in general, see Sean D. Kirkland, “Heidegger and Greek Philosophy,” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger,

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of what it means “to be” was definitively and fatefully put forward. This answer determined what could present itself at all for philosophical investigation as something that is. And after this answer was generated, it was, according to Heidegger, never fundamentally examined or critiqued in the entire subsequent history of Western philosophy all the way down to the twentieth century. All thinking in this mode Heidegger terms “metaphysics,” and both pre- and post-Kehre this is fundamentally a reduction of Being to “being present” in two senses: ‘What is’ became defined exclusively as ‘what is present temporally,’ or ‘what is now,’ making ‘what was’ and ‘what will be’ simply and definitively other than being, not-being, nothing. 2) ‘What is’ became defined as exclusively ‘what is present spatially or epistemologically,’ or ‘what is there,’ right there before us and in principle completely available for human investigation, knowing, and mastery – indeed, everything that is can be (and should be) exhaustively illuminated by propositional discourse and accessed without remainder by human understanding.

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The task of raising once again the question of the meaning of Being and, perhaps, coming to respond to Being otherwise than in the Greek metaphysical mode, Heidegger came to believe, requires poetry or at least “poetic thinking” (GA40: 153/144). For our purposes, we wish to clarify the relation between Sophoclean tragedy’s ability to more primordially shelter the dwelling place of human being, the da of Dasein, and the project of thinking Being beyond the traditional metaphysics inaugurated by Plato and Aristotle. We might note first that, in his discussion of ethos above, Heidegger is invoking a certain etymology that Aristotle himself notes in the Nicomachean Ethics.9 ˇ

ed. François Raffoul and Eric S. Nelson (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 77–86. And see Heidegger’s “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” (GA14), originally presented at a conference in Paris in 1964, for a later change in Heidegger’s position on when in the history of Greek thought the “forgetting of Being” occurred. Whereas earlier Heidegger had tended to read the pre-Socratics like Heraclitus and Parmenides as thinking prior to metaphysics, here in 1964 he declares that even for Parmenides truth was not thought as aletheia or ‘unconcealment,’ but as correctness, and Being was consequently already reduced to the presence of present beings (GA14: 83–90/444–449). For a fuller discussion of phronesis and its relation to ethike arete or ‘ethical virtue,’ see Sean D. Kirkland, “The Temporality of Phronesis in the Nicomachean Ethics,” Ancient Philosophy 27.1 (2007): 127–140. And for an excellent and encompassing discussion of Heidegger’s various interpretations of Aristotle, see W. A. Brogan, Heidegger and Aristotle: The Twofoldness of Being (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006). Brogan’s illuminating treatment of the “twofoldness of being” ˇ

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Let us address ourselves first to Aristotle’s apparently metaphysical thinking of the ethos, so that we can then understand precisely how Heidegger sees Sophoclean poetry as operating in excess of metaphysics. Aristotle observes at a central moment in the Ethics that: ˇ

The function [ἔργον] of a human being is well-accomplished in accordance with phronesis and ethical virtue [ἠθικὴν ἀρετήν]; virtue makes the aim right, and phronesis the means to the aim. (EN 1144a6–9) ˇ

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To live truly well, according to the argument of the first book of the Ethics, is to fully accomplish the ergon or ‘function’ specific to human beings, that is, to use one’s logos or ‘reason’ properly in living one’s life (EN 1097b25–1098a4). However, reason can be applied in various contexts to accomplish various ends. The one employment of logos that would seem to be the sine qua non for complete human flourishing is phronesis, which is often translated as ‘prudence’ or ‘practical wisdom’ and which Aristotle identifies with euboulia or ‘good deliberation.’ This is reason’s application in concrete practical situations in order to determine which available course of action is choiceworthy as “the good deed [τὸ πρακτὸν ἀγαθόν]” (EN 1097a24). However, phronesis thus understood requires a supplement. Given that it is defined as a power for achieving good (EN 1140b20–22) and given that deliberation alone can be correct and effective but aimed at an ethically indifferent or even a condemnable aim (EN 1142b18–22), something must always accompany phronesis in order to ensure that its good deliberation is directed toward a proper aim (EN 1142b28–34). Thus, this necessary and essential supplement is “ethical virtue,” to which phronesis, simply in order to be itself, must always be bound (EN 1144b20–21, 30–32). The Greek phrase in the passage cited above, ethike arete, is usually understood to be ‘excellence’ of one’s ethos or ‘character,’ that which determines one’s actions, preferences, reactions to situations, in short one’s way of life. It could be argued that Aristotle’s most important contribution to moral philosophy was his deep insight into what it is that determines an individual’s character. For, after the apparent intellectualism of the Socratic ethics featured in Plato’s dialogues, where one’s character would often seem determined by the clarity of one’s ˇ

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there will be helpful in thinking through some of the implications of what we encounter in Heidegger’s reading of Sophocles as the Gegenwendigkeit or ‘counterturning’ at the heart of the deinon.

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noetic grasp of an intelligible Idea (Virtue or the Good itself, perhaps), Aristotle represents a profound and radical shift. He writes of ethike arete that “it comes to be out of habits (ἐξ ἔθους), and has indeed derived its name, with a slight variation in form, from the word ‘habit’ (απὸ τοῦ ἔθους)” (EN 1103a17–19). Aristotle is observing that ethos or ‘habit’ becomes ethos simply by lengthening the initial epsilon into an eta. And if one then generates an adjective from the noun, the word ‘ethike’ is the result. The middle term ethos certainly often means ‘character,’ but its original meaning is, as Heidegger insists above, ‘a haunt, or a dwelling place, somewhere one has become accustomed to living.’10 This is by no means thought of as a simple physical location or a container in which something is spatially situated, which might be measured geometrically or mapped geographically. Rather, ethos refers to a site where certain conduct is encouraged, and thus repeated, and other conduct is discouraged, such that, for the kind of being who has the dunamis or the ‘potential’ to become habituated, one’s character is en-formed accordingly. The Aristotelian innovation in ethical thinking, then, is insisting on the nearly all-determining role of habituation in human ethical life, and trying to suggest with the Ethics and the Politics together a philosophical approach to living well, given the inescapable effects of an always already accomplished process of habituation for any adult human being. This is why Aristotle insists that inculcating good customs and habits during childhood is of “supreme importance” (EN 1103b25) in ethics and that in politics “the legislator should direct his attention above all to the education of children; for the neglect of education does harm to the constitution” of the polis (Pol. 1337a10–11).11 ˇ

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Preserving the Ethos: Sophoclean Poetizing in Excess of Metaphysics If we wish to go deeper into what precisely is being claimed about Sophocles’ preservation of the ethos, we must turn now to the most extensive discussion of Sophocles in the Heideggerian corpus, the ˇ

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1942 lecture course, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister.”12 This lecture course is divided into three lengthy sections, and the Sophocles interpretation occupies Heidegger for the entirety of the second part, constituting about half the total length of the course. Heidegger justifies the long detour through Sophocles, saying: [A] singular poetic work of a singular poet resonates repeatedly in Hölderlin’s poetic telling of human beings’ becoming homely. We mean the choral ode from the Antigone of Sophocles. (GA53: 63/51)

By Heidegger’s lights, Hölderlin’s “Ister” centrally brings to language the play of Ortschaft and Wanderschaft, or ‘locality’ and ‘journeying,’ by which the river accomplishes its essence and gathers the German people together. Also invoked are themes of home and foreign, modern and ancient, German and Greek, and it is in this context that Heidegger introduces the ancient Greek poetic work that most fascinated

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There is a well-known, but less substantive, discussion of the Antigone in 1935’s Introduction to Metaphysics, where Heidegger focuses exclusively on the second choral ode and on the deinon as a name for Being and for the human response to Being. That interpretation’s emphasis on a fundamental violence at the ontological level and the necessary violence of any creative human response, in poetry, in thought, or in grounding a state, is unsavory, to say the least, especially when put in connection with Heidegger’s remark on “the inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism in that text (GA40: 208/ 199). There are two mentions of National Socialism in the reading of Sophocles in our 1942 Hölderlin course as well (GA53: 98/80, 106/86), but the apparent justification of some kind of violence has been left mercifully behind, in favor, as we shall see, of a more circumspect and mild response to the deinon. On the differences between the 1935 and 1942 readings, see the clarifying discussion in Clare Pearson Geiman, “Heidegger’s Antigones,” in A Companion to Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics, ed. Richard Polt and Gregory Fried (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 161–182. In his excellent study of the theme of Gelassenheit or ‘releasement’ in Meister Eckhart and Heidegger, Ian Alexander Moore remarks that, in certain texts prior to or contemporaneous with the Introduction to Metaphysics, “Heidegger’s thinking could have taken a radically different course . . . Rather than violence, Heidegger could have promoted releasement” (Ian Alexander Moore, Eckhart, Heidegger, and the Imperative of Releasement [Albany: SUNY Press, 2019], 111). Anticipating Moore, Geiman suggests quite directly that eventually he did, writing, “With the move to poetic thinking [in the 1942 treatment of Antigone], Heidegger’s characterization of the ‘destiny’ of the West thus decisively turns away from the violence of creative founding in the direction of the later Gelassenheit, the ‘releasement’ toward beings that belongs to meditative thinking and ‘lets beings be’” (180). For a thorough and illuminating treatment of Heidegger on Sophocles that ranges much more broadly over the Heideggerian corpus than the present study, see HansChristian Günther, “Heidegger und Sophocles,” in Heidegger und die Antike, ed. H.-C. Günther and A. Rengakos (Munich: Beck, 2006), 174–218.

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Hölderlin, a tragedy he translated in its entirety and on which he wrote an interpretive essay – the Antigone of Sophocles.13 Heidegger begins with a brief discussion of the first choral ode, the parodos or entry song of the play, but he soon turns his attention to the second choral ode, the first stasimon or stationary song, often referred to as the “Ode to Man.” It may be helpful to provide a very preliminary summary of the play and of the ode in particular. Summary of Antigone The two sons of Oedipus have killed one another in battle after the one, Eteocles, refused to relinquish the throne of Thebes to the other, Polynices, as was mandated by the plan for alternating rule devised after their father’s downfall and abdication. Kreon, their uncle, has assumed power and issued a decree, punishable by death, that the traitor Polynices should receive no burial. At the play’s opening, Antigone reveals to her sister, Ismene, her intention to bury Polynices. She then does so, twice, and is subsequently apprehended. Against the entreaties of Ismene, Tiresias the seer, and his own son and Antigone’s betrothed, Haemon, Kreon proceeds with punishing an unrepentant Antigone, ultimately entombing her alive. She hangs herself and is followed in this by Haemon. Eurydice, Haemon’s mother and Kreon’s wife, shows up in time to kill herself as well, adding to the misery of Kreon’s tragic reversal.

Summary of the Second Choral Ode The second choral ode (Ant. 332–375) is situated after the revelation that the first burial of Polynices has taken place, but before the second burial attempt and the revelation that Antigone was the perpetrator. It comprises four parts: Strophe I: Humans are the most deinon or ‘uncanny’ of beings, ranging over and mastering the entire earth. Antistrophe I: Humans also hunt down and capture all the wild beasts of the earth, the air, and the sea. Strophe II: With language and thought, humans invent a means to overcome every obstacle, except death. Antistrophe II: With technai or ‘arts, skills’ of every sort, humans can rise to astounding heights when gathered into cities, but those who stand outside the city are unwelcome among us.

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Let us turn now with Heidegger to the justly famous opening lines of the ode, first in Greek, then in Heidegger’s German translation, and then in McNeill and Ireland’s English rendering of Heidegger (GA53: 64–65/52): polla ta deina k’ouden anthrôpou deinoteron pelei (Ant. 332–333) Vielfältig das Unheimliche, nichts doch über den Menschen hinaus unheimlicher waltet Manifold is the uncanny, yet nothing beyond the human being prevails more uncannily

Heidegger tells us that these two lines are “the essential ground of this tragedy, even of Sophocles’ poetic work as a whole” (GA53: 73/60). He writes: The decisive word, which falls at the beginning of the choral ode, is ta deina, to deinon. We translate: das Unheimliche, the uncanny. If every translation is always only the result of an interpretation and not something preliminary to it, then the translation of deinon by ‘unheimlich,’ ‘uncanny,’ can first be seen as justified, or even as necessary, only on the basis of the following interpretation. For this translation is initially alien to us, violent, or, in “philological” terms, “wrong.” (GA53: 74/61)

As radical as it perhaps sounds, Heidegger’s starting point here is, on second thought, quite common-sensical. He is simply making evident just how wrong-headed the standard approach to interpreting these ancient texts is. Many would imagine that the first step in interpreting a text like Sophocles’ Antigone would be the elemental replacement of the Greek with German or English terms, guided presumably by the sober judgment of a reputable lexicon. Then, once every element has been dutifully replaced and a coherent German or English text has been engineered, the work of interpreting the meaning of the text can begin. But is it not inevitable, accepting even just the most basic insights of philosophical hermeneutics, that each of those decisions about each individual word will necessarily be guided by a presupposed, even if resolutely implicit, sense of the meaning of the whole text? Will not that implicit whole always provide the horizon within which the part is viewed and interpreted? Given this, Heidegger pledges to undertake here what has become a familiar hermeneutic vacillation, a circling back and forth between close attention to the part and a broad consideration and perpetual reassessment of the whole, from (for example) a deep dive into the etymology of an individual word to an encompassing sense of the whole tragic play or even all of Greek literature in general.

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Heidegger observes that, according to the lexicon, deinon means “that which is fearful and therefore arouses fear” (GA53: 76–77/63). He focuses then on a certain double valence in the fearful itself. On the one hand, there is a “habitual fear or fearfulness that readily degenerates into the avoidance and trembling of cowardice,” while, on the other hand, there is the “fear pertaining to reverence and awe,” which calls forth “a turning toward something in heed and respect,” and a “standing firm in honoring that which awakens such fear” (GA53: 77/63). In the former case, note that the fear provoked is “habitual,” it participates in and even binds one to one’s habitual activities of avoiding this or that, busily pursuing one’s self-interest in the horizon of one’s familiar, everyday world. In the latter, fear arises and seems to expose one to something in excess of the site of one’s usual hustle and bustle, stopping one in one’s tracks and demanding reverence and awe. Both of these are indeed fearful, but they provoke quite different responses. Having thus analyzed the phenomenon, Heidegger concludes that a certain “counterturning [Gegenwendigkeit] prevails in what the Greeks name deinon” (GA53: 77/63). He moves on then from the fearful to identify two further essential and interrelated aspects of the deinon, all three of which manifest this fundamental counterturning: The Three Aspects of to deinon 1) 2) 3)

as das Furchtbare or ‘the fearful’ (the deinon inspires fear) as das Gewaltige or ‘the powerful’ (the deinon is capable of much) as das Ungewöhnliche or ‘the inhabitual’ (the deinon interrupts or intrudes upon the habitual)

Note that, in all three of these aspects, the deinon either situates one more exhaustively within the site of habitual activity or it exposes one to an excess of that site. The fearful, the merely violent, and the threat of an inconvenient breakdown can all serve to motivate committed adherence to the habitual. But the fearful can also be the awesome and honorinspiring, the powerful can be the great and towering, and the inhabitual can be the extraordinary, all of which seem to explode the site of habitual life, looming over it and halting the frenzy of the everyday for a moment. This is “the concealed essence” of the deinon, the source of this phenomenal manifold, and it is what Heidegger hopes to indicate with the translation das Unheimliche, usually translated as ‘the uncanny,’ but literally ‘the unhomely,’ that which interrupts one’s comfortable sense of being at home in the world.

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Vital here is the fact that the double valence in the term deinon does not characterize merely the two extremes in a spectrum of idiosyncratic human tendencies. If we think in this way, we take the uncanny in terms of the impression it makes upon us. But to the extent that we intend the uncanny as meaning the extraordinary in the sense of something objective . . . we think the uncanny as the immense and vice versa. In our translation, however, the word is to be conceived in a more originary [ursprünglicher] way. The uncanny means that which is not “at home,” not homely within whatever is homely . . . Being unhomely is no mere deviance from the homely, but rather the converse: a seeking and searching out of the homely, a seeking that at times does not know itself. (GA53: 90–91/74)

This is a dense passage. First, Heidegger is, characteristically, beginning with what is traditionally reduced to a merely subjective element, a matter of psychology, the experience of something as uncanny, and insisting that we approach the phenomenon instead as a true pathos, from the Greek paschein, ‘to undergo, suffer, be affected or touched by something.’ To experience something as uncanny is not a merely emotional event, but the appearing of something to us, its emerging into view and affecting or contacting us. What is experienced as uncanny is something’s presenting itself to us, even if there are still, of course, possibilities of error and incomprehension, for instance partial, unclear, multiple, or oblique appearings. Nonetheless, something shows itself in the human reception of that appearing to which we give the name the ‘uncanny, unhomely.’ Now, Heidegger proceeds, this is not then to insist that there is some objective thing or condition that possesses this or that feature, an independently existing thing that is extraordinarily large, enormous, for instance. No, Heidegger wishes us to think the uncanny, the unhomely in an ursprünglicher or a ‘more original’ way, digging down to the Ursprung or the ‘source, origin’ of the experience, before that experience has been parsed into two potentially disconnected poles, an independent object and a perceiving subject. Prior to the imposition of that separation, there is the emergence of something into appearance to us, where its appearing and our receiving of that appearance are one and the same event. The appearing of the uncanny, the unhomely. Heidegger then insists that the unhomely, at this more original register, relates to the homely not as something wholly other or distinct, or something located elsewhere. Rather, the unhomely, the uncanny is what is not at home right here within what is most homely. If, as the opening lines of the choral ode suggest, there is much that is unhomely, but most

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unhomely is the human being, then Heidegger takes this to mean that the human is the one who, despite being situated in the familiar, the everyday swirl of activity, is somehow not entirely ‘at home’ even in that familiar site. And homeliness and unhomeliness, this counter-valence, again, is not a merely personal, psychological, or cultural issue. No, it reflects a fundamental aspect of the way the world of beings presents itself to the human being. There is an ontological counter-turning between homeliness and unhomeliness, between familiarity and uncanniness. It belongs to the Being of beings itself, or better, to the relationship between Being and beings in their emergence into appearance to us humans. Constituted by our receiving of this counter-turning in the way beings present themselves, we humans are essentially constituted by our potential for losing the homeliness of the familiar abode. The unhomely one is deprived of the homely; deprivation is the way in which the unhomely one possesses the homely, or to put it more precisely the way in which whatever is homely possesses the unhomely one. What becomes manifest in these relations is the essence of uncanniness itself, namely presencing [Anwesen] in the manner of an absencing [Abwesen], and in such a way that whatever presences and absences here is itself simultaneously the open realm of all presencing and absencing. (GA53: 92/75)

Here, in Sophocles’ choral ode, Heidegger finds the poet poetizing Being, the “open realm” within which all individual beings can appear and present themselves to us, and bringing Being to language as tragically deinos, unheimlich or ‘uncanny, unhomely.’ Having become present, beings can be named, identified, and then, as detailed in the choral ode, subjected to human techne or ‘craft, skill, technical knowledge,’ exhaustively revealed, and mastered. However, what can never present itself as a being, what is subject to the countervailing Abwesen or ‘absencing’ that supports and is entailed by the Anwesen or ‘presencing’ of beings, is that open site itself, that clearing. Thus, homeliness and unhomeliness are features of Sophocles’ tragic ontology itself. And to be clear, that “open site” for the presencing of beings is always already organized by language, by culture, by ethics, even by politics, though it is also always in excess of all of these. It is always geschichtlich or ‘historical,’ emerging into specific available forms and structures in the coming to presence of present beings, by which human beings are geschickt or ‘sent’ off along historical trajectories and even exposed to a certain historical Schicksal or ‘destiny.’ And Heidegger sees the polis, ˇ

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usually the ‘city-state,’ as it appears in Sophocles accordingly. That is, the polis is not in the first instance a politically organized space, with certain forces vying with other forces for resources, power, influence, etc. Rather: The pre-political essence of the polis, that essence that first makes possible everything political in the originary and in the derivative sense, lies in its being the open site of that fitting destining [Schickung] from out of which all human relations toward beings – and that always means in the first instance the relations of beings as such to humans – are determined. The essence of the polis therefore always comes to light in accordance with the way in which beings as such in general enter the realm of the unconcealed: in keeping with the expanse of those limits within which this occurs, and in keeping with the way in which the essence of human beings is determined in unison with the manifestness of beings as a whole. (GA53: 102/82–83)

Our reception of the unhomely withdrawal of Being in the homely presencing of beings can take two basic forms, it seems. In our thinking, our poetizing, and our acting in the city, we can mark the play of presencing and absencing in Being, as our abode or dwelling-place, or we can allow Being to recede into the background and remain in complete oblivion, throwing ourselves vigorously into the cataloguing, scrutinizing, and eventual mastering of those present beings, insisting that Being is reducible without remainder to the sum total of present beings. For Antigone and Kreon, Thebes is essentially the local name of Being, that site in which they find themselves pitted against one another in which the play of presencing and absencing is underway. The question is which of these two modes of relating to Being they exhibit. At this point, we have come to understand what precisely characterizes the ethos of the human being, which the dramas of Sophocles preserve more originally than Aristotle’s ethics. As we saw above, insofar as Aristotle’s thinking in the Ethics is already metaphysical, he will see Being, as the site for the self-presencing of beings, as nothing at all, as not-being. He will reduce the human to one present being among others, rather than that being uniquely constituted by suffering the play of Being’s presencing and absencing. The dwelling place of the human will then, from an Aristotelian perspective, appear simply as a site in which the human being is stamped with the customs, norms, and expectations of one’s culture, that is, by way of habituation at the hands of other present beings, one’s fellow citizens. In order to preserve that ethos as something more than the sum of present beings, a poetizing in excess of metaphysics is required. ˇ

ˇ

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Antigone’s “Becoming Unhomely” in Intimating and Waiting We began with the oft-cited line from the “Letter on Humanism,” that the “tragedies of Sophocles . . . preserve the ethos in their saying [in ihrem Sagen] more primordially than Aristotle’s lectures on ‘ethics’” (GA9: 354/LA 256). We now understand what exactly this ethos is that is being preserved by Sophoclean poetry and why Aristotelian metaphysical thinking is by definition incapable of preserving it in its origin. What is left is to ask how precisely Sophocles’ tragedies are able to do this “in ihrem Sagen” or ‘in their saying.’ What is it about the “saying” we encounter in the Antigone that allows it to shelter the Being of beings as the site of presencing to and absencing from human beings? Heidegger offers some initial direction perhaps when he points us, not to this or that feature or structure or element of the poetic text, but toward what is poetized. ˇ

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The essence of the deinon experienced in a Greek way stands within the poetic purview of this poetizing, yet in such a way that what is poetized is a becoming homely in being unhomely [Heimischwerden im Unheimischsein]. (GA53: 147/118)

Sophoclean tragedy would seem to shelter the uncanniness of the human dwelling place by bringing to language “a becoming homely in being unhomely.” Crucial here is the term werden or the ‘becoming.’ The Antigone does not, it seems, accomplish its essence by describing or re-presenting more accurately or more comprehensively in its text the deinos character of the reality present around us. Rather, Heidegger tells us, it manages to stage in its saying an event of coming-to-be, an emergence into being homely within unhomely Being. It is itself a true moment of what the ancient Greeks would call poiesis, for which the lexicon gives us first ‘making,’ and only secondarily ‘the art of poetry’ or ‘a poem.’ Indeed, the term suggests a making that resists any reduction to an engineering or a producing, a mere rearranging of matter. At the heart of the phenomenon of poiesis is a transformation at the ontological register, what Heidegger refers to elsewhere as a Her-vorbringen, a “bringing forth” into being here before us and a “bringing into appearance” of something (GA7: 12/QT 317). And Heidegger tells us here that text of the play is not the product of a poiesis, but poiesis itself. But how so, precisely? How does the Sophoclean “saying” manage to be experienced as the event of coming-to-be homely in the unhomely? First, an alternative formulation of “what is to be poetized”: ˇ

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What is poetized, essentially prevailing in the poetic work, is never something that is, but rather Being . . . Being is not some thing that is actual, but that which determines what is actual in its potential for being, and determines especially the

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potential for human beings to be; that potentiality for being in which the being of humans is fulfilled: being unhomely in becoming homely. Such is our belonging to Being itself. What essentially prevails as Being, and is never a being or something actual and therefore always appears to be nothing, can be said only in poetizing or thought in thinking. (GA53: 150/120, trans. modified)

Is there a contradiction here? What is poetized in Sophocles’s Antigone is, as we heard above, a “becoming homely in being unhomely,” and we read now that what is poetized is simply “Being.” These are, in truth, one and the same occurrence. For Being, as we discovered in the last section, is not the sum total of present beings, but the self-eclipsing clearing that opens up for and grounds beings in their emerging into presence and appearing to us. Indeed, one cannot help but think here in terms of Being as Ereignis or ‘event,’ that term Heidegger began to introduce in the decade prior to this lecture course in an attempt to resist the constraining vocabulary of metaphysics. “Being essentially occurs as the event of grounding the there, or, in short, as the event [Das Seyn west als das Ereignis der Dagründung, in der Abkürzung: als Ereignis],” Heidegger writes in his Contributions to Philosophy (GA65: 247/195). He is suggesting that we think of Being as the event of beings’ emergence into presence, the ground of a coming into being and appearing to us as what they are. This would entail that we are not surrounded by beings simply sitting there before us, however much this may seem to be the case most of the time. Rather, beings are understood to be by emerging into view, taking on form, and stretching open thereby the very site in which they can appear and enter into relation to one another and to us. To be a being at all is to burst into appearance thanks to that dynamic inapparent ground. Heidegger is suggesting something like this event-like ontology in the passage above by invoking Aristotle’s own ontological principles, though he does not intend the traditional metaphysical understanding of dunamis and energeia, or ‘potentiality’ and ‘actuality.’ Rather, because Aristotle is located at the initiating threshold of metaphysics, Heidegger is able always to find a certain ambivalence in the Stagirite’s most basic concepts – they can point forward to the tradition of metaphysical thinking they inaugurate, but they can also, under the right destructive critical reading, point backward to the pre-metaphysical Greek thinking Aristotle brings to a close.14 Here, he seems to be invoking Aristotle’s potency and, 14

On the method by which this ambivalence is uncovered and as it were activated, see my forthcoming monograph, The Destruction of Aristotle: Reading the Tradition with the Early Heidegger (Evanston: Northwestern University Press).

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in a more literal and revealing translation, ‘being-at-work’ in order to trouble the impression that a being is by sitting there, present and available before us. Consider this actual river birch outside the window before me. If we see the tree as a being that, in its actualization, is putting its material potency to work and living as a tree, it points us back toward that grounding potency, inaccessible as such, that the tree is at the moment actualizing or putting-into-work in being a tree. If I could really suffer that dynamism in the being of the tree, and resist freezing it into a present thing possessing certain properties (a certain height, a certain number of main trunks, a certain rusty hue to the papery bark, etc.), I would come to experience the tree as an ongoing event of actualization, a thing for which being what it is entails a dynamic emerging from a subtending and eclipsed ground and presenting itself as a river birch. If I then understood my very “humanity” (my being as Dasein) to involve the receiving of that dynamic emergence into appearance, that event of Being, and I managed to inhabit that site and belong to it, so to speak, that would be a “being homely in becoming unhomely.” It is not a making Being homely, for Being retains its uncanny absencing from our understanding. But it is a becoming homely, a coming to be at home, in this being unhomely. In order to shelter and bring to language the belonging together of Being and human being, poetizing is apparently the saying that stages this play of presencing and absencing, appearing and withdrawal, accessibility and inaccessibility. Heidegger himself gives us precious little indication, however, of the precise manner in which Sophocles’ tragic poetizing text does this.15 Indeed, only a single indication. In the course of addressing some general questions about how the chorus relates to the dramatic scenes of the play, and how the “content” introduced in the choral odes either does or does not relate to the “content” of the plot, he writes:

15

I suspect Heidegger would respond here that, although formally this is the task of poetizing in the tradition born among the Greeks, passed down to us and still binding us to them, the specific techniques or methods by which that happens are peculiar to each linguistic, cultural, historical context, as well as to individual poets, and that it would thus be deeply misguided to look for general rules applying to how poetry accomplishes its essential task. Fair enough. But even on the mechanics of how the text of Sophocles’ Antigone manages to stage this event of Being as emergence and the becoming homely in being unhomely as a poetic saying, Heidegger says quite little. He has to pull his conception of Being as uncanny out of the second choral ode with not a little interpretive effort, but there must be something more that characterizes poetic saying as such for Heidegger than its being resistant to our interpretive efforts.

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[W]hat is misunderstood as general content here is the singularity of the telling of the singular deinon and its essential ground, and this appears in the singular figure of Antigone. She is the purest poem. (GA53: 149/119)

It seems to me, here, that Heidegger reveals something profound about the “saying” of Sophocles’ Antigone, but that he does so somewhat in spite of himself. Heidegger has made, in the interpretation rehearsed above, the double claim that the poetic essence of Sophocles’ Antigone lies in its sheltering of the ethos of human being (Being as the play of presencing and absencing of beings) and that it does so by staging the event of becoming homely in being unhomely. This is deeply illuminating and compelling as an interpretation of Sophocles’ play and of Greek tragedy in general, to my mind. However, what Heidegger does not notice, and seems quite unreceptive to, is the fact that the play accomplishes precisely this not only in the choral ode’s presentation of the human condition, but more poetically still by way of its muthos, its ‘plot, story,’ that is, in the narrative arc in which Antigone’s tragic fate plays out. Let us consider here some of Aristotle’s basic observations about how tragedy functions in the context of his handbook for composing poetry, the Poetics.16 ˇ

The whole [of tragedy] has spectacles [ὄψεις], character [ἦθος], story [μῦθος], diction [λέξις], lyric [μέλος], and thought [διάνοια], but most important among these is the bringing together of things [ἡ τῶν πραγμάτων σύστασις]. For tragedy is the mimesis [μίμησις] not of human beings, but of praxis and of life [πράξεως καὶ βίου]. (Poet. 1450a13–17)

Putting pragmata or ‘things, deeds’ together into a whole is how tragedy accomplishes its essential function for Aristotle, which is the mimesis of human praxis, the ‘goal-directed action’ by which human beings principally live out their lives and accomplish their being. This is why Aristotle declares that the plot is “the first principle [ἀρχὴ] and, as it were, soul of tragedy” (Poet. 1450a37). ˇ

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In the final chapter of The Time of Life: Heidegger and Ethos, Will McNeill offers a much more robust discussion of how Aristotle’s presentation of tragic poetry in the Poetics relates to Heidegger’s claim about the Antigone sheltering the human ethos in a primordial way. Indeed, McNeill focuses attention on the element of the katharsis of fear and pity, showing that it is in part by way of this cathartic transformation of our attunement that tragedy situates us in “the site of our originary dwelling, our ethos, transporting us into a sense of worldly presence attuned to the approach of the unfamiliar and the unforeseen” (William McNeill, The Time of Life: Heidegger and Ethos [Albany: SUNY Press, 2012], 190). ˇ

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One question the reader of Aristotle might ask: What is it about human praxis and life that we learn through their imitation on the tragic stage, that we have not yet learned sufficiently by our inevitable human firstperson participation in acting and living? To my mind, Heidegger has a very satisfying response: The ethos of human action and life, Being as the self-eclipsing dwelling place in which beings emerge and present themselves to us human beings. Agreed! But with Aristotle we would have to insist that Being thus understood is brought to language in performing the play on stage. Indeed, the audience comes to suffer this unhomely abode most powerfully when, by partly identifying with the tragic protagonist and immersing ourselves in their praxis as the plot unfolds, we undergo a moment of peripeteia or ‘reversal’ and anagnôrisis or ‘recognition.’ ˇ

Among all the means by which tragedy turns the soul [ψυχαγωγεῖ] [of the audience member], the greatest are in fact parts of the plot [τοῦ μύθου μέρη], in particular reversals and recognitions [περιπέτιεαι καὶ ἀναγνωρίσεις]. (Poet. 1450a33–34)

Scholars have struggled to find the moment of reversal and recognition for the figure of Antigone, which has been a source of consternation, given the evident greatness of Sophocles in Aristotle’s estimation. I would argue, however, and have argued extensively elsewhere,17 that these do indeed occur in the play and that they occur toward its end, just before Antigone’s sentence is carried out (Ant. 925–934). Now, Heidegger clearly understands choral odes in general to be, as he says, the “essential middle” of tragedy, that which “poetically gathers around it the whole of the poetic work” (GA53: 148/119). No doubt thinking of Aristotle’s own account of the sixth-century BCE historical genesis of tragedy in the Poetics (Poet. 1449a9–26), and perhaps thinking of Nietzsche’s radical interpretation of the chorus as the Dionysian “womb” of Apollonian drama (BT §8), Heidegger writes: [T]he poetic truth of a tragedy, that which is said before all else and for everything else, is said in the choral ode. The chorus is not simply the origin of tragedy in terms of its “developmental history.” (GA53: 148/119)

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For this reason, though Heidegger finds the sheltering of the ethos really only in one of the choral odes, that is not a problem with the interpretation.

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See Sean D. Kirkland, “Speed and Tragedy in Cocteau and Sophocles,” in Interrogating Antigone in Postmodern Philosophy and Criticism, ed. S. E. Wilmer and A. Zukauskaite (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 313–328.

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Of course, it can really come as no surprise to us that Heidegger’s interpretive gaze is drawn to the gnomic utterances of the Antigone’s choral ode rather than the unfolding of the narrative. After all, attending to the concrete steps in a plot, tracing out an action and its various intended and unintended consequences, digging into the subtleties of character development – none of this is really Heidegger’s forte as a reader of poetic and literary works. However thrilling his interpretations often are, his interpretive posture is that of a safecracker facing a vault with an elaborate lock protecting a cache of priceless gems, and those gems are always concepts. The concepts Heidegger finds in poetry and literature are admittedly almost always quite unorthodox, sometimes even wildly original. Nonetheless, when one reads a poem or a novel with Heidegger, he seems most interested in removing each gemstone from the dusty hold, polishing it, and inspecting it for its own inherent quality and brilliance. Consider “the foreign” in Hölderlin (GA52: 188–193/ 161–164), “the open” in Rilke (GA54: 225–243/151–163), “the word” in Stefan George (GA12: 215–223/OWL 146–154), “the nothing” in Knut Hamsun (GA40: 29/26–27), etc. In any case, if it is the plot of Sophocles’ Antigone that accomplishes precisely what Heidegger sees as the very essence of poetizing, we cannot be shocked that the interpretive work necessary to reveal as much is left to us. Heidegger does give the hint above that Antigone is herself the purest poem. We need only ask now, how so? In that she undergoes the becoming homely in being unhomely. But what is altogether missing from Heidegger’s own Antigone is any hint of becoming. I would argue that, indeed, she does eventually come “to suffer this unhomely [παθεῖν τὸ δεινὸν τοῦτο]” (Ant. l.96), but this only happens toward the end of the play, when she loses her self-certainty. Heidegger himself remarks on Antigone’s self-certainty in the opening scene as she attempts to enlist the help of her sister, Ismene, in burying Polynices: “Antigone knows that no one can take her decision away from her and that she will not flinch in her resolve” (GA53: 127/102).18 In this discussion, Heidegger sees this as the steely resolve of someone awed and 18

Indeed, in diagnosing a certain presumed certainty about history that would allow modern “self-consciousness” great confidence in its political activities, Heidegger describes in the following terms the kind of attitude Sophocles quite clearly attributes to Antigone in this opening scene: “The fundamental guise of such certainty that provides its measure is the surveyability and indubitability of everything that can be calculated and planned. That consciousness that wishes to be certain of history must therefore be a consciousness that plans and acts” (GA53: 117/94).

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respectful before the uncanny. However, one might ask, is such inflexible, unquestioning certainty really the way one receives the unhomely and becomes homely in relation to it? I think not, and Heidegger thinks not as well, as we shall see. Indeed, Sophocles takes pains to emphasize not only Antigone’s certainty here in the opening scene, but also the rushing pace that her certainty allows and even demands. The literary critic and theorist George Steiner remarks on “the crowding, almost breathless, insistence and imperiousness of Antigone’s appeal” to Ismene.19 We must note that, in this exchange, Antigone is not only intolerant of her sister’s having a different opinion as to how to respond to this fraught and complex situation; she cannot countenance even Ismene’s pausing to take any time at all to deliberate and decide. When Ismene counsels that “to act excessively is mindless [τὸ γὰρ περισσὰ πράσσειν οὐκ ἔχει νοῦν οὐδένα]” (Ant. 67–68), Antigone responds in the very next line: I will not command it of you. And if you should later wish to take action, you would not be welcome to act alongside me [εἰ θέλοις ἔτι πράσσειν, ἐμοῦ γ’ ἂν ἡδέως δρῴης μέτα]. (Ant. 69–70)

Antigone’s stated position here is that, even if someone comes to the proper decision eventually, having paused at all to deliberate is unforgiveable. In fact, Ismene will come to regret her decision and ask to “sail beside you through your suffering” (Ant. 541), at which point Antigone will reject her late-materializing allegiance (Ant. 536–560). At these points in the play, Sophocles is very clearly associating the figure of Antigone with utterly unquestioning self-righteous certainty and headlong action, however much he also wants us to respect her strength and the nobility of her cause. For her, what the past demands of her and what the future holds are perfectly apparent and already indubitably grasped when she walks on the stage. And it is precisely this rushing pace of action that the second choral ode then associates with the ordinary way of being in the world for human beings. Humans see the world as something that can and should be exhaustively mapped and controlled, demystified, and placed in our control. There are no limits to our power and our understanding when it comes to beings. We pounce upon everything with “speech and thought swift as the wind [καὶ φθέγμα και ἀνεμόεν/ φρόνημα]” (Ant. 354), and there is a certain temporality that belongs to this swiftness. The world of beings 19

George Steiner, Antigones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 85.

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before us seems so fully revealed, so completely understood, that we even “approach no future thing wayless” (Ant. 360). Just like Antigone, in our actions we presume to know what the past we are inheriting meant and what the future toward which our actions are directed will bring – this blind presumption of mastery belongs to human praxis as such. As Goethe will famously observe more than two millennia later, “The one who acts is always without conscience.”20 There is then a clear note that this industry and mastering attitude is not an unambiguous positive. The ode tells us that: ˇ

Possessed of a machinating techne, something wiser than one could hope, [humans] move sometimes toward the bad, other times toward the good. [σοφόν τι τὸ μαχανόεν τέχνας ὑπὲρ ἐλπίδ’ ἔχων τοτὲ μὲν κακόν, ἄλλοτ’ ἐπ’ ἐσθλὸν ἕρπει] (Ant. 365–367)

What Heidegger does not perceive here is that, while this is indeed a critique of how human beings generally are in the world, their presumption of an exhaustive understanding and consequent headlong mastering activity, it is also a critique specifically of Antigone,21 as a paradigmatic human being in this respect. Indeed, she presumes to know not only the world of human action, but what the divine wants from us, with perfect clarity – she is utterly confident that her actions conform with “the laws of the gods, unwritten and unfailing, living not now nor yesterday only, but always” (Ant. 454–455). This is indeed Sophocles’ portrait of someone who is utterly at home in a homely world, all beings, mortals, and even immortals completely present and accessible to her such that she can act without hesitation. This is not yet someone who is at home in being unhomely. The ode then points ahead to one moment at the play’s end that will bring Antigone to the limit of her homely world. The chorus tells us that though our machinations and technical means seem to allow us to master everything that is, the entirety of Being, there is one thing that still sets a limit – “from Hades we can devise no escape [Ἅιδα μόνον/ φεῦξιν οὐκ ἐπάξεται]” (Ant. 360–361). On the one hand, this moment in the ode marks a recognition of

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Schriften zur Literatur. Maximen und Reflexionen, ed. E. Trunz, vol. XII, Goethes Werke Bd XII: Hamburger Ausgabe in 14 Bänden (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1998), 399. The critique of thoughtless, unquestioning activity and presumed mastery is surely directed every bit as much at the tyrant who is carrying out the punishment of our tragic protagonist, but the play is not, after all, called Creon.

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the fact that, although we all face death at every moment and our finitude defines us inescapably and essentially, we do not live toward death. Mortals, in their energetic mastery of their world and their constant industry, live in denial of their own finitude, of the limit of what appears to us. Only when the specter of death intrudes and towers over us, uncanny and disorienting, are we forced to confront the limitation of our understanding and our power. On the other hand, again situating the ode with the narrative arc of the title character, this points ahead to the moment in the play when Antigone will face the limit of what can appear to us in our ordinary, everyday mastering mode. Only then, for the first time, will she come to truly pathein to deinon or ‘suffer the unhomely.’ In her final exchange with Creon, already sentenced, Antigone comes to stand before the prospect of being entombed, of entering Hades itself. She has stoically accepted her fate throughout the play as something that is already accomplished – “My soul died long ago [ἡ δ’ ἐμὴ ψυχὴ πάλαι τέθνηκεν]” (Ant. 559–560). But now, for the very first time in the play, we hear Antigone utter the Greek word ei, the ‘if,’ the ‘maybe,’ the ‘perhaps’ concerning what she knows to be true and on the basis of which she is acting.22 She says: If then this [my being punished] is what is pleasing to the gods, I would acknowledge my error, as one having suffered [ἀλλ’ εἰ μὲν οὖν τάδ’ ἐστὶν ἐν θεοῖς καλά, παθόντες ἂν ξυγγνοῖμεν ἡμαρτηκότες]. (Ant. 925–926)

Sophocles, further, makes sure that we note this shift, for he marks for us very deliberately Antigone’s now hesitating praxis in her final scene. As her guards lead her off to the tomb in which she will be enclosed, Creon watches and remarks, “Those ones leading her away there will regret the extreme slowness with which they are moving [τοῖσιν ἄγουσιν κλαύμαθ’ υπάρξει βραδυτῆτος ὕπερ]” (Ant. 931–932). Antigone and her guards now move along at a labored pace, all delaying under her just uttered ‘perhaps,’ confronting the limit of human finitude. Antigone responds then, “that word there comes as close to death as possible [θανάτου τοῦτ’

Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 2005), 29, 67. Jacques Derrida refers to something like this as the ‘peut etre,’ or literally the ‘it can be,’ in his Politics of Friendship. He calls it “another way of addressing oneself to the possible,” according to which one need not face what is utterly decided and projected on the basis of the past, but rather confronts what “must remain at one and the same time as undecidable – and therefore as decisive – as the future itself.” For Derrida, this would mark a properly open and truthful way of bringing the future qua future to language. That is, it would speak the future as the ‘arrivant,’ as what is precisely in approaching and this in not yet being present. ˇ

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ἐγγυτάτω τοὔπος ἀφῖκται]” (Ant. 933–934). Might we suggest here that the epos or ‘word’ in question here is ‘slowness,’ perhaps, and that it is in slowing down that the human comes as close as possible to what is in excess of the sum of present beings, the homely world? Antigone, no longer certain and no longer in haste, does not freeze entirely. She is not completely incognizant of the world around her, nor is she completely incapable of action. But in light of the limit that the spectre of death has introduced, bearing up under her ‘perhaps,’ she knows her world differently and acts differently, suggesting what exactly it might mean for someone to, in Heidegger’s striking phrase, “become homely in being unhomely.” And here we can join Heidegger again, for he indicates in his lectures the kind of questioning knowing of beings and hesitating action among beings that might be provoked by a poetizing preservation of the human ethos. In the last line of the choral ode, the chorus declares their desire to never share their hearth with the hubristic machinating human they have conjured up, one unfit for life in the polis. They go on there to hope as well that their own phronein or ‘thinking’ will not come to be like such an individual’s. Heidegger asks here what kind of thinking is proper to the world of present beings now seen in light of the absencing ground of their presencing, Being itself. He writes: ˇ

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[I]t calls itself a phronein, a pondering and meditating that comes from the phren, that is, from the ‘heart,’ from the innermost middle of the human essence [Wesen] itself . . . If this “hearty” knowing is an intimating [ahnen], then we must never regard such intimating as an opining that floats around in unclarity. It has its own lucidity and decisiveness and yet remains fundamentally different from the self-assuredness of calculative reasoning. (GA53: 134/107–108)

Heidegger is finding here a different way of thinking and knowing being poetized by Sophocles, one that is at home in the unhomely dwelling place of the human. He notes that the chorus uses the word phronein, and he capitalizes on the sense that this way of thinking would be centered neither in the nous or ‘intellect,’ nor the logos or ‘calculating reason,’ but in the phren, the ‘breast’ or ‘heart.’ It is vital that we do not imagine this to be merely an emotional way of thinking. Emotion is always something merely subjective, even if it is granted a certain improved status when we speak of the “intelligence of emotions.”23 ˇ

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Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

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In phronein Heidegger is finding a pathetic knowing, a way of thinking about beings in their emerging forth and appearing to us that is able to paschein or ‘suffer’ that appearance with the play of presencing and abscencing by which it occurs. This is thinking from the “heart” as “the innermost middle of the human essence,” insofar as the human is constituted in its Wesen, in our essencing and being what we are, through the appearing of beings to us and the withdrawal of Being. Thinking about the world of beings and suffering that absencing within the presencing of beings is not, as a result, merely confused, a waffling about in oblivion. It has “its own lucidity and decisiveness,” but these are other than the presumed certainty of the technical reasoning with which humans generally pounce on beings and set about in haste to master them. One does not grasp and know beings simply, but rather always thinks them in the mode of ahnen, usually ‘guessing, suspecting,’ but also crucially ‘foreseeing.’ This last meaning conveys a sense of knowing something that is explicitly withdrawn from presence. One intimates something in ahnen in that one sees it before it becomes fully and completely present – one does not overcome the withdrawal and imagine the thing in perfect presence, but knows something while continuing to grant it its withdrawal. In this mode, thinking beings in their relation to Being, as the poetically sheltered but always withdrawn dwelling place in which they present themselves to us, we would hold their presencing together with the absencing of their ground and think them accordingly. And this way of thinking beings would accompany a certain way of acting in the world. Antigone’s slowness in her final scene points to a kind of hesitating that is not the simple opposite of acting. Heidegger writes: [B]eing able to wait [warten] is not an actionless or thoughtless letting things come and go, it is not a closing of one’s eyes in the face of some dark foreboding. Being able to wait is a standing that has already leapt ahead, a standing within what is indestructible, to whose neighborhood desolation [Verwüstung] belongs like a valley to a mountain. (GA53: 68/55)

Antigone, as she carries her self-sacrificing deed toward its conclusion and enters her tomb, seems to exhibit this warten or ‘waiting’ in action. It is not merely a matter of pace, though this too points to something profound in Sophocles’ play, as we have seen. It is more deeply a matter of how the action situates itself in its world. When one acts among beings as present and fully available entities, one can proceed in haste and hope in principle to engineer a certain mastery. When one acts among beings

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as beings whose presencing is grounded in the absencing of Being, indestructible because not a being among others but the very source of beings at all, this absencing imposes itself on one’s action and requires a waiting, a hesitating. It does not insist on paralysis, but it does situate one who resides near to it in an event of Verwüstung, a ‘becoming desert, a desertification.’ This is, to be sure, an unhomely site for the human being, and hesitation belongs to action when one becomes homely there. Though I would suggest that, according to his discussion in the lecture course, it is not clear that Heidegger understood entirely how it was the case, he was right to insist that Antigone herself is the purest poem. In her narrative arc, in the unfolding of the muthos or ‘plot,’ we see her pass from being utterly and completely at home in her world, possessed of perfect self-certainty and unquestioning haste, to confronting the limits of what appears to her, the limits of the human world, and thereby suffering the deinon, the unhomely. As we follow her through the tragic drama of Sophocles’ play and its saying of the plot, we come to inhabit her ethos, her dwelling place with her. We too “become homely in being unhomely,” the event of becoming that was, for Heidegger, to be poetized in Greek poetry. ˇ

Bibliography Aristotle. Ethica Nicomachea. Ed. I. Bywater. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1894. Poetics. Ed. Stephen Halliwell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Politica. Ed. W. D. Ross. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957. Brogan, Walter. Heidegger and Aristotle: The Twofoldness of Being. Albany: SUNY Press, 2006. Cornford, Francis. Principium Sapientiae: The Origins of Greek Philosophical Thought. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1971. The Unwritten Philosophy and Other Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950. Derrida, Jacques. The Politics of Friendship. Tr. George Collins. London: Verso, 1997. Geiman, Clare Pearson. “Heidegger’s Antigones.” In A Companion to Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics, 161–182. Ed. Richard Polt and Gregory Fried. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Schriften zur Literatur. Maximen und Reflektionen. In Goethes Werke Bd. XII: Hamburger Ausgabe in 14 Bänden. Ed. E. Trunz. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1998. Günther, Hans-Christian. “Heidegger und Sophocles.” In Heidegger und die Antike, 174–218. Ed. H.-C. Günther and A. Rengakos. Munich: Beck, 2006.

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Heidegger, Martin. Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event). Tr. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. (GA65) (CP) “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking.” Tr. Joan Stambaugh. In Basic Writings, 369–391. Ed. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. (GA14) (EPTT) Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister.” Tr. William McNeill and Julia Davis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (GA53) (HHI), 1996. An Introduction to Metaphysics. Tr. Ralph Manheim. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959. (GA40) (IM) “Letter on Humanism.” Tr. Frank A. Capuzzi and J. Glenn Gray. In Basic Writings, 189–242. Ed. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. (GA9) (LH) Nietzsche. Volume II: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same. Ed. and tr. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper & Row, 1984. On the Way to Language. Tr. Peter D. Hertz. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. (GA12) (OWL) Parmenides. Tr. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. (GA54) (P) “The Question concerning Technology.” Tr. William Lovitt. In Basic Writings, 287–317. Ed. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. (GA7) (QCT) Hesiod. Theogonia. Ed. Friedrich Solmsen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. Hölderlin, Friedrich. “Anmerkungen zur Antigone.” In Sophocles, Tragödien, 249–257. Hyland, Drew A. “First of All Came Chaos.” In Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays, 9–22. Ed. D. A. Hyland and J. P. Manoussakis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Kirk, G. S., Raven, J. E., and Schofield, Malcolm. The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical Edition with a Selection of Texts, 2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Kirkland, Sean D. The Destruction of Aristotle: Reading the Tradition with the Early Heidegger. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, forthcoming. “Heidegger and Greek Philosophy.” In The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger, 77–86. Ed. François Raffoul and Eric S. Nelson. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. “Speed and Tragedy in Cocteau and Sophocles.” In Interrogating Antigone in Postmodern Philosophy and Criticism, 313–328. Ed. S. E. Wilmer and A. Zukauskaite. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. “The Temporality of Phronesis in the Nicomachean Ethics.” Ancient Philosophy 27.1 (2007): 127–140. Krell, David Farrell. “Introductory Essay to ‘The Origin of the Work of Art.’” In Basic Writings, 144–147. Ed. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. McNeill, William. The Fate of Phenomenology: Heidegger’s Legacy. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019. ˇ

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“The Hölderlin Lectures.” In The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger, 223–235. Ed. François Raffoul and Eric S. Nelson. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. The Time of Life: Heidegger and Ethos. Albany: SUNY Press, 2006. Miller, Mitchell H., Jr. “‘First of All’: On the Semantics and Ethics of Hesiod’s Cosmogony.” Ancient Philosophy 21.2 (2001): 251–276. “La Logique implicite dans la cosmogonie d’Hésiode.” Tr. Louis Pamplume. Revue de metaphysique et de morale 82 (1977): 433–456. Mitchell, Andrew J. The Fourfold: Reading the Late Heidegger. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015. Moore, Ian Alexander. Eckhart,Heidegger, and the Imperative of Releasement. Albany: SUNY Press, 2019. Naas, Michael. “Keeping Homer’s Word: Heidegger and the Epic of Truth.” In The Presocratics after Heidegger, 73–100. Ed. David C. Jacobs. Albany: SUNY Press, 1999. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Tr. Ronald Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Nussbaum, Martha C. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Ó Murchadha, Felix. “The Political and Ethical Significance of Waiting: Heidegger and the Legacy of Thinking.” In Critical Communities and Aesthetic Practices: Dialogues with Tony O’Connor on Society, Art, and Friendship, 245–262. Ed. F. Halsall, J. Jansen, and S. Murphy. New York: Springer Publishing, 2012. de Romilly, Jacqueline. Le Temps dans la tragédie grecque. Paris: Vrin, 1971. Schadewaldt, Wolfgang. “Einleitung.” In Sophocles, Tragödien, 9–95. Sophocles. Antigone. Tr. Reginald Gibbons and Charles Segal. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Sophoclis Fabulae. Ed. H. Lloyd-Jones and N. G. Wilson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Tragödien: Oedipus/Antigone. Ed. Wolfgang Schadewalt. Tr. Friedrich Hölderlin. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Bücherei KG, 1957. Steiner, George. Antigones. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. ˇ

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Playing with Shadows in Heidegger’s Reading of Greek Tragedy Encountering Oedipus, Antigone, and (Absent) Medea Silvia Benso

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Heidegger and the Shadows of Greek Literature

Heidegger’s engagement with Greek literature is primarily a confrontation with the world of Greek poetry (rather than, for example, historiography or comedy). Specifically, it develops in relation to the world of Greek tragedy (as opposed to epic or lyric, for example). Even more precisely, it unfolds as a dialogue with Sophocles’ tragic work (as opposed to the works of Aeschylus or Euripides). In this predilection, Heidegger displays his loyalty to Nietzsche and Hölderlin, possibly Heidegger’s most revered poet. Thus, the engagement with the world of Greek literature is also part of Heidegger’s ongoing dialogue with Hölderlin and Nietzsche. It is within the complexities of these affiliations (and of Hölderlin’s and Nietzsche’s own association with the Greeks) that Heidegger’s engagement ought to be framed and understood – certainly a daunting task for any scholarly project, and certainly a task beyond the scope and limits of what can be addressed here.1 Heidegger devotes major attention to some select passages from Sophocles’ tragedies primarily in two contexts: the 1935 lecture course An Introduction to Metaphysics, where he discusses Oedipus Rex and the first chorus from Sophocles’ Antigone, and the 1942 lecture course Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” where he engages in a new reading of the Antigone’s first choral ode. I will turn to a more detailed discussion of these passages shortly. 1

With respect to Heidegger’s use of the poets, and especially Hölderlin, see Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert and Richard Taft, “Heidegger and Hölderlin: The Over-usage of Poets in an Impoverished Time,” Research in Phenomenology, no. 19 (1989): 59–88. Of interest is also Dennis Schmidt, On Germans & Other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).

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Why does Heidegger – as well as Hölderlin and Nietzsche – turn to the Greeks and, more particularly, to Greek tragedy? Ultimately, the shared concern of the three thinkers is a desire to circumvent what they perceive as the alienated and alienating conditions of the period they live in – an age of decadence, Nietzsche would say – in the quest for an alternative, more genuine way of relating to life and its possibilities.2 The turn is not a simple return, though, and the goal is not a nostalgic or antiquarian re-enactment of a time long gone. For Heidegger, the Greeks are neither the irremediably lost world of the Romantics nor a model of perfection to repeat and re-enact in a purely mimetic way, as was the case for the Neoclassicists. Rather, the task is the future as the destinal opening of possibilities that the past contains and inspires but left unattended, unrealized, and unthematized. The possible path for an alternative history to that of Western calculative metaphysics and its Gestell begins there where the current course has started, that is, in Greek thinking – not in Plato or Aristotle’s philosophies, which already suffer from a metaphysical, productivistic, techno-scientistic, and utilitarian understanding of being, but in pre-Socratic thinking, in whose proximity Greek tragedy stands and resonates.3 There is no doubt that, albeit focused on the history of being, Heidegger’s project is highly political even when Heidegger himself no longer partakes in any party’s politics, at least after 1933.4 What Heidegger pursues is a project of identity formation, of building a cultural (even before nationalistic) identity based on appropriating (yet without complete assimilation or identification) that which, as a matter of fact, was profoundly alien to the majority of the German people but very familiar to the German intellectual elites since the times of Winckelmann, Goethe, Schiller, and the Romantics, namely, the world

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See for example C. R. Bambach, Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). In this sense, Heidegger’s interest in Greek tragedy proceeds in parallel with his readings of Anaximander, Parmenides, and Heraclitus in various lecture courses he held during the war period. Heidegger lectured on Anaximander during the winter semester 1941; the winter semester of 1942–43 was devoted to Parmenides; and the summer semester of 1943 was devoted to Heraclitus. We will not address the thorny issue of Heidegger’s continued support of Nazi ideology after the time when he formally resigned from his post as Rector of Freiburg University, nor will we tackle the controversial issue of his antisemitism as disclosed in the recent publication of the Black Notebooks. On these topics, see, among others, M. de Beistegui, Heidegger & the Political (London: Routledge, 1998); and Gregory Fried, Heidegger’s Polemos: From Being to Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).

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of ancient Greek poets. The goal, which Heidegger shares with Hölderlin, is “the possibility of a passage through the foreign, and thereby, the possibility of a return home into one’s own, and thereby that which is one’s own itself” (GA53: 68/54). The cultural and intellectual venture has to do with how to be or become good or, rather, better, Germans, how to rejuvenate and reinvigorate one’s Germanness, as it were, via the Greeks. This implies bypassing (and sanitizing) the impurities and contaminations with which the Roman and, moreover, Christian cultures have stained the originary Greek attitude toward being and have thereby prepared the shift toward the epistemological models that have ultimately produced the excesses of modern technology and mechanization we currently observe.5 Due to these multiple twists and turns, Heidegger’s approach to the Greeks is overall highly peculiar – in terms of Greek authors and textual passages he favors as well as in terms of his translations of Greek terms. Heidegger’s interest in the Greek world, language, and poetry is not dictated by philological any more than by historical, psychological, sociological, or anthropological accuracy. Nor is his concern of a poetic or literary nature either. As he says, “we learn the Greek language so that the concealed essence of our own historical commencement can find its way into the clarity of our word” (GA53: 81/66). What Heidegger is interested in is the legacy that the Greek world, in the specific, Greek tragedy, can bestow us in terms of the Greek disclosure of being. His preoccupation is ontological. What he searches for in tragic thought is a nonmetaphysical way of thinking about being and the possibility of a renewal of our own (German but also contemporary) way of relating to being. Heidegger never thematizes at length what he understands Greek tragedy and the tragic to be. In the course of his thinking, he makes several ambivalent references to the tragic. At times, he disavows it 5

This is that which Heidegger names das Gestell and often associates with Americanism (Bolshevism being also a derivative thereof ). In Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” Heidegger assimilates Americanism with the prevalence of quantity over quality, and identifies Americanism with “the properly dangerous configuration of measurelessness, because it emerges in the form of the democratic bourgeoisie and mixed with Christendom, and all this in an atmosphere of decided ahistoricality” (GA53: 86/70). That is, Americanism, in Heidegger’s eyes, is characterized, as it were, by the qualities of excessiveness, fascination with data, numerical analysis, and arithmetical (rather than differential) equality, coupled with an absolutized denial of historical factors that bring to the current conditions. As troublesome as this may be, the picture seems a pretty accurate portrait of a great part of the current North American, anti-humanist culture.

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because of the psychological, moral, or aesthetic readings of it (such as in Aristotle’s theory of katharsis or Nietzsche’s heroism of the will to power) that incorporate the tragic into the history of metaphysics Heidegger wishes to overcome. At other times, he endorses the tragic as one of the places where the possibilities for an overcoming of metaphysics in fact open up. In his second lecture course on Nietzsche, presented at Freiburg University in 1937 and devoted to Nietzsche’s notion of the eternal recurrence of the same, Heidegger comments on the section of Nietzsche’s Gay Science that is also reproduced mostly unaltered in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and marks Zarathustra’s return among human beings from the solitude of the mountains – a section appropriately titled Incipit Tragoedia. There, Heidegger remarks that “the ‘only thing’ that happens in tragedy is the downgoing” (GA6.1: 251/vol. II: 31). A similar comment is made in Mindfulness, another text from around the same years (1938–39), where, in a section devoted to the history of being, Heidegger writes that “the ownmost of ‘the tragic’ consists in the beginning being the ground of the ‘going under,’ and the ‘going under’ not being the ‘end’ but rather the rounding of the beginning” (GA66: 223/197). There has been much discussion, by Heidegger as well as by his commentators, in order to understand what such “down-going” and “goingunder” mean. In the passage from Nietzsche’s Incipit Tragoedia Heidegger quotes, Zarathustra’s going-under implies that he “must descend to the depths” where human beings live, in a reminiscence of another descent, the one through which, in Plato’s most political work, the Republic, Socrates descends to the Piraeus. What the confrontation with Greek tragedy both offers and compels Heidegger to, I argue, is a descent into the depths of being, an exposure to shadows as integral (and not accessory, tributary, or opposed) to being, an encounter with a world where being is not a clear, transparent, and regimented notion as in the metaphysical tradition that has rigidified concepts and truth into objectivity, correctness, fixed entities, and simple and stable presences. Rather, being is the experience of an emergence into appearance that carries with itself its doubles, ambiguities, obscurities, and shadows – not as opposites, but as part of the shared structure of emergence. The shadows reveal both that from which being emerges, but also the other side of being, its limits, its limitations, and its possibilities that are left behind yet not lost in their essential character. As Heidegger writes, still commenting on Nietzsche’s Incipit Tragoedia, “tragedy prevails where the terrifying is affirmed as the opposite that is intrinsically proper to the beautiful. Greatness and great heights subsist together with the depths and with

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what is terrifying . . . Affirmation of the convergence of these opposites is tragic insight” (GA6.1: 247/vol. II: 29). Playing with shadows – that is what Greek tragedy sets on stage and represents for Heidegger’s going-under to visit the possibilities of/for the (new) beginning. Heidegger’s playing with shadows, however, occurs as a confrontation with shadows that both permeate and are distant from the German culture Heidegger’s identity project is intent in invigorating. The Greeks are, for Heidegger, the shadows that are both close and distant, familiar and unfamiliar, to be retrieved and yet irretrievable. Even though one may wish that they be retrievable, they can only be partly recovered because they are the double origin both of the current metaphysical, technological situation to be overcome and of a possible other beginning. Thus, the conversation with Greek tragedy is also a confrontation with the relation of sameness and otherness, identity and difference, the familiar and the unfamiliar, the native and the foreign(er) or stranger, homeliness and displacement.6 Whether Heidegger takes full notice of the multiple possibilities that the world of shadows revealed by Greek tragedies offers him is a question that we wish to raise. The final answer, attained through an analysis of the conceptual work done by three great shadow characters in Greek tragedy, namely, Oedipus, Antigones, and Medea, will have to be in the negative.7 In the chiaroscuro that the confrontation between Heidegger’s philosophy and Greek tragedy sets on stage, Greek tragedy has still more shadows to offer than what Heidegger is willing to reckon with, I argue. This means that Heidegger’s thinking is neither the nor at the end, when it comes to Greek tragedy. Stated otherwise, the engagement between Heidegger’s philosophy and Greek literature, especially tragedy, must continue beyond Heidegger himself.

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The question of the relation between literature (understood as literary works) and theory (that is, possible political, philosophical, and social uses of literary works) is addressed, with explicit reference to Sophocles’ Antigone, for example in Charles Shepherdson, “Antigone: The Work of Literature and the History of Subjectivity,” in Bound by the City: Greek Tragedy, Sexual Difference, and the Formation of the Polis, ed. Denise McCoskey and Emily Zakin (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009), 47–80. It will not be possible, here, to go through all details of the complex, nuanced, idiosyncratic interpretation of the Greek tragic characters Heidegger offers his reader in his works. Each interpretation deserves a study of its own.

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Oedipus, or Heidegger’s First Descent into the World of Shadows

The first shadow Heidegger encounters in his going-under into the world of Greek tragedy is the figure of Oedipus, whose very existence is marked by multiple shadows. These are the shadow of a degree of knowledge that turns out to be blindness; the shadows of Oedipus’ father and mother who have abandoned him; the shadows of a king and queen that shelter an additional, secret identity; and even Oedipus’ own shadows both when he is at the peak of his glory as king (an honor that he does not truly deserve) and when he becomes aware of his crime (whose guilt also he does not truly deserve). Ultimately, shadows are what Oedipus chooses for himself as the outcome of the revelation of his own secret, which he can only bear “by putting out his own eyes, i.e., by removing himself from all light, by letting the cloak of night fall round him, and, blind, crying out to the people to open all doors in order that a man may be manifest to them as what he is,” Heidegger writes (GA40: 114/107). Is tragedy, ultimately, a wrestling with shadows? Heidegger’s encounter with Oedipus takes place in the 1935 lecture course Introduction to Metaphysics. Here, Heidegger’s engagement is with Oedipus Rex, understood within the context of “the unity and conflict of being and appearance” which, for the early Greek thinkers, “preserved their original power.” This unity and conflict with their original power were “represented with supreme purity in Greek tragic poetry,” Heidegger claims (GA40: 114/106). Thus, Oedipus’ tragedy does not consist in the fact that, in the end, Oedipus does not prove to be what he initially appeared to be. This would imply that being and appearance (understood as illusion or falsity) were static, objective concepts that can be contraposed to each other in a discrete manner so that the conclusive predicament (Oedipus as murderer of his father, Laius, the former king, and as desecrator of his mother, Queen Jocasta) would be in opposition to and a negation of the initial condition (Oedipus as the savior and lord of the state), which would itself be a concealment and a distortion (a lie) of an even previous state of being. Oedipus’ story is not simply the account of a downfall at the end of which is a resolution, Heidegger claims (GA40: 114/107).8 It is not the abatement of a glorious truth discovered to be an obscure illusion and a 8

In this sense, Oedipus is not a Christian sinner. There is no willful sin committed by Oedipus, nor is there a sudden conversion that redeems him to a previous state of grace. His situation is rather one of hamartia, a crime that is committed unknowingly. Perhaps this is what Heidegger tries to retrieve with the notion of errancy, which he discusses extensively in the 1930 essay “On the Essence of Truth” (GA9).

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dark lie. On the contrary, for Heidegger, the sense of Oedipus’ tragedy – its truth – lies in the very unfolding and passage, “the way,” as Heidegger puts it, “from the radiant beginning to the gruesome end.” In other words, what Oedipus Rex stands for is an understanding of being as becoming, as passing and coming to be, as blooming into appearance. What this tragedy reveals is that, with a word dear to the pre-Socratic thinkers, being is physis: emerging, becoming, passage or, one could say, drama.9 Drama, appearing, is not a matter of peaceful transformations, sublations, or integrations. Rather, it is “one struggle between appearance (concealment and distortion) and unconcealment (being)” (GA40: 114/107). That is, it is a matter of a dynamic relation in which ambiguities are not dissolved but rather maintained. The process of emergence of being, the unveiling of the secret, and the revelation of the glory of truth are the outcome of a gradual process where each stage is conquered “step by step,” Heidegger reminds us (GA40: 114/107). For Oedipus, there is no immediate revelation of being, no sudden disclosure or intuitive enlightenment that does away with all shadows in the brightness of a high-noon, final, and conclusive vision (or theoria) of truth. As we said at the beginning, the disclosure of truth is accompanied by Oedipus’ descent into the world of darkness. Every truth shelters an untruth, every light shelters some darkness, and all being is accompanied by non-being. The passion for being understood in this sense of dynamic relation, of coming to be as appearing – “the struggle for being itself,” Heidegger says – is what Oedipus as an individual ultimately embodies to the highest degree and what Oedipus Rex sets on stage: not as the characteristic of a specific person but as the essential feature of “Greek being-there,” of Greek Dasein (GA40: 114/107). It should be remarked that, here, Oedipus appears as both the unveiler and the unveiled with respect to a way of being and truth that interweaves “being, unconcealment, and appearance.” That is, Oedipus discloses the relational nature of both being and truth, which augment (or diminish) together with the human beings in relation to whom they become manifest. Hermeneutically and in line with his earlier works such as Being and Time, there is no opposition of subject and object, knower and known, agent and patient, or action and passion. Oedipus is both. His own being (as well as the truth) unfolds in the contest – rather than conflict – between components that are never far apart. The passion that penetrates, even desecrates one layer of appearance by unveiling its 9

The notion of physis too is central to Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics; see especially GA40: 15–19/13–17.

