Heidegger's Turn To Art: The Uses of Rhythm 9781350410046

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Heidegger’s Turn to Art

Also Available from Bloomsbury Heidegger's Style, Markus Weidler Heidegger and the Problem of Phenomena, Fredrik Westerlund The Poetic Imagination in Heidegger and Schelling, Christopher Yates

Heidegger’s Turn to Art The Uses of Rhythm Christopher Fynsk

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2024 Copyright © Christopher Fynsk, 2024 Christopher Fynsk has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Series design by Charlotte Daniels Cover image: Manuscript by Friedrich Hölderlin of “Der Abschied”, first version, page 1 (CC-PD / Wikicommons) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3504-1003-9 ePDF: 978-1-3504-1004-6 eBook: 978-1-3504-1005-3 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents The Rhythms of Usage

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Rhythmic Transport

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The Rhythmic Figure I. Heidegger’s Hölderlin Lectures of 1934–1935 II. The Use of the Earth: “The Origin of the Work of Art” III. Heidegger’s Lectures on “The Ister,” 1942

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Usage and Relation

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The Uses of Craft

Appendix: Aristotle’s Poetics, Hölderlin’s Remarks Part One: The Rhythmic Schema: Reading Aristotle from Hölderlin Part Two: Returning to Hölderlin with the Question of Rhythm and Catharsis In the Guise of a Conclusion Notes Abbreviations Index of Names

29 51 75 93 115 131 132 141 155 159 203 205

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This volume took its guiding impetus from a question rooted in an experience with art that I take as elemental (and common): Before a work that particularly strikes me, I sense the presence of a rhythm. This is hardly surprising with respect to artistic forms that unfold in time. Preeminent among these would be music, and my primal scene as regards my topic may have occurred there. But I have found that such an experience imposes itself no less in some forms of painting or sculpture, in images or standing figures. The question from which I started is thus a basic one: Does art, in general, have a rhythmic character? Is rhythm even the right term? And then in expanding inquiry: Does the presence of rhythm in art relate to what is known commonly in almost all spheres of life, be this in rhythms that are termed “natural” or ones that are more socially defined? These unfolding questions evidently require a form of fundamental philosophical inquiry bearing not only on art but also on the nature of rhythm. Needless to say, the project is immense. Philosophy has been preoccupied with the topic of rhythm since its beginning and as an essential part of its own prehistory. A treatise is called for, it would seem. But prior to any such undertaking, one must first determine what is meant by fundamental and what it means to reflect on a topic of this character—what ways are offered to a phenomenon that may be said to shape thought itself and cannot be taken simply as an object of reflection.1 For such introductory questions, which largely define the space in which this volume moves, I know of no text that offers better access than that of Martin Heidegger. Important approaches have been offered by other thinkers (Gilles Deleuze comes immediately to mind2), but I have not found, for my own course of reflection, quite the same measure as I do in Heidegger, by which I mean both a breadth and a form of hold (on thought). In Heidegger’s text, the problematic of rhythm gains a scope that carries, potentially, across the totality of the fields of knowledge and practice—the entirety of those fields in which the question of rhythm takes on rapidly growing importance.3 The insistence of this topic is evident in both the earlier and later works of Heidegger, though its explicit presence as a theme is not significant. One

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could almost say that its importance is actually conveyed through Heidegger’s reticence; Heidegger is openly reluctant even to use the term “rhythm” (or the Greek “rhuthmos”). It is suggested powerfully by his meditation on the temporal grounds of human practice (where we initially find reference to a notion of “Schwingung” that I will be defining) and in his accounts of the modalities of engagement with poetry and with art more generally, be this in creation or reception. But Heidegger shies from the word, even while hinting at the importance of what lies behind it and pointing to a relevant path for reflection that is informed by pre-Socratic thought and the work of poets in what Heidegger seeks to open to us as the era of Hölderlin. Moreover, following Heidegger into this question requires a work of interpretation that cannot be contained with respect to the immediate topic. To speak of an experience of rhythm, for example, requires engagement with the question of human receptivity (in its passive and active dimensions), and finally that of the relation of Being and human being in the relation Heidegger names der Brauch (“usage”; the infinitive “brauchen” can mean “to need” and “to use”)—a structure governing every level of human experience that Heidegger explores throughout his later thought, from the use of the human in Ereignis for the advent of language through the ontic relations engaged in all human pragmatics. Rhythm is therefore not the “topic” of this volume, in a traditional sense. It constitutes, rather, a guideword for inquiry and a line of entry. This inquiry, I would add, does not represent a contribution to what is normally taken as theory, at least not immediately.4 It attempts, in its introductory steps, a course of thought. Heidegger will indicate that the “way” of thinking has a rhythmic source. This study approaches the meaning of that formulation. The most immediate point of entry into this problematic is the turn to art Heidegger undertook in the mid-1930s.5 This turn, which marks a retreat from national political ambitions, but not a national political thought, commences with a series of lectures on Friedrich Hölderlin’s hymns “Germania” and “Der Rhein”—lectures in which a thought of rhythm plays a vital role, in part by reason of Hölderlin’s own preoccupation with this notion. It leads into Heidegger’s monumental essay, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” becoming an essential part of that more fundamental turn in Heidegger’s trajectory commonly named die Kehre: Heidegger’s introduction of the notion of Ereignis and thus what commentators have generally referred to as his later thought. Leaving aside, momentarily, the much-discussed question regarding the degree of discontinuity or transformation involved in this passage, it is obvious that this is a critical and very charged moment in Heidegger’s path of thinking that is in

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itself of considerable interest and requires careful attention. One cannot simply lift a set of statements pertaining to rhythm from the texts of this period—no more, in fact, than one can ever simply take over theoretical “statements” or “positions” from Heidegger’s thought without significant textual work (that is, if they are to be used meaningfully). One must engage the course of thought and the exposition in which it appears: a task that requires a form of sustained reading devoted to long periods of textual composition. However, the question of continuity cannot be put aside for long, because any assessment of the turn toward art to which I have referred requires attention to a core problem that haunts Heidegger’s treatment of this topic—what he himself identified in 1957 in commenting on the artwork essay as a “distressing difficulty” involving the relation between Being and human being.6 That latter relation had in fact been offered as the path into fundamental ontology in the project presented in Being and Time; the existential analytic, devoted to laying forth the full constitution of the Dasein’s being, was to offer a foundation for renewing the question of the meaning of Being. This project led Heidegger, as it happens, into a distinctively rhythmic construction of the grounds of temporality in a recasting of Kant’s notion of transcendental schematism. The temporal articulations projected as the horizon for an understanding of Being were described as introducing a fundamental “sway” into the existence of the Dasein. Clearly, there was already, here, a thought of rhythm, to which I devote a significant part of my first chapter. But the latent difficulty involving the relation of Being and human being (which would have a role in the interruption of the project of fundamental ontology) would resurface for Heidegger after his turn toward the question of art in the mid-1930s under the guise of an apparent disjunction between the assumptions (or imperatives) guiding the path undertaken in the reading of Hölderlin, where the role of the poet is foregrounded, and those motivating the gesture of thought in the powerful statement of 1936 on the essence of art, from which consideration of the poet’s (or artist’s) experience largely drops away in favour of an effort to think creation from the “work-being” of the work. The “disjunction” to which I refer, appearing within the movement of the Kehre itself, poses a significant challenge to any effort to define conclusively Heidegger’s understanding of the rhythmic constitution of the work of art in this period of his work. Chapter 2, in three parts, is devoted to the problematic I describe here, using the temporal frame of Heidegger’s attention to Hölderlin’s “river hymns.” Of course, Heidegger himself never sought “conclusions” in the course of his thinking. “Wege, nicht Werke,” he famously said. But the Addendum in which Heidegger noted his “distressing difficulty” also pointed to the “problematic

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context” in which it was concealed, suggesting that the point where it should be addressed appears near the conclusion of “The Origin of the Work of Art,” namely “where the essence of language and of poetry is touched on” (BW 211/74). When Heidegger wrote his Addendum, he was in fact returning to this topic, and the notion of “way” itself, in what would become the collection entitled On the Way to Language. Several essays in this important volume on language turned specifically to the question of the event by which Being and human being come into relation through the human relation to language. For this structure of relation, the thought of usage was of fundamental importance. I may now appear to be moving away from the problematic of rhythm, but as I turn (or return) to Heidgger’s later work on language in my penultimate chapter on “the use of poetry,” the pertinence of the point I made above will become evident: the question of rhythm I broached in my initial approach to the question of art must be carried into a broader framework, namely that of the rhythms of usage (der Brauch).7 It thus seems appropriate to introduce this last term and dwell on its import as it accrues meaning in Heidegger’s work from the time of his engagement with Hölderlin. It is a term not widely explored or recognized, either in Heidegger-studies or in the broader theoretical context in which Heidegger’s thought is still commonly referenced. Of course, the backdrop for Heidegger’s later use of this term “usage” is its insistence in the period of the existential analytic. We need to consider here not only the pragmatics of the Dasein’s everyday ontic relations, from which the existential analytic presented in Being and Time effectively begins, but also Heidegger’s striking way of taking over a Kantian usage (with respect to the exercise of the human faculties) in his description of the Dasein’s “use” of the time that opens to it in the temporal configuration of its worldly being. (I pause over this topic in my first chapter, “Rhythmic Transport.”) All of these earlier formulations find their place in a thought of production (Herstellung) that Heidegger will come to see as held, in some measure, within the metaphysics of subjectivity. This thought disrupts the metaphysical horizon quite profoundly in certain ways, but it is still constrained by it. It is Hölderlin, as we will see, who appears to offer Heidegger the path toward a thought of usage that allows a fundamental recasting of the position of the human Dasein—a thought of the use of the human Dasein for the advent of Being, and a new formulation of the question of its “handlings” (I evoke awkwardly here the opening sentences of Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism”8). In An Introduction to Metaphysics, written shortly after the lecture series of 1934/5 devoted to Hölderlin, we find broad statements on the use of the human in the

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tragic formulation of the relation between humankind and physis. The motif of the use of the human is then echoed throughout Heidegger’s Beiträge later in the decade and in the meditations that follow. In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” we will see evidence of this thought of the use of the human Dasein in the “setting into work” of the event of truth (notably in two enigmatic sentences alluding to what the work requires of its creator), but also a concerted deployment of the notion of usage for a meditation on the way in which creation engages the movement of physis in a “use of the earth” that answers to and draws forth its essence (rather than “use it up” for utilitarian purposes). “Usage” connotes here an answering relation to the essence of what it engages. It is thus proper to what we might call a “truth-bound” (or simply “aletheic”) comportment. In texts such as “The Anaximander Fragment” (which follows after Heidegger’s return to Hölderlin in his lecture series of 1942), we see Heidegger draw strongly on pre-Socratic sources in a way that elucidates his earlier (almost ecstatic) declaration that Hölderlin, with his thought of usage, was touching on the most archaic Western thought of Being. The “fragment” in question refers explicitly to usage. I do not return to this text in this volume,9 but a thought of rhythm is manifestly present in it via Heidegger’s thought of Fügung, which engages, as is already evident in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” the Greek understanding of rhusmos. My attention in the present volume moves rather to the “The Question Concerning Technology” (1953) by reason of its appeal to the potential role of art in revealing the use of the human in what Heidegger thinks as the destining of Being. Art, Heidegger tells us, offers a possible freedom in our relation to Technik by helping us grasp it in its essence as a mode of revealing from the ground of a more primordial disclosure of the destining event. The essay evokes the human share in this destinal revealing in such a way as to open onto the “difficulty” Heidegger addressed in his “Addendum,” though it does not really advance with respect to the question of how art is disclosive with respect to the relation between truth and human being. Only later in the 1950s will Heidegger pursue in a focused way this notion of a use of the human. It appears already in “Language” when Heidegger argues that the articulation brought to language in human speech is required for the “sounding” of language that is proper to its “essencing”; language, Heidegger tells us, “needs and uses” human speech.10 But in the later essay, “The Essence of Language,” Heidegger will move back to begin to think how the use of the human for the advent of language and its opening of the ways of the countering regions of the fourfold has its source in a use of the human by Ereignis itself (“for itself,” as Heidegger will say in the subsequent essay, “The Way to Language” [OWL 130/249]).

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The way of this latter “turning back,” as Heidegger describes and performs it, is a thinking use of poetry that touches on the shared origin of thought and poetry in Saying. To approach and draw forth this limit for thought (its own origin in Saying), Heidegger must entertain how thought and poetry need and use one another. Heidegger will himself engage this relation of usage in a singular (and singularly rhythmic) path of thinking that opens upon the waymaking movement proper to language. And in the term “way” itself, we will again find a reference to usage. The insistence of my reference to the use of this term is only barely indicative of what we find in the weave of Heidegger’s text. This fact makes the scant attention to this term in the field of Heidegger-studies really quite astounding.11 But rather than dwell on this matter here, I will pause merely to reiterate the reach and significance of this notion in Heidegger’s later thinking (even “reach,” as we will see, is referred to usage). In brief, der Brauch names the structure of that nexus Heidegger indicates when he points to the proper site for addressing the “difficulty” he identifies in his “Addendum.” It is the relational structure that is contracted in Ereignis between the essence of language, Being, and human being, and thus defining for any “meaning” of Being. “Usage” marks the totality of relations and the finitude of every element adjoined in these relations—even Ereignis “itself,” which needs the relation between human kind and language. Need and use are at work throughout the structure of appropriation, and thereby a fundamental condition for every truth-event, at every level of this event. All human usage, be this in idiomatic language or other forms of practice (human mores or “forms of life”), is to be thought from and within this gathering, articulating relation that thought and art, among other “aletheic comportments,” help to bring into being in their incisive gestures. We have, in the notion of der Brauch, therefore, a relational structure that marks every dimension of human existence within what Heidegger thinks as “the fourfold” and every intra-worldly relation. It traverses (and articulates, rhythmically) the ontico-ontological difference and finally points to a general thought of a human comportment that is both inventive and answering, be this in the tasks of the thinker or the poet, or in the learning and practice of the most elemental relations of hospitality or craft (as we will see in the last chapter). And once again, from the perspective of the thought of usage, we have a glimpse of what is actually a profound continuity (and development) in Heidegger’s thinking. *

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I have noted that this volume takes its initial orientation from questions relating to Heidegger’s turn to art in the mid-1930s, foremost among these being Heidegger’s attention to what he hesitates to call the rhythmic composition of the artwork. I am certain that Heidegger’s monumental essay, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” played an essential role in shaping this orientation, given the importance it held for me in my first work on Heidegger. But the actual inception of this study must be dated back to a reading of Aristotle’s Poetics that I undertook almost forty years ago in a seminar at the University of Strasbourg. Prompted by the context (I was substituting for Jean-Luc Nancy and for Philippe LacoueLabarthe, whose own work on rhythm was quite significant12), and inspired by a magnificent critical edition of the Poetics proposed by DuPont-Roc and Lallot,13 as well as an essay by Émile Benveniste that has been defining for the modern study of rhythm,14 I asked whether Friedrich Hölderlin’s account of the rhythmic construction of tragedy might in some way shed light on Aristotle’s text. The result was a contribution to the question of catharsis (one that recovers, to some degree, an older approach to Aristotle’s text), but also a standing obligation, since the gesture dictated that I reverse my approach and return to Hölderlin with an eye to the rhythmic grounds of catharsis as the “proper effect” of tragic art. The task of satisfying that debt shaped my work for this volume inasmuch as I only felt prepared to undertake that task after a renewed engagement with Heidegger’s only partially visible reading of Hölderlin’s “Remarks” (in the 1934/5 lectures on Hölderlin’s hymns and in the lecture series of 1942 on “The Ister”). I am pleased to be able to offer now the full “dyptich” originally called for in an appendix to this volume. The interpretation of the Remarks I sketch there relates immediately to the analysis of Heidegger that I propose in the principle part of the text, though it can be read independently. I owe a very different kind of debt to the students and colleagues who have accompanied me through quite a number of seminars devoted to Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art,” particularly in two decades of teaching at the European Graduate School. With them, I shared and explored my sense that Heidegger’s dismantling of the “form/matter” relation in the opening pages of the essay pointed to the necessity of thinking the rhythm of the artwork. The teaching context also offered me the opportunity to explore and communicate the articulations (the rhythms) of Heidegger’s writing; there is always performance in the lecture. Of course, when we speak of a scene of teaching, we must be cognizant of all those who make it possible. For this, I want to give special thanks to my friend and colleague Nemanja Mitrovic, first for intellectual accompaniment, and then for a tireless attention to the infrastructure of the

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institution in which much of this teaching occurred, The European Graduate School. One seminar from my years at the EGS is particularly worthy of note, since it forms the basis of my chapter devoted to the topic of craft, the last chapter in this volume devoted principally to Heidegger. For this experience, I want to give special thanks to Robert Brewer Young, a practicing luthier and research partner who renews for me continually one of the core themes addressed in this last chapter, namely that thought is itself to be understood as a craft. I hope that this chapter conveys something of the way the meaning of this notion caught me in a first drafting of my final seminar presentation, because I believe such an experience of writing and teaching illustrates what can be meant when we say that a rhythm takes. From this basis, it may just communicate what has been moving me through this project as a whole. It is difficult not to be left with the sense that what one has formulated in response to Heidegger, at whatever stage one has attained (and I have been at it for some time!), remains of the order of a sketch. But if this sketch achieves the schematic form I attend to in this chapter of this book, it is still potentially communicative in the sense I intend. In any case, I do hope I am communicating what I see as the outline of a profound unity in Heidegger’s thought. With the problematic of usage, I believe I am tracing and opening a circle that moved him from the 1920s forward (even in his thought of the hermeneutic circle itself)—a circle that effectively begins in the analytic of the everyday handlings of the Dasein in an approach to the horizon of the Dasein’s understanding of Being and ultimately takes form with Heidegger’s movement into the differential grounds of all relation with his thought of der Brauch. There were counter-rhythmic interruptions in this movement, to be sure; and the motor of this movement was a “distressing difficulty.” But there was also always an obscure impetus in Heidegger’s “circlings,” and I hope I have caught something of this in my attention to the rhythms of usage. Further work will lead me back into the broader conceptual space in which the notion of use has been deployed, from Marx through Bataille and beyond. But in this volume, I have sought to focus only on the destiny of this term as it unfolds in Heidegger’s thought.

Further Acknowledgments As I noted earlier, the first part of my Appendix in this volume re-presents, in only slightly modified form, an essay last published in The Firm Letter: Readings

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of Friedrich Hölderlin, ed. Aris Fioretos (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 237–47. Chapter 1 revises and expands an essay translated into German by Elias Torra: “Von Rhythmus erfaßt.” It is presented in Rhythmus: Spuren eines Wechselspiels in Künsten und Wissenschaften, ed. Barbara Hahn (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005), 109–21.

A Note on Reading Heidegger Today Continuing in the mode of acknowledgment, and before proceeding to the first chapter, I want to address a question that is pretty much required for any serious reading of Heidegger’s text at this time. It is a question that properly shadows every philosophical inquiry, in fact, but looms particularly large in the case of any contemporary approach to Heidegger’s text that does not focus principally on ethical and political matters. The question is the following: Is there a proper need for pursuing this research in our present conjuncture, a genuine cause? And in Heidegger’s case: Is there a question other than the political one to pursue today? My answer remains largely unchanged with respect to what I wrote in my Postface to the second edition of Heidegger: Thought and Historicity (which goes farther than what I can summarize here).15 This answer is affirmative for the simple reason that the source so much contemporary Continental thought found in Heidegger’s text in the twentieth century has become occluded, with significant potential implications for this contemporary thought itself and the projects it opened (including political ones). The stance, I acknowledge, is a somewhat isolated one. It is quite evident that within the narrowing horizon of the governing critical reception of Heidegger (and of the modern thought of difference overall, so profoundly marked by his thinking), there is relatively little space for explicit evocation or pursuit of the passage he sought with respect to what he helped us grasp as the end of metaphysics. Where it is attempted, it is done so primarily under other names; one simply does not draw explicit inspiration from Heidegger. The question of Mitsein (“being-with”), so essential for ethico-political thought, offers an interesting example. Here, hasty evocations of community replace dedicated research and speculative development; the question goes largely untreated. Even the thought that Heidegger devoted to the question of truth and the modality of relation he named with the phrase “Es gibt” appears in little more