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untruth is also the passion that unveils a richer, multi-layered, more complex structure of being and truth. Against what, in subsequent years, Heidegger will call calculative thinking, which is always reductionist thinking, Oedipus’ quest, his questioning and pursuing of being, is the manifestation of a “passion,” Heidegger notes – the “passion for disclosure of being” (GA40: 114/107). Such passion is asserted “radically and wildly,” Heidegger remarks. The disclosure of being implies engagement, commitment, desire, longing, possibly even lust, fury, and violence – in all cases, emotions, feelings, affects, and adventurousness (what the Greeks named tolma, courage or daring), and not only aseptic, uncontaminated thinking, questioning or remembering within the comfort zone of a notion of being understood as stable, fixed, and defined presence. Of tolma, Heidegger writes that it amounts to “undertake the venture of being, non-being, and appearance all at once, i.e. to take upon oneself being-there as a de-cision between being, nonbeing, and appearance” (GA40 121/113). Nevertheless, and in line with the anti-heroic, anti-epic inspiration of Heidegger’s position even in its most decisional moments, Heidegger specifies that “decision means here not human being’s judgement and choice, but a separation in the . . . togetherness of being, unconcealment, appearance, and nonbeing” (GA40 118/110). Oedipus is not a hero motivated by a voluntaristic desire for his own subjective self-assertion or glory. Rather, he is a tragic figure, for whom the passion for the truth implies responding, submitting – mostly unknowingly – to the ontological intrigue that demands untangling. In doing so, Oedipus lets emerge what is, in fact, also his own untruth and shadows. Shadows too have being, and allow for a double manifestation. They enable both being to reveal itself as being and shadows to be revealed as shadows in the shared space of a joint appearing. Will Heidegger’s encounter with Oedipus and his shadows bring the shadow of passion and the passion of shadows into Heidegger’s own thought as a legacy of, and a testimony to, his going-under to encounter Greek tragedy? Will Heidegger allow Oedipus and Greek tragedy to disentangle the shadows that haunt his own thinking? How will Heidegger subject himself (pathei) and respond to such shadows?

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Antigone, or the Second Descent into the World of Shadows

In traditional interpretations, the shadow of passion pervades the second character Heidegger encounters in his confrontation with Greek tragedy:

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Antigone, the protagonist of Sophocles’ eponymous tragedy. Heidegger engages with the play Antigone on two occasions. The first is the 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics, where he produces a detailed (albeit controversial) commentary on the first choral ode (lines 332–375) of the tragedy, the so-called Ode to Man. The second is in the 1942 lecture course on Hölderlin’s hymn “Der Ister,” which opens with a quotation of Antigone’s invocation to the men of her paternal earth (gas patrias politai) to look at herself, the bride whom “in preparation of the festival / will [n]ever a celebratory song celebrate” (GA53: 1/1). Since the beginning, the stage of this second reading is set within the framework of celebration and loss, inclusion and exclusion, domestic and foreign, belongingness and exile – in other words, a set of opposites that Greek tragedy has precisely the merit of holding together without reciprocal dissolution while visualizing them on the theatrical stage, on the skene, which is the space of their appearance.10 Traditional readings of Antigone have focused on her personality and have interpreted her as upholding “the prevailing or ancient cult of the dead, or the familial blood-relatedness” (GA53: 144/116).11 Heidegger’s analysis is instead deliberately void of any personal, emotional, anthropological, or psychological attempts at understanding the ethical, legal, symbolic, or metaphorical motivations behind Antigone’s acting. In Heidegger’s rendition, she is no longer an embodied woman who passionately mourns the physical death and loss of her brother. Despite the fact that Antigone’s acting is about a body, and reclaiming the right of the 10

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The differences in approach between Heidegger’s two confrontations with the same Sophoclean tragedy are many and remarkable. They are perhaps exemplarily and summarily captured in the title of Véronique Fóti’s chapter on this topic, namely “from an agonistic of power to a homecoming”; see Véronique Fóti, Epochal Discordance: Hölderlin’s Philosophy of Tragedy (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), 91. See also Véronique Fóti, “Textuality and the Question of Origin: Heidegger’s Reading of ‘Andenken’ and ‘Der Ister’,” in Heidegger and the Poets: Poiesis, Sophia, Techne (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1992). In the present chapter, I will limit myself to addressing Heidegger’s confrontation with the tragedy Antigone as it appears in the Ister lectures. This choice is due not to the conviction that what Heidegger says in Introduction to Metaphysics is uninteresting, inessential, or, simply, an anticipation (which it is not) of the later text. Rather, the restriction is because it is in the Ister lecture course that Heidegger confronts the character of Antigone – the focus of my concern in this section – in an open-face engagement, allegedly “listen[ing] to what Antigone herself says”; see GA53: 121/97. It is here that the shadows of this tragic work and figure as interpreted by Heidegger emerge most significantly, I argue. The literature on Antigone, both as tragedy and character, is truly vast – so vast that I will not be able to refer to any of it here, as it spans literary studies, socio-political theory, psychology and psychoanalysis, feminist theory, philosophy, theater studies, and more.

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body – all bodies, including the body of the outcast – to be duly honored in death, Heidegger is not interested in this aspect. Likewise, her gendered identity, her condition of being a woman, her appeal to a nonhierarchical, perhaps non-patriarchal line of thinking based on horizontal kinships among siblings to the point of a possibly total mobilization, fluidification, and dissolution of gender and family roles, in other words, the aspects that have deeply inspired many (yet not only) feminist readings of this figure, are of no concern to Heidegger.12 And neither is the theme of the moral, ethical, legal, political dilemmas Antigone’s actions have been thought to represent. Heidegger erases the emotional pathos that, in past as well as contemporary readings, has made such a tragic figure the core of many renditions and interpretations, including some operatic and cinematic performances. Conversely, Heidegger understands Antigone exclusively in terms of what she reveals with respect to the human relation to being. Once ontologized, that is, purified of the psychological affects that individualize subjectivity, from a human perspective Antigone’s figure appears somewhat cold and uninspiring, even abstract in her impersonality. A discussion of what constitutes the political does precede Heidegger’s analysis of Antigone’s final words – her testament and legacy – in her exchange with her sister, Ismene. Yet Heidegger’s discussion of the political is aimed at retrieving not Antigone’s understanding of it but rather the original Greek meaning of the political, enshrined in the understanding of the polis as “the open site of all beings, which are here gathered into their unity” (GA53: 117/94). That is, in a sense that will be best thematized in Hannah Arendt’s reflections, the political is the space of appearance of being, it is the open where “all beings and all relational comportment toward beings is gathered” (GA53: 106/86). Thus, the political is fundamental, but it is such not in the modern sense – from which Heidegger is at pain to distance himself – of the “unconditional priority of the modern ‘totality of the political’” or that “everything is political.” The modern notion of the “political,” which Heidegger places in quotation marks to delimit the contemporary estrangement from the Greek 12

Among some interesting feminist readings of Antigone, one could quote at least Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Adriana Cavarero, Stately Bodies: Literature, Philosophy, and the Question of Gender, trans. Deanna Shemek and Robert de Lucca (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002); Fanny Söderbäck, ed., Feminist Readings of Antigone (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012).

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originary concept, is tied to the concept of (self-)consciousness so that a political action would be one in which the agent has consciousness and certainty of his or her actions and can use such a certainty to provide surveillance and predictability to beings and events. Almost anticipating Foucauldian themes, modern politics is interpreted here as a matter of governmentality, of the imposition of rules based on the certainties of the “political” agent. Hence, the modern “political” is in fact totalitarian, insofar as it is the imposition of one point of view, namely the viewpoint of certainty and self-consciousness, disguised under the pretense of scientificity and technology. In modernity, “the ‘political’ is marked by an unconditional failure to question itself,” Heidegger writes (GA53: 118/ 94). Is this Heidegger’s criticism of totalitarian, imperialistic regimes? Could it also amount to a (possibly shadowy) criticism of Nazi politics, which, in the years the lecture course is given, has already revealed its intolerant, totalitarian, and abhorrent aspects? The topic of Heidegger’s political allegiance is notoriously difficult, problematic, and controversial. Yet the thinker that transpires in these pages on Antigone can also be interpreted, I argue, as a rather unfamiliar Heidegger, one that possibly resonates (as I will try to highlight) with later motifs of the Frankfurt School with its anti-totalitarian critique and with aspects of Adorno’s negative dialectics.13 Let us return to Antigone, though, leaving to other scholarly works the specific, complex, and controversial topic of Heidegger’s political allegiances. In Heidegger’s reading, Antigone can ultimately be claimed to be a political figure in the highly idiosyncratic sense that she enables the appearance of being according to modalities that are non-totalitarian, I argue. Nevertheless, there is nothing political in her actions if we construe them traditionally as pertaining to a specific, delimited field of practice (whether it is the political or the ethical or the religious) taken as “some special or isolated region of human activity” (GA53: 117/94) or if we understand her as the embodiment of a modern subjectivity based on consciousness. Political are not Antigone’s actions but Antigone’s being and way of disclosing being – that is where her passion lies. In fact, she does not act, Heidegger tells us. Rather, she suffers not in the sense of passivity and acceptance but in the sense of undergoing and

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On Adorno’s criticism of Heidegger, see Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity (London: Routledge, 1973). For an investigation of various aspects of the relation between Adorno and Heidegger, see Iain Macdonald and Krzysztof Ziarek, eds., Adorno and Heidegger: Philosophical Questions (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).

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experiencing, of adapting herself with courage to “that against which nothing can avail” (GA53: 128/103). This specific form of passion and suffering is the core of Greek tragedy, Heidegger claims. It is what is expressed by the term drama. It is the “downgoing” with which all tragedies commence (GA53: 128/103), that is, the fading away of the protagonists as heroes to accommodate themselves to the truth and appearing of being – to let themselves be appropriated by being as their own destiny and destination, we could say.14 Foreshadowed here is what elsewhere Heidegger calls Gelassenheit.15 Within this interpretative context, Antigone becomes a formalized, stylized figure whose historicality, on which Heidegger insists, is in fact severed from specific, contingent historical conditions. She is a figure of thought – of disembodied, aseptic, dispassionate, and hence essential thought. Yet despite or, rather, precisely due to her lack of incarnated, personalized emotionality, this figure bespeaks something essential about the way in which to negotiate fundamental ontological relations between the homely and the unhomely, the domestic and the foreign, the resident and the alien. In this sense, by divesting the figure of Antigone of her individualized affectivity – the one that links her to rites and rituals, rules and laws, family history, feuds, resentments, and misunderstanding – we become able to detect, in Heidegger’s Antigone, something that has to do with the overall situation of ontological relationality and, more specifically, the relationality between same and other, identity and difference, integration and marginalization, and, possibly, ontology and affectivity. Rather than being caught in the beings and concerns that populate everyday existence (such as would be the death of her brother, her conflict with the king and the law of the polis, her allegiance to family ties and relations, her respect for the law of the ancestors, etc.), the sense of Antigone’s figure plays itself out in “becoming homely in being unhomely,” Heidegger claims (GA53: 151/121). In line with the ambiguous nature of tragedy, which discloses the connection of oppositions, Antigone too is a figure of shadows, insofar as she reveals the counterturning homely/unhomely nature of her being, the shadows that 14

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In this sense, “that against which nothing can avail” (GA53: 128/103) cannot be equated simply with death, as if we were still within the framework of Being and Time. See the texts from GA13: 37–74 and GA16: 517–529 translated as Discourse on Thinking. On the concept of Gelassenheit and its relation to the notion of will, see the fundamental work by Bret W. Davis, Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007).

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necessarily accompany any coming to light, any epiphany and revelation of being. Through Antigone, Heidegger descends and wrestles with the most intricate nature of being, with the relation between being and nonbeing, which he tries to understand beyond both a Kierkegaardian dialectics of exclusionary alternatives (aut–aut) and a Hegelian dialectic of subsumption and overcoming (et–et). The element that characterizes and differentiates various forms of dialectics is that which is traditionally called “the negative.” Through Antigone, Heidegger wrestles with his own shadows, constituted by the ghostly presence of Hegel and German idealism. By bringing together, in interpreting Antigone, Hölderlin and Sophocles, Heidegger is in fact intent on purifying German dialectical thinking from its metaphysical elements via the filter of Greek tragedy, which is in turn read through Hölderlin. The overall hope is the accomplishment (the celebration) of a homecoming in which the opposites (in many senses, an idealist legacy) stand side by side in co-belonging (a Greek, tragic motif ). In this context, Heidegger aims at understanding the negative neither as mere lack nor as a failure (a sin and a downfall, in traditionally religious, Christian categories) but as co-belonging – what he names a “counteressence” that retains its own essence and, as such, “must be sustained and respected together with its counteressence from out of the grounds of their unity” (GA53: 104/84). With Antigone, Heidegger descends into the deepest cave of metaphysics and its dualisms. Condemned by Creon to an agonizing life in the cave, to an appearance of life that is in fact deadly, Antigone frees herself from such a living death by entrusting herself to the protective doubleness of the earth which, in the mysteries of the terrestrial depths and their regenerative powers, offers her a real death that in fact brings her new life (the life of the many Antigones who will take after her). Likewise, Heidegger too passes unscathed through the cave of metaphysics by assuming metaphysical themes yet freeing them from their metaphysical scaffoldings and thus consigning himself (and them) to future possibilities for thought (or so he thinks). Heidegger’s passage through metaphysics in Antigone’s company unfolds through the notions of the uncanny, the homely, and the unhomely. What do such uncanniness (Unheimliche), homeliness (Heimische), and unhomeliness (Unheimische) mean? In Heidegger’s reading, which is textually too complex to follow here in detail, Antigone’s essence and the ties with the duality of being homely/ unhomely begin to emerge in the course of her dialogue with her sister, Ismene. Ismene is the only living sibling with whom Antigone shares a

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common ancestry, accentuated by its incestuous nature. Also, Ismene is the sister with whom Antigone would be, presumably, more likely to share affinities of emotions, visions, and attitudes rooted in participation in a common gender. Additionally, Ismene is the one who has an intimation of (but, in fact, does not understand) Antigone’s intentions in their deeper meaning, which eventually creates a rift between them. Consequently, Ismene is the sister who is in fact rejected by Antigone, presumably because of her siding not necessarily with Creon but certainly with the law that he is said to represent. Situated at the border between commonality of gendered/familial kin and separation of conceptual positions, Ismene is the one who, in the tragedy, discloses Antigone’s essence exactly through an exchange that, while putting the two sisters in communication, also sees them as opponents. Here, as everywhere else, Antigone moves between homeliness and unhomeliness – those who are alive and part of her family reject her, those who are dead and with whom she nevertheless sides cannot welcome her, and it is her own sister who discloses her (Antigone’s) essence precisely by dismissing what she (Antigone) sets out to do just to be dismissed in turn once she (Ismene) later turns to support Antigone (but of this Heidegger does not talk). So, Antigone is a character marked by rejections and expulsions, by the “not” of negation – not only the rejection that others (Creon, Ismene, perhaps even the elders of Thebe) pronounce against Antigone, but also the rejection Antigone herself pronounces against others (Creon, Ismene) and the self-imposed ban she places on herself by following the path she is determined to follow. In all these rejections, expulsions, self-exclusions, Antigone amounts to a figure of what the philosophical tradition has called “the negative” – not negativity but negation. Is this the unhomely? Yet, the rejection Antigone suffers and makes others suffer does not apply to the same order of beings, Heidegger tells us. What (or who) rejects Antigone, and in the name of what reasons, is not exactly the same as what (or whom) Antigone rejects, and in the name of what alternative reasons. It is this complex relation of multiple orders and registers of being that Antigone somehow holds together, in Heidegger’s explanation. This bringing together is, ultimately, what makes Antigone a figure of the unfamiliar – Antigone is strange, weird, distressing exactly because of the multiple configurations of being (being and beings, being and non-being) that come to emerge within her own being. It is precisely such strangeness, such oddities enabled by her character that make Antigone disquieting and distressing – disquieting for thought, first of all.

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Heidegger stigmatizes Antigone’s essence, her oddity (as revealed indirectly by Ismene) in her pathein to deinon, her “tak[ing] up upon [her] own essence the uncanny” (GA53: 127/103) to the point that “within the uncanny, Antigone is the supreme uncanny” (GA53: 129/104). In the preceding pages of the lecture course, Heidegger had described human beings as “the uncanniest of the uncanny” (GA53: 63/51). By understanding Antigone as “the supreme uncanny,” Heidegger is in fact elevating her persona (not Antigone as a person but what Antigone stands for in terms of the manifestation of being disclosed in her character) to the exemplar of what it means to be human – according to the Greeks but also in terms of the most appropriate relation to being. What is the uncanny? The answer lies in Heidegger’s certainly (and admittedly) unorthodox interpretation of the tragedy that bears Antigone’s name. Heidegger identifies the fundamental meaning or “word” of this tragedy, and “even of Greek antiquity itself” (GA53: 76/63), in the concept of to deinon, which appears in the choral ode that is pronounced by the elders of Thebes. Heidegger translates the Greek term as “das Unheimliche,” “the uncanny.” The uncanny is the fundamental sense, the core of Greek tragedy, while the tragedy Antigone becomes the Greek tragedy par excellence. The range of denotations of to deinon, Heidegger tells us, spans over three concepts: that which is fearful, that which is powerful, and that which is inhabitual. Yet, each of these notions cannot be fixed in a univocal meaning. Each, in fact, doubles to indicate opposing things so that “the fearful [appears] as that which frightens, and as that which is worthy of honor; the powerful [appears] as that which looms over us, and as that which is merely violent; the inhabitual as the extraordinary, and as that which is skilled in everything” (GA53: 78/64). Anticipating what Aristotle will later say about being, in the choral ode the elders of Thebes remind the audience – and Heidegger emphasizes this – that “manifold is the uncanny” (GA53: 71/58). So, what Heidegger names “the uncanny” aims at capturing the gathering of the multiple, contrasting meanings in one word that “grasps the concealed grounds of the unity of the manifold meanings of deinon, thus grasping the deinon itself in its concealed essence” (GA53: 78/64). The claim I wish to advance is that Antigone is the most uncanny, at least in an initial sense, precisely because she holds together a plurality of meanings without severing them in one univocal formulation that, while excluding the others, would absolutize the one. This absolutization is, conversely, precisely what Creon does. That is why, ultimately, Heidegger indirectly criticizes this character, I argue, as that

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of a despot and a tyrant, whom the chorus chastises by banishing him from the hearth. Although Heidegger’s criticism is not made explicit, it seems pretty clear that, for Heidegger, Creon is driven by a hybristic, arrogant, and despotic attitude that makes him consider human laws (the laws he himself has established) as final, unchallengeable, and exclusive of any amendment and revisitation, or, in a word, absolute. So, like Antigone, Creon is certainly a figure of the uncanny, but of only one, unilateral side of it: the side that frightens, that is violent, and that is inhabitual in the sense of its arbitrariness and arrogance – the side that eliminates complexities, thereby denying the possibility of a counterturning. Against this, in Heidegger’s analysis, Antigone’s “not” appears as a figure of resistance – resistance against Creon but, more radically, resistance against reductionism and absolutization, against a concept of being presented as totalitarian and monarchic (in the literal sense of only rule by one principle, monos, arche).16 Her resistance, however, is not carried out in the name of an alternative nomic principle, but rather on behalf of the complexity of being itself, which resists the technocratic, machinistic eliminations imposed by unilateral thinking. Antigone is thus a figure of the negative in the sense of negation – she rejects and denies Creon’s ban. Yet she is also the figure of a negative dialectics for which the complexity of being in all its aspects can be sustained, grasped, and let be only from the position of that which is excluded. In other words, whereas the oppressor can only annihilate, must ban, defeat, and kill the other in order to assert himself and his own mastery, the excluded contains within herself both her own reasons (her own essence, Hegel would say) and the reasons of her opponent – not as excluded or sublated reasons but as counter-reasons (Heidegger would say), as the reasons against which a resistance is enacted. Antigone’s resistance is thus ontological and structural. It is from the perspective of the “not” – what Heidegger calls the unhomely, the non-belonging, and the alternative – that the homely can be inhabited. It is from this perspective alone that what appears to be the homely, what Creon upholds – that is, a concern with beings, with their organization, distribution, and management, an obsession for order and inflexible rules – can reveal its real character of unhomeliness, whereas what seems to be unhomely – a tension that refuses conceding to

16

The idea of Antigone as a figure of resistance appears, for example, in Simone Weil.

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simplified, unilateral, absolutized perspectives – discloses itself as the homely. Antigone inhabits the latter. Certainly, all this is highly uncanny – highly unsettling and disquieting. The stranger is more at home than the (self-proclaimed) citizen who is in fact too much at ease in his or her soothing comfort to truly be at home. Actually, by being at ease with beings, the citizen is forgetful of what Heidegger, in Being and Time, had named the ontological difference. Why is the stranger at home? Heidegger is absolutely clear about that. By dwelling by the complexity of being, by not letting herself be dominated by the univocity of the perspective that sees itself as the only ground for all reality, the stranger is also cognizant of the beings from which being differs and which the stranger brings to disclosure. All of this is, of course, readily inviting a political or an ethical reading. As we know, Heidegger does not address it in those terms and resists such an address – perhaps to remind us that the political as well as the ethical too are subject to the totalizing temptations of various dogmatisms and fanaticisms. His concern with Antigone, his extolling her as a figure of the uncanniest, has to do with the ontological possibilities that her own way of being lets emerge – against reductive unification, she stands for multiplicities that remain related in their differences. Whereas homeliness with beings cannot sustain homeliness with being and must necessarily either sublate (Hegel) or annihilate it (Kierkegaard, but also Marx and techno-scientific capitalism), homeliness with being allows the disclosure of the travesty of the alleged homeliness with beings and its exposure for what it is, in its violent and hybristic features. Hence the need to resist it. Antigone becomes the emblem, I argue, of Heidegger’s formulation of permanent resistance, of permanent critique to the system of absolutization and totalization. Against the mechanistic powers of techne to exercise mastery and control over beings, which Creon represents, Antigone stands for the disclosive abilities of the poetic as the alternative. Hence, Heidegger refers to her as to “the purest poem itself” (GA53: 149/119). Is the poetic not the highest form of resistance to the totalizing powers of technology, science, bureaucracy, rationalization, but also of politics, religion, ideology, etc.?17 The interpretation of Heidegger’s encounter with Antigone I am suggesting enables maintaining, with respect to this figure (and to 17

An inquiry into the notions of techne and poiesis as they are articulated starting with the 1935–36 essay “On the Origin of the Work of Art” seems here appropriate. See GA5: 1–74/ 15–86.

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Heidegger’s reading of it), the tension that, according to Heidegger, is peculiar to Greek tragedy as a whole. As Heidegger writes at the very beginning of his analysis, “the two main figures, Creon and Antigone, do not stand opposed to one another like darkness and light, black and white, guilty and innocent. What is essential to each is as it is from out of the unity of essence and nonessence, yet in different ways in each case” (GA53: 64/52). Analogously, with respect to Ismene and Antigone, Heidegger writes that “the words and counter-words of the two sisters are like an encounter between two swords, whose sharpness, gleam, and power we must experience in order to apprehend something of the lightning that flashes when they strike” (GA53: 122/98). The question remains of whether the tension has necessarily to take up the features of a polemic agon, of conflict, and of the violent resolution it displays in Antigone’s tragedy. Must the tension staged by tragedies be inscribed under the sign of death? Can such a form of tension be sustained productively, that is, in ways that are life-affirming and nourishing? Heidegger does not address the last part of Antigone’s tragedy, which ends with the death of virtually everyone who had dared resist totalization and side with the resistance Antigone embodies. Antigone’s death is joined by those of both a male character, Haemon (Creon’s son and Antigone’s betrothed), and a female figure, Eurydice (Creon’s wife and Haemon’s mother). Are acts of resistance, whether political or ontological, doomed to self-defeat? Are they bound to generate even more tragedy and death at the universal level? Is this the ontological conclusion of the tragedy of Antigone, of her pursuing “that against which nothing can avail as the point of departure governing everything” (GA53: 127/102)? Is being, in its complexities, bound to be swallowed up by totalization, the prevailing of beings, mechanization, and technosciences? Is all resistance futile? Does the shadow of defeat accompany Antigone? By not addressing the ultimate solitude of Antigone’s homeliness – the fact that, at the end, no one remains standing: not Antigone, but not even Creon or Ismene, who abandon their previous position, even though too late to save Antigone – Heidegger in fact crystallizes loneliness in the essentiality of its ontological traits. As if to say that the unfolding, the plot, the outcome, and the intertwining of the tragedy do not matter. What matters is the ontological comportment toward being that is herein disclosed. Resistance brings us to nothing; and yet there is nothing else that one can do but resist. Being, however, is the shrine of solitude.

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Must this truly be the case, though? The question remains open. And it is certainly true that Antigone’s resistance does effect a change in the polis and transforms its order – neither for the past, nor for the present, but for the future, even though Antigone does not know that. In the tragedy as well as in Heidegger’s interpretation, Antigone has to die so as not to become the new absolute. She is not simply the counteressence but that which lets both essence and counteressence reveal themselves. In this sense, she is not simply an alternative but also that which nourishes and sustains alternatives, that which enables them to be. As was mentioned earlier, Heidegger’s interpretation of Antigone comes rather close to the role of the negative performed in Adorno’s negative dialectic. Antigone embodies the power of resistance against any absolutization and totalization, including her own. It is, of course, puzzling and perplexing that Antigone has to die for her way of being to succeed, and that her success is not measurable in terms of current outcomes, which would reject her in the totality of an ontic present. Likewise, it is difficult to understand her logic as being outside the sacrificial economy of death. Yet Heidegger forbids all considerations of her death in terms of martyrdom, sacrifice, or even “beautiful death,” that is, in terms of possible religious, political, or even aesthetic sublimations of death. Applying such interpretations and trying to read an “outcome,” a result in Antigone’s death would be to subject her to the calculative, utilitarian logic of metaphysical thinking. Antigone, for Heidegger, is not only “the poem” but also, and moreover, “the purest poem,” that is, the one that operates at the wholly ontological level. She is the figure of the opening toward the future that only the continuous presence and resistance of the negative can bring about – at the cost of its own defeat. In the end, Heidegger associates Antigone not with the polis but with Hestia, the hearth, of which Sophocles’ chorus speaks and from which the chorus bans the unhomely. The hearth is the homestead, “the ground of being homely” (GA53: 147/118), and Antigone belongs to it. How can she belong to the homely when she is utterly unhomely, Heidegger pertinently asks? How can the stranger, the uncanny, the outcast, be at home? Because the hearth is the ground – the cave into which Antigone descends, the chora of the earth which protects and shields both life and death – that enables the differentiation between two ways of being unhomely, namely “being unhomely in the sense of being driven about amid beings without any way out, and being unhomely as becoming homely from out of a belonging to being” (GA53: 147/118). Antigone

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speaks for the latter. As we have seen, she stands for a differential being where the excluded, the rejected, the negative has a revelatory role and occupies a space – be it the space of resistance – within the economy of being. Said otherwise, the unhomely is that which reminds the homely of its homely character and keeps it such; that is, it keeps it open to the unhomely. Is Heidegger saying that we need the unhomely, the rejected, the homeless, and the marginalized in order to keep being differential? This would be, of course, a rather outrageous, offensive claim, especially when considered from an ethical or socio-economic and political perspective (and also, as has been remarked, within the historical context of the period when Heidegger’s lecture course was given, when the programmatic murdering of Jews, Sinti, Roma, and homosexuals had already become an institutionalized routine). What Heidegger seems to be doing here is to recognize, in the spirit of Greek tragedy and against a metaphysical tradition that denies or sublates (thereby actually reducing or annihilating the power of ) the negative, that there is a negative and that the negative is, belongs to being. The claim is not normative but ontologically descriptive or phenomenological. The hearth, which Heidegger visualizes around the notion of the fire (a Heraclitean notion), despite its sinister shadows (especially in light of the crematoria of Auschwitz and other Nazi camps) speaks of the co-existence of opposites, of the coexistence and co-belonging of life and death. The hearth, that is, being, is the site of the co-belonging or the dwelling place – the home – of differences. Yet, in the tragedy which bears Antigone’s name, there is no enlivening fire at the bottom of the cave to which Antigone is sentenced. She is condemned to dwell within the earth, but the earth is not truly a hearth for her. Rather, it is the source of death, and the life that may be generated from her is not her life, nor the life of her children, since she will not have any. The cave is cold, life has abandoned it, the fire has extinguished itself into ashes, and what is left is death. The homely of her “becoming homely in being unhomely” (GA53: 151/121) seems precluded to Antigone; the earth remains cold and unwelcoming. Is there perhaps something in the way in which such an earth/hearth is conceptualized that makes it barren? Heidegger writes that “the unhomely remains related to the homely. Granted that there are various possibilities of this relation, then there are also various ways of being unhomely. In that case, the expulsion of the uncanny one will correspondingly have various meanings” (GA53: 135/108).

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Could it be that, while Antigone is indeed a figure of the uncanny in the sense of the mobilization of being for which she is also expelled from the hearth, yet there are other ways of the uncanny that perhaps do not appear in Antigone’s tragedy? Ways that nevertheless are present in Greek tragedy as a whole, even though Heidegger may not address them, the same way that he does not address the conclusion of Antigone’s life? Does Antigone have shadows, and what are they? Antigone, I argue, remains within the circle (the opening) of common being. She is not an absolute other but the other within the home, who can ultimately find herself at home even despite or, even better, because of her difference, a “becoming homely that is a passage through and encounter with the foreign,” as Heidegger says of Hölderlin’s understanding of human beings in their relation to the essence of history (GA53: 67/ 54). In this sense, Antigone is an image of immanent difference as it were, of the part that difference plays in all identification processes that (as Oedipus teaches) would not truly be in development and becoming without some alterity. The confrontation Antigone stages remains, in the end, within a polis that is also hers, a polis which ultimately Antigone never leaves. Certainly, Antigone inhabits difference and makes it her home. Yet it is the difference within the home that still characterizes her. Undoubtedly, she is a figure of resistance; but of internal resistance. Thus, she represents the alternative to the system, yet from within the system – she is a reformist but not a revolutionary, a dissident but not an exile. Despite what she may initially suggest, she is not the (im) migrant, the refugee as the unassimilated within a home of being that remains unhomely. In her travelling through the unhomely, Antigone is similar more to those other Greek figures of travelers such as Odysseus and Aeneas (who, even when displaced in foreign lands, never lose the sense of their home) than to, let us say, Abraham, the wandering Jew, or some contemporary migrants, who are truly figures of exile, of displacement, of an unhomely that does not rest at home. Or, to remain within Greek tragedy, whose shadows we are exploring, Antigone is rather unlike Medea, whose shadowy – and highly uncanny – existence Heidegger never confronts. Is Medea Antigone’s shadow?

4

Medea, or a (Missed) Third Descent into the World of Shadows

In the Republic, Plato differentiates a double sense of hostility: the internal opponent, the Greek echthros (rendered in Latin as inimicus) and the

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external enemy, the Greek polemios (which translates into the Latin hostis).18 Within Plato’s distinction, Antigone’s contestation is that of the echthros. Her adversarialness is an antagonism internal to the condition(s) from which she differentiates herself. She challenges, resists, and opposes the status quo, which she intends to restore to a more pristine form inclusive of differentiations and interrelations. Ultimately, though, she speaks the same (political, cultural, and ideological) native language of that which she resists, as she belongs to the same conceptual, ethnic, and cultural oikos and syngenos.19 What about the second sense of enmity to which Plato refers? Is there, in Greek tragedy, a staging of an adversarial relation where the passing through the counterturning of homely/unhomely produces not ontological homeliness as modelled by Antigone’s case but rather radical unhomeliness? Where the other is received into the home just to be ousted without mercy or return, thereby possibly generating the enmity of the polemios? And what might it reveal, if anything, with respect to Heidegger’s ontological framing of the confrontation with Greek tragedy in terms of the homely and the unhomely? Greek tragedy indeed offers its readers a powerful testimony of the homely that rejects the unhomely or, rather, of the unhomely that never becomes truly homely. Euripides’ Medea is, in the eponymous tragedy, a

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Plato, Republic 470b–471a. For a discussion of the notions of inimicus, hostis, and the relation with hostes (host or guest), the obvious reference remains Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. G. Collins (London: Verso Books, 2005). The shared intelligibility of her position is testified by Creon’s conclusive, albeit delayed, recognition of Antigone’s claim. While adding to the tragic theme of the play because of its belatedness, such recognition and conversion attest to a horizon of continuity where conflicts can ultimately be pacified because reasons can be shared. In this sense, Hegel is correct when arguing that the opposition between the public law of Creon’s absolute order and the family ties to which Antigone subscribes are two interrelated stages that in fact find a joint resolution in a third moment that reconciles them both – for Hegel, this is the moment of the ethical state. As Hegel writes, Antigone . . . lives under the political authority of Creon; she is herself the daughter of a king and the affianced of Haemon, so that her obedience to the royal prerogative is an obligation. But Creon also, who is on his part father and husband, is under an obligation to respect the sacred ties of relationship, and only by breach of this can give an order that is in conflict with such a sense. In consequence of this we find immanent in the life of both that which each respectively combats, and they are seized and broken by that very bond which is rooted in the compass of their own social existence. See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel on Tragedy, trans. Anne Paolucci and Henry Paolucci (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1962), 73. Having ontologized the bond to which Hegel refers, Heidegger reformulates it in terms of the doubleness of being and the “not,” and of the dynamic relation that he sees in place between them.

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powerful representation of such an unsuccessful attempt at homecoming via home-building.20 The failed attempt also has an additional outcome. It transforms the unhomely, unable to find rest in the homely, into an instance of the polemios as referenced by Plato, thereby underscoring a non-neutrality of the homely in questions of ontological accountability and responsibility related to what remains outside the homely – as if what is at stake in being is not only its “not,” for which Heidegger’s Antigone account, but also its exterior – Medea, for which Heidegger does not account. Enshrined in the failures Medea stages with respect to the relation between homely and unhomely is the possibility, I argue, of a different understanding of their relation – one where the homely is never an a priori given to which one is granted or refused participation but is, rather, the outcome of a shared project of trustworthy partnerships among parties. When read along these lines, Medea is the anti-Antigone in the double sense of being both Antigone’s negation (she exemplifies the opposite of Antigone’s successful homecoming) and Antigone’s negative or counter-image (she situates herself on the other side, outside of the economy of being and the home within which Antigone operates). Antigone’s shadows get doubled in Medea’s counter-shadows. To my best knowledge, Heidegger never addresses Medea – either the character or the play. Thus, it is impossible to follow him textually on a path that is absent from his considerations.21 Yet absences are as revelatory as presences. What is it that Heidegger leaves out when not engaging a discussion of Medea’s figure? What might Medea reveal with respect to that “passion for being” that Heidegger uncovers in Oedipus and follows in Antigone through an ontologization of both figures? What would Medea bring to the complexity of the ontological stage Heidegger discloses when exploring the shadows of Greek tragedy? How does Medea’s ontological status affect the concepts of the homely and unhomely that

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All references to Medea will be to this play as it appears in the translation in David Green and Richmond Lattimore’s edition of Euripides I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 55–108. The opening lines of the third stanza of Hölderlin’s poem “Der Ister,” on which Heidegger comments when engaging his discussion of Antigone, read “He [Der Ister] appears, however, almost / To go backwards and / I presume he must come / From the East. / There would be / much to tell of this.” The idea of the river’s flowing backward toward the East is right out of Euripedes’ Medea, as the chorus exclaims “Flow backward to your sources, sacred rivers” (410–411). But Heidegger does not comment on the reference; in his own words, then, “there would be much to tell about this” (see GA53: 42–46/36–39).

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Heidegger thematizes in his confrontation with Antigone? What might Heidegger encounter in an ontologization of Medea’s figure? Whether an uncontaminated position of pure ontologization is tenable or whether Medea might uncover, among other matters, the shadows of Heidegger’s ontologized interpretations of Oedipus and Antigone is something that might also surface at the end of a descent into Medea’s tragedy.22 The opening words of Medea are a reminder by Medea’s own nurse that her mistress, not unlike Antigone, is a figure of loss and the unhomely. Not a Greek, she rather comes to Corinth – where the tragedy takes place – from Colchis, on the eastern shores of the Black Sea, that is, modern days’ Crimea (1–15).23 Medea is an outsider, a foreigner, and an immigrant – a refugee (255).24 She stands for differential being, she embodies the possibility that being may be multifarious, inclusive of various forms of beingotherwise: in addition to the domestic “not” Antigone exemplifies, for which Heidegger accounts, radical alterity, which Medea embodies. A descent into the tragedy Medea would then amount to a descent into, and passage through, the other – not the other of the same, the unhomely of the homely, and the alternative within the system, but the absolutely other, as Levinas would say – the other whose being is otherwise, external, extraneous. What does Greek tragedy tell us about the shadow of absolute otherness? The shores of Colchis, situated beyond the land of Western determination, are reachable only via a passage through the “misty blue Symplegades” (2) – that is, they are reachable by letting go known certainties and by entering the realm of the indeterminate. They are the land where Greek conceptual categories loosen their grip and are at a loss. Despite the fact that Jason boasts to Medea the superiority of Greek civilization over the barbarian culture from which he claims he rescued her, he needs Medea’s help to navigate the foreign country to which he has travelled to reconquer (in fact, to steal back, against all rules of 22

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The figure of Medea is the subject matter of the collected volume edited by James J. Clauss and Sarah Iles Johnston, Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, and Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). An interesting connection between Heidegger and Medea’s land, Crimea, is made by German author, director, and television producer Alexander Kluge who, in the docufiction Heidegger auf der Krim, addresses the role of the intellectual in the face of war and dictatorship while also confronting Heidegger’s philosophy with the persecution of Jews in Crimea during World War Two. See Alexander Kluge, “Heidegger auf der Krim,” in Chronik der Gefühle (Germany: Bayerische Rundfunk, 2019). Medea as the figure of the refugee in search of asylum is the reading advanced in Demetra Kasimis, “Medea the Refugee,” The Review of Politics 82, no. 3 (2020): 393–415.

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gift-giving) the Golden Fleece.25 Exposure to the other is both needed and desirable. In her foreignness, Medea invites an experiment in ontological relationality, as it were. Of her own doing and driven by the passion of a love (8) to which she deliberately gives in, Medea abandons her land (but not her customs), her family ties (but not her allegiance to family relations), in the pursuit not of a new form of oppressive relation (whether patriarchal or matriarchal) between herself, the daughter of a king, and the Greek hero (who, it should be noted, has gone to Colchis out of selfinterested calculation and desire for power), but out of a desire for the establishment of a new relation tied by an oath of equality, of equal participation and agency – an alliance based on trust and an eternal promise (22). It is the concept of trust – which Jason has betrayed, according to the chorus’ opening words – that constitutes the ontological core of Medea’s figure and tragedy, I argue. What would it mean, for being, to be structured through and by relations of trust rather than (ant)agonism? What would it mean if trust were the fundamental category structuring ontological relations? How would trust affect the possibility of interrelations among being, non-being, being otherwise, and the otherwise than being? How would Heidegger’s notions of ontological difference, Dasein, the Ereignis of being, the Fourfold, even language be affected by the thematization of trust as a core ontological category? What would the affectivity of trust do to Heidegger’s ontologized readings of Greek tragedy? For the time being, these must remain as questions cast by Medea’s (obliterated) shadow onto the cave walls surrounding Heidegger’s descent into Greek tragedy. Like Antigone in Heidegger’s reading, Medea too belongs to the hearth. Yet Medea’s hearth is not buried in the cave of ancestral ties and pre-political laws of family and kinship. Medea’s hearth is that of the political scene, of the hearth elevated to the condition of the oikos which, in the form of the palace in front of which the tragedy takes place, occupies the center stage of the play. Whereas psychological desires and affects belong to the private and pre-political, Medea is deeply aware that the home is a political construct. It is the place where relations are negotiated, established, and recognized. Ontology needs political representation to be effective. 25

This operation also opens the question of the Greek debt to their Eastern neighbors in terms of the development of their own Greek culture and civilization, and consequently the problem of what Heidegger is retrieving (and what he acknowledges to be retrieving) when he turns to the Greeks for a regeneration of the German cultural world. On this, see especially Charles Bambach, Thinking the Poetic Measure of Justice: Hölderlin-Heidegger-Celan (New York: State University of New York Press, 2013), 53–56.

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Medea wishes for her marriage – for the coming together of two different ways of being, hers and Jason’s – to be honored, acknowledged, and sanctified at the public level, not momentarily, but forever. She demands that political calculations and a concern with what Heidegger would call “beings” do not substitute the interpersonal relationality based on love, affection, and friendship, and also on the equal standing of the partners. To her mind, her spousal relationship is the equal friendship and partnership between Greek and foreign, between sameness and otherness, between one civilization and its outside, between being and being-otherwise. To her, the relationship between herself and Jason is a matter of philia, of that bond based on equal ontological status that Aristotle denies to man and woman in marriage but which he considers fundamental to the well-being of political states. There is no doubt, in Medea’s mind, about her belonging to her new home, which she enriches and broadens through her own unhomeliness, through her own difference. Her belonging to the new home is by virtue not of domestication or assimilation but of her foreignness, a condition she repeatedly claims for herself. Loyal to her own cultural heritage, Medea uses her unusual knowledge to repeatedly help her new fellow citizens to improve their lives. Her model of the home is one not of assimilation but of cohabitation and enrichment through differences. Like Antigone, in the course of the drama Medea too is banned from the home, excluded, and rejected. What is threatened by the ban is the very possibility of equal relationality between same and otherness, domestic and foreign, homely and outside-the-homely. What is attempted is the submission of the other and the replacement of Medea’s unique singularity with subjection and objectification (“How I have treated you and what you did to me,” Medea exclaims at 1353, where the shift in grammatical subject signals the asymmetry of the relation). Like an object whose exploitation is no longer useful, the foreigner is pushed back into her condition of exile and refugee. The promise – actually, the pact signed with an oath – of a relation where different ways of being neither collide nor eliminate each other is shattered. The house is no more, is what the nurse’s lapidary words proclaim near the beginning of the play (140). The unhomely, having passed through the semblance of a homely (Jason, Creon) that, in fact, never relinquishes its selfish concern with beings (status, prestige, power, security, and greed), is now rejected to its originary condition of unhomeliness. Discarded, cast off with Medea beyond the homely borders are also the product and material embodiment of the bond of trust between Medea and Jason, namely, the two children, who

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would in fact attest the possibility of the co-existence of multiple origins (the multiple citizenship that ensues from trust?). Driven by a pact of love and co-belonging that is revealed disposable, Medea progressively turns into an enemy – she physically disrupts the current political status quo of the city by murdering the woman who, by marrying Medea’s own husband, Jason, would bring stability to the polis by restoring the patriarchal law. Through the poisonous gift of the nuptial gown to the bride-to-be, Medea also undermines the future of the polis, which will never receive an heir to grant its continuity. Yet, Medea’s own enmity is, to her eyes, the response to Jason’s own having become an enemy by breaking the promise and oath, the reciprocal philia that was in place between them. Significantly, she refers to Jason as an echthistos (467 and 1050), that is, by using a cognate of echthros, the word Plato reserves for internal adversaries. It is as if, in Medea’s eyes, the ontological, exterior relation of inside/outside, citizen/foreigner, friend/ enemy, Greek/barbarian, man/woman could be reframed and renegotiated on the ground of trust – the element that would equalize different ways of being without depriving them of their difference. In Medea’s aspirational vision, then, equal agency belongs to both parties in the spousal bond, which Creon instead considers as a sheer, self-motivated, temporary, practical, and utilitarian association driven by self-interest. Thus, in an act of what Carl Schmitt might name “political theology,” Creon downplays Medea’s agency and attributes his success and that of the expedition he led in search of the Golden Fleece to Aphrodite (526–528), in a heroic vision that highlights the autonomy of his own self (526), whereas Medea relies on bonds of love and (com)passion as recognitions of mutual selfhood and agency. Like Antigone, Medea too is a figure of profound uncanniness (deine, 44; deina is also how her filicide is qualified at 1243), and her uncanniness reveals itself in her extreme passion. Her most uncanny aspect is, possibly, her willingness to murder her children with her own hands. This deed alienates from Medea the chorus of the Corinthian women otherwise sympathetic to her predicament. This act has also caused great unease among scholars and commentators, who have then tried to explain it away by attributing it to her barbarian origin (which turns her into an infanticide) or to her sexual jealousy and excessive pride (motivated by Jason’s unfaithfulness) or to a self-imposed sacrifice of her natural maternal instinct (so that the children do not fall prey to the rage of the Corinthian citizens). In all cases, Medea appears as the one to blame. The other, the foreigner, the refugee, and the unhomely is always

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at fault – even when the fault is a construct by the homely that wishes to exclude its others. In the end, just like Antigone, Medea speaks the language of an ontology of solitude as she ends up alone, isolated from both the scenic participants (the chorus) and the audience (the Athenian public and future spectators of the tragedy). Yet, unlike Antigone, Medea survives her confrontation with exclusionary notions of being and home that would prefer to see her submissive, objectified, ridiculed, or dead rather than the independent and dignified partner of an equal ontological relation. Here, Medea’s uncanniness reaches its peak, I argue. By killing her children, orchestrating their burial ceremony as a rite of atonement, and escaping with them on the chariot, she immunizes herself and her offspring against possible retaliations, whether human or divine. She demonstrates the uncanny, unsettling power of the other when not respected in her own dignity, individuality, and uniqueness. Beyond all too easy and haughty moralizing judgements, Medea discloses the ambiguous truth that the one who has the power to give birth also has the ability to give death, and that it is only when they are inscribed in an economy of trust, respect, and shared partnership that such ambiguous powers can be kept in check.26 Trust, not opposition and conflict, allows being to emerge and its multiplicity to flourish. Medea’s uncanniness, understood as her ability to hold together ambiguities, even of an extreme kind, has been recognized by many scholars.27 It is what causes the difficulties as well as the fascination in dealing with her character both at the scholarly and at the theatrical level. Ontologically, it is hard not to sympathize with her betrayed being. Morally, it is difficult, even impossible, not to condemn her extreme, horrific, and murderous infanticidal action. Yet despite her excesses, Medea does not appear as a wicked character; only an unfortunate, tragic figure. Throughout the tragedy, Medea is the embodiment of conflicting aspects, which are not solved but held together in her personality, capable of “counterturnings” (to use a Heideggerian term) that transform one feature into its opposite without transitions, progressions, or 26

27

Adriana Cavarero considers Medea to be a powerful reminder that “care is not an automatic or obvious response of maternal inclination”; that is, motherhood produces death as well as life. See Adriana Cavarero, Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude, trans. Adam Sitze and Amanda Minervini (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 105. As is the case for Antigone, both character and tragedy, Medea too has been the subject matter of many reinterpretations, commentaries, scholarly work, performances, and reproductions through various media.

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sublimations requiring the “labor of the negative,” as it were – that is, without (either positive, negative, or open) dialectical moves. A foreigner, she is nevertheless guided by Greek ideals and values as well. A loving mother, she does not hesitate to murder her children. A faithful and devoted wife, she turns her love and passion into an indomitable hatred. Apparently out of control first in her passionate love for Jason and later in her hatred and desire for revenge over him, she nevertheless acts with calm calculation and thoughtful consideration of her options. Deceivingly subservient when convenient, she denudes her soul with a sincerity and honesty of introspection that is touching. Self-identifying as a woman through qualities that would have appeared as feminine to a Greek audience, she nevertheless acts boldly and assertively, displays intelligence and argumentative abilities, and pursues kleos, honor, and reputation – all virtues proper to heroic men. Compared by Jason to an animal fury, a she-lion, with a nature more bestial than Scylla, the Tuscan monster (1342–1343), she leaves the scene of betrayal as a goddess on a chariot provided by Helios, displaying a self-mastery and control of the tragic plot and the circumstances of life appropriate to a divine entity. The description of these apparent ambiguities could go on as they constitute the ontological core of Medea’s tragedy.28 Her glorified exit confirms them all as fundamental to the scene of being. Given that, as we have already pointed out, Heidegger does not confront Medea, all questions as to the reasons for his lack of consideration cannot receive an ascertainable answer. Nevertheless, we can address the fundamental question of what is being left out of Heidegger’s confrontation with Greek tragedy when he neglects to address Medea’s case. The answer becomes accessible through a question Medea herself asks of Creon before her murderous plot unfolds. “Creon, I am the one abused, so why banish me? What have I done?” she inquires. Creon’s answer crystallizes the reason in a lapidary manner: “I am afraid of you” (281–282, translation modified). Creon proceeds to list a series of contextual reasons to rationalize his fear of Medea. Yet the fear is deeper, more radical, and more problematic than the reasons provided. What Creon fears, what Heidegger omits, is what Medea stands for at the ontological level. Medea stands for the other that does not belong to the system, whose voice does not object from within as an internal alternative, a relatable resistance, or a dialectical opposition. She is the outsider – the

28

See Helene Foley, “Medea’s Divided Self,” Classical Antiquity 8, no. 1 (1989): 61–85.

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outsider that comes not as the enemy (who can be fought) but as a friend, as a bringer of “glad tidings,” as it were, of different ways of inhabiting and co-habiting ambiguities, and of models of relationships based not on domination, self-interest, and calculation. Because she does not come as an enemy (polemios) while still remaining unassimilable into the system (nor does she come as a victim in need to be rescued), her unassimilability ends up being exorcized by turning her into the enemy she did not intend on being – with the terrible consequences that this produces, including Medea’s unforgivable murdering of her own children. By the end of the tragedy, Jason and his people are addressed by Medea as enemies, polemioi (1322). The alternative ontological proposition Medea stands for, the one Heidegger does not care to confront, is the one she advances in her interaction with Aegeus (708–718). For the most part, the proposal duplicates the failed attempt that Medea and Jason tried without success because of Jason’s ultimate ontic attachment to his own interests rather than to shared partnership in the relation. What Medea leaves out in the formulation of her newly sought relation with Aegeus is the erotic passion with which she had embraced Jason. She replaces it with a more sober pact, an oath and a promise of mutual trust aimed at both partners’ co-flourishing and co-well-being – possibly a form of shared happiness. Ultimately, the ontological relation Medea advocates is that of two strangers who find, through their mutual strangeness, a sense of shared homeliness. In other words, the home is never a priori as such. Rather, it is something that is created as homely through the sharing of one’s respective unhomeliness. There is no home – there is only an unhomely that either becomes homely through reciprocal trust, respect, and observance of the promised oath of trust (749) or it will remain unhomely for all. The homely is not a matter of a return but of a joint adventure between strangers who, in trust, make the home hospitable for everyone. Antigone’s passion of differential being becomes, in Medea, despite the scandal of her infanticide, the passion for a welcoming home that is made of strangers. On the chariot on which Medea leaves the skene, presumably to join Aegeus, the king of Athens, she does not leave alone. She takes her two dead children with her, whom she intends to bury in the sacred lands of Hera, in a sanctuary at the borders of the Corinthian territory. Dead to the world of the father, they will be mourned in the world of the mother as the loss, the absence, and the memory of another home that could not be. No home is ever homely enough – not for Medea, who is accompanied

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by her mourning, and not even for Aegeus, since his home, Athens, is also only partly homely, as he is sterile and cannot give his country any children. The shadows of the unhomely, of the ontological past full of ontic presences that we all carry with us cannot be erased. They too need to find accommodation in the welcoming home. Yet, there is no trace of any of this in Heidegger’s encounter with Greek tragedy. For him, Medea remains an unnamed, insubstantial shadow. In relating Heidegger and ancient Greek literature, not only do we need to read Heidegger. We also need to read more literature and, more specifically, more Greek tragedies so that additional ontological possibilities left in the shadows may emerge while engaging a Heideggerian dance with tragic shadows and counter-shadows.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. The Jargon of Authenticity. London: Routledge, 1973. Bambach, C. R. Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. Thinking the Poetic Measure of Justice: Hölderlin-Heidegger-Celan. New York: State University of New York Press, 2013. Butler, Judith. Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Cavarero, Adriana. Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude. Translated by Adam Sitze and Amanda Minervini. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. Stately Bodies: Literature, Philosophy, and the Question of Gender. Translated by Deanna Shemek and Robert de Lucca. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Clauss, James J., and Sarah Iles Johnston, eds. Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, and Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Davis, Bret W. Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007. de Beistegui, M. Heidegger & the Political. London: Routledge, 1998. Derrida, Jacques. The Politics of Friendship. Translated by G. Collins. London: Verso Books, 2005. Foley, Helene. “Medea’s Divided Self.” Classical Antiquity 8, no. 1 (1989): 61–85. Fóti, Véronique. Epochal Discordance: Hölderlin’s Philosophy of Tragedy. Albany: SUNY Press, 2006. “Textuality and the Question of Origin: Heidegger’s Reading of ‘Andenken’ and ‘Der Ister’.” In Heidegger and the Poets: Poiesis, Sophia, Techne, edited by Veronique M. Foti. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1992. Fried, Gregory. Heidegger’s Polemos: From Being to Politics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.

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Gethmann-Siefert, Annemarie, and Richard Taft. “Heidegger and Hölderlin: The Over-usage of Poets in an Impoverished Time.” Research in Phenomenology no. 19 (1989): 59–88. Green, David, and Richmond Lattimore, eds. Euripides I. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Hegel on Tragedy. Translated by Anne Paolucci and Henry Paolucci. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1962. Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Translated by Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. Kasimis, Demetra. “Medea the Refugee.” The Review of Politics 82, no. 3 (2020): 393–415. Kluge, Alexander. “Heidegger auf der Krim.” In his Chronik der Gefühle. Munich: Bayerische Rundfunk, 2019. Macdonald, Iain, and Krzysztof Ziarek, eds. Adorno and Heidegger: Philosophical Questions. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. Schmidt, Dennis. On Germans & Other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical Life. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Shepherdson, Charles. “Antigone: The Work of Literature and the History of Subjectivity.” In Bound by the City: Greek Tragedy, Sexual Difference, and the Formation of the Polis, edited by Denise McCoskey and Emily Zakin, 47–80. Albany: SUNY Press, 2009. Söderbäck. Fanny, ed. Feminist Readings of Antigone. Albany: SUNY Press, 2012.

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Heidegger and Literary Works

8

Places of Pain Heidegger’s Reading of Trakl Claudia Baracchi

And Place was where the Presence was / Circumference between. (Emily Dickinson, 1084) On or around December 1910, human character changed. (Virginia Woolf ) Ich verstehe sie nicht, aber ihr Ton beglückt mich. (Ludwig Wittgenstein)1

The thinking of place is a crucial preoccupation in Heidegger’s late thinking, especially sustained by an ongoing frequentation of poetry and its posture towards language. The question of Ort is illuminated in Heidegger’s discussion of Georg Trakl, notably in two essays: “Die Sprache,” presented in a first lecture version on October 7, 1950; and “Die Sprache im Gedicht: Eine Erörterung von Georg Trakls Gedicht,” first presented on October 4, 1952 under the title “Georg Trakl: Eine Erörterung seines Gedichtes” and published the following year with the same title (in the journal Merkur 61: 226–258).2 In what follows I trace a few moments of Heidegger’s meditation on place in these two texts. Issues ranging from estrangement to belonging, from rhythm to the quiet unity preceding all difference, from body to politics, from pain and evil to their transfiguration, are encountered along these paths.

1

2

L. Wittgenstein on Trakl’s poems, postcard to Ludwig von Ficker, November 28, 1914, in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Briefe an Ludwig von Ficker (Salzburg: Otto Müller, 1969), n. 12, 22. “Die Sprache” and “Die Sprache im Gedicht: Eine Erörterung von Georg Trakls Gedicht” first appeared together in Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1959). In English translation, the earlier essay (“Language”) appears in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter (New York: HarperCollins, 1971); the latter in On the Way to Language, trans. P. D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).

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Versammlung

The human being speaks. We speak in wakefulness and in dream. We always speak, even when we do not utter a word, but only listen or read, and even when we are not particularly listening or speaking but are attending to some work or enjoy leisure time. We constantly speak in every way. We speak because speaking is natural to us. It does not first arise from a special will. The human being is said to have language by nature. It is held that the human being, as distinct from plant and animal, is the living being capable of speech. The sentence does not mean only that, alongside other capabilities, the human being also possesses that of speech. The sentence means to say that language first enables [befähige] the human being to be the living being that he as human is. It is as the speaking one that the human is: human.3

Thus opens Heidegger’s first essay focusing on Georg Trakl, “Die Sprache.” However, Heidegger adds, “there remains to consider what this means – the human being.”4 We are immediately contemplating the scope of the issue: bringing to language the being of the human being, the speaking one, and elucidating what makes it possible and constitutes it as such. A quasi-transcendental mode of inquiry. Quasi-transcendental because, on the one hand, in order to gain insight into the being of the human, the human must be brought to language, to its condition, as it were. Yet, at the same time, not quite transcendental, because it is in bringing the human to language, in this very movement, that language itself, as it were, is somewhat illumined. The condition is clarified in virtue of the oriented motility of the conditioned (or conditional), and not a priori: “To discuss language, to situate it, means to bring to the place of its essence not so much language as ourselves.” In such a situation (Erörterung) of language, not only is the meaning of being human raised as an issue, but also the human, by moving towards the place of language, comes into itself: it is preserved from dispersal, arranged, housed into its historical taking place.5 Heidegger, then, completes the statement just quoted by suspending it to a colon and attaching what sounds like an elucidation: “To discuss language, to situate it, means to bring to the place of its essence not so much language as ourselves: gathering into the event [the appropriation][Die Sprache

3 4 5

GA12: 9. Here and for the rest of the chapter all the translations from German are mine. Ibid. On the intertwined questions of being and of place in Heidegger’s thinking, see Jeff Malpas, “The House of Being: Poetry, Language, Place,” in Heidegger’s Later Thought, ed. Günter Figal et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020).

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erörtern heißt, nicht so sehr sie, sondern uns an den Ort ihres Wesens bringen: Versammlung in das Ereignis].”6 The key questions that will be broached are all already here, announced by likewise decisive terms. It will have been a matter of thinking place as the site of the essence (Wesen) of language; a matter of thinking the human as a task, the task of becoming human, that is, bringing the human into the locality of language, wherein alone the human may be inaugurated as human; above all, a matter of thinking (in) the tension between place dynamically understood (Ereignis taking place and becoming place) and the binding intimation of Versammlung. Place, then, from this inception onwards bespeaks that in which becoming is secured to integrity, preserved from dispersion, held together (versammelt). It names the exertion of attraction, intensification, holding in concentration and arrangement. Neither at this early stage nor later in the text is the mandate of Versammlung, the necessity of gathering, explicated further, let alone questioned. It carries the nearly insurmountable force of what is just posited, its emphasis setting the tone and mood of the discussion. We may already discern here a concern with dissemination, with the teeming and transient multiplicity of the sensuous. We will return to this. For the moment, however, a few more inceptive considerations are in order. The event (Ereignis) at stake has nothing to do with chronicles, the news, the loud and spectacular. This goes altogether without saying in the context of Heidegger studies. Stating it explicitly may even sound embarrassingly naïve. Yet, going without saying is often a preamble to going unthought, being taken as plain and obvious. Thus, it may not be idle to underscore the event as a coming to pass in and of subtlety, calling for a precise, sensitive attunement to what comes to take place as it passes away – especially today, in an epoch grown noisier and coarser, farther and farther removed from the cultivation of experience (Erfahrung), attention, and the contemplative posture. And let us likewise underscore that the question of attention, attending, meditation, which is central to phenomenological research in general, characterizes Heidegger’s thinking, in particular from the late 1930s (Besinnung, GA66) to his late works (for instance, “der sinnende Mann” in “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” GA14).7 6 7

GA12: 10. In Trakl’s “Gesang des Abgeschiedenen” is the line “Schon dämmert die Stirne dem sinnenden Menschen.”

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The event in which the human would come to be gathered, the taking place of the experience of language inaugurating the human as such, thus, far from anything in the order of the spectacle, comes to pass most inconspicuously. It proves to be most arduous to seize, taking place furtively. As Heidegger will observe in the second essay on Trakl, “the essential [das Wesenhafte] comes to pass [sich ereignet] quietly, suddenly, and rarely.”8 The human being is what it is, that is, human, because always on the way to language and, at the same time, always already reached, overtaken, anticipated by language. The human condition distinctively involves always already belonging in language, in its infinite and indefinite precedence, and, at the same time, moving towards language, coming to take note of such a condition while always already being appropriated by it. Thus, orientation to language, the motility (Bewegung) itself of being on the way (Weg), moving towards language, appears at once as a turn backwards. For it moves towards that which always already precedes – the precedent, the before, the first. Advancing is at once returning. Only afterwards would we come to the before. It is last for us, precisely because it is first. It is first absolutely and, at the same time, otherwise than we might have anticipated. Both absolutely and otherwise.9 It will be a matter of suspending a host of traditional convictions regarding language, or rather, of interrupting their alleged and alluring obviousness, and, in loosening their hold, stretching out to an even earlier, forgotten beginning: We still reflect too little, however, on the peculiar role of these correct representations of language. They assert themselves, as if unshakable, over the whole field of the varied scientific perspectives on language. They go back to an old tradition.

8 9

GA12: 42. J. Derrida traces the movements of such a temporality in Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question [De l’esprit, 1987], trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), esp. chapter 9, through the constellation of Geschichte, Geschick, Abendland. He thoroughly highlights the same thematic cluster in Jacques Derrida, Geschlecht III: Sex, Race, Nation, Humanity [Geschlecht III. Sexe, race, nation, humanité, 2018], trans. K. Chenoweth and R. Therezo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020). As we shall see, Heidegger’s second essay on Trakl brings into further focus the movement from the last (the movement taking place in the end and consummation of that which is last) to the first, a movement reaching out to an even more originary origin, to a beginning incomparably more primordial than the first. See also David Farrell Krell, “Marginalia to Geschlecht III: Derrida on Heidegger on Trakl,” CR: The New Centennial Review, 7, no. 2 (2007): 175–199; Phantoms of the Other: Four Generations of Derrida’s Geschlecht (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015).

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Yet they completely ignore the oldest essential cast [Wesensprägung] of language. Thus, despite their antiquity and despite their comprehensibility, they never guide us to language as language.10

The traditional “representations of language,” old and well established as they may be, are not nearly ancient enough to capture what is “oldest” – the primeval beat of language, the place of language vibrating and arranging. They miss language as the deep syntax of becoming, as that which gathers becoming into being. Such would be the most originary dawn of language. It is perhaps striking that such a hyperbolical antiquity should not altogether overwhelm the order of the old and, along with it, the primacy of the oldest, of the first, of the originary itself. Let us simply take note of this here. Poetry is essentially bound up with the question of the human, of the meaning of being human. For what poetry conveys, in its striving, is the movement towards language, the experience of reaching language, of coming to the word, through a fundamental receptivity – through a defenseless exposure to “the oldest,” to the quiet prior to all articulation, to resounding silence prior to all sound. To what is neither owned as a property nor controlled at will. To what, inappropriable, appropriates. It is in such a poetic undergoing that the words we utter first arise. Such is, however forgotten, the inhuman root of human utterance, even of the most quotidian prose.11 Towards the end of “Die Sprache,” Heidegger brings together the movements of his Erörterung and observes that the essence of language: is nothing human. On the contrary, the human is in its essence linguistic [sprachlich]. The word “linguistic” just mentioned here means: having taken place [ereignet] out of the speaking of language. What has thus taken place [Das so Ereignete], human essence, has been brought into its own through language, so that it remains given over or appropriated [übereignet] to the essence of language, the resounding of stillness. Such an appropriating takes place [Solches Ereignen ereignet sich] in that the essence of language, the resounding of stillness, uses [braucht] the speaking of mortals in order to sound as the resounding of stillness for the hearing of mortals. Only as human beings belong in the resounding of stillness is it possible for mortals to speak in their own way in sounds.12

10 11

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GA12: 13. “Authentic poetry is never only a higher mode [melos] of everyday language. On the contrary, everyday speech is a forgotten and thus exploited poem . . . The opposite of pure speaking, of the poem, is not prose. Pure prose is never ‘prosaic.’ It is as poetic and, therefore, as rare as poetry” (GA12: 28). GA12: 27–28.

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Being on the way to language constitutes the defining task of humans. Being human entails the exercise of speaking, that is, of echoing the speaking of language, of being spoken by language through and through, constitutively. Such is the task (infinite, we might say) of bringing ourselves to the place of language, to its speaking essence, held in that attraction. Taking up such a task, in its infinite character, means experiencing finitude: learning mortality, dwelling in the oriented transiency that mortality names. And this holds true even, or especially, in the age in which language is prevalently taken to be a human attribute, a tool that humans may brandish at will, in the service of global communication, omni-connectedness, all-encompassing networks and modes of controlled conveyance – whether by land, sea, air, or electronic impulse.13 Thus understood, being on the way requires the availability to a listening, the openness to perceiving the human (ourselves) in question, as a question, and a profoundly unsettling one. For, more precisely, the endless task of being on the way, of bringing the human to the place in which language speaks, resounds, and can be followed – such a task reveals the human as a being that stands in need. A being needing to be placed, to fathom its own conditioned character, and hence its situation and situatedness. Which also means its fragility, non-omnipotence, ephemeral character. Heidegger’s preoccupation (or even obsession), from the 1930s onwards, and in diverse contexts, with nomadism, homelessness, and uprootedness as extreme threats to modern humanity, stems from such considerations. In this line of thinking, being uprooted inevitably bespeaks aimless wandering, a distorted self-perception, loss of measure and rhythm. Conversely, being on the way, staying in the draw of language, approaching the place of language speaking, involves allowing ourselves to fall into the “abyss” (Abgrund) of an extremely consequential tautology: “Language is: language. Language speaks. [Die Sprache ist: 13

In the present age what Heidegger calls the traditional understanding of language (language as phonetic expression, as human activity, as representation of the real) can be experienced in full force. Heidegger refers such a stance to a lineage that, from Aristotle, would lead to J. G. Hamann and W. von Humboldt. The continuity of the Greek–German lineage, whether polemically posited (as in the narrative of the history of metaphysics) or assumed for other strategic purposes, as well as such a framing of the question of language in Aristotle, are problematic for more than one reason – first and foremost in light of the uncontrollable polysemy (or, better, the plasticity indicated by the adverb pollachos) of the term logos in the Aristotelian corpus. But this will have to be broached elsewhere. In Unterwegs zur Sprache (GA12), see also “Das Wesen der Sprache” (1957–58) and “Der Weg zur Sprache” (1959).

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Sprache. Die Sprache spricht.]”14 Language, not a speaking subject, speaks. However, such an abyss is altogether other than “emptiness”: “We fall into the height [Höhe]. Its altitude [Hoheit] opens up a depth. Both span a locality [Ortschaft] in which we would like to become native [heimisch], so as to find an abode for the essence of the human being.” And again: “To reflect on language means: in a way, to reach the speaking of language so that the speaking takes place [sich ereignet] as that which grants an abode to the essence of mortals.”15 And yet, how unstable, to the point of impossibility, is the distinction between aimless wandering and moving into the essence of language, between being lost and being spoken by language, placed into the proper being of the human being. How ethereal, never traced once and for all, is the line between erring and homecoming, disorientation and guidance. And how inescapable, in the course of the human transit, are the irredeemable falls, those that disclose no livable, habitable place and cannot be assimilated to elevation or height.16 It would seem that poetry is just as much the place in which this undecidable ambiguity is hosted, the place of dwelling as well as the radically inhospitable gaping wherein all may be scattered and lost. The place of humanity and of the inhuman, of language and its disarticulation. Heidegger’s allergy to the nomadic (literally an aversion to the allos – the other, the non-autochthonous, the homeless and placeless) not only significantly distorts his approach to and consideration of the errant peoples, but also seems to make opaque to him the phenomena of migration, displacement, and intermingling that are coterminous with the history of humankind (that is, with the being of the human being).17 Phenomena relentlessly occurring in epic proportions even today, amid immense suffering, in often tragic circumstances. Even aside from the recently published Notebooks from the decade of the 1930s onwards, which have prompted a great deal of debate, Heidegger’s preoccupation with anything in the order of diaspora or dissemination is deeply

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15 GA12: 11. Ibid. As a counterpoint here, and a suggestion from a wandering homeless, hear Paul Celan’s juxtaposition of language and transient, hardly protective veils, in the compound “wordtent”: “Sichtbares, Hörbares, das / frei- / werdende Zeltwort: // Mitsammen” (“Anabase,” I, 257). I attempt a translation, without line breaks: “Visible, audible, the word-tent becoming free: together.” See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. G. Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (London: Verso, 1994), 108–109.

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embedded in his thinking and should not be surprising.18 In this regard, we might profit from drawing closer to the text by Trakl at the center of Heidegger’s first essay. And to Heidegger’s reading strategy.

2

Schmerz

“Die Sprache” unfolds around the axis of Trakl’s poem “A Winter Evening,” which I venture to translate thus: When snow falls against the window, Long sounds the evening bell, For many is the table prepared And the house is set in order. Some in wandering Come on dark paths to the gate. Golden the tree of grace is flowering Out of the cool sap of the earth. Wanderer silently steps in; Pain has turned the threshold into stone. Glowing in pure brightness On the table bread and wine.

Opposites are held together beyond any possible conciliatory resolution – a mark of Trakl’s verse. The first two verses juxtapose the silence of snow falling and the tolling of the vespers bell – protracted, open ended, stretching into the indefinite expanse of darkness outside. The poem then switches from the aural impression to a vision of dazzling simplicity. An interior is evoked in its vivid sensuousness, one can almost sense the warmth, the smells of the kitchen, the whiteness of the clean tablecloth, the comforting refuge, enclosed and yet open, readied for many (Vielen). The second stanza introduces a new shift: in the wintry expanse outside, out of obscure coiling paths, some (Mancher) come to that entrance. They arrive somehow, as if by chance, for wandering is an uncertain motion, unsecured to a definite destination, and it is unclear where it

18

D. Vallega-Neu speaks of “resistance against dissemination and pluralization” (Daniela Vallega-Neu, Heidegger’s Poietic Writings: From “Contributions to Philosophy” to “The Event” [Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2018], 93).