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than a form of theoretical mention. We do find in contemporary critical theory an obligatory acknowledgment of Heidegger’s place in the history of modern thought (hardly avoidable, given the importance of this text for authors such as Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Lacan, or Blanchot, among many others). But we also see a kind of general consensus that no further significant attention to his thinking is required. Even in the theoretical space opened by deconstruction and psychoanalysis, where one should certainly expect more, these contributions are considered to have been assessed and largely superseded by the more recent initiatives. They rarely receive further discussion. The reasons for such foreshortening in the contemporary construction of the history of twentieth-century thought in critical theory are many and include a rather simplistic construction of intellectual history itself, which frequently becomes a history of critical progress. Heidegger’s thought is not the only one to suffer here. For many authors, even sophisticated theorists, the history of thought is reduced to a history of concepts and thetic propositions (where terms like “Being” or “ontological difference” can be treated as stable in their signifying function and are easily dismissed). In the shorthand of critical debate informed by school affiliations or political agendas (which are always shaped by professional pressures in academia and even a certain policing) simplifications easily take over. This development in modern critical thought is deserving of considerable attention in itself. In Heidegger’s case, however, there is the considerable weight of ongoing scandal relating to Heidegger’s ideological and personal commitments in the fateful period of the 1930s and early 1940s. A good part of what has been revealed, even in the Black Notebooks, could be surmised from published writings of the 1930s already several decades ago, though the reader was partially shielded from the ugliness and extremity of Heidegger’s constructions and hatreds. But there has been a crushing cumulative effect in the more recent disclosures that further shapes what I attempted to describe in my Postface as “the legibility of the political” in Heidegger’s text, and thus the legibility of the text itself. In understanding what is happening in the reception of Heidegger, we cannot ignore the simple fact that reference to Heidegger today that is not significantly qualified is nothing less than awkward. This is, in large measure, for very valid reasons. I am certainly not immune to this feeling and do not want to deny in any way the gravity of what has been revealed in these disclosures. The ethical and political faults (I collapse a great deal here) are irredeemable and clearly exceeded Heidegger’s own understanding. I do not believe they are even terribly

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instructive for us today—even in this time of a new onset of fascism—though they do reveal, in a kind of relief, various limits to Heidegger’s thinking. But I do not attempt a dialectical sleight of hand when I note that those limits, as limits, do help delimit what still claims thought if one maintains a critical and questioning vigilance. In this volume, I try to maintain the vigilance (whose grounds I outlined in my earlier work) while concentrating on outstanding questions. Heidegger’s ethical and political failings (I would also say “ethico-political” to capture where the failures compromise his thinking, as in his construction of a Volk) do not eclipse his entire oeuvre, much of which still remains not only unexhausted, but beyond general philosophical grasp. His path of thinking remains haunting for our modernity not only in its daring and reach (have we assessed what opened there and so captured the attention of those leading the post-structuralist initiatives?); it is also insistently pertinent. At least we are in no position to say that it does not potentially speak to our time of ecological and socio-political catastrophe. Thus, it concerns me that contemporary thought, in its thorough absorption with socio-political exigencies—an understandable absorption in itself, but not immune to question inasmuch as it falls short of questioning the constitution of the political itself—is now largely unable to follow Heidegger’s turn back into the grounds of human finitude (or the finitude of Being itself). Is there not a foreclosure here of a thought of human ex-posure to alterity that is itself the condition of thinking community (or even sexual difference) in the larger framework of the governing orders of Technik and Capital? Let me underscore that when I appeal to a history of thought in continuing to uphold the necessity of reading Heidegger, I do not appeal to the broad strokes of Heidegger’s own problematic account of that history, even if I employ a shorthand with a term like Technik. I certainly do not mean to give the last words to Heidegger. But I do not want to let go of the openings to which I referred in my last paragraph, and of my sense that another thought of relation is required in our socio-historical conjuncture. In a volume like this one, therefore, I hold to a still searching path, guided by, and seeking to sustain, an impetus that inspired most of my teachers. In this respect, my appeal to history is an appeal to a legacy that remains, in part, outstanding, still to be claimed. The fact that I do this via close textual reading of what I have described as a “source” text (I also learned this practice of reading from my teachers) does not indicate what might appear at some moments to be a form of submission. While I am in the mode of supplementary acknowledgment, let me tell a story about one of those teachers. In my first meeting with Jean-François

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Lyotard (which sealed a friendship; this was 1976) I told him that I was studying Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche. He responded with considerable interest and then noted that he had met Heidegger personally and quite disliked him. I responded by sharing his smile and said that I suspected it can be a good thing, as a student, not to be too enamored of an author one studies closely. After that day, I could not help but be struck by the continuing attention Lyotard would pay to Heidegger’s thought, even in his late texts, where we find some quite severe critique. Lyotard was no Heideggerian, but he was not afraid of referring to him as he described his own teaching as an attempt to go there, evoking the site of the Dasein as the place where his thought would find some purchase with respect to a real. His endurance in this respect was inspiring for the work I continue to pursue.

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Rhythmic Transport

While I am entering an immense and congested traffic circle (more a knot than a circle), a rhythm from a fast-paced jazz tune on the radio enters my awareness. The tune is all percussion, joined by trumpet and saxophone, and punctuated with a repeated phrase enunciated by a husky female voice: “I want you to get together . . . I want you to get together.” Now the traffic picks up its pace and I am seized with the sense that I can anticipate the movements of the cars. I know where they are going, or better, I enter a kind of dance with them, transported by a strange clarity and sureness of movement. I move through the treacherous intersection with extraordinary ease and a delighted sense that I have caught the rhythms of the intertwining, competing flows of traffic in this “circle.” My awareness of this rhythm recedes soon after I have broken into the clear and continue down the avenue.1 What is this heightened state? Where is my dexterity, my grace, coming from? One could say, accurately enough it seems, that I have found a rhythm. But this is where the questions begin. What rhythm have I found? Has the jazz piece merely tuned my responsiveness—has it sharpened my senses and reaction times so that I move at a speed that gives me the illusion of clairvoyance in my circumstances (a phenomenon familiar to anyone who participates in sports and not without interest in itself). Or has my attuned sensibility actually disclosed something of those circumstances, a rhythmicity of a kind? Has the rhythm of the jazz tune helped me to find the rhythm of the traffic circle? I have to say that I’m confident I have not imposed a rhythm, or something like a finer order on a loosely ordered play of movements. I know from hard experience the dangers implied in such presumption. Moreover, I don’t need such presumption, because I have a sense that my circumstances have opened to me as I move through them, that I move with them. So have I perhaps found a rhythmic articulation—have I somehow drawn out an articulation that is fully of the situation? And if so, what

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kind of engagement could this be? How could I so successfully discover and practice the rhythms of such a complex situation? Perhaps we may take it as something of a given that traffic flows (be they in transport, communications, or exchange) will draw definable rhythms from the temporal regulations of diurnal activity and from the determinations of the lived environment (including population densities and technological infrastructure). Mathematicians can provide extremely precise descriptions of these rhythms, and ethnographers, with the help of analysts in fields such as human geography, can align these with the relevant local and global determinations, taking into account factors such as social organization and religious practice. There is surely nothing very daring in claiming that social experience has an important rhythmic dimension. But how do we understand what is happening when these rhythmic configurations disclose themselves in individual experience as such in a form of shared usage and lend to a form of play? What rhythmic capacity has been set into motion? The attunement I experienced in my driving experience points not only to a fundamental disposition to rhythm (it is thus necessary to account for the fact of an opening to rhythm), but even a certain freedom in that disposition. Moreover, the possibility of this play opened in and through a juxtaposition of rhythms, where one that was pronounced helped to reveal one normally hidden or latent. The former rhythm, belonging to the distinctly musical idiom that I was capable of picking up, not only transported a linguistic content with its appeal to community, but communicated its rhythm idiomatically, in the manner of a kind of language. The latter, governed by an extensive set of sign systems and rules for comportment could hardly be called “natural,” any more than those other flows of traffic to which I have pointed. But its latent rhythmic articulation could only surface when it was punctuated by the jazz piece. I’ll leave to the musicologists and the properly initiated the task of accounting for the manner in which the peculiar way in which jazz plays at its own createdness might explain its disclosive potential and simply underscore that a form of art drew forth this rhythmic play.2 The conjunction of rhythms I experienced, in any case, appears to require some form of shared ground. Thus one could not stimulate a “free” practice of the other without some fundamental articulation, if only between the music and a physical form of receptivity, a capacity for rhythmic attunement that was then translatable into something resembling a dance in the material circumstances. Already, with this formulation, we would say that one rhythm enabled participation in another (via a stirred rhythmic capacity of a fundamental kind). But it is also not a big step to suggest from here that one rhythm was effectively brought into

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communication with another, that the peculiar “schematism” effected was simply a translation of rhythms—a particularly dextrous rhythmic transport. Perhaps we need only acknowledge the disclosive, communicative power of an experienced rhythm (as set into play in a form of art) to recognize that a form of fundamental analysis moving to the grounds of language and lived experience itself is required for a true “rhythmanalyse.” To the extent that rhythm belongs to the very modality of our worldly experience, recourse to phenomenology is essential. But for a case like the one we are pursuing, we must also give special attention to the work of authors such as Wittgenstein and then Heidegger (on whom I will be focusing here) in order to suggest that what we seek to understand, once again, are structures of shared usage, where “usage” is understood as the ground from which both forms of life (Wittgenstein) and the worlds that define their unity (Heidegger) take their order, an order that for each of the authors is an order of meaning. Customs and mores, or anything that might be defined as a habitus, are all to be understood from this ground as forms of meaningful, sedimented practice (whose meaning can be obscured precisely by the sedimentation or repetition). This is not to say that all sociocultural practices may thus be reduced to language as forms of Sprachgebrauch, if language is understood in the standard sense. Indeed, the question of usage, as will become increasingly clear, offers the means to grasp extra-linguistic dimensions of the shared practice under consideration, and eventually even the possibility of thinking an opening to rhythms that are not properly “human” at all. Given its full import in a Heideggerian perspective, it gives us the means to rethink agency in art and ultimately social practice in general.3 * I turn, then, to sketch what Heidegger offers of an approach to rhythm at what I have termed the existential level. The question of rhythm does not appear overtly in Heidegger’s work until after his celebrated “turning” in the mid-1930s, but it is powerfully latent throughout those texts of the 1920s that address the “fundamental constitution” of the human Dasein, for it is from the opening of temporality in the Dasein, understood as the horizon for all understanding, that Heidegger hopes to derive the foundation for a new articulation of the meaning of Being.4 The sway of time’s temporalizing (Zeitigung), as Heidegger describes it (into the early 1930s), necessarily introduces a rhythmic element into every dimension of the Dasein’s lived experience. So I will begin from the existential analytic and then follow Heidegger into the turn that unfolds with his thinking on art.