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will lead, whether it will lead anywhere in the end or one will roam to no end, lost in the storm. Thus, the table inside is arranged to welcome many, but only a few make it there. Before transiting from the somber exterior into the inviting home, the poem names a tree, another site of contrast. In its majesty, its upper visible part is resplendent with gold, while its roots sink into the cold receptacles of the earth and invisibly draw nourishment from it. Visible and invisible, glowing and gloom, warmth and frost, manifestness and hiddenness, drawn together in their stark distinction, are at once revealed in their belonging together and mutual implication: one nourishing and sustaining the other; the other magnifying and praising the former by taking place and coming into a shining outline. Third stanza: a wayfarer out of obscurity enters the glowing space inside. One, out of many, and even out of the few. After the figure of the tree of grace, the jointure of darkness and radiance is brought back from a vertical to a horizontal articulation. In pure light, on the table, bread and wine. Yet the moment of relief and luminosity may be transient, a mere pause of rest and reconstitution. Hence, the sudden interpolation of the second line strikes one as an abrupt reminder. It peremptorily names pain, as that which joins light and dark, height and depth, respite and threatening uncertainty, holding together the indefinite space outside and the delimited, protected place inside, solidifying the transit between them, in both directions – pain paradoxically coming into its own precisely in the moment of its suspension, in coming to the place of relief; and again in leaving that place, in the loss of protection, returning to the dangerous paths outside. Pain does not merely petrify the threshold. It constitutes the threshold as such, as the consolidated passage from one side to the other. Why is the threshold as such solidified? The threshold, pain, is as solid as stone, for it is that which appears most firm. In the instability of wandering, it stands, invariant. In the midst of transiency, of restless migration, it lasts. It abides between inside and outside, disclosing both inside and outside as such. It is the constant transition from outside to inside, from inside to outside; the reversibility of one extreme into the other, of plenitude into loss, of direction into senselessness. It marks their indissoluble bind. In a nearly unsustainable tension, the poem seems to indicate pain as the dwelling place – human dwelling as pathos, as the pathos of an interminable roaming punctuated with moments of reprieve, which we share perhaps beyond language (if language is the site wherein the human becomes human), in a silence and in a listening that are perhaps

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irreducible to our relatedness to originary language (“Wanderer silently steps in; / Pain has turned the threshold into stone”). We might characterize such a basic pathos as existential, if Ek-sistenz is indeed a risky venture, a matter of standing-out “bare-headed,”19 exposed to excess, to the overpowering and incalculable – a movement not possibly kept safe from straying, from erring in the loss of aims and ends. However, this appeal to existence, this elaboration not so steadily anchored to the height and the originary, to what is elevated and first, seem no longer to belong in the Grundton of Heidegger’s reading of the poem. In fact, they rather counter it. Heidegger’s reading at first acknowledges pain as that which rends, tears apart (“der Schmerz reißt”). And yet, pain is what it is, that is, is perceived as pain, precisely because it breaks a whole. It is the whole qua whole that, in abiding through the rending, is in pain. Thus, on the one hand, pain “is the tear [der Riß],” yet, on the other hand, it does not rip the whole apart, disintegrating it into splinters (“er zerreißt nicht in auseinanderfahrende Splitter”). Rather, at the same time, the whole is preserved, held together as such precisely as it is violated. Pain gathers to itself and in itself: “alles auf sich zieht, in sich versammelt.” It is the grief of difference (“Der Schmerz ist der Unter-Schied selber”) and that which heals and reaffirms the jointure (“die Fuge”) of the differing.20 The disturbing hypothesis of difference ending up in dispersed fragmentation must be reined in, brought back to some kind of overall comprehension. Almost a transcendence. In this way, despite the sudden insertion of pain into the poem, in and of itself lacerating the fabric of the text, and despite the even more prominent lingering of pain in an earlier version of the poem, sorrow becomes a figure of speech, an abstraction. It comes to indicate the between (“das Zwischen”), the threshold uniting as it keeps apart, the Versammlung that, in various guises and ubiquitously, re-emerges in the palimpsest of Heidegger’s thinking. To be sure, Heidegger even recalls Trakl’s earlier draft, where grief is amplified – where the human being is shown in its wounds (however filled with grace, Gnaden) and “bare suffering [bloße Pein],” having fought with angels and now “tamed” by sacred pain (“von heiligem Schmerz”), silent (stumm, still) both in

19

20

“. . . mit entblößtem Haupte zu stehen,” Hölderlin writes in “Wie wenn am Feiertage. . .,” imaging the poets standing with bare head in the storm and seizing “the father’s radiant beam.” GA12: 24.

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struggling and in reaching out to “God’s bread and wine.”21 From the start, however, Heidegger also insists that issues pertaining to life, experience, and the unique vicissitudes inflecting each single existence in its geo-cultural-historical context, must be kept at bay. The poem was composed by Georg Trakl, but this is irrelevant (“bleibt unwichtig”): with great poetry one need not pay heed to the person and name (“Person und Namen”) of the poet.22 The poet, the human being and its venture, must be left alone, at the margins of the philosophical discourse. This, of course, holds for the thinker as well, as Heidegger also says in other contexts.23 Of course, one wonders how one may begin to discount the experience of chronic maladaptation and estrangement that makes life a nearly (or even utterly) unsustainable prospect – a maladaptation and an estrangement hardly accidental and so intimately implicated in the very source of pain. At times there is neither redemption of, nor return from, dismembering pain.24 Nevertheless, Heidegger insists, pain names the gathering of the fragmentary, the holding together of all things in unity, of the whole torn apart: the differing (Unter-Schied) in intimacy (Innigkeit) of world and things. And, most emphatically, “we should not represent pain anthropologically, as sensation [Empfindung] bringing about suffering. Nor should we represent intimacy psychologically, as that in which sensibility [Empfindsamkeit] is harbored.”25 The troubling character of this dismissal of sensibility hardly needs to be signaled. Pain loses its existential thickness, its inscription in the deepest, most secluded receptacles of the living, its anguish beyond recourse and irredeemable remainder. It is exorcized to the point of insignificance. The overwhelming experience of pain, of being lost on the winding paths of this earthly passage, becomes a sign.26

21 23

24

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22 GA12: 15. Ibid. For instance, Heidegger’s well-known statement in the Summer 1924 Aristotle course, confirmed by H. Arendt, concerning the irrelevance of the “personality of the philosopher.” Of the thinker we only need to know that he was born “at a certain time,” thought, and died (GA18: 5/4). Upon hearing of Trakl’s death, on November 3, 1914, K. Kraus writes that he never understood how Trakl could live at all: K. Kraus and S. N. von Borutin, Briefe an Sidonie Nádherný von Borutin, 1913–1936, 2 vols., ed. F. Pfäfflin (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005), cited in Allan Janik, “‘Ethik und Ästhetik sind eins’: Wittgenstein and Trakl,” Modern Austrian Literature (1990): 62. GA12: 24–25. L. Wittgenstein (born the same year as Heidegger, 1889, dies in 1951) underscores the “contemptuous attitude towards the particular case” and “craving for generality” characterizing the philosophical posture (Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books

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A suggestive sign, to be sure, whose evocativeness is deployed in the service of the logic of discourse, of logos – the logic of gathering.27 [Oxford: Blackwell, 1958], 18). And in the Philosophical Investigations (section 92), regarding the pursuit of exactness: This finds expression in the question of the essence of language, of propositions, of thought. – For although we, in our investigations, are trying to understand the nature of language – its function, its structure – yet this is not what that question has in view. For it sees the essence of things not as something that already lies open to view, and that becomes surveyable through a process of ordering, but as something that lies beneath the surface. Something that lies within, which we perceive when we see right into the thing, and which an analysis is supposed to unearth. “The essence is hidden from us”: this is the form our problem now assumes. We ask: “What is language?”, “What is a proposition?” And the answer to these questions is to be given once for all, and independently of any future experience [Erfahrung]. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953).

27

It will be said (and correctly so) that these concerns are certainly not foreign to Heidegger, although in a completely different language. Again, it goes without saying. And it is likewise remarkable that between 1949 and the early 1950s, through the elaboration of the fourfold (sky and earth, mortals and immortals), Heidegger delves ever deeper into the question of the thing, and of the mutual implication of world and things, in a radical reformulation of the phenomenological pursuit. This receives a conspicuous development in the central pages of “Die Sprache” (GA12: 19ff.). Yet, precisely in this light, it appears all the more noteworthy that the phenomenon of life in its singularity should be denied philosophical dignity and that the philosopher should abdicate the task of reflecting anew (that is, originally) on biography, on thought’s rootedness in the biographical. Derrida comments on the crypto-autobiographical tenor of Heidegger’s engagement with Trakl, in Derrida, Geschlecht III, passim. If genuinely disquieting in conjunction with pain, the insistence on Versammlung takes on an altogether different force and range of implications in the meditation on logos Heidegger carries out in Auseinandersetzung with Heraclitus, dating from the same period (1951), “Logos (Heraclitus, Fragment B 50),” in GA7: 212–234/EGT: 59–78. No modern European language can convey the semantic field of logos with one similarly broadranging term. Logos, according to context, may mean word, discourse, discursive articulation, scientific-demonstrative procedure (logos as sun-logismos, syllogism), and therefore ratio, reason, rationality, law, definition, the intimate structure of (a) being. But it is the verb legein that reveals what is common to these apparently disparate connotations. Legein, to be sure, means saying, uttering, but in its most archaic sense it designates a gathering that protects and preserves: linking, connecting, articulating so as to hold the differing together while saving it as such, as differing. In this way, logos bespeaks relation, correlation – a “letting things lie together before us” that lets them shine forth as such, a fitting together from which arise configurations of meaning, a union that literally makes sense, brings sense forth and lets it be illumined. This is what discourse, thinking (even as reason), and world (as the organism in which things as things take place) have in common – what makes them likewise grammatical, communicative. This generative arrangement, which is the bearer and locus of sense, equally defines linguistic articulation, the work of rationality, and the organized structures (whether internal or external, whether visible or invisible) of the world as world of phenomena or, more graeco, the sphere of life. Well beyond the exercise of the human calculative

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Heidegger returns to the question of pain in the second essay as well. Within the scope of the present discussion it will not be possible to consider in depth those passages and the essay overall, especially because in that context, unlike in “Die Sprache,” Heidegger draws upon a broad repertoire of poems, in what often appears a pretextual or even rapacious selection of fragments, key figures, and words put in the service of movements of thinking that seem preordained. In and of itself, this is a perplexing comportment vis-à-vis the poetic material. Heidegger’s pronouncements often seem forced on the poems. He seems to say too much. Or not enough. Above all, he never lets transpire a sense of doubt, the least hesitation concerning outcome and implications of his interpretive operation. He seems to speak from unassailable knowledge, exerting

capacities, most basically rationality is relationality, the meaningful bond disclosing traits inaccessible through the consideration of unconnected components. Logos is Versammlung. Heraclitus said: “Listening not to me, but to the logos, it is wise to say concordantly [homologein]: one all” (in the Diels-Kranz edition of Heraclitus, 50). In a statement that has become almost inaudible, if it ever was heeded, archaic thinking evokes the logos of phusis, logos before the logos (the logoi) spoken by mortals. At stake is logos before logos, the logos of the all that is one – gathering, connecting, contacting, transmitting, and communicating, giving rise to a composite whole that originates through communion. Heidegger does not mention it, but such is the silent logos still to be found in Plato’s Timaeus (37b), the logos “without sound and noise” traversing the psuche of the kosmos (the cosmos is alive) quietly speaking to herself – the logos infinitely prior to human logos, listening to which human logos determines itself as concordant. The homologein, the homology fostered in Heraclitus’ saying, is not a matter of conventional agreement, conformity, or conformism. Rather, the fragment intimates that it is wise to cultivate a mode of speaking that arises from a heeding and in response to it – to speak in the recognition of a commonality and to recognize our own saying as the echo of a more primordial, choral and ultimately, irreducibly inhuman logos. The logos that Heraclitus invites his listeners to listen to, so that they may come to an agreement with it and among themselves, and find an accord and concordance, is the bond articulating the world in which we belong, the language of becoming that sustains each being in its being and all beings in the complex design of their interdependence. This is a thought perhaps still waiting in the future, attempting to outline a sense of universality sorely needed in an increasingly disintegrated world – a lived, sensed, embodied universal out of relatedness (not unlike what can be discerned in the development of J. Butler’s work, for example, in Senses of the Subject [New York: Fordham University Press, 2015]). Logos, thus, names the relation that at once unites and unfolds the differing; recursiveness in transformation; the drawing that draws the contours of things, ideas, and events, composing them in ever more comprehensive patterns. Despite the mutual extraneity of these discourses (and their respective traditions), it may be tempting (and fruitful) as well to juxtapose the outcomes of Heidegger’s interpretation of logos in Heraclitus to Gregory Bateson’s thought of “the pattern which connects.”

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absolute mastery over the poetic texts.28 However, on the later reprise of pain let us simply point out this much. In “Die Sprache im Gedicht” pain is first juxtaposed to the figure of the animal “as yet uncertain” (“noch nicht fest gestellt”), that is, the human not yet safely brought home, “nach Haus” (here the quotation marks are Heidegger’s), “into the native locale of its hidden essence” (“in das Einheimische ihres verhüllten Wesens”).29 Thus, the blue animal punctuating Trakl’s poetry becomes a figure of the human to come, inceptively announced here in the promise of an auroral renewal. The placement of the human in its essential abode involves a gestation still infused with pain. In the further development of this thematic kernel, pain seems to be acknowledged in its existential incisiveness: as permanent and unresolvable as stone,30 it inheres in “the living” (“das Lebende”), for “all that lives is in pain” (“Alles, was lebt, ist schmerzlich”).31 It would seem that here pain is no longer a logical formula, but is addressed in its unadorned crudeness. Yet, at this very moment, pain is lifted, as it were, to a highly celebratory tone. And here celebration means something close to redemption, which, in turn, may be but another mode of denial. The theme of pain enters the orbit of certain images of Trakl’s (“Give your flame to spirit, ardent sadness,” “O pain, you flaming contemplation / of the great soul,” “Thus in pain, the living is good and truthful. . .”),32 and Heidegger leads it to disquieting consequences. There is no emphatic grandeur in Trakl’s poems, especially because of the play of pronouns, I, you: “Schwester, da ich dich fand an einsamer Lichtung / Des Waldes und Mittag war und groß das Schweigen des Tiers.”33 Every time poetry returns to these first two pronouns, as it paradigmatically does in archaic lyric poetry, it speaks out of the 28

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Again, in contrast to Wittgenstein’s posture, who underlines his lack of understanding (“I don’t understand his poems”) coupled with affect and the intuition of something non-conceptual yet utterly significant (“their tone delights me”). Adorno seizes the importance of the 1914 note to von Ficker, and the way in which the issue of tone, first experienced as a problem in Trakl’s poetry (“I hear,” “I don’t understand”), would profoundly influence the development of Wittgenstein’s thinking from the Tractatus to the Investigations, becoming a central concern in the latter (Theodor W. Adorno, “Introduction,” in The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, tr. G. Adey and D. Frisby [London: Heinemann, 1976], 52–53). See also Charles Altieri and Sascha Bru, “Trakl’s Tone: Mood and the Distinctive Speech Act of the Demonstrative,” in Wittgenstein Reading, ed. S. Bru, W. Huemer, and D. Steuer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 355–372. 30 31 32 GA12: 41. GA12: 59. GA12: 58. GA12: 57–58. “Sister I found you there in a solitary clearing / Of the woods and it was noon and great the silence of the animal” (“Frühling der Seele” in Georg Trakl, Dichtungen [Salzburg: Otto Müller, 1938], 150).

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paradoxical immediacy of the address, of an evocation that is already an invocation, of a desirous living contact with the living. That is why at times poetry’s character is so distinctly tactile, as primitive as touch, even when the matter it evokes is most evanescent: “Am Abend, wenn die Glocken Frieden läuten, / Folg ich der Vögel wundervollen Flügen . . . Träum ich nach ihren helleren Geschicken . . . So folg ich über Wolken ihren Fahrten.”34 These pronouns are what keeps even the most aspiring, winged poetry small, close to earth, to its accidents, its minimalism: “Wer bist du Ruhendes unter hohen Bäumen?”35 Even when in third person. For the poet (a poet like Trakl) knows how to speak out of witnessing, letting it transpire that it is from this pathos, from this undergoing, here, that the word rises, and never out of an unaffected, apathetic selfsubsistence. It is I, speaking. I speaking to you, whether inside or beside me. And when I speak of others, even of things, it is out of being (in) them: “Du auf verfallenen Stufen: Baum, Stern, Stein! Du, ein blaues Tier, das leise zittert.”36 Heidegger, however, as if sustained by the winged verses he cites, here again points out that sensibility, Empfindung, precludes access to the essence of pain – pain is “flaming contemplation” and “[f]laming contemplation determines greatness of soul.”37 And we find ourselves distant, the abysmal simplicity of pain has withdrawn into words, and we read of pain as the “fundamental character of the great soul” and as the “pure correspondence to the holiness of blue.”38 So that we may be lost when coming to the following conclusion: “Pain is truly pain only when it serves the flame of spirit. The last poem by Trakl is entitled ‘Grodek.’ It is usually praised as war poetry. However, it is infinitely more than that, for it is other than that.”39 But what could the poem “Grodek” reveal, beyond woods resounding with fire weapons, landscape where even the sun shines sinister, somber autumnal flutes, the wavering shadow of the sister, blood reddening the sky, furious god, all the roads converging into black rottenness? For, granted, a poem always says more, or less, in brief something other than what it allegedly says, or means to say. Yet, what is at stake in trying to dispel the harshness this text carries, in trying to transcend (or is it an 34

35 36

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“In the evening, when the bells call for peace / I follow the wondrous flight of birds . . . I dream their more luminous destinies . . . So I follow their journeys over the clouds” (“Verfall” in Trakl, Dichtungen, 13.) “Who are you resting under tall trees”? (“Passion” in Trakl, Dichtungen, 146). “You on decaying steps: tree, star, stone! You, a blue animal, softly trembling” (“Verwandlung des Bösen” in Trakl, Dichtungen, 130). 38 39 GA12: 58. GA12: 61. Ibid.

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exorcism?) its situation? This is not to foster literal readings or to resolve poetry into history report, mere biography, or documentation.40 But it is as if Heidegger would draw the power out of the poem’s images and leave them behind – worn out, hollow, on the side of the road to his projected end. To what end? In the last two verses of “Grodek” Heidegger envisions the transfiguration whereby, out the corrupted generation of humans and the disastrous propagation of the Abendland, another beginning might be announced, albeit in the image of unborn grandchildren (grandsons, actually – Enkel). It is an immense pain, before the unborn, a pain in comparison with which the carnage on the battlefield seems to pale. It is the pain of the not yet, of the vigil, of suspension. And, as a matter of fact, the carnage may even somehow facilitate the laborious, drawn-out process of transformation: The “grandsons” mentioned here are in no way the unbegotten sons of the sons fallen in battle, those coming from the corrupted generation [verwesenden Geschlecht]. If it were only the interruption in the reproduction of generations [Geschlechter] up until now, then this poet should rejoice over such an end. But he grieves, albeit with a “prouder grief” that, flaming, envisions the rest of the unborn. The unborn are named grandsons because they cannot be sons, that is, they cannot be the immediate descendants of the collapsed generation [Geschlecht]. Between them and this generation [Geschlecht] lives another generation [eine andere Generation]. It is other, because it is of another kind, in keeping with its other essential provenance in the morning of the unborn. The “violent pain” is the all-burning flaming vision, which looks ahead into the still withdrawing morning of the dead one,41 with respect to whom the “spirits” [“Geister”] of those fallen early have died.42

So not only has pain become an abstraction, placeless and rhetorically emphatic, but, moreover, it has come to serve a curious shift that, as the counterpart of a dawn to come, more novel and more originary, involves the anaesthetization, or even the jubilation, over the effects of war. Assisting the beginning of a new “cosmic year” (Weltjahr),43 in the

40

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At any rate, a remarkable presentation of the European (and more broadly Western) literary, philosophical, and artistic landscape just before World War I can be found in Thomas Harrison, 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). The figure of Trakl is analyzed at length and in various respects, most notably in connection with the cultural trope of guilt (Emancipation, 117ff.). The reference is to Elis, the one who died young, in the poems “Elis,” “An den Knaben Elis,” and “Abendland” (Trakl, Dichtungen, 98–100, 71–73). See also GA12: 50ff. 43 GA12: 61–62. GA12: 73.

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anticipation of matutinal radiance, entails however traversing the night, going alone, separate (Abgeschieden).44 Pain accompanies this long wake, as the fil rouge connecting the moments of the transition – again, as that which holds together, unmoved, from one end to another, or rather from the ongoing end to the future/earliest beginning. Analogously, the separate, the de-ceased or departed (these are all legitimate ways of rendering “das Abgeschiedene”) never simply designate disruptive, centrifugal movements, but rather the work of repairing, mending, unifying.45 In this wandering in separation, Heidegger says, “the spirit of evil” may be neither annihilated nor denied, but rather “transformed” (verwandelt).46 It can only be noted here that, as the cipher of evil, Heidegger introduces the conflict between the sexes, and specifically between brother and sister.47 He does not explicate this further, maintaining the most roundabout mode of reference to Georg and his sister, Grete.48 It may also be observed, albeit in passing, that the transformation of the negative would require quite different presuppositions, certainly other than strategies of avoidance, shifts to disembodiment and alienation, let alone the celebration of bloodshed and extermination. The same holds for the labor of transfiguration, Verklärung, to which Trakl repeatedly returns. In the trajectory of “Die Sprache im Gedicht,” then, coming home, to the properly human dwelling, to the human itself, remains a task to be accomplished – a promise.49 The promised home, however, towards the end of the essay becomes explicitly “das Land,” the land into which descends the “prematurely dead,” the child Elis. Such would be the

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Richard Detsch notes that Abgeschiedenheit belongs in the linguistic ambiance of Meister Eckhart (Georg Trakl’s Poetry: Toward a Union of Opposites [University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1983], 78). One of Eckhart’s treatises, which Trakl may have known, bears the title Von Abgescheidenheit (in the old spelling). “Now the Versammlung, this gathering in the One, is also called Geist by Heidegger . . . The separation of what takes its departure in de-cease is none other, in its very burning up, than spirit, ‘der Geist und als dieser das Versammelnde’: spirit and, as such, what gathers” (Derrida, Of Spirit, 107). GA12: 63. On this exceedingly difficult issue, David Farrell Krell, “Schlag der Liebe, Schlag des Todes: On a Theme in Heidegger and Trakl,” Research in Phenomenology 7 (1977): 238–258. But the reticence regarding Grete, complemented by an ambivalent attraction to the relationship of brother and sister, characterizes from the start the attitude of Trakl’s friends and readers, notably the members of Der Brenner circle. See, for instance, Laura A. McLary, “The Incestuous Sister or the Trouble with Grete,” Modern Austrian Literature (2000): 29–65. A “promise [Versprechen] of language,” Heidegger surmises in the first Trakl essay (GA12: 12).

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“location of the place” (“Ortschaft des Ortes”) within which Trakl’s poetry is gathered (versammelt). It coincides with apartness (Abgeschiedenheit), the solitude of the alone.50 It is “das Abendland,” but an Evening-Land older and earlier (älter, früher) than the land of Christo-Platonism (than what we call Europe and the West) – an Evening-Land “more promising” (versprechender), harboring more promises. Indeed, “apartness is ‘beginning’ [‘Anbeginn’] of a mounting cosmic year, not abyss of decay.”51 In the end, then, we note yet another terminological shift coming to inflect the issue of gathering: the place of Versammlung is now “das Land.” Heralded here is the promise of an ascending to come, harbored as a seed within the nocturnal land – a locus, for now, of pain: of descent, burial, wasted youth, exile, estrangement, solitude, madness. At least for “the few” who venture there, endowed with greatness of soul alone. And it is in virtue of such a promise that the pain receives an orientation, I would say a teleological justification, a rhetorical ennoblement that turns “pain” into an extremely thin signifier, the trace of something remote, lost, unrecognizable, on the page. It has become a function: gathering, granting the unfolding of the transfiguration and the connection with the not yet. Let us be clear about this: the problem is not the figure of the gathering per se. An extended note just above underscored its disclosiveness, its promise, we might say, for instance in thinking logos with Heraclitus. Equally fecund, no doubt, can be the thought of the end as consummation, carrying in itself the fruit of an entire epoch, as in an incubation. Rather, what seems deeply troubling is the assumption that the gathering may be said, named, unfolded in its formula and predicted in its end – with this degree of assuredness, without a hint of tentativeness in the appropriation of the poems, without questioning for a moment the arbitrariness of a semantic deployment that surreptitiously, almost imperceptibly but surely, carries out the work of determining the indeterminable. For such is the yet to come, that which can only be prepared, imagined, invited – not simply said, let alone posited. As if the entire matter were self-evident. Unless, of course, one speaks as a seer, an oracle, or a priest. Heidegger claims the poets as his source – the few, endowed with great souls. And the few, the poets, may be wanderers, strangers, madmen, children, but they do not get lost. They are secured to language, the inaudible one language. Their heeding keeps them safe. Safe within

50

GA12: 73.

51

Ibid.

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the silent but recognizable (how would one dare say that, with what kind of self-confidence?) speaking of language, the unwritten and inaudible poem.52 Safe at home, even as wayfarers. For “the foreign [das Fremde] wanders ahead. But it does not err [es irrt nicht] without any determination, disoriented . . . That which is ‘foreign’ already follows the call, barely revealed to it, on the way into its own.” It is Althochdeutsch that grants such an understanding of “das Fremde”: the foreign, the strange, does not err, does not wander aimlessly, for Old High German fram means “on the way to . . . towards what is reserved in advance [Voraufbehaltenen].”53 “Doch es irrt nicht.” Yet even Hölderlin, the poet inciting poets to take up their task as mediators between gods and mortals, wearily warns about his oscillating position, perhaps a visionary in the neighborhood of “the father,” or perhaps a “false priest,” deluded and thrown back into the dark by the gods themselves.54 While Heidegger rejects these ending fragments (available to him in the 1923 Hellingrath edition and 1922 Zinkernagel edition) in his reconstruction of the unfinished text of “Wie wenn am Feiertage. . .,” still, in the essay “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry” (1936) he does note the perils of poetic language, at once (and undecidably) essential and counterfeit.55 We are left here with the task of measuring the distance of the discourse on Trakl from the 1936 essay on Hölderlin or, say, from “On the Essence of Truth” (1930), in which Irre, “errancy,” is acknowledged as constitutive of truth. A distance which may not merely be a matter of chronology, of differing moments in the development of an author’s thinking, but rather a distance of Heidegger with respect to Heidegger, an immanent rift, or chasm, marking perhaps, in Heidegger, a crisis of Versammlung.

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53 GA12: 33–34. GA12: 37. “Sie selbst, sie werfen mich tief unter die Lebenden, / Den falschen Priester, ins Dunkel, daß ich / Das warnende Lied den Gelehrigen singe” (“Wie wenn am Feiertage. . .”). The pure and the common [das Gemeine] are in the same way something said. The word as word never offers an immediate guarantee as to whether it is an essential word or a deception. On the contrary – an essential word, in its simplicity, often presents itself as an inessential one. And, on the other hand, what gives the appearance of the essential in its surface is merely something said over and over again. Thus language must constantly place itself into an appearance which it engenders by itself, and so endanger its ownmost, genuine saying. GA4: 35.

See also Michael Murray, “Heidegger’s Hermeneutic Reading of Hölderlin: The Signs of Time,” The Eighteenth Century, 21, no. 1 (1980): 41–66; William Arctander O’Brien, “Getting Blasted: Hölderlin’s ‘Wie wenn am Feiertage. . .’,” MLN (1979): 569–586.

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Heimat

In a remarkable analysis of Heidegger’s meditation on Trakl, Françoise Dastur emphasizes that it is in order to address “the situation of the human being as historical being” that Heidegger so often departs from philological discipline, biographical materials, and considerations of style and literary technique.56 His motivation is not that of the historian or literary critic (or, following Heidegger, that of the biologist, anthropologist, sociologist, psychopathologist, and theologian),57 but rather that of the thinker probing poetry in order to glimpse the listening-speaking wherein the human beinghistorical takes place. It is certainly so. As if moving through a translucent medium, the philosopher traverses the poet’s work and, out of its palette and vocabulary, unfolds a reflection on mortals, their abiding in language, their destiny. Yet, even leaving aside for a moment the ambiguity of this interpretive strategy, partly receptive to the poetic voice and partly curbing it to programmatic exigencies,58 it is precisely the being-historical scope of Heidegger’s elaboration that warrants the utmost caution. In such an ambitiously all-encompassing discourse on the human condition, the insistence on home, the familiar, and the native (heimisch) would call for vigilance, particularly as it tends to obscure the uncontainable errancy, loss, and ecstatic dispersion of Ek-sistenz – the standing out that is no less distinctive of mortal transit than its being sheltered in gathering. Even the possibility of understanding Heimat in terms neither of nation nor of territory, but rather as language, is nullified by the privilege consistently accorded to the German idiom, whose centrality diminishes and distorts the discussion of language. Troubling as they may be, indeed, (1) Heidegger’s thematization of language in the singular and (2) the persistent ambiguity between the one inaudible language (“das Geläut der Stille”) and perceptible historical language (“das menschliche Sprechen,” “das sterbliche Sprechen”),59 work as a basso continuo in his thinking, allowing for a number of apparently obvious moves, not

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Françoise Dastur, “Heidegger et Trakl: Le site occidental et le voyage poétique,” Noesis, no. 7 (2004). My translation. GA12: 12–13. On the jumps, metonymies, self-dissimulations, and other strategies connoting Heidegger’s interpretive stance, see Derrida, Geschlecht III, especially 27, 35–39, 56–61, 89. GA12: 28–29. Such an ambiguity rests on a correspondence: “Mortals speak insofar as they hear. They pay attention to the naming call of the silence of difference [den heißenden Ruf der Stille des Unter-Schiedes], even when they do not know it. Hearing draws from the direction of difference that which it brings into the perceptible word. This speaking that hears-draws out is a corresponding [Ent-sprechen]” (GA12: 29).

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least of which the deployment of the resources of the German language, followed in its morphological and semantic transformations all the way back to the Old–High roots. German thus becomes the philosophical language par excellence, surpassing even ancient Greek in this respect. This will prompt Derrida to speak not so much of euro-centrism, as of “central-europo-centrism.”60 The being-historical problem of “human dwelling,” in itself irreducibly variegated, comes to speak German and is inexplicably “gathered” into the singular prestige of Althochdeutsch, into the lofty authority of the old, that is, the precedent, what comes before.61 The proposition “all communities think and think equally in their language,” a statement reflecting linguistic, cultural, and anthropological manifoldness, “does not correspond to Heidegger’s thinking,” Derrida observes, adding: “It does not correspond, he would say, with thought, insofar as thought corresponds uniquely with Being and can correspond with Being only according to the singular event of a language capable of naming, of calling up Being – or, rather, of hearing itself called by Being.”62 Thus, on the one hand, a poet’s poems would stem from a source utterly “unspoken” – not only unwritten but inaudible: one single soundless poem, which is the place of poems, concealing in itself the inceptive movement that we call rhythm – the informing movedness of Ort.63 Such an altogether inaccessible originary place would likewise harbor the tone (Grundton, fundamental intonation), the unique voice and mood of the poet. Yet, on the other hand, the unspoken source does speak. And, as a matter of fact, it speaks German. It is German.64 Even “[i]ts silence is 60 61

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Derrida, Of Spirit, 70. This is a pivotal theme in Geschlecht III no less. Indeed, the question of nation, nativity, nationalism in various permutations remains central to that cycle of lectures. See also Krell, “Marginalia to Geschlecht III,” 184. Derrida, Of Spirit, 69. In a fragment on Arthur Rimbaud (a late outcome of an ongoing exchange with René Char) Heidegger asks, after Archilochos: “Is the rhythmos that was originally experienced as Greek the nearness of the unapproachable and, as this region, the proportion [VerHältnis] that keeps men in line?” He then goes on to consider, by reference to Trakl, that the discipline of the question and the confrontation with the unknown may only be exercised “by becoming ‘still,’” by heeding the generative silence that is “other than a mere loss of speech” (“Rimbaud vivant,” Left Curve, no. 33 (2009)). In “Das Wort” (1958), rhythm is Fügung (structure, articulation, arrangement) and “das Ruhende” (that which rests): in resting, it configures (fügt) the movement (“die Be-wegung”) of dance and singing (GA12: 217). “The German alone can poetize and say being originarily and anew – he alone will conquer anew the essence of theoria and finally create the logic” (GA94: 27). See Daniela

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German.”65 We find ourselves located in German – presuming, without a doubt, to speak for the human beings of the Evening-Land, or even for the human as such (but, if this is the case, why would one still speak of the few, why assume that only a few will know and withstand pain, and that the human multitude will keep needing great-souled guides leading them on?). Meanwhile, as we began to observe, the elaboration of place grows increasingly ambiguous, unfolding in differing, even diverging directions. Along with Geist, Ort becomes one of “the names of collecting and gathering” (Versammlung), even to the point of abstraction, of designating an indivisible simplicity.66 A matter neither of dwelling on this earth (which might be imagined, with Hölderlin, in its coupling with sky, and ultimately in light of “das Geviert”), nor of belonging in the physical, natural, phenomenal environment, place ends up signifying the nonextended unification in virtue of a tractive force, of an attraction at once oriented and piercing in its lightning speed: the tip of the spear (“Spitze des Speers”). “Die Sprache im Gedicht” opens with this suggestion, evoking place in these strange and estranging traits, as the tip into which the spear as a whole converges, “the supreme and most extreme” point that attracts and thus, at once, gathers and shelters: In it everything runs together. The Ort gathers to itself [zu sich] into the highest and furthest. The gathering penetrates and pervades everything [Das Versammelnde durchdringt und durchwest alles]. The Ort, the gathering, collects to itself [zu sich] and preserves the collected, although not as an encapsulating shell, but so that it shines through and illuminates the gathered, and through this releases it for the first time into its essence.67

Ort, then, would be a matter neither of extension nor of containment, but rather would draw back as it sets forth what it attracts, pervades, and concentrates. It would hide in the releasement of everything it gathers. While place would thus remain unopened, undisclosed, everything drawn into its field of attraction would at once be drawn to itself – everything gathered would come into its Wesen and shine forth as such. Not a matter of containment but rather a gathering force, place would name the expansive, all-pervasive luminosity and dynamic orientation

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Vallega-Neu, “The Black Notebooks and Heidegger’s Writings on the Event (1936–1942),” in Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks 1931–1941, ed. J. Malpas and I. Farin (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016). Derrida, Geschlecht III, 76. 67 Derrida, Of Spirit, 9, 52; Derrida, Geschlecht III, 16–17, 29, 43, 79. GA12: 33.

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wherein what comes to be may genuinely unfold as what it is. A placeless place, or a place before all places, Ort infuses with its radiance everything that comes into the open.68 Holding together by penetrating, it lets what it draws to itself take place in its being. Unextended place – attraction that frees, expansiveness of light, of coming into the light, into selfmanifestation.69 Ending and beginning, twilight and dawn, obscurity and translucent blueness somehow inhere, are drawn into the motion of the spear – a motion joining extremes and, covering the distance from here to there, at once originally opens it up. Such a place aloof from extension to the point of indivisibility, remains nevertheless, at the same time, subjected to division. It is, indeed, marked by infinite separateness, by the Abgeschiedenheit of the poet, of the solitary wanderer, of poetic dérèglement, so as to become the condition for the announcement (if not the emergence) of an other world (a world aloof from this world and its self-assertion), an other beginning, an other human being, an origin to come, more ancient than historical antiquity.70 68

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The Versammlung is by no means diminished, let alone disrupted, through this understanding of Ort as other than containing. For, indeed, here the unifying force of Ort lies in its attraction and all-pervasive luminosity. Everything comes to its Wesen in virtue of the durchdringen and durchwesen of Ort. This is why I do not find convincing the interpretation of the tip of the spear as an image of Ort that would insinuate the possibility of dissemination. See Gerhard Richter, “The Debt of Inheritance Revisited: Heidegger’s Mortgage, Derrida’s Appraisal,” Oxford Literary Review 37, no. 1 (2015): 76–77. Recall as well Wahrheit, in the most originary sense, as Ort, in Sein und Zeit § 44 (GA2: 299/ 268). We may sense the fecundity of this figure of place, returning with particular vividness in the later essay “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” a meditation hinging on end as place, as that in which an epoch is passing away. First published in French in Kierkegaard vivant, trans. Jean Beaufret and François Fédier (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), “Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens” appeared three years later in Martin Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1969). At stake in this essay is the fate of philosophy and the task announced in the epoch of its ending, that is, of its coming to full fruition. The movement of this meditation echoes with a certain precision the earlier reflection on the fate of humanity in the nocturnal descent of the deceased and the anticipation of the as yet unborn. Heidegger is coherently unfolding the question of the Abendland, adumbrated as darkness saturated with possibility. Such a deepening night does not coincide with decay: rather, in its fulfillment it announces a still remote inauguration. And the dawn to come, the not yet experienced matutinal turn, lies in an unheard-of antiquity, in a past more originary and heretofore unheeded. The essay “The End of Philosophy” develops in a precarious balance: the end of philosophy can only be perceived in the experience of distance with respect to Western philosophy as we know it (an academic subject matter, the discipline of knowledge losing itself into the scientific paradigm); yet, on the other hand, such an alienation does not simply amount to extraneousness, as if the end were polemically discerned, or even simply observed from

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A placeless place, we said. Yet, simultaneously, an expansive, opening force. It becomes necessary to seize place in the oscillation between extension and the unextended, divisibility and indivisibility, separability and inseparability – ultimately, between word and silence. And here “oscillating between” would indicate hovering in a discontinuity so radical as to remain unbridgeable and unthinkable. The tense flight of the spear, disclosing the open region it is crossing, seemingly returns us to a familiar notion of place as thick and extended. The point of the lance, however placeless, simply in virtue of its crossing “from one end to another,” uncovers place. But it also, by the same movement, covers over the place it uncovers, closing up the distance it discloses – the expanse nullified precisely in being traversed. Heidegger’s meditation on Trakl leaves us with the place of Abgeschiedenheit, place as Abgeschiedenheit, a site of transition, of a divergent drifting in the nocturnal meanderings of madness and death. An uninhabitable place crossed by a gaping rift, pervaded by the motility and instability of transition, of being in transit, being as transit. A place unextended and indivisible, then, precisely because divided, broken, hardly a locale. Yet, however divisible, divided, and torn, place (the place of language, silently speaking through the audible language of the poet) retains a prevalent reassembling force. “Das Abgeschiedene” is “das Versammelnde,” separation unites, again the same figure we encountered in the characterization of pain. The one prevails over the scattering of many. In virtue of its “measure and law,”71 Trakl’s poetry “sings the destiny of the strike [das Geschick des

71

without, or after the fact. The end, rather, is ongoing, immanent, inherent in the exercise of philosophy. Heidegger’s reflection oscillates between what is fulfilled and what remains as an assignment to be carried out, the completion of an epochal trajectory and an infinite task ahead. In this oscillation the end thickens, expands, becomes a matter of place. The end is the place (Ort) experienced in this movement of trespassing and traversing. Again, the suggestiveness of Old German supports the line of thinking: “The old meaning of the word ‘end’ means the same as place: ‘from one end to another’ means from one place to another” (GA14: 70). Thus, the end of philosophy is its “there,” “where” philosophy is properly situated. However, “that in which” philosophy unfolds indicates that which exceeds philosophy and in fact provides the conditions for it. Heidegger concludes: “The end of philosophy is the place, that place in which the whole of philosophy’s history is gathered in its most extreme possibility. End as completion means this gathering [Versammlung]” (GA14: 70–71). The end, thus, emerges as the place of coming to light of the as yet unborn, a birth that is at once a rebirth, the return of (and to) that which never was. It also indicates the place of estrangement and placeless concentration, the incandescent tip, the stranger’s strange place – discontinuous, immeasurable, unquantifiable. GA12: 74.

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Schlages] which casts [verschlägt] humankind [das Menschengeschlecht] into its still withheld essence – that is to say, saves humankind.”72 Such a thinking of place, in its implications and tone, engenders perplexity, particularly as its central concern is the essence and destination of humankind, “das Menschengeschlecht” – issues that German, “our language” (“unsere Sprache”), again seems able to approach from an especially felicitous position: Our language calls Geschlecht the human essence [Menschenwesen] cast from one matrix [or: stamped by one strike, aus einem Schlag geprägte] and framed in this matrix [und in diesem Schlag verschlagene]. The word means humankind [Menschgeschlecht] in the sense of humanity as well as species [Geschlechter] in the sense of tribes, clans, and families, all of that in turn cast into the duplicity of the sexes [in das Zwiefache der Geschlechter].73

Perplexity arises for several reasons. The coherent neglect of sensibility is one of them (sensibility is, after all, a political question), as are the silence on embodiment and on the most basic requirements for its endurance; the dissociation from nature and insistence on places unrelated to the demands of life (in fact, the question of life, particularly of forms of life other than human, is consistently denied philosophical relevance);74 the programmatic downgrading of the individual living being (its body, history, geo-historical situatedness), without whose unique inflection place is but a word, as abstract as Cartesian spatiality. Not to mention, in the passage just quoted, the language of “der Schlag” (“strike” or “mold”), which seems in and of itself a peculiar way of framing the essence of humanity: Menschengeschlecht as that which bears an impression and imprinting, the imposition of a type, of a coup, emphatically one and only. Nevertheless, one could argue, this de-territorialization/de-materialization of place might strategically preserve place (the place of the human coming to itself ) from facile reductions and reifications, might allow for an understanding of place in its undecidable manifoldness, thus reenergizing the thought of place in light of renewed and interminable wonder. Bringing the human into the unextended place of language (of being that takes place and comes to pass) might free the human from the logic of territorial belonging, identification, hypostasis. It might 72 74

73 GA12: 76. GA12: 45–46. Heidegger’s mention of the “remote legend of the woods [uralten Legende des Waldes]” and of instances of Trakl’s lush verdant imagery, in contrast to the big cities made of stone, in the valley (GA12: 76), hardly constitutes an objection to this remark.

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inoculate an antidote to provincialism, with attendant arbitrariness, undiscerning discrimination, and distortions of reality. And yet, the “quasi” in “quasi-transcendental” is eroded. However abstract, the infinitely antecedent condition ends up being overdetermined, becoming a fully intelligible, that is, decidable, paradigm. Paradoxically enough, here the turn to intelligibility coincides with a valorization of territory. The overdetermination of the condition, indeed, involves a peculiar re-territorialization – a return to/of the territory, in a way that still involves no access to body, singularity, event, but instead merely amounts to the privilege (unacknowledged, unexamined, and hence absolute) of one region – whether geographical, cultural, linguistic, or anthropological. One kind or form (Gestalt) of historical humanity becoming (or speaking for) humanity as such. The singularity and finitude of place, the radically unique modulation that the individual (alone) gives to place, that is, also, the possibility of erring and loss – all this is lost. And if expression (Ausdruck) is devalued,75 as are historico-cultural institutions (with their fluctuations, differences, instability, irreproducibility), then there remains a speaking, a language, as if without source, without idiosyncrasies, and thus without responsibility or accountability (which is always an individual affair). Language as place of hiding. And of authority no less. This is what happens to the thinking of place in the development of Heidegger’s engagement with Trakl. Not only is place progressively emancipated from the experience of living beings on this earth, but also, on the other hand, place is brought under the spell of an overly confident outlook where everything has been decided already, nothing left undecided, let alone acknowledged as undecidable. This would be allowed, Heidegger says, by the nature of poetic language – which, again, may not err. Ambiguous as such a language may be, this ambiguousness [Mehrdeutige] of the poetic saying does not scatter in indeterminate ambiguities [Vieldeutige]. The ambiguous tone of Trakl’s poetry arises out of a gathering [Versammlung], that is, out of a unison which, meant for itself, always remains unsayable. The ambiguousness of this poetic saying is not the imprecision of approximation, but rather the rigor of one who lets [be], who has let oneself into the discipline of “right vision” and lends oneself to it.76

Abgeschiedenheit, “like fair spirit,”77 the torn place pervading the poem, fulfills itself essentially in bringing together, granting, securing.78 In 75

GA12: 12 and passim.

76

GA12: 71.

77

GA12: 62.

78

GA12: 66.

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virtue of the unitive force of the few who follow the gathering path of separation (thus becoming alienated from the others, from the heretofore dominant Geschlecht),79 the divisiveness of the two Geschlechter at war may be overcome, the two reunited in the tranquility of childhood.80 I will not comment on this disarming, extraordinarily opaque treatment of conflict through the regressive turn to infancy, prior to full-blown sexuality, its troublesome dynamics, and its consequences. I shall limit myself to one last quotation, exemplary of the many affirmations of a turn/return home, to a pacified, unified togetherness – a turn to native land, claimed by one homeward-turning Geschlecht, in the singular. The poet (the detached, the deceased, the mad one, ultimately the thinker) receives unfailing guidance, so that he may safely, with sure orientation, avoid the dangers to which the others are exposed and point to a twilight rife with auroral translucency: “Trakl’s poetry sings the song of the soul that, ‘a foreign thing on earth,’ first roams the earth as the quieter homeland of the Geschlecht returning to it [als die stillere Heimat des heimkehrenden Geschlechtes erwandert].”81 The poet has learned to divine the glow of dawn within languishing twilight and envision the turn home (Heimkehr). As in the poem “Kindheit”: “And in sacred blue resound luminous steps [Und in heiliger Bläue läuten leuchtende Schritte fort].”82 The philosopher’s accentuation of the one, his insistence on gathering without dissemination, return without remainder, wandering without peril (for it is always already other than drifting), perhaps deform, or even destroy, this fleeting, vulnerable experience. Perhaps words resemble the diaphanous, makeshift tents of migrants, set up in the noise and commotion of camps, more than the one quiet, unerring homeland.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. “Introduction.” Translated by G. Adey and D. Frisby. In The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology. London: Heinemann, 1976. Altieri, Charles, and Sascha Bru. “Trakl’s Tone: Mood and the Distinctive Speech Act of the Demonstrative.” In Wittgenstein Reading, edited by S. Bru, W. Huemer, and D. Steuer, 355–372. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013. Butler, Judith. Senses of the Subject. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Dastur, Françoise. “Heidegger et Trakl: Le site occidental et le voyage poétique.” Noesis, no. 7 (2004): 1–14. 79

GA12: 63–64.

80

GA12: 74–75.

81

GA12: 76.

82

GA12: 40.

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Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. What Is Philosophy? Translated by G. Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson. London: Verso, 1994. Derrida, Jacques. Geschlecht III: Sex, Race, Nation, Humanity. [Geschlecht III: Sexe, race, nation, humanité.] Translated by K. Chenoweth and R. Therezo. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. [De l’esprit.] Translated by G. Bennington and R. Bowlby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Detsch, Richard. Georg Trakl’s Poetry: Toward a Union of Opposites. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1983. Harrison, Thomas. 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Heidegger, Martin. On the Way to Language. Translated by P. D. Hertz. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by A. Hofstadter. New York: HarperCollins, 1971. “Rimbaud vivant.” Left Curve, no. 33 (2009): 75. Unterwegs zur Sprache. Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1959. Zur Sache des Denkens. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1969. Janik, Allan. “‘Ethik und Ästhetik sind eins’: Wittgenstein and Trakl.” Modern Austrian Literature (1990): 55–70. Kierkegaard Vivant. Translated by Jean Beaufret and François Fédier. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. Kraus, K., and S. N. von Borutin. Briefe an Sidonie Nádherný von Borutin, 1913–1936. Edited by F. Pfäfflin. 2 vols. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005. Krell, David Farrell. “Marginalia to Geschlecht III: Derrida on Heidegger on Trakl.” CR: The New Centennial Review, 7, no. 2 (2007): 175–199. Phantoms of the Other: Four Generations of Derrida’s Geschlecht. Albany: SUNY Press, 2015. “Schlag der Liebe, Schlag des Todes: On a Theme in Heidegger and Trakl.” Research in Phenomenology, 7 (1977): 238–258. Malpas, Jeff. “The House of Being: Poetry, Language, Place.” In Heidegger’s Later Thought, edited by Günter Figal, Diego D’Angelo, Tobias Keiling, and Guang Yang, 1–44. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020. McLary, Laura A. “The Incestuous Sister or the Trouble with Grete.” Modern Austrian Literature (2000): 29–65. Murray, Michael. “Heidegger’s Hermeneutic Reading of Hölderlin: The Signs of Time.” The Eighteenth Century, 21, no. 1 (1980): 41–66. O’Brien, William Arctander. “Getting Blasted: Hölderlin’s ‘Wie wenn am Feiertage. . .’.” MLN (1979): 569–586. Richter, Gerhard. “The Debt of Inheritance Revisited: Heidegger’s Mortgage, Derrida’s Appraisal.” Oxford Literary Review, 37, no. 1 (2015): 67–91. Trakl, Georg. Dichtungen. Salzburg: Otto Müller, 1938. Vallega-Neu, Daniela. “The Black Notebooks and Heidegger’s Writings on the Event (1936–1942).” In Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks 1931–1941, edited by J. Malpas and I. Farin. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016.

p laces of pain Heidegger’s Poietic Writings: From “Contributions to Philosophy” to “The Event.” Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2018. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. The Blue and Brown Books. Oxford: Blackwell, 1958. Briefe an Ludwig von Ficker. Salzburg: Otto Müller, 1969. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953.

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The (Im)possibility of Homecoming Heidegger, Celan, and the Aporia of Language Charles Bambach

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What Calls for(th) Silence?

In an essay written almost fifty years after the Allied air war destroyed Germany’s industrial cities, W. G. Sebald addresses the deep and abiding contradictions of such devastation and the succeeding German economic miracle of the postwar years. For Sebald, the terrible cost of such an achievement remains tainted by “the extraordinary faculty for selfanesthesia shown by a community that seemed to have emerged from the war of annihilation without any signs of psychological impairment.”1 Confronting the question of Germany’s own “inward and outward destruction,” Sebald keeps returning to the taboo about bringing such destruction to speech or recognition. Instead, what gets underlined by Sebald is the peculiar “amnesia” that attends such destruction, an amnesia whose force was so intense that it “prohibited any look backward” and conferred upon a whole generation of Germans an unacknowledged bond to maintain its “silence about the past.” Sebald’s description of German silence does not end, however, with the question about the destruction of German cities and landscapes. It extends far beyond this to include the generational silence about the whole Nazi era and the horror of the Shoah. In his book Race and Erudition, Maurice Olender explores the “taciturn generation” of German academics compromised by Nazism and looks to question why these figures, who were so gifted with the facility of speech and poetic-literary-philosophical language, were so resistant to addressing their own role in the years of National Socialist terror.

1

W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction (New York: Random House, 2003), 11–12, 7, 23.

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As part of his study, Olender interviews Hans-Robert Jauss, a distinguished literary critic of reception theory who helped found the Constance School of hermeneutics in the 1960s. Jauss was 17 years old in 1939 when he joined the Waffen-SS, and later earned a gold cross for his actions in Estonia. For over half a century, Jauss had remained silent about his complicity in the National Socialist era until an article describing his alleged “Hitlerian ideology” appeared in the Frankfurter Rundschau of May 28, 1996. In response, less than a year before his death, Jauss consented to being interviewed by Olender. In his interview, Jauss spoke directly about “the silence of a generation” and “wondered why German academics who played such a major role in legitimating Nazism, had so much trouble after the war talking about what had happened, as if the incomprehensible inhumanity of the crimes committed by that regime confined everyone who participated in it – in whatever capacity, as actors or as witnesses – to total mutism.”2 The very culture of academic life – its institutional norms of scholarly objectivity and self-effacement – helped to ensure a silence about one’s own contributions and about the institution itself as a site of learning and reflection. For Jauss, “the radical strangeness of Nazi barbarism paralyzed a generation of intellectuals, confining them to passivity, a mental inertia, literally to stupidity – if stupor indeed renders one mute.” This inability to confront what had really happened in Germany was reinforced by the widespread tendency to proclaim a “Stunde Null” (zero hour) that served to draw a stark line between that which had happened and the present. The result of such a useful mythos for the survivors was to deflect attention (and responsibility) away from the Nazi horror and to begin to address the ever-present devastation and catastrophe of a society in ruins. As the German people began to deal with the flood of refugees, the shortage of foodstuffs and heat, the dominance of the black market, and the pervasive shock of defeat, there seemed little energy left over to reflect on the past. This deflection-mentality was bolstered by the short period of political reconstruction between 1945 and 1948 that then ushered in the founding of the Federal Republic in 1949. This “new beginning” reinforced the already pervasive German tendency to avoid any serious confrontation with its Nazi past and to simply move on to the pressing tasks at hand. As Jauss comes to offer an explanation for the wholescale silence of his generation on the era of Nazi terror, he also manages at the same time

2

Maurice Olender, Race and Erudition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 142.

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to conceal, suppress, and remain aphasic on his own involvement in the Nazi troops’ terror campaign in Russia and Eastern Europe where he served.3 Able to proffer poignant insights about the fate of a postwar German society traumatized by its suffering, Jauss remains unable (or unwilling) to address the question of his own personal responsibility. But Jauss was hardly alone. As Hannah Arendt returned to Germany in November 1949 – the first time since 1933 – she saw first-hand evidence of the self-same cultural tendency toward amnesia and cover-up. In her 1950 “Report from Germany,” Arendt writes about the physical, moral, psychological, and spiritual wreckage of a nation struggling to survive. She describes “the nightmare of Germany and its physical, moral, and political ruin” – not only the palpable remains of “Germany’s destroyed cities,” but also “the knowledge of German concentration and extermination camps” that shapes the whole landscape of German life.4 And yet despite the persistent evidence of this physical devastation and ruin, Arendt reports that “nowhere is the nightmare of destruction and horror less felt and less talked about than in Germany itself.” There she finds “indifference” to this destruction, and “absence of mourning for the dead” and an “apathy . . . to the fate of refugees in their midst.” In her words, “this general lack of emotion . . . is only the most conspicuous outward symptom of a deep-rooted, stubborn, and at times vicious refusal to face and come to terms with what really happened.” For Arendt, “such an escape from reality is also, of course, an escape from responsibility,” and so, as she sees it, the typical German blames the horrible problems of postwar life – homelessness, hunger, unemployment, lack of proper heat and nourishment – on a “campaign of successful revenge” perpetrated by the Allies to punish Germany for its crimes. For Arendt, it is this careful and tortuous dance between silence and blame that comes to define the conditions and possibilities of German postwar existence. To understand the development of such a postwar German existence means to grapple with the various strategies of denial, evasion, avoidance, and taciturnity that marked the existential life-world of the German nation. And yet, as hard and clear as Arendt’s fiercely critical stance was in her political-cultural essays from this period, she was

3

4

Jauss claims, for example: “I did not discover what really happened until the end of the war – and with horror. I often learned only after the fact what battle I had participated in.” Olender, Erudition, 140. Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1994), 249–50.

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unable to confront these same strategies in the person of her former teacher and intimate partner, Martin Heidegger. The same philosopher who would indict the German intelligentsia with the charge that for them “avoidance of reality has become a profession,” could not bring herself to press Heidegger on truly addressing the horror of the Nazi genocide.5 Instead, Arendt spoke of Heidegger’s “courage” as a thinker and wholly embraced the mythos that “Heidegger himself corrected his own ‘error’ more quickly and more radically than many of those who later sat in judgment over him.”6 Arendt even goes so far as to claim that Heidegger “took considerably more risks than were usual in German literary and university life during that period.” And to underscore her defense of Heidegger, she avers, with no hint of irony, that “Heidegger . . . never read Mein Kampf and so fell victim to a “misunderstanding of what it was all about.” But let us pause here to reflect for a moment on what these utterances signify now, fifty years after they were written, decades before we had access to either the Black Notebooks or the letters to Elfride and Fritz Heidegger. My aim in what follows will be to explore the relationship – both personal and philosophical – between Heidegger and Paul Celan, a relationship that is defined in all its various senses in terms of silence, denial, evasion, and responsibility. I will do so by addressing two different but related themes. In the first half of my chapter, I offer a biographical– historical account of their interactions in postwar Germany during the 1950s and 60s. I then perform a close reading of one of Celan’s notoriously difficult poems – “Schliere” – that serves as a kind of dialogue with Heidegger and as an intimate conversation with him about the topics of postwar silence, evasion, and blindness. We need to remember, however, that so many documents that have become available in the last five years would have dramatically altered Celan’s relationship with Heidegger. Had Celan known what we now know, I do not think he would have been receptive to the dialogue that emerged, fraught and compromised as it was during this difficult period.7 This helps to explain why I began my 5

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Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, Letters 1925–1975, trans. Andrew Shields, ed. Ursula Ludz (New York: Harcourt, 2004), 161; Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, Briefe 1925–1975, ed. Ursula Ludz, 3rd ed. (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 2002). “. . . self-cultivated fiction that . . .” Hannah Arendt, “Heidegger at Eighty,” in her Thinking without a Banister (New York: Schocken, 2018), 429–30. For example, Heidegger sent a copy of Mein Kampf to his brother, Fritz, praising it for its hope in attempting to “save Europe,” W. Homolka and A. Heidegger, eds., Heidegger und der Antisemitismus (Freiburg: Herder, 2016), 21–23.

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chapter on the phenomenon of generational silence that pervaded the work of Jauss, Alfred Andersch, Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll, and others of the postwar era. To begin to understand the underlying ambivalence, uncertainty, fear, and even repulsion that Celan grappled with as he tried to establish a relationship with Heidegger, we need to realize just how pervasive the phenomenon of cover-up was in the years just following the war. One of the crucial new organs of cultural life in these years was the literary journal Der Ruf, edited by Alfred Andersch and Hans Werner Richter, who went on to establish “Gruppe 47,” which had as its aim to bring about a radical break with the German past and to draw a clear line between the old institutions and the new. For these writers, the trope of the “Stunde Null” gave credence to the notion of a blank slate that could now serve as the basis for a revitalized German literary culture. Celan was drawn to this new group, and among the many people he met there was the young Ingeborg Bachmann, who was writing her doctoral dissertation on Martin Heidegger. The intersections here between literary and philosophical topoi would become determinative for all of Celan’s poetic work. But what would also prove decisive was the art of navigating the intricate and tangled web of German literary self-fashioning and equivocation that would come to define the cultural world within which Celan moved. Hence, as this new generation of writers strove to legitimate themselves by making a clean break with the past and promulgating a myth of their anti-Nazi resistance, Celan became doubtful and suspicious.8 Almost all of the well-known writers of this generation – Andersch, Richter, Böll, Siegfried Lenz, Martin Walser, Günter Eich – served in the Wehrmacht and some, like Günter Grass, were part of the SS. For Celan, learning how to find his way in the labyrinth of cover-up, prevarication, and silence became its own art form – and the aftermath of such experiences would keenly shape his lifelong relations with Heidegger. Although they met only three times – the famous meeting poetized in “Todtnauberg” from July 1967; after another Freiburg reading in summer 1968; and for the last time in March 1970, just weeks before Celan’s Freitod – the relationship between the two extends over two decades.9

8

9

Cf. Paul Celan and Hanne und Hermann Lenz, Briefwechsel: Mit drei Briefen Gisele CelanLestrange (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001). Details on their meetings are provided in James K. Lyon, Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: The Unresolved Conversation, 1951–1970 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

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Heidegger–Celan: A Reading Relation

It was most likely through his friendship with René Char that Heidegger came to read Celan’s poetry. Char was well-known as a resistance fighter in the Second World War, and Celan came to translate some of his poetry into German, as well as his resistance diaries. In August 1955 Char writes to Celan that he has just had a long conversation with Heidegger who, he tells him, “highly esteemed your poetry as a great connoisseur of your work.”10 Heidegger was also probably introduced to Celan’s poetry by Ludwig von Ficker, the revered Austrian editor, whom Celan visited in Innsbrück as he left Vienna for Paris in 1948 and with whom he laid flowers on Trakl’s grave. Beyond this, Heidegger also knew of Celan from his friend Erhart Kästner, who delivered the Laudatio for Celan’s Bremen prize speech. Kästner, whose love of ancient Greek culture had its roots in his Wehrmacht service in Greece during the Second World War, had, like Heidegger, carefully split the Athens–Jerusalem lines of descent within Western culture and, like him, remained silent about the Nazi terror. That Kästner’s “Greece” would function as a mytheme for a Germany come home to itself in the dream of national self-assertion would not be lost on Celan. Celan was always suspicious of Kästner’s cultural politics and was uneasy about this deeply entrenched leader of the postwar German literary establishment providing a Laudatio for him. As he later wrote to his friend Eric Einhorn: “don’t let yourself be fooled by the literature prizes that were conferred upon me. In the final analysis they are mere alibis of those in the shadows . . . Such alibis merely continue with other, more up to date means what they began under Hitler.”11 It is this same ambivalent comportment that will mark Celan’s own relation to Heidegger, a relation that was adumbrated in Celan’s dealings with Günther Neske. Neske was a devotee of the master who was launching his own publishing firm in the early 1950s. Through his publishing contacts he became well acquainted with Ernst Jünger and his brother, Friedrich-Georg, as well as Clemens von Podewils – all right-wing nationalists whose careers flourished during the National Socialist era and who, in the 1950s, sought public rehabilitation. Neske attended Heidegger’s public lectures in the early 1950s and convinced Heidegger to begin publishing his writings 10

11

René Char letter to Heidegger, August 30, 1955, in Hadrien France-Lanord, Paul Celan und Martin Heidegger: Vom Sinn eines Gesprächs (Freiburg: Rombach, 2007), 25. Paul Celan, letter to Eric Einhorn, August 10, 1965, from Walter Kühn, Vermischte Zustände (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2015), 297.

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with his small Swabian firm. From 1953 to 1959 Neske published Vorträge und Aufsätze (1954), Der Satz vom Grund (1957), Unterwegs zur Sprache (1959), and other smaller contributions.12 As a sign of his gratitude, Neske wanted to commemorate Heidegger’s upcoming seventieth birthday with a Festschrift that would bring together distinguished scholars, scientists, philosophers, artists, and poets to honor Heidegger’s work. By the time of Neske’s planned seventieth birthday volume, Heidegger had – with the help of both Podewils and Neske – successfully reclaimed his standing in German public life and almost succeeded in erasing the most egregious traces of his National Socialist past.13 The list of distinguished contributors – from Gadamer, Rudolf Bultmann, Walter Jens, Wolfgang Schadewaldt, Jean Beaufret, Ernst and Friedrich-Georg Jünger, Maurice Blanchot, Carl-Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Hajime Tanabe, Medard Boss, and Werner Heisenberg – gave testimony to Heidegger’s international standing as one of the world’s greatest thinkers. But Neske was also concerned that he acknowledge Heidegger’s important standing with artists and poets, and so he received contributions from artists Hans Arp, Georges Braque, and Hap Grieshaber, as well as from well-known poets such as Ilse Aichinger, René Char, and Günter Eich. Neske also extended invitations to both Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan to include some of their work. But things did not proceed according to plan. Bachmann had written her doctoral dissertation in philosophy at the University of Vienna (1949) on Heidegger and, though critical of Heidegger’s work, she nonetheless considered him to be a fundamental voice in contemporary European thought.14 During the writing of her thesis, Bachmann became intimate with Celan in Vienna and undoubtedly shared her excitement about Heidegger’s style of thinking. But she was not without her own reservations about Heidegger – both philosophically and politically. In 1951 Celan begins to read Heidegger himself – first Feldweg, then “What Is Metaphysics?” and then, over the next three years, Being and Time, Holzwege, Introduction to Metaphysics, and What Calls forth Thinking? He even sends Bachmann a copy of Heidegger’s On the 12

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Was ist das – die Philosophie?, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, Hebel – Der Hausfreund, Identität und Differenz, Gelassenheit, as well as the two-volume Nietzsche lectures of 1961. Guido Schneeberger’s 1962 book could not find a legitimate publisher among German publishing houses. Consequently, Schneeberger was forced to publish this volume of Heidegger’s National Socialist–era speeches and writings privately (Nachlese zu Heidegger [Bern: (Selbst-verl.), 1962]). Ingeborg Bachmann, Die kritische Aufnahme der Existentialphilosophie Martin Heideggers (Munich: Piper, 1985).

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Essence of Ground as a gift.15 When Neske writes him about contributing a poem to the Heidegger Festschrift, his first reaction is positive. During this time, Celan takes the initiative to write to Heidegger by sending him a book of poems, Das schwere Land, from his friend Klaus Demus. Moreover, Neske invites Celan and his wife, Gisele, to publish a book of poems/ etchings that he intends to bring out simultaneously with Heidegger’s latest book. Before he sends Neske his poem for the Festschrift, however, Celan writes to Bachmann, who tells him in no uncertain terms that she will not contribute to the Heidegger volume because she “still considers his political offenses unacceptable.”16 Nonetheless, she confesses that “I was pleased when I heard Heidegger knows my poetry.” Celan responds by telling her that he is “surely the last person who would turn a blind eye to the Freiburg Rectorial Address and various other things,” but, he confesses, “I can tell myself that Heidegger has perhaps realized some of his errors.” By comparison with figures such as Böll and Andersch, who hid behind the defense of an “inner emigration,” Heidegger struck Celan as somehow more dignified. Still, Celan decides not to contribute a poem honoring Heidegger, although he waffles in his letter to Neske, making excuses that he doesn’t have enough time now, but that he will contribute to a seventy-fifth birthday Festschrift (which never comes to fruition). All the same signs of psychological ambivalence will characterize the remaining interactions between Celan and Heidegger that ultimately find expression in Celan’s famous poem “Todtnauberg.”17 Celan had read Karl Löwith’s critical study Heidegger: Denker in dürftiger Zeit (1953) and later Guido Schneeberger’s Nachlese zu Heidegger (1962), which collected in documentary form speeches, letters, newspaper articles, and reviews from Heidegger’s time as National Socialist Rector of Freiburg University.18 Based on these critical sources, Celan knew of Heidegger’s

15

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Kühn, Vermischte Zustände, 269. Kühn’s book is rich in detail concerning the reception of Heidegger’s work among German literary figures in the 1950s and 60s. Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, Correspondence, trans. Wieland Hoban (London: Seagull Books, 2010), 178–79, 81. In a later interview Bachmann remarked that she rejected Neske’s invitation because “I know the Rectorial Address of Heidegger and even if there wasn’t this Rectorial Address, there would still be something – the seduction to German irrational thinking.” Ingeborg Bachmann, Wir müssen wahre Sätze schreiben: Gespräche und Interviews (Munich: Piper, 1991), 137. I cannot address this complex poem within these pages, but see my Thinking the Poetic Measure of Justice: Hölderlin-Heidegger-Celan (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2013), 213–30. Karl Löwith, Heidegger: Denker in dürftiger Zeit (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1953); Schneeberger, Nachlese zu Heidegger. This book, which was privately printed in Switzerland, destroyed Schneeberger’s academic career.

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association with National Socialism, and this, of course, made him wary of any unambiguous endorsement of Heidegger’s work. But there are deeper divisions here as well, marked by fundamentally different life spheres that each of them inhabited. As the city-dwelling Jew from the Bukovina, Celan understood himself as “shelterless” and a “displaced person,” an orphan from a “former province of the Habsburg monarchy, now fallen into historylessnesss.”19 Celan’s “German” was hardly German at all; it was part of the Lingua austraica that linked him with Habsburg writers such as Robert Musil, Joseph Roth, and Karl Kraus.20 Heidegger, on the other hand, was a Catholic-educated son of Swabia, a country boy wedded to the dialect of his homeland and suspicious of urban dwellers, foreigners, and rootless “intellectuals.” Instead of the Jewish authors prized by Celan, Heidegger favored Heimat-Dichter such as Johann P. Hebel and Hans Grimm.21 What separated them was the vast chasm of German-Jewish history, the nondialogue that took place over more than two centuries. To bridge such a chasm required more than poetic grace. As Gershom Scholem put it, the healing could only commence when “Jews, precisely as Jews, speak to Germans in full consciousness of what has happened and what separates them.”22 This, in nuce, constitutes what I take to be at the heart of the Celan–Heidegger relation. And yet achieving this openness is precisely what eluded both Celan and Heidegger. Undoubtedly, much of the difficulty in overcoming this problem lay in the vastly different personalities, psychology, and personal history of these two figures – and “much could be said about this.” But, I would argue, it is in the writings of these two that the real conversation took place and it is there, I believe, that the work of interpretation needs to begin. There is much that connects the work of Heidegger and Celan – indeed so much of Celan’s poetic diction and so many of his poetic idioms have their roots in Heidegger’s own style of writing. The shared passion for deconstructing etymologies, the tendency to form composite words, the 19

20 21

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Paul Celan, Selected Poems and Prose, trans. John Felstiner (New York: Norton, 2001), 395/ Gesammelte Werke III (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), 185. Hereafter: SPP and GW. Brigitta Eisenreich, Celans Kreidestern (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2010), 44. Hans Grimm’s Volk ohne Raum was a proto-National Socialist novel quite popular during the 1920s; Heidegger writes to his brother, Fritz, about it in admiring terms. Cf. Homolka and Heidegger, eds., Heidegger und der Antisemitismus, 27, 67. Gershom Scholem, “Jews and Germans,” in his On Jews and Judaism in Crisis (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 71/Judaica, II (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), 20.

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use of the hyphen in bursting words asunder, the ironic formation of ‘Ge-’ nouns (das Genicht, Gerede, “Weggebeizt,” vv. 1, 3, 6), the embrace of Hölderlinian “naming” as a way of “making visible” – all these show unmistakable Heideggerian traces. We see this play on Heideggerian language-construction particularly in “The Meridian” speech, where Celan draws on the Heideggerian idioms of being unterwegs, being unheimlich, of “In-Frage-Stellung,” of the language of Abgrund, of the language of Denken, Danken, Andenken, eingedenken, of the language of Nähe–Ferne, Eigene–Fremde, Gegenwart–Gegenwort, of Geheimnis, Gespräch, of Kehre, Heimkehr, Umkehr, Wege, Ereignis, Daseinsentwürfe, Kommendes, Begegnung, An/Ab-wesenheit, and of Ort. Heidegger did not teach Celan about the absolute centrality of place (Ort) or topos for approaching language – especially in the poem. But Celan encountered in Heidegger’s idioms an authentic attachment to place that proved ever more powerful for him precisely in and through its absence. Celan understood in a powerful way the bond between language and homeland, persistent in his manner of underlining how central “landscape” (Landschaft) was to his understanding of “language” (Sprache). In his 1958 Bremen lecture, he recounts his bond to the lost world of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire and speaks of the detours (Umwege) that attended the beginning of his poetic career. Although he does mention the role played by “those Hassidic tales that Martin Buber retold to us all in German,” he cryptically refrains from mentioning his personal experiences: his years in a Nazi labor camp, his flight from Romania to Austria in the postwar years that rendered him a displaced person, the sense of displacement, exile, and banishment that he experienced as an Eastern European Jew in Paris cut off from his mother tongue and his homeland. Instead, he expresses these elements poetically in a cryptic style that registers with allusions to his situation as an émigré Jew in the postwar European landscape: Reachable [erreichbar], near and unlost amid the losses there remained this one thing: language [Sprache]. This thing, language, remained unlost, yes, in spite of everything. But it had to go through its own answerlessness [Antwortlosigkeit], had to go through terrifying muting [furchtbares Verstummen], had to go through the thousand darknesses of death-bringing speech [Rede]. It went through and gave no words for that which happened [das, was geschah]; yet it went through this happening [Geschehen]. Went through and could come to light again, “enriched” [angereichert] by all this.23

23

SPP: 395–96/GW III: 185–86.

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There are, I want to argue, allusions here within the Bremen speech to questions and problems within German history that will sharply form the terms of the relation between Celan and Heidegger. It is within the possibilities of Sprache – poetic language in Heidegger’s sense – that Celan tells his audience that he was able “to speak, to orient myself, to find out where I was [wo ich mich befand], where I was going [wohin], in order to project a reality for myself [Wirklichkeit zu entwerfen].” The language here reads as if taken from a commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time. In sections 29–30 of that work, Heidegger lays out one of the three components of care (Sorge) that he terms Befindlichkeit (attunement to the way one finds oneself in relation to the world). Heidegger underlines here that Dasein does not choose its own moods but, rather, that “moods bring Dasein before the that of its there [das Dass seines Da], which stares directly at it with the inexorability of an enigma” (SZ [Sein und Zeit]: 136/BT [Being and Time]: 135). What shapes this Da, Heidegger emphasizes, is its thrownness (Geworfenheit), the condition that none of us chooses to be born at all, but that we are simply thrown into a world without the ability to refuse such existence. Yet, Heidegger contends, “as thrown, Dasein can project itself [sich entwerfen] only upon specific factical possibilities” (SZ: 299/BT: 286). To exist authentically means to take over one’s own thrownness – which has no ground and thus reveals Dasein as a nullity (Celan’s “Genicht”) (SPP: 246) – and become responsible (verantwortlich) for it. As this thrown entity without ground, Dasein is a nullity whose primary task becomes taking responsibility for its thrownness and beginning to project its possibility of what it can be. In Heidegger’s words, Dasein receives a call of conscience “that comes from me, and yet from beyond me and over me” (SZ: 275/BT: 265), a call whose uncanniness brings Dasein face-to-face with the nullity of its own existence. Such a call summons Dasein beyond the chatter of the They-self to a responsibility for its own being – not in an egological or subjective sense, but ontologically, as a way for Dasein to attune itself to its authentic being as care. In the Bremen speech, we see Celan drawing on Heidegger’s language from section 57 of Being and Time, “Conscience as the Call of Care.” In his private notebooks, Celan marked and underlined Heidegger’s claim that “It is in its uncanniness [Unheimlichkeit] as primordially thrown being-inthe-world, as Not-at-home [Un-zu-hause], the naked ‘that’ in the nothingness [Nichts] of the world” that comes to Dasein as “an alien voice [eine fremde Stimme]” (SZ: 276–77/BT: 266). All of these Heideggerian excurses on death, conscience, guilt, uncanniness, the nothing, attunement, the thrown project, and Dasein’s sense of

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its “being the (null) ground of a nullity” (SZ: 285/BT: 274) would come to shape Celan’s own sense of his poetic mission, even as it pushed him in a very different direction from Heidegger’s. What would mark the Bremen speech was the raw sense of Dasein as homeless, displaced, dispossessed, alien to its world and to itself – in Celan’s idiom, “zeltlos” (literally, “tentless” but meaning “unsheltered” beneath the stars). As Celan put it, this sense of being “most uncannily in the open” exposed him to the awesome power of a techne far beyond human control, a techne whose power and possibility was expressed in the 1957 Russian Sputnik launch. And yet Celan also affirms that he goes “with his Dasein to language – wounded by reality and seeking it.”24 He couches his poetological ethos in the language of Ereignis as a poetic movement that is “underway” and “heading toward something” – “something standing open,” “inhabitable,” perhaps toward an addressable Thou (“ansprechbares Du”) that makes a claim upon us. But Celan also understood the specific facticity and historicity of the postwar German environment in which he made his own claim, and so he also writes about needing to go through the German language’s “own answerlessness [ihre eigene Antwortlosigkeit], its terrible muteness”; “it went through this and gave no words for that which happened.” And here I read his carefully constructed speech as a way to call forth the German refusal to take up the word as a way of combating “the thousand darknesses of death-bringing speech.” In their Antwortlosigkeit Celan detects a “lack of responsibility” on the part of many Germans. But there are other linguistic gestures here that play upon the language of what the philologist Viktor Klemperer termed “Lingui Tertii Imperii” (LTI)– “the language of the Third Reich”: the thousand darknesses, punning upon the thousand-year Reich; the quadruple use of “er-reich-bar” to underscore the connection that he later makes with the geological term “an-ge-reich-ert,” which suggests the possibility of “enrichment” in the soil, in crops; allusions that later, in poems such as “Todtnauberg,” will play off the moorlands of Eastern Europe that function as the killing fields for the production/“enrichment” of Jewish corpses.25 These are the spectral phantoms that haunt this “innocent” acceptance speech, bordered on every side by silence and the unspeakable.

24 25

SPP: 396/GW III: 186. Cf. Uta Werner’s insightful work Textgräber: Paul Celans geologische Lyrik (Munich: Fink, 1998), 108–10.

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And here too we can find the traces of Heidegger who, in section 57 of Being and Time, writes about the call of conscience. As Heidegger frames it, “the call does not report any facts; it calls without ordering anything. The call speaks in the uncanny mode of silence” (SZ: 277/BT: 266). Indeed, it is in Heidegger’s privileging of silence as constituting the very heart of language that Celan finds one of the most powerful sources for his own poetics of silence. In Being and Time Heidegger “characterizes silence (Schweigen) as an essential possibility of discourse (Rede)” (SZ: 296/ BT: 283). Indeed, in section 34, Heidegger stresses that “Listening and silence are possibilities belonging to discursive speech” and help to attune us to communicate with one another authentically. Against the usual view that understands communication as something “like the conveying of experiences . . . from the inside of one subject to the inside of another,” Heidegger stresses that “the essence of language” has to do with attuning ourselves to the world through understanding (hence, the equiprimordiality of Verstehen – Befindlichkeit – Rede) and “letting something be understood” (SZ: 162–64/BT: 157–59). Moreover, Heidegger underscores that it is in “authentic silence” that genuine discourse takes place. As Heidegger puts it: “in talking with one another the person who is silent [schweigt] can ‘let something be understood’ . . . more authentically than the person who never runs out of words.” It is especially in the language of poetic saying that Heidegger finds in Hölderlin that he alights upon the authentic mode of silence. As he expresses it: Silence [Schweigen] – does this merely mean: to say nothing, to remain mute [stumm]? Or can only he who has something to say be truly silent? If this were the case then he who would be capable of letting the unsaid appear in his saying, of letting it appear as unsaid, would, precisely through this alone, be capable of silence in the highest degree. (EHP: 216/GA4: 189)

Precisely because, as he states in section 34 of Being and Time – “only in genuine discourse is authentic silence possible” – can Heidegger cleave to the power of silence as a way of authentically “speaking” what, he believes, cannot be properly said – namely, the trauma, the horror, unspeakability of “that which happened.” In his criticism of Heidegger’s position during the years of the Third Reich, Jean-François Lyotard, writing in 1988, rejects this argument about “silence” as a way of trying to protect, defend, justify, or exonerate Heidegger. For him, “Heidegger was implicated in Nazism in a way that is not merely anecdotal, but rather deliberate, profound, and in a certain

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way persistent.”26 Heidegger’s “silence” proves for Lyotard “a leaden silence” – “the leaden silence on the Shoah.” In a similar vein, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe likewise focuses on this question of silence in Heidegger, arguing that “his silence after the war – his silence on the Extermination – is unpardonable.”27 Moreover, Emmanuel Levinas too offers his own bitter commentary on his former teacher: “But doesn’t this silence, in time of peace, on the gas chambers and death camps lie beyond the realm of feeble excuses and reveal a soul completely cut off from any sensitivity, in which can be perceived a kind of consent to the horror?”28 One could, of course, add other voices of condemnation, but doing so would hardly alter the matter. Our focus here is the question of silence in Heidegger as it concerns the work of Paul Celan. And here, it seems to me, two quite relevant points need to be stressed. One is the relation (conflation) of Heidegger’s public support for National Socialism (especially during his rectorate) to his postwar stance of public silence about the Nazi extermination camps. The second concerns the palimpsest of public knowledge concerning Heidegger’s stance on National Socialism and on the terror of the gas chambers. What did Celan know? And when? It goes without saying that Celan had no knowledge of the contents of the Black Notebooks. Had he, I believe he would never have even attempted to enter into a possible conversation with Heidegger. But the whole issue here is palimpsestically complex. The Black Notebooks make it very clear that Heidegger thought a good deal about the Jewish presence (absence) in German life. For him, the Jews “with their emphatically calculative talent” represented a force of nihilistic machination (GA96: 54) that well suited them “in an utterly unrestrained way” for their “worldhistorical task of uprooting all beings from being” (GA96: 243). As Heidegger expresses it in a notebook entry from 1942: Jews came to incarnate “the principle of destruction” – the self-same machinational force of technology, capital, and calculation that leads the Jews – who embody such calculative technics – to their own “self-annihilation” (GA97: 20). Heidegger’s logic here is rooted in his historical-destinal vision of the history of beyng which grants ontological justification for a coming 26

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Jean-François Lyotard had far less evidence in 1988 than we have today, and yet his position is one that I find convincing. Cf. his Heidegger and the Jews (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 52, 88. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, trans. C. Turner (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 116. Emmanuel Levinas and Paula Wissing, “As If Consenting to Horror,” Critical Inquiry 15, no. 2 (1989): 487.

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German stewardship over the transition to another beginning. Within this contorted logic, the National Socialist planning and calculation of the Final Solution is the fulfillment of the Jewish principle of machination – hence, “Auschwitz” fulfills a historico-destinal drive for self-annihilation that drives the Jews to their proper and fitting role within the history of beyng. But evidence of this contorted logic can be found only through the war years where there remains the hope for a German victory. Once the capitulation becomes inevitable – and after Heidegger’s own turmoil of the de-Nazification hearings – a new note is sounded: that of revenge. Revenge becomes a persistent motif in those Black Notebooks written immediately after the German collapse. As a response to his own personal struggles (the humiliation and scandal at the loss of his teaching position, the threat of his library being confiscated, the billeting of French soldiers in his private residence, etc.), he goes on the offensive in the Black Notebooks by shifting guilt away from the Germans and onto the Allied victors. There we find a running series of comments expressing outrage over the Allies’ co-optation of “justice” in their administration of the universities and the courts, pre-eminently in the widely publicized “show trials” at Nuremberg. Heidegger’s response is clear and uncompromising: the Allies’ “morality supposes that justice consists in revenge” (GA97: 50). Moreover, in response to the Allies’ attempts to impose their own humanistic standards of moral judgment upon the German Volk, Heidegger offers this rebuttal: “where does the greater presumptive arrogance lie? In criminal offenses or in judicial judgment thereon?” (GA97: 64) And then, in a kind of reverse coup de grâce, Heidegger writes about the utter lack of thinking in the Allies’ unbridled technological machination that has uprooted and devastated German existence: One notices the perplexed floundering of the “Western powers” in their political plans for Europe. Some of them suppose we are still living in the 17th century. The responsibility for such thoughtlessness – or is it already something more: an inability to think? – exceeds by many thousand degrees the irresponsible, dreadful trade with which Hitler raged around Europe . . . The Christian–liberal relation to communism that pervades the world today is just as foolish and ignorant and smug as the conduct of the all too clever and genteel members of the bourgeoisie in Germany against National Socialism. (GA97: 250)

And Heidegger adds: The German Volk is politically, militarily, and economically ruined; ruined as well is the strength of the Volk – as much by the criminal insanity of Hitler as through the foreign will to exterminate that has finally made its move . . . This calculating is still not at its end. (GA97: 444)

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What emerges from this whole encounter with the revenge motif in the Black Notebooks and with Heidegger’s comments on “world Jewry” and “the self-annihilation” of the Jews is a clear and irrefutable claim against the myth of Heidegger’s purported “silence” about the Shoah (GA96: 243; GA97: 20). Heidegger did speak about the Shoah – both directly and indirectly – in the Black Notebooks. He acknowledged there what he called “the gruesomeness of the gas chambers,” “the brutalization of National Socialism,” “the criminal madness of Hitler,” and “the unbounded brutality of the executioners and of the concentration camps” (GA97: 99, 100, 444, 59). But had Celan had access to these manuscripts, he would have been profoundly struck by Heidegger’s uncanny ability to rethink the relation between perpetrator and victim that defined the period of Nazi rule. For what Heidegger achieves in these notebooks is a remarkable inversion or role reversal whereby the Jews will be portrayed as agents of their own annihilation and the Germans become the victims of an Allied coup to emasculate the German Volk and reduce it to the status of a defeated enemy. In one damning entry Heidegger alludes to the Jews as “victims” by placing quotation marks upon his description, yet when he refers to the Germans as victims he drops such notation (GA97: 136). Heidegger insists that “never should we ‘justify’ criminality – but also not that way of proceeding that takes political advantage of it” by holding a moral trump card (GA97: 135). Heidegger’s most fulminatory bile in these notebooks is directed at all those he suspects of declaring their own moral high ground while condemning the whole German people as criminals (cf. GA97: 51, 84, 250). Heidegger feels as if he is the one being persecuted, and he directs his anger at the Allies who, with their modern, calculative planning, wish to lay the guilt for all the destruction at the feet of the Germans. In 1947 he writes: The task still remains: to extinguish the Germans spiritually and historically. Let us not fool ourselves. An old spirit of revenge is haunting Europe. The intellectual–spiritual history of this revenge will never be written for doing so would hinder the revenge itself. (GA97: 444–45)

There is little left to say or explain here. Heidegger’s inability to speak of, never mind “think,” the suffering of the Other undermines his voice as a philosophical voice of wisdom. As Blanchot has so poignantly put it: “Nazism and Heidegger, this is a wound to thinking itself in which each of us is profoundly wounded.”29 29

Maurice Blanchot, Political Writings (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 145.

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And yet I do not think Heidegger was a moral monster. In his relations with Celan we find, on the contrary, a genuine willingness to understand the suffering and trauma of the Other. In his interactions with both Otto Pöggeler and Gerhart Baumann – in letters and conversations – we find Heidegger acknowledging Celan’s trauma and attempting to connect to it through close and careful readings of his poems, as Pöggeler tells us. Indeed, I would go so far as to argue that what connected Heidegger and Celan in a powerful way was this sense of having been victimized by the nihilistic forces of machination, calculation, and the technics of planning – and of finding in a poetic relation to language a way of healing the traumas of German history. In a very real way, Heidegger identified with Celan’s struggles with mental health, given his own paralyzing depression in winter–spring 1946 at the Badenweiler clinic and his suicidal mood there.30 Heidegger knew that Celan was being treated for mental illness in various Parisian psychiatric clinics. From Pöggeler’s reports we also know that Heidegger was aware of Celan’s traumas from the war years – the death of his parents in the Transnistrian winter of 1942, the forced-labor camps, the ever-present threat of arrest and deportation to a concentration camp.31 Moreover, Heidegger also knew about the persecution of Celan by Claire Goll, and could identify in a deeply personal way with these feelings of persecution.32 Pöggeler relates that in the silence of an evening in his Freiburg home, Heidegger listened attentively to his guest’s narrative about the poet’s parents. Moreover, he explains how “Heidegger was really concerned about Celan” and twice tried to find teaching positions for him in Ulm and Freiburg. And we know from the documentary evidence that Heidegger owned several volumes of Celan’s poetry, including Sprachgitter, Die Niemandsrose, Atemwende, Fadensonnen, and Lichtzwang, as well as his Meridian speech.33 We also find evidence of Heidegger’s solicitude for Celan in his 1967 letter to Gerhart Baumann on the eve of Celan’s reading in Freiburg. He confides to Baumann that he understands “the difficult crisis from which he (Celan) has gotten himself out of, as 30

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Andrew J. Mitchell, “Heidegger’s Breakdown: Health and Healing under the Care of Dr. V. E. von Gebsattel,” Research in Phenomenology 46, no. 1 (2016): 70–97. See also Hugo Ott’s comment in the BBC film, Human All Too Human, on Heidegger’s suicidal thoughts. Otto Pöggeler, “Celans Begegnung mit Martin Heidegger,” Zeitmitschrift: Journal für Ästhetik 5 (1988): 126–32. Especially during the de-Nazification hearings and in his self-defense uttered in “Der Spiegel Interview”; GA16: 652–83. Cf. the list in France-Lanord, Paul Celan und Martin Heidegger, 226–27.

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much as a human being can” and he concurs with Baumann that the upcoming reading should prove “helpful” for the poet.34 He goes on to add an invitation to his famous cabin in Todtnauberg, since he believes “it would be healing to show Paul Celan the Black Forest.” The eventual meeting in Todtnauberg on July 25, 1967, of which Celan’s poem offers an Andenken in multiple senses, gives testimony to the difficult, uneasy relation between these two figures. Each understood in his own singular way that this was not a meeting between an émigré language teacher from Paris and a retired Freiburg philosophy professor. Instead, each knew that there was a deeply symbolic meaning attached to their encounter, if not by each other than certainly by a German academic community attuned to all the polarities and intersections of their formidable pairing as Jew–German, poet–philosopher, homeless émigré from the Bukovina–rooted geophilosopher from the Swabian heartland. But each also came to this meeting with certain expectations. Heidegger sought confirmation as the pre-eminent representative of a new genre of philosophical thinking – the philosopher as interpreter of poetic texts.35 In the 1950s, he extended his earlier lectures and essays on Hölderlin and Rilke to focus on poetic texts from Trakl, George, Hebel, Mörike, and even the French poets Arthur Rimbaud and René Char. To be associated with the leading German poet of the day was an honor Heidegger was drawn to. As for Celan, his long-standing fascination with the works of Heidegger has been well documented. Celan’s enduring struggle with the poetic possibilities of the German language is virtually unthinkable without the constant presence of Heidegger. This presence was, to be sure, not always a welcome one, for Celan grappled painfully with the conflicting residues of Heidegger’s influence upon him. We can locate stylistic similarities in world-construction, the use of composites, the borrowing of locutions (unterwegs, Ereignis, unheimlich, eingedenk, Rätsel, Nähe, nichten, Wege, et al.) But the genuine influence of Heidegger on Celan’s poetry is less dramatic and yet much more formidable. It shows itself in Celan’s understanding of temporality, of absence, of abyss, of caesura, of “thing,” and of the almost imperceptible shaping force of the verb “to be” that reigns over the field of human perception in unostentatious yet decisive ways. Heidegger’s presence in Celan’s poetic work is undeniable – and yet perhaps on that account all the more threatening 34 35

Gerhart Baumann, Erinnerungen an Paul Celan (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992), 59–60. Dilthey had written on the problem of Dichtung, but not in the text-focused way Heidegger had.

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and ambiguous. It is hardly surprising, then, to learn that despite his deep interest in getting Heidegger to recognize his work, Celan waited at least ten years before meeting him face to face. He also declined Otto Pöggeler’s offer to dedicate his 1963 book, Der Denkweg Martin Heideggers, to him, despite having spent hours discussing Heidegger’s philosophy with him during the time of the book’s composition. There are so many tales of Celan’s ambivalence toward Heidegger: the seventieth birthday Festschrift; the change of heart about being photographed with Heidegger during the July 1967 visit; the letters to friends and family after the visit; the notebook entries concerning Heidegger, and, of course, the text of “Todtnauberg” itself, fraught with so many chiastic constructions that betray Celan’s own deep ambivalence to Heidegger as person– thinker. Yet despite all this ambivalence, we can also find in Celan – not only in his letters to and about Heidegger – but above all in his poems, an earnest will to meet Heidegger at least halfway, if not more. There we find indications of a cautious hopefulness that is not blind to tragedy and despair, but that grows out of it towards the other. Celan was hardly naïve about Heidegger’s ties to National Socialism – and yet, in the teeth of that recognition, he writes with the ethical fervor of an Old Testament prophet: . . . of a hope, today for a thinker’s (undelayed coming) word in the heart.36

That such a word never came, that Celan’s hopes would be dashed on the altar of Heidegger’s own sense of victimization, would become a truism. Heidegger could not speak of the Other as victim, because he was so preoccupied with the Germans’ own suffering – the bombing of Dresden “through a brutally calculated act of violence [that left it] in ruins”; the fate of the “East Germans” under Soviet occupation; the German prisoners of war trapped in the Soviet Union.37 Part of this victimization came to full expression in June 1952 when, in response to

36 37

Paul Celan, Lichtzwang, Tübinger Celan-Ausgabe (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999), 51. GA16: 635–36.

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the opening of the Freiburg exhibit “Prisoners of War Speak,” Heidegger tells his students: “I implore you to go, so as to hear this silent voice and never more to let it be lost from your innermost hearing.”38 As if to confirm his own monopoly on suffering and victimization, Heidegger, both of whose sons spent time in Soviet prisoner-of-war camps, then adds: “we are not yet in the proper place to reflect upon freedom, nor even to speak about it, if, by comparison, we also close our eyes to this extermination of freedom [Vernichtung der Freiheit].” It is precisely this inability and/or unwillingness to accept responsibility for the horrors of the Shoah and this oppugning of the Other’s claim to having suffered as much or more than he that marks Heidegger’s stance as, in Lacoue-Labarthe’s words, “unpardonable.”39 And yet the mystery – and perhaps it is not too strong to say it – “miracle” of Celan’s willingness to both challenge Heidegger for his political silence and his moral stonewalling and to ask him for a word of acknowledgment and hope marks him as the poet of a divided heart. For what Celan seeks to elicit in Heidegger is a “word in the heart” that might initiate a process of healing and recovery that is signaled in the very opening words of “Todtnauberg,” with their allusion to the restorative properties of the flowers “arnica, eyebright” (SPP: 314–15).

3

“Schliere”: A Reading

To properly situate my discussion of the Heidegger–Celan relation, I want to offer a reading of a poem that Celan wrote in the mid 1950s, “Schliere”/ “Streaks,” that he resolutely wished to send to Heidegger, but never did. We can only speculate about the reasons for which Celan wished to share this particular poem with Heidegger, but I think a close reading of the text provides genuine clues about what Celan sought in any possible relationship with the Freiburg philosopher. Otto Pöggeler relates that when he first met Celan in 1957, the poet confessed his interest in dispatching his poem to Heidegger.40 Such an admission alone would grant this poem a special status in Celan’s work, but what also confirms this is the fact that when Celan went to Jerusalem in 1969, this was one of 38

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Heidegger, letter to Herbert Marcuse, in Richard Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 163. Was heisst Denken? June 20, 1952 (GA8: 161). Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art, and Politics, 116. Pöggeler, “Celans Begegnung mit Martin Heidegger,” 124; Lydia Koelle, Paul Celan’s pneumatisches Judentum (Mainz: Grünewald, 1997), 36n.

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the poems he chose to read. The poem comes to us as part of the collection Celan titled “Sprachgitter”/”Speech-grille” that takes up the recurrent themes of speech–silence, nearness–distance, union–separation, but perhaps, above all, a way to poetically construct a temporality of the caesura.41 Drawing upon Hölderlin’s notion of the caesura from his writings on Greek tragedy, Celan gestures in the direction of a cut, rip, or tear in the fabric of time – of the past cut off from its future, of a present cut off from its past, of an epoch so fractured by the rupture of what has transpired that it declares a “Stunde Null” between what it can no longer face up to and what the process of rebuilding, rethinking, and remembering might demand of it. But there are several other allusions at work here as well in the figure of a speech-grille: of the curtain (iron?) separating two speakers who cannot see one another, whose anonymity defines each; of the separation between German and Jew; perpetrator and victim; the realm of god and the realm of the human; the one who speaks and the one who remains silent; and, perhaps most tellingly, between what can (not) be seen and what can (not) be heard. This image of the speech-grille was no arbitrary poetic conceit. The idea for the poem and the volume “Sprachgitter” comes out of a picture-postcard that Günther Neske sent Celan of a medieval cloister (1250) that stood in the cloister garden just opposite Neske’s house in Pfullingen. Neske sent it to him as part of his campaign to become Celan’s new publisher. But, of course, the very same problems emerge here as in the Heidegger Festschrift of 1959 – Celan’s deep ambivalence about being identified with Heidegger’s work. In this image of the speech-grille/ Sprechgitter that separates outsiders from the secret, silent world of the nuns who work and worship in the cloister, Celan drew together multiple threads of both his life and his poetic themes. Living in Paris during the 1950s, Celan understood himself above all else as an exile, a foreigner, an outsider, a stranger. He was married to a French woman whose aristocratic family was deeply Catholic and did not support their marriage. In spring 1957 they visited Gisele’s mother at a convent in Brest where, after the death of her husband, she had joined a silent order of nuns. During their visit they were forced to speak to her through a latticework

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See especially Paul Celan’s letter to Walter Jens, March 21, 1959, where he explains that in his collection “the titles of the cycles are not merely structural elements (but also) they are above all, the years, the hours, which (may I tell you? I may: the terrible) caesurae,” cited in Barbara Wiedemann, Ein Faible für Tübingen (Tübingen: Klöpfer & Meyer, 2013), 169–70.

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speech-grille.42 Yet the distance separating Neske/Celan and the son-/ mother-in-law (Schwieger-mutter with its pun on schweigen or “remaining silent”), was part of a more profound separation – not only between living persons who remain strangers to one another, but to the dead whose spectral presence was quarantined by the realities of language, silence, time, and history. In an implacable and unremitting sense, the time separating the living and the dead was always already out of joint. For Celan, the urgent task of the present was to address this chasm of speech– silence that prevented his generation of Germans from attending to such a schism that rendered the question of Andenken or remembrance an impossible one. Such a question, Celan believed, could not be addressed without confronting the caesurae of speech – the psychological, historical, cultural, linguistic forms of cover-up, silence, denial, rejection, and self-justification that marked the life of post-1945 Germany. He understood this quite concretely and told his publisher Rudolf Hirsch: I understand all too well your objections to the title “Sprachgitter” [Languagegrille]; this title is undoubtedly ambi-, indeed poly-valent (I do not say “Sprech-“ but rather “Sprachgitter” [not Speech-, but rather Language-grille]). Moreover, at least at first glance there is something damnably “poetic,” but that was not my intention at all. Being esoteric is not what I am trying to do. At the same time, what comes to word for me in the title is the existentiell [Existentielle], the difficulty of all speaking (to-one-another) as well as its structure.43

What we find in the poetic language of Sprachgitter is a condensed, poetic diction where one word comes to open and close off a world, where language is strained to its limits and passes through the speech-grille of human communication – but only in shards, breaks, splinters. We are unremittingly barraged by line-breaks, enjambments, blank and empty spaces, fractured punctuation, and ellipses that work to undermine any possible sense of union, completion, perfection, or consummation. The poems come to appear on the page as typographic instantiations of a latticework trellis of white spaces crossed and covered by black markings that appear to the eye as “streaks.” It is both the appearance of the streaks to the eye and their function as a grille through which the world appears as a reticulated network of intersecting images that will serve as the defining image of the poem “Schliere.”

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Ibid., 109–12, 37, and Paul Celan and Gisele Lestrange, Briefwechsel II (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001), 424, 358. Paul Celan and Rudolph Hirsch, Briefwechsel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004), 44.

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“Streaks”: The Ethics of the Eye Schliere Schliere im Aug: von den Blicken auf halbem Weg erschautes Verloren. Wirklichgesponnenes Niemals, wiedergekehrt.

Streaks in the eye: A loss glimpsed midway by gazes lost. A never, truly spun, back again.

Wege, halb – und die längsten.

Pathways, half – and the longest.

Seelenbeschrittene Fäden, Glasspur, rückwärtsgerollt und nun vom Augen – Du auf dem steten Stern über dir weiss überschleiert.

Threads tread by souls, A trace of glass, rolled backwards and now veiled in white by You-Eyes sitting on the constant star above you.

Schliere im Aug: dass bewahrt sei

Streaks in the eye: that a sign carried through darkness may be preserved,

ein durchs Dunkel getragenes Zeichen, vom Sand (oder Eis?) einer fremden Zeit für ein fremderes Immer belebt und als stumm vibrierender Mitlaut gestimmt.

a sign enlivened by sand (or ice?) of a strange time for an even stranger forever and tuned to the pitch of an accompanying consonant silently oscillating.44

“Schliere” comes to us not simply as a poem that spaces words on a page, but as a finely cut stone that draws on various images, themes, motifs, and perceptions that shape its possibilities as a form of language. Like all of Celan’s poems, this one deploys language sparingly in such a way that virtually every line presents a break, fracture, enjambment, pause, or interruption so as to undermine anything like a smooth or coherent presentation of a theme. Instead, we are confronted by an enigmatic assemblage of discrete words and voices without any seeming internal 44

Paul Celan, Die Gedichte, ed. Barbara Wiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2018), hereafter: DG. I consulted English translations by Felstiner, Joris, Tobias, and David Young.

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cohesion or unity. The poem lies before us in its spareness and provides only elusive hints as to its meaning or purpose. We begin, as it were, in the dark, where words remain hidden, veiled, and distant. Such a way of poetizing remains deeply tied to its own factical situation in postwar Germany, where both language and poetry have had to confront their own inadequacy and privation. If we can say anything about Celan’s way of writing poetry, then, we can say it presents a poetology of the limit, a poetology of silence and of remaining silent in the face of what is unspeakable, and of needing to confront such silence, but not in the usual way by “producing” speech. Indeed, it is such speechifying in its usual forms that has brought on the need for silence. In the postwar era, where the typical responses to “that which happened” included equivocation, stonewalling, self-justifying, denial, and dissembling, language appeared as a succession of streaks that left behind smudges and smears. Given how little trustworthiness one could ascribe to language within such a shifting world, the poet needed to address this instability and lack of a fixed center. Celan would do precisely that by turning to the work of Heidegger in all its phenomenological depth. “Schliere” designates many things. It can refer to an ophthalmological flaw or injury that produces a “streak” in the eye. At the same time, as a geological term, it designates morphological deviations or anomalies within various strata of rocks. It can also refer to the streak within stones that gives evidence of tectonic shifts or dislocations. Beyond this, Schliere can also allude to a phenomenon within glassblowing that leaves behind a “streak” in the glass. In each of these various realms, light will be refracted in such a way that it reveals streaks that take the form of bends, cracks, and tears.45 In the famous Grimms’ Dictionary from the nineteenth century, schlieren as a verb denotes “covering something with slime, ooze, or mud; to soil, pollute, taint, contaminate.”46 From this brief overview of the various technical meanings of this term, we learn that it is polysemic and open to several contrastive and oppositional discourses. To speak philosophically, there is no “essence” to Schliere that lies within its own domain; only as a phenomenon in relation to other phenomena can we even begin to fashion a meaning for it. But in addition to all these various

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Franz Lotze, Geologie (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1955), 76, 79; DG: 746–47; Rochelle Tobias, The Discourse of Nature in the Poetry of Paul Celan: The Unnatural World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 15–27. Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. XV (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1854), 688–91.

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ophthamological, geological, graphological, or vitriform senses of the word, what concerned Celan perhaps most of all is the poetological– philosophical sense of the term and here Heidegger comes to play no small role. A poet who is phenomenologically attuned presents not the Schliere-in-itself, but the multiple ways such Schliere shape our own perception – in German, Wahr-nehmung (literally, “taking as true”). For Heidegger, the question of such Wahrnehmung is less an epistemological one about the correct way to balance sensory input and cognitive refraction than it is the question about the lived unity of such experience as an understanding of our factical-historical existence. Moreover, for Heidegger, the question of truth will be deconstructed and rethought not as what is “present” there before us in any objective way, but as a process of withdrawal (Entzug), concealment (Verbergung), and errancy (Irre) (GA12: 20, 40, 61, 72, 135, 159, 247). In other words, what matters to Heidegger in the question concerning truth is less the question of correctness or adequation than it is one of how being’s self-concealing and errancy gives rise to a range of human errors and denials. This, I would argue, is precisely what will come to preoccupy Celan in “Schliere” – the wound in the eye that results from a trauma or injury and the streak that blocks any clear vision of what it can perceive. But, to speak the language of the later Heidegger, such a streak is not merely a correctable flaw or defect within Dasein; it touches, rather, the way that Sein shows/hides itself within language and how the poet must address such a problem from out of his own specific situation from where he befinds himself (Befindlichkeit) and how any possible understanding of such a condition is intimately bound up in language – or speech – as Dasein’s ownmost way of being-in-the-world as care. The traces of Heideggerian influence go much deeper, however, informing not merely the structural arrangement of the poem and its question-frame, but even specific word choices and idioms that manage to bring into play the technical realms of optical-geological-graphological discourse with the language of Heidegger, all against Celan’s pressing concern of how to address the question of darkness, loss, and destruction that leaves its pall upon every possible utterance in German postwar existence.

5

The Text: “Schliere im Aug” (Colonoscopy)

In one of his notebook entries during the time he was reading Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics, Celan writes this: “in each first

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word of the poem, the whole language gathers itself” (MSS: 98/PhB: 351). Clearly, Celan thought hard about his opening verses. Here we find several clues to how he will proceed in the poem. The very first word begins with a repetition: “Schliere,” the title of the poem, is now repeated and is placed in a conjunctive relation to the eye. Yet as soon as this conjunction between Schliere and eye is announced, it becomes fractured, interrupted, and split – by a colon – : – whose very shape on the page serves as an interval interposing itself between the eye (compromised by a streak) and A loss glimpsed midway by gazes lost.

Here the colon functions as a marking device to set up a spatial gap between the opening line – “streak in the eye” – and the gazes lost. It also serves as a way to signal a temporal relation between them, one characterized by loss and forfeiture. In German, this time between Aug (v.1) and Blicken (v.2) evokes the great philosophical–poetical topos of German thinking: der Augenblick. For Celan, the Augenblick functions here not so much as a crystallizing “moment of vision” wherein everything disparate comes together in epiphanic unity. On the contrary, for him the blinks remain cut off from the eye and indeed in a doubled way. Not only is the word severed (Aug-Blicken), but the gazes are “halfway” (halbwegs), glances that are lost. We can find several different discourses at play here in these opening lines. On a purely narrative level, Celan writes of the streak in the eye, hinting of an injury or deformation in the eye of the one who attempts to “look.” But whose eye? And at what is such an eye looking? Given Celan’s penchant for polysemic allusion, we can never attach one exclusionary meaning to a single image. Is this the eye of the native German looking back at the phenomenon of the Second World War? National Socialism? The Shoah? Is it Heidegger’s eye which cannot properly “see” since it looks at the past in a way impaired by the “streak” of its National Socialist affiliation? Is it Celan’s eye, injured by the pain and trauma of his experiences as a Jew in a Germany still blinded by what it promulgated and how it looked away from a genuine “coming to terms with the past”? I think we need to consider all these possibilities as we try to make sense of why Celan wished to send this poem to Heidegger above all others. No matter where we place our interpretive emphasis, there are a few poetic markers that Celan provides to help situate us. And here the question of the colon serves as a beginning. In the notes to his “Meridian” speech, Celan writes:

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charles bambach “Streak in the eye” – the blind spots – (M [Meridian]: 138)

He also writes about the use of the colon and maintains: . . . In the “mora” and “cola” the poem culminates. –

But what is this use of the colon about for Celan? And how does it function to serve as the “culmination” of the poem? Firstly, in its very form as a doubled set of points, the colon becomes a set of “eyes” through which all else in the poem will be filtered. In this sense, the colon interposes itself between the first line and what is to follow and becomes the “lens” through which all seeing transpires. But, for Celan, it also comes to show the function of a breath-pause, an interruption, that in “The Meridian” he would name “die Atemwende” or “Breathturn” for a transformed way of poetic seeing, a reversal. In his notes he writes: Reversal [Umkehr] – the foreign [das Fremde] as what is most one’s own [das Eigenste] – Jewishness [Jüdisches]. (M:127)

Then he adds: Your reversal – what is that? . . . Only when with your most own pain you’ll have been with the crooked-nosed and Yiddish-jabbering and goitery dead of Auschwitz and Treblinka and elsewhere, will you also meet the eye and the almond. And then you stand with your thinking, fallen silent in the pause which reminds you of your heart and don’t speak of it . . . And speak later of yourself. [In this “later,” in the there] remembered pauses, in the cola and mora (,) your word speaks; the poem today– it is a breathturn . . . (M: 127) . . . Not the motif, but the pause and interval, but the mute breath-auras, but the cola guarantee in the poem the truth of such an encounter. (M: 128)

What Celan associates with the colon, then, is the pause, break, differentiation, and distinction between the “crooked-nosed” and the “straightnosed” – that is, between the Jew and the native German. Read in this way, the opening line of “Schliere” performs a remarkable number of poetic tasks. It speaks of the division separating the native and foreign; it offers as a poetic reality the streak in the eye of those who look back at “that which happened” and are insensitive to the injury and trauma occasioned there. Beyond this, the opening line offers a lapidary, chiseled account of what is to follow – a poem about the event of truth, one marked by the interplay and mutually determinative force of concealment and/as revelation. For Heidegger, truth as appropriating event (Ereignis) becomes intimately tied up with the eye (Auge) that “the

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appropriating event appropriates [Ereignis ereignet] mortals by catching sight of [er-äugen] the essence of the human being” and does so by handing over (vereignen) the human being to language (GA12: 249). In “Schliere,” Celan draws upon a Heideggerian lexicon that self-consciously explores the visual relation between “the essential event of language” in the moment of vision that opens itself in the poetic rendering of time (GA4: 39). In “The Way to Language,” which Celan knew well, Heidegger shows how this way to language (“der Weg zur Sprache”) is determined by the saying (Sage) that belongs to the event of language. He then thematizes the topos of the Weg in terms of the old Swabian dialect that retains a sense of “clearing a way” as wëgen (“way-ing”). Here, “Be-wëgen, Be-wëgung (‘moving, motion’) . . . no longer means merely transporting something on a way [Weg] that is already present at hand, but rather: first of all furnishing the way to – and so, ‘being’ the way” (WL: 418/GA12: 249). For Heidegger, “way, hodos, Weg, is being itself as appropriating event” (GA97: 72). The language of “Schliere” is marked by these Heideggerian themes of the blink of the eye (Aug. . .Blicken, vv. 1–2) those “glimpses of half-way Lostness” (vv. 2–3). As Celan frames it, this Lostness becomes of a piece with what he calls: The really-spun Never, returned again.

Here we enter the very core of Celan’s complex poetics of loss, absence, withdrawal, and abyss that pervades the whole of this poem. From its very first line, the poem recedes from providing any “ground” for its arrival or coming to be. “The streak in the eye” – a line that will be repeated or “returned again” in the first line of the last stanza – stands upon nothing; emerges from nowhere; provides no cause for its appearance. At the very arche of the poem, there is no arche, only an abyss. This enacts a poetic performance of “the groundless ground” that Heidegger knew all too well. In The Principle of Reason, Heidegger writes: “so it is in withdrawal [Entzug] that being proffers itself to human beings in a manner that conceals its essential origin [Wesensherkunft] behind the thick veil [dem dichten Schleier] of rationally understood grounds, causes, and their shapes” (GA10: 165). What Celan proffers in “Schliere” is a poetic idiom that understands how thickly textured (dicht), dense, and compact poetry (Dichtung) must be, how close and near to (dicht) the real it needs to perform its work if it hopes to be able to articulate “the really-spun Never” whose “soul-stridden threads” remain difficult to find. In his Meridian notes, Celan draws a

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sharp connection between this poetic thickness and the opacity of the poem with its darkness that remains a mystery and, he claims, “faces you with silence” (M: 96–97). He then goes on to identify the thickness of poetry with “the geological,” “the stone,” and “the inorganic” (M: 98). Moreover, he returns to the image of the poet as the lapidary who, like a stone-cutter, carefully chisels out his epitaph as if on a gravestone. Here, “Language becomes lapidary, the poem has the character of an inscription – waiting for a near or distant – eye –” (M: 88). Read against this poetology of the lapidary, “Schliere” can be understood as a poetic inscription on a grave whose meaning cannot be seen by those who have a streak in the eye. In geological terms, the Schliere are “liquid traces” in rocks that survive a process of liquefaction.47 Celan will, of course, read these streaks as traces of the destruction initiated by National Socialism and its attempts to reach a “Final Solution” to the Jewish problem by pursuing a technocratic strategy of extermination. We can see the poetic trace of such a reading in stanza 3, verse 8, where Celan reserves a complete line for one solitary word – “Glasspur” – the only line in the entire poem so constructed. In English, Glasspur can be translated as “glass trace” and can be read as a reference to a technique in glassblowing that effects a change in the way light refracts, leaving behind a trace or Spur that can impair the ability to see. Beyond this, it can also refer to the vitreous humor in the eye between the retina and the lens that determines the very function of seeing. For Celan, the streak in the eye of the I who looks within the poem manifests an injury or trauma to this vitreous humor, one that impairs it, a wound that leaves behind streaks in the way one perceives. It is this wounded eye, afflicted by iritis, that stands for the marred perception of contemporary Germans whose vision of the past is shaped by the earlier injury. Again, for Celan, this “Glasspur” contains several hints of what this affliction entails. Not only does it serve as a trace of the Nazi destruction of Jewish life in Germany, the “Night of Broken Glass” (Kristallnacht) November 9, 1938, but encrypted within this single-line verse comprised of a single word, directly in the middle, we find the cipher “SS” – the dreaded Nazi Schutz Staffel, the Blackshirts, the ones committed to a vision of racial purity (pur). Yet Celan does not confine this “Gla-SS-pur” to a long-forgotten past. On the contrary, he sees it being revived, “come back again” (“wiedergekehrt,” v. 5), a neo-Nazism that threatens him once more in a Germany 47

Lotze, Geologie, 76. Paul Celan, The Meridian. trans. Pierre Joris (Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press. 2011)/Der Meridian. Tübinger Celan Ausgabe. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999).

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where the deadly atavisms of the old Nazi past are “rolled backwards” (“rückwärtsgerollt”). This vision of the Nazi past does persist as a “streak in the eye,” yet Celan does not confine himself to mere accusations and assigning blame in “Schliere.” Rather, he writes this poem in a cryptic style that also offers the possibility of a turn, a shift, a reversal – one directed at Heidegger in the language of the Heideggerian idiom. In structural terms, “Schliere” consists of twenty verses in four stanzas. Line 10 – “and now” (“und nun”) – is situated not only in the middle of the poem, but in the middle line of the third stanza. As the center-point of the middle, it sounds the note of a sudden change, a Zeit-Umschlag that announces a shift of direction at the half-way mark in the poem. Everything that follows from this break needs to be read in and through this caesura, one that divides the poem in half. This caesura serves as a moment of awakening, the insight into the “now-time” expressed in the work of Walter Benjamin. For Benjamin, “now-time” (Jetztzeit) is not “calendar time, clock time, and stock-exchange time,” but “fulfilled” time, the time of change and transformation where the traumas of the past are brought into an im-mediate relation to the dangers of today – heute.48 If historicism had relegated the past to an enclosed museum, Benjamin sought to unlock the past’s revolutionary potential: It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been [das Gewesene] comes together in a flash with the now [das Jetzt] to form a constellation . . . the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression, but suddenly emergent . . . and the place where one encounters this is language. Awakening.49

Celan’s “Schliere” condenses this Benjaminian insight of awakening in the “now of recognizability” in its two-word line “und nun” (“and now”) that serves as the fulcrum on which this poem turns. If one recognizes this “now” as a genuine encounter with “that which happened,” then “in it, truth is charged to the bursting point with time.” Celan intimates something of this possibility of awakening to time’s revolutionary potential in his Bremen speech of 1958 where he speaks of being both “wounded by – and in search of – reality” (SPP: 396/GW III: 186).50 This 48

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Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, trans. Michael W. Jennings, vol. I, ed. Marcus Bullock (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 11. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 462–63; Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. V: Das PassagenWerk (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982), 577–78. SPP: 396/GW III: 186.

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temporal caesura – both within the poem and within German history – needs to be read as a kind of Kantian ethical imperative, a Celanian demand on his reader – Martin Heidegger – to recognize the streaks in his eye, the one that has prevented him from seeing clearly the dangers of a “return” of those same forces within the German past and its language that threaten the “soul-trodden threads” of Jewish fate that have been woven together in a skein of racial destruction, but that “today” are still only “halfway” seen and recognized. For Celan, the tension in “Schliere” is set, then, between the “Never” of the first stanza and the “Always” of the last (v. 18). In this space between the traumatic experience of the Never and the barely visible, yet still preserved possibility of a hope that Always endures, Celan offers his poetic vision of how to embody the thematics of “Schliere.” The final stanza offers several clues to the way Celan positions this fragile hope for a renewed, enlivened way of seeing that, on the one hand, remembers what has been lost and, on the other, turns to the Other as a way to heal the injury done to the eye with the streak. His impetus in attempting to address this tension that runs through the poem finds its echo in the work of Heidegger. If the opening stanza underscores the pain of loss glimpsed, the final one hints at a way of pointing toward futural possibility. Here the preservation of a sign might be a way for the halfway-seeing eye to move from the metaphorics of veiled sight to one of aural consonance with a shared sense of an other future. We can find several Heideggerian notes in this last stanza that point to something like a hope for reconciliation with Heidegger precisely over the question of “sand” and/or “ice” thought in and through a “strange foreign time” and a “stranger/more foreign forever” (vv. 17–18). But the imagery here is complex. Celan draws much of the background structure for this last stanza from Franz Lotze’s Geologie, a scientific text that speaks of the rhythmic interchange between erosion and sedimentation in the geological interaction between glaciers that, in stormy epochs, transport ice and, in periods of rest, yield sand banks in rivers.51 This geological relation between sand and ice will then be read in terms of the tension between a Nordic culture of German coolness against what Celan calls a “Sandvolk,” that is, the Jews, a people come from the desert.52 Here Celan plays on the famous Hölderlinian distinction between Hesperians and Greeks from the Böhlendorff letter, a 51 52

Lotze, Geologie, 33. DG [Die Gedichte]: 113; the analogies to Hölderlin’s Böhlendorff letter, with its positioning of Hellas and Hesperia, are also at play here in Celan’s attempt to offer a different

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distinction all too familiar to Heidegger. But instead of reinscribing the same cultural dynamic between autochthonously bound peoples, Celan will distinguish them from Jews, the people of the sand. Moreover, he will draw upon the geological process of magma formation and how, in the sediments of time, we find witnesses of/for the past. In her remarkable book, Textgräber: Paul Celans geologische Lyrik, Uta Werner reminds us of how tied to the scientific disciplines of astronomy and geology Celan truly was. Hence, it is no surprise to find a pervasive tension between stars and stones in “Schliere” and how, through the processes of temporal change, stones become “sand (or ice?).”53 Through the “eye” of geological research “what is dead, rigid, bound in a static way becomes living, transformed, and capable of dynamic movement and change.” Much depends here upon the “eye” of the one who looks at what appears to be dead. From within his own poetic optic, Celan sees “the ashes of Auschwitz” not as something “lost” (v. 3), but as that which needs to be “preserved” (v. 15) as a “sign carried through darkness” (v. 16), a sign or Zeichen that, as Hölderlin put it in “Mnemosyne,” is without meaning: A sign we are, without meaning/Ein Zeichen sind wir, deutungslos. (v. 1)

As a gesture of attentive composition, Celan appropriates several Heideggerian topoi here, even as he transforms them for his own poetic purposes. The first line of the last stanza is an exact repetition of the opening line in stanza 1. What might such a gesture mean? Celan well knew of the centrality of repetition in Heidegger’s Being and Time, where Wiederholung signified not merely a kind of bloodless re-enactment of what once was in all its features and details. Wiederholung, for Heidegger, means not merely repetition, but much more “retrieval,” insofar as “repetition responds to the possibility of existence that has been there [dagewesene Existenz]” (BT: 367/SZ: 386). Moreover, as Heidegger grasps it, repetition is “a mode of resolution [Entschlossenheit]” that hands itself down and “by which Dasein exists explicitly as fate.” Within Celan’s poem, repetition functions in play with six different Heideggerian themes that appear in the final stanza of “Schliere”: preservation (“bewahre,” v. 15), sign (“Zeichen,” v. 15), silence (“stumm,” v. 19), attunement (“gestimmt,” v. 20), and, of course, being (“sei,” v. 16) and time

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narrative of German history from the graecophilic metaphysics of the philosophical tradition. Werner, Textgräber, 55–56, 91–93.

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(v. 18). On my reading, what Celan offers here is a way to parse Heideggerian themes against the geological and ophthamological wordscape that he so painstakingly develops in “Schliere.” As Heidegger put it in Being and Time, understanding is always “attuned” (gestimmt) (SZ: 142). But to what is Dasein’s understanding attuned? The truth – aletheia. Heidegger insists that it is “the business of philosophy to preserve [bewahren] the power of the most elemental words in their truth [Wahrheit].” But, as Heidegger knew all too well from his engagement with pre-Socratic thinking, truth as aletheia essentially prevails (west) in the strife and conflict between what hides itself and what shows itself. In the hidden, sedimented layers of rock formations and in the optical occlusions of light and its refractions/deviations, Celan finds a streak in the way humans perceive phenomena – especially phenomena tinged by “darkness.”

6

A Heideggerian “Ethics” of the Eye?

In his Meridian notes, Celan makes a point of thinking this geological and optical darkness in terms of the poem itself. “The poem is dark qua poem,” he writes (M: 85); “poetry . . . preserves for itself the darkness of the ‘illegitimate’” and does so, he emphasizes, “without quotation marks.” In other words, poetry writes its sign burdened by carrying this darkness with it (v. 16) and does so in “a strange time” while simultaneously preserving the sign “for an even stranger forever” (v. 18). In a very concrete sense, “Schliere” becomes a translated text, one that ferries across or “setzt über” from geology to poetry, from ophthalmology to ethics, from the Heideggerian realm of preservation and remembrance to Celan’s own form of a Kaddish for the lost Jewish dead. In the last stanza of “Schliere,” Celan carries out just such an “Über-setzung” by focusing his poetic eye on the praxis of grammar, which he will reinterpret in this singular context as a form of ethics. What the untrained reader’s eye does not perceive here is precisely the play between the grammatical possibilities of the poem and the singular enactment of these possibilities in the form of an enigmatic sign – “sand (or ice?).” Here Celan plays on the intricate threads that are woven between being and time within grammar (“sei” v. 16; “Zeit” v. 18) and how these threads come together to configure our lives. Within the poem there are five grammatically constructed passages ending with a punctuation mark. Yet only one of these has a verb; the other four either lack any verbal hinge or are tied to a past

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participle (v. 5, “wiedergekehrt”; v. 8, “rückwärtsgerollt”; v. 13, “überschleiert”; v. 15, “bewahrt”; v. 19, “belebt” and v. 20 “gestimmt”). The only proper verb in the poem appears in v. 15 as the subjunctive verb sei – which is notoriously difficult to translate and finds no perfect match in English. Within traditional German grammar, a verb is called a Zeitwort.54 And here Celan plays further on the Heideggerian theme of time even as he reads it in terms of both historicity and futurity, between remembrance and hope. The verb sei is written in the subjunctive mood. Grammatically, the subjunctive remains tethered for Celan to the messianic promise of a temporal shift – what he later termed “a breathturn.” Here it functions as a gesture of willingness to engage, encounter, perhaps even welcome, the Other. Moreover, here the poem crystallizes as an ethical response – not only to Heidegger’s work Being and Time, but to Heidegger’s place within the postwar order of German cultural life in his position as a thinker. What Celan risks here in employing the subjunctive hope “that a sign carried through darkness/may be preserved” is nothing less than a coming together of the stranger, the Jew, the poet of the Sandvolk who were forced to wear the sign of the (yellow) star on their person and the natively endowed, autochthonous thinker of the Volk whose vision of Heimat and Hölderlinian Aufenthalt had been inattentive to the silently oscillating voice of the Other. Celan offers some powerful hints for this ethical reading of “Schliere” in his Meridian notes. There he draws upon the work of Edith Stein, former classmate of Heidegger, whose doctoral dissertation, “On the Problem of Empathy” (1917), was one Celan knew: One also reads in a description by Edith Stein: only when you’ll have recognized the Other and foreign as what is most your own and yourself . . . this relation to the most foreign as the most brotherly is what the poem wants to create: not through its theme, but through its being. (M: 128)

Or, in Stein’s own formulation: The constitution of the foreign individual is the condition for the full constitution of what is one’s own.55

For Celan, the ethicality of the poem lies in this attuned recognition of the Other that pervades any sense of an encounter. In his Meridian speech,

54 55

Tobias, Discourse of Nature, 26–27. Edith Stein, Zum Problem der Einfühlung (Munich: Kaffke, 1980), 99.

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Celan vouchsafes that “the poem wants to reach an Other, it needs this Other, it needs an opposite . . . The poem becomes conversation – often it is despairing conversation” (SPP: 409–10/GW III: 198). The mere act of “thinking” the Other can never suffice; our ethical responsibility to the Other comes to us in that fractured space . . . passed between homeland and abyss through your memory.

ging zwischen Heimat und Abgrund durch dein Gedächtnis. (SPP: 152)

Ethics, for Celan, is abyssal. It can be given a secure and solid ground neither in ontology nor in aesthetics. Poetry, in all its thickness and densely layered textures, can often appear impermeable, much like a geological fold. But like this fold, the poem often harbors clues to its meaning in the traces and shards that emerge within and from it. Celan seeks to focus his reader’s attention precisely on these fissures and dislocations, finding in them a way to move his reader out of the self-enclosed sphere of its own subjectivity. This involves a moment of recognition that the Other exceeds my own realm of autonomy and power and must be granted her own sense of possibility apart from me. But it also involves an encounter with the Other that acknowledges the Other’s alterity. That means not encountering the Other so as to make it my own, but to recognize that what is most my own doesn’t belong to me at all: it belongs to the Other. The I is not “I,” but an I in virtue of the Other and of the I’s own otherness (to itself ). In his inscription of the ever-elusive “You” into his poetry, Celan offers a gesture in the direction of such alterity. Within “Schliere” the You appears in its plural form as the “You-eyes” (v. 11) that sit on the constant star above you. We find this Other as the stranger whose sign of a strange time (National Socialist occupation) may be preserved – for an even stranger forever. And here Celan speaks to the situation of the Jews, strangers in a strange land, who bore a dark sign through a strange time and who, despite this darkness and its abyssal despair, still hold out hope for a future. Such a hope is not clear-sighted and limpid, however. It is marked by the streak of a time whose darkness needs to be recognized and acknowledged. It is on the basis of this call for recognition, addressed to his readers, that Celan claims that “every poem has its ‘20th of January’ inscribed” (SPP: 408–10/GW III: 196–98).56 56

January 20, 1942 is the date of the Wannsee Conference planned by Reinhard Heydrich and his deputy Adolf Eichmann that led to the annihilation and destruction of the Jews.

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In this sense, we can read “Schliere” as an address to Heidegger to “remain mindful of such dates” to summon “a concentration that remains mindful of all our dates.” Here, in the language of the Meridian speech, the Heideggerian resonances are unmistakable. As the philosopher in conversation with Hölderlin, Heidegger understood that “remembrance thinks of the locality of the place of origin in thinking of the journeying of the journey through the foreign” (GA4: 150). Yet An-denken is no mere thinking back on what happened; on the contrary, “Remembrance is a poetic abiding in the essence of one’s poetic vocation which, in the festive destiny of the Germans’ future history, festively shows its founding origin.” It is this deep and abiding attempt in Heidegger to think futurally from out of remembrance and toward it that captivated Celan. But Celan also was preoccupied by the abyssal character of the homeland as a philosopheme for those who could still think of “the Germans’ future history.” For him, this “concentration” that sought to remain mindfully attentive to the dates of Germany’s “dark” history was something that needed to be addressed and recognized. Beyond this, Celan called for all those who had managed to “pass through the dreadful silence . . . of deathbringing speech” to bear witness to the dates crystallized in the synechdoche of January 20, while never forgetting the irreducible singularity of each day, each death, each moment of “concentration.” The poem itself, Celan tells us, “is a form of concentration,” but one that is attuned to a You – “the You to whom the poem is addressed is given to this You [ihm mitgegeben zu diesem Du]” (M: 56, 142). It is in the concentration upon what is strange, foreign, other, that “the You awakes.” Moreover, for Celan, “You = who is absent, what is absent” – a future You who has not yet appeared, a past You whose trace of ash has been scattered (M: 136–37). The poet’s responsibility thus becomes a way of acknowledging that this You at whom the poem is addressed “is no one.” And yet the poet is drawn to take the fate of that “no one” (Niemand) upon himself in such a way as “to perceive, to take as true [wahrnehmen] the catastrophes, the tremors, the rejections inside of language.” What Celan locates in Heidegger’s thinking is this inordinate attention – dare one say, concentration – upon the fractures, the ruptures, the tears, the Riss that lets language speak in such a way that its most profound way of speaking becomes an attunement to silence. As Dennis Schmidt has so gracefully put it, what drew Celan to Heidegger was the sense that “the poetic experience of language today commits us to

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mourning.”57 Because Heidegger was so attuned to this dimension of poetic mourning, and because he understood that it is the poet who, above all, is granted the task of witnessing the uncanny silence of language as its most authentic way of giving voice to the absential, Celan was able to find in his work a resonance that moved him in the direction of hope. In a sense, Heidegger became a test case for Celan in his hope for contemporary Germans to find what he called “an Ethos of the eye” (M: 138), even an eye streaked with Schliere. As a gesture toward this Other, in the hope of “a true encounter,” Celan adjured Heidegger to partake in the work of mourning with him, to share in the “silently isolating consonant [Mitlaut]” (“Schliere,” v. 20) of a pitch that affirmed their co-being in a shared u-topic space, so that we only silence ourselves before a foreign You as consonants [Mitlaute] and give it a chance. (M: 146)

In the teeth of a geological landscape whose destruction was not witnessed by any human eye, even one with streaks, Celan invites Heidegger to join him in the work of mourning that requires an ethos of the eye as a way to acknowledge “the witness without witness” whose silence Celan’s poetry inscribes.58

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. Essays in Understanding. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1994. “Heidegger at Eighty.” In H. Arendt, Thinking without a Banister, 419–31. New York: Schocken, 2018. Arendt, Hannah, and Martin Heidegger. Briefe 1925–1975. Edited by Ursula Ludz. 3rd ed. Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 2002. Letters 1925–1975. Translated by Andrew Shields. Edited by Ursula Ludz. New York: Harcourt, 2004. Bachmann, Ingeborg. Die kritische Aufnahme der Existentialphilosophie Martin Heideggers. Munich: Piper, 1985. Wir müssen wahre Sätze schreiben: Gespräche und Interviews. Munich: Piper, 1991. Bachmann, Ingeborg, and Paul Celan. Correspondence. Translated by Wieland Hoban. London: Seagull Books, 2010. Bambach, Charles. Thinking the Poetic Measure of Justice: Hölderlin–Heidegger–Celan. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2013. 57

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Dennis Schmidt, “Black Milk and Blue: Celan and Heidegger on Pain and Language,” in Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan, ed. Aris Fioretos (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 123. Maurice Blanchot, A Voice from Elsewhere (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007), 55, 85.

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Baumann, Gerhart. Erinnerungen an Paul Celan. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. V: Das Passagen-Werk. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982. Selected Writings. Translated by Michael W. Jennings. Edited by Marcus Bullock. Vol. I. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Blanchot, Maurice. Political Writings. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. A Voice from Elsewhere. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007. Celan, Paul. Die Gedichte. Edited by Barbara Wiedemann. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2018. Lichtzwang. Tübinger Celan-Ausgabe. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999. Selected Poems and Prose. Translated by John Felstiner. New York: Norton, 2001/ Gesammelte Werke III (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986). Celan, Paul, and Gisele Lestrange. Briefwechsel II. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001. Celan, Paul, and Hanne und Hermann Lenz. Briefwechsel: Mit drei Briefen Gisele CelanLestrange. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001. Celan, Paul, and Rudolph Hirsch. Briefwechsel. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004. Eisenreich, Brigitta. Celans Kreidestern. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2010. France-Lanord, Hadrien. Paul Celan und Martin Heidegger: Vom Sinn eines Gesprächs. Freiburg: Rombach, 2007. Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. Deutsches Wörterbuch. Vol. XV. Leipzig: Hirzel, 1854. Homolka W., and Heidegger, A., eds. Heidegger und der Antisemitismus. Freiburg: Herder, 2016. Koelle, Lydia. Paul Celans pneumatisches Judentum. Mainz: Grünewald, 1997. Kühn, Walter. Vermischte Zustände. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2015. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Political. Translated by C. Turner. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990. Levinas, Emmanuel, and Paula Wissing. “As If Consenting to Horror.” Critical Inquiry 15, no. 2 (1989): 485–88. Lotze, Franz. Geologie. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1955. Löwith, Karl. Heidegger: Denker in dürftiger Zeit. Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1953. Lyon, James K. Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: The Unresolved Conversation, 1951–1970. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Lyotard, Jean-François. Heidegger and the Jews. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. Mitchell, Andrew J. “Heidegger’s Breakdown: Health and Healing under the Care of Dr. V. E. von Gebsattel.” Research In Phenomenology 46, no. 1 (2016): 70–97. Olender, Maurice. Race and Erudition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. Pöggeler, Otto. “Celans Begegnung mit Martin Heidegger.” Zeitmitschrift: Journal für Ästhetik 5 (1988): 126–32. Schmidt, Dennis. “Black Milk and Blue: Celan and Heidegger on Pain and Language.” In Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan, edited by Aris Fioretos. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

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Schneeberger, Guido. Nachlese zu Heidegger. Bern: [Selbstverl.], 1962. Scholem, Gershom. “Jews and Germans.” In G. Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis. New York: Schocken Books, 1976/Judaica, II (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970). Sebald, W. G. On the Natural History of Destruction. New York: Random House, 2003. Stein, Edith. Zum Problem der Einfühlung. Munich: Kaffke, 1980. Tobias, Rochelle. The Discourse of Nature in the Poetry of Paul Celan: The Unnatural World. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Werner, Uta. Textgräber: Paul Celans geologische Lyrik. Munich: Fink, 1998. Wiedemann, Barbara. Ein Faible für Tübingen. Tübingen: Klöpfer & Meyer, 2013. Wolin, Richard, ed. The Heidegger Controversy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

10

Heidegger and Blanchot ‘Wherefore Poets in Time of Distress?’ (Hölderlin, Rilke) Leslie Hill

In the last days of 1946, surrounded by the ruins of a Germany whose commanding destiny he had once made a cornerstone of his thinking, with the city of Freiburg, where he lived and taught, now under French military occupation, Martin Heidegger rose before a hand-picked audience to pay tribute, on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of his death, to the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. This was, however, no ordinary commemoration. The aim was not to deliver a eulogy to an admired poet whose untimely death from leukaemia at the age of 51 was still keenly felt. Nor was it to remember the numerous victims of war, state terror, and genocide, who also demanded to be heard. Heidegger’s more precise purpose lay elsewhere: it was to address the beleaguered status of Germany itself in its moment of defeat, while offering more broadly, by way of deflection or displacement, his diagnosis of a time in which, he argued, ‘not only have the gods and God fled’, but also ‘the radiance of divinity has been extinguished from world-history’.1 The implications for poetry were far-reaching. For if it was the task of poets to plumb the abyss, Heidegger went on, it was to poets that also fell the responsibility for naming the ground beneath the abyss. The consequences for thought were similarly dramatic, not least for the thinker himself, whose homage to Rilke could not do other than serve as a reminder of his own marginalised position, officially banned from university teaching and struggling to accept or elude the legacy of the preceding thirteen years, even as he persisted in claiming that his notorious Rectoral Address of 1933 had been grossly misunderstood, and continued to affirm with reinforced tenacity the epochal radicality of his

1

GA5: 269/200; translation slightly modified.

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thinking. The title of Heidegger’s presentation said all this and more: ‘Wherefore poets?’, ‘Wozu Dichter?’, he asked. In particular, ‘and wherefore poets in time of distress?’, ‘und wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?’. The quotation for Heidegger’s audience was instantly recognisable. It was drawn from the poet Friedrich Hölderlin’s elegy ‘Brot und Wein [Bread and Wine]’, written in the winter of 1800 in hope of increase and renewal (whence the initial title: ‘Der Weingott [The Wine-God]’, aka Dionysus), when, after years of war, the signing of the Treaty of Lunéville between Bonapartist France and the Holy Roman Empire of Francis II made the prospect of peace in Europe a reality – albeit one that would prove shortlived.2 This in 1946 was similarly the aspiration, and the fear, following Germany’s unconditional surrender, once it became apparent, in Churchill’s famous words from March 1946, that ‘from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent’. Heidegger’s choice of Hölderlin to frame his reading of Rilke was at any event far from accidental. Already in a sequence of seminars in 1934–5 and 1941–2 (not published till 1980, 1982, and 1984 respectively), and in a series of papers given in Mussolini’s Rome in April 1936 (‘Hölderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung [Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry]’), then throughout Germany in 1939–40 during the onset of war (‘Hölderlins Hymne: “Wie wenn am Feiertage. . .” [Hölderlin’s Hymn: “As When on a Holiday. . .”]’), and finally in Freiburg in 1943, the poet’s centenary year (‘Andenken an den Dichter: “Heimkunft/An die Verwandten” [Remembrance: “Homecoming/To Kindred Ones”]’), Heidegger had addressed repeatedly the meta-historical significance of Hölderlin’s poems. For, unlike Klopstock and Herder, Goethe and Schiller, Novalis and Kleist, Eichendorff and Mörike, Stefan George and even Rilke, all influential names in the history of German poetry, Hölderlin, according to Heidegger, was the pre-eminent poet’s poet, ‘der Dichter des Dichters’, as well as, more importantly, the poet of the Germans or Germany, ‘der Dichter der Deutschen’, in the sense that Hölderlin, as Heidegger put it in his 1935 seminar, was not only the poet ‘who first sang the Germans [der die Deutschen erst dichtet]’, but also ‘the founder of German Being [des deutschen Seyns]’, ‘the poet of the Germans of the future and, as such, unique’.3 As has often been pointed out, the verb dichten in Heidegger’s 2

3

For Hölderlin’s poem and its historical context, see Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Gedichte, ed. Jochen Schmidt (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2005), 285–91, 722–49. GA39: 220–1/201–2; translation modified.