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That Heidegger understands time as the horizon for the understanding of Being is widely known, but the import of this statement is not easily summarized for the reason that time is subject to so powerful a re-conception (with consequent impact, obviously, on the “meaning of Being”). A way into his existential analysis is offered, however, by a striking locution that Heidegger adopts in speaking of the human relation to time. Referring to the manner in which the human Dasein orients itself in all worldly dealings, and even toward the world itself as it defines that for the sake of which it applies itself in those dealings, Heidegger says that the Dasein “uses its time.” The locution is curious because it is so mundane, leading us easily to think of time as something extant at hand, something of which the Dasein simply disposes. But when we grasp that Heidegger is describing the manner in which the Dasein uses itself in the act of defining the finality of its existence and in “binding” itself to this definition of its “possible” being, we glimpse the force with which the word “use” is employed. And we see how deeply the reference to functionality reaches in Heidegger’s earlier thought of the Dasein’s productive activity, something that can actually be obscured by the way functional and instrumental relations are brought immediately to the fore when Heidegger lays out, from our most “proximate,” everyday experience, the pragmatic organization of signification. Because, again, Heidegger’s “pragmatism” seems to lead to a very instrumental understanding of our being in the world in the work of many commentators (particularly those who have trouble getting past the first half of Being and Time—an entire current of Anglo-American reception is shaped by the astonishingly limited reading offered by Hubert Dreyfus). But we must move to the more fundamental level to understand how a context of functional involvements is always already defined in the Dasein’s existence, already significant. For the human Dasein has already projected an order of “signifiability” when it proceeds in any end-directed activity; it knows its way about in its world for the fact that it has always already given this world to itself to understand. It holds itself in this world from the ground of its determination of its “for-the-sake-of-which,” which unfolds in the Dasein’s own projection of its being-able. But the very possibility of such a projective movement, in which the human Dasein defines for itself an order of ends, arises from the opening of time, which is in fact the primordial tracing of this being’s “Da” (BP 307/436), it’s “there.” To be precise, we say of the existence of the human Dasein, in its temporally defined essence, “es gibt,” to distinguish it from any intra-worldly being, of which we say simply, it is. The human Dasein certainly is in the world, thrown into a factical existence that it assumes in some way or other, but the Dasein in

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the human is the “there” of this world’s opening, which is primordially temporal in character (once again, I summarize with respect to the Heidegger of 1927 and 1928). The “Es” in that locution “es gibt,” as regards the Dasein in the human, must be understood most immediately as time. And it is from here that we have to understand Heidegger’s meaning when he says that the Dasein “uses its time” or explains that the possible horizon for the signifying relations the human Dasein projects for itself is time, that the Dasein is “for its time.” Because time is something the human Dasein “has” only inasmuch as it is drawn from what of time has been given, and to which the human Dasein opens, assuming its thrown being in projection. Time is the ground of possibility itself, a kind of source or well-spring whose generative character prompts Heidegger to refer back to Plato’s idea of the good (BP 283/400). When the Dasein uses its time “authentically,” Heidegger tells us, it is “more in being,” “richer” than when it defines itself in relation to the entanglements of everyday expectations (see BP 308/437), though a free use of time is possible even in a traffic circle. How the human Dasein uses its time is a matter of insistent concern for it. The Dasein, Heidegger says, is thus constantly “expressing” itself as it uses the time available to it. Taking time for itself, Heidegger says, it utters itself in such a way that it is always saying time; time is constantly there in such a way that in all our planning and precaution, in all our comportments and all the measures we take, we move in a silent discourse (BP 259/365). The latter discourse is a “self-exposition” of comportments that articulate the constant transposition (the infinitive is verlegen) of the Dasein, a being underway that originates fundamentally in a primordial being-moved, an ecstatic movement comprising each of the temporal directions of the Dasein’s existence. Thus, three ecstatic movements (expecting, retaining, and enpresenting) make time available, and their originary movedness as “ecstatic openings” forms what Heidegger terms “original time” [die ursprüngliche Zeit] or Temporality [Zeitigkeit]. I will return shortly to the formal constitution of this unity, but I want to emphasize, first, two traits of the Dasein’s “interpretive” [auslegende] use of time within its lived context of pragmatic relations. In this usage, time is significant, and it is public. “Signifiability,” Heidegger tells us, refers to the manner in which time is always appropriate or inappropriate, a “right” or “wrong” time in relation to our concerns, all of which take their orientation from the ordering of relations that structure the signifiability [Bedeutsamkeit] of the Dasein’s world. Time is always “time for” or “time to” within a context of pragmatic relations. “Now the light is green,” I will say, and I have so much time to make at least four lane changes before I reach another light and then move on toward my destination,

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hopefully within the time I have allotted for my travel. I can expect certain things from the traffic around me, and from the performance of my vehicle, in this case a Volkswagen. All of this is temporally organized, all of it signifying. We thus see that the Dasein’s temporal determinations are fully commensurate with the significance it assigns to the set of relations that define its pragmatic involvements (and the things that find their place therein). Time is initially “world time.” Heidegger further affirms that time has a public character which is expressed in our being-with-one-another. It is fundamentally shared, whether or not the “now” or the “then” are spoken out loud. We may date each now differently, in relation to individual concerns, and we may experience the span in different modes, but we all understand the expressed now. The accessibility of the now for everyone, without prejudice to the diverse datings, characterizes time as public. The now is accessible to everyone and thus belongs to no one. On account of this character of time, a peculiar objectivity is assigned to it. The now belongs neither to me nor to anyone else, but it is somehow there. There is time, time is given, it is extant, without our being able to say how and where it is. (BP 264/373)

In the “now,” time is obscurely given in its quasi-transcendental character. But what would be the basis for the shared usage of the now? How can Heidegger assign this “peculiar objectivity” and general communicability to this temporal designation if it points to the facticity of time and is not simply a general operator? We broach here a forbidding question regarding the nature of Mitsein (beingwith): If time is always shared in our being-with-one-another (Miteinandersein), then this more “original” relation that Heidegger terms Mitsein must entail some form of “time-with” that is prior, in a logical sense, to its articulation in practical involvements. How could this be conceived? Here, we have to return to the theme of the originary unity of the three ecstasies, taking our guide from a subsequent remark on time’s public accessibility. The factor of the publicness of time is also rooted in the ecstatic-horizonal character of temporality. Because temporality is intrinsically the outside itself, it is as such already intrinsically disclosed and open for itself along the directions of the three ecstasies. Therefore, each uttered, each expressed now is immediately known as such to everyone. [. . .] In the Dasein’s being-with-one-another, in their communal [gemeinsam] being-in-the-world, there is already present the unity of temporality itself as open for itself. (BP 270/382)

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Originary time is essentially “outside itself ” in its temporalizing: “It is this outside-itself itself,” he says (BP 267/379). This means, first, that each ecstasis involves a carrying away toward something [Entrückung nach—Heidegger emphasizes] in a formal sense. And he continues: Every such remotion [Entrückung] is intrinsically open. A peculiar openness, which is given with the outside itself, belongs to the ecstasies. That toward which each ecstasis is intrinsically open in a specific way we call the horizon of the ecstasis. The horizon is the open expanse toward which remotion as such is outside itself. The carrying off opens up this horizon and keeps it open. As ecstatic unity of future, past and present, temporality has a horizon determined by the ecstasies.

The movement Heidegger terms Entrückung thus takes its definition (including the possibility of a certain “hold” or tenu) from its horizon, and each ecstasis is so defined. Moreover, these ecstasies have their own ecstatic unity (and thus their own horizon), which leads Heidegger to say that temporality is “characterized [characteriziert] by a horizon given with the ecstasis itself ” (BP 267/378). I emphasize the reference to a “characterizing,” because it is surely through this formal delineation, by defining traits (we have here a form of defining sketch) and the openness that this secures, that time gains its shared and communicable character (which is ultimately drawn out in the Dasein’s expressive comportment as discourse [Rede] is brought to language). The temporal ground of Beingwith (and perhaps we could say the originary with of this relation) is traced out in what Heidegger calls at this point the horizon. Heidegger will then name what are traced in the Dasein’s multifold temporal Entrückungen “schemata.” Each ecstasis is characterized by a schema, and the unity of the ecstasies has its own schema. Time is thus configured in schemata that mutually modify one another (time cannot be thought except in this relational structure), defining the ecstatic movements (we might also describe these as flows of power) that traverse and delineate the very “Da” of the Dasein as time reaches or recedes in its temporalization. Obviously, the configuration of these traces and the schemata themselves must have a fairly supple or fluid character; the measure they introduce in the movements of temporalization allows for play. But let us first try to appreciate the full scope of this evocation of the dynamic character of the Dasein’s temporal foundations. I have based most of the preceding discussion on Heidegger’s exposition in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology of 1927, with an eye to Being and Time (BT 416/365). In the lecture series of 1928, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, Heidegger takes forward the analyses of

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the previous year by describing the ecstatic opening of temporality in still more vivid terms, offering the transport of Entrückung as a “raptus” and its impetus as an Überschwung. The reach and recession of temporalization, delineated in temporal schemata, here named “ecstemata,” constitutes a swing, an oscillation, vibration, or, as we have already seen, a sway. And Heidegger emphasizes again that the Dasein would have no capacity to project upon its future and no relation to the thrown being it has been were it not for the primordial impetus, the Schwung of the opening of time. Temporality is the free oscillation [Schwingung] of the whole of primordial temporality. Time reaches [erschwingt] and contracts itself [verschwingt sichselbst]. (And only because of momentum [Schwung] is there throw [Wurf], facticity, thrownness; and only because of oscillation is there projection [Entwurf]).5