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usage (meaning ‘to put into poetry’, ‘poetise’, ‘write’, even ‘invent’), together with the noun Dichtung (‘poetry’, ‘literature’, ‘fiction’), is impossible to translate adequately. It is, however, perhaps enough to note, according to the initial 1935 version of ‘Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks [The Origin of the Work of Art]’, that for Heidegger ‘all art is in essence Dichtung’, insofar as it is ‘the uncovering [Aufschlagen] of that Open [jenes Offenen] in which everything differs from what it is elsewhere’.4 A year later, he would extend the claim to read more fully: ‘All art, as the letting happen of the advent of the truth of beings as such [als Geschehenlassen der Ankunft der Wahrheit des Seienden als eines solchen], is, in essence, Dichtung.’5 In contrast to others, including one particularly sinister set of others, with whom some commentators continue to suspect a greater degree of complicity on the thinker’s part, Hölderlin, for Heidegger, ‘founded’ what in 1934 the latter would call ‘the beginning of a different history, a history that commences with the struggle over the decision concerning the arrival or the flight of the God’.6 As this suggests, Heidegger’s approach to Hölderlin’s poems had little if anything to do with literary criticism in any conventional sense. His aim, as he put it in one of his socalled Black Notebooks in 1946, was not to ‘dabble in the aesthetics of poetry [Poesie], but to probe Hölderlin’s writing according to the history of Being and to think the concealed, essential relation between poetry [Dichten] and thinking [Denken]’.7 Yet if the poems of Hölderlin held special importance for Heidegger in enabling his turn from fundamental ontology to the history of Being, they were also intimately bound up with the fraught and ambiguous negotiation and renegotiation of his relationship with the ideology of National Socialism. It was thus no coincidence, he claimed, that, ‘immediately following the resignation from the Rectorate and the complete withdrawal from any kind of “political” or pseudopolitical activity’, he should decide to devote the summer semester of 1934, in preparation for the seminars on Hölderlin later that year, lecturing on the topic of ‘Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache [Logic as the Question concerning the Essence of Language]’.8 Though much of this background may have been unfamiliar to postwar audiences, there is no doubting its relevance when, early in November

4 5 6 8

Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2012), 92. GA5: 59/44; translation slightly modified; Heidegger’s emphasis. 7 GA39: 1/1; translation slightly modified. GA97: 177–8; translation mine. GA97: 178; translation mine.

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1946, shortly before delivering his anniversary lecture on Rilke, Heidegger was invited by the French philosopher Jean Beaufret to comment on the issues, implicitly directed at Heidegger, addressed by Sartre in his controversial October 1945 public lecture ‘L’Existentialisme est un humanisme [Existentialism and Humanism]’, that is, whether it was possible in abandoning all humanism that saw ‘man’ as a superior value and an end in himself, and while rejecting that ‘cult of humanity’ which, according to Sartre, only led to positivism or ‘fascism’, to recover a humanism grounded in self-transcendence, subjectivity, freedom, and responsibility.9 Heidegger responded immediately, and at some length, revising his text for publication the following year under the modest title: ‘Brief über den “Humanismus” [Letter on “Humanism”]’. In the letter, Heidegger scornfully dismissed what he took to be Sartre’s naïve return, deemed neither valid nor timely, to the metaphysics of the Cartesian subject. In rebuff, he explicitly drew attention to the primordial significance of Hölderlin, who, quite differently from the urbane Weimar classicism of Goethe or Schiller, he maintained, ‘does not belong within “humanism,” not least because he thinks the destiny of the essence of the human in more originary fashion than any [Enlightenment] “humanism” is capable of doing’.10 The world-historical thinking of Hölderlin as voiced in the poem ‘Andenken [Remembrance]’, he went on, still in fiercely nationalist vein, ‘is thus in an essential way more originary and more futural then the mere cosmopolitanism of Goethe. And on the same grounds, Hölderlin’s relation to Greek civilisation is in an essential way something quite different from humanism.’11 This in turn, he told Beaufret, remembering those conscripts on the Eastern Front to whom in 1943 – notwithstanding Hölderlin’s own strong sympathies with the French Jacobin Republic before it was derailed by Napoleon – copies of the so-called campaign anthology (Feldauswahl) of Hölderlin’s poems (including such titles as ‘Gesang des Deutschen [The German’s Song]’, ‘Der Tod fürs Vaterland [Dying for One’s Homeland]’, ‘Stimme des Volks [Voice of the People]’, and ‘Germanien [Germania]’), had been distributed in their thousands, was why ‘those young German men who knew about Hölderlin thought and lived, in the face of death, something very different from what the general public assumed to be a

9

10

Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Existentialisme est un humanisme, ed. Arlette Elkaïm Sartre (Paris: Gallimard folio, 1996), 75–7. 11 GA9: 320/244; translation modified. GA9: 339/258; translation modified.

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German attitude’.12 Moreover, when Hölderlin spoke of Heimat, ‘home’ or ‘homeland’, Heidegger insisted, ‘the word was thought in an essential sense, not as something patriotic or nationalistic, but in terms of the history of Being’, and ought to be understood within the wider sense of ‘a belonging to the destiny of the West’. ‘That which is “German”’, Heidegger added, offering an idiosyncratic gloss on the closing lines of Hölderlin’s poem ‘Germanien’, ‘is not announced to the world so that the world might convalesce by dint of German essence, but announced to the Germans so that from their destinal belonging to the peoples of the world they might become world-historical alongside them in their turn . . . The home of this historical dwelling is proximity to Being.’13 Between 1934 and 1946, then, there can be no mistaking the philosophical and political uses to which Heidegger felt able to put Hölderlin’s poems. That, over time, he should adjust his thinking or revise his interpretation of the poet is in itself not surprising. The fact, however, that the spiritualised nationalism of 1934–5, by which Hölderlin was deemed to be the quintessentially ‘German’ national poet, should give way in 1946 to the assertion (which is only superficially contradictory) that ‘each and every nationalism is metaphysically an anthropologism and, as such, a subjectivism’,14 or that the claim, advanced in 1934 and repeated in 1936, that ‘poetry [Dichtung] is the original language of a people [die Ursprache eines Volkes]’, implying that all art is national or nationalist art, should be reprised in 1944, and in all subsequent editions of his Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung [Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry], only in subtly mitigated and politically less loaded form as ‘the original language of an historical people [die Ursprache eines geschichtlichen Volkes]’,15 all this emphasises what continued to be contentious and unresolved in Heidegger’s thinking of the relationship between art and politics, literature and nationhood, writing and history – which numerous others would come to question radically in their turn. In 1947, when Heidegger’s response to Beaufret appeared in print, and even more so in 1950, when ‘Wozu Dichter?’ was published in Holzwege, alongside other papers from the period between 1936 and 1946, there were likely to have been few more attentive readers than the French

12 14 15

13 GA9: 339/258; translation modified. GA9: 338/257–8; translation modified. GA9: 341/260; translation modified. For the first formulation, see GA39: 214/195; it is reprised without change in Heidegger’s ‘Hölderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung’, Das Innere Reich, no. 9 (December 1936): 1074, then amended from 1944 in GA4: 43/60.

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novelist and critic Maurice Blanchot, whose familiarity with Heidegger’s thinking was by then well established. As early as 1928 in Strasbourg, alongside his friend and fellow student the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, he had read Sein und Zeit in the original German, and, sixty years later, still remembered vividly the impact of that first encounter. ‘Reading that book’, he recalled, ‘produced in me a veritable intellectual shock. An event of primary importance had taken place: I find it impossible to attenuate it, even today, even in my memory.’16 Throughout the 1930s, Blanchot continued to take a lively interest in Heidegger’s published output, sparse though it was, and, when Sartre’s La Nausée [Nausea] appeared in 1938, was one of only a very few critics to recognise, in the words of a review for the magazine Aux écoutes, how far the novel was ‘visibly inspired by a philosophical movement little known in France and yet of huge importance, that of Edmund Husserl and, in particular, Martin Heidegger’. ‘Extracts from Heidegger’s work have just recently been translated into French’, Blanchot also reported, ‘which allows one to discern the force and creative will of a thinking which, in the infinite dispute between laws, minds, and chance, gives art a fresh point of view from which to contemplate its necessity.’17 And yet, as shown by the title of his article – ‘L’Ébauche d’un roman [Sketch for a Novel]’ – in what may be seen as an uncanny rehearsal of the debate between Heidegger and Sartre nearly ten years later, Blanchot was almost alone in taking the latter to task, not for burdening his novel with philosophical exposition, as early critics tended to argue,18 but for making too many concessions to conventional literary realism, which had the effect of promoting the all-too-human subjectivity of Sartre’s protagonist, forfeiting the chance, as Blanchot would have preferred, of writing ‘a kind of novel of being [une sorte de roman de l’etre]’, a project on which he had himself been working for some years, and ˇ

16

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Maurice Blanchot, Écrits politiques 1953–1993, ed. Eric Hoppenot (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), 230–1; Political Writings, 1953–1993, translated by Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 123; translation modified. Maurice Blanchot, ‘L’Ébauche d’un roman’, Aux écoutes (30 July 1938). The volume to which Blanchot refers, translated by the philosopher and orientalist Henry Corbin, included versions of ‘What Is Metaphysics?’, extracts from Being and Time, and ‘Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry’. For early reception of La Nausée, see Jean-Paul Sartre, Œuvres romanesques, ed. Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 1701–11. Blanchot’s review may be found in English translation in The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 33–4.

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which would culminate in his own Thomas l’Obscur [Thomas the Obscure], published in 1941. By that stage, after France’s defeat and occupation by Nazi Germany, Blanchot had abandoned his pre-war career as a political journalist and was now mainly active as a novelist and literary critic. It was in this latter capacity that from April 1941 till the Liberation in August 1944 he was responsible for a more or less weekly review article in the venerable ‘liberal-conservative’ evening daily, the Journal des débats, for which he had worked as a leader-writer till June 1940, but which, like other newspapers, was forced to relocate to Clermont-Ferrand in the ‘unoccupied’ zone, where it survived precariously, largely thanks to hand-outs from the Vichy government, and with a reduced circulation of a few thousand subscribers mainly limited to the local area. As a regular contributor, Blanchot’s purpose was both public and private. It was, on the one hand, in discreet defiance of Vichy and the Occupying forces, to defend the relevance and autonomy of art and literature at a time of national crisis, while on the other, as he explained in a letter to the critic Évelyne Londyn in 1975, it was to elaborate a ‘theoretical response’ to the experience of Thomas l’Obscur.19 One recurrent point of reference in Blanchot’s critical writing, and given pride of place in his 1943 essay collection Faux Pas, was the work of the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, whose meditations on poetry Blanchot thought it essential to extend to all literature and to novel-writing in particular. In an article entitled ‘La Poésie de Mallarmé est-elle obscure? [Is Mallarmé’s Poetry Obscure?]’, published in February 1942, just as he was putting the finishing touches to his second novel, Aminadab, he argued that ‘in the poetic act, language ceases to be a tool, analogous to many others used by man, and reveals itself in its essence, which is to found a world, to make possible the authentic dialogue that we ourselves are, and, as Hölderlin puts it, name the gods’.20 In a later article, ‘Mallarmé et l’art du roman [Mallarmé and the Art of the Novel]’, published in October 1943, and reprinted only weeks later in Faux Pas, he went on:

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Maurice Blanchot, ‘À Évelyne Londyn: brouillon de lettre’, in Cahier de L’Herne: Maurice Blanchot, ed. Eric Hoppenot and Dominique Rabaté (Paris: L’Herne, 2014), 165–6. Maurice Blanchot, ‘La Poésie de Mallarmé est-elle obscure?’, Journal des débats (24 February 1942). Reprinted with modifications in Faux Pas (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), 128–9; Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 109; translation modified.

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Language is what founds human reality [la réalité humaine] and the universe. Man, who reveals himself in a dialogue in which he finds his founding event [son événement fondamental], the world that puts itself into words [paroles] by an act that is its profound origin, both express the nature and dignity of language. The mistake is in believing language to be a tool which man has at his disposal in order to act or to manifest himself in the world; language, in reality, has man at its disposal insofar as it guarantees the existence of the world and his existence in the world. Naming the gods, making the universe become speech, that alone founds the authentic dialogue that human reality is, and that too supplies the fabric of that speaking, its brilliant and mysterious figure, its form and its constellation, far from the terms and rules current in everyday life.21

As readers of Heidegger will have realised, these lines are almost entirely in the form of an unacknowledged paraphrase of a central passage in ‘Hölderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung’, probably encountered first of all by Blanchot in Henry Corbin’s 1937 French translation (‘réalité humaine’ is the latter’s much criticised attempt at rendering Heideggerian Dasein),22 where Blanchot would also have read the following remarks on one of Hölderlin’s drafts for the unfinished poem ‘Friedensfeier [Celebration of Peace]’, written in 1801 at much the same time as ‘Brot und Wein’. ‘Since we have been a dialogue [Gespräch]’, writes Heidegger, himself paraphrasing the poet, man [der Mensch] has experienced much and named many of the gods. Since language has authentically [eigentlich] come to pass [geschieht] as dialogue, the gods have come to expression [zu Wort] and a world has appeared. It is, however, important to see that the presence of the gods and the appearing of the world are not merely a consequence of the event [des Geschehnisses] of language, but are simultaneous with it. And so much so that it is precisely in the naming of the gods and in the becoming-word of the world [im Wort-Werden der Welt] that the authentic dialogue [das eigentliche Gespräch], which we ourselves are, consists.23

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Maurice Blanchot, ‘Mallarmé et l’art du roman’, Journal des débats (27 October 1943); Faux Pas, 189–96 (p. 191); Faux Pas, 165–71 (p. 167); translation modified. See Heidegger, ‘Hölderlin et l’essence de la poésie’, trans. Henry Corbin, Mesures, no. 3 (15 July 1937): 119–44. Heidegger’s lecture was reprinted, still in Corbin’s translation, alongside other, explicitly pro-Nazi and antisemitic essays on the poet, in the volume commemorating the poet’s centenary (7 June 1943), published that very day by the Nazi Institut allemand in Occupied Paris; Johannes Hoffmeister and Hans Fegers, eds., Friedrich Hölderlin, 1770–1843 (Paris: éditions Fernand Sorlot, 1943), 131–54. Heidegger, ‘Hölderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung’, Das Innere Reich, no 9 (December 1936), 1071. Compare GA4: 40/57-8; translation modified. For Hölderlin’s ‘Friedensfeier’, see Hölderlin, Sämtliche Gedichte, ed. Jochen Schmidt (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2005), 338–43, 887–935.

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In developing his account of Mallarmé’s poetics, many, then, are the arguments that Blanchot borrows from Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin: notably, that words are not a tool in the hands of humans, but that it is language that holds humans in its grasp; that the language of poetry is therefore not mimetic, but creative; that what it creates is a world, and what it names are the gods; and that human Dasein is collective and essentially linguistic in nature. At the same time, Blanchot’s redeployment of Heidegger’s thinking is just as interesting for what it does not say. Though he occasionally lists Hölderlin in his wartime criticism alongside other German-language authors (Meister Eckhart, Goethe, Novalis, Jean-Paul, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Nietzsche, or Rilke), Blanchot never once mentions Heidegger by name. The reasons for this are not hard to guess. From the very outset, in his extensive pre-war political journalism, Blanchot’s opposition to the Nazi regime and to Nazi antisemitism was resolute and uncompromising,24 and there is little doubt that Heidegger’s public endorsement of National Socialism in 1933 was sufficient reason for Blanchot’s unwillingness under the Occupation to name him in print. But this was far from implying a rejection of what he saw as ground-breaking in Heidegger’s thought. Indeed, it was precisely because of its philosophical importance, he later observed, that Heidegger’s political choices, before and after the war, were deserving of the most trenchant criticism. This much is already implicit in the use Blanchot makes of ‘Hölderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung’. For signally absent from the digest of Heidegger’s thought presented in the Journal des débats is any sense that poetry or literature might somehow be ‘the original language of a people (or Volk)’, speak to and of the past or future destiny of a people, or found a politics of essentialised nationhood. Admittedly, in exchanging Hölderlin for Mallarmé, he was purposefully replacing a German poet with a French one. And in that regard Blanchot’s choice of Mallarmé was as overdetermined ideologically as was Heidegger’s of Hölderlin. Indeed, in much the same way that Hölderlin was claimed both by the political right and the political left, by (say) Stefan George and Heidegger on the one hand, and Walter Benjamin and subsequently Adorno on the other, so Mallarmé too divided opinion. For the monarchist right, committed to the classicism of Pre-Revolutionary France, he was a ‘retarded Romantic’, whose ‘aesthetic 24

Much ill-informed controversy still attaches to Blanchot’s pre-war and war-time politics. For a comprehensive reassessment, see my Blanchot politique: sur une réflexion jamais interrompue (Geneva: Furor, 2020).

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theories . . . could have been applied without difficulty to some animal species lacking the higher faculties of intelligence’, and whose work, for conservative critics, was little more than a kind of effete ‘feminine’ ‘preciosity’. French fascist sympathisers went further. For Robert Brasillach, the antisemitic, pro-Nazi editor of the weekly Je suis partout, and a bitter enemy of Blanchot, Mallarmé, by dint of his prose style, ‘had really acted against the French language’ to the point of becoming what he called ‘a foreigner within his own nation’, while for Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, similarly a committed advocate of collaboration, all Mallarmé displayed was ‘the last stage of physical degeneracy’, that is, ‘sexual degeneracy’, ‘onanism or inversion’.25 In promoting Mallarmé as a foundational literary figure, then, Blanchot was making an implicit political point. For the essential quality of Mallarmé’s poems, he maintained, did not lie in their embodiment of some mythic national or nationalist essence, but in their dedication to the absolute. As he put it in his October 1943 article, again making Heidegger’s (and Corbin’s) vocabulary his own, the poet, Blanchot wrote, affirms that our human reality is poetic at its root [en son fond] and is the language that uncovers it, which also means that poetry and language, far from constituting subordinate means, or most noble but secondary functions, are in their turn an absolute, of which ordinary language fails even to glimpse the primacy. That language should be an absolute, the form of transcendence itself, and that it can nevertheless be assimilated within a human artwork, that is what Mallarmé envisaged with equanimity in immediately pursuing the literary consequences . . . Mallarmé the obscure turned what could be expressed only by a total absence of expression into something sensuous and radiant.26

For Blanchot, the absolute to which poetry sought to respond was not something that coincided, however, with the fullness of embodied presence. It was much rather inseparable from a radical power of contestation deeply opposed to all external or internal authority, including its own. It was therefore symptomatic that when, recalling in 1946 Heidegger’s phrase about Hölderlin as ‘the poet’s poet’ and ‘the poet of Germany’, Blanchot should apply a similar, but importantly different, label to the

25

26

Quotations from Charles Maurras, Romantisme et révolution (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1922), 186, 272; Albert Thibaudet, La Poésie de Stéphane Mallarmé (Paris: Gallimard, 1926), 455; Robert Brasillach, ‘À Propos de Mallarmé’, Je suis partout (7 June 1940); Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Notes pour comprendre le siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1941), 100–1. Blanchot, Faux Pas, 191–2; Faux Pas, 167–8; translation modified.

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poet René Char, a resistance activist from the very first, whose poetry, Blanchot wrote, is the revelation of poetry, the poetry of poetry, and, as Heidegger says more or less of Hölderlin, the poem of the essence of the poem . . . In [Char’s] Le Marteau sans maître [1934], just as much as in Seuls demeurent [1945], poetic expression is poetry brought face to face with itself and made visible, in its essence, through the words that seek it. Feuillets d’Hypnos [1946], ‘these notes’ scribbled down day by day by a ‘partisan’ amidst all the difficulties of action and grim fears of what may happen, contain the strongest and simplest of poetic statements poetry has ever devised to clarify and recognise itself. And in those pages is revealed most clearly the supremacy of the poem, not only with regard to the poet, but with regard to poetry itself.27

Where Heidegger, then, in contemplating the abyss, had conferred on poetry a foundational, meta-historical function, Blanchot, using much the same argument, drew an entirely opposite conclusion. Returning in November 1957 to the parallels between Mallarmé (writing in a letter that poetry ‘endows with authenticity our dwelling’) and Hölderlin (suggesting in a late, perhaps apocryphal fragment, that ‘. . .poetically man dwells. . .’), and thence to Heidegger’s remarks on a famous line from ‘Andenken [Remembrance]’, that is, that ‘What remains however, poets found [Was bleibet aber, stiften die Dichter]’, Blanchot offered the following gloss: we should be mindful of all that, but perhaps in a way that does not correspond to the interpretation authorised by Heidegger’s remarks. For, as far as Mallarmé is concerned, what poets found, space – both the abyss and the ground of language – is what does not remain, and the authentic dwelling is not the shelter where man is protected, but has rather to do with running onto the rocks, through shipwreck, and the yawning chasm beneath, and with the ‘memorable crisis’ that alone makes it possible to reach the shifting void where the task of creation begins.28

To write, in other words, for Blanchot, was always already to be exposed to an abyssal absence of all foundation, and it was this that had prompted the use of the name ‘Thomas’ for the protagonist in both his first and his second novels, a name that, according to the Golden Legend of Jacobus da 27

28

Blanchot, La Part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 105; The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 100; translation modified. Blanchot makes a similar point in Le Livre à venir (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 241; The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 198. Blanchot, Le Livre à venir, 289; The Book to Come, 237–8. For Heidegger’s commentary on ‘Andenken’, see GA4: 79–151/101–73, and on ‘. . .poetically man dwells. . . [. . .dichterisch wohnet der Mensch. . .]’, GA7: 189–208/PMD: 213–29.

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Voragine, a popular treatise much read by young people of Blanchot’s generation, already meant the ‘abyss’.29 It was from this radical refusal of all prior authority that derived, for Blanchot, literature’s irrepressible strength and subversive weakness, its status, as Derrida later put it, using an idiom borrowed precisely from Blanchot, as ‘an institution without institution’.30 The difference between Blanchot and Heidegger may also be understood as reflecting the dissymmetry between two equally curious impersonal expressions: between the French ‘il y a’, meaning ‘there is’, from which the verb ‘to be’, etre, is conspicuously absent, and which, for the early Blanchot and his friend Levinas, was evidence of infinite precession prior to any possible origin, before any decision could be made as to being or non-being, and the German ‘es gibt’, similarly meaning ‘there is’, or, more literally, ‘it gives’, where the ‘es’ or ‘it’ in question, prior to any entity, according to Heidegger, is Being itself. While language, then, for Heidegger, was synonymous with ‘the house of Being’, the place in which Being is gathered together and resides, so for Blanchot, as for Levinas, it was that which is never gathered, but is always already dispersed, always already exposed to that which is different and other, without which words would never come to name anything at all. The philosophical and political implications are hard to miss. And notwithstanding Blanchot’s enduring admiration for the Heidegger of Sein und Zeit, the gulf between the pair would become increasingly explicit. It was not till after the war, however, having by then completed a third novel, bearing the Hölderlinian title of Le Très-Haut [The Most High], that Blanchot returned to Heidegger’s reading of the poet, notably to his 1941 commentary on the Pindaric hymn ‘Wie wenn am Feiertage. . . [As on a Holiday. . .]’, which had only recently appeared in French translation in Max-Pol Fouchet’s Resistance poetry journal Fontaine.31 Blanchot’s interest was immediate. On 17 October 1946 he replied to his friend Georges Bataille, who had launched the monthly journal Critique earlier ˇ

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See Jacques de Voragine, La Légende dorée, trans. J.-B. M. Roze (1900), 2 vols. (Paris: GarnierFlammarion, 1967), I, 57. Jacques Derrida and Derek Attridge, ‘Cette étrange institution qu’on appelle la littérature’, in Derrida d’ici, Derrida de là, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Philippe Romanski (Paris: Galilée, 2009), 262; ‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), 42. Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymne: ‘Wie wenn am Feiertage. . .’ (Halle: Niemeyer, 1941); ‘L’Hymne: “Tel qu’en un Jour de Fete. . .”’, trans. Joseph Rovan (formerly Rosenthal), Fontaine, no 54 (summer 1946), 206–35. Compare GA4: 49–78. ˇ

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in the year, telling him how tempted he was to respond to Heidegger’s essay, even though, by then, he had yet to see the issue of Fontaine where it had appeared. Blanchot lost no time, however, in completing his article. Within weeks, and only a short while before Heidegger delivered his memorial lecture on Rilke, the essay had already appeared in the December issue of Critique,32 suggesting that, since his time writing for the Journal des débats, he had continued to study Hölderlin’s poems and ponder Heidegger’s reading at length. Indeed, when he had occasion to quote Hölderlin in the article, it is revealing that he did so largely giving versions of his own, rather than those used by Fontaine’s translator, Joseph Rovan. In 1941, as he would do à propos of Rilke five years later, Heidegger framed his discussion of Hölderlin’s hymn, first brought to light in 1910 by the poet’s pioneering editor, Norbert von Hellingrath, by addressing the meta-historical place of the poet within the history of Being and his understanding of the deleterious effects of metaphysics and technology. ‘During these decades [since first publication of the poem]’, Heidegger began, ‘the overt turmoil of modern world history has begun, the course of which imposes a decision as to the future character of the now unconditional domination of humanity over the entire globe’. And he ended, as he had in 1934, with political implications that had lost none of their ambiguity, by declaring, with the help of key phrases from the poem, that ‘that which is holy, “older than the ages,” rising “above the gods,” founds in its coming another beginning of another history. That which is holy decides originally in advance as to humans and gods, whether they are and who they are and how they are and when they are.’33 He opened discussion of ‘Wie wenn am Feiertage. . .’ by prefacing it with a remark whose oddity has often been noted. The version of Hölderlin’s text he was about to use, he explained, ‘which has been

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Blanchot, ‘La Parole “sacrée” de Hölderlin’, Critique, no. 7 (December 1946): 579–96. Republished, with modifications, in La Part du feu, 115–32; The Work of Fire, 111–31. GA4: 51, 76/74, 97–8; translation modified. Even many years later, according to a 1966 letter to von Hellingrath’s former fiancée, Imma von Bodmershof, published in Martin Heidegger and Imma von Bodmershof, Briefwechsel 1959–1976, ed. Bruno Pieger (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2000), 84–5, Heidegger would persist in preferring von Hellingrath’s original findings, nourished as they were, at the time of the First World War, by an abiding belief in the survival of a ‘secret’, that is, deeply nationalist Germany, to more recent, philologically rigorous editions of the poet’s work, which he dismissed as purely ‘literary-technical’.

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checked afresh against the original manuscripts, rests upon the following attempt at interpretation’.34 This implied that the text being used was reliant on the meanings attributed to it, not the reverse. Philosophy, in other words, took precedence over philology, interpretation over interpreted. This was not the only idiosyncrasy attached to Heidegger’s reading, as Blanchot in his 1946 article was quick to point out. ‘Heidegger’s commentary’, he wrote, proceeds word by word, in as careful and as painstaking a way as any commentary conducted according to the methods of didactic erudition . . . Heidegger’s questioning questions each word and each comma, and expects from every element seen in isolation, each taken one by one, a complete answer which itself may be taken in isolation. The impression given is often quite strange.35

Admittedly, remembering the opening paragraphs of Sein und Zeit on the hermeneutic circle, Blanchot was nevertheless willing to accept Heidegger’s unusual way of proceeding, and willing to admit that the dissymmetry between the relative sobriety of Hölderlin’s poems and the stylistic virtuosity of his interpreter (‘tempted more than ever’, Blanchot put it, ‘by the infinite resources of German idiom, and the dangerous power that words derive from the interplay of their structure and the inflections of meaning produced by the ceaseless dance of prefixes and suffixes around an etymologically transparent core’)36 was justified to the extent that some, at least, of Heidegger’s language was not imposed on the poet, but borrowed from his writing. This was notably the case for the adjective offen (‘open’) and the noun ‘das Offene’ (‘the Open’), used by Hölderlin primarily to mean ‘the open air’, but taken by Heidegger, as it is by Blanchot, in its philosophical or epochal meaning, that is, as Blanchot has it, summarising Heidegger, to convey the sense that ‘for the being [l’etre, that is, the Dasein] who wishes to see, it is first necessary to encounter the Open [das Offene], and that it is only possible to see in the freedom of that which is open, in the light which is also an opening and a blossoming’.37 But though Blanchot appears to endorse Heidegger’s use of the expression, this does not mean that Hölderlin’s ‘Open’ meant the same for him as for Heidegger. Here too ˇ

34

35 36 37

GA4: 51/74; translation modified. Heidegger was alerted in 1953, it seems, to the wayward logic of this methodological remark, which he promised to delete in future editions, but never did. Blanchot, La Part du feu, 115; The Work of Fire, 111; translation modified. Blanchot, La Part du feu, 117; The Work of Fire, 113–14; translation modified. Blanchot, La Part du feu, 117; The Work of Fire, 113; translation modified.

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there were serious disagreements. For while the ‘Open’, for Heidegger, as ‘Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks’ makes abundantly clear, was synonymous with ‘truth’ or, more precisely, with ‘aletheia’, that is, un-forgetting, or with Unverborgenheit, that is, unhiddenness or disclosure, for Blanchot it was far more a matter of encountering the alterity of the unknown. The best-known poem by Hölderlin in which the expression occurs, known diversely as ‘Der Gang aufs Land [The Walk in the Country]’, ‘An Landauer [To Landauer, the poem’s dedicatee]’, or ‘Das Gasthaus [The Tavern]’, which Blanchot quotes at the start of his article, begins, notably, with the invocation: ‘Komm! Ins Offene, Freund! [Come! Into the Open, Friend!]’, a phrase that in French (‘Viens!’), as Derrida demonstrates, plays a crucial role in Blanchot’s récit, L’Arret de mort [Death Sentence],38 where it is used to address an imperious thought, which, in its repetition, by dint of already being a citation, bears the trace of its own perpetual difference from itself, and is in that regard synonymous not with ‘aletheia’ or Unverborgenheit, but with an absence of world, irreducible to truth or non-truth, where what comes to be inscribed is an event, a call, a relation without relation with the other. The Open, in other words, insofar as it is ‘that which opens up, which in opening up is a call for everything else to open up, be lit up, and come into the light’, is also, by that very token, ‘the day prior to the day and always prior to itself’, in that respect ‘beyond the light’, not dissimilar to what Derrida understands by différance.39 Elsewhere, too, Blanchot showed himself to be a scrupulous and testing reader. Insofar as Heidegger’s interpretation, he realised, was in the form of a series of step-by-step glosses on words taken in isolation, Blanchot was particularly attentive to the claim that nature (‘die Natur’) in Hölderlin ought no longer to be read, according to Heidegger, in its conventional sense, but rather as a synonym for pre-Socratic phusis. Whenever Hölderlin spoke poetically in German, then, it was so as to be able to speak in ancient Greek. ‘In the hymn “Am Quell der Donau [At the Source of the Danube]”. . . ’, Heidegger argued, ˇ

Hölderlin says: ‘We name you, compelled according to what is holy [heiliggenöthiget], name you / Nature! and new, as from a bath / There emerges from you all that is divinely born [Göttlichgeborne].’ And yet, precisely these lines are those, in a revision done in pencil, the poet subsequently crossed out, as

38

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See Jacques Derrida, Parages, revised ed. (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 19–24; Parages, trans. Tom Conley et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 11–16. Blanchot, La Part du feu, 124; The Work of Fire, 121; translation modified.

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shown by Hellingrath who comments that, from now on, the name “nature” for Hölderlin was no longer an adequate one’, but in the hymn itself already overcome.’ ‘And this overcoming’, Heidegger added, ‘is the consequence and sign of a saying arising in more originary manner [eines anfänglicher anhebenden Sagens].’40

Citing the same passage from Holderlin’s often conjectural manuscript, underlining the fact that, ‘though they were subsequently struck out, those lines were nevertheless still formulated’, Blanchot countered by suggesting that: what the line suggests, at one and the same time, is: that nature is Nature only after the naming it receives from the poet, since, if his is the speaking that founds nature, it is only in answer to the call and demand of that which is holy; that in answering he himself becomes the holy necessity he obeys; and that finally nature, once named, is then intimately close to the poet, with the ‘you’ of Nature and the poetic ‘we’ cease to be separate. What is that which is Holy? It is the immediate, says Heidegger, drawing on a prose fragment by Hölderlin, the immediate that is never communicated, while yet being the principle of all possibility of communication. On the following page, Heidegger adds: ‘Chaos is the Holy itself.’41

But, here again, Blanchot demurs. ‘On this point’, he argues, ‘it seems the commentator is more reliant on tradition than on Hölderlin’s own experience.’42 For Hölderlin the poet, according to Blanchot, drawing on his own experience as a writer, what was primary was not the poet’s privileged, authoritative, meta-historical place in the history of Being, but the irresolvable tension, inseparable from Hölderlin’s writing, which resisted unproblematic attribution to any originary source. Indeed, rather than being based on a sequence of Heideggerian founding words to which the poet, knowingly or not, had supposedly given expression, Blanchot’s reading of Hölderlin, not unlike his own Thomas l’Obscur, took the form of a series of variations on abyssal aporia. ‘To question Hölderlin’, he began, ‘is to question a poetic existence so intense that, once its essence was unveiled, it could itself constitute proof

40 41

42

GA4: 58/80; translation modified. Blanchot, La Part du feu, 123; The Work of Fire, 119–20; translation modified. The text cited by Heidegger to which Blanchot refers is from a commentary on Pindar to which Hölderlin gives the title ‘Das Höchste’, ‘The Most High’, or, in French, ‘Le Très-Haut’, an expression Blanchot was about to use for his forthcoming novel. I examine some of the implications of the title in ‘“Not in Our Name”: Blanchot, Politics, the Neuter’, Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007), 141–59. Blanchot, La Part du feu, 123; The Work of Fire, 120; translation modified.

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of the impossible, and persist into nothingness and emptiness without ceasing to be fulfilled.’43 Blanchot nevertheless agreed with Heidegger that the dominant motif in ‘Wie wenn am Feiertage. . .’ was the poet’s intimacy with ‘ever-present’, ‘ever-creative’, ‘ever-living’ nature. ‘On the surface’, Blanchot added, ‘it would seem a simple matter for the poet to awaken and blossom in nature’s embrace.’ ‘But the question is this’, he went on, where will the poet find this ever-present, ever intimately present nature? Where will the poet find it as the presence of All, as movement passing from the ether to the abyss, from gods to chaos, from the heights of daylight to the extremity of night? Itself is presence as All, only if the poet calls it forth, and, alas!, the poet cannot call it forth, because, to be capable of that call, to exist as a poet, the poet needs precisely this miraculous omnipresence from which he is still excluded.44

This, for Blanchot, is the fundamental point: the poet must exist as a premonition of himself, as the future of his existence. He is not yet, but has already to be what will be later, in a ‘not yet’ that constitutes the essence of his grieving, his wretchedness and also his riches. Historically, the situation is one that Hölderlin experienced and put into poetry in a state of profound anguish: he was born at a time of poetry’s distress, in dürftiger Zeit, in a non-existent present, trapped within that non-existence by the double absence of the gods who had already departed and not yet appeared.45

In this regard, the predicament of the poet had little to do with world history, or the history of Being, more to do with the exigencies of poetic experience, that ‘experience of non-experience’, as Blanchot once put it à propos of Bataille,46 far removed from that presence of the subject to itself which, according to Derrida, it will be remembered, is almost invariably how ‘experience’ is understood in the Western philosophical tradition. And Heidegger, too, in his 1956 postface to ‘Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks’, would similarly reject any conceptual recourse to the experience of a subject. But this too was Blanchot’s point, that ‘experience’ needed to be rethought, deconstructed, delivered from its metaphysical assumptions.

43 44 45 46

Blanchot, La Part du feu, 118; The Work of Fire, 114; translation modified. Blanchot, La Part du feu, 120; The Work of Fire, 116; translation modified. Blanchot, La Part du feu, 121; The Work of Fire, 117; translation modified. Blanchot, L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 311; The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 210.

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‘The poem, through speech’, Blanchot explained, preferring experiential aporia to meta-historical prophecy, and rewriting what Heidegger had claimed in his 1936 Rome lecture, is what makes that which is unfounded become foundation, and makes the abyss of day become the day that brings forth and constructs. Das Heilige sei mein Wort (May the Holy be my word [Hölderlin]) means that that which is Holy become speech and speech become holy. But how is that possible? How can the Holy, ‘unexpressed’ and ‘unknown’, which unveils only insofar as it remains veiled, and reveals only because it is itself unrevealed, how can it lapse into speech, and, pure interiority that it is, let itself be altered to the point of becoming the exteriority of the poem? In truth, precisely, that cannot be, it is the impossible itself. And the poet is but the existence of that impossibility, just as the language of the poem is but the echoing and the communicating of its own impossibility, a reminder that all worldly language, all speech that occurs and unfolds in the realm of radical facility, has at its origin an event that cannot occur, and is bound to an ‘I am speaking, but speaking is not possible’, from which there nevertheless comes the little meaning that words retain.47

So when, having failed to grasp, according to Blanchot, that Hölderlin’s ‘eternal heart’ referred not only to ‘the interiority of the Holy’, but more pertinently to ‘the interiority of the Holy in the interiority of the poet’, Heidegger sought to equate the crux of Hölderlin’s hymn with the oddly conventional notion that ‘[like] the shock of Chaos which eludes one’s grasp, the terror of the immediate which foils all penetration, the Holy is transformed, through the silence of the sheltered poet, into the mildness of the mediate and mediating word’,48 it fell to Blanchot to set aside the second half of Heidegger’s sentence, and replace it with two further – aporetical – questions: for if the Holy was what Heidegger claimed, how then, asked Blanchot, might it ‘let itself be transformed and brought together with silence? And, then, why and how can silence be brought together with speech?’49 In December 1946, taking the poems of Rilke as his ostensible subject, Heidegger resumed where he had left off only weeks earlier. His understanding of the course traced by Hölderlin’s ‘thinking poetry [denkende Dichtung]’ within ‘the history of Being’ remained, in other words, his essential yardstick.50 In this respect, the purpose of his presentation, mainly limiting itself to a single poem, was not so much to offer an 47 48 49 50

Blanchot, La Part du feu, 127–8; The Work of Fire, 126; translation modified. GA4: 71/92; translation modified. Blanchot, La Part du feu, 128; The Work of Fire, 126; translation modified. GA5: 273/203–4.

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interpretation of his subject’s work as to chart the ways in which Rilke, necessarily falling short of Hölderlin, this ‘fore-runner [Vor-gänger] of poets in time of distress’, whom ‘no poet of the present age can outstrip’,51 was for his part reliant on a Nietzschean metaphysics of the will, albeit that, by that token, his work testified to the abyss into which modern technology had plunged Being, humanity, the Earth as a whole. To support this reading, Heidegger’s choice of text was, however, surprising. It consisted not in a selection from such canonical works as the 1922 Sonette an Orpheus [Sonnets to Orpheus] or the Duineser Elegien [Duino Elegies] that same year, which merit only a few mentions in passing, but in the ‘improvised verses’, as Rilke called them in a letter to his wife, inscribed in a leather-bound copy of his early novel Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge [The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge], when presenting it on his wife’s behalf to his friend, the patron of the arts, Baron Lucius von Stoedten, at the time German ambassador in The Hague. The reasons for Heidegger’s decision soon become clear, however, once it is apparent that Rilke’s extemporary lines contain such talismanic founding words (Grundwörter), already glossed at length in Heidegger’s commentaries on Hölderlin, as ‘Nature [die Natur]’, ‘fundamental ground [Urgrund]’, ‘our Being [unseres Seins]’, or, most reminiscent of all of his 1941 essay, ‘the Open [das Offene]’. This privileging of individual words over discursive syntax was nothing new. As Blanchot would observe in a footnote to his November 1957 article on Mallarmé, the attention Heidegger pays to language, which is of extreme urgency, is an attention to words considered in isolation, concentrated within themselves, to such words as are deemed foundational, which are then tortured to the point where, in the history of their formation, the history of Being comes to be heard – but never to relationships between words, and even less so to the prior space those relationships suppose, the originary movement of which alone enables language as an unfolding.

‘For Mallarmé, however,’ Blanchot added, ‘language is not made up of words, be they pure: it is that into which words have always already disappeared and this oscillating movement of appearance and disappearance.’52 As far as Heidegger was concerned, to pay tribute to Rilke amounted in the end, somewhat paradoxically, to little more than a circuitous and often

51 52

GA5: 320/240; translation modified. Blanchot, Le Livre à venir, 286n1; The Book to Come, 265–6; translation modified.

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violent act of translation, which, in drawing on regional idiom and on sometimes hypothetical etymologies, sought to substitute for Rilke’s own words a list of other, founding expressions more consistent with the abiding concerns of the thinker. The treatment of Rilke’s invocation of ‘Nature’ (die Natur) is a case in point. For whereas Heidegger was adamant, in reading Hölderlin, that the term ‘nature’ ought to be read, in its erasure, as a synonym for Greek phusis, so, in glossing Rilke’s improvised verses, he argued the opposite. ‘We must think Nature here’, Heidegger argued, in the broad and essential sense in which Leibniz uses the capitalised word: ‘Natura’. It means the Being of beings [das Sein des Seienden]. Being essences as the vis primitiva activa. This is the beginning power that gathers each and every thing to itself, but in such a way that it releases each entity to itself. The being of beings is the will. The will is the self-mustering gathering of each ens to itself. Each entity is, as an entity, in the will. It is as a thing willed.53

Similarly, in glossing ‘das Offene’ (the Open) in Rilke, the thing to emphasise, according to Heidegger, was its radical opposition to what Hölderlin meant by the word. ‘What Rilke names with the word “Open”’, he argued, is in no way to be defined by openness in the sense of the unhiddenness of beings [der Unverborgenheit des Seienden] that lets beings as such come to presence. Were one to attempt to interpret what Rilke means by the ‘Open’ in the sense of unhiddenness and the unhidden, then one would have to conclude: what Rilke experiences as the open is precisely the closed, the unlit, which draws onwards in the unbarriered [im Schrankenlosen] in such a way that there is no possibility of encountering something unusual or anything at all.54

Very different of course was Rilke’s own presentation of ‘the Open’. As Heidegger notes in passing, it is in the first few lines of the Eighth Duino Elegy that the poet addresses the question in more detail, in particular with regard to the different relation to ‘the Open’ enjoyed by animals and by humans. As Rilke famously writes: With all eyes the creature sees the Open [das Offene]. Only our eyes are like turned back on themselves and set all around like snares, all around preventing their free escape. What on the outside is, we know from the animal’s countenance alone; since we already turn young children around and force them to look back at what is already formed, not the Open which 53

GA5: 278/208; translation modified.

54

GA5: 284/213; translation modified.

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in the face of animals is so deep. Free from death. But that is all that we can see; the free animal has its decline already behind it, and before it God, and when it departs, it departs into eternity, as do fountains.

For Rilke, then, the absence of self-consciousness, the lack of foreknowledge regarding death, the freedom from representation, all confer on animals a certain privilege: a receptivity, in other words, to what is both open and lies on the outside. Not so, however, for Heidegger, who takes the opportunity afforded by Rilke’s verses not only to emphasise the latter’s supposed blindness to the futural poetics of Hölderlin and reliance on Nietzschean metaphysics, but also to reaffirm that anthropocentric hierarchy of being implicit in his own earlier commitment to fundamental ontology, and similarly in evidence in his thinking of the artwork. ‘Plants and animals’, Heidegger writes, glossing Rilke’s poem, are let into the open. They are ‘in the world’. The ‘in’ means: drawn unlit into the nexus of pure relation. The relationship to the open, if one can still speak of a ‘to’ at all, is an unconscious one of a merely striving-drawing framing into the entirety of beings. With the accentuating of consciousness, the essence of which, for modern metaphysics, is representation, the positioning and opposing of objects is also accentuated. The higher the level of consciousness, the greater the degree to which the conscious creature is excluded from the world. That is why man [according to Rilke] stands ‘before the world’. He is not let into the open. Man is left facing the world.55

Responding to these lines some three years after they were published, which he did only obliquely, and without mentioning Heidegger’s presentation by name, Blanchot lingered on Rilke’s thematics of death and dying as they had emerged in particular in Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge. ‘I am still convalescing from that book’, Blanchot quotes Rilke as noting in a letter two years after finishing the novel. ‘Can you understand’, the poet also conceded, ‘that I’m still in its shadow, just like a survivor, within the depths of myself, helpless, unoccupied, and unable to occupy myself?’ ‘In relentless despair’, Rilke had also written, ‘Malte has reached behind everything, and in a sense behind death, such that nothing is possible for me any more, not even dying.’ Blanchot commented: 55

GA5: 286/214; translation modified. See too GA5: 31/23, where Heidegger reiterates the claim that ‘[t]he stone is world-less. Plants and animals similarly have no world; they belong, however, to the veiled crush of an environment in which they are suspended’; translation modified.

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These words are worth remembering, unusual as they are in Rilke’s experience, which they show to have opened onto that nocturnal region in which death no longer appears as my most proper possibility, but as the empty chasm of impossibility, a region which most of the time he avoids, even as he is left traversing it for nearly a decade, drawn on by the work and the demand of the work.56

This was, as Blanchot was well aware, while implicitly dismissing the commanding dictates of Heidegger’s history of being, to return, albeit critically, to the fundamental ontology of Sein und Zeit, in order to reiterate how far death and dying, as they were for Rilke, remained an irreducible experience, not of my most proper possibility, but of dispossession and impersonality. ‘I do not die’, Blanchot would often repeat, ‘one dies’, dying occurs without occurring according to the anonymity of the impersonal. From this it followed that, for Blanchot, poetry, or writing, was incompatible with that classic Heideggerian anthropocentrism by which only humans, having language, are properly capable of dying, while other living creatures simply demise. And there too lay the reasoning behind Blanchot’s reading of the opening lines in the Eighth Duino Elegy. It was admittedly true, Blanchot agreed with Heidegger, that, for the Rilke of the Elegies, representational self-consciousness on the part of humans was an obstacle to any properly poetic experience of the outside or the open. But all the more essential, from Rilke’s point of view, was the demand that, like ‘the animal’, the poet must pass beyond representation. ‘It is clearly the case’, Blanchot observed, that Rilke sees great difficulty in the idea of consciousness closed upon itself, inhabited by images. The animal is wherever it looks, and its look does not reflect it, nor reflect the thing, but opens onto the thing. This other side, which Rilke calls ‘the pure relation’, is also the purity of relation, the fact of being, in this relation, outside oneself, in the thing itself and not in any representation of it. Death in this sense might be thought to be the equivalent of what is sometimes called intentionality. Through death, ‘we stare outside with perhaps great animal eyes’. Through death also, our eyes are turned back on themselves, and this turning back is the other side, and the other side is the fact of living no longer being turned aside, but turned back, introduced into the intimacy of conversion, not deprived of consciousness, but, through consciousness, installed outside it, thrown into the ecstasy of that movement.57

56

57

Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), 134; The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 132, translation modified. Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire, 137–8; The Space of Literature, 135; translation modified.

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‘The Open’ in Rilke, in other words, is anything but an obtuse moment of metaphysical closure. What it names is nothing less than the poem itself, its passage beyond being and non-being, into the outside, the unknown, the radically open. Wherefore poets, then, in time of distress? For Heidegger, the answer was unambiguous and clear from the outset. It was a wandering to find home: ‘To be a poet in time of distress’, he argued, ‘means: to attend in singing to the trace of the departed gods. That is why, when darkness descends on the world, the poet says the holy. And that is why, in Hölderlin’s words, the darkness falling upon the world is holy darkness.’58 Blanchot’s more detailed response was no less far-reaching. Bereft of all nostalgia, all dogmatic conviction, all belief in destiny, it said this: What is proper to the poet and is poetry’s force and risk is to have for one’s resting place where gods are missing, where truth is lacking. ‘Time of distress’ refers to that time which, in all time, is proper to art, but which, when historically the gods are missing and the world of truth trembles, emerges into the work as the care in which the work has its reserve, which threatens it, and makes it present and visible. The time of art is time on the hither side of time, which the collective presence of the divine evokes by concealing it, which history and the labours of history revoke by negating it and which the work, in the distress of the ‘Wherefore poets?’, shows to be that which lies concealed in the depths of appearance, which reappears at the heart of disappearance, which fulfils itself in the vicinity and under the threat of a radical reversal: that which is at work when death comes, improper and impersonal, and which, perpetuating being in the form of nothingness, makes of light a source of fascination, of the object an image, and of ourselves the empty heart of endless recapitulation.59

On the one hand, then, the authority of decision, the unconcealment of the true, the quest for the origins of Being; on the other, unwavering contestation, the withdrawal of truth and non-truth, the perpetuity of the abyss.

Bibliography Blanchot, Maurice. ‘À Évelyne Londyn: brouillon de Lettre.’ In Cahier de L’Herne: Maurice Blanchot. Edited by Eric Hoppenot and Dominique Rabaté. Paris: L’Herne, 2014. The Blanchot Reader. Edited by Michael Holland. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. The Book to Come. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. 58 59

GA5: 272/202; translation modified. Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire, 259; The Space of Literature, 246; translation modified.

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Écrits politiques 1953–1993. Edited by Eric Hoppenot. Paris: Gallimard, 2008. Faux Pas. Paris: Gallimard, 1943. Faux Pas. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. The Infinite Conversation. Translated by Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. ‘L’Ébauche d’un roman.’ Aux écoutes (30 July 1938). L’Entretien infini. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. L’Espace littéraire. Paris: Gallimard, 1955. ‘La Parole “sacrée” de Hölderlin.’ Critique, no. 7 (December 1946): 579–96. La Part du feu. Paris: Gallimard, 1949. ‘La Poésie de Mallarmé est-elle obscure?’ Journal des débats (24 February 1942). Le Livre à venir. Paris: Gallimard, 1959. ‘Mallarmé et l’art du roman.’ Journal des débats (27 October 1943). Political Writings, 1953–1993. Translated by Zakir Paul. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. The Space of Literature. Translated by Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. The Work of Fire. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Brasillach, Robert. ‘À Propos de Mallarmé.’ Je suis partout (7 June 1940). de Voragine, Jacques. La Légende dorée. Translated by J.-B. M. Roze (1900). 2 vols. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1967. Derrida, Jacques. Parages. Revised ed. Paris: Galilée, 2003. Parages. Translated by Tom Conley, James Hulbert, John P. Leavey, and Avital Ronell. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. ‘This Strange Institution Called Literature.’ In Acts of Literature, edited by Derek Attridge. London: Routledge, 1992. Derrida, Jacques, and Derek Attridge. ‘Cette étrange institution qu’on appelle la littérature.’ In Derrida d’ici, Derrida de là, edited by Thomas Dutoit and Philippe Romanski. Paris: Galilée, 2009. Drieu La Rochelle, Pierre. Notes pour comprendre le siècle. Paris: Gallimard, 1941. Heidegger, Martin. ‘Hölderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung.’ Das Innere Reich, no. 9 (December 1936): 1065–78. ‘Hölderlin et l’essence de la poésie.’ Trans Henry Corbin. Mesures, no. 3 (15 July 1937): 119–44. Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2012). ‘L’Hymne: “Tel qu’en un jour de fete. . .”.’ Trans Joseph Rovan, Fontaine, no. 54 (summer 1946): 206–35. Heidegger, Martin, and Imma von Bodmershof. Briefwechsel 1959–1976. Edited by Bruno Pieger. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2000. Hill, Leslie. Blanchot politique: sur une réflexion jamais interrompue. Geneva: Furor, 2020. ‘“Not in Our Name”: Blanchot, Politics, the Neuter.’ Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 141–59. ˇ

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Hoffmeister, Johannes, and Hans Fegers, eds. Friedrich Hölderlin, 1770–1843. Paris: Éditions Fernand Sorlot, 1943. Hölderlin, Friedrich. Sämtliche Gedichte. Edited by Jochen Schmidt. Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2005. Maurras, Charles. Romantisme et révolution. Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1922. Sartre, Jean-Paul. L’Existentialisme est un humanisme. Edited by Arlette Elkaïm Sartre. Paris: Gallimard folio, 1996. Œuvres romanesques. Edited by Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka. Paris: Gallimard, 1981. Thibaudet, Albert. La Poésie de Stéphane Mallarmé. Paris: Gallimard, 1926.

11

Thomas Mann and Martin Heidegger Two Distinct Paths of the “Conservative Revolution” in Germany Ingo Farin

1

Prelude

Thomas Mann and Martin Heidegger never crossed paths. Nonetheless, as hommes de lettres (Mann) or Dichter und Denker (Heidegger), both men lived more or less in the same literary and cultural universe, producing literary and philosophical works in the German language, and, as such, they certainly took note of each other. We know that Heidegger read The Magic Mountain in 1925. In letters to Hannah Arendt,1 Heidegger writes how “exciting” he finds reading the book, since “the world” portrayed by Mann is one that he himself had known and observed “from afar” during his student years at Freiburg University. Despite being “a very slow” reader, Heidegger reveals that he read the first part of the book “in one go.” He also notes that, in order to do justice to the book, one would have to sit down and “study” it in detail, which is something he apparently intended to do, for he writes that he would reread the book very soon. Overall, Heidegger is quite taken by The Magic Mountain, writing that the mastery of Mann’s presentation is “unprecedented.” Heidegger is particularly intrigued by what he considers Mann’s superb description of how “Dasein is lived by its environment,” instead of living from out of itself. But Heidegger also records his disappointment concerning Mann’s treatment of time. Probably referring to the early chapter in The Magic Mountain on the “Excursus on the Sense of Time,” Heidegger curtly states that he is “not overwhelmed.” If we now turn to Mann, all the evidence suggests that he probably never read, let alone studied any of Heidegger’s philosophical texts. In a 1

Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, Briefe 1925–1975, ed. Ursula Ludz, 3rd ed. (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2002), 40–45; Letters 1925–1975, trans. Andrew Shields, ed. Ursula Ludz (New York: Harcourt, 2004), 28–33.

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letter to Paul Tillich from 1944, first posthumously published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,2 Mann takes issue with Heidegger’s stilted terminology he had encountered in Tillich’s essay “Existential Philosophy,” which Tillich had sent to him earlier that year. The offending expression is Jemeinigkeit, which Mann considers “philosophical horror jargon [philosophischen Schreckensjargon]” that ought not to be permitted to go “unpunished.” His linguistic sensibility thusly violated by Heidegger, Mann then falls back on what must be an already established aversion to Heidegger as a public intellectual and supporter of Hitler, for Mann confesses, in the same letter to Tillich, that he “had always disliked Heidegger.” He underscores this dislike by calling Heidegger “a Nazi par existence.” This is the most extensive direct commentary by Mann on Heidegger, as far as I know.

2

Conservative Revolution: Literary, Political, IntellectualHistorical, and Philosophical

The very concept of “conservative revolution” is contested, as every interesting concept should be. Breuer argues that the term conservative revolution fails to be a “uniquely identifying” concept, being thus useless for any descriptive, diagnostic, or “polemical” purpose.3 However, to give up the concept altogether is untenable, if only because it has gained currency in the secondary literature.4 While we must accept the vagueness of the concept, we can clarify core aspects and different approaches. It is clear that, unlike nineteenth-century conservatism, proponents of conservative revolution are not interested in preserving an already existing reality, but attempt to create what is worthy of preserving in the first place, even if that requires “a revolutionary break with the past.”5 This paradoxical juxtaposition of a conservative outlook with a revolutionary 2

3

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5

Thomas Mann, “Das Deutscheste: Thomas Mann an Paul Tillich, 13 April 1944,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 20, 2002, 45. The Fischer Verlag in Germany owns the copyright for this letter, which has not been published in any collection of letters up to this date. According to an email from the Fischer Verlag to me (September 19, 2020), the publication of the letter is planned for the future, but “it will take some time.” Stefan Breuer, “Die konservative Revolution – Kritik eines Mythos,” Politische Vierteljahresschrift 31, no. 4 (1990): 604. Helmuth Kiesel, Geschichte der deutschsprachigen Literatur 1918–1933 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2017), 877. Henning Ottmann, “Die konservative Revolution (Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Thomas Mann, Oswald Spengler, Ernst Jünger),” in Geschichte des politischen Denkens, ed. Henning Ottmann (Berlin: Springer, 2010), 202.

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impetus certainly means that it is a conservatism sui generis, if it is conservatism at all. For clarity’s sake, I distinguish between two different thematizations of the conservative revolution. First, there is the group of heavily invested instigators and provocateurs who attacked the legitimacy of the Weimar Republic and bourgeois culture at large with positions that did not aim at the restitution of the Wilhelmine Empire. The fact that also decidedly left-wing ideas, such as the call for socialism, and the empowering of soldiers and workers, became part of the volatile ideological mix of the conservative revolution is oddly underexposed or dismissed as mere window-dressing in the Anglophone world.6 In other words, the authors of the political-cultural plane of conservative revolution are anything but monotone.7 A second group, often sidelined or ignored, comprises writers who, in giving an account of the intellectual currents of their times, provided a literary assessment and commentary on the conservative revolution as a cultural phenomenon without being active partisans of it. It is an important fact that the very notion of a conservative revolution was first put forward in decidedly literary form, in 1887 by Dostoevsky,8 and, in a different form, by Thomas Mann (1921), who later, in his Doktor Faustus, also turned out to be the most outspoken literary critic of the first group of the agents of a conservative revolution. However, it was Hugo von Hofmannsthal who elevated the idea of conservative revolution to the defining concept of his time in 1927.

2.1

Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann was one of the first to use the concept of “conservative revolution” as a term of art in Germany.9 In his 1921 “Russian 6

7

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9

For instance, Möller von den Bruck’s book The Third Reich is a genuine attempt to forge an anti-capitalist alliance between nationalists on the right and socialists on the left. This group comprises novelists like Ernst Jünger, as well as political writers such as Edgar Jung. Dostoievsky discusses the problem of a conservative revolution in two consecutive entries in his Diaries of a Writer. The first entry is titled “My Paradox” and the second “Deduction from the Paradox,” in The Diary of a Writer, translated and annotated by Boris Brasol, vol. I (London: Cassell, 1949), 350–56. Michael Zantke has recently argued that, between 1919 and 1921, Mann may have gleaned the term from discussions with authors who contributed to the journal Gewissen, most probably Ernst Krieck or Moeller von den Bruck. Nothing much hinges on any quarrel about priority, for Mann’s expounding of the term is surely based on his own thinking. Michael Zantke, “Thomas Mann und die Versuchung der ‘konservativen Revolution,’” in

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Anthology,” a short essay written for a collection of Russian stories published by the Süddeutsche Monatshefte, Mann notes that as “a son” of “the nineteenth century,” or “the bourgeois epoch,” he escaped “paralysis” and “intellectual death” by two formative encounters: “Nietzsche and the Russian world.”10 What he encountered there was the life-elixir of a new synthesis which balances “enlightenment and faith,” “spirit and flesh,” “freedom and dependence,” “sensuousness and criticism,” “‘God’ and ‘world,’” and also “conservatism and revolution.”11 Based on this paradoxical and ironic juxtaposition of the conservative forces in life on the one hand, and the critical and revolutionary principle of spirit on the other, Mann postulates the idea of a conservative revolution, which for him is an aesthetic and ironic attitude, an intelligent conservatism, or a revolutionism mindful of the forces of tradition and life. It transforms both traditional conservatism and traditional utopian revolutionism. By way of explanation, Mann writes: For conservatism only needs to have spirit in order to be more revolutionary than any odd positivistic-liberalistic Enlightenment, and Nietzsche himself was, from the beginning, already in the “Untimely Observation” nothing other than conservative revolution.12

In general, Mann associates conservatism with the concept of “life,” meaning that conservatism aims to preserve the traditional rhythms and forms of life prior to and frequently in contrast to modern, intellectual, or rational demands for justification, reform, and revolution. It is for this reason that Mann already in the Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen argues that “life” is “a conservative concept.”13 Next, taking Nietzsche as the modern apologist of “life,” and conservatism in that sense, Mann then notes that Nietzsche obviously lends his intellect and spirit to the defence of life. Thus, Nietzsche is not only intellectualizing life, but also transforming an otherwise uninterestingly dull or mindless conservatism into a more spirited version, a revolutionary kind of conservatism, or, conservative revolution. Mann’s implication of Nietzsche in conservative revolution, or, more precisely, his attempt to reinterpret Nietzsche as a figure of conservative

10

11 13

Thomas Manns “Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen” nach 100 Jahren: Neue Perspektiven und Kontexte, ed. Erik Schilling (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2018), 173–74. Thomas Mann, “Russische Anthologie,” in Essays II, in Große kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe, ed. Hermann Kurzke et al., vol. XV.1 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2002), 340. 12 Ibid., 341. Ibid. Thomas Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2015), 92.

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revolution was to stick. It elevated conservative revolution to something like a respectable philosopheme of sorts. It had the further advantage that it conveniently camouflaged the lack of any clear political or programmatic implications. It is significant that there is no programmatic outline of goals of the conservative revolution that Mann puts forward. It is an aestheticliterary idea that Mann circulates, based on the growing influence of Nietzsche in intellectual circles of his time. Hence, Mann’s entirely aesthetic-literary conception of conservative revolution is not so much a revolutionary conservatism, that is, a wild conservatism bent on overthrowing the present condition for some conservative ideal of the past (what one may call counter-revolution), nor is it a conservative revolution, as opposed to a more radical overthrow. Rather, it is an ironic juxtaposition of two opposites, life (conservatism) and spirit (revolution), giving rise to the mutual relativization of each by the other. But this strife is based on a hidden attraction that binds life and spirit together. Already in the Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, Mann had argued that “not only does spirit call for life, but life also calls for spirit,”14 meaning that “mere” conservatism harbors a suppressed and secret longing for spirit, articulateness, and literary presence, just as much as radical, utopian spirit is animated by the longing for becoming life, the desire to grow roots in the earth, or to become lived reality. Mindless conservatism by itself is as raw and unsophisticated as mere utopian radicalism is devoid of life and, therefore, unappealing. For Mann, conservative revolution is the cultural bridge that brings together the antipodes of life (conservatism) and spirit (revolution), giving each its rightful place. However, even though Mann did not explicate it in this way at all, the very notion of a bridge between life (= conservatism of customs, belonging to country, etc.) and spirit (= criticism and revolution) had an implicit political resonance at the time, for it points, however obliquely, to the merging of the nationalism of the right with the socialism of the left, giving rise to what has been called National Bolshevism, and, ultimately, National Socialism as well. These explosive consequences were not quite visible in 1921 when Mann circulated the term conservative revolution, but, arguably, they were already in the air.

2.2

Hugo von Hofmannsthal

Six years later, without any acknowledgment of Mann, but with crucial reference to Nietzsche, Hugo von Hofmannsthal consciously politicized 14

Ibid., 100.

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the concept of conservative revolution and turned it into a powerful watchword for an entire generation in Germany. He accomplished this in his 1927 speech “The Written Word as the Spiritual Space of the Nation,” where he mentions, to great effect, the phrase “conservative revolution” only once at the very end, claiming it as the master concept for the future of Germany and Europe. In this speech, given at the University of Munich, Hofmannsthal rejects the notion that the identity of a nation or community is based on the territory or land it lives on. Instead, it depends on the intellectualspiritual space opened up by its language and the written word.15 The European nations have their home in their language. Next, Hofmannsthal outlines the difference between French and German literature, giving unstinting and honest praise to the Romance nations, particularly France, which “possesses a literature in the true sense of the word.”16 According to Hofmannsthal, French literature is a harmonious whole in which a sharp sense for “linguistic norms” reins in aspirations to uniqueness or individual extravagance, for the French writer does “not aim to stand out but to fulfil traditional demands.”17 Nonetheless, this firm bedrock enables or “makes room” for diverse and contradictory tendencies, such as “aristocratic,” “sceptical,” “levelling,” and “revolutionary,” as well as “conservative” viewpoints.18 With great admiration, Hofmannsthal notes how in France a revolution can be “unleashed” that “shakes up” the country but does not “break” the nation.19 Turning from France to Germany, Hofmannsthal contrasts the unanimity and connection in French literature and society with Germany’s disunity and distractedness, which is owed to the fact that in Germany “the nation’s sociability is not what is primary, but instead the repudiation of the social is primary.”20 The German intellectual energies are much more anarchic, individual, bereft of any social responsibility, and not at all checked by the governing norms of a common literature. Although “striving for the deepest, even cosmic ties and the greatest, even religious responsibilities to the whole,” the German intellectual

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“We are bound together in a community not by our shared living on the soil of the homeland, not by our physical contact in social and economic intercourse, but above all by a spiritual connection [geistiges Anhangen],” Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Das Schrifttum als geistiger Raum der Nation (Munich: Verlag der Bremer Presse, 1927), 9. 17 18 19 20 Ibid., 10. Ibid. Ibid., 11–12. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 15.

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finds his intellectual centre only in himself, “the individual personality,” not even bound by the standards of the German language itself.21 Not embedded within a definitive or authoritative literature, and without a sense of sociability and tradition worthy of continuation and veneration, the German intellectual strikes out on his own. Prominently drawing on Nietzsche, in particular the Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, Hofmannsthal sees the German intellectual as a “seeker” (Suchender),22 a “solitary wanderer” in “a nation of solitary ones.”23 This restless seeker is opposed to the “cultured Philistine” and all “those who are settled in their beliefs”; he attacks “pseudo-authorities” and “casts aside dominant ideas of the day”; and he favours “those who are spiritually homeless” over those who rest on the laurels of the great works written by others.24 According to Hofmannsthal, these revolutionary “seekers” must not be confused with their Romantic brothers and sisters of 1770. The new type of seeker has foregone the playfulness and innocent submission to the sensuous and intoxicating, and, instead, assumes a “more manly demeanour”; he is firmly resolved “against the temptation” to lose himself either in “the conceptual or the visionary,” and he has a deep mistrust of “the irresponsibly speculative” and “what is irresponsibly full of brio.” There is “something fanatical and ascetic” in the new type, disdaining haste and cultivating tenacity instead.25 Of these rather un-Romantic or anti-Romantic seekers, Hofmannsthal then says that “it is not freedom they are looking for but bonds [Bindungen].”26 Hofmannsthal continues that these seekers want “to bind themselves to necessity, but also to the highest necessity, to what is above all principles and, as it were, the geometric locus of all thinkable principles.”27 Everything is subordinate to this one absolute goal, that is, the desire to get close to the pivot around which everything revolves in order to get a grip on the totality of beings. The underlying impetus is “that it is impossible to live without believing in a total view of the world – that there is no life in a half-belief, that escaping from life, as the Romantics wanted to do, is impossible: that life becomes liveable only through valid bonds [gültige Bindungen].”28 In other words, the liberal ideals of freedom, self-fulfillment, and the pursuit of happiness are here despised in

21 22

23 26

Ibid., 16. This is Nietzsche’s term for the free spirit in Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, in Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in drei Bänden, ed. Karl Schlechta, vol. I (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1973), 144ff. 24 25 von Hofmannsthal, Das Schrifttum, 16, 19. Ibid., 17–21. Ibid., 26–27. 27 28 Ibid., 27. Ibid. Ibid., 29–30.

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the name of some absolute binding principle. The longing for Bindung, commitment, and the will to belong, to bind oneself and to obey, trumps what, from this perspective, appears as the curse of choice and individualism. Binding themselves to what is ultimate and necessary, the solitary wanderers and seekers also “become bound to the core of the nation,” namely by finding that unifying whole that overarches all the divisions and distractions in the life of the nation.29 Hofmannsthal sees this enthusiasm for bonds and necessity as the “counter-movement” to the Enlightenment and, indeed, the Reformation and Renaissance. All of this, 500 centuries of development, is to be overturned. By way of explanation, Hofmannsthal then adds: “The process of which I speak is nothing other than a conservative revolution of a scope that is unknown to European history.”30 The directly following and last sentence of the speech draws out the ultimate goal of this conservative revolution, that is, “to form a new German reality in which the whole nation can take part.”31 In other words, through this conservative revolution, rolling back the Enlightenment, Reformation, and Renaissance, and with it the notions of freedom, individualism, and so on, Germany is meant to achieve a preeminent status in Europe. Although Hofmannsthal, like Mann, makes Nietzsche the patron saint of the conservative revolution, Mann’s reading of the phenomenon of the conservative revolution is quite different. For instance, Mann would certainly not advocate the radical overthrow of the bourgeois order that is implied in Hofmannsthal speech. Nor would Mann trade his ironic take on life and spirit for a radical political idea sans phrase, least of all for the de facto idea of a gigantic European counter-revolution of the sort imagined by Hofmannsthal. For all practical purposes, Hofmannsthal’s highly polemical and political reading of the conservative revolution as a counter-revolution did become the more prevalent notion in the Weimar Republic.32

3

Heidegger and Conservative Revolution

Heidegger never commented on or wrote about the idea of conservative revolution as such. However, his philosophical work does explore a 29 32

30 31 Ibid., 30. Ibid., 31. Ibid. Klaus Dethloff provides a detailed account of Hofmannsthal’s intellectual sources for the construction of his conservative revolution, in particular Ludwig Landsberg and Carl J. Burckhardt (“Hugo von Hofmannsthal und eine conservative Revolution,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 92 [2018]: 531–55).