Schwung connotes impetus or swing; Schwingung suggests swinging, reverberation, resonance, oscillation, or pulsation. Erschwingen is employed when we say that something can be reached, attained, or afforded. Verschwingung would connote contraction. Only by this primordial movement, Heidegger insists, can there be the “thrownness” that is known most originally in attunement, or the projecting movement of understanding. Any disclosing act in the Dasein’s being in the world takes its possibility from this originary movement, and the unity of the signifying structure of the Dasein’s being in the world is secured therein (thereby enabling the synthesis between existence and factical being that Heidegger works to define in Being and Time).6 The reader will forgive me for the inevitable citation at this point: “It don’t mean a thing, if it ain’t got that swing . . .” (as phrased, of course, by Ella Fitzgerald). Now, it is even somewhat reductive to define this movement as rhythmic (there are resonance and oscillation here), but I hold to the notion, at least initially, because of Heidegger’s appeal to the term “schema” to name the delineation of the horizon of each form of transport in the temporalization of time. Heidegger will use other terms to denote these tracings of the “out there” (or “tracing outs” of the there), but “schema” is particularly telling and suggestive because it points forcefully to Kant even while referring back to the Greek “skhema,” a term that is almost synonymous with rhusmos in pre-Socratic thought.7 Heidegger would have known this well, if only from Aristotle’s reference to Leucippus and Democritus in his Metaphysics, 985b.8 It is striking that Heidegger is actually so circumspect with the term “rhythm.” When he does appeal to it, however, he does something rather intriguing. On

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the one hand, he appeals to the Greek understanding of rhusmos as that which distinguishes bodies in their form or configuration, emphasizing always that rhythm is to be thought as something that structures, articulates, and defines. In emphasizing this differentiating and articulating character of rhythm, he also demonstrates that he is cognizant of the traditional, but problematic derivation of rhusmos from reo and rein, which prompted an understanding of rhusmos as deriving originally from the movements of the seas.9 His dialogue with Eugen Fink on Heraclitus, from the winter semester of 1966/67, makes explicit reference to this point,10 which also appears in the earlier essay on Stefan George that is collected in On the Way to Language. Here, Heidegger states simply that “Rhythm, rhusmos, means not flux or flowing, but rather jointure [Fügung]” (OWL 149/H217). Rhythm orders and “composes,” he argues; as it configures movement, it brings it to a moving, but composed configuration: “. . . [it] structures [fügt] the setting under way [Be-wëgung] of dance and song, thus letting these rest in themselves” (OWL 149/H217). At the same time, however, he retains an insistent reference to a flowing movement, exploiting playfully, perhaps, an ambiguity obrserved by Benveniste when he distinguishes between the etymological and semantic levels in his treatment of the terms reo and rein.11 This appeal to a configured flowing is at work in his famous reference to the understanding of rhythm within the aesthetic tradition determined by Western metaphysics that is offered with respect to the poetry of Trakl. Of the gathering, “unsung poem” that configures all of Trakl’s poetry, he writes: From the site of the poem [Gedicht] wells forth the wave that in each instance moves the saying as a poetic one [als ein dichtendes bewegt]. Yet the wave so little abandons the site of the poem, that its welling forth lets all the movement of saying flow back into the ever more veiled source of origin [Ursprung]. The site of the poem, as the source of the animating wave, shelters the veiled essence of what—to metaphysical-aesthetic representation—can at best appear as rhythm” (OWL 160/34).

The obscurity of the last phase is intriguing, but let us draw at least the notion that something that appears as “rhythm” (and this at best for an impoverished aesthetic tradition which does not quite grasp the self-showing—sich Zeigen— of the true phenomenon) both holds and moves at the origin; its joining traits (Züge), draw out movement while drawing it back. I introduce Züge because this movement will manifest itself in what Heidegger terms the “Zug zum Werk” of truth in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” and in the “inward” turning movement of its conflicting forces, whose defining traits—Züge—compose the work’s

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rhythmic structure. And as I will try to show in the coming chapters, such an understanding of the “Ursprung” is at work throughout Heidegger’s attempt to read Friedrich Hölderlin’s river poems and his powerful interpretation of what a river is for Hölderlin. Heidegger will not hesitate to describe both time and language as rivers, even as he maintains the reference to a “rhythmic” structuring of these forms of “streaming.” But I have moved ahead of myself a little by turning to the rhythmic configuration of art, since it will be necessary to complement what I have pursued thus far with respect to the structuring of originary temporality with a consideration of the articulations defining the work-being of the work of art. The passage from the thought of originary temporality to that of the presencing of the artwork is quite visible and to be anticipated (albeit of a forbidding difficulty). The schematic articulation of temporality, whose description is consonant with Heidegger’s attention to the “articulating traits” of meaning in the existential analytic,12 is carried into the thought of the fundamental sketch or design (Aufriss) that gathers the distinguishing traits of the work. Hölderlin may well have offered to Heidegger a defining term for this articulation with his account of the “tearing” of time (his adjective is reissende), and Heidegger will establish the bridge via his emerging thought of the essence of language (which he will also come to name Aufriss). But it is crucial to work through the way Heidegger deploys this thought of an articulating, “originary” tracing in the course of his analyses (which I will undertake in my next chapter). Let me therefore summarize my progress thus far and thereby attempt to prepare for the fascinating step Heidegger makes when he turns from a productive notion of human usage to one that involves what he calls the use of the human in the rhythmic event that is art. In the period of the existential analytic, then, essentially the later twenties, Heidegger thinks the human Dasein as a being that produces its world from the ground of a disclosive ex-posure. The structure is one of finite transcendence. The Dasein opens to the there of its being, traced, as we have seen, in the schematizing of its temporal horizons, and thereby gains relation to itself and to the beings it encounters in its world. More precisely, it gains a possible relation to a world into which it has been thrown and whose meaning it must project for itself (authentically or inauthentically—this self may be no more than “theirs”) in the interpretative movement of understanding and discursive articulation. The Dasein must produce its world for itself, and as it projects upon its possibilities in its futural engagements, it effectively brings into play that reaching and contracting of temporal horizons that we have considered, which are the finite a

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priori of its praxis. The Dasein always moves from the Schwung of temporalization, constantly re-engaging, thus actively repeating the primordial movement of time itself, thereby bringing into play, once again, a more fundamental rhythm. The more fundamental, the more authentic its projection, the more dynamic this play can be. But the temporal grounds of the Dasein, as we have seen, are shared and public, thus in all its creative practices and practical comportments, some rhythmic measure must be commonly available and communicable. In short, from the temporal expressions and gestures of other drivers, for example (and believe me, they are very expressive in New York), it should be possible to catch the rhythms of a traffic circle and answer the injunction of the song I heard: “I want you to get together.” A project of “Rhythmanalysis” would lead us, should we follow the Heideggerian line I have sketched, into a general re-reading of all forms of human usage, all human practices and performance. In the reading of Heidegger’s turn to art, which I will pursue in the subsequent chapters, the scope of such a project should become more clear. The Heideggerian line pursued here, I must insist, remains prefatory with respect to a far broader pursuit of the question of rhythm.13 But my hope is that it will serve to indicate a level of analysis to which any full treatment of this question must attain. With these words, I do not mean to claim that the form of “ontological” inquiry sketched here constitutes an imperative, controlling point of reference to which every study must submit. Such a demand can only prove limiting—even with respect to the eventual shape of such fundamental inquiry. In the question of rhythm, I see an important route for ecological thinking that engages physical phenomena that quite exceed human experience; the presence of such phenomena is visible even within human life. But I would hasten to add that if we are to consider the meaning of these phenomena for human life (how they can matter to us, or engage us, and thereby how we can act with them), a “rhythmanalysis” like the one I have begun to prepare here is vital. But to turn this last statement about a bit provocatively, I might say that I believe we have reason to ask whether analysis that does not involve the form of engagement to which I have alluded is yet thinking (in the sense of this phrase that Heidegger explores in What Is Called Thinking?). In the second volume of his Nietzsche, Heidegger offered a passing account of how we might understand the famous phrase by Protagoras defining the human being as the “measure” of beings.14 In a few brief strokes, a commonplace regarding the anthropocentric character of Western thought is submitted to a profound transformation whereby Protagoras emerges as a thinker of finitude who understands thought itself, as

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regards “things of use” (chremata). from aletheic grounds (that is to say, within the bounds defined by a presencing and an absencing). By reason of our finitude, Protagoras offered, our measure is taken with respect to the presencing of what is as we think that presence. Humankind has no relation to beings that does not involve such a measuring. We have no meaningful relation to what is (be this the behaviour of a sub-atomic particle obeying some “clinamen,” a stream of air, or some cosmic wave) that does not involve such measure, even when we proceed by calculations of probability, employing some technical apparatus. As Neils Bohr put it, it all comes down to language, and the observer can never be abstracted from the observation. Moreover, every observation (and there is no observation that is not shaped by language, in Heidegger’s use of the term) must be translated at some point into natural language to be meaningful, in a strong sense of this term. “Rhythmanalysis” must not only recognize such a stricture. It may help us to understand and embrace the binding of this stricture (we may think of the term now in the sense given to us by Archilochus15) in an affirmative way, which is to say as a binding that frees from the abstractions of technics. Learning to attend to the rhythms of existence as they are given to us in usage (whose meaning emerges in language, as Wittgenstein saw) may provide one impetus to developing the thought of ethos so desperately needed today—a thought that takes account of Heidegger’s identification of this term with his notion of “dwelling” (linked, as Heidegger recognizes, also after Hölderlin, to hospitality), but gives genuine allowance to alterity, thereby allowing a far more generous and open sense of what it means to dwell on this earth, or even leave it.

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The Rhythmic Figure

Heidegger’s monumental essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” offers near its outset an eye-opening attack on the fundamental assumptions guiding the field of aesthetics. Discussing the provenance and prevalence of the form/matter distinction, he delivers a lapidary statement: The distinction of matter and form is the conceptual schema which is used, in the greatest variety of ways, quite generally for all art theory and aesthetics. This incontestable fact, however, proves neither that the distinction of form and matter is adequately founded, nor that it belongs originally to the domain of art and the artwork. Moreover, the range of application of this pair of concepts has long extended far beyond the field of aesthetics. Form and matter are the most hackneyed concepts under which anything and everything may be subsumed. And if form is correlated with the rational and matter with the irrational; if the rational is taken to be the logical and the irrational the alogical; if in addition the subject–object relation is coupled with the conceptual pair form-matter; then representation has at its command a conceptual machinery that nothing is capable of withstanding. (BW 153/12)

The stakes reach evidently well beyond the field of aesthetics. But the statement does present us with a rather forbidding question for any approach to the topic of art and Heidegger’s own argument in this essay: How are we to speak of art without falling back onto this distinction? Heidegger will offer the following: The work’s composition (producing its Gestalt) is to be thought in terms of a structuring articulation or “jointure” (Fügung) of fundamental lines or traits, and any aesthetic “effect” must be thought from the ambiguous presence produced by this composition: the work’s thrusting forward of the fact that it is, which is inseparable from the strangeness of its marked recession. What this means, as I hope to show, is that we must think, in the composition of the work of art, a structuring rhythm, and grasp our experience of the work from this ground.

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It is a formulation that can transform our understanding of art if we follow it through in Heidegger’s text and resist the distraction that can arise if “The Origin of the Work of Art” is understood primarily as presenting a theory of art, or worse, a contribution to the history of art, in a traditional sense, or art criticism (in which case, we risk getting caught up in Heidegger’s treatment of certain examples—for example, those notorious shoes, not to mention a poem about a fountain). The text is in fact an answer to Hegel’s dictum about the end of art that engages, in passing, the entire history of philosophical approaches to art. It is a thinking effort to come to grips with the peculiar status (and stature) of art as an event of truth: an attempt to approach truth’s “need” for a finite instantiation that renders it patent in both its disclosing character and its inherent obscurity. The essay’s argument will not preserve either truth or art from this obscurity and will not guard art’s “proper” place in the larger cultural order. Little wonder that many will get hung up on the examples. But this monumental essay (“even in this version,” Heidegger writes of a difficulty encountered over a period of a decade [BW 211/74]), in fact belongs to a more extensive meditation on the question of art that began (in earnest) in 1934 with Heidegger’s turn, in an important lecture series, to the poetry of Hölderlin. And what occurs here, once again, goes well beyond the topic of art in Heidegger’s oeuvre. We have to do with a veritable turn in Heidegger’s thinking that forms an essential part of the larger “turning” that has been used to define his life’s work. On this occasion, the importance of what is occurring can only be sketched. But let us simply note that the turn to art occurs in a matter of months after the rectoral episode and serves as a vehicle for a critical distancing from the Nazi “movement” underway that Heidegger will increasingly understand—though surely not quite as quickly as he claims—as a manifestation of the historial order of Technik.1 In this respect, the meditation on Hölderlin’s poetry continues to serve a political agenda that amounts to questioning the foundations of the political order itself. It eschews an openly political tack, but it remains profoundly concerned with the question of the national and the grounds of a people’s community.2 It is, at the same time, a crucial engagement with the question of language and what Heidegger will define as its poetic character (one might appropriately write “poietic”). It becomes an occasion for a crucial advance into the thought of Ereignis and the attendant notion of usage (der Brauch). For Heidegger, everything turns here, even as he strives to hold to advances initiated in the time of the existential analytic. With an eye to the topic of rhythm, I will restrict our attention in this chapter largely to the period of 1934–6 (turning only briefly in a third section of this

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essay to a subsequent treatment by Heidegger of Hölderlin’s “The Ister”), and I will proceed chronologically, beginning with the 1934–5 lecture series on Hölderlin. As it happens, the question of rhythm is particularly prominent in this series, even if Heidegger is quite reticent in his use of the word, as I noted in my introduction. The importance of the question is due to the specific topic under consideration: namely Hölderlin’s poetic thinking, particularly as this is manifest in the hymns of the period around 1800 that give a prominent place to rivers; in the lecture series initiated in 1934, the poems under primary consideration are “Germania” and “The Rhein.” Since Heidegger interprets this material with a constant attention to the “Remarks” Hölderlin appended to his translations of Antigone and Oedipus the King in 1805, the motif of rhythm is virtually unavoidable. And while Heidegger’s reference to the “Remarks” is relatively muted, it is evident that Hölderlin’s consideration of the question of rhythm in these texts is essential to Heidegger’s understanding of the composition and “working” of the poetic work. But in the course of the treatment of art and poetry from the period I have isolated, we encounter a notable shift that presents a challenge to any effort at summation with respect to our topic. The challenge presents itself in the following way: Heidegger argues in this interpretative foray into Hölderlin’s hymns, as he will do in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” that we must understand the poetic act from the work in which it properly occurs. The rhythmic constitution of this work is thus no ancillary feature. The lecture series of 1934–5, however, indicates that the rhythmic structure of the work is determined by the singular attunement (Stimmung) from which the poet writes. This attunement takes form within a “general outline” to which Heidegger will give special attention in “The Origin of the Work of Art.” But according to Heidegger’s argument in these lectures, this latter “outline” (Aufriss) is effectively drawn forth in and from the poet’s receptive stance in relation to that to which they are exposed (in and from the coming to definition of that stance and the affirmative opening it affords). The rhythmic structure of the work of art is thus thought in this lecture series with essential reference to the experience of the poetic Dasein. Such a reference no longer overtly guides Heidegger’s meditation in “The Origin of the Work of Art”; it is almost entirely absent from his account, in this major essay undertaken only months after the lectures devoted to Hölderlin, of the setting into work of truth. And if the reader has not taken full notice of the pronounced elision of the poet’s Stimmung in the body of Heidegger’s essay (all the more pronounced given its important place in the lectures), they cannot miss Heidegger’s explicit acknowledgment, in the “Addendum” to the

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essay, that he has failed—“even in this version”—to treat to his satisfaction the relation of Being and human being, which, as I have noted in my introduction, is nothing other than the core question of his earlier thought (the condition of a “fundamental ontology”). Once again, the question of the human has presented, since the time of the existential analytic itself, a “distressing difficulty.” So, as we consider the movement of the “poetic turn” from 1934 to 1936, we confront what is ostensibly a significant shift in focus with respect to what are taken to be the determining conditions of rhythmic structure. Can the rhythmic constitution of the work of art as it is defined in 1934–5 be the same as that invoked in “The Origin of the Work of Art”? Are these texts finally complementary despite their differing circumstances and primary concerns, or do they offer critically different accounts of the rhythmic figure? These questions will have to remain open as we undertake to consider what happens with the question of rhythm in these two approaches to the origin of the work of art. I believe it is also important that we not seek to resolve too quickly for Heidegger his “distressing difficulty.” And it is for this reason that I am prompted to return, in a third section of this essay, to the question of Being and human being as Heidegger addresses it in his lectures on Hölderlin of 1942 devoted to “The Ister.” I will also continue to pursue the question in the following chapters.

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I. Heidegger’s Hölderlin Lectures of 1934–1935 Germania

I propose to address these textual sites in chronological order, and I start with Heidegger’s remarkable summary account of the poem’s rhythmic structure in the opening moments of the lectures of 1934. This account comes at the outset of a very lengthy treatment of what is required of the reader of poetry (particularly that of Hölderlin, who went further in exploring the essence of poetry than any other modern poet, in Heidegger’s estimation). What is required will in fact entail nothing less than a decisive overturning of standard assumptions concerning poetry, language, and even our understanding of the essence of time and history. The notions of metaphor and figure itself will come into fundamental question in the course of this analysis as Heidegger urges we rethink what Hölderlin names a “river.” Unless we are prepared to hold in question our firmly seated biases on these matters and remain open (in a properly existential manner) to a veritable transformation in our thinking usage with respect to language and the historical/historial import of the poet’s address (for it represents a defining intervention in the destiny of a people), we cannot begin to take upon ourselves the event of the poetry. This, too, is part of the hermeneutic circle into which Heidegger will invite us. We must already be hearkening, already in movement, and Heidegger’s critical act is meant to prepare this receptivity. Indeed, much of Heidegger’s introduction to the poetry of the two hymns under consideration (the entire first chapter—some eighty pages) is devoted to this task. In this context, we can anticipate some impatience on Heidegger’s part with respect to common assumptions guiding the reading of poetry: notions of content and form, the status of the poetic image, the notion of poetry as a form of expression or representation, and so forth (all of which contributes to the understanding of poetry within what Heidegger labels a “liberal” construction of cultural production). And in fact we are confronted with a curious imbalance in rhetoric in the summary statement on structure to which I have referred as Heidegger passes from a rather simplistic, almost mocking, lesson in reading poetic syntax to a statement that encompasses the whole of poetic structure and what we might call at this point its originary ground. The movement of the entire lecture series can effectively be read from these sentences that proceed from

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a reversal of the conventional assumption that the “overarching resonance” of the poetic word (the structuring of its rhythmic movement, which contributes to the “expression” of its poetic meaning) derives from syntactical and lexical determinations. The structure of resonance (Schwingungsgefüge), Heidegger declares, is in fact generative for poetic language, whose meaning cannot be understood as the expression of some subjectivity. The overarching resonance of the telling is not simply the result of the positioning of words and arranging of lines, but rather the reverse: the overarching resonance of the telling is the initial, creative resonance that first intimates the language; it is the origin not only for the arranging and positioning of words, but also for the choice of words, an origin that constantly anticipates their use. The overarching resonance of the telling, however, is from the outset determined by the fundamental attunement of the poetry, which takes form within the inner outline of the whole. The fundamental attunement, for its part, grows out of the particular metaphysical locale of the poetry in question. (HH 18/14-15)

Here is the German, with which the translators have had to struggle, gamely, giving over suggestion and syntactical display for clarity: Dieses Schwingungsgefüge des Sagens aber ist nicht erst das Ergebnis der Wortstellung und Verteilung der Verse, sondern umgekehrt: das Schwingungsgefüge des Sagens ist das erste, die Sprache erst ahnende schöpferische Schwingen, der ständig der Wortwendung schon vorausschwingende Ursprung nicht nur für Wortverteilung und -stellung, sondern auch für den Wortwahl. Das Schwingungsgefüge des Sagens jedoch ist von vornherein bestimmt durch die Grundstimmung der Dichtung, die sich im inneren Aufriss des Ganzen ihre Gestalt verschafft. Die Grundstimmung aber erwächst aus dem jeweiligen metaphysischen Ort der jeweiligen Dichtung.