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conservative revolution, which, although sui generis, is not without a certain intellectual-historical proximity to what we find in the milieu of conservative revolution as addressed by Mann and Hofmannsthal. This proximity includes convergences as well as divergences. In the following I shall argue that, overall, Hofmannsthal’s conception of conservative revolution captures elements that we can also find in Heidegger (see Section 3.1), whereas Heidegger’s and Mann’s conception of conservative revolution, especially when seen through the lens of their very different views on the concept of “life,” as well as the value of (bourgeois) “culture,” differs quite substantially (see Sections 3.2 and 4). However, Mann’s later critique of conservative revolution in Doctor Faustus affords valuable clues for situating Heidegger within the tendencies of conservative revolution that Mann rejects (see Sections 5–6).

3.1

Heidegger and Hofmannsthal

According to Heidegger, Dasein’s Befindlichkeit or attunement discloses the world in an original and primary sense (GA2: 183/177).33 This attunement also comprises the way we feel affected by the past. Focusing on the latter alone, we can speak of historical attunement, or historical Zeitgefühl, the way we are affected by and react to historical time. Obviously, this always includes a sense of one’s own present time and the anticipated future as well. This historical attunement is not laid out in a theoretical proposition, nor is it based on academic historiography. It would be wrong to see in it a mere psychological disposition either, for it is world-disclosing. According to Heidegger, we are immersed in “history” as we are immersed in “the world,” and, therefore, we are always already taking up a position towards history and historical time, however that may be articulated. As Heidegger argues, even theory and philosophy are enacted historically; they arise out of attunement, including historical attunement. Applying this insight to Heidegger’s own philosophizing, we can differentiate between, first, Heidegger’s acknowledgment and testimony of the historical attunement informing his thinking, and, second, the historical sentiment that is operative in his philosophy, whether acknowledged by himself or not. I shall argue that on both counts, Heidegger’s historical attunement is rather close to the conservative revolutionary sentiment as described by Hofmannsthal, namely with regard to the negative assessment of modernity and the need to overcome it, including the 33

Translations from the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe my own unless otherwise noted.

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repudiation of the French Revolution and all the progress in its wake, and the search for a new, necessary, binding principle. To begin with the first level, early Heidegger’s investigation into time and history or historicity is consciously informed by a historical sentiment or attunement according to which the world created by “modern man” has exhausted itself, such that a return to and reappropriation of the “ancients” is the only way forward. Crediting Yorck von Wartenburg with having recognized this, Heidegger approvingly quotes a passage from von Wartenburg’s letter to Dilthey, dated 1889 and published posthumously in 1923: It appears to me that the ripple effects caused by the eccentric principle, which ushered in a new age more than four hundred years ago, have become exceedingly broad and flat; knowledge has advanced to the point of nullifying itself, and man has become so far removed from himself that he no longer catches sight of himself. “Modern man,” that is, man since the Renaissance, is ready for burial. (GA80.1: 156/57)

This is conservative revolution avant la lettre. Heidegger quotes this passage in three different texts (in 1924, 1926, and 1928),34 making it clear that it encapsulates a key insight of his outlook, his own historical Zeitgefühl. In an entry from 1938 in the Black Notebooks Heidegger makes the principled rejection of modernity, and even Christianity, the necessary starting-point for breaking through to the standpoint from which essential decisions can be made. The “essential things” that one “must get over” are: “Christianity, culture, ‘science,’ ‘university,’ Western metaphysics, worldview, addiction to experiences” (GA95: 127). All of this is of course in alignment with Heidegger’s officially held anti-modernist views.35 But the Black Notebooks show the almost visceral allergic reaction to modernity and everything associated with

34

35

Der Begriff der Zeit (GA64: 12); “Wilhelm Dilthey’s Forschungsarbeit und der gegenwärtige Kampf um eine historische Weltanschauung” (GA80.1: 156/57), and Being and Time (GA2: 529/452). For instance, in 1938 Heidegger claims that the nineteenth century, often upheld as the culmination of human progress, science, technology, and human culture, is “the darkest century of all centuries in modernity” (GA5: 99/75). Three years earlier, Heidegger had presented the same view when he invoked the “spiritual decline” and the “darkening of the world,” “the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, [and] the transformation of men into a mass,” in light of which “categories such as pessimism and optimism have long since become absurd” (GA40: 41/38).

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“progress.”36 Moreover, Heidegger also articulates this view in straightforward historical-political terms. In a tell-tale passage he takes direct aim at the French Revolution and what he considers its ultimate realization in modern industrial mass society: “Work,” “public welfare,” “culture,” and “reason” are the “ideals” of the French Revolution. Insofar as these ideals are “completely” realized for the millions of the masses, and all social barriers and distinctions fall by the wayside, this revolution will become reality for the first time. This is the newest of this Modern Time, because it is its first [principle] and therefore its last [principle]. (GA96: 203)

Heidegger is as opposed to the French Revolution as any of the “seekers” of the conservative revolution described by Hofmannsthal. This historical Zeitgefühl shapes also Heidegger’s philosophical outlook, although it cannot be reduced to it. However, it is one thing to ascertain an objective affinity between Heidegger and the conservative revolution, it is another to show that Heidegger himself was aware of it. One particular entry in the Black Notebooks from 1938 suggests that Heidegger himself fully realized his own historical standpoint within the conservative revolution. In this entry Heidegger plays with two adjectives, “revolutionary” and “conservative,” as if derived from the syntagma “conservative revolution,” allowing the inference that he refers to the historical sentiment denoted by the term, and even its political partisans. In fact, on close reading, Heidegger seems bent on putting the political agents of conservative revolution into their place (although they were already defeated and/or absorbed by the Nazis), for Heidegger claims that the proper grounding for anything like a true conservative revolution would have to be based on a real return to the fundamental origins of Western history, which is of course what Heidegger attempts to provide in his history of Being (Seinsgeschichte). Heidegger writes: The “revolutionary” is, as a mere turning around, necessarily still too “conservative” (attached to the status quo and the preservation of what has been tried and tested). As such it can never pave the way to the oldest origin.37 (GA95: 229)

36

37

Already in 1932 Heidegger notes: “We have become weary of progress – we wish to come to a halt” (GA94: 38). At one point Heidegger comes to the more radical conclusion “that revolutions can never overcome an age, because they aim at validating that which has been the hitherto suppressed and not yet acknowledged in an age; they want to take hold of the age through its completion” (GA95: 53/54). In the years after 1945 this thought issues into Heidegger’s idea that the most decisive acting is thinking.

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This fairly general claim, written in 1938, also contains Heidegger’s verdict about the failed “revolution” by Hitler. It did not usher in a new age, but completed the tendency of modernity and machination within the twentieth century. It was not the overcoming of the French Revolution, but, rather, its continuation by other means. However, the important point here is that Heidegger interprets the “revolution” of National Socialism as if it was a failed “conservative revolution,” signifying his implicit acceptance of the normative framework of it, as if it was a matter of course. In other words, Heidegger’s critique of National Socialism, after his original enthusiasm faded in late 1933, amounts to the charge that it was not radical enough, not determined enough to throw off the fetters of modernity. It was unsuccessful in re-establishing a relation to the “oldest origin.” All of this is clearly couched in the idiom of the conservative revolution as laid out by Hofmannsthal. Now, Heidegger continues the very same entry quoted above as follows: The will to origin [der Wille zum Ursprung] always entertains – as it unfolds on the surface – a tendency towards the “revolutionary” and, at the same time, a tendency towards the “conservative.” (GA95: 229)

Heidegger combines here, even if only rhetorically, the “conservative” and the “revolutionary” orientation in order to fuse them into “the will to origin,” all of which suggests that it is Heidegger’s view that the dream of conservative revolution has its proper home in philosophy. This must have been all the more compelling to Heidegger, given that the political realization had miserably failed anyhow. Put differently, conservative revolution is not only, as we have already seen, congenial to Heidegger’s historical attunement as a philosopher, but it actually is, according to Heidegger himself, operative in his own philosophy, constituting a genuine philosophical motif in it, for the impetus of a revolutionary break with modernity for the sake of grasping an origin beyond which one cannot reach and to which Dasein binds itself defines philosophy for Heidegger. The overall structure of his philosophizing in the 1930s is analogous to the conservative revolution as defined by Hofmannsthal. However, it is important to note that before and after the 1930s Heidegger’s position is different. As Heidegger puts it in 1938/39, only what “belongs to the originary, the necessity of Being [Seyn]” has a rightful claim to the “revolutionary,” because it alone, absolutely and radically, breaks with the status quo, the world of machinations and manipulations of beings (GA95: 229). The revolutionary breakthrough to “the oldest origin” is, of course, a

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restitution (or another institution altogether) of what is worthy of preserving; it is therefore “conservative” in that sense, and it offers its own version of an absolute bond (Bindung), the bliss of belonging, that is, Dasein’s belonging to Being. As “denizens of Being” (GA98: 268), humans find their ultimate destination outside the humdrum wheeling and dealing with mere entities, technology, culture, etc. Thus, we can take Heidegger at his word that his innermost philosophical aspiration is philosophical conservative revolution. It does align, on a philosophical level, with Hofmannsthal’s invocation of a political conservative revolution, and it is buttressed by Heidegger’s overall historical attunement. This is not merely an external connection, because Heidegger’s philosophical enterprise is based on rejecting the claims and principles of modernity, all of which Heidegger sums up with the one blanket term, machination, Machenschaft.38 Moreover, as the Black Notebooks amply demonstrate, Heidegger likes to cast himself in exactly the role of lone “seeker” that Hofmannsthal notes in the conservative revolutionary.39 When Derrida speaks of Heidegger’s “nostalgia” and “hope,” he is precisely describing the revolutionary hope of a conservative longing in Heidegger, the attempt to reach “the lost country of thought,” that is, Being.40 If we understand Heidegger as a philosophical partisan of conservative revolution, his decision to support the so-called national revolution and Hitler’s ascent to power in 1933 appears as a philosophically motivated decision, since Heidegger thought, like many others of the conservative revolution, that Hitler, another “seeker” in the German nation, would

38

Thus, Heidegger writes: We are used to calling the era of “civilization” the one that dispelled all enchantment [Entzauberung], and this dispelling seems more probably – indeed uniquely – connected to complete unquestionableness [Fraglosigkeit]. Yet it is the reverse. We merely need to know where the enchantment comes from, namely from the unbridled dominance of machination. When machination attains ultimate dominance, when it pervades everything, then there are no more circumstances whereby the enchantment can be sensed explicitly and resisted. The spell cast by technology and by its constantly selfsurpassing progress is only one sign of this enchantment that directs everything towards calculation, utility, breeding, manageability, and regulation. (GA65: 124)

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40

Understanding himself as “the philosopher,” Heidegger notes: “The philosopher as selfrunner [Alleingänger, literally, someone who goes it alone] – but not by himself and his little ‘self’ – but, rather, with the world and this before all ‘being-together-with-others’ [Miteinander]” (GA94: 56). Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 27.

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bring about the revolutionary break with modernity. While Heidegger thus became a card-carrying member of the NSDAP, the roots for this commitment lay in his conservative revolutionary rejection of modernity.41 Gadamer confirms this when he insists that Heidegger was a “National-Bolshevik.”42 All of this should not mislead us into thinking that Heidegger had something like a political philosophy. He did not, because of his “blindness for the phenomenon of the ‘political,’” if we understand by that the business of citizens to regulate their affairs, and negotiate the burdens and benefits of living together in cooperation.43 This blindness for the political is clearly displayed when Heidegger, in a discussion about truth, argues that it is revealed through “works,” and then enlists “the act of founding a state” as such setting into work of truth. The polity is here seen as if it was “the creation” of a founder, “des Staatsgründers,” shaping the state like an artist (GA5: 49, GA39: 144). This is an apolitical and aesthetic conception of the political that has little to do with the business of politics. It is only at the limit of the political, the revolutionary transformation of society as a whole, that Heidegger could find some foothold for injecting his thought into the public arena, that is, the revolutionary break with modernity for the sake of breaking through to and thus preserving what alone deserves thinking, namely, Being.

3.2 Heidegger and Mann The lines that connect Heidegger and Mann are far less straightforward than the connections between Heidegger and Hofmannsthal. I suggest reading Mann and Heidegger as providing indirect critical commentaries on each other. That is to say, although Mann and Heidegger do not discuss each other’s writings in their respective works, we can, in 41

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This is consistent with Löwith’s claim that Heidegger told him that his decision to support Hitler was based on his philosophy and his notion of history (“My Last Meeting with Heidegger in Rome,” in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Wolin [New York: Columbia University Press, 1991], 142). Jacques Derrida, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Philosophy, and Politics: The Heidelberg Conference, trans. Jeff Fort, ed. Mireille Calle-Gruber (New York: Fordham, 2016), 73. According to Mohler, adherents of National Bolshevism thought that Germany and Russia would have to stand together against the capitalist West. For a brief period, National Bolshevism had its presence within the NSDAP in Otto and Gregor Strasser. See Armin Mohler, Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1972), 47–53. Klaus Held, “Heidegger und das Politische,” in Heidegger und der Antisemitismus: Positionen im Widerstreit, ed. Walter Homolka and Arnulf Heidegger (Freiburg: Herder, 2016), 261.

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hindsight, appreciate how, with respect to their shared interest in conservative revolution, each author can help to throw light on the other. As we have seen, the concept of “life” is crucial for Mann to buttress his version of conservative revolution. In the following, I argue that the early Heidegger’s concept of “life” contains valuable insights that allow us to show limitations in Mann’s idea (see Section 3.2.1). On the other hand, we can learn from Mann’s final settling of accounts with the misfired conservative revolution in Germany in his novel Doctor Faustus various shortcomings in Heidegger’s philosophical conservative revolution (see Section 6), especially concerning his extreme condemnation of all things “cultural” in the 1930s and 1940s, as recorded in Heidegger’s Black Notebooks (Section 4).

3.2.1

Bourgeois Life versus Daring Life

As already mentioned, in Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, originally published in 1918, Mann works with what he considers Nietzsche’s antithesis of “life” and “spirit,” and their mutual opposition and implication, particularly “the self-abnegation of spirit for the sake of life [Selbstverneinung des Geistes zugunsten des Lebens].”44 Mann distinguishes between two cases. The first issues in a radical negation of all reason and morality, opening the floodgates to the nefariousness of “Renaissance-aestheticism,” “the hysterical power-, beauty-, and life-cult” popularized by Nietzsche, at least by some interpretations of him, and the legion of life-besotted Nietzscheans.45 The other option, the one that Mann favors, defines life, for the sake of which spirit forfeits its claim to dominance, in a much friendlier, more conservative key, in terms of life’s “loveliness,” “happiness,” “grace,” and “the pleasant normality of mindlessness [Normalität der Geistlosigkeit].”46 What is at issue here is best expressed in Tonio Kröger’s longing for the “Wonnen der Gewöhnlichkeit,” the joys of ordinary life, or the bliss of the commonplace, unperturbed by thought, criticism, and the pressures to justify one’s every step and thought.47 It is the enjoyment of life as it is lived in its own rhythm and set course without answering questions about its legitimacy, questionability, or perfectibility, and so on. It is vital to understand that Mann’s apologia of this obviously rather “conservative” concept of life is directed against the proponents of pure

44 47

45 46 Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, 28. Ibid., 28–29. Ibid., 29. Thomas Mann, Tonio Kröger (Project Gutenberg, 2007), chapter 9, www.gutenberg.org/ ebooks/23313.

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spirit, as they embrace the principle of reason and introduce a strident moralism, and, by implication, revolution.48 This is as much a defence against and a critique of utopian thought, as it is a rejection of the aestheticism of power, violence, and terror. Although Mann defends the joys of the ordinary, he does not mean to glorify dullness or philistinism, for he acknowledges that life cannot exist without spirit altogether. In fact, as a chronicler of life, Mann knows that we have intelligence about life that has nothing to do with a theoretical account of it. Life tells its own stories, and one would think that it behoves philosophy or reason to listen to this intelligence of life, instead of dictating life the principles by which it has to live. Mann’s apologia of life is primarily directed against utopian thought, the purely intellectual attempt to ground life on nothing but reason or spirit. In a sense, Mann adopts Nietzsche’s critique of nihilism, but translates it into a more moderate idiom, without the grandiose revaluating project. Mann’s intriguing idea is to turn Nietzsche into a moderate, conservative thinker. Obviously, this is more Mann’s conservatism than Nietzsche’s. It amounts to a principled defence of the humaneness of life, as it is lived according to its own rhythms and patterns, “justified,” without many words or a doctrine, by tradition and convention. This seems eminently “reasonable,” and the friends of philosophy or spirit should take note of life’s own intelligence. Had Mann read Hume or Burke, he might not only have recognized in their anti-rationalist scepticism and affirmation of human instinct, time-honoured customs, and habits some agreement with his own conception, he also might have been able to correct his grotesquely parochial “idea,” according to which the “conservative” idea of life was a particularly “German” idea.49 There are other problems with Mann’s concept of life. Apart from the nationalistic overtones, Mann’s concept of life is biased towards the trappings of a very particular form of life. That is to say, Mann does not only understand himself as “a son of the bourgeoisie,” he also is committed to its way of life – provided it accommodates the arts as well – and he clearly sees it as his task to provide a kind of chronicle of bourgeois life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.50 While Mann is acutely aware of the inner tensions and problems of his class, he does share its characteristic blind-spots as well, such as the obliviousness to the working men and women in society, which is also evident in most of his novels, which focus

48

Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, 92.

49

Ibid.

50

See ibid., 112–63.

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on the bourgeois life, the concert halls, spas, theatres, salons, universities, and other such distinguished places of “good society,” or bourgeois culture. In fact, on further reflection, it is clear that Mann’s novelistic work aims at preserving the travails and tribulations of his fellow burghers for posterity, bespeaking a traditional conservative sentiment, very much in line with Mann’s “conservative” idea of life. However, it has little to do with Mann’s own construct of “conservative revolution,” and even less with Nietzsche, or Nietzsche’s “seekers,” who figure so prominently in Hofmannsthal’s account, and nothing at all with the militant political conservative revolution in the Weimar Republic, which, after all, longed for the total destruction of the bourgeois world. If we now turn to Heidegger and his lecture courses from the early 1920s, there is no doubt that he and Mann could have had a good argument about “life,” but it would certainly not end in happy agreement. Quite the contrary. At first blush, it may look as if Heidegger’s early “phenomenology of life” is a case of the then-fashionable life-philosophy (Dilthey, Bergson, Simmel, and Nietzsche) and, therefore, also part of the same philosophical tendency that influenced Mann. Furthermore, noting that Heidegger’s concept of life is polemically directed against the primacy of consciousness in much of traditional and academic philosophy, and, by extension, the preponderance of “spirit,” or, as Heidegger directly says, “the hegemony of the theoretical” (GA56/57: 87), one could be tempted to conclude that Heidegger dismisses reason and rationality for the sake of the irrational forces of “life,” as if to celebrate the “value” of life (like Nietzsche), or to vindicate the “bliss of the commonplace” in line with Mann’s, or, rather, Tonio Kröger’s human-all-too-human conservatism. However, as every serious reader of the early Heidegger knows, that is not what he aims at. Quite the contrary, for Heidegger “life” is the basic ground from which all meaning is derived.51 Consequently, there is not the slightest hint that Heidegger would ever have thought of life as a particular “value,” least of all a particularly German one. In fact, Heidegger’s idea of starting from “the primacy of life” (GA58: 126), in contrast to the primacy of theory, is surprisingly close to Feuerbach, as

51

I have tried to identify the “constructive” and “deconstructive” moves in Heidegger’s early life-philosophy in Ingo Farin, “The Concept of Life in Heidegger’s Early Lecture Courses,” in Heideggers Hermeneutik der Faktizität, ed. Sylvain Camilleri, Guillaume Fagniez, and Charlotte Gauvry (Nordhausen: Traugott Bautz, 2018).

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well as Marx and Engels.52 This critical, emancipatory direction is underlined by Heidegger when he notes, again objectively close to Feuerbach, Marx, and Engels, that the idea of philosophy qua interpretation of life serves the goal of overcoming “the self-alienation” with which Dasein is stricken. This critical (self-) interpretation of life is meant to enable an understanding of Dasein as it exists in factical, real life, not in some theory heaven, or some ideology (GA63: 15). To achieve this selfunderstanding it is necessary to radically question things, and not go along with the uncritical acceptance of a traditional mode of life or an inherited interpretation of life (GA61: 37), be that German, Russian, bourgeois, proletarian, aristocratic, or whatever. Nothing in Heidegger’s insistence on radical questioning strikes one as particularly conservative or revolutionary. It is quite Socratic and certainly also quite “enlightened.” Questioning life and attempting to give an account of it is everything for the early Heidegger. The retreat to the joys of the ordinary, however ironically refracted, is not a philosophical option for Heidegger, although he certainly knows about it. In his “categories of life,” that is, the structures and tendencies in which life is lived (which obviously foreshadow the “existentialia” in Being and Time), Heidegger argues that life is torn between two tendencies, the tendency to inquire, to question, and the opposite inclination, to immerse oneself in the uncontested continuation of the ways of life, to submit to the stupendous “self-sufficiency [Selbstgenügsamkeit]” of life (GA58: 30). In fact, Heidegger even argues that, commonly and for the most part, life tends to go on and is borne along by a sense that all of life’s questions, problems, challenges, obstacles, etc., can be managed and answered by life itself, because life “addresses itself in its own ‘language’” only (GA58: 30–31). There is nothing that pushes life beyond itself; resting in itself, it is always attuned to and capable of whatever task is set before it. Life is absorbed in the world and carried along by the prompts of the world, which are followed more or less unquestioningly.

52

The German Ideology states: Consciousness can never be anything else except conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process . . . Consciousness does not determine life, but life determines consciousness. In the first view the starting-point is consciousness taken as a living individual; in the second it is the real living individuals as they exist in real life, and consciousness is considered only as their consciousness. Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. Lawrence H. Simon (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 111–12.

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Indeed, Heidegger goes out of his way to emphasize the contingent, “mixed,” and “motley” “variety” of experiences in the course of our lives, as they come without a clear pattern, and yet weave a kind of “tapestry of life [Teppich des Lebens]”53 (GA58: 69). Without a doubt, Heidegger’s surprisingly sympathetic description of the inertia and self-sufficiency in life shows insight and gives credit to what is an essentially conservative trait in life. Thomas Mann would have been delighted, had he read those passages! The intelligibility of life on its own terms, outside of the confines of theoretical reason or the strictures of morality, is an insight that Mann and Heidegger both hold dear. However, unlike Mann, Heidegger does not endorse this conservative tendency as an “ideal” of life. Instead, Heidegger notes that there also is a countervailing tendency in life, awakening in us the unsettling “character of the questionability of all life [Fraglichkeitscharakter allen Lebens]” (GA58: 41). Apparently alluding to Plato, Heidegger argues that the factical dialogue of life with itself is “the breach” in the “well-roundedness of immediate life” that potentially shatters the “insular untouchability” and un-mediated self-sufficiency of life (GA61: 151). Once life is opened to the sea of questions, it would be wrong to look for “the safe harbour” Heidegger argues. Tossed about by the storms of factical life, Heidegger holds that everything hinges on successfully “leaping into the drifting boat” and “getting the mainsheet into one’s hand and looking to the wind” (GA61: 37). Philosophical questioning is entirely unmoored from the standards of tradition, from a commitment to community, a search for safety and shelter, or any other mundane concern. Mann would probably, against the likely remonstrations of Heidegger, attribute this to “spirit,” and see it as antithetical to “life.” Conversely, Heidegger would take Mann’s fondness for the cushioned bourgeois life as an escape from the radical questions of philosophy, as an expression of the fear of philosophy. Here, Heidegger fully and uncompromisingly embraces the modern spirit of critique and questioning, making no concessions to the conservatism of life. In adopting this radical and unlimited questionability of the whole of life, Heidegger effectively calls into question not only all forms of a fixed and unquestioned perpetuation of societal and cultural concerns, but

53

As Heidegger himself notes, the expression “tapestry of life” is taken from Stefan George’s volume of poems. Stefan George is often counted among the voices of conservative revolution, and it is quite clear that Hofmannsthal’s description of the figure of the lone “seeker” in his 1927 speech is meant as a portrait of Stefan George.

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also traditionally entrenched scientific pursuits, including academic philosophy. Handed-down practices, routines, and the entire realm of everyday intelligibility are here interpreted as organized evasions, as means to avoid the deep questionability of all life, to escape the ultimate insecurity, questionability, and finiteness of all life (see GA61: 120). In the name of radical questioning Heidegger cultivates a cultural scepticism that includes the delegitimization of modernity as such, as we have seen, and legitimizes a total break with it, a revolution that would sweep away all the props and anchors of culture as we know it. Indeed, in his early lecture courses Heidegger considers the very immersion in the world, the tendency to grow roots in it, “a plunge” (Sturz) or “ruin” in which one escapes the questionability of one’s own life for a bit of worldly security and bourgeois comfort (GA61: 131). In his later work Heidegger considers the very same tendency as a falling away from Being, a plunge into the midst of beings (see Section 4 below). It is one of the great paradoxes that Heidegger, who so emphatically teaches that being-in-the-world is the human condition, shows great reservations, even a certain world-shyness, when it comes to the reality of how people actually live in the world, for, if it entails the oblivion of Dasein or of Being as such, then Heidegger rails against the world as if it were of the devil. Heidegger’s philosophically professed worldliness is far from an unqualified love of the world, let alone a conservative attachment to it. However, all of this is intellectualized in Heidegger and thus predicated on the most daring and free questioning that is not beholden to any so-called social objectivity or normality. As such, Heidegger’s posture of total questioning stands at the opposite pole of Mann’s reverence for the securities of the bourgeois life. Like Nietzsche, Heidegger links the freedom of thought to the daring life. This is true not only for his early writings, but also his writings in the 1930s and 1940s, although it does become less prominent in the 1950s. For instance, in the context of the ultimate question concerning Being (which is prior to and sovereignly independent of all cultural, social, political, and worldly affairs), nothingness comes into sight as well, and when Heidegger argues that Dasein is “the placeholder of nothingness,” he argues that anxiety before the nothing is only fully felt, recognized, and sustained by “das im Grunde verwegene Dasein,” “the Dasein that in its very ground is daring” (GA9: 118). Dasein’s daring corresponds to Being itself, as Heidegger holds that “Being is risk simpliciter [Das Sein ist das Wagnis schlechthin],” releasing entities into their risk (Wagnis), “risking us, humans” too (GA5: 279). This ontic-ontological primacy of

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risk clearly resonates with Nietzsche’s advice to philosophers, that is, “to live dangerously.”54 Living at the edge of Being and Nothingness, Dasein’s daring stands in the service of breaking through to “Dasein’s last greatness” in order to “preserve” it (GA9: 118). What Heidegger “risks” is nothing other than the overcoming of “modern man,” in order to break through to “the last greatness” of Dasein, to resettle in the nearness of the oldest origin of all, Being. We have here in a nutshell, but on a philosophical plane, the rather heroic gesture of the conservative revolution as outlined by Hofmannsthal. Heidegger’s first volume of the Black Notebooks has a telling epigraph lifted from the Theaetetus (196d2), panta gar tolmēteon, which is best translated as “one must risk everything.” And in the Notebooks Heidegger makes it clear that the risk is to be taken not for the sake of the idea of “liberation [Befreiung],” and “detachment [Lösung],” propagated by the Enlightenment, but rather for the sake of finding the proper attachment and ultimate “bond [Bindung]” (GA94: 126–27). If Mann rejects Nietzsche’s aestheticism and tones down Nietzsche’s critique of nihilism to the conservative acceptance of life as it is actually lived and handed down, that is, without the blessings of a theory or a political party, let alone the utopian dreams of reformers and revolutionaries, Heidegger disowns this sort of making peace with life as a miserable flight from the radical questioning to which humans, qua Dasein, owe their real allegiance. Adopting Mann’s language for the moment, we can say that Mann sides more with the (more less conventional) conservatism of bourgeois life, whereas Heidegger sides with Nietzsche’s solitary seekers and free spirits, beholden to no one, bound to the purity of thinking alone. Mann’s ironic synthesis of life and spirit unravels here, giving way to the old and opposition between mere conservatism here and relentless, if not to say reckless, thinking and questioning there. In pursuit of the latter, Heidegger calls into question almost all institutions of culture as we know them. Heidegger’s critical conception of the questionableness of life is certainly more “modern” and “spirited” than Mann’s measured, conservative trust in it. Relative to Mann, Heidegger stands on the side of modernity, that is, critique, spirit, and revolution. But Heidegger’s radical questioning seems to know no measure but Being. During the 1930s, Heidegger ends up with an extreme condemnation of all settled life, or culture and civilization as we know it. 54

Friedrich Nietzsche, “Die fröhliche Wissenschaft,” in Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in drei Bänden, ed. Karl Schlechta, vol. II (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1973), 166.

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299

Heidegger’s Philosophical Anti-Culturalism in the Black Notebooks

While in Being and Time Heidegger insists that “Being is always the being of a being” (GA2: 12), during the 1930s he tends to hypostasize Being in the context of his history of Being, conceiving of it as something separate and distinct vis-à-vis all entities and beings in the world. However, this real separation does not preclude a certain “closeness” of Being to beings and humans. In an entry in the Black Notebooks, jotted down around 1938–39, Heidegger puts this quite poetically, likening Being to a river, on whose opposite banks “the God” resides on the one bank, and “the human beings” together with all entities on the other, with a “bridge,” called Da-sein, connecting the two banks across the sustaining “river” of Being: The God and the human being, completely separate and different – belong to Being [Seyn] as the banks of a river. The bridge, however, is Da-sein. (GA95: 64)

Here, everything is related to the river (Being); without it there would be no determinable banks (the humans with their buildings and affairs on the one side, and the revealed or concealed God on the other), and no bridge (Dasein or the understanding of Being) which connects the two banks and gathers everything into its presence (Anwesen). With this allegory in mind, we can now state Heidegger’s main worry about culture. He fears that all the energy, industry, and thought directed towards the projects on the two banks of the river occlude and suppress the awareness of the river of Being and the bridge of Dasein altogether. In particular, the all-consuming interest on the human side of things, human affairs, interests, needs, and cares, that is, the business of material and intellectual culture, functions as a constant distraction from the very presence of the river (Being), giving rise to the forgetfulness of Being itself. In other words, Heidegger interprets culture as the “immersion” in or “captivation” by the maintenance, management, and control of all sorts of entities in the service of human “needs,” while ignoring or forgetting Being and Dasein.55 At times, Heidegger offers a more damning interpretation according to which culture as such is nothing other than a deliberate defence shield put up against the “blows of Being [Stösse des Seyns]”:

55

“Alle Kultur is eben doch jene Versunkenheit in die Pflege des Seienden [All culture is just this immersion in the maintenance and care of beings]” (GA94: 394).

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The history (of entities) as the cushioning of the blows of Being. “Culture” is such cushioning, which, not coincidentally, degenerates into the gigantism of events made for experiences [Erlebnisveranstaltung]. (GA95: 3)

Put differently, for Heidegger, all “culture” secures and props up human life without regard for Being, or even with the intent of actively shielding it from any direct contact with Being.56 Culture, technology, and science are all part of what Heidegger calls machination,57 for all stand in the service of planning, producing, and ordering the entities of the world for the sake of satisfying human needs (GA95: 211). Heidegger identifies this relentless self-empowerment of the human and the concomitant occlusion of Being as the main characteristic in National Socialism, Communism, and liberal democracies. Thus, Heidegger speaks of the world-historical or planetary victory of the “historico-technical animal” (GA95: 282). He puts it quite succinctly in 1934, when he declares: “The last man rages through Europe” (GA94: 239). With regard to the more narrowly conceived notion of “culture” as the domain of literature and the fine arts, Heidegger is the first author to address what, since Horkheimer and Adorno, we call culture-industry. Already in his Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger notes the bureaucratic, calculated, industrial organization of “culture” for mass consumption, and he calls it Kultur-betrieb (GA65: 117), “culture business” or “culture industry.” For Heidegger it is clear that the planned and calculated production of cultural goods is entirely divorced from any philosophical or intellectual probing of man’s relation and response to Being. Where “culture” is organized in a bureaucratic and business-like manner and the advancement of culture is the given “watchword,” the avoidance concerning the decision about Being [Seyn] is already under way. (GA95: 103)

Given that Heidegger holds that philosophy or thinking is dedicated to the task or the decision to respond to Being, he concludes that culture and philosophy are fundamentally at odds with each other. According to Heidegger, proper philosophical “thought” does not deal with “the needs of human beings,” but, rather, “the needs of Being [Seyn]” (GA97: 243). Heidegger emphatically affirms the fundamental opposition between

56

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For Heidegger, “culture is the affirmation of the modern self-certainty of the human within the machinations of beings” (GA95: 185). Heidegger includes in this list modern or scientific historiography, because it interprets history in order to provide a secure and manageable foothold in history for the contemporary generation (GA95: 112).

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philosophy and all things cultural. He rejects any serviceability of philosophy to the aims and purposes of culture, precisely because philosophy is dedicated to thinking Being, not beings, least of all human machinations with beings. Thus, Heidegger holds that philosophy does not belong to the sphere of culture at all, neither as capstone nor as a foundation. Asking the rhetorical question as to whether philosophy directly “negates” the essence of culture or simply walks past it (GA95: 43), Heidegger’s implied preference for the latter must not be read as if he did not also endorse the former. What Heidegger fears and wants to circumvent is that by drawing philosophy into a “discussion” about its negation of culture, one would assimilate philosophy to the cultural realm of endless discussions about human needs, which is entirely contrary to its calling. Proceeding calmly and, unperturbed, passing by the whole sphere of culture, assured of its own superiority, is therefore the much more appropriate philosophical conduct, according to Heidegger. Nonetheless, that philosophy in principle, and not just accidentally, negates the “achievements” of culture is explicitly affirmed by Heidegger in another entry: Thinking is not bound by science or morality. Both are pillars of European culture and the world of reason. They proffer the instruments of civilization, aimed at industrializing the whole of beings. (GA97: 237)

The more Heidegger interprets science as part of machination, the more he sees philosophy in opposition to science: All science enters into the region it belongs to: technology. For the first time in the Western world philosophy assumes the hitherto unknown and most decisive opposition to “science,” to which all “worldview” belongs as well. (GA94: 457)

Conversely, Heidegger also argues that with the victory of philosophy proper, “the essential possibility of culture” is “undermined” too (GA95: 248). As Heidegger puts it succinctly: “Great ages have no culture” (GA94: 319). It goes without saying, then, that the Greeks, known for their philosophy, were the “only people” that had no ‘culture’” (GA95: 322). Heidegger has nothing but scorn for the well-meaning attempts by various intellectuals to “save” the threatened cultural sphere in the face of the approaching barbarism in the 1930s.58 At times Heidegger shows

58

Thus, Heidegger writes: “Not the much dreaded ‘barbarism,’ but this ‘saving’ of the ‘highest values of culture’ is the real disavowal of the will to a [new] beginning” (GA95: 294).

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even a certain complicity with the barbaric principle, as long as it tears down the barriers of culture and allows the breakthrough to Being. This also motivated, in part, Heidegger’s support for the National Socialist regime in 1933: National Socialism is a barbaric principle. That is what is essential about it, and its possible greatness. The danger is not National Socialism itself – but rather that it is watered down to a sermon of the true, the good, and the beautiful (as happened in a political evening course). (GA94: 194)

For Heidegger it is essential to “grow out of ‘culture’ – into a more essential region” (GA94: 196). In the early months of 1933, Heidegger categorically states: “culture – as a formation – no longer has got anything to do with Da-sein” in our time59 (GA94: 196). Obviously, Heidegger’s anti-culturalism is of a piece with his conservative revolutionary view that “modern man” has become obsolete. This is not something that accidentally intrudes into Heidegger’s thought from outside. Rather, it is constitutive of his historical attunement, ready for activation at the appropriate moment.60 However, I should add that Heidegger keeps his most radical anti-cultural formulations confined to the Black Notebooks, while in his philosophical publications he is content with a more generic anti-modernism. After World War Two, Heidegger drops the extreme separation of Being on the one side, and beings and entities on the other. Moreover, he attempts to think through the very relation and connectivity that permeates the fourfold in such a way that building, dwelling, and thinking come to form a cohesive whole of a world. Here, Being is present only through the mediation of building, dwelling, and thinking, and that means that the cultural sphere and human needs are no longer exiled for the sake of Being’s pre-eminence.61 Nonetheless, Heidegger’s anti-culturalism is a mainstay of his recorded thoughts in the Black Notebooks during the 1930s and World War Two. As we shall see, in his Doctor Faustus Mann directly critiques the kind of anti-culturalism Heidegger espouses in his Black Notebooks. But before we

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By way of explanation that indicates the philosophical dimension of this verdict, Heidegger writes that culture is “possible only – where ‘I’ – society – ‘consciousness’ and subjects and personalities” are recognized (GA94: 196). While there is the occasional, and certainly not to be neglected, remark about the “Jewish” appropriation of culture as an “instrument of power” (GA95: 326), it is an idea superadded to an already and independently developed anti-cultural sentiment. See Andrew J. Mitchell, The Fourfold: Reading the Late Heidegger (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015).

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can come to that, we need to briefly sketch Mann’s journey from being a friendly observer of the conservative revolution à la Nietzsche to becoming the foremost critic of the right-wing ideologues of the Weimar Republic who claimed the flag of conservative revolution for themselves.

5

Mann’s Political Critique of the Conservative Revolution

In 1922, Mann gave his address “Von deutscher Republik [Of the German Republic]” on the occasion of the festive state celebration for Gerhart Hauptmann’s sixtieth birthday.62 Mann used his oration to distance himself from his earlier support for the Wilhelmine Empire and from his nationalism, as well as his anti-democratic outlook in general. Instead, he now firmly not only embraced the new Weimar Republic and the democratic system, but also made peace with “progress.” In fact, in the speech he even flirted with socialism, drawing on an unlikely mixture of thoughts by Whitman and Novalis. The aim of the address was to woo German youth into supporting the new regime, and to dissuade it from nationalism and “the romanticism” of war, which in reality was just “brutality.” Consequently, Mann went out of his way to praise peace as the “realm of culture, the arts, and thought.”63 However, in the speech Mann entirely bypassed the issue of conservative revolution, which he had put on the literary agenda in the previous year. In fact, during the Weimar Republic and the 1930s Mann kept his commitment to his own concept of conservative revolution – as an artistic and aesthetic formula, while at the same time attacking its political reinterpretation and appropriation or, rather, hijacking by right-wing writers of the Weimar Republic. For instance, in his 1937 preface to his journal Mass und Wert, Mann defended, admittedly in less Nietzschean and somewhat more Gadamerian terms (if that anachronism is permitted here), “conservative revolution” as the fusion of “conservative” and progressive or “revolutionary” tendencies, combining respect for the past with an open mind about the new and the future.64 In other words, Mann clung to “conservative revolution” as an aesthetic idea or inspiration for artistic creation. But concerning the co-optation or, rather, corruption of 62

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Thomas Mann, “Von deutscher Republik,” in Essays II, in Große kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe, ed. Hermann Kurzke et al., vol. XV.1 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2002). Ibid., 519. Thomas Mann, “Vorwort zum ersten Jahrgang von ‘Mass und Wert,’” in Politische Schriften und Reden, ed. Hans Bürgin, vol. II (Hamburg: Fischer, 1968), 350.

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conservative revolution by right-wing authors, Mann did not mince his words, although he did not name anyone in particular. He lashed out against their “stupidity, recalcitrance and evil design,” and their “welleducated brutality,” claiming that in their hands the artistic ideal of conservative revolution was turned into “the revolution for the preservation of the false and what has turned bad.” In other words, recognizing that under the banner of conservative revolution right-wing authors propagated the cult of power for the sake of power and the glorification of barbarism, Mann did everything to distance himself from that group, without sacrificing his own concept of conservative revolution.65 As late as 1944, in the above-mentioned letter to Tillich, Mann attempted to salvage and embed conservative revolution within a “progressive” frame, which he probably did not have in mind originally in the early 1920s.66 In this letter, Mann points to two intriguing passages in Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human, sections 24 and 26 respectively.67 The first one is entitled “Possibility of Progress.” Nietzsche’s point is that while it is impossible to turn the clock back, progress is “possible,” but by no means “inevitable.” Progress comes about only by conscious effort, which must include a proper understanding of the past. The second passage, entitled Reaction as Progress discusses what one may call the dialects of reactionary thought, or the cunning of unreason. According to Nietzsche, the very occurrence of what appears to be reactionary or a mere throwback to the past, such as, for instance, “Luther’s Reformation,” must be read as a sign that the “new direction,” that is, “the freedom of spirit,” is still “not strong enough” and that “something is still missing.”68 In other words, the new direction has not yet come into its own, and the resurgence of “backward” thought, like the Reformation, functions as a warning signal that a clearer and better articulation of what is at issue in the new departure must still be worked out. In this sense, argues Nietzsche, by doing justice to “reaction,” and thereby life’s immersion in the past or tradition, “we take a step forward.” Mann interprets this as meaning that the forces of “reaction” ironically help to facilitate “progress.” That Mann affirms this as his own position is clear from the rhetorical question at the end of the letter, where he asks Tillich:

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66 Ibid., 351. Mann, “Das Deutscheste,” 45. Nietzsche, “Menschliches, allzumenschliches: Ein Buch für freie Geister,” in Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in drei Bänden, ed. Karl Schlechta, vol. I, (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1973), 465–67. Ibid., 466–67.

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Do you not find that today we should similarly be thankful to the irrationalism of the first third of the twentieth century and consider it as a reaction which has brought some progress? This irrationalism has deepened, corrected, and recollected a lot.69

Of course, Mann does not leave it at that. He hastens to add the all-important qualification that eventually this “irrationalism,” intoxicated by interiority or Innerlichkeit, plunged itself “into the abyss,” namely “as fascism.” Mann draws the only possible conclusion: “I believe, we now must carry ‘all over again’ the banner of progress, which, at times, has become so risible.”70 That Mann takes the dialectic of unreason as the new meaning of “conservative revolution” is clear from the fact that in 1945 Mann directly calls Luther a “conservative revolutionary,” on account of his “liberating” as well as “backward-oriented” outlook.71 After all, Luther preserved Christianity by staging a revolution against the orthodoxy of his time. But it is quite clear that Mann can no longer identify with such conservative revolution, for it is only by reference to the Enlightenment, ultimately, the overcoming of any “throw-back” to the religiosity of the Middle Ages, that Luther serves “progress” and the free thinkers. It is a startling thought that for Mann, admittedly at different times, Nietzsche as well as Luther qualify as exponents of conservative revolution. The reason is that both authors express the complication of the human mind which weaves together and mixes up “progressive” and “regressive” threads to tell the story of humankind. With that, however, we have already reached the threshold of Mann’s treatment of conservative revolution in Doctor Faustus.

6

Doctor Faustus: Mann’s Literary Discussion of Conservative Revolution

A central theme in Doctor Faustus is the literary presentation and unequivocal critique of the essential core of conservative revolution, understood as an aesthetico-political ideology. That is to say, Mann’s own earlier version of an ironic conservative revolution is not present in the novel. Instead, Mann depicts the proponents of conservative revolution as calling for a revolutionary overthrow of the values and aspirations of bourgeois and humanistic culture for the sake of something 69 71

70 Mann, “Das Deutscheste,” 45. Ibid. Thomas Mann, “Deutschland und die Deutschen,” in Thomas Mann, Essays, vol. V, ed. Herrmann Kurzke and Stephan Stachorski (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1996), 266.

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much older and more primordial, rooted in the great realities of life. According to Mann, the telos of the rejection of modern culture is nothing other than the return to mythos, and the cult, the primitive, and the barbaric. Therefore, Mann concludes that the proponents of revolutionary conservatism are complicit with barbarism, and, more specifically, the real barbarism ushered in by the Third Reich. Despite his overall negative verdict, Mann goes out of his way to canvass and present different views and constellations among the proponents of revolutionary conservatism, such as the fictional characters Dr. Chaim Breisacher and the poet Daniel zur Höhe, as well as others from the circle around the salons maintained by Sixtus Kridwiss and Mrs Roddes. In one chapter, Georges Sorel’s book “Réflexions sur la violence” features prominently. Thus, there is no “one” doctrine, but rather a family of anti-cultural views that Mann presents and discusses. Moreover, although the main character of the novel, Adrian Leverkühn, entertains his own gnawing doubts about the viability and integrity of “the idea of culture,” he never takes sides in the debates about the future prospects of “culture” as discussed by Breisacher, Daniel zur Höhe, and others. It is as if Mann wanted to spare Leverkühn the stigma of sympathizing with these more unsavoury advocates of conservative revolution. Before turning to these men, we must first have a closer look at Adrian Leverkühn.

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Leverkühn

Serenus Zeitblom reports that Leverkühn formed the thought of the historically contingent existence and rather precarious nature of culture very early on when he took classes as a high school student with Wendell Kretzschmar.72 The crucial question here was the “emancipation” of art from its erstwhile embeddedness in myth, religion, and cult, and its acquired autonomy in post-medieval Europe. Freed from religious bonds, art, for Leverkühn, became a highly technical and intellectually stimulating “work” for individuals and their private enjoyment.73 For Leverkühn, the showcasing of and pride in “culture as such” and its “enjoyment” is possible only after its original embeddedness in mythical reality is given up and replaced with a kind of sophisticated swindle by which the derivative and autonomous culture posits itself as the superior and 72

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Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus in Grosse kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe, ed. Ruprecht Wimmer and Stephan Stachorski, vol. X.1 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2007), 91. Ibid., 123.

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rational essence of the former, without having any of its substance. According to Leverkühn, there is too much proud and idle talk about “culture,” as if to cover up the fact that the real substance has long been lost or forgotten. In a conversation with Zeitblom, Leverkühn says: For a cultural epoch, there seems to me to be a spot too much talk about culture in ours. Don’t you think? I’d like to know whether epochs that possessed culture knew the word at all, or used it. Naïveté, unconsciousness, taken-for-grantedness, seems to me the first criterion of the constitution to which we give this name. What we are losing is just this naïveté, and this lack, if one may so speak of it, protects us from many a colorful barbarism which altogether perfectly agreed with culture, even with high culture. I mean – our state is that of ethical culture [Gesittung] – a very praiseworthy state no doubt, but also neither was there any doubt that we should have to become much more barbaric to be capable of culture again. Technology and comfort – in that state one talks about culture but one has not got it.74

One can imagine Leverkühn finding a sympathetic ear in Heidegger, had they ever been able to meet in reality.75 As we have seen, in the Black Notebooks Heidegger explicitly says that great ages, particularly that of the Greeks, had no “culture,” and he goes out of his way to argue that the Greeks did not have a word for it.76 Indeed, Heidegger’s anti-culturalism is of a piece with that of Leverkühn’s. Of course, Heidegger is not a musician like Leverkühn. But Leverkühn’s sceptical doubt about progress in music and the theory of music can be detected in Heidegger’s very own field, the passion for words, and its relation to philology. For instance, 74 75

76

Ibid., 91–92. Leverkühn died on August 25, 1940, having suffered a nervous breakdown in May 1930 which permanently damaged his intellectual capacities (Mann, Doktor Faustus, 712 & 738). Heidegger explicitly argues that proper cultivation and education means “a grown way of life,” and that the negation of such proper appreciation is modern “educatedness [Gebildetheit].” Heidegger adds, somewhat disingenuously, that the Greek concept of παιδεία stands outside the modern notion of education or educatedness (GA95: 430). Much more would have to be said here. Although Heidegger does not mention this, there is no entry for “culture” or “Kultur” in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Deutsches Wörterbuch (online version). Raymond Williams has shown that in England the word “culture” denoting an “abstraction and absolute,” that is, a separate sphere from the impetus of industrial society, as well as a kind of “mitigating and rallying alternative” to it, emerged only in the nineteenth century (Culture and Society [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963]). According to this account, “culture,” or the aspiration to culture, has its origin in the emerging industrial society. It is, as it were, the “better side” of it. None of this is ever clearly addressed in Heidegger, but his anti-culturalism is explicable from this perspective, for it logically follows from his rejection of modern industrialism and everything connected with it.

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Heidegger once critically notes that the original love of words is killed when transformed into enlightened, sophisticated philology, and embedded in the armature of culture: Philology removes us as much from the word as the natural sciences remove us from earth and sky, for both stem from the technē of representation; they strangle thinking. However, they are accomplishments of culture. (GA97: 269)

In contrast to philology, which “works” on the “material” of words and texts, Heidegger claims that “the word acquires its language from the Ereignis only” (GA98: 116), that is, from the way Dasein responds to the revelation of Being. This original dimension is prior to “culture” and “cultural techniques.”77 It is already irretrievably lost when philology or the philosophy of language set upon words. This line of Heidegger’s thought corresponds to Leverkühn’s general claim that all culture as such has fallen away from the original, direct, raw encounter with what is given to humans. However, this is not the only point of convergence. Both Heidegger and Leverkühn are so disaffected by “culture” and its self-understanding as the superior, higher, essence of all human aspirations, that they reject what they consider the self-serving and disparaging verdict about its supposed opposite, “barbarism,” especially when it is invoked by partisans of “culture.” Thus, when Zeitblom tells Leverkühn that his anticulturalism is in sympathy with “barbarism,” Leverkühn angrily rejects the idea, arguing that any such construction uncritically presupposes the value of “culture” as sacrosanct. Leverkühn contends: Barbarism is the opposite of all culture only within the order of thought which it gives us. Outside of it the opposite may be something quite different or no opposite at all. (Mann, Doktor Faustus, 91)

Heidegger expresses the same view, as can be seen, for instance, in the following stand-alone aphorism: “‘Barbarism’ is a distinction [Auszeichnung] of civilized peoples [Kulturvölker]” (GA95: 280). Apart from claiming the logical dependence on the values of culture in the determination and condemnation of something as “barbaric,” Heidegger here also hints at the additional point that, contrary to their self-understanding, civilized peoples are by no means immune to perpetrating “barbaric” crimes either.78 77

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In fact, Heidegger once notes “as long as we do not belong to Being [Seyn], every word is superfluous” (GA97: 56). This is, of course, already noted in Hölderlin’s critical remarks about the educated or, as he puts it, “the all-calculating barbarians” within culture or civilized society (Friedrich Hölderlin, “Hyperion,” in Grosse Stuttgarter Ausgabe, ed. Friedrich Beissner, vol. III

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However, Heidegger’s position is not merely that of a rhetorical inversion. In interpreting the modern age as an age of machination, Heidegger posits the ubiquity of the will to power, manifesting itself in the scientific-technological assault on the earth and the management of culture, including the planning and administration of education, art, the publishing industry, and journalism – all for the sake of the “progressive enlightenment” and entertainment of man. Since all of this stands in the service of increasing power over nature and man, which alienates humans from Being, Heidegger sees this as the self-destruction of the very basis of humankind. Therefore, he concludes that “culture” is precisely a way of “barbarism.”79 In short, for Heidegger, the distinction between “barbarism” and “culture” has lost its traditional significance, precisely because he discounts the tradition as a binding or moral authority (GA96: 201). Not only that. In his sceptical questioning of the so-called achievements of “culture,” Heidegger polemically courts, in 1933, in the face of supposedly clueless defenders of said culture, “the barbarism which has become necessary” (GA94: 402). This is very close to Leverkühn’s abovequoted statement that in order to be capable of proper culture, one must first become “much more barbaric.” Both Heidegger and Leverkühn consider “culture” as a mere artificial evasion from a more original encounter with the world. For Leverkühn, this is the cult, for Heidegger, Being. With this very important difference in mind, we can see the proximity of these two views. In Doctor Faustus, the gist of these views is summarized by a person of great international

79

[Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1957], 154). Heidegger references Hölderlin’s all-calculating barbarians once (GA96: 114). While this is a simple inversion of the valuation adopted by the proponents of “culture,” it is still a powerful and paradoxical provocation, as it draws on the immanent sense of superiority and refinement in the state of culture, only to question its reality. Thus, Hyperion exclaims: “How I hate all the barbarians who think themselves wise because they no longer have a heart, all the vulgar brutes who find a thousand different ways to kill and destroy youth’s beauty with their stupid and petty ideas of manhood” (“Hyperion,” 12). Later, Hyperion would have these “harsh words” for the Germans: “I can imagine no people more fragmented than the Germans. You see craftsmen, but no human beings, thinkers, but no human beings, priests, but no human beings – is this not like a battlefield where hands and arms and all the limbs lie about in pieces while the spilled life-blood seeps away into the sand?” (“Hyperion,” 153). It is useful to recall that in German the idea of “culture” or Kultur is often spoken of as “das von Menschen Gemachte” (that which has been made or created by human beings), as opposed to what is naturally grown, gewachsen. What Heidegger calls “machination” or Machenschaft is the abstract noun denoting human making, “das Gemachte.” Thus, Machenschaft has a direct semantic link to “culture.”

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renown, the “Great Adversary” himself, who, in a conversation with Leverkühn,80 puts it like this: Since culture fell away from the cult, and made a cult of itself, it has become nothing else than a falling away, and all the world after a mere five hundred years is as sick and tired of it as though, salva venia, they had ladled it in with iron cooking-spoons.81

However, as we have seen, the claim that the last four or five hundred years of culture constitute a dead end is of course the core claim in Hofmannsthal’s conception of conservative revolution, and it is also the key proposition in Yorck von Wartenburg’s note to Dilthey,82 which Heidegger liked to quote. The one crucial difference is that these authors do not share Leverkühn’s or the Devil’s preference of cult over culture.

6.2

Breisacher

The main character to expound an anti-cultural theory on the basis of the alleged originality, superiority, and purity of the cultic sphere is a certain Dr. Chaim Breisacher.83 According to Zeitblom’s account, he was a suave polymath “who knew how to talk about anything and everything.” Primarily concerned with “the philosophy of culture,” his “views were anti-cultural, insofar as he pretended to see in the whole of history of culture nothing but a process of decline.”84 As Zeitblom notes: “the most contemptuous word on his lips was the word ‘progress’; he had a devastating way of pronouncing it.”85 But Breisacher was not content with simply denouncing “progress” and “bemoaning” the loss of an original past. Rather, he wanted the 80

81 82

83

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For the idea of a Faustian bargain in Heidegger, see Morten S. Thaning, “Faustian Intellectualism: Reading the Considerations in the Perspective of Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics and Mann’s Doctor Faustus,” in Heideggers “Schwarze Hefte” im Kontext: Geschichte, Politik, Ideologie, ed. David Espinet et al. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018), 36–67. Mann, Doktor Faustus, 356. In preparation for his Doctor Faustus, Mann did read a summary of the correspondence between Yorck von Wartenburg and Dilthey put together for a meeting of the Freideutsche Kameradschaft in 1931 (see Mann, “Doktor Faustus,” 1115–39). While the quotation from Yorck von Wartenburg is not part of the summary, it is more than likely that Mann read the correspondence when it appeared in 1923. Thomas Mann acknowledged that the real-life model for Breisacher and his ideas was Oskar Goldberg (1885–1953), especially with reference to his book Die Wirklichkeit der Hebräer [The Reality of the Hebrews], published in 1925, and widely read at the time (see Mann, “Doktor Faustus,” 614). 85 Mann, Doktor Faustus, 406. Ibid.

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revolutionary overthrow of the present “culture” in order to institute a future cultic reality. Breisacher’s main theme was the “field of Old Testament criticism,” especially the transformation of “the old and genuine actuality of Yahweh, the Elohim of the folk” into a more or less abstract and intellectual idea of “a general human god in heaven,” by which change the “religion of the folk” became “a religion” like any other religion, tamed, normalized, and enshrined within “culture” and the human need for something vaguely superior and wonderful, carefully and skilfully administered by rabbis and the “poets of the Psalms.”86 According to Breisacher, the real home of the Elohim was not in the sky, but in the midst of the people, where “the Elohim goes ahead of the people in a pillar of fire,” demanding his “slaughter-table [Schlachttisch],” which word Breisacher found much more appealing than its thin and humane substitute of later ages, “the altar.”87 In fact, Breisacher went out of his way to insist that real sacrifice was not to be talked away as a mere symbol for “giving up” one’s sin. All such allegorizing interpretation was just insipid “humanistic water-gruel,” worlds apart from the original reality of religion, folk, and blood.88 Consequently, Breisacher also rejected the idea that religion and morality could be aligned. Any such attempt was just “a purely intellectual misunderstanding of the ritual,” for morality was already “the decline” of religion.89 Zeitblom’s report about Breisacher’s zeal for the archaic, the ritual, the atavistic over anything that evolved from it, is anything but neutral, beginning with Zeitblom’s note concerning Breisacher’s “reckless” mentality and his “fascinatingly ugly physique,” and ending with the remark that listeners of Breisacher’s perorations found them both “amusing” and “repulsive.”90 In Zeitblom’s mind there is no doubt that in Breisacher’s ideas he encountered “the new world of anti-humanity,” meaning that Breisacher’s kind of revolutionary conservatism foreshadowed and helped pave the way for the real barbarism of National Socialism.91 In a perceptive interpretation of Mann’s treatment of Breisacher, aka Goldberg,92 Jacob Taubes showed how Oskar Goldberg did indeed argue for a return to “the magical ritual of the mythical age,” in order to resist

86 91

Ibid., 409–10. Ibid., 414.

87

92

Ibid., 410. See footnote 83.

88

Ibid., 411.

89

Ibid., 412.

90

Ibid., 405, 11.

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“the tyrannical domination of technology in our culture.”93 Like Zeitblom, Taubes sees the intellectual antecedents for the emergence of “fascism and Nazism” in such ideas of conservative revolution.94 Moreover, Taubes also claims, even if only en passant, that Heidegger, like Breisacher, was on a path of “restoring mythology” and envisaged a new “union of Gods and men,” for the sake of which “the entire history of civilization had to be abandoned and destroyed.”95 After the publication of the Black Notebooks we have a much better picture of the extent to which Heidegger did indeed pursue a highly anti-cultural perspective. Heidegger certainly shares Breisacher’s view that cultural integration and normalization of the divine is a case of falling away from the real presence of the divine. In the Black Notebooks Heidegger even writes: “The God has as little to do with religiosity and theology as the thought of Being (philosophy) with ‘culture’” (GA94: 303). One can readily see that Heidegger and Breisacher inhabit the same intellectual milieu of anti-culturalism. But the all-decisive difference is that for Heidegger the terminus ad quem for any conservative revolution is not God, or the divine, as it is for Breisacher, but Being, which does not figure in Breisacher’s account at all. Unlike Breisacher, Heidegger is not after the restoration of a sacred union between a god and his people. Therefore, Taubes’ further claim, that Heidegger would be a “hierophant” showing the way towards the future sacred presence of a God,96 similar to Breisacher or Goldberg, is not convincing, because it simply assimilates Heidegger’s concept of Being to that of a divine presence, which has no foundation in any of Heidegger’s texts.97 However, in rejecting this

93

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Jacob Taubes, “Vom Kult zur Kultur,” in Vom Kult zur Kultur, ed. Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2007), 273. In Doctor Faustus this is not specially mentioned, although it is implied in Breisacher’s overall rejection of modernity. Taubes, “Vom Kult zur Kultur,” 269. In fact, Mann is even more critical of Goldberg than of his fictional character Breisacher, for, in a letter to Jonas Lesser, dated October 25, 1949, Thomas Mann calls Goldberg a “typical Jewish fascist,” which is far more outspoken than his literary condemnation of Breisacher (Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus. Kommentar, in Grosse kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe, ed. Ruprecht Wimmer and Stephan Stachorski (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2007), 614. 96 Taubes, “Vom Kult zur Kultur,” 281. Ibid. Given Goldberg’s highly “biologistic” conception of God as a real and not metaphorical biological center of his people, it is clear how distant this is to Heidegger. Still, in the Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger does claim that “A people is a people only if it receives its history as allotted to it through finding its god, the god that compels this people beyond itself and thus places it, the people, back into beings. Only then does a people escape the danger of circling around itself and idolizing, as its unconditioned, what are merely conditions of his subsistence” (GA65: 398). Bruce Rosenstock has attempted to

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particular thesis I do not mean to say that Heidegger is not ultimately presenting his very own myth, the myth or poem of Being. As I show below, he is very much pursuing that option in the 1930s.

6.3 Georges Sorel Apart from fictional characters who discuss the advantages and disadvantages of culture at the various soirées that feature in Doctor Faustus, Mann decided also to include direct references to Sorel’s book Réflexions sur la violence, originally published in 1908. Thus, even Zeitblom concedes that the book could be called “the book of the epoch,” insofar as it reflected essential tendencies of the political Zeitgeist. Zeitblom’s own critical stance is unmistakable when he highlights what he takes to be Sorel’s “trenchant and telling” idea: that in this age of the masses the parliamentary discussion must prove entirely inadequate for the shaping of political decisions; that in its stead the masses would have in the future to be provided with mythical fictions, devised like battlecries, to release and activate political energies.98

As Zeitblom notes, the turn to myth was just the other side of the deeply entrenched scepticism about the legitimacy of science, truth, and ethical thought in society.99 Breisacher’s particular myth of an original religious cult was just one example of this return of the myth. If we now look at Heidegger’s Black Notebooks from the early 1930s, written just a few years after the discussions recorded by Zeitblom, there is no doubt that, in rejecting science and the outlived forms of the cultural orientation in modernity, Heidegger redefines philosophy as “Dichtung des Seins [poetry of Being]” (GA94: 77). Moreover, he does not hesitate to link this new poetry of Being to a blatantly nationalistic sentiment, for instance, when he writes: “The German alone can primordially write anew the poem of Being” (GA94: 27). For Heidegger, everything hinges on “leading man to a more original poetry” (GA94: 25), and Heidegger understands poetry very much in terms of “mythos,” and the philosophical thinking towards Beings as poetically re-creating Being (GA94: 66). The “decision” concerning who we are, what Being is, how

98

show more fundamental “convergences” between Heidegger and Oskar Goldberg (“The Flight of the Gods: A Comparative Study of Martin Heidegger and Oskar Goldberg,” New German Critique 46, no. 137 [2019]). 99 Mann, Doktor Faustus, 531–32. Ibid., 532–33.

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Dasein responds to it and thereby defines itself, is not a matter of discursively practiced philosophy, least of all university philosophy, nor is it a matter of political-cultural discussions from within the plurality of viewpoints and interests within society. In the early 1930s Heidegger was resolved to provide the new myth of Being for the German nation as part of his attempt to facilitate the break with modernity. Like many thinkers of the conservative revolution, he had no qualms about siding with the National Socialists. It was sheer hubris on Heidegger’s part to think that his myth of Being would be more palatable to the Nazis than Rosenberg’s unloved Myth of the Twentieth Century.100

6.5

Aestheticism and Barbarism

In reflecting on his acquaintance with thinkers of the conservative revolution, Zeitblom eventually concludes that there is a nexus between “aestheticism” and “barbarism,” or, as he puts it, that “aestheticism” paves the way for “barbarism.”101 We may think here of Nietzsche, who suspends the ethical for the sake of “justifying” life solely as an aesthetic phenomenon.102 Sorel’s myth would very much exemplify this. In the case of Breisacher, the suspension of the ethical is aesthetico-religious. But there is also an aesthetic suspension of the ethical in Heidegger’s history of Being in the Black Notebooks. As already mentioned, during the 1930s Heidegger tended to hypostasize Being as that which stands over and above beings and entities. At times, Heidegger even mentions something like a rather mythical “battle” between “Being [Seyn]” and “beings”

100

101 102

Heidegger’s remark about Rosenberg’s book needs no comment: “The Myth of the Twentieth Century is the highest perfection of the a-mythical rational subjectivism and liberalism of the 16th century” (GA95: 412). Mann, Doktor Faustus, 541. It is instructive to quote Nietzsche on this directly: For to our humiliation and exaltation, one thing above all must be clear to us. The entire comedy of art is neither performed to our betterment or education, nor are we the true authors of this art world. On the contrary, we may assume that we have our highest dignity in our significance as works of art – for it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified – while of course our own consciousness of our own significance hardly differs from that which the soldiers painted on canvass have of the battle represented on it. (“Die Geburt der Tragödie,” in Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in drei Bänden, ed. Karl Schlechta, vol. I [Munich: Carl Hanser, 1973], 40.)

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(GA95: 287). Indeed, Heidegger once envisages how, driven by technology and imperialism, “the earth blows itself up” such that “the present humanity disappears” with it (GA96: 238). He comments on this imagined spectacle with the telling words that this would be “no misfortune,” but rather “the first purification of Being,” in which it would be cleansed of the “most profound disfigurement” it suffered by dint of “the primacy of beings” (GA96: 238). The only conclusion is that, for Heidegger, human beings are “justified” only insofar as they are players within the tragedy of Being.

7

Conclusion

As we have seen, Mann changed his view on nationalism and democracy already in 1922. It should be acknowledged that Heidegger changed his views too. After World War Two, Heidegger gives up the reified dichotomy of Being on the one side and beings on the other, which underlay much of his strident anti-modernism in the Black Notebooks. Moreover, the fourfold is precisely characterized by the fact that Heidegger no longer assigns Being a particular “place.” Rather, Being is manifest in the relationality of the fourfold. Moreover, Heidegger clearly distances himself from nationalism, not on moral grounds, however, but on grounds of its “subjectivism” (GA9: 341). However, Heidegger never made peace with democracy and, to the very end of his career, keeps an anti-cultural bias. Is there a place for a publishing house or a university within the fourfold? Only if we emphasize Heidegger’s concept of dwelling, which comes with building and buildings, and meeting-points, can we make room for a genuinely cultural and democratic life in the fourfold. This comes with the proviso that dwelling, ethics, and culture must not be dissociated.103 Critique of modernity belongs to modernity itself.104 In this sense, Heidegger never fully owned up to his own modernity. However, the ground from which any such critical discussion must proceed is life in our modern, discursive, highly intellectual culture, behind which one

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104

See the work of Jeff Malpas, particularly Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2018), In the Brightness of Place: Topological Thinking in and After Heidegger (Albany: Suny Press, 2022), and Rethinking Dwelling: Heidegger, Place, Architecture (London: Bloomsbury, 2023). For a good recent discussion, see Steven B. Smith, Modernity and Its Discontents: Making and Unmaking the Bourgeois from Machiavelli to Bellow (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).

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cannot go, on pain of intellectual suicide. One cannot simply switch off history and traditional forms of life and the very intelligibility of the world vested in it, nor can one ignore the claims of reason and critical questioning. To find a proper balance between these two claims on us, we need something of the humane humility and irony that we can learn from Thomas Mann.

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah, and Martin Heidegger. Briefe 1925–1975. Edited by Ursula Ludz. 3rd ed. Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 2002. Letters 1925–1975. Translated by Andrew Shields. Edited by Ursula Ludz. New York: Harcourt, 2004. Breuer, Stefan. “Die konservative Revolution – Kritik eines Mythos,” Politische Vierteljahresschrift 31, no. 4 (1990): 585–607. Derrida, Jacques. “Différance.” In Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, translated by Alan Bass, 3–27. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Derrida, Jacques, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Heidegger, Philosophy, and Politics: The Heidelberg Conference. Translated by Jeff Fort. Edited by Mireille Calle-Gruber. New York: Fordham, 2016. Dethloff, Klaus. “Hugo von Hofmannsthal und eine conservative Revolution,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 92 (2018): 531–55. Dostoievsky, Feodor. The Diary of a Writer. Translated and annotated by Boris Brasol, vol. I. London: Cassell, 1949. Farin, Ingo. “The Concept of Life in Heidegger’s Early Lecture Courses.” In Heideggers Hermeneutik der Faktizität, edited by Sylvain Camilleri, Guillaume Fagniez, and Charlotte Gauvry, 79–98. Nordhausen: Traugott Bautz, 2018. Held, Klaus. “Heidegger und das Politische.” In Heidegger und der Antisemitismus: Positionen im Widerstreit, edited by Walter Homolka and Arnulf Heidegger, 257–68. Freiburg: Herder, 2016. Hölderlin, Friedrich. “Hyperion.” In Grosse Stuttgarter Ausgabe, edited by Friedrich Beissner, vol. III. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1957. Kiesel, Helmuth. Geschichte der deutschsprachigen Literatur 1918–1933. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2017. Löwith, Karl. “My Last Meeting with Heidegger in Rome.” In The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, edited by Richard Wolin, 140–43. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Malpas, Jeff. In the Brightness of Place: Topological Thinking in and After Heidegger. Albany: Suny Press, 2022. Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2018. Rethinking Dwelling: Heidegger, Place, Architecture. London: Bloomsbury, 2023.