Following our discussion in Chapter 1, the reader will recognize immediately the pertinence of this passage for the question of rhythm, though the term goes unemployed (which is the case for the lecture series as a whole, as it is for “The Origin of the Work of Art”). It is true that a term such as “resonance” is more appropriate to the phenomenon in question in this immediate context. But its rhythmic determination (already signalled with the term “gefüge”) is clear and will emerge more strongly as the discussion proceeds. We thus glimpse something like an avoidance or hesitation with respect to the term, a hesitation that stems, we may presume, from Heidegger’s deep wariness with respect to its metaphysical construction. We will see him voice this wariness in the later reading of Trakl, as I noted earlier. Heidegger appears to be committed to redefining it, from the very outset, and this fact should make us proceed

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cautiously in bringing it to bear in a commentary on his readings of Hölderlin and other statements on art. We should note too, in the passage just quoted, that Heidegger is moving back in his characteristic manner, proceeding from the extant poetic composition (the words as disposed on the page) to its predetermining conditions, leaving syntax and word choice almost out of account in this consideration of the poetic process. Mallarmé, that great “syntaxier,” would have smiled, even if he too had a quite profound sense of what it is marked when the “place” of the poem is remarked (“rien n’aura eu lieu que le lieu”)—namely a spacing that is fundamentally rhythmic.3 But we must not assume from this passage that Heidegger neglects the letter of poetic composition. (And immediately after the passage I have cited, he insists that we must derive all of this from the individual poems themselves.4) His interpretive efforts show the contrary, even if he is not wholly consistent in his practice of close reading. How could it be otherwise, given what Heidegger will say about the necessity of a material, finite instantiation of truth in the artwork in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” or given what he does himself with language, or allows to occur in his writing?5 No, we cannot read this passage as giving implicit license to an unbound interpretive procedure that willfully disregards the poet’s attention to the material of their creative practice, and an important dimension of the craft that is proper to it, which includes the rhythmic research of millennia in poetics. We must, rather, recognize his push back toward the existential conditions of the poetic use of language (identified already in Being and Time) as one moment in a circling movement that will be identified explicitly in “The Origin of the Work of Art.” He is actually recovering here the terms of the existential analytic through his reference to the fundamental attunement of the poetry, even as he carries forward dramatically his account of its quasitranscendental conditions—conditions (of space and time, thought from the “locale” of human dwelling) that we can already describe here as written by reason of his reference to the “inner outline” [Aufriss]. Again, Heidegger’s leap in the passage we are reading can suggest that he is oblivious to the material instantiation of poetic rhythm in what I have called the letter. One will ask, quite justifiably, about poetic meter, the breath of poetic performance, and so forth. Hölderlin himself evoked poetic meter in the opening pages of his “Remarks” in evoking the procedures by which the poet brings to the fore representation itself. But we should recognize that Heidegger is attempting to engage the circular path that is required of thought when it approaches the “origin” of something like Dichtung, and precisely inasmuch as it defines, in its writing, the grounds of space and time. Terms like meter will have to be rethought from the basis of a fundamental reflection that moves “epagogically” between the individual poem

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and the domain of the event that occurs there. At this point, we are only in the first chapter of Heidegger’s poetic turn, and Heidegger is just getting the circle underway—jump-starting, a little impatiently. But let us stay a bit longer with this passage regarding the grounds of the rhythmic (and resonant) structure of the poem, its Schwingungsgefüge. These grounds, we will note, are offered as pre-linguistic; again, the creative movement they bring to form “intimates the language.” But the term “Aufriss” (forming the “inner outline of the whole”), which will underlie Heidegger’s assertion in “The Origin of the Work of Art” that the essence of art is language, and will subsequently be offered in Heidegger’s volume on language as a name for the essence of language itself, already hints here at a schematism that belongs properly to the unfolding of language in its originary advent in poetry. We must await “The Origin of the Work of Art” for a thematic development of the notion of the Aufriss, which remains largely latent in the lectures of 1934–5 (it is properly a “fil conducteur latent,” to adopt Mallarmé’s expression). The fact of this latency is intriguing. It indicates, first of all, that the extensive treatment of the topic of language offered in the first part of the Hölderlin lectures (actually more extensive than what we find in the subsequent art-work essay, where the motif of the “Aufriss” is nevertheless more prominent) still requires significant development; Heidegger’s full thought on language—itself never “final,” of course—still awaits. But it is also striking by reason of Hölderlin’s powerful appeal to the verb “reissen” (to tear), to which Heidegger is very attentive in his lectures. Is Heidegger hesitating in some way with respect to this motif? The “outline of the whole” is the tracing of the difference by which beyng (as Heidegger will write the word with an eye to a thought of historial destiny: Seyn) is brought into its own.6 Aufriss both incises and gathers together. Heidegger will stress the gathering of difference in thinking how the “fundamental attunement” of the poetic Dasein can be brought into a fitting accord with its metaphysical locale through a work of poiesis like the one evoked in these lectures via a reference to Homer. This is not properly an organic unity (in a Romantic sense), but it is nonetheless a form of unity that can bear the epithet “beautiful” inasmuch as it is an appearing of truth. But a more radical understanding of the formal scission thought by Hölderlin in his meditations on tragedy (in which the term “reissen” is prominent) points to a very different poetic experience and articulation of the “conditions of space and time”—something far more severe in character. Heidegger’s quite triumphant account of Hölderlin’s achievement in the last part of his lecture series of 1934/5 has to be read from the ground of the question that presents itself here. Stimmung and “metaphysical locale,” for their part, are terms that must be defined together in this context because the manner in which the poetic

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attunement finds its rhythmic determination (with its general outline) involves a kind of “double articulation” with respect to the forces at play in the “locale”: powers that are divine and earthly. Let me begin, here, with a very rapid review of the import of the term “Stimmung” in Heidegger’s early thought. The term holds a prominent place in the existential analytic, where it is used to describe the most primordial of the three forms of disclosure in the Dasein’s existence (see paragraph 29 of Being and Time (130–136/134–140). At the ontological level, this disclosure is named “Befindlichkeit” (“attunement”), while Stimmung (“mood”) is offered as its familiar ontic manifestation. It is the term that perhaps most directly names the finitude of the Dasein’s existence since the infinitive “stimmen” connotes determination (while Befindlichkeit speaks to the state in which one finds oneself from the ground of one’s thrownness). Of course, “Stimme” also means “voice,” and Heidegger will use the notion of Stimmung to think a determination of the poet’s vocation and the tonality of poetic saying and song. In mood or attunement, Heidegger tells us, the Dasein is exposed, or delivered over, beyond any cognitive reach, to the facticity of its being there. It first discovers, in this state, that it is and has to be. Even in the moods that actually veil this disclosure (in turning from it—as most do), Dasein remains delivered over to the fact that it has already discovered itself as thrown into a world. “Stimmung” is thus always disclosive of the Dasein’s having-been, and where it is most radical, as in anxiety, Angst, the Dasein knows something abyssal, for the mood brings Dasein before the “that it is” of its “there,” which as such “stares it in the face with the inexorability of an enigma” (BT 136/175). Because the Dasein is exposed to the facticity of its own being in the world in this manner, which is inseparable from (though not reducible to) its being delivered to the captivation of its factical involvements, Heidegger will assert that the mood will have already disclosed being in the world as a whole, and will have made it possible to direct oneself toward something. The prior disclosure of world allows things to be encountered and to matter to the Dasein; it is the condition of the Dasein becoming affected (BT 133/137). Attunement is thus the condition of any poetic “sensibility” and any aesthesis, as well as any pathos, as we might approach this topic from the perspective of rhetoric. The notion of Stimmung undergoes considerable development in Heidegger’s work of the 1920s and 1930s, and the rhythm of this development is of considerable interest in itself. It is striking, for example, that The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1928), an important lecture series following closely after the composition of Being and Time, offers little mention of attunement, while the series of 1929/30, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, turns extensively to

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this topic (with a focus on the state of boredom). This emergence and recession of the topic will be dramatically visible again in the period we are considering (from 1934 to 1936). We have here a strong hint that Heidegger is actually struggling to articulate the three modes of disclosure from Being and Time, understanding, discourse, and attunement. For the question of art, this problem is of capital importance. At this point, let me complete this quick review of the notion of Stimmung by noting that in the course of the 1930s, Heidegger expands and deepens the notion in such a way as to see it as fundamental for the determination of an epochal experience of Being and thus the constitution of Mitsein (“Being-with”). The poet, as we will see, defines a Stimmung for their people. At the same time, Heidegger’s thought of the situated character of attunement (the fact that a state such as Angst transports us into an experience of being in its totality from our factical, embodied situation—this point is stressed in “What Is Metaphysics,” from 1929) allows him to develop the notion of an earthly experience of beyng, which is essential to the poetic task as Heidegger defines this in the course of his reading of Hölderlin. The earthly determination of poetry is first stressed in Heidegger’s lecture series in a passage with a troubling pitch of its own that nonetheless captures the elusive articulation (between attunement and discourse) that I noted earlier: Despite our considerable preparation in many respects, we have yet to ponder the fact that the voice [Stimme] of the telling must be attuned [gestimmt], that the poet speaks from out of an attunement [Stimmung], an attunement that determines and attunes [be-stimmt] the ground and soil and that permeates [durchstimmt] the space upon which and within which the poetic telling founds a way of being. This attunement we name the fundamental attunement of the poetizing. (HH 73/79)7

The particular attunement Heidegger will foreground in the Hölderlin lectures is that of “holy mourning,” a state of suffering, of pain, that is subsumed in a transcending movement that is at once an assumption of divine absence (in renunciation) and a readiness for what prepares itself in that absence. Hölderlin will name this poetic condition “holy” for the fact that it is beyond the dimension of utility, fundamentally disinterested by reason of its condition of ex-posure, and thereby, as we will see, disposed to a usage of a different order from that of everyday comportments. Heidegger unfortunately defers here a full engagement of the manner in which Hölderlin takes over and transforms a romantic understanding of poetic