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Mann, Thomas. Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen. Frankfurt: Fischer, 2015. “Das Deutscheste: Thomas Mann an Paul Tillich, 13. April 1944.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 20, 2002, 45. Doktor Faustus. In Grosse kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe, edited by Ruprecht Wimmer and Stephan Stachorski, vol. X.1. Frankfurt: Fischer, 2007. “Doktor Faustus.” Kommentar. In Grosse kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe, edited by Ruprecht Wimmer and Stephan Stachorski, vol. X.2. Frankfurt: Fischer, 2007. “Russische Anthologie.” In Essays II. In Große kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe, edited by Hermann Kurzke, Joëlle Stoupy, Jörn Bender, and Stephan Stachorski, vol. XV.1, 333–72. Frankfurt: Fischer, 2002. Tonio Kröger. Project Gutenberg, 2007. www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/23313. “Von deutscher Republik.” In Essays II. In Große kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe, edited by Hermann Kurzke, Joëlle Stoupy, Jörn Bender, and Stephan Stachorski, vol. XV.1, 514–59. Frankfurt: Fischer, 2002. “Deutschland und die Deutschen.” In Essays V, edited by Hermann Kurzke and Stephan Stachorski, 260–281. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1996. “Vorwort zum ersten Jahrgang von ‘Mass und Wert.’” In Politische Schriften und Reden, edited by Hans Bürgin, vol. II, 348–58. Hamburg: Fischer, 1968. Marx, Karl. Selected Writings. Edited by Lawrence H. Simon. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994. Mitchell, Andrew J. The Fourfold: Reading the Late Heidegger. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015. Mohler, Armin. Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1972. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Die fröhliche Wissenschaft.” In Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in drei Bänden, edited by Karl Schlechta, vol. II, 7–274. Munich: Carl Hanser, 1973. “Die Geburt der Tragödie.” In Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in drei Bänden, edited by Karl Schlechta, vol. I, 7–134. Munich: Carl Hanser, 1973. “Menschliches, allzumenschliches: Ein Buch für freie Geister.” In Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in drei Bänden, edited by Karl Schlechta, vol. I, 435–1009. Munich: Carl Hanser, 1973. Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen. In Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in drei Bänden, edited by Karl Schlechta, vol. I, 135–434. Munich: Carl Hanser, 1973. Ottmann, Henning. “Die konservative Revolution (Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Thomas Mann, Oswald Spengler, Ernst Jünger).” In Geschichte des politischen Denkens, edited by Henning Ottmann, 143–214. Berlin: Springer, 2010. Rosenstock, Bruce. “The Flight of the Gods: A Comparative Study of Martin Heidegger and Oskar Goldberg,” New German Critique 46, no. 137 (2019). Smith, Steven B. Modernity and Its Discontents: Making and Unmaking the Bourgeois from Machiavelli to Bellow. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. Taubes, Jacob. “Vom Kult zur Kultur.” In Vom Kult zur Kultur, edited by Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann, 269–82. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2007. Thaning, Morten S. “Faustian Intellectualism: Reading the Considerations in the Perspective of Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics and Mann’s Doctor

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Faustus.” In Heideggers “Schwarze Hefte” im Kontext: Geschichte, Politik, Ideologie, edited by David Espinet, Günter Figal, Tobias Keiling, and Nikola Mirković, 37–67. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018. von Hofmannsthal, Hugo. Das Schrifttum als geistiger Raum der Nation. Munich: Verlag der Bremer Presse, 1927. Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963. Zantke, Michael. “Thomas Mann und die Versuchung der ‘konservativen Revolution.’” In Thomas Manns “Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen” nach 100 Jahren: Neue Perspektiven und Kontexte, edited by Erik Schilling, 169–81. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2018.

12

Travels in Greece Heidegger and Henry Miller Andrew J. Mitchell

Among the 500 pages of additional material that were added to the Gesamtausgabe version of the Zollikon Seminars are sheaves of previously unpublished notes from the time of the seminars, 1959–69. Buried among these notes is one that has nothing to do with the seminars, devoted to a wholly separate topic, a note on Henry Miller’s travelogue of his time in Greece, The Colossus of Maroussi. The note is found in a group dating from 1965, thus placing it right in the middle of Heidegger’s five trips to Greece from 1962 to 1967, the first of which he documented in the text Sojourns, with watercolors by his wife, Elfride. In the midst of these travels, and like many before and after him, Heidegger reads Miller. My main interest in this unlikely connection concerns the problem of description. In the 1930s and 40s, Heidegger identified metaphysical presuppositions in the practice of description while considering both the “heroic realist” writings of Ernst Jünger as well as his own publication, Being and Time. Description describes what is present. Travel writing tends to be full of such description. How does Heidegger navigate this in the writing of his travels? How does Miller? Without putting too fine a point on it, we might say that they both focus on writing what is not there, writing the non-present. Description does not have access to this. Since this writing concerns what does not appear, it would seem off limits to “phenomenology,” too, since we are no longer dealing with any apparent “phenomena.” In the early 1970s, however, Heidegger develops a notion of what he calls a “phenomenology of the inapparent” (“Phänomenologie des Unscheinbares”). My contention is that both Heidegger’s and Miller’s approaches can be viewed as instances of such a phenomenology of the inapparent, as I hope to show. A second interest concerns Heidegger’s conception of the relation between Germany and Ancient Greece, specifically in regard to the 319

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Second World War, the setting not only of Miller’s Colossus, but also of Erhart Kästner’s early works on Greece, the man with whom Heidegger first planned his Greek travels and spent twenty years in correspondence about them. The Miller note brings this issue into some focus, however ominous it may be.

1

Travel Writing and the Problem of Description

Travel writing is an intriguing genre, especially when we consider that it is composed of presumably unique experiences and singular encounters. Everything that occurs does so around unfamiliar and foreign locales. As such, it behooves the author to convey this rich and exotic content to the reader. That author does so by means of description. Description (German: Beschreibung) is travel writing’s spongy white bread and cold yellow butter; it is essential to the genre, as essential as the (lived) experiences themselves. Heidegger’s problems with description surface in his notes on Ernst Jünger from 1934 to 1940, as well as in his retrospective look at Being and Time from 1936. With regard to Jünger, a large part of his allure is due to his keen eye for those trends in society that lead to a fusion of the biological and the technological, trends he sees culminating in the formation of the figure of “the worker.” He describes the many processes he sees at work towards this goal: an increasing concealment of the face behind masks or cosmetics, the preponderance of uniforms in society, the development of torpedoes that must be piloted by humans who explode in the detonation, etc. These descriptions give the work its conviction. Description supposedly presents us with reality; it is taken to be “close to life,” as opposed to “abstract” philosophizing and theorizing. This gives description a certain persuasive force, as Heidegger observes: “The age . . . takes the descriptions and holds them for ‘truth’” (GA90: 259).1 For Heidegger, description repeats the real, whereas questioning breaks with it. Questioning, therefore, is “suspected in advance as being ‘estranged from actuality’” (GA90: 259). Description is not suspicious in this way, as it merely reaffirms that actuality. Jünger, consequently, is “a describer and no questioner” (GA90: 355). Description is no innocent endeavor, however. Description is not a passive reflecting back of an otherwise objectified reality, description is 1

Translations from the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe my own unless otherwise noted.

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the act of objectification itself. It is not a copying or mirroring, it is a positing. Description affirms the actual, and in Jünger’s case, given his Nietzscheanism, that actuality is will to power. Heidegger writes: “Jünger’s procedure and the reliability of his statements appear to restrict themselves to the describing of the ‘work world.’ In truth, however, this describing is an interpreting and constant co-positing of beings as a whole as will to power” (GA90: 51, emphasis modified). Description would itself be an act of will to power, reifying the world. The same worry of description pervades Heidegger’s retrospective text from 1936, “Running Notes on Being and Time.”2 Here Heidegger is at pains that Being and Time not be mistaken for a piece of descriptive phenomenology.3 Here again we see description obstructing the inquiry: “The obsession with sheer givenness for description posits Dasein not only as describable, but pursues it in the foregroundedness of the everyday, where all sorts of ‘phenomena’ come to light – but with this questioning is completely driven away from its metaphysical task” (GA82: 42). Description requires a present at hand given available for the describing. Dasein does not exist in this way; to “describe” it is to petrify it. Being and Time is not engaged in a description of Dasein: “The question concerning the being of Dasein is not a search for a more appropriate description of Dasein (as if it would ‘be’ something already ‘present at hand’), rather the achieving of the beyng of the Da!” (GA82: 51). Dasein must be performed, not described. Description is simply inappropriate for its way of being: “Dasein – not describable” (GA82: 96). If description is to be utilized at all, it seems it could only apply to the present-at-hand. But is anything ever simply present-at-hand?

2

Heidegger in Greece

In the record of Heidegger’s 1962 maiden voyage to Greece, Aufenthalte (plural of Aufenthalt, sometimes translated as “sojourn,” but perhaps better rendered “residency,” that is, a temporary dwelling in a place), description is again at play, and cast in a rather derogatory light. 2 3

I am grateful to William McNeill for pointing out these references to description. On descriptive phenomenology, the distinction between descriptive and ideal essences, and a descriptive science of essences, see §§73–75 of Edmund Husserl, Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2014), 131–36.

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Heidegger repeatedly remarks on how disciplinary approaches to Greek cultural phenomena, due to their general reliance on description, fail to gain either insight or traction. While at the temple of Athena Parthenos in the Piraeus, for example, Heidegger notes that “no archaeological descriptions, no historical explanations” are able to capture the thrust of the temple (GA75: 236/41, translation modified). Visiting the Parthenon, he notes that it threatened to be a disappointment, given the “oft seen images and art-historical descriptions” of it (GA75: 238/44, translation modified). Indeed, at the very outset of the text, while worrying whether he will ever encounter anything “inceptually Greek [anfänglich Griechisch]” (GA75: 219/8), Heidegger wonders about the compositional strategy of his own text, “why not directly cast what is seen in a simply descriptive narrative [beschreibenden Erzählen]?” (GA75: 219/9, translation modified). He immediately rejects the idea, “As if ‘Greece’ has not been described often enough already, in many striking and knowledgeable ways” (GA75: 219/9, translation modified). Nevertheless, these objections do not preclude Heidegger from writing passages such as the following in Sojourns: The wide floor of the valley, where the lone village of Nemea is nestled, is surrounded by terraced slopes; flocks of sheep stroll leisurely through its pastures. The entire region itself appears as a single Stadium that invites festive games. Only three columns are left standing that still speak of the temple of Zeus that once was: in the breadth of the landscape they are like three strings of an invisible lyre on which perhaps the winds play songs of mourning, inaudible to mortals – echoes of the flight of the gods. (GA75: 225/19–20)

Ruined marble columns as lyre strings, echoing the flight of the gods; the image is repeated in the text, this time in regard to the temple of Poseidon: Early in the afternoon our multilingual friend drove us with her car to the temple of Poseidon in Cape Sounion. The well-designed road followed the quiet bays of the Saronic Gulf, passing through small suburbs while offering us a view across the gulf of Aegina. Over the steep foot of the mountain stood the gleaming-white ruins of the temple in a strong sea breeze. For the wind these few standing columns were the strings of an invisible lyre, the song of which the far-seeing Delian god let resonate over the Cycladic world of islands. The way the bare rock of the cape lifts the Temple towards the sky over the sea, serving as a signal for the ships; the way that this single gesture of the land suggests the invisible nearness of the divine and dedicates to it every growth and every human work – who could insist here any more on the capability of meager saying [dürftigen Sagens]? (GA75: 238/42–43, emphasis modified)

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These passages of the text stand alongside the criticisms of description. If these are not description, then what is their status? Heidegger tends to think of saying, Sagen, as a showing, Zeigen. How is this Heideggerian saying that shows distinct from mere description? One way to approach this question is by pursuing what it is that description describes. We have heard Heidegger’s answer already, the actual. But what does description miss in so proceeding? If actuality is understood to be a quality of beings, then what description misses is the ground of these beings, or better, the space of appearance in which they arise. Heidegger calls it the “truth” of being, and his understanding of it is shaped by his interpretation of the Greek word ’αλήθεια. For Heidegger, the Greeks understood ’αλήθεια as unconcealment. Heidegger seeks the Greek truth of Greece. He seeks the clearing that allows the Greek world to appear. In the middle of his text, on an island that he calls “the middle of Greece,” on Delos, Heidegger finds his truth (GA75: 232/32, translation modified). The island lives up to its name: “Δῆλος the island is called: the revealed, the appearing, that which gathers all in its openness, and which through its shining shelters everything in one present” (GA75: 231/30, translation modified). The experience is transformative; Greece confirms Heidegger’s conception: Only through the experience of Delos did the journey to Greece become a residency [Aufenthalt], become a cleared tarrying [Verweilen] with that which is ’αλήθεια. This is precisely that region of disclosive sheltering [entbergenden Bergens] which grants residency [der Aufenthalt gewährt]: to φύσις, to the pure, sheltered-in-itself emergence of the mountains and islands, of the sky and of the sea, of the vegetation and the animals, that wherein each respective thing appears in its rigorously cast and equally gently swaying figure. In the residency thus granted by ’αλήθεια there also appear the ἔργον, all the buildings and formations constructed by human work. In the residency so granted, the mortals themselves appear, and indeed as those who correspond to the unconcealment, in that they bring to light what appears expressly as what presences in such and such a manner. All this, however, in the face of, and in the service of, the gods, whose nearness once was due to the sheltering disclosing [verbergenden Entbergen]. (GA75: 233/34–35, translation modified, emphasis modified)

Truth lets all that is emerge, that which arises on its own, φύσις, and that which is constructed, ἔργον, those who are mortal, and also even the gods. Ἀλήθεια provides the medium, the space of appearing, that allows even the divine to appear, and to appear despite those gods having flown. What appears in truth need not be objective, it can be a trace. For Heidegger, this concerns the invisible. Ἀλήθεια is the space of appearing in which the particular being comes forward and shows itself,

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but that space in which it appears does not necessarily show itself. It remains determinative and yet “invisible” (unsichtbar). Heidegger observes: To experience residency in ’αλήθεια, and ’αλήθεια as the grantor of residency, means: to catch sight of what is invisible of ’αλήθεια as the invisible in all things which first releases [freigibt] each thing that presences into visibility and perceptibility, supporting it there [darin aufbehält], that invisible, which as disclosive sheltering [entbergendes Bergen], refrains from any sensualization [Versinnlichung]. (GA75: 234/35–36, translation modified)

One way to think of this invisible would be to consider that each of the particular beings that appear do so in the context of the truth. This context is distinct from this being, but nonetheless determinative of it. When we examine just the being, that surrounding context is not present, it is “invisible.” The move we need to make now is understanding that this invisibility does not mean imperceptible as such, but imperceptibility to an eye that only views the world in terms of presence. What is invisible is not “present.” Let me propose two examples of this from the text (though the passages regarding lyre strings attest to this, too). The first concerns the sculptural depiction of the contest between Pelops and Oinomaos, originally part of the Zeus temple and preserved now in the Olympia museum. Heidegger writes: Never, though, were the two pediments objects of observation at the same height as the observer, but they were visible to the eye only upwards to a much greater height. Were they created for the human observer after all? Was not the flowing stillness of their appearance dedicated to the gaze of the invisible god as a gift of consecration? (GA75: 223/17, emphasis modified)

The sculptures are here, the gods are not, they are invisible. But that invisibility nonetheless marks itself in the sculpture. The sculpture attests to the invisible god in its very proportions and arrangement. A second example, while viewing the temple of Athena Parthenos, Heidegger has something of a vision: The structural elements of the temple lost their materiality. What was fragmentary disappeared. The spatial distances and measures became condensed [verdichteten sich] into one singular place. The gathering of the temple came into play. Through an inconceivable shine the entire building began to float, as, at the same time, it assumed a firmly defined presence, akin to that of the supporting rock. The temple was fulfilled by the abandonment of the holy. In it, the absence of the flown goddess drew invisibly near. (GA75: 236/40–41, translation modified, emphasis modified)

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The temple which stands in a fragmented state is “fulfilled” (erfüllt) by the goddess. Not through her presence, but by her absence, more precisely, by the trace of the flight of her withdrawal. This abandonment, invisible though it may be, is what appears to fulfill the temple. The temple is marked by that loss, and that loss can, in effect, be “read off of” the temple. To tarry in the truth is not to exist after the manner of fixed objects. What exists in truth brings this beyond its context with it, and is marked by its invisibility. Standard description can only describe the present. It completely overlooks the invisible.

3

The Note on Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi

A few years later, in 1965, Heidegger reads Henry Miller’s now classic account of his own travels in Greece, The Colossus of Maroussi. Published in 1941, Colossus records Miller’s time vacationing in Greece in 1939, taking up an invitation from his friend Lawrence Durrell to visit him in Corfu. I had promised myself on leaving Paris not to do a stroke of work for a year. It was my first real vacation in twenty years and I was ready for it . . . I felt the war coming on – it was getting closer and closer every day. For a little while yet there would be peace and men might still behave like human beings.4

The impending world war casts a shadow over the book, and its outbreak ends the journey, sending Miller back to the United States. Miller biographer Arthur Hoyle writes of Miller’s trip to Greece, and, according to Hoyle, “Durrell brought Miller into a world – Greece – that changed his views about nature and pointed him in the direction of the next major period in his life, his years living in Big Sur, California.”5 According to another, the residency “had been a profound encounter with people and a landscape that marked the beginning of his new life.”6 Miller himself is aware of this change in himself: Greece had done something for me which New York, nay, even America itself, could never destroy. Greece had made me free and whole . . . To those who think that Greece to-day is of no importance let me say that no greater error could be

4 5

6

Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi (New York: New Directions, 2010), 13. Arthur Hoyle, The Unknown Henry Miller: A Seeker in Big Sur (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2014), 32. Matthew Jennett, ed., George Seferis to Henry Miller: Two Letters from Greece (New Haven and Athens: Pharos Press, 1990), 1.

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committed. To-day as of old Greece is of the utmost importance to every man who is seeking to find himself. My experience is not unique. And perhaps I should add that no people in the world are as much in need of what Greece has to offer as the American people. Greece is not merely the antithesis of America, but more, the solution to the ills which plague us.7

The Greek sojourn was a turning-point in Miller’s life; the book documenting it is reportedly considered by Miller to be his best. There’s not much for plot in Colossus, nor does the genre demand one. Instead of plot, what we get is scintillating description and eccentric characterizations. Miller visits key sites in Greece and has epiphanies, more or less. There is none of the sexual bravado of his earlier novels. What there is, for lack of a better term, is description, and lots of it. Miller makes everything interesting. The “colossus” of the book’s title is the rambling Greek poet, George Katsimbalis, whom Miller meets and quickly befriends. Miller’s description of him fits his own writing style to a T: During the time I knew him Katsimbalis’ life was relatively quiet and unadventurous. But the most trivial incident, if it happened to Katsimbalis, had a way of blossoming into a great event. It might be nothing more than that he had picked a flower by the roadside on his way home. But when he had done with the story that flower, humble though it might be, would become the most wonderful flower that ever a man had picked. That flower would remain in the memory of the listener as the flower which Katsimbalis had picked; it would become unique, not because there was anything in the least extraordinary about it, but because Katsimbalis had immortalized it by noticing it, because he had put into that flower all that he thought and felt about flowers, which is like saying – a universe.8

Miller is always ready to fall into such raptures and bring the whole universe into play himself. What, then, does Heidegger remark about Miller? Looking at Heidegger’s note there are basically two columns to it; the column on the right flags two passages from the book, one having to do with the flight of the gods, the other with the technological challenge to nature. The rest of the right side comments on that point. On the left are five

7 8

Miller, Colossus, 184. Ibid., 209. On Katsimbalis’ similarity to Miller: “He seemed to be talking about himself all the time, but never egotistically. He talked about himself because he himself was the most interesting person he knew. I liked that quality very much – I have a little of it myself” (ibid., 27).

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groupings to note, one untitled, the others regarding “civilization,” “Greece,” “thinking,” and “quiet.” Beneath all this a quotation from the book is written out. We are moving into a new latitude of the soul [Geistesebene], and a thousand years hence men will wonder at our blindness, our torpor [Gefühllosigkeit], our supine acquiescence to an order which was doomed [unsere träge Fügung in eine Ordnung, die zum Untergang verdammt war]. [p. 171] (GA89: 535–36)

The first passage Heidegger highlights concerns the flight of the gods. Miller travels to Mycenae and finds himself at Agamemnon’s tomb: I say the whole world, fanning out in every direction from this spot, was once alive in a way that no man has ever dreamed of. I say there were gods who roamed everywhere, men like us in form and substance, but free, electrically free. When they departed this earth they took with them the one secret which we shall never wrest from them until we too have made ourselves free again. We are to know one day what it is to have life eternal – when we have ceased to murder.9

Gods are important for Miller in the book. They participate in human selfdefinition: “We say erroneously that the Greeks humanized the gods. It is just the contrary. The gods humanized the Greeks.”10 This humanization has to do with the establishment of a human measure or standard: The greatest impression which Greece made upon me is that it is a man-sized world . . . Greece is the home of the gods; they may have died but their presence still makes itself felt. The gods were of human proportion: they were created out of the human spirit . . . In the Western world, this link between the human and the divine is broken.11

Miller laments the loss: We too are creating myths, though we are perhaps not aware of it. But in our myths there is no place for the gods. We are building an abstract, dehumanized world out of the ashes of an illusory materialism. We are proving to ourselves that the universe is empty, a task which is justified by our own empty logic. We are determined to conquer and conquer we shall, but the conquest is death.12

Miller is nonetheless sensitive to the traces of those gods’ flight. And, like Heidegger, Miller finds something peculiar about Greece that is able to support the appearance of such traces: Greek light. It is what Miller says he likes best of Greece, “‘The light and the poverty’ [which alone does not make a people wretched, he avers] . . . ‘I also believe that if

9

Ibid., 82, emphasis modified.

10

Ibid., 206.

11

Ibid., 205.

12

Ibid., 206.

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you have light, such as you have here, all ugliness is obliterated. Since I’ve come to your country I know that light is holy; Greece is a holy land to me.’”13 Heidegger’s note on “quiet” affirms our concern with the trace of departure, it is from a passage where Miller is traveling to the plain of Thebes: We were in the dead center of that soft silence which absorbs even the breathing of the gods. Man had nothing to do with this, nor even nature. In this realm nothing moves nor stirs nor breathes save the finger of mystery; this is the hush that descends upon the world before the coming of a miraculous event. The event itself is not recorded here, only the passing of it, only the violet glow of its wake.14

Miller is thus aware of the fact that, in regard to the gods, he may not be recording their presence directly, but events, and events of departure particularly, leave markers in their wake, even if only a violet glow. But this violet glow is not nothing. It is in fact everything. It designates the peculiar light, that is, truth, of Greece. The second passage Heidegger picks out under the heading “Greece” confirms this: The rain has stopped, the clouds have broken; the vault of blue spreads out like a fan, the blue decomposing into that ultimate violet light which makes everything Greek seem holy, natural and familiar. In Greece one has the desire to bathe in the sky. You want to rid yourself of your clothes, take a running leap and vault into the blue. You want to float in the air like an angel or lie in the grass rigid and enjoy the cataleptic trance. Stone and sky, they marry here. It is the perpetual dawn of man’s awakening.15

The violet light endemic to Greece allows for receiving the markers of flight, it allows what is not present to show itself non-presently, or rather, to use Heidegger’s term, invisibly. Miller’s interest in Greek light climaxes on his trip to Eleusis (a passage not cited by Heidegger): Everything here speaks now, as it did centuries ago, of illumination, of blinding, joyous illumination. Light acquires a transcendental quality: it is not the light of the Mediterranean alone, it is something more, something unfathomable, something holy. Here the light penetrates directly to the soul, opens the doors and windows of the heart, makes one naked, exposed, isolated in a metaphysical bliss which makes everything clear without being known. No analysis can go on in this light.16

13 16

Ibid., 117. Ibid., 41.

14

Ibid., 165–66, emphasis modified.

15

Ibid., 138, emphasis modified.

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One characteristic of this light is that bodies appear beautiful in it. This makes sense if we grant Heidegger that “beauty,” “das Schöne,” is what shines, scheinen, “das Schöne scheint.” The shining of beauty requires a space of appearing, of radiance – that space is truth. Bodies appear beautiful in this light. The untitled page numbers cited by Heidegger in the upper-left corner point to two passages regarding the beauty of Greek women. One presents a six-toed woman, whom Miller finds ugly, but with an ugliness “which instead of repelling attracts” (in this light “all ugliness is obliterated”).17 The other passage speaks of Greek women in general: Due to the absorption of Greeks from Asia Minor the new generation of Athenian womanhood has improved in beauty and vigor. The ordinary Greek girl whom one sees on the street is superior in every way to her American counterpart; above all she has character and race, a combination which makes for deathless beauty and which forever distinguishes the descendants of ancient peoples from the bastard offshoots of the New World.18

The other reference to “Greece” that Heidegger lists emphasizes the nature of Greece, which Miller views as a kind of innocence: Greece is what everybody knows, even in absentia, even as a child or as an idiot or as a not-yet-born. It is what you expect the earth to look like given a fair chance. It is the subliminal threshold of innocence. It stands, as it stood from birth, naked and fully revealed. It is not mysterious or impenetrable, not awesome, not defiant, not pretentious. It is made of earth, air, fire, and water. It changes seasonally with harmonious undulating rhythms. It breathes, it beckons, it answers.19

This naïve sense of nature is just what is challenged by technologically dominated approaches to nature. Miller encounters such a view when he visits the Athens astronomical observatory with Lawrence Durrell, and the two are invited to look through the massive telescope by the scientists there. This is the second passage that Heidegger lists on the right side of the note. It reads: Our hosts seemed impervious to such reflections; they spoke knowingly of weights, distances, substances, etc. They were removed from the normal activities of their fellow men in a quite different way from ourselves. For them beauty was incidental, for us everything. For them the physico-mathematical world palped, calibred, weighed and transmitted by their instruments was reality itself, the stars and planets mere proof of their excellent and infallible reasoning. For Durrell and myself reality lay wholly beyond the reach of their puny instruments 17

Ibid., 97, 117.

18

Ibid., 95.

19

Ibid., 134.

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which in themselves were nothing more than clumsy reflections of their circumscribed imagination locked forever in the hypothetical prison of logic.20

The scientists’ quantified conception of reality clashes hard with Miller and Durrell’s more aesthetic conception. The scientists lack the imagination that is necessary to perceive reality in this way. Heidegger’s comments on the note speak to this passage: “the calculated, positioned ‘nature.’ Method has the priority. The objects only stockpiles of vouchers for correctness” (GA89: 535). This seems to refer to Miller’s claim that “the stars and planets [were] mere proof of their excellent and infallible reasoning.”21 For Heidegger, their “reasoning,” however logical, is always geared not at truth, but “correctness.” The objects they reason about, Heidegger thinks, only serve to further entrench this order of correctness. In fact, the objects reasoned about are only there for that purpose; they are vouchers of correctness. Beneath this, Heidegger writes “i.e. the dominance of logic” and, immediately beneath that, “the lived body [Leib] as the supremacy of positionality [Übermacht des Ge-Stells]” (GA89: 535). I see an analogy proposed here: object : correctness :: body : logic. The object becomes an inventory item on demand for attesting to correctness. The body assumes just such a role in regard to logic. The supremacy of positionality is achieved when the body is thoroughly governed by logic (the importance of the body could not be greater). Jünger would agree. This, too, is an instance of the technologization of nature. But that treatment of nature is fully in accord with the technologizing tendency of Western civilization as such, a civilization for which Greece is considered the source. The passage Heidegger flags under the rubric “civilization” reads (I quote at length): The aeroplane comes along, lifts you up by the seat of the pants, and spits you down in Baghdad, Samarkand, Beluchistan, Fez, Timbuktu, as far as your money will take you. All these once marvelous places whose very names cast a spell over you are now floating islets in the stormy sea of civilization. They mean homely commodities like rubber, tin, pepper, coffee, carborundum and so forth. The natives are derelicts exploited by the octopus whose tentacles stretch from London, Paris, Berlin, Tokio, New York, Chicago to the icy tips of Iceland and the wild reaches of Patagonia. The evidences of this so-called civilization are strewn and dumped higgledy-piggledy wherever the long, slimy tentacles reach out. Nobody is being civilized, nothing is being altered in any real sense. Some are using knives and forks who formerly ate with their fingers; some have electric 20

Ibid., 91.

21

Ibid.

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lights in their hovels instead of the kerosene lamp or the wax taper; some have Sears-Roebuck catalogues and a Holy Bible on the shelf where once a rifle or a musket lay; some have gleaming automatic revolvers instead of clubs; some are using money instead of shells and cowries; some have straw hats which they don’t need; some have Jesus Christ and don’t know what to do with Him. But all of them, from the top to the bottom, are restless, dissatisfied, envious and sick at heart. All of them suffer from cancer and leprosy, in their souls. The most ignorant and degenerate of them will be asked to shoulder a gun and fight for a civilization which has brought them nothing but misery and degradation. In a language which they cannot understand the loud-speaker blares out the disastrous news of victory and defeat. It’s a mad world and when you become slightly detached it seems even more mad than usual. The aeroplane brings death; the radio brings death; the machine gun brings death; the tinned goods bring death; the tractor brings death; the priest brings death; the schools bring death; the laws bring death; the electricity brings death; the plumbing brings death; the phonograph brings death; the knives and forks bring death; the books bring death; our very breath brings death, our very language, our very thought, our money, our love, our charity, our sanitation, our joy. No matter whether we are friends or enemies, no matter whether we call ourselves Jap, Turk, Russian, French, English, German or American, wherever we go, wherever we cast our shadow, wherever we breathe, we poison and destroy. Hooray! shouted the Greek. I too yell Hooray! Hooray for civilization! Hooray! We will kill you all, everybody, everywhere. Hooray for Death! Hooray! Hooray!22

Greece gave birth to the civilization that now seeks to undermine its own greatness. Greece becomes part of the octopus’s arms that stretch out and hold the world in their clutches. All this Heidegger identifies in Miller’s book.

4

A Phenomenology of the Inapparent: Writing Greece

In his 1973 Zähringen seminar, Heidegger introduces the notion of a “phenomenology of the inapparent [Phänomenologie des Unscheinbares]” (GA15: 399/80). The term stems from Greek considerations, specifically a reading of Parmenides’ claim ἔστι γὰρ εἶναι, or, as Heidegger translates it, “presencing namely presences [anwest nämlich Anwesen]” (GA15: 397/79). The present thing, the entity, and presencing as such coincide; Heidegger deems this a “genuine tautology” (GA15: 397/79). The particular being, τὸ ἐόν in Parmenides’ Greek, “is neither a being, nor simply being”; rather, it names the differentiating simultaneity of the two (GA15: 397/79, translation 22

Ibid., 111–12.

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modified). Thinking τὸ ἐόν consequently places us “in the domain of the inapparent [Bereich des Unscheinbaren],” places us before a difference that does not show itself due to its tautological overlap, a difference that does not show itself as present (GA15: 397/79). Just this sense of the inapparent is operative in Heidegger’s Greek trip as well, at least implicitly. In his correspondence with Erhart Kästner in 1964, two years after his Aufenthalte trip, Heidegger writes, “Very mysterious remains the inapparent [unscheinbar] constant presence of Delos.”23 This phenomenology of the inapparent is not something restricted to the ancients, however. A letter Heidegger wrote to Roger Munier ahead of his 1973 Zähringen seminar proposed as its topic a reading of Husserl’s sixth Logical Investigation on categorial intuition. Heidegger explains, “For me, it is a matter of actually performing an exercise in a phenomenology of the inapparent; by the reading of books, no one ever arrives at phenomenological ‘seeing’” (GA15: 417/89). I want to propose both Heidegger and Miller as practicing a phenomenology of the inapparent. They do so in seemingly opposed ways. Both see the world as nothing merely real or actual. For Heidegger, the ruins of temples complete themselves by presenting the flight of the gods. A trace of absence supplements the real. With Miller, things seem the other way around. Whatever catches Miller’s attention is caught in a rhapsodic proliferation of associations, connections, resonances, and entailments. To each thing he adds what Katsimbalis adds, its “universe.”24 One deals in withdrawal, one in surplus. What difference does this make? Heidegger’s last trip to Greece was in 1967, two years after his reading of Miller. Like his first trip, Heidegger documents this last one, in an unpublished text titled “To the Aegean Isles [Zu den Inseln Ägäis].”

23

24

Martin Heidegger and Erhart Kästner, Briefwechsel 1953–1974 (Frankfurt: Insel, 1986), 75. It is in this same correspondence that Heidegger confesses, in 1954 no less, that “Without being able to justify it exactly, Delos has long been my dream” (Briefwechsel, 24). When Heidegger finds what he was looking for in Greece on Delos, it is therefore not terribly surprising. Heidegger’s note under the heading “thinking” associates this with an awareness of the one that holds the many: “This is the first day of my life, said I to myself, that I have included everybody and everything on this earth in one thought. I bless the world, every inch of it, every living atom, and it is all alive, breathing like myself, and conscious through and through” (Miller, Colossus, 140–41).

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Heidegger returns to the topic of the invisible and poses a question with which I would like to bring this section to a close. If the particular being and being are tautologically and inapparently present, then why do we always prefer the particular being, why do we always start from it in our approach to being? If being is present, to quote Parmenides, then why can we not begin directly with it? As Heidegger puts it: “Do we late born have need of the fragments in order to pursue what is lacking, construct it further, and thereby bring it on the way towards completeness [zum Ganzen], so as to experience the presence of it in terms of its absence, to be struck more strongly by it?” (GA75: 254–55). Do we need fragments to access the whole, or can we begin from the whole itself? And even if we could, what kind of priority would that be? Why does Heidegger ask this?

5

Coda on Greece, Germany, and Untergang

Heidegger’s note ends with the only fully copied-out passage from the book, one it is hard not to read as speaking directly to Heidegger’s experience as well: We are moving into a new latitude of the soul [Geistesebene], and a thousand years hence men will wonder at our blindness, our torpor [Gefühllosigkeit], our supine acquiescence to an order which was doomed [unsere träge Fügung in eine Ordnung, die zum Untergang verdammt war].25

I am curious about a strange connection between Greece and the Second World War that seems operative behind the scenes with Heidegger. Heidegger’s trip to Greece is indissociable from the name Erhart Kästner, the philhellenic humanist author of numerous books detailing his travels to Greece and Turkey, all replete with description. A trip to Greece with Kästner had been in the works for Heidegger since 1953, but never came to fruition. Heidegger swooned at the thought of traveling with him – “to be in Greece with you” – and came to identify Kästner with his Greek sojourns: “When ‘Greece’ is named or comes to mind – in truth, constantly – you are also always there.”26 Heidegger praises his “masterful book” Ölberge, Weinberge [Olive Groves, Mountain Vineyards] of 1953.

25

26

Ibid., 171. German translation: Henry Miller, Der Koloss von Maroussi: Eine Reise nach Griechenland, trans. Carl Bach and Lola Humm-Sernau (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1956), 183. Heidegger and Kästner, Briefwechsel, 22, 94.

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What is less known is that Erhart Kästner was a member of the NSDAP who first traveled to Greece in 1942 as part of a mission for the Propaganda Ministry. Kästner’s assignment was to write a Greek travel guide for the Nazi soldiers who would be stationed in Greece. The result of that research was his first book, Griechenland: Ein Buch aus dem Kriege, published in 1942, and accompanied by a preparatory note from General der Flieger, Wilhelm Mayer, the commanding general and commanderin-air for Greece and the Southeast, 1938–41. Mayer writes: Soldiers of the armed forces in the Southeast! It has been my wish to let the memorable sites of Greece [Denkwürdigkeiten Griechenlands] come closer and thereby awaken and strengthen in you a consciousness of the beauty and the magnitude of Ancient Greece. I hope that this book, written by a soldier for soldiers, animated by personal experience and genuine enthusiasm, helps make this land, in which the Führer’s command has stationed you, become a lasting memory for you!27

That book, subsequently expurgated and revised, was reissued by Kästner as Ölberge, Weinberge in 1953. Miller’s book on Greece is written during the war; so is Kästner’s “masterful” book.28 Heidegger seems to cite Miller as attesting to his own situation during the war, looking back twenty-five years later. And maybe this citation, this jotted-down sentence from Miller’s Colossus, reveals something larger about Greece and the German–Heideggerian imaginary. For, from that perspective, Germany’s relation to Greece is what is at stake in the Second World War. The world for which the war was fought was not solely the geographical world lying static on a map, the world for which the war was fought was also the historical (spiritual) world; the historical connection between Greece and Germany was at stake in that war. Greece was great and, as testament to its greatness, it suffered downfall (Untergang). If the Germans of the Second World War were verdammt to suffer Untergang themselves, then would this not give them something more in common with those Ancient Greeks? They would have downfall in common, and that connection, would it not make them great as well?

27 28

Erhart Kästner, Griechenland: Ein Buch aus dem Kriege (Berlin: Verlag Gebr. Mann, 1942), 5. Even Ernst Jünger, though uncited by Heidegger in this context, documents his time in Rhodes in 1938 in his Ein Inselfrühling: Ein Tagebuch aus Rhodos (Zurich: Verlag der Arche, 1948).

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This would be a kind of “reverse engineering” of greatness. If something is great, then, alas, it must fall. The National Socialists have fallen. Therefore, they too must be great. Any student of logic knows that affirming the consequent is an invalid move. But what when logic itself has been decreed the enemy, or a matter of mere correctness against the truth for which many stand ready to sacrifice themselves? Is it possible to see a resonance between the fall of Greece and the demise of the Third Reich? Heidegger’s note on Miller gives us these matters to think.

Bibliography Heidegger, Martin, and Erhart Kästner. Briefwechsel 1953–1974. Frankfurt: Insel, 1986. Hoyle, Arthur. The Unknown Henry Miller: A Seeker in Big Sur. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2014. Husserl, Edmund. Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Translated by Daniel O. Dahlstrom. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2014. Jennett, Matthew, ed. George Seferis to Henry Miller: Two Letters from Greece. New Haven and Athens: Pharos Press, 1990. Jünger, Ernst. Ein Inselfrühling: Ein Tagebuch aus Rhodos. Zurich: Verlag der Arche, 1948. Kästner, Erhart. Griechenland: Ein Buch aus dem Kriege. Berlin: Verlag Gebr. Mann, 1942. Miller, Henry. The Colossus of Maroussi. New York: New Directions, 2010. Der Koloss von Maroussi: Eine Reise nach Griechenland. Translated by Carl Bach and Lola Humm-Sernau. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1956.

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Hölderlin’s Heidegger, Heidegger’s Mourning David Ferris

I remember an afternoon during my journey in Aegina. Suddenly I saw a single bolt of lightning, after which no more followed. My thought was: Zeus. Heidegger, Heraclitus Seminar, 1966–671 He [Hölderlin] caught sight of the statues [of twenty-four of the greater and lesser Greek gods on a balustrade enclosing a marble water-basin] and his whole demeanor changed . . . he lifted up his arms as if in worship. “This water should be clearer, like the water of Cephissus or the spring of Erechtheus on the Acropolis. It is not worthy of the clear gods to be reflected in a darker mirror – but,” he added with a sigh, “we are not in Greece.” “Are you a Greek?” questioned the count. “No, on the contrary, I am a German,” and again the stranger sighed. “‘On the contrary?’ Is the German the opposite of the Greek?” “Yes,” said the German shortly, and he added after a pause, “But then, we all are . . .”2

More than any other poet, the work of the German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin is privileged across Heidegger’s writings, starting with his lecture course in 1934–35 devoted to two works of this poet, his “Germania” and “Der Rhein.” Two more lecture courses follow. In 1941–42, a course devoted to “Andenken [Remembrance],” and finally, in the summer of 1942,

1 2

Heraclitus Seminar 1966–67 (GA15: 15/HS: 5). This moment in Hölderlin’s journey from Homburg to Bordeaux in 1801 is recounted by E. M. Butler in her chapter on Hölderlin in The Tyranny of Greece over Germany (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 203–4. For the misreading of this story as rehearsing the Winckelmann-like idealization of Classical Greece, see Andrzej Warminski, “Chapter 2, Hölderlin in France,” in his Readings in Interpretation: Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

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Hölderlin’s hymn, “Der Ister,” is addressed. While these courses form the basis of several essays published separately and then included in Heidegger’s Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, first published in 1944, they do not form the whole corpus of Heidegger’s engagement with either Hölderlin or with poetry in general.3 This last consideration, poetry in general, and its persistence as an engagement with language, will be crucial in what follows, both for the role of Hölderlin as a means for Heidegger to address his own thought and also for the language adopted for that thought: concealing, unconcealing, dwelling, calling, fate, the prophetic. The stage for this question is set at the end of Heidegger’s 1936 essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” when he cites the following lines from Hölderlin’s “Die Wanderung [The Journey]”: Schwer verlässt, was nähe dem Ursprung wohent, den Ort. (18–19) [It is hard, for what dwells near the origin, to leave that place.] GA5: 66/50, trans. mine

Heidegger characterizes what Holderlin writes in these words as both a naming (“Hölderlin . . . hat es genannt”) and a sign that does not deceive (“ein untrügliches Zeichen”). What Hölderlin’s words name for Heidegger is as an “either/or and its decision.” Two acts of naming are here drawn into proximity: one belongs to poetry, the other to thought. The thought to which Heidegger gives a name here (and which is what he says Hölderlin names in poetry) is the sequence of three questions in the preceding paragraph, the penultimate paragraph of his whole essay: Are we in our existence [Dasein] historically at the origin? Do we know, that means [das heißt], do we pay heed to the essence [Wesen] of the origin? Or, in our relation to art do we still only appeal [berufen auf] to a cultured knowledge of the past [gebildete Kenntnisse des Vergangenen]? GA5: 66/50, trans. modified

In the guise of this either/or, it is already clear what Heidegger’s thought wants to emphasize. For the understanding that cannot address the origin and is essence, there can only be an appeal or a commanding (both senses of berufen) to an understanding that is already formed (gebildete speaks directly of this in its tense and in its reference to both form and image in the word Bild). For the understanding that is to be emphasized, the guiding words of Heidegger’s thinking are already at work as he

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Four essays in the 1944 first edition, enlarged to six essays in the 1971 fourth edition.

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redefines his own words. “Do we know” is rephrased, as the linking phrase indicates: in English, “that means,” but in German this is expressed differently, as “das heißt.” Heißen is the modality in which meaning arises for Heidegger as a calling. Thus, to imitate Heidegger, this common phrase, “das heißt,” already bears the traces of his thinking, and does so before Hölderlin is called upon as the poet most attuned to his thought. The movement across the closing paragraphs of “The Origin of the Work of Art” essay raises several questions. Why this deferring, which allows the poet the last word when what is at stake is Heidegger’s thought? Why does Heidegger define what the poet names before the poet is called on to speak in the line-and-a-half of poetry he excerpts from a 117-line poem? And why this either/or, which is in effect a “this but not that,” rather than the choice that two alternatives seem to call for? Is the only possible path, then, to pay heed to what Heidegger has already called forth as what the poet names before he calls on Hölderlin? And why this difference between calling and naming in this final moment of Heidegger’s essay? To bring these questions to a head: why does Heidegger need to call upon Hölderlin, to call upon poetry as this naming?

Lightning Strikes: From das heißt to was heißt The end of “The Origin of the Work of Art” essay will not be the first and only time Heidegger will call upon Hölderlin’s poetry as a naming, and especially in those instances where Hölderlin will also invoke names, signs, or words. Amongst these is one phrase of Hölderlin’s that seems to have had a particular hold on Heidegger. This phrase, from the second version of Hölderlin’s poem “Mnemosyne,” sets up Heidegger’s thinking in the first of a sequence of lectures published in 1954 under the title What Is Called Thinking? [Was heißt Denken?]: Ein Zeichen sind wir, deutungslos Schmerzlos sind wir und haben fast Die Sprache in der Fremde verloren [A sign we are, without meaning Without pain we are and in foreign parts Have almost lost our language.] “Mnemosyne,” 2nd version, 1–3

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Heidegger’s given reason for turning to these lines (which he does twice in the opening part of this lecture) begins with a claim in which he anticipates and repeats the “we” from the opening of Hölderlin’s “Mnemosyne”: We, today, can learn only if we, through that learning, unlearn at the same time. Applied to the matter before us: we can only learn thinking if we unlearn what has been its essential foundation to this day. GA8: 10/8, trans. modified

Heidegger reiterates the task of this unlearning in the next paragraph and again reverts to the authorship of a collective “we” that now becomes a recollecting “we,” a “we” that recalls itself: We said: man still does not think and this because what must be thought turns away from him; in no way does he not think for this reason, but because man does not sufficiently reach out and turn to what is to be thought. GA8: 10/8; cf. GA7: 134

What is at stake for Heidegger in this turning-away and withdrawal is established in the several paragraphs that precede his quoting of the lines from Hölderlin’s “Mnemosyne.” As at the end of “The Origin of the Work of Art” essay, what poetry does will be introduced by, first, what already directs the task of philosophical thought and, second, by the terms in which Heidegger defines this thought. Heidegger’s first step in this laying-out will be to voice an objection to what he has just claimed, and he does so once so again in the form of a collective “we”: What is to be thought about turns away from man. It withdraws from him. But how can we actually know the least [überhaupt das Geringste wissen] of what withdraws itself from the beginning [einsther] or even name it [oder es auch nur nennen]? GA8: 10/8–9, trans. modified

Heidegger’s “we” speaks on behalf of what withdraws, but does so by speaking on behalf of those it has withdrawn from by focusing on their inability to know or name. In focusing on this inability, another either/or is established. Should we worry that we may have only the least knowledge, or should we worry about our ability to name what has already withdrawn? Heidegger’s wording for each side of this either/or again loads the dice. There is a difference between saying “How can we know the least?” and “How can we even know least?”4 The first seems a little

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I have intentionally used the first side of this either/or to highlight the difference between these two phrasings.

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more hopeful. At least there can be a something “least” to be known, as if there were a property of this withdrawing that can be ascertained and known. The second locates knowing within an act of naming belonging to whoever confronts this withdrawing. One is an epistemological question (how can we know?); the other is a question of language and its ability to name. Taken together, this either/or could be made to say that there is no “least” to know and that no name is possible. A simple nothing. Here is the point on which Heidegger will pivot his use of this ventriloquized objection and leave the question of knowing the least and the inability to name suspended for now: Whatever withdraws itself refuses arrival. But – self-withdrawing is not nothing. Withdrawal is event [Ereignis]. GA8: 10/9

Withdrawal in Heidegger’s references to it is expressed in a self-reflexive verb, “sich entziehen.” Something that withdraws is figured with the ability to withdraw and to refuse. Still, this is not the “not nothing” Heidegger has in mind. What is not nothing is given a temporal description in the form of an event or Ereignis. In order not to be an object of knowledge, or a revelation, or to have no relation at all to whatever exists (Heidegger’s “man”), withdrawing still must leave a trace of its withdrawing that must also refuse all possibility of being a projection or conform to how something actual is understood or known. Heidegger is explicit on this and uses it as the negative pointer to the event of withdrawing being understood as a presence: What withdraws itself can concern man even more essentially than anything present that strikes and affects [trifft und betrifft] him. Being struck [Betroffenheit] by actuality is what we like to regard as constitutive of the actuality of the actual. However, being struck by the actual can obstruct man from what rises up to him, rises up in a certainly riddling [rätselhaften] way that eludes him while it withdraws itself from him. The event of withdrawal could be [könnte] what is most present in everything now present [in allem jetzt Gegenwärtigen] and so exceed [übertreffen] infinitely the actuality of the actual. GA8: 10–11/9, trans. modified

Heidegger’s “we” now recedes. Has it performed its task? In each instance cited here, Heidegger’s “we” had three functions. First, it speaks on behalf of those for whom Heidegger’s remarks were intended, including himself. Second, “we” becomes the voice of Heidegger’s text as it recollects his own words (“we said”). Third, “we” speaks for those who find their ability to know and name obstructed (“how can we know the least . . . or even

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name?”). These instances perform a kind of dramatic monologue performed for others to hear. Why should this be Heidegger’s procedure before he has cited or even reached the poetic lines of Hölderlin? And does it preface his turn to naming as “withdrawal” what is not even known in the least way? And not only naming it as “withdrawal” (Entzug) but naming it again in the same emphatically short sentence as “event” (Ereignis): “Withdrawal is event.” After naming what has not the least actuality, in the traditional sense of the actual as something with real presence, Heidegger turns to the withdrawing that this “we” is said to experience. Before Heidegger gives a name to this withdrawal he repeatedly refers to it by the reflexive verb “sich entziehen.”5 Withdrawal is what is self-withdrawing, that is, it is already in the act of withdrawing itself before coming to be a withdrawal. Calling this an event does not change this, since it is also the structure of the event in Heidegger to do the same thing (the withdrawal withdraws, the event events, the thing things, etc.). Here, we can say (but with the full irony missing from Heidegger’s repetition, his renaming): Entzug, daß heißt, Ereignis. Withdrawal can be called event. By what means? Analogy, or difference, or the least thought? But how are the “we” to whom Heidegger addresses these words to know that this calling is philosophical, essentially philosophical and not poetic? The two are not the same, as Heidegger has insisted on several occasions and with reference to Hölderlin’s poem “Patmos”: “they live on the most separate mountains [wohnen auf getrenntesten Bergen].”6 Or is it that they cannot be the same? Could this be why simply being separate is not quite enough? For Heidegger, it is a matter of the utmost separateness, of a separation that can neither have nor know any equal (the mountains could of course be similar, but what is at stake in this superlative is their separation and not their likeness). In this case, if one mountain is poetry and the other is thinking, and if they are the most separated, why will Heidegger not only call upon poetry to affirm that the act of naming is not nothing but do so in a poet he regards as calling the most towards his thought? And when Heidegger does so in this phrase from Hölderlin’s hymn, “Patmos,” why does he omit the adverbial phrase that Hölderlin

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The climactic nominal pronouncement of “Entzug ist Ereignis” is preceded by four instances: “Es entzieht sich ihm,” “das sich einsther entzieht,” “Was sich entzieht,” “das Sichentziehent” and followed by one more: “Was sich entzieht.” The phrase is from Friedrich Hölderlin’s “Patmos, 11–12,” and is cited by Heidegger in a lecture at Cérisy-la-Salle in 1955, “Was is das – die Philosophie?” (GA11: 26).

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puts between the verb “live” and the phrase “most separate mountains”? Hölderlin writes, “live, growing weary on most separate mountains.”7 There is perhaps reason to fear growing weary of what unfailingly withdraws from being known or named. Heidegger describes this withdrawing as riddling in the passage where he speaks of what rises up to man even when it is actuality that strikes. To recall: “being struck by the actual can obstruct man from what rises up to him, rises up in a certainly riddling way [angeht in der gewiß rätselhaften] that eludes him while it withdraws itself from him.” Riddling is a form of expression in language whose naming veils its reference while at the same time insisting that something is intended as the meaning of this kind of expression. For Heidegger to speak of withdrawing in this way is certainly to speak of what it is like (rätsel-haft: riddle-like). If one of Heidegger’s favored paths were taken here, much could be made of this word’s etymological history. It is derived from rādan, a proto-German verb which has three fields of overlapping meaning attributed to it: to advise or give help; to devise or plan; to suppose or guess. In Old English usage it becomes the verb rǣdan, which includes both the act of reading and the act of interpreting. But, rather than adopt etymology as way of understanding why Heidegger should choose rätselhaft to typify the experience of this withdrawal, a less contingent question is sought here. Withdrawal, and with it the original philosophical thinking attributed to it, remains something to be read and does so without privileging a pre-existing meaning for a given word. The general issue is that it is not so much this self-withdrawing which is to be read but rather the text in which this self-withdrawing is first a philosophical thought and then a poetic experience. Included here is the question of a riddle that refuses being read within thinking when it “refuses its arrival” (GA8: 10/9). In this refusing it is personified by thinking, but, in poetry, it is precisely this personification that is given to be read.

Mit dem Zuge Before poetry can make its entrance Heidegger makes one additional step to address a withdrawal that withdraws without any actual presence of 7

In addition to omitting part of the first line, Heidegger does not mention the subject of the sentence. Hölderlin writes “und die Liebsten / Nah wohnen, ermattend auf / Getrenntesten Bergen” (“and the most loved / Live near, growing weary on / Most separate mountains”). Friedrich Hölderlin, “Patmos 11–12,” trans. Michael Hamburger, in Friedrich Hölderlin: Poems and Fragments (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 2007), 550–51, trans. modified. Hamburger translates ermattend as “fainting away.”

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its withdrawing. Heidegger states that “what withdraws itself from us draws us along precisely at the same time [Was sich uns entzieht, zieht uns dabei gerade mit]” (GA8: 11/9, trans. modified). What is unknown, unseen, etc., has an effect on us and does so, Heidegger continues, “whether or not we are aware of it either above all else or at all [ob wir sogleich und überhaupt merken oder nicht]” (GA8: 11/9, trans. modified). In another either/or statement, Heidegger offers two possible effects of this withdrawal: we are aware of it above all else or we are not aware of it at all. This either/or again has something not quite balanced about it. Immediate awareness and not aware at all belong to two very different realms; one might also say, after Heidegger’s selective reference to Hölderlin’s “Patmos,” they live on two very different mountains, or at least one could say that, if these effects were in any way comparable. The alternative to being aware “above all else” in this moment would be becoming aware later, somehow mediated with the passage of time. If we are unable to know this withdrawing, and are not aware of it, and therefore not aware of not having known it, then how are we to have the even least knowledge of being drawn by it? How are we to know that there is even anything to name, as withdrawal, as an effect caused by a self-withdrawing? Heidegger will not tarry and consider such a “most separate” consequence. Neither not nothing nor even any nothing at all enters their awareness unless this absence is claimed to be the sign of what is absent. In addition, for this group to even exist, this withdrawal cannot be anything they would know they missed. Yet Heidegger immediately moves to the next sentence as if this either/or is nothing and as if there is no question to be asked about being drawn in. It is something that will happen, and will happen because of our “essential nature,” and not being at all aware of it has no meaning. Our arrival is inevitable, as if we had taken a Zug (both the “drawing” of withdrawal and a train) from Heidegger’s Bahnhof: Once we arrive in the drawing [Zug] of what withdraws we are – only completely differently from migratory birds – in the drawing of what pulls us in as it withdraws itself. GA8: 11/9, trans. modified

As the either/or contains one side that is to be ignored, so does Heidegger offer an analogy that is not an analogy at all since it is “completely different” – in case we would think such an idea is an adequate analogy for what pulls us in this withdrawal. To accept this distinction is to be aware of what withdraws. And to offer an analogy we are not allowed to entertain, Heidegger secures this awareness even if it takes the form of a refusal.

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Wir sind wir For Heidegger, however, there is more at stake after having guided us to 1) there is withdrawing (aware or not); 2) withdrawing draws us in. This “drawing in,” Heidegger states, is not simply what it says, it is also a “drawing towards” exhibited in those who encounter it being “drawn in.” Having relocated the “drawing in,” Heidegger will then rename it as a “pointing toward” performed by those who have become aware of the withdrawing in which Heidegger’s whole train of thought and renaming originates. Heidegger will now add three more steps in this sequence before he allows Hölderlin to speak. The first is to redefine the “we” that has only been given a role in these paragraphs as long as it admits no objection, unless it is through an either/or whose alternatives will not be seriously considered. The second occurs when, after redefining “we,” Heidegger refers to his renaming of the “drawing in,” and then as “drawing towards,” and then in terms of a “pointing towards,” as an essential aspect of the “we” he has called upon throughout these passages. Heidegger continues: We are we [Wir sind wir] in that we point towards that withdrawing. Not belatedly and not incidentally, but rather: this “drawing to” is in itself an essential [wesenhaft] and for this reason a constant pointing towards what withdraws itself. “Drawing toward” already says: pointing toward the self-withdrawing.” GA8: 11/ 9, trans. modified

“Pointing toward” speaks on behalf of “drawing toward.” “Drawing toward” speaks on behalf of “drawing in.” “Drawing in” speaks on behalf of “self-withdrawing.” This train of redefinition takes the following as its guide: what is now said is what was already said; the drawing in of selfwithdrawal is already the drawing toward that is already a pointing toward. This complex of layered actions (all are given “doing” verbs) poses the questions: what is it that acts, and how does it do so? Heidegger states that the “we” he has been previously using becomes a “we” when it “points towards that withdrawing.” Heidegger precedes this claim with the phrase that gives the subject of this sentence an unexpected and reflexive tautology: “wir sind wir, indem . . . .” We are we only in this “pointing towards” what withdraws. Does this phrase suggest we are something else before “we” are the “we” that points? The not-pointing we, or at least the not-pointing-towards-something “we”? Or must we stay on the rails and understand that the first “we” in Heidegger’s phrase is already the second “we”? The inflection at work here could certainly pass as a riddle: we are already the we that we are and, once we know we are

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that we, there is no other we that we could have been. But how are we to even know this? To go back to a sentence cited earlier, Heidegger says that the withdrawing from which this whole line of thought unfolds is known either above all else or not at all: “what withdraws itself from us draws us along at precisely the same time whether or not we are aware of it either above all else or at all [Was sich uns entzieht, zieht uns dabei gerade mit ob wir es sogleich und überhaupt merken oder nicht]” (GA8: 11/9, trans. modified). This withdrawing is known to the exclusion of all else, including not being aware of it. As an existential moment in which what is at stake is that a conflict between the linear unfolding of language and a self-reflexive relation of the subject to itself (that this subject is already its own object) should not interfere? That “we” is inseparable from a “pointing towards,” itself inseparable from a “drawing in,” itself inseparable from a “self-withdrawing” which constitutes the originary withdrawal.

Wir sind Menschen / Menschen sind Zeichen In the last paragraph immediately preceding the citation of Hölderlin, Heidegger brings these preceding remarks to a conclusion that shifts from “we” to “man.” No longer a grammatical category, and no longer a word standing in place of a noun, and not just any word: “der Mensch,” the one who exists. Now, the preceding language is recentered. In fact, it will be recentered twice as Heidegger continues these acts of giving names. The first recentering/renaming occurs abruptly and begins with a hesitation. The paragraph in which Heidegger states “wir sind wir” ends. One paragraph ends, another begins: “Drawing toward” already says: “pointing toward the self-withdrawing.” Insofar as man is in this drawing in, he, in this way, as the pointer in this withdrawing, points towards what withdraws itself. [Insofern der Mensch auf diesem Zug ist, zeigt er als der so Ziehende in das, was sich entzieht]. Heidegger’s emphasis; GA8: 11/9, trans. modified

“Insofern.” Insofar as, to the extent that, etc., does this not indicate, as in the either/or of “aware or not all aware,” that there is another possibility? Heidegger’s use of “als” or “as” here suggests two roles for man: man as pointer, and man as something else, a mere man. Heidegger, perhaps aware of having said too much, immediately counters this possibility and shuts down the explanatory analogy by stating that the man in question here is not merely a man: “Man here is not first of all a man, and then also

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occasionally someone who points” (GA8: 11/9). Heidegger then offers the following statement, which also modifies the reflexive understanding present in his phrase “wir sind wir”: On the contrary: drawn into what withdraws itself by the drawing in of this selfwithdrawal and then pointing into this withdrawal, man is first of all man. His essence, to be such a pointer, is founded in it. What is in itself a pointing, according to its nature, we call a sign [Zeichen]. In the drawing in of the selfwithdrawal man is a sign. Heidegger’s emphasis; GA8: 11/9, trans. modified

Man is what he has always been: that which points. As such, in the next and final replacement of terms in this prelude to the words of Hölderlin, Heidegger draws man and sign into one and the same: “As he draws toward what withdraws itself, man is a sign” (GA8: 11/9, trans. modified). “We,” having become “man,” man having become sign, man becomes what a sign does, it points. But there is a distinction made here. Man, as this sign, is not a sign that points indiscriminately, or generally. Immediately following the passage just cited, Heidegger says it is the sign as man that, when it points to what draws itself away, does not point at what draws away but only into the withdrawal. The emphatic conclusion to this whole line of examination is then stated: “the sign remains without meaning [Das Zeichen bleibt ohne Deutung]” (GA8: 11/9, trans. modified). What man is based on (the verb here is beruhen), that is, pointing, is without meaning. Why? Because man is a sign. And why is man a sign? For Heidegger, it is because sign and man do the same thing: they point at what can only be known or named in its selfwithdrawing from both that knowing and that naming that “we,” “man,” and “sign” cannot achieve. This is Heidegger’s “not nothing,” arrived at by first stating that man points at “what withdraws” and then redefining this “what” as not an object. This sequence sets up Heidegger’s thinking as an error whose form, but not object, will remain. What Heidegger performs here is an intervention that removes the more easily grasped analogy that always turns to the actual for understanding, a move also performed when he discounts migratory birds as an analogy. Taking away the actual, Heidegger states, results in what “rises up in a certainly riddling way” that “eludes man while it withdraws from him” (GA8: 10–11/9, trans. modified). But, like a riddle, what emerges now is what names but without saying what it names. Rather, it points to what withdraws from this same pointing in the way that a riddle would indicate that it points to something but withholds in its language the actual thing or object it conceals. Consequently, the function of “we,” “man,” and their displacement towards the condition of a sign, is to unfold a sense of

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language that is not mere riddling but a riddling that has a certain, assured, positive significance. Heidegger writes: “in a certain [gewiß] riddlelike way” (GA8: 11/9, trans. modified, emphasis added). From a mere riddling to a certain riddling, from a sign as that which points to something to a sign that points without meaning, from “we” to “man” to “sign,” Heidegger prepares the stage onto which Hölderlin will now be called.

Dichtung, zu Hilfe! The point where Heidegger completes the movement from riddle to man as sign is the point at which Hölderlin first arrives directly to meet the task of What Is Called Thinking?’ The opening line of the poem “Mnemosyne” is first referred to alone: “A sign are we, meaningless [Ein Zeichen sind wir, deutungslos].” The succeeding two lines, which are grammatically part of the first line, are interrupted by what looks like a merely formal, and in that respect meaningless, introduction. Heidegger writes: “The poet continues with these two lines” (GA8, 11/10, trans. modified). Perhaps it is only a question of style to replace the name Hölderlin with “the poet.” But when it becomes, for Heidegger, a matter of not just any poet but the proximity of Hölderlin to Heidegger’s thinking, then what is at stake in this mere substitution is already the role that Hölderlin will fulfill for Heidegger: not just any poet but the poet. Hölderlin is no mere poet. As Heidegger indicates in his claim, “Hölderlin’s poetry is for us a destiny” (GA4: 195/224, trans. modified). Given the magnitude of such a claim, the substitution of “Hölderlin” for “the poet” is hardly meaningless, even if Heidegger has not yet explicitly anointed Hölderlin in this role in What Is Called Thinking? The role is already standing by, as if waiting for an actor to learn the lines that Heidegger has written in advance. An already familiar pattern recurs in this preparation: from the last sentences of “The Origin of the Work of Art” essay, from the either/or’s which are not equally affirmed, from the substitutions that move from “we” to “man” to “sign,” from the proper name of a poet to “the poet.” These acts of naming and renaming are the guiding points to a thinking that sees no obstacle in drawing upon names to establish what “turns away from man” (GA8, 10/8).8 But why should poetry be at stake in this 8

The passage referred to here (cited previously) is: “What is to be thought about turns away from man. It withdraws from him. But how can we actually know the least [überhaupt das Geringste wissen] of what withdraws itself from the beginning [einsther] or even name it [oder es auch nur nennen]? (GA8: 10/8–9, trans. modified).

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moment in Heidegger’s account of what withdraws from man, or, if we follow his line of thought, what withdraws from the sign? What does philosophy need from poetry? Or what does philosophy want from poetry? And if there is such a “want,” how is it to be drawn out from poetry? Approaching these questions begins with the line suspended by Heidegger’s interruption of the opening lines of Hölderlin’s “Mnemosyne.” The line first cited appears as the culminating condensation of Heidegger’s preceding thinking: “A sign are we, meaningless.” To find one’s thought already so neatly summarized in poetry would perhaps give one pause for thought, lest all that thought amounts to is an ornament left behind by the self-withdrawal of what is to be thought. Heidegger immediately intervenes to discount such a possibility: But this might [mag] be already clearly evident now: we are not drawing Hölderlin’s word from the realm of poetic language [dichterischen Sagens] as a citation in order to enliven and embellish the dry path of thought. GA8: 21/19, trans. modified

Poetry is not an ornament to thought introduced to counteract its dryness – even if it just happens to owe its insertion at this point in Heidegger’s text as some confirmation of his preceding thought. If neither a condensation nor an ornament, what are Hölderlin’s words when Heidegger calls upon them?

Only a God … After citing the first line of “Mnemosyne” and renaming Hölderlin as “the poet,” Heidegger cites the next two lines of the poem: Schmerzlos sind wir und haben fast Die Sprache in der Fremde verloren [Without pain we are and in foreign parts Have almost lost our language.] “Mnemosyne,” 2nd version, 1–3

Instead of addressing these two lines and their words, Heidegger becomes more concerned with the title of Hölderlin’s poem “Mnemosyne,” and begins a series of analogic substitutions whose end-result is to change the gender of a German word to better fit what Hölderlin’s title names as its subject. Mnemosyne is memory; the Greek word can be translated into the German word for memory, “das Gedächtnis”; but since the Greek word is

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feminine, Heidegger then states that “without violence” it could be translated as “die Gedächtnis.”9 After completing this conformation of German to Greek, Heidegger then embarks, without a transitional explanation, on a longer disquisition on myth occasioned by what he refers to as “Hölderlin’s” use of the Greek word mnemosyne as the name of a Titan, as not mnemosyne (memory) but Mnemosyne (Titan). The language Heidegger uses to make this bridge from a faculty to a mythical figure continues what has carried his thinking to poetry, naming: Hölderlin names namely [nennt nämlich] the Greek word Mnemosyne as the name [Namen] of a Titaness. GA8: 12/10, trans. modified

“Nennen nämlich.” Having overdetermined his segue to myth on the back of this characterization of what Hölderlin does (a doubled naming, “names namely”), Heidegger proceeds as if the subject of the poetic is approachable as not only a myth but also according to a history in which both mythos and logos each say the same before their separation in Plato. As his excursion to Hölderlin’s “Patmos” already establishes, this saying of the same is precisely what is at stake for Heidegger’s account of the name of Hölderlin as synonymous with what poetry essentially does as well as with the relation of thinking and the poetic. What is said poetically, what is said thinkingly are never identical; but there are times when they are the same – namely, those times when the cleft [Kluft] between poetry and thinking cleaves purely and decisively [rein und entschieden klafft]. GA8: 21–22/20, trans. modified

In the case of mythos and logos, Heidegger locates a time, the time of the pre-Socratics, when each were used “in the same sense [in derselben Bedeutung]” (GA8: 12/10). Having posited this sameness, Heidegger then calls on the conjunction of Platonism and modern rationalism to account for why this sameness of mythos and logos no longer holds: It is on the ground of Platonism that history and philology through the prejudice of a modern rationalism say [meinen] that mythos had been destroyed [zerstört] by

9

Why Heidegger calls not following the practice that accepts Gedächtnis as a neuter noun as being “without violence” (“ohne Gewaltsamkeit”) should not be overlooked here, to the extent that it indicates a willingness to make German conform to the Greek example despite an irreducible difference of designating memory as neuter in German. Another choice is possible in German, already feminine, “die Erinnerung,” but then this word would not allow his claim that a German word can be made to conform to a Greek word without violence.

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logos. The religious will at no time ever be destroyed [zerstört] through logic but only ever through the god who self-withdraws. GA8: 12/10, trans. modified

The sameness Heidegger sets up here, springing from an original sameness of mythos and logos, is also what informs his claim that thinking and poetry may also say the same. But when Heidegger calls upon this sameness, he shifts mythos into the religious and then secures any possibility of its destruction as the act of a god, thereby locating the fate of mythos outside the reach of any destructive logos. With this claim that only a god can destroy the religious/mythos, Heidegger claims the possibility of the sameness he describes as the experience of mythos and logos in early Greek thinking. If logos cannot destroy mythos, mythos still persists, even if it can only be experienced in relation to a withdrawal. This persistent yet concealed significance of mythos is the opening that Heidegger has emphatically prepared the poetry of Hölderlin to accept by his insistence that the poet names the subject of this poem in the name of myth [“Hölderlin nennt nämlich das griechische Wort Μνημοσύνη als den Namen einer Titanide”].

The Return of the Same At this point it is difficult to ignore the delay and displacement that Heidegger’s thinking has visited upon both poet and poetry. After arriving at the first line, then inserting his own words between it and two of the following lines of the poem, Heidegger takes a step back to the title in order to remember a longer history. But not only this. What is set up is that poetry, in its relation to mythos, to Mnemosyne the Titaness, is a form of remembering. It is with this claim that Heidegger concludes his reading of the poem’s title after having cited its opening and two subsequent lines, and not before calling upon an analogical poetic touch that turns its back upon the earth and its laws: Memory, the mother of the Muses: the thinking back to what is to be thought is the source and ground of poetry. This is why poetry is the water that flows back towards the source, towards thinking as a thinking towards [Denken als Andenken]. GA8: 13/11, trans. modified

The poetic inflection given to poetry as water flowing backwards is sustained in a final sentence before the opening line of Hölderlin’s “Mnemosyne” is cited once more. This time, however, it is a matter of the source that poetry flows from in order to flow back to the source just

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mentioned: “All poetry springs from the de-votion of recollection [Alles Gedichtete entspringt aus der An-dacht des Andenkens]” (GA8: 13/11, trans. modified).10 Poetry flows from the devotion of recollection (Andenken) and flows back to thinking as recollection (Andenken). The religiosity and mythos of devotion call for a difference here. Hence the almost two-page emphasis on defining Hölderlin’s poem in terms of mythos. Yet why is this slightest of differences to be insisted on? Having made the water of poetry flow from and backwards to something else, Heidegger does not engage this difference here. Instead, as if this were the point to be established all along, Heidegger breaks to another paragraph and writes: Under the title Mnemosyne, Hölderlin says: “A sign are we, without meaning . . .” GA8: 13/11, trans. modified

What follows in the poem now stands under how Heidegger reflects upon this title.11 This reflection acts as a prefacing of the poem (and not simply a preface to the poem), so that what is now to be read has already been read. Accordingly, the lines of this poem, not read before, can return as if they no longer need to be read, having been irrevocably framed by a title word, a word Heidegger reads as a proper noun and not as the kind of sign described by Hölderlin’s opening words.

“Wer wir?” After re-citing the opening line of “Mnemosyne,” but without including the two lines immediately following it, Heidegger asks “Wer wir? [Who, we?]” This question has not been asked directly before, even though Heidegger will already provide an answer: wir is to be understood as

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The separation of the prefix here, as well as the translation of Andenken as “thinking towards” in the preceding quotation, is in line with Heidegger’s repeated insistence on “being towards” – as present in the pointing towards that defines the sign, man, which are also definitions of Heidegger’s philosophical subject, “we.” Andenken and recollection in general as “thinking towards” is an emphasis in Heidegger’s essay on Hölderlin’s poem of that name (see “Remembrance,” in Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry [GA4]). De-vote, in its own way, catches some of what Heidegger does to An-dacht. “De” read as from, and “votion” read as the past participle of vovere, to vow, would give “vowed from,” which imitates Heidegger’s separation of prepositions in nouns. Question of other titles to the poem which Heidegger is aware of: the drafts of the Hymn, besides titles like “The Serpent,” “The Sign,” “The Nymph,” are also entitled “Mnemosyne” (GA8: 12/10).

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“man” and then as “sign.” When Heidegger poses the question here, it is in the sense of “which we” and answered in temporal terms: We? Who? [Wer wir?] We the men of today, of a today that has lasted since long ago and will still last for a long time, so long that no calendar in history can give its measure. In the same hymn, “Mnemosyne,” it is called/it calls [heißt]: “Long is / The time” – namely, the time in which we are a meaningless sign. Does that not give enough to thought that we are a sign and indeed a meaningless one? GA8: 13/ 11, trans. modified

The preceding redefinitions of “we” as “man” and as “sign” are now all located in a time that has no measure that can be grasped by either calendar or history. Instead, Hölderlin is called upon to support that Heidegger’s claim is what the poet also understood in the words “Long is / The time” which occur at the end of the first strophe of “Mnemosyne” (lines 15–16). But, having aligned Hölderlin with his thinking, Heidegger follows with two sentences that each begin with a hesitation: “Perhaps . . . . Perhaps.” The first is directed at the opening line of Mnemosyne (“A sign we are, meaningless”) to which Heidegger returns after his excursion through the proper names (not signs) of myth. To this return Heidegger adds that these words and Hölderlin’s “following words” belong to what our time, the time of today, attempts to think: Perhaps, what the poet says in these and in the following words, by which the most thoughtful shows itself to us, belongs to the most thoughtful, about which the claim concerning our thoughtful time attempts to think. GA8: 13/11–12, trans. modified, emphasis added

The second hesitation (actually a double hesitation) sets a condition that needs to be fulfilled if Heidegger’s claim is to cast any light on the word of the poet: Perhaps this claim brings, if only we consider [erörtern] it sufficiently, some light into the word of the poet; perhaps also the word of Hölderlin, because a poetic word, is more richly appealing [anspruchreicher] to us and thereby more inviting [windkender] on the path of thinking that thinks after [nachdenkt] the most thoughtful. GA8: 14/11, trans. modified, emphasis added

What defines sufficiently? On it rests not only the claim that ours is a thoughtful time but that, within such time, this thoughtfulness will bring light to the poetic word which, presumably, will lack light if this claim cannot be sufficiently considered. In addition here, Heidegger regards the poetic word as a more appealing and inviting way to find the (his) path of thinking. But why should Heidegger frame this claim

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three times by the hesitation of “perhaps”? And why must the word of the poet receive the light of thinking? Indeed, why is the poet that Heidegger calls a destiny for us, here today, kept so decisively in an uncertainty as to whether the poetic word “belongs to the most thoughtful”? And why does Heidegger say that his claim includes not just the words of Hölderlin he cites from the first line of “Mnemosyne” but also “the following words” to which he pays no attention here? Hölderlin’s first line and following words: Ein Zeichen sind wir, deutungslos Schmerzlos sind wir und haben fast Die Sprache in der Fremde verloren [A sign we are, without meaning Without pain we are and in foreign parts Have almost lost our language.] “Mnemosyne,” 2nd version, 1–3

Schmerzlos … ? Discounting one instance involving a definite article, there are only two words in the whole of this version of “Mnemosyne” that rhyme exactly with one another and also follow one another within the same sentence: “deutungslos, / Schmerzlos.”12 Heidegger’s repeated separation of the first line from the two which follow indicates that that the presence of Hölderlin may have less to do with “the realm of poetic saying [Bereich des dichterischen Sagens]” than with what Heidegger, in the same sentence he speaks of this realm, and in a decisively singular and figurative way, calls Hölderlin’s poetry, Hölderlin’s word (“Hölderlins Wort” [GA8: 21/19, trans. modified]). Decidedly in the singular, and decidedly set against the whole realm of poetic saying, this calling-out of a word from Hölderlin establishes Heidegger’s point of entry into the realm of poetry. This moment, which occurs at the point when Heidegger reaches the culmination of his account of withdrawal and how it establishes man as a sign without meaning (man as sign “remains without meaning [bleibt ohne Deutung]” [GA8: 11/10, trans. modified]). Is not this the moment when thinking and poetry are to be the same? Heidegger remarks that this sameness involves a separation that is not just any separation: “they live on the most separate mountains [wohnen auf getrenntesten Bergen]” 12

One other word belongs to this rhyming set in “Mnemosyne”: Zweifellos (line 8).

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(GA11: 26). The demand for such separation, is it not also what is at work within Heidegger’s account of Hölderlin in order to preserve a reducible difference between thinking and poetry? Reducible in the sense that it is the necessary counterpart to a withdrawal that is least known to us (“how can we actually know the least . . . or even name . . .”) and reducible to the necessary counterpart found in the word of Hölderlin? The separation addressed here is first noted above in the lines from Hölderlin’s “Patmos,” when the phrase “growing weary” is withdrawn. For Hölderlin, the “most loved” live “near, growing weary on / Most separate mountains.” Hölderlin’s nearness and separation of “deutungslos” and “schmerzlos” remain unaddressed by Heidegger. The words are separated by an interjection which cuts off the first line of the poem, and then this separation is enforced by Heidegger’s excluding emphasis on a mythical name, Mnemosyne. The lines separated from the opening of the poem “Mnemosyne” will only be rejoined once by Heidegger in the whole of What Is Called Thinking? At the end of his transition from Lecture 1 to Lecture 2, Heidegger cites these three lines together for the first time, and then adds the following without addressing a word to lines 2–3: And so, on our way to thinking, we hear a word of poetry [ein Wort des Dichtens]. But the question to what end and with what right, upon what ground and within what limits, our attempt to think allows itself to get involved in a dialogue with poetry [Dichten], let alone with the poem [Gedicht] of this poet – this question, which is inescapable, we can discuss only after we ourselves have taken the path of thinking. GA8: 20/18, trans. modified

The path of thinking Heidegger points towards will decide the ground and limits of a dialogue with poetry. The “inescapable” question of poetry’s relation to thinking will not be decidable by poetry. Now poetry, and the poet, like the weariness of those who live “on most separated mountains,” like the title of Hölderlin’s poem assumed into mythology, like the opening sentence of this poem, will be left behind. All sent into a separateness from which they will not return, except sporadically and without attentiveness as to how Hölderlin inflects the words that Heidegger’s thinking isolates. Only once will Heidegger directly point towards the painlessness that Hölderlin joins to meaninglessness, but will do so again without comment. In Lecture 8, Heidegger writes: The pain that rises from the rift [Riß] of that which is does not yet reach man in his essence. How is this called in the first of these lectures? “Without pain we are . . . ” GA8: 89/84, trans. modified

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In Heidegger’s recall, the poetic saying does not survive, nor does the poet. Heidegger calls back not to Hölderlin but to his own lecture, as if doing so defines the words of the poet as a statement addressing a man who does not yet know the pain of the rift or fracture that is given to thought on the path of Heidegger’s thinking. Yet, to cite these lines here, Heidegger must again perform and repeat his dismemberment of poetry and Hölderlin. Why does Heidegger so insistently perform this dismembering rather than the remembering he claims?13 Is it because, as Hölderlin also writes in “Mnemosyne,” “Mortals would sooner reach towards the abyss [Abgrund]. With them the echo turns” (lines 13–15)?

In der Fremde In the opening lines of Hölderlin’s “Menmosyne,” meaninglessness and painlessness are inflected by a paratactic phrase which abruptly follows on from the deutungslos / Schmerzlos parallel in lines 1–2. In these lines, the pronoun “we” which is a sign in Hölderlin’s “Mnemosyne,” the pronoun “we” which is without meaning, and without pain, is also the “we” that has “almost lost its language in foreign parts [und haben fast / Die Sprache in der Fremde verloren].” This is not the only reference to foreignness in “Mnemosyne.” “In der fremde” is also where the mythological name goes to die: “in foreign parts great / Ajax died [in der Fremd’ ist groß / Ajax gestorben]” (lines 42–43). While the mythological (Mnemosyne rather than mnemosyne) may not survive in such parts, language does, since it is not completely lost even if the “we” in these lines is both meaningless and painless. “We” becomes a word that remains foreign to the poet, since to write and to think as “we” is to perform on behalf of poetry and thinking. And, to return to the title of the poem, what memory could a “we” have and feel the pain of? We feel your pain is not the pain a person feels but the invention of a non-existent, painless, and decidedly un-plural subject. Is this why, as Hölderlin’s poem develops, the plural subject not only recedes but this subject of pain and suffering loses its place? In the first lines of the third stanza, Hölderlin writes: “By the fig tree is my / Achilles dead to me [Am Feigenbaum ist mein / Achilles mir gestorben]” (lines 35–36).14 To whom else could Achilles be dead except to another? In 13

14

In addition, it should be noted that Heidegger did not refer to pain in this way in Lecture 1. In fact, “schmerzlos” is not addressed directly or indirectly at the end of Lecture 1. On these lines, as well as Hölderlin’s poem “Andenken,” see my “The Recall of Thought,” in Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 158–97.

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this case, the poet. Here, the poet is the indirect object (to me) in a sentence whose subject (“my Achilles”) is dead, and, as such, has become a sign, painless and now meaningless to the community, to the “we” who will mourn their loss. But that is not the Achilles to whom Hölderlin refers. His Achilles is dead to him, the Achilles of the poet. Such an Achilles is not lost in order to become an object for which the poet can mourn. Hölderlin’s Achilles existed and remains in a language that has not yet ceased to exist. This language is not yet a language that has become lost in foreign parts – like the Greek gods in the second epigraph to this chapter who, perched on a balustrade in France, are reflected in a “darker mirror.” It is the language in which Achilles first exists to the poet and in which, even when “dead,” he remains still. As Hölderlin’s language insists, there is for him no “we” from whom Achilles has been irrevocably withdrawn either by himself or by another who would see the words of the poet differently. Differently: as the affirmation of a mere sign pointing meaninglessly and painlessly to such a withdrawal in a way that, in its inability to know the least thing about it or even name it, emulates mourning, philosophy-style. Protected in this way, no words may reach this withdrawal but, swept up into the indifference of meaningless, painless signs, they are said to reach towards it, asserting their limitation on the one hand but, on the other, making a philosophical virtue out of this same limitation while pointing towards this withdrawal with an unending mournfulness for its unending self-withdrawal in the present. In the last lines of Hölderlin’s “Mnemosyne,” and with another example of the abrupt syntax that upends Heidegger’s favorite words from the beginning of this poem, the poet writes: The heavenly are Angry if a man does not Gather gently to himself His soul, yet he surely must; like him Mourning errs. “Mnemosyne,” lines 48–52, trans. modified

The antecedent subject of these words is the death of Mnemosyne, figured in the “cutting of her lock of hair,” performed by what belongs to the “evening [das abendliche]” after the “god cast off his cloak.”15 Heidegger is silent on her death. The anger of the gods visited upon Mnemosyne by Hölderlin, to which there is no reference in Greek myth, occurs immediately after the

15

On this passage, see Anselm Haverkamp, “Error in Mourning – A Crux in Hölderlin: ‘dem gleich fehlet die Trauer’ (Mnemosyne),” Yale French Studies, no. 69 (1985): 244.

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poet’s catalog of fallen Greek heroes at Troy: Achilles, Ajax, Patroklos, and “many others.” Memory, on which Heidegger sets such store in his account of Hölderlin’s relation to his thinking, is not only killed but, with this killing, the source of the errant act of mourning is also removed: without memory there can be no mourning. Mourning is equal to a man who does not gently gather his soul to himself; both are errors. One angers the gods, the other misunderstands how the Greek hero has meaning only through the living (“my Achilles is dead to me”). Achilles is not a sign withdrawing from the poet, but only from the mythical “we” of Heidegger, who can only literalize the first words of Hölderlin in this poem as if they were already his words. It is for this reason that Hölderlin gathers Achilles’ death to himself to avoid the error of fixating on what is no longer present, as if Achilles had not died but was merely withdrawn from us, from “we.” The difference? For Heidegger, Being is dying away from beings. For Hölderlin, it does not die separately from them, it is theirs, and dies to them and with them. This is hardly the fate Heidegger had in mind when he claimed that “Hölderlin’s poetry is for us a destiny.”

Traumdeutungslos, Heidegger dreams of poetry lightning Towards the end of his essay “ . . .Poetically Man Dwells. . .,” Heidegger introduces a fragmentary verse by Hölderlin into his account of the latter’s “In Heavenly Blue.” The verse includes the following lines: For the lightnings Are the wrath [Zorn] of a god. The more something Is invisible, the more it yields to what is alien [es sich in Fremde]. GA7: 204/PMD: 223, trans. modified

Lightning, plural, is the sign of the anger of the gods for Hölderlin. And, in his essay “Remarks on Oedipus,” anger is the sign of an “unmeasure” that arises where thought no longer holds itself together as thinking, a sign he will also refer to as the poetic caesura or pause such as occurs in the abrupt shifts present in the lines cited from “Mnemosyne.”16 The words Hölderlin also uses for the effect of this moment is “lacerating time.” For Hölderlin, anger (specifically, Zorn) occurs in and as this 16

See Friedrich Hölderlin, “Remarks on Oedipus,” trans. and ed. Thomas Pfau, in Friedrich Hölderlin: Essays and Letters on Theory (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988), 101–8. On these terms in Hölderlin’s essay, see especially Part 2, “The Time of Mourning,” in my “Wrathful Translation: On the Name of Shelley’s ‘Adonais’,” Romantic Circles, Special Issue in Memory of Thomas J. McCall, www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/mccall/praxis.2014.mccall.ferris.html.

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lacerating of time. Is it to this that Heidegger responds (see the epigraph to this chapter) on his only actual journey of thought to Greece, recalled in a seminar on Heraclitus, the father of the phrase “thunderboldt steers all”? Unlike Hölderlin, Heidegger will have only one bolt of lightning. Only one, “after which no more followed. My thought was: Zeus.” Lightning, whose visibility is also the sign of its disappearing, here yields, in Heidegger’s word, to what is alien to anger: Zeus, the proper name. Here again, as in Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin’s “Mnemosyne” as Mnemosyne, Heidegger has the measure of the god’s anger when, in the moment of its invisibility, in the time it would take him to say Zeus, the unmeasure of Hölderlin is lost in a proper name, lost in what is foreign to such an unmeasure. In such names, Heidegger repeatedly mourns for his Greece as if it were only withdrawing. Meanwhile, for Hölderlin, back in France, in a part foreign to Greece, the gods have no proper reflection, “a dark mirror,” even for Germans, as he observes, after a pause: “‘On the contrary?’ Is the German the opposite of the Greek?” “Yes,” said the German shortly, and he added after a pause, “But then, we all are . . .”

Suffice it to add, Heidegger would already be included here, facing a dark mirror anthropomorphized as self-withdrawing, mourning in error for a different Greece.

Bibliography Butler, E. M. The Tyranny of Greece over Germany. Boston: Beacon Press, 1958. Ferris, David. “The Recall of Thought.” In his Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. “Wrathful Translation: On the Name of Shelley’s ‘Adonais’.” Romantic Circles, Special Issue in Memory of Thomas J. McCall. www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/mccall/ praxis.2014.mccall.ferris.html. Haverkamp, Anselm. “Error in Mourning – A Crux in Hölderlin: ‘dem gleich fehlet die Trauer’ (Mnemosyne).” Yale French Studies, no. 69 (1985): 238–53. Hölderlin, Friedrich. “Patmos 11–12.” Translated by Michael Hamburger. In Friedrich Hölderlin: Poems and Fragments. London: Anvil Press Poetry, 2007. “Remarks on Oedipus.” Translated and edited by Thomas Pfau. In Friedrich Hölderlin: Essays and Letters on Theory. Albany: SUNY Press, 1988. Warminski, Andrzej. “Chapter 2, Hölderlin in France.” In his Readings in Interpretation: Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Heidegger, Index of Works

As well as being linked to their respective English translations, references to Heidegger’s works are also indexed throughout this book to the standard German edition of Heidegger’s complete works, the Gesamtausgabe edited by Vittorio Klostermann. The first page number refers to the Gesamtausgabe, while the second corresponds to the translation. For instance, a citation reading GA2: 240/225 refers to a page occurring in volume II of the Gesamtausgabe on page 240, and on page 225 of the English translation produced by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. In cases where material from one volume of the Gesamtausgabe exists in two or more English translations, an abbreviation is included to specify the relevant one. •

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GA2: Sein und Zeit Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. GA4: Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung. 1936–68 Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry. Translated by Keith Hoeller. Amherst: Humanity Books, 2000. GA5: Holzwege Off the Beaten Path. Translated by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. OWA: “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In Basic Writings, translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: HarperCollins, 1977. GA6.1: Nietzsche, vols. I and II Nietzsche: Volumes One and Two. Translated by David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991. GA7: Vorträge und Aufsätze EGT: Early Greek Thinking. Translated by David Farrell Krell and F. A. Capuzzi. New York: HarperCollins, 1984. 359

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PMD: “. . .Poetically Man Dwells. . .” In Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. QT: “The Question concerning Technology.” In Basic Writings, translated by William Lovitt and David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993. SR: “Science and Reflection.” In The Question concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated by William Lovitt. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. GA8: Was heisst Denken? What Is Called Thinking? Translated by Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray. New York: Harper & Row, 1968. GA9: Wegmarken Pathmarks. Edited by William McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. LH: “Letter on Humanism.” In Basic Writings, translated by Frank A. Capuzzi and J. Glenn Gray. New York: Harper & Row, 1993. GA11: Indentität und Differenz (1955–57) Edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 2006. GA12: Unterwegs zur Sprache On the Way to Language. Translated by Peter D. Hertz. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. WL: “The Way to Language.” In Basic Writings, translated by David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993. GA13: Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens Discourse on Thinking. Translated by John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. GA14: Zur Sache des Denkens EP: “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking.” In Basic Writings, translated by Joan Stambaugh. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993. GA15: Seminare. 1951–73 Four Seminars. Translated by Andrew J. Mitchell and François Raffoul. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. HS: Heraclitus Seminar. Translated by Charles H. Seibert. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1979. GA16: Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges. 1910–76 Discourse on Thinking. Translated by John Anderson and Hans Freund. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.

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GA18: Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy. Translated by Robert D. Metcalf and Mark B. Tanzer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. GA20: Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs History of the Concept of Time. Translated by Theodore Kisiel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. GA24: Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie Edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 1975; lecture course, summer 1927. GA39: Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein” Hölderlin’s Hymns “Germania” and “The Rhine.” Translated by William McNeill and Julia Ireland. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. GA40: Einführung in die Metaphysik An Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959. GA53: Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister” Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister.” Translated by William McNeill and Julia Davis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. GA54: Parmenides Parmenides. Translated by André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. GA56/57 (1999): Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie GA58 (1993): Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (1919–20) Edited by Hans-Helmut Gander, 1992. GA59: Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks Phenomenology of Intuition and Expression. Translated by Tracy Colony. London: Bloomsbury (Continuum), 2010. GA61 (1994): Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles. Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung Edited by Walter Bröcker and Käte Bröcker-Oltmanns, 1985. GA63 (1995): Ontologie (Hermeneutik der Faktizität) Edited by Käte Bröcker-Oltmanns, 1988. GA64: Der Begriff der Zeit Edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 2004. GA65: Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) Edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 1989.

362

heidegger, index of works

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Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event). Translated by Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. GA66: Besinnung Edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 1997; notes, 1938–39. Mindfulness. Translated by Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary. New York: Continuum, 2006. GA67: Metaphysick und Nihilism: 1. Die Überwindung der Metaphysik; 2. Das Wesen des Nihilismus Edited by Hans-Joachim Friedrich, 1999. GA69: Die Geschichte des Seyns Edited by Peter Trawny, 1998. The History of Beyng. Translated by Jeffrey Powell and William McNeill. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. GA70: Über den Anfang: 1. Die Geschichte des Seyns (1938–40); 2. Aus der Geschichte des Seyns (1939–40) Edited by Paola-Ludovika Coriando, 2005. GA71: Das Ereignis Edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 2009. GA72: Die Stege des Anfangs Edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (forthcoming); notes from 1944. GA73: Zum Ereignis-Denken Edited by Peter Trawny, two volumes, 2013. GA74: Zum Wesen der Sprache und Zur Frage nach der Kunst Edited by Thomas Regehly, 2010. GA75: Zu Hölderlin – Griechenlandreisen Edited by Curd Ochwadt, 2000. Sojourns: The Journey to Greece. Translated by John-Pantaleimon Manoussakis. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. GA80.1/.2: Vorträge (Teil 1: 1915–32) Edited by Hartmut Tietjen (forthcoming). GA82: Zu eigenen Veröffentlichungen GA89: Zollikoner Seminare GA90: Zu Ernst Jünger Edited by Peter Trawny, 2004. GA94: Überlegungen II–VI (Schwarze Hefte) Edited by Peter Trawny, 2014.

heidegger, index of works

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363

Ponderings II–VI: Black Notebooks 1931–1938. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. GA95: Überlegungen VII–XI (Schwarze Hefte 1938–39) Edited by Peter Trawny, 2014. GA96 (2014): Überlegungen XII–XV (Schwarze Hefte 1939–41) Edited by Peter Trawny, 2014. GA97: Anmerkungen I–V (Schwarze Hefte) GA98 (2018): Anmerkungen VI–IX (Schwarze Hefte 1948–49 – 1951)

General Index

ABC of Relativity (Russell), 70 Abgeschiedenheit (apartness), 202, 207–8, 210 absence, 6, 42, 48, 116, 179, 227, 231, 241, 263, 267, 332 absolute, the, 262 Abwesen (absencing), 134–35 abyss, the, 11, 104, 190–91, 253, 263–64, 270–71, 275, 305 Adorno, Theodor W., 28, 160, 198n27, 261, 300 aestheticism, 314–15 aesthetics barbarism and, 314–15 national, 100 play and, 52–53 technology and, 101 Aichinger, Isle, 220 Alfano, Mark, 80 Allen, William, 88–89 alterity, 10–11, 248 Altieri, Charles, 198n27 Amben, Giorgio, 86n12 Americanism, 152n5 Aminadab (Blanchot), 259 Ancient Greece, 319–20, 334 Ancient Greek theatre, 8 “Andenken,” (Hölderlin), 51, 254, 256, 263, 351 Andenken (remembrance), 18, 223, 231, 235, 249, 254, 351 Andersch, Alfred, 218, 221 anthropocentrism, 11, 274 Antigone (Sophocles), 8–9, 130–31, 136, 141–47, 150, 157–70 death in, 144–46, 163, 167 ethos and, 139 hearth in, 145, 165, 168–70 Heidegger’s departure from traditional readings of, 158–59 hermeneutical circle and, 131–32 as poiesis itself, 136–37 ˇ

364

Anwesen (presencing), 134–35, 299 Antwortlosigkeit (answerlessness), 225 anxiety, 86–87 Arendt, Hannah, 5, 51, 54–55, 159, 216–17, 278 correspondence with Heidegger, 54–61, 69, 73, 278 poetry of, 57 reading of The Magic Mountain, 56–59, 61, 74–75 Aristotle, 124–28, 175 metaphysics of, 136–38, 151 theory of kartharsis, 153 on tragedy, 139–40 Arp, Hans, 220 art alethic character of, 103 autonomous, 53 the beautiful and, 101 becoming of, 106 creation of, 107 equipmentality of, 91–94 Ereignis as, 31 as in essence Dichtung, 255 poietic essence of, 100 revealing and concealing of Being and, 4 riddle of, 3–4 Stimmung of, 32 technology and, 102 truth and, 30, 103, 106, 108 “As on a Holiday” (Hölderlin), 264–65, 269 Asimov, Isaac, 75 “At the Source of the Danube” (Hölderlin), 267 Atemwende (Celan), 230 Attridge, Derek, 264n30 attunement, 33–34, 42, 49–50, 139n16, 187, 245, 249, 289–90, 302. See also Befindlichkeit (attunement in relation to the world); Stimmung (tone/disposition); Zeitgefuhl (historical attunement)

general index Auschwitz, 28, 169, 228 Auseinandersetzung, 19, 102, 125n6 autonomy, aesthetic, 53 Badiou, Alain, 81 Bachman, Ingeborg, 218, 220–21 Bambach, C. R., 151n2, 174n25, 221n17 barbarism, 215, 301, 304, 306–9, 311 aestheticism and, 314–15 Basic Problems in Phenomenology (Heidegger), 68 Bataille, Georges, 264–65, 269 Bateson, Gregory, 196–97n26 Baudelaire, Charles, 17 Baumann, Gerhart, 230–31 Beaufret, Jean, 220, 256–57 Befindlichkeit (attunement in relation to the world), 63, 224, 226, 238, 286 Being absencing of, 147 anthropocentric hierarchy of, 273–74 art as revealing and concealing of, 4 as becoming, 156 as being present, 126 calling forth poetic thinking and, 37 co-belonging with time, 22 concealment of, 16 culture and, 302 Dasein belonging to, 290 disclosure of in Greek tragedy, 152 as Ereignis, 137–38 falling away from, 297 forgetfulness of the meaning of, 18 gift of, 16 history of, 15–16, 255, 268–70, 274, 288, 299 history of metaphysics and, 18 history of the truth of, 20–22, 26–27 language as house of, 264 meaning of in Greek metaphysics, 126 myth of, 313–14 as the name of the holy, 25 necessity of, 289 and non-being, 162 non-totalitarian appearance of, 160, 165 Nothingness and, 298 ontology of the history of, 255 own-most essence of, 15–16, 21 play of presencing and absencing in, 135, 137–39, 145 poetization of, 134, 136–37, 145 poetry and, 4 projective sending of, 32 question concerning technology and, 82 revelation of, 308 river of, 299 saying of, 16

365

secret of, 17 as self-eclipsing dwelling place, 140 thinking of, 5, 15, 88 thinking of in poetry, 125–26 thinking the history of, 17 topography of, 46–48 tragedy of, 314 the tragic and, 153 truth of, 323 unhomeliness of, 135–37 word of, 27 Being and Time (Heidegger) Blanchot’s reading of, 258, 264, 274 the broken tool and, 7–8, 85, 96 call of conscience and, 226 Celan’s reading of, 220 criticism of Bergson in, 70 critique of das Man in, 60 Dasein and, 55, 69, 125, 224, 246 equipmentality in, 86, 88 existentialia in, 295 foundational question of philosophy and, 16 Heidegger’s reappraisal of, 75 history of Being and, 299 human being and, 103 language and, 90–91 The Magic Mountain and, 51, 56, 58–61 ontological difference and, 166 poetry in, 88–89 problem of description and, 319–21 repetition in, 245 return to ontology in, 82 “Schliere” as ethical response to, 247 Stimmung and, 104 Zergliederung in, 61–62 being-historical problem, 204–5 Beistegui, Carlos de, 95 Benjamin, Walter, 243, 261 Bergson, Henri, 69–70, 72–75, 294 Bernard of Clairvaux, 60 Besinnung (meditative thought), 30, 41–42, 45, 50, 187 Dichten resounding in, 46 Ereignis and, 40 new senses of thinking and, 41 as an otherwise to thinking, 43 as preparatory thinking, 37–38 stillness and, 35–36 Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Mann), 281–82, 292 Bindungen (bonds), 284–85, 290, 298 Black Notebooks (Heidegger) anti-culturalism and, 299, 302, 307, 312 Bindung and, 298 conservative revolution and, 288 Heidegger’s politics and, 6, 217

366

general index

Black Notebooks (Heidegger) (cont.) history of Being and, 314 Hölderlin and, 255 nature and, 89–90 rejection of modernity in, 287, 315 scholarly reception of, 99, 191 responses to the war and, 227–29 Blanchot, Maurice, 11, 78, 220, 229, 258–71, 273–75 “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry” and, 260 Blattner, William, 63n21 Bodmershof, Imma von, 264n31 Böhlendorff letter (Hölderlin), 244 Böll, Heinrich, 218, 221 Borutin, S. N. von, 195n23 Boss, Medard, 220 Braque, Medard, 220 Brasillach, Chaim, 310–12 Brasillach, Robert, 262n25 “Bread and Wine” (Hölderlin), 254, 260 Breisacher, Chaim, 310–13 Bremen lecture (Celan), 219, 223–25, 243 Breuer, Stefan, 279 Brogan, W. A., 126–27n9 broken tool, the, 7–8, 82–85, 87–88, 91–92, 96 Bru, Sascha, 198n27 Bruck, Moller von den, 280n6, 280–81n9 Buber, Martin, 223 “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” (Heidegger), 7, 117, 302 Bultmann, Rudolf, 220 Buonomano, Dean, 70 Burckhardt, Carl J., 285n32 Burke, Edmund, 293 Butler, E. M., 336n2 Butler, Judith, 159n12, 196–97n26 Byatt, A. S., 51 caesura, 231, 234, 243–44, 357 Canales, Jimena, 56, 63n31 Canetti, Elias, 27n14 Carroll, Sean, 70 Cassirer, Ernst, 69, 70n32 Castorp, Hans, 56–57, 60–61, 63, 65–68, 70–71, 74–75 Cavarero, Adriana, 159n12, 177n26 Celan, Paul, 99 Bremen lecture, 219, 223–25, 243 engagement with Heidegger, 10 on ethicality of the poem, 247–48 ethics as abyssal and, 11 Heidegger on language and, 222–24, 231 Heidegger’s influence on poetry of, 231–32 Meridian speech, 223, 230, 239–42, 246–49

the Other’s alterity and, 248 poetological ethos of, 225 poetology of silence, 237 reading of Heidegger, 220–21, 238–39 relationship with Heidegger, 217–19, 227, 230–34 “Shliere,” 233–46 “Celebration of Peace” (Hölderlin), 260 chaos, 121–22 Char, René, 219–20, 231, 263 character, human, 127–28 Chauchat, Claudia, 58, 65–67 Clauss, James J., 173n22 closure, 3, 99, 275 Cohen, Joseph, 22nn8–9, 23n10 The Colossus of Maroussi (Miller), 6, 325–26, 330–31, 334 Greek light in, 327–29 “The Concept of Time” (Heidegger), 70 conscience, call of, 62–64, 224, 226 Dasein and, 224 conservative revolution, 279–82, 305 critique of in Doctor Faustus, 292, 305, 312 as dialectic of unreason, 305 Heidegger and, 285–98, 302 Heidegger’s support of National Socialism and, 290–91 Hofmannsthal on, 283–86, 288–90, 294, 298 Mann on, 280–82, 285, 291–94 Mann’s critique of, 303–15 Nietzsche on, 285, 304 politicization of, 282–85, 290 Constance School, 215 contemplation, 60, 198–99 contingency, experience of, 84–85 Contributions to Philosophy (Heidegger), 137, 300 Corbin, Henry, 260–62 Cornford, Francis M., 122–23n4 critical theory, 99 Crompton, C., 79n2 culture critique of in Doctor Faustus, 306–14 Heidegger on, 299–302, 309, 312 religion and, 311 cybernetics, 37, 39, 44 Das schwere Land (Demus), 221 “Das Wort,” (George), 109, 111, 116, 205n62 Dasein, 6, 19, 24–26, 64, 69–70, 90, 138, 238, 246, 278, 299, 314 belonging to of Being, 290 call of conscience and, 62 da of, 126, 224 deep structure of, 63 as homeless, 225

general index

projective sending of Being and, 32 re-energizing language and, 44 resounding in Besinnung, 46 as setting the pitch of thinking, 33 thinking as the end of philosophy and, 43 transformation of thinking and, 43 the way of art’s working and, 31–32 way of thinking, 42–43 Dichtung, 29–30, 42 art as, 255 end of philosophy and, 38 as Poesie, 30, 32 See also poetry Dickinson, Emily, 185 Die Bestimmung der Sache des Denkens (Heidegger), 29 Die Niemandsrose (Celan), 230 “Die Sprache” (Heidegger), 185–86, 189, 192, 197 “Die Sprache im Gedicht” (Heidegger), 185, 198, 201, 206 digital humanities, 78–81 Dilthey, Wilhem, 62, 231n35, 287, 294 “Diversity of the Structure of Human Language,” (Heidegger), 115 Doctor Faustus (Mann) critique of conservative revolution in, 292, 305, 312 critique of culture in, 306–14 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 280 drama, 147, 156, 161, 175 Dreyfus, Huburt L., 60n18 Duino Elegies (Rilke), 271–74 Duration and Simultaneity (Bergson), 69 Durrell, Lawrence, 325, 329–30 dwelling, human, 4, 7, 75, 99–100, 105–7, 117, 201, 205–6, 263, 302, 315, 337 poetic, 47 as proximity to Being, 257 dwelling place ethos as, 124–25, 128 of human being, 122–26, 135–36, 140, 145–46, 166, 201, 321 pain as, 193–94 ˇ

The Magic Mountain and, 74–75 in novels, 54 Oedipus Rex and, 156 ontological structure of, 85 own-most responsibility of, 26 as placeholder of nothingness, 297–98 problem of description and, 321 revelation of Being and, 308 self-alienation of, 295 social nature of human, 55 temporal structures of, 125 tool use and, 82–83 transformation of, 66 trust as ontological category and, 174 Dastur, Françoise, 204 Davis, Bret W., 161n15 de Beistegui, Miguel, 89, 161n4 de Rocha, Antonio Casado, 107n6 de Sica, Vittorio, 56 death, 11 in Antigone, 144–46, 163, 167 good, 117 language and, 113 poetry and, 7 Death Sentence (Blanchot), 267 deinon (unheimlich, the uncanny), 129n12, 130–31, 134, 136, 144, 147, 170, 176–77 appearing of, 133 hermeneutical circle and, 132–33, 164–66 human experience of, 133 as unhomely, 133–34 Deleuze, Gilles, 191n16 Delthloff, Klaus, 285n32 Demus, Klaus, 221 “The Departure” (Hölderlin), 116n11 Der Denkweg Martin Heideggers (Pöggeler), 232 Der Sprache (Heidegger), 9 Derrida, Jacques, 78, 100, 144n22, 171n18, 188n8, 195–96n25, 201n44, 204n57, 205, 64–65, 264, 267, 269, 290, 291n42 description, mode of, 6 description, problem of, 319–25, 330–31 experience and, 323–25 Vorhandenheit and, 321 destiny of the German people, 95, 99, 249, 253, 261 historical, 134 Hölderlin’s poetry as a, 8, 347, 353, 357 human, 11, 18–19, 21–22, 52, 161, 256, 275 poet’s, 204 of revealing, 108 of the West, 257 Detsch, Richard, 201n43 Dichten, 30–31, 36–37, 49 Ereignis and, 48 formative force of, 45 as measure, 47–48

367

Eddington, Arthur, 69 Eich, Günter, 218, 220 Eichendorff, Joseph Freherr von, 254 Einhorn, Eric, 219 Einstein, Albert, 69–70, 72 Eisenreich, Brigitta, 222n20 either/or decision, 337–40, 343–44, 347 Elden, Stuart, 89n17 Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry (Heidegger), 115, 257, 337 Empfindung (sensibility), 199

368

general index

emotions, 145–46 “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” (Heidegger), 37, 39–40, 125–26n8, 187, 207–8n69 enframing, 18, 20, 23, 39 Engels, Friedrich, 295 Enlightenment, the, 256, 281, 285, 298, 305 equipmentality art and, 91–94 in Being and Time, 86, 88 of language, 85–86 Ereignis (event), 30–31, 55, 100, 102, 112–15, 117, 187, 225 Being as, 137–38 Besinnung and, 40 calling forth poetic thinking and, 37 Dichten and, 48 projective opening of, 34 as spatio-temporal singularity, 48 thinking resonant with, 33 trust as ontological category and, 174 truth as, 240–41 withdrawal as, 340–41 “The Essence of Language” (Heidegger), 103, 108–9, 115 ethics as abyssal, 11, 248 Socratic, 127 ethos, 126, 135, 140 Antigone and, 139 as dwelling place, 124–25, 128 habit and, 128, 135 of the human being, 135 metaphysical thinking of, 127, 135 preserving of, 128 in Sophocles, 136 Euripides, 9 “Existential Philosophy” (Tillich), 279 “Existentialism and Humanism” (Sartre), 256 experience of absence, 333 aesthetic, 44, 51 of Being, 106, 153 of contingency, 85 deconstruction of, 269 inner human, 72–73 of language, 102–3, 108–9, 111–12, 116, 188, 249 of the Never, 244 of non-experience, 269 problem of description and, 323–25 of time, 73–74 of trauma, 244 ˇ

Fadensonnen (Celan), 230 Farin, Ingo, 294n51

Faux Pas (Blanchot), 259 Feldauswahl (Hölderlin), 256 Feldweg (Heidegger), 220 Felski, Rita, 58–59 Fergers, Hans, 260n22 Ferris, David, 355n14, 357n16 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 294–95 Ficker, Ludwig von, 219 Foley, Helene, 178n28 form/content distinction, 44 Foucault, Michel, 78, 100, 160 Fóti, Véronique, 158n10 Frankfurt School, 160 Freitod (Celan), 218 French Revolution, 287–89 Fried, Gregory, 151n4 Freud, Sigmund, 60, 65 Fynsk, Christopher, 98n1, 101n4, 108–9n7, 114n10 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 220, 291 Gallagher, Shaun, 67n25 Gay Science (Nietzsche), 153 Geiman, Clare Pearson, 129n12 Gelassenheit (releasement), 35, 50, 115, 129n12, 161 Geologie (Lotze), 244 George, Stefan, 55, 109, 111, 116, 141, 231, 254, 261, 296n53 Gethman-Siefert, Annemarie, 150n1 “Germania” (Hölderlin), 51, 103, 257, 336 German language, 204–6 Germanity, 21, 25, 152, 154 Germany Ancient Greece and, 319–20, 334 destiny of, 95, 99, 249, 253, 261 postwar silence of, 214–18, 237 Gestalt switch, 63–64 Goebel, Gerhard, 17n2 Goethe, J. W., 143, 254, 261 Gold, M. K., 79n2 Golden Legend (Voragine), 264 Goll, Claire, 230 Gordon, Peter, 72 Grass, Günter, 218 Griechenland: Ein Buch aus dem Kriege (Kästner), 334 Grieshaber, Hap, 220 Grimm, Hans, 222 Grimm, Jacob, 237n46 Grimm, Wilhelm, 237n46 Gruppe 47, 218 Günther, Hans-Christian, 129n12 habit, 69, 128, 135 Hamacher, Werner, 98n1 Hamann, J. G., 190n12

general index Haraway, Donna, 68, 75 Harrison, Thomas, 200n39 Haverkamp, Anselm, 356n15 hearth in Antigone, 145, 165, 168–70 in Medea, 174 Hebel, Johann P., 222, 231 hedos (seat, abode), 122, 122–23n4, 124–25 Hegel, G. W. F., 106, 162, 165–66, 171n19 Heidegger, Martin on Americanism, 152n5 analysis of the Greek temple, 93–94 Ancient Greek theatre and, 8 anthropocentrism of, 11, 274 on Antigone, 130–31, 133–34, 136–43, 145–47, 157–70 Aristotelian metaphysics and, 162 aversion to the nomadic, 191 on barbarism, 308–9 blindness to the political, 291 call of conscience and, 226 conception of Greek poetry, 121 conservative revolution and, 285–98, 302 correspondence with Arendt, 54–61, 67, 69, 73, 278 on culture, 299–302, 309, 312 definition of metaphysics, 126 on dwelling, 315 engagement with Hölderlin on Greek tragedy, 150–52, 162, 170 Festschrift for, 220–21 on the French Revolution, 287–89 on George, 141 on the German Volk, 228–29 on Germany and Ancient Greece, 319–20, 334 in Greece, 321–25, 332–33 Greek thought and, 94 Greek tragedy and, 150–80 Heraclitus Seminar, 336 on Hölderlin, 52, 54–55, 69, 94, 98–101, 103–6, 110n9, 112, 116n11, 125n6, 141, 254, 261 identity project of, 152, 154 on Incipit Tradoedia, 153–54 on the Jews, 227–29 lack of engagement with Medea, 172, 178 language-construction of, 222–24 later aesthetics of, 51–53 lectures on Hölderlin, 231, 336–39, 354–55 on machination, 89, 227–28, 230, 289–90, 301, 309 Mann and, 291–98 manner of writing, 36, 44–45 on “Mnemosyne,” 347–57 National Socialism and, 222, 227–29, 232, 239, 261, 289, 300, 302

369

on nationalism, 315 Nazism and, 89, 226, 229 on Oedipus Rex, 155–57 ontologized readings of Greek tragedy, 174 on the Other, 229–30 on pain, 193–95, 197–202 phenomenology of, 87 phenomenology of the inapparent and, 331–33 phenomenology of life of, 294–96 on philology, 308 playing with shadows, 153–54 playing with shadows in Antigone, 157–70 playing with shadows in Oedipus Rex, 155–57 plurality of, 1–2 on the political, 159–60 political uses of Hölderlin’s poetry, 256–57 politics of, 6, 151 postwar silence of, 217, 227–29, 232 on the problem of description, 320–25, 330–31 on psychoanalysis, 64 radicality of, 2, 73 Rectorial Address, 221, 253 on reading, 54–55, 58–59, 68 reading of Celan, 219, 230 reading of The Colossus of Maroussi, 325–30, 333, 335 reading of The Magic Mountain, 56–68, 72–75, 278 reading of Trakl, 9–10, 53, 58, 68, 185–86, 188, 192–95, 198–200, 202, 204, 208–11 reception of writing on poetry, 78–79 relationship with Celan, 217–18, 227, 230–34 rejection of modernity, 286–87, 297–98, 315 on Rilke, 141 Roman lecture, 270 science and, 74 on silence, 226 on technology, 90, 101 on time, 69–70, 247 on the tragic, 152–53 tribute to Rilke, 253–54, 256, 270–73, 275 on truth, 238, 240–41, 246 turn to poetry, 99–105, 112 Van Gogh’s representation and, 92–93 on withdrawal, 339–46, 348, 353 Zähringen seminar, 331–32 Heidegger: Denker in dürftiger Zeit (Löwith), 221 Heimat (home), 204, 222, 247 Heisenberg, Werner, 220 HeiÍen, 338

370

general index

Held, Klaus, 291n43 Hellingrath, Norbert von, 265 Heraclitus, 107, 196–97n26, 336 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 254 hermeneutical circle, 87, 131–33, 164–66, 266 Hertz, Peter, 108n7 Herzog, James M., 65n23 Hesiod, 121–24 Hill, Leslie, 261n24 Hirsch, Rudolf, 235 history meaning of Being and, 26 poetic thinking about, 27 “History of Being,” (Heidegger), 15, 17–18 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 261 Hoffmeister, Johannes, 260n22 Hofmansthal, Hugo von conservative revolution and, 283–86, 288–90, 294, 298 influence of Nietzsche on, 282–85 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 11, 18 “Andenken,” 51, 254, 256, 263, 351 on Antigone, 129–30 “As on a Holiday,” 264–65, 269 “At the Source of the Danube,” 267 Böhlendorff letter, 244 “Bread and Wine,” 254, 260 on caesura, 234 “Celebration of Peace,” 260 “The Departure,” 116n11 essence of truth and, 203 Feldauswahl, 256 the foreign in, 141 “Germania,” 51, 103, 257, 336 Heidegger on, 52, 54–55, 69, 94, 98–101, 103–6, 110n9, 112, 116n11, 125n6, 141, 254, 261 Heidegger’s engagement with on Greek tragedy, 150–52, 162, 170 Heidegger’s lectures on, 231, 336–39, 354–55 Heidegger’s reading of, 254–55, 261 humanism and, 256 “Hyperion,” 73, 308–9n78 “In Heavenly Blue,” 357–58 influence of on Heidegger, 4, 6–8, 20–22, 73, 84–95, 112, 226, 249 “The Ister,” 105, 129, 152n5, 158, 172n21, 337 “The Journey,” 337–38 meta-historical significance of poetry of, 254 “Mnemosyne,” 104–5, 245, 338–39, 347–57 nature and, 268 “Patmos,” 101, 341, 343, 349, 354 as the poet, 347–48

as poet of Germany, 254, 257, 262 as poet most attuned with Heidegger’s thought, 338, 347–57 “Poet’s Calling,” 116n11 “Remembrance: ‘Homecoming/To Kindred Ones,’” 254 “The Rhine,” 51, 103–4, 336 “Sophokles,” 104 “The Tavern,” 267 “The Walk in the Country,” 267 on withdrawal, 339–41 “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry” (Heidegger), 203, 254, 260–61 “Hölderlin’s Hymn: ‘As When on a Holiday . . .” (Heidegger), 254 Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister” (Heidegger), 129, 150, 158, 164 Hölderlin’s Hymns “Germania” and “The Rhein” (Heidegger), 103 holy, the, 265, 267–68, 270 poet naming of, 15, 25, 275 Holzwege (Heidegger), 220 homely, the in Antigone, 134, 154, 162–63, 166–67, 171 in Medea, 172–73, 175, 179 Homolka, W., 217n7 Hooked: Art and Attachment (Felski), 58–59 Horkheimer, Max, 300 Hoyle, Arthur, 325 Human, All Too Human (Nietzsche), 304 human being, 9–10 own-most historical responsibility of, 23 humanism, 109, 124, 136, 256 Humboldt, Alexander von, 115, 190n12 Hume, David, 293 Husserl, Edmund, 69, 258, 321n3, 332 Hyland, Drew A., 122–23n4 “Hyperion” (Hölderlin), 73, 308–9n78 idealism, German, 162 “Ideas concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology” (Dilthey), 62 immediacy, 3 “In Heavenly Blue” (Hölderlin), 357–58 inapparent, phenomenology of, 6–7, 319, 331–33 Incipit Tradoedia (Nietzsche), 153 Introduction to Metaphysics (Heidegger), 100, 129n12, 150, 155, 158, 220, 238–39 Irigaray, Luce, 159n12 “Is Mallarmé’s Poetry Obscure?” (Blanchot), 259 “The Ister” (Hölderlin), 105, 129, 152n5, 158, 172n21, 337 Janik, Allan, 195n23 Jauss, Hans-Robert, 215–16, 218

general index Jemeinigkeit, 26 Jennett, Matthew, 325n6 Jens, Walter, 220, 234n41 Jetztzeit (now-time), 243 Johnston, Sarah Iles, 173n22 “The Journey” (Hölderlin), 337–38 Jung, Carl, 60, 62 Jung, Edgar, 280n7 Jünger, Ernst, 219–20, 280n7, 319–21 Jünger, Friedrich-Georg, 219–20 Kasimis, Demetra, 173n24 Kästner, Erich, 56, 219 Kästner, Erhart, 332–34 katharsis, 153 Katsimbalis, George, 326 Kehre (turn), 17, 26, 55, 103, 125–26 Kierkegaard, Søren, 162, 166 Kiesel, Helmuth, 279n4 “Kindheit” (Trakl), 211 Kirkland, Sean D., 125–26n8, 126n9, 137n14, 140n17 Klein, L. F., 79n2 Kleinberg-Levin, David, 36 Kleist, Heinrich von, 254 Klemperer, Viktor, 225 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 254 Kluge, Alexander, 173n23 Kraus, Karl, 195n23, 222 Krell, David, 121n2, 122n3, 188n8, 201n46, 205n60 Kriek, Ernst, 280–81n9 Kröger, Tonio, 292, 294 Krokowski, Dr., 60–61, 65 Kühn, Walter, 221n15 La Nausée (Sartre), 258 La Rochelle, Pierre Drieu, 262 Lacan, Jacques, 100 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 89n17, 98n1, 227, 232, 233nn39–40, 291n42 Lagerkvist, A., 79n2 Landsberg, Ludwig, 285n32 language as attunement of thinking, 32–33 being on the way to, 190 bringing the being of human being to, 186–87 as calculative, 3–4, 9, 40, 44 death and, 113–14 Dichten as re-energizing of, 44 as double articulation, 114n10 equipmentality of, 85–86 essence of, 90, 103, 110–11, 113, 116, 189–91, 226 event of, 241 as Heimat, 204–6

371

as the house of being, 109, 264 human being and, 188 instrumentality of, 3–4, 9 lack in, 116 landscape and, 223 musical qualities of, 33 natural, 90, 116 own-most essence of, 21 paths of reflection and, 109 perils of poetic, 203 philosophical reflection on, 109–10 of poetry as creative, 261 and poetry as encounter of language as, 53 poetry as remaking of, 95 as primary for thought, 90–91 as ready-to-hand, 85 relation to poetry, 109 representations of, 188–89 saying and, 115 speaking of, 190–91 as thinking experience, 110 thought and, 117 as tool, 85 transformation of our relation to, 108 trust as ontological category and, 174 truth of being and, 25 usage of, 108, 116 as the way Heidegger’s thinking moves, 45 “Language in the Poem” (Heidegger), 35 Latour, Bruno, 75 Le Guin, Ursula, 75 Lenz, Siegried, 218 “Letter on Humanism” (Heidegger), 109–10, 124, 136, 256 Levenberg, Lewis, 80 Leverkühn, Adrian, 306–10 Levinas, Emmanuel, 227, 258, 264 Lichtzwang (Celan), 230 life Heidegger’s phenomenology of, 294–96 Mann’s apologia on, 281, 285, 292–94, 297–98 spirit and, 281–82, 285, 292–94, 296, 298 The Life of the Mind (Arendt), 55 literature as distinct from poetry, 17 the fundamental question and, 15 in Heidegger’s topology, 15 poetry and, 1–2 as setting, 2 “Logic as the Question concerning the Essence of Language” (Heidegger), 255 Logical Investigation (Husserl), 332 logos, 109n8, 127, 196, 349–50 Lotze, Franz, 237n45, 244 Löwith, Karl, 221, 291n41

372

general index

Luther, Martin, 304–5 Lyotard, Jean-François, 226–27 Macdonald, Iain, 160n13 machination, 89, 227–28, 230, 289–90, 301, 309 The Magic Mountain (Mann), 51, 54–55 call of conscience and, 63 explorations of time in, 69–71 Heidegger and Arendt’s reading of, 56–59, 61, 74–75 Heidegger’s reading of, 59–68, 72–75, 278 psychoanalysis and, 60–62, 64–65 psychological observation and, 72 recontextualizing of thinking in, 74 social comedy and, 72 technology and, 71–72 traces of in Being and Time, 59–61 Magrini, James M., 51n2 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 259, 261–63, 271 “Mallarmé and the Art of the Novel” (Blanchot), 259–60 Malpas, Jeff, 46n29, 186n5, 315n103 Mann, Thomas, 5–6, 51, 54, 56–59, 62 apologia on life, 281, 285, 292–94, 297–98 on conservative revolution, 280–82, 285, 291–94 critique of conservative revolution, 303–15 dislike of Heidegger, 279 Heidegger and, 291–98 interest in time, 69–73 Nietzsche’s critique of nihilism and, 293, 298 on psychoanalysis, 64–65 on time, 278 See also The Magic Mountain (Mann) Marx, Karl, 166, 295 Maurras, Charles, 262n25 Mayer, Wilhelm, 334 McLary, Laura A., 201n47 McNeill, William, 125nn5–6, 139n16, 321n2 Medea (Euripides), 9, 170–80 hearth in, 174 lack of engagement with by Heidegger, 172, 178 ontologization of Medea in, 172–79 meditation, 112–13 Meister Eckhart, 129n12, 261 melos, 34–35 Meridian speech (Celan), 223, 230, 239–42, 246–49 metaphysics, 16, 18–23, 126 Antigone and, 162 calculative, 151 completion of, 38 ethos and, 127, 135

overcoming of, 3, 5 the philosophical and, 2–5 of subjectivity, 100, 106, 115 Miller, Henry, 6–7, 319, 325–32, 334–35 Miller, Mitchell, 122–23n4 Mindfulness (Heidegger), 153 Mitchell, Andrew J., 52n3, 122n3, 230n30, 302n61 Miyazaki, Hayao, 56 “Mnemosyne” (Hölderlin), 104–5, 245, 338–39, 347–57 Mohler, Armin, 291n42 Moore, Ian Alexander, 129n12 Morgan, Ben, 67n25 Mörike, Eduard, 231, 254 The Most High (Blanchot), 258 Munier, Roger, 232 Munroe, Alice, 56 Murakami, Haruki, 56 Murray, Michael, 203n54 Musil, Robert, 222 myth, turn to, 311–13 Myth of the Twentieth Century (Rosenberg), 314 mythos, 349–50 Naas, Michael, 122–23n4 Nachlese zu Heidegger (Schneeberger), 221 National Socialism, 99, 129n12, 242, 255, 282, 311 Heidegger and, 222, 227–29, 232, 239, 261, 289, 300, 302 nationalism, 257, 303, 315 Nazism, 89, 99, 160 German intellectuals and, 214–15, 312 Heidegger and, 89, 226, 229 See also National Socialism negation, 87, 165 Neilson, Tai, 80 Neske, Günther, 219–21, 234 Nichomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 125n6, 126–28, 135 Nichtigkeit, 25 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 18–19, 21, 107, 261, 270, 292, 294 aestheticism of, 298 conservative revolution and, 285, 304 critique of nihilism, 293 Heidegger’s engagement with on Greek tragedy, 150–51 influence on Hofmannsthal, 282–85 as modern apologist of life, 281 will to power, 21, 153 nihilism, 19, 21, 293 as forgetfulness of the meaning of Being, 18 “Not,” the, 100

ˇ

general index

pain, 193–95, 197–202 Parmenides, 105 pathos, 193–94, 199 “Patmos” (Hölderlin), 101, 341, 343, 349, 354 Paul, Jean, 261 Pendergast, Christopher, 55 Phenomenology of Spirit (Heidegger), 22n8 philosophical, the abyssal grounding of, 3–4 alignment with thinking, 2 instrumentality of language and, 3 philosophy computational drift of, 39, 44 culture and, 300–1

ˇ

Oedipus Rex (Sophocles), 150, 155–57 Being as becoming and, 156 Dasein and, 156 truth and, 155–57 “Of the German Republic” (Mann), 303 Olender, Maurice, 214–15 Olive Groves, Mountain Vineyards (Kästner), 333 On the Aesthetic Education of Man (Schiller), 51–52 On the Essence of Ground (Heidegger), 221 “On the Essence of Truth” (Heidegger), 155n8 “On the Problem of Empathy” (Stein), 247 On the Way to Language (Heidegger), 108, 112–15 onto-theology, 16, 18–23 Open, the, 266–67, 271 Rilke on, 272–73, 275 “The Origin of the Work of Art” (Heidegger), 3, 30–32, 47, 51, 91, 103, 106, 112, 3, 17, 255, 267, 269, 337–39, 347 Ort (place), 46–48, 185, 187, 202, 205–7, 223 movedness of, 205 Other, the, 244 alterity of, 248 “Schliere” (Celan) and, 247–48 suffering of, 229–30 Ott, Hugo, 2, 30, 30 Ottmann, Henning, 279n5

end of, 38–40, 43 foundational question of, 16 history of metaphysics and, 2–3 immediacy and, 3 presence and, 3 phronein, 145–46 phronesis (practical wisdom), 127 Piéron, Henri, 72 place, 9–10 placeless, 208 as site of the essence of language, 187 Plato, 153, 176 metaphysics of, 125–27, 151 plurality of worlds, 5 pluriverse, 10 Podewils, Clemens von, 219–20 poesis, 21–22, 27–28, 49 co-belonging with thinking, 27 poet, the existence of as premonition of himself, 269–70 in time of distress, 11, 254, 271, 275 poetical, the as language of unthought, 20 as novel beginning for thinking, 20–21 saying and, 17–18 Poetics (Aristotle), 139 poetry the absolute and, 262 the abyss and, 253 act of naming and, 337–42, 346–47, 349 ambiguousness of language of, 210 in Being and Time, 88–89 co-belonging with thinking, 22 continual possibilities of, 8 death and, 7 in digital humanities, 78–81 as distinct from literature, 17 as dwelling place, 124, 191 encounter of language as language in, 53 language of as creative, 261 literature and, 1–2 meaning of being human and, 189 metahistorical function of, 11, 254, 263, 265, 268, 270 myth and, 313 as the naming of being, 52 philosophical thinking and, 7 preservation of ethos and, 125 preservation of hedos and, 125 as privileged form of human activity, 52 relation of language to, 109 as remaking of language, 95 as resistance to technology, 82, 96, 166 as the striving toward language, 189 technical treatment of, 78–81 thinking and, 29, 67, 354 ˇ

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Rilke), 68, 271, 273–74 nothingness, 224, 269, 275 Dasein as placeholder for, 297–98 Novalis, 115, 254, 261 novels form of, 6 Dasein in, 54 Nowell-Smith, David, 99n2 Nussbaum, Martha C., 145n23 “Ode to Man” (Antigone) (Sophocles), 130–31, 133–34, 138–45, 150, 158, 168

373

374

general index

poetry (cont.) thinking Being and, 125–26 thinking by way of, 102 thinking the propriety of human being and, 4 thought and, 110–11 in time of distress, 11 truth of human being and, 4 work of, 10 “Poet’s Calling” (Hölderlin), 116n11 Pöggeler, Otto, 230, 232–33 poiesis, 106 as a Hervorbringen, 136 Technik and, 102 polis (city-state), 135 political, the, 159–60 Politics (Aristotle), 128 Prendergast, Christopher, 55n11 presence, 3, 6, 42, 48, 116, 179, 227, 231, 241, 263, 267, 33 Price, Leah, 54n7 The Principle of Reason (Heidegger), 241 “The Provenance of Art and the Destination of Thought” (Heidegger), 37 Protestant Reformation, 304–5 psychoanalysis Heidegger on, 64 The Magic Mountain and, 60–62, 64–65 Psychological Types (Jung), 62 quasi-transcendental, the, 186, 210 “The Question concerning Technology” (Heidegger), 101, 103, 108 Rabkin, Leslie Y., 60n19 Race and Erudition (Olender), 214–15 recognition, moment of, 140 reading as encountering the world, 53 Heidegger on, 54–55, 58–59 Réflexions sur la violence (Sorel), 306, 313 “Remembrance: ‘Homecoming/To Kindred Ones’” (Hölderlin), 254 “Report from Germany” (Arendt), 216 Republic (Plato), 153, 170–71 Research Methods for the Digital Humanities (Levenberg, Neilson, and Rheams), 80 responsibility, 21 Rheam, David, 80 “The Rhine” (Hölderlin), 51, 103–4, 336 Richter, Gerhard, 207n67 Richter, Hans, 218 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 11, 68, 141, 231 invocation of nature by, 272–74 thematics of death and dying of, 273–74 tribute to by Heidegger, 253–54, 256, 265, 270–73, 275

Rimbaud, Hans, 218 Rokotnitz, Naomi, 67n25 Rosenberg, Alfred, 314 Rosenstock, Bruce, 312–13n97 Roth, Joseph, 222 Rovan, Joseph, 264n31 “Runaround” (Asimov), 75 “Running Notes on Being and Time” (Heidegger), 321 “Russian Anthology” (Mann), 281 Russell, Bertrand, 70, 75 sacrifice, 21–25, 28 freedom of, 26 poetics of, 27 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 256, 258 sayable, the, 4 saying language appropriated to, 115 modes of, 111–12 relation to thinking, 111–13 Schadewaldt, Wolfgang, 130n13, 220 Schelling, F. W. J., 55 Schiller, J. C. F., 51–53, 254 “Schliere” (Celan), 217, 233–37, 243, 246 as demand on Heidegger, 244, 249 Heideggerian notes in, 238–42, 244–47, 249 Jetztzeit and, 243 the Other and, 247–48 Schmidt, Dennis, 150n1, 247n57, 249–50 Schmitt, Carl, 176 Schneeberger, Guido, 220n13, 221 Scholom, Gershom, 222 Schufreider, Gregory, 36n13, 46n29 Schwieler, Elias, 51n2 “Science and Reflection” (Heidegger), 37 Sebald, W. G., 214 seekers, revolutionary, 284–85, 288, 294, 298 self-alienation, 295 Settembrini, Luigi, 59 Sheehan, Thomas, 68n28 Shepherdson, Charles, 154n6 Shoah, 214, 227, 229, 233, 239 “Sketch for a Novel” (Blanchot), 258 Simmel, Georg, 294 Sinclair, Elias, 51n2 “Shliere” (Celan), 10 signs, 85 man as, 346–48 silence Andenken and, 235 Heidegger on, 226 of Heidegger, 217, 227–29, 232 poetology of, 237 of postwar Germany, 214–18, 237 Sinclair, Mark, 85–86 Smith, Steven B., 315n104

general index social conformity, 59–60 Söderbäck, Fanny, 159n12 Sojourns (Heidegger), 322–25 solitude, 177 Sonnets to Orpheus (Rilke), 270 Sophocles, 8–9, 124–26, 135 ethos in poetry of, 136 poetizing in excess of metaphysics, 127–35, 145 polis in, 135 tragic ontology of, 134, 138–39 “Sophokles” (Hölderlin), 104 Sorel, Georges, 306, 313 spirit, 199, 201, 308 life and, 281–82, 285, 292–94, 296, 298 “Sprachgitter” (Celan), 230, 234–35 Stanley, Matthew, 69n30 Stein, Edith, 247 Steiner, George, 142 stillness Besinnung and, 35–36 while as moment of, 49 Stimmung (tone/disposition), 32–34, 36–38, 48–50, 104, 107 strangeness, 9 stranger, the, 166, 179 Stunde Null (zero hour), 215, 218, 234 subjectivity, 100, 106, 115 Substance and Function and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (Cassirer), 69 Suglia, Joseph, 55 ˇ

Tanabe, Hajime, 220 Taft, Richard, 150n1 Taubes, Jacob, 311–12 “The Tavern” (Hölderlin), 267 Technik, 102–3, 109, 113, 115 poiesis and, 102 technology, 39 art and, 102 devastation of, 20–21, 96 essence of, 82 excesses of, 152 Heidegger on, 90, 101 in The Magic Mountain, 71–72 poetry and, 82 question concerning Being and, 82 Textgräber: Paul Celans geologische Lyrik (Werner), 245 Thaning, Morten S., 310n80 Theogony (Hesiod), 121–24 Thibaudet, Albert, 262n25 they-self, the, 64 thinking alignment with the philosophical, 2 of Being, 15, 88 Besinnung and new senses of, 41

375

calculative, 157 co-belonging with poesis, 27 co-belonging with poetry, 22 Dichten as way of, 42–43 essence of, 17 essential, 23–25 essential task of, 18, 20 from the heart, 146 the human, 187 language as attunement of, 32–33 language of, 45 novel beginning for, 20 the other, 17 other beginning of, 19, 21, 23 otherwise to, 42–44 place, 187, 209–10 the poetical and, 29 poetic, 37, 49, 102, 126 poetry and, 7, 33, 67, 354 preparatory, 37–38, 41–45, 47, 49–50 recontextualizing of in The Magic Mountain, 74 relation to saying, 111–13 resonant with the Ereignis, 33 the Sache of, 29 Stimmung and, 33–34, 36–38, 42, 49 tonality of, 33–34 the truth, 24 Thomas the Obscure (Blanchot), 259, 263, 268 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche), 153 Tillich, Paul, 279, 304–5 time co-belonging with Being, 22 Heidegger on, 247 Mann on, 278 philosophy of, 69–70, 72–73 “To the Agean Isles” (Heidegger), 332 Tobias, Rochelle, 247n54 “Todtnauberg” (Celan), 218, 221, 225, 232–33 tragedy, 134, 138–40 tragedy, Greek, 150–51, 153–57 disclosure of Being in, 152 tragic, the, 152 depths of Being and, 153 overcoming metaphysics and, 153 as playing with shadows, 153–80 Trakl, Georg “Die Sprache” and, 185–86, 189, Heidegger’s reading of, 9–10, 53, 58, 68, 192–95, 198–200, 202, 204, 208–11 Ort and, 185 Verklärung and, 201 transcendentalism, Kantian, 92 travel writing, 320–21 truth art and, 103, 106, 108 as Ereignis, 240–41

376

general index

truth (cont.) Greek understanding of, 323–25 Heidegger on, 238, 240, 246 letting happen of, 30–31 Oedipus Rex and, 155–57 own-most, 17 as unconcealment, 323–25 Tucker, Aaron, 79 unheimlich. See deinon (unheimlich, the uncanny) unhomely, the, 9 in Antigone, 133–35, 140, 144, 162, 165, 168–69 becoming homely in, 136–39, 143, 145, 147, 161 in Medea, 171, 173, 175–76, 179 unsayable, the, 4, 11, 15 unthinkable, the, 15 Unverborgenheit (unhiddenness), 267 Usiskin, Jana Millar, 79 Valega-Neu, D., 192n17, 205–6n63 Van Gogh, Vincent, 92–93 Verklärung (transfiguration), 201 Versammlung (gathering), 186–88, 194, 196–97n26, 201n44, 202–3, 206, 207n67 Voragine, Jacobus da, 264 Vorhandenheit (present-at-hand), 83–84, 87–88 “The Walk in the Country” (Hölderlin), 267 Wartenburg, Yorck von, 287 “The Way to Language” (Heidegger), 114n10 Wahrnehmung (taking as true), 238 Walser, Martin, 218 Warminski, Adrzej, 336n2 Watroba, Karolina, 56–57, 69 Weil, Simone, 165n16 Weimar Republic, 51, 57, 256, 280, 285, 294, 303

Weizsäcker, Carl-Friedrich von, 220 Werner, Uta, 225n25, 245 What Calls forth Thinking (Heidegger), 220 “What Does the Poem Think?” (Badiou), 81 What Is Called Thinking? (Heidegger), 33, 105, 339–40, 342–52 “What Is Metaphysics?” (Heidegger), 15, 23, 25, 220 Wheeler, Michael, 70, 74 “Wherefore poets?” (Heidegger), 254, 257 while, the, 49 Wiedemann, Barbara, 234n41, 235n42 Wild, Markus, 53 will to power, 21, 153, 308 Williams, Abigail, 53nn5–6 Williams, Raymond, 307n76 “A Winter Evening” (Trakl), 192–95 Winterreise (Schubert), 66, 68 Wissing, Paula, 227n28 withdrawal, 339–46, 348, 353 Wittgenstein, Ludwig von, 185n1, 195–96n25 Woolf, Virginia, 185 world, the already-yet-only-now character of, 84 as world, 86–87 worldhood of, 107 “The Written Word as the Spiritual Space of the Nation” (Hofmannsthal), 283 Zantke, Michael, 280n9 Zeitblom, Serenus, 306–8, 310–15 Zeitgefuhl (historical attunement), 286–90 Zergliederung (to dissect) in Being and Time, 61–62 as self-dissection, 62–64 Ziarek, Krzysztof, 48n33, 160n13 Ziemsen, Joachim, 62, 65, 71 Zolikon seminars, 6, 319 Zuhandenheit (ready-to-hand), 83–84, 88