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sentiment (Empfindung) in terms that require, as Heidegger puts it, “a genuine understanding of the innermost core and of the fundamental questions of the philosophy of Kant and above all German Idealism.” He makes due, simply, with a dizzying citation from Hölderlin’s essay, “On the Operations of the Poetic Spirit” (HH 78-79/85-86). It would lead us considerably afield to furnish the missing analysis here, but the reference to a “core” in the philosophy of Kant cannot but draw us back, at least initially, to the arguments of Heidegger’s 1929 volume on Kant regarding the temporalizing grounds of self-apperception, for Heidegger appears to be retracing this path when he grasps the Schwingung of the poetic calling from a temporalizing event that occurs in the movement between renunciation and opening. At the same time, we must not lose sight of Heidegger’s effort in this moment to take his departure from the metaphysics of subjectivity. Stimmung must be divorced from a reference to subjective feeling or experience, in the sense of Erlebnis. In fact, Heidegger will underscore almost immediately that the earthly determination of Stimmung is the condition for the poet experiencing “the nothingness of his individual I-ness” (HH 80/89). Denied an evocation of the gods, or denying this to himself, then, the poet preserves a relation to their having-been.8 He thus takes the full measure of their absence, suffering and assuming a condition of fundamental need or urgency (Not). I underscore, once again, that the relation to the flight or the absencing of the gods is understood essentially from its temporal determination. It must be emphasized, too, that in renouncing an evocation of the Greek gods, Hölderlin turns from a naïve or melancholic relation to antiquity. He seeks the time and space of his being as a modern. There is a relation to the divine at stake, to be sure, but as Hölderlin states and Heidegger acknowledges, “the God is nothing but time” (HH 52/ 54). Holy mourning is first a way of holding oneself in time and against a time that Hölderlin describes as “reissende,” tearing. The poetic Grundstimmung, then, testifies to a particularly violent ex-posure to the absencing of the gods and thus a particularly violent form of poetic rapture or transport (Einrückung), what Heidegger called in the time of the existential analytic, an ecstasis. In fact, we have in Section 9c of the lectures an explicit and unqualified reference to Heidegger’s formulations regarding the ecstasies of time (and by implication the tracing of their schemata) that are described in Being and Time and then developed in lecture series such as The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, and Metaphysical Foundations, as I noted in my previous chapter. The fundamental poetic Stimmung, as we see, takes form in the day of a primordial temporality:

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Heidegger's Turn to Art Within this prevailing forward of that which has been into the future—which, directed backward, opens up that which earlier already readied itself as such— there prevails the approach of a coming [das Zu- kommen] and a still-presencing (future and having-been) in one: originary time. The temporalizing of this time is the fundamental occurrence of that attunement in which the poetizing is grounded. [. . .] I have provided an account of the essential constitution of this originary temporality and its essential possibilities in the treatise, Being and Time. The poet on a number of occasions names this time the “time that tears.” Because it is within itself the oscillation that tears us away into the future and casts us back into having-been. Within the rhythm of this being torn back and forth into an ever-new preservation of what has been and an ever-new awaiting of that which is to come, there is temporalized the time of a people. By virtue of this time, a people enters into the standing open of valley and flowing rivers for that which is told from the mountains concerning what is to come, from those peaks of time upon which the creators dwell. (HH 99-100/108-109)9

The topology of the messianic spatio-temporal order sketched in this last passage is complex, as it faithfully places the prophetic voice of the creators on the peaks of time.10 But the poetic Stimmung, as I have noted, is also earthly, or “doubly articulated,” as I put it earlier, holding to Heidegger’s account of the “Fügung” of rhythm. Time is accorded a primary place in the determination of a fundamental attunement (as we see in the passage above), but for human being, the power of the earth is co-originary: “The way in which mourning stands within itself is a standing-open to the prevailing of that which thoroughly attunes and embraces the human being.” Thus, in the topography provided in the last cited passage, the poet too must be understood as entering into the standing open of valley and flowing rivers. There is, in fact, a temporal determination at work in this opening, but also an earthly opacity. In fact, the poet occupies a very particular place with respect to the rivers, as Heidegger hints, initially broaching the topic shortly before the passage on originary temporality from which I have just cited with a citation of Hölderlin’s astonishing explication of a fragment from Pindar entitled “That Which Animates.” Here, what Pindar names a “honey-sweet wine” seized by centaurs in victory over men is interpreted by Hölderlin as the coming to definition of a river’s course, a movement in which the river “cuts paths and limits, with violence, upon the originarily pathless, upward-flourishing earth” (HH 83/92). The centaur, in its animation, and song (not to mention its spear), thus embodies, for Hölderlin, “the spirit of a river.” Hölderlin points to Chiron as model, who stands out among the centaurs for his role in teaching (he is identified here as the one who taught Achilles

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to play the lyre) and probably best embodies the distinctive place of centaurs in the natural order for the fact that they inhabit the place where the river, in its turning, becomes poietic: “Centaurs,” as Hölderlin explains in introducing this figure, “are therefore also originally teachers of natural science, because nature can best be discerned from that perspective” (HH 83/92). It is quite unlikely that the reader will capture the full import of this extraordinary passage in their first encounter with it, given its early appearance in Heidegger’s presentation, but it very playfully says much of the essential for this lecture series—namely that the poet stands at the point of a turning that defines what we might simply name the relation between physis and logos (we might say “science”) when it is brought into a poetic saying (which, for Heidegger, is the only place where this relation is properly said, at least with respect to the earth).11 We will concentrate on the topology of this rhythmic turn as we move to the second part of Hölderlin’s lectures, and return briefly to the dramatic mytho-poietic identifications Heidegger will pursue with respect to river and poet in another version of this remarkable reflection on centaurs. Before approaching this second section, however, the “double articulation” to which I have referred should be underscored by reason of its essentially earthly component. Thus far, our accent, in accordance with Heidegger’s manner of presentation, has fallen primarily on the ecstatic component of a Grundstimmung Heidegger describes as Entrückung. But the co-originary engagement of relation with the earth occurring in and by this Stimmung is of an equally forceful transposing character. So, to the ex-posure of Entrückung that occurs with respect to the absencing of the gods, there is a powerful entry into relation with the earth: Einrückung. The fundamental attunement is thus described as “grounding” in that it “places [stellt] Dasein into its grounds and before its abysses” (HH 124/141); it thereby “determines for our Dasein the locale [Ort] and time of its being.” But what is meant here by the opening to “abysses” that occurs in this double movement of ex-posure and earthly engagement? Heidegger’s reference to the existential analytic will suggest clearly enough that the trans-position he is describing (Ent- and Ein-) corresponds and develops the “double” directionality prevailing throughout the spanning of the Dasein’s existence that was described in Being and Time (where the Dasein must assume “being the ground of a nullity”). The nothingness the Dasein faces in its futural, authentic being-toward-death, brings it back to the abyssal enigma faced in the anxious ex-posure to facticity. In its ecstatic, resolute being, the Dasein assumes ex-posure to an abyss. But Heidegger lacks in the existential analytic what a thought of the earth (inspired by his strong turn to the ancient Greek notion of physis in the mid-1930’s) begins to offer in this

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period of his thinking.12 In thrownness, as it is thought in the existential analytic, there is necessarily an engagement with the earth, but the thought of facticity (and the factical) in Being and Time gives us little to work with in this regard. That said, his words on the earth in the text we are reading still remain, in themselves, notably sparing, despite all the attention he will give to the motif of the river and his frequent reference to the notion of earth itself. We must await “The Origin of the Work of Art” for a fuller engagement of the notion.13 But Heidegger nonetheless asserts that the “abyss” to which he appears to refer in the line I cited earlier is to be thought from the breach torn open between gods and earth, wherein the earth figures as the mother who “carries the abyss” (“Germania,” line 76). This abyss, into which human mortals alone can reach “in the disinterestedness of authentic Dasein,” holds, in its indeterminacy, the possibility of a destinal turn.14 . . . The heavenly Are not capable of all. Mortals rather Reach into the abyss. Thus things turn With them. (from “Mnemosyne,” cited at HH 96/106)

Heidegger will give special attention to Hölderlin’s assertion, in “The Rhein,” that the gods need humans for their capacity to feel. This needed capacity is inseparable, for Heidegger (and for Hölderlin), from what a relation to mortality affords of a relation to the earthly being of the Dasein and what Hölderlin’s poem names an abyss. As 1934 remains a time of revolution for Heidegger, this Hölderlinian motif of the turning for which mortals are necessary participants was surely of special interest. But in this context, Heidegger appears to keep the motif primarily within the terms of his analysis of the fluvial turning that animates poetry, all the while insisting that a people’s destiny is at stake in this poietic event. The poetic Grundstimmung thus takes its definition, once again, in the double movement of Entrückung (poetic transport in ex-posure to the tearing time of the gods), and Einrückung, a being-drawn into an experience of the earth and the abyss it holds. By this Einrückung, the poet comes to feel with the earth, to mourn with it, which also means to join with the earth in sensing the coming that is prepared in and with the god’s absencing (which means that engagement with the earth is also a temporal experience). All of Hölderlin’s evocations of nature are written from this experience, Heidegger suggests, and none of them are descriptions in a representational mode. Never does he describe a landscape that is simply available to human admiration, habitation, or exploitation. What

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is “given” of the earth always conditions the possibility of dwelling; it is never a matter of a mere site. Only in this way is nature the “locale” of a Heimat or Vaterland, while the presence/absence of the god is itself nothing but time. The sway of primordial time thus finds an earthly determination that is also temporally oriented in the earth’s opening to what comes. Entrückung and Einrückung are mutually determining, thus their play of relation, as engaged in the poetic saying, constitutes an ever-deepening, but also ever more precise, more attuned resonance. This attuning produces the “Innigkeit” of the assumed renunciation and the assumed opening to what renunciation, as releasement, has let come—not “inwardness” in the sense of inward turning self-absorption, but rather the poised sustaining of an ex-posure that defines and articulates in intimation the forces that animate it. It is a drawing of contrary movements— the drawing of the Schwingungsgefüge—into a taught but balanced preparedness that awaits, like a bow, the release of an arrow. The arrow, we may assume, is ultimately the fitting, naming word—that for which the poet prepares in an ecstatic and resolved having-received: “may the holy be my word.” The bow and the arrow point back to Heraclitus, of course (we could also refer to the lyre), but also to Bettina von Arnim, who described the poetic state, with its Hölderlinian determination, in the following way: And thus the god has used the poet as an arrow to release the rhythm from the bow and whoever does not feel this or lend himself to it will have neither the dexterity nor the athletic virtue necessary to the poet, and such a one will be too weak to be able to grasp, either the material or the worldview of the ancients, or the later manners of representation of our tendencies, and no poetic form will become manifest to them. Poets who merely rehearse the given forms and who can only repeat the spirit that has once been given, sit like birds on a branch of the tree of speech, swaying there, following the primal rhythm that lies in the roots. But such a poet will not take flight as the eagle of spirit, born from the living spirit of speech.

For Heidegger, who subsequently cited these lines in prefatory words to his essay “Earth and Sky in Hölderlin,” von Arnim’s statement captures beautifully the Heraclitean tenor of Hölderlin’s thinking, particularly in the reference to the required strength and athletic virtue of the required poetic stance.15 Because, for Heidegger, it is a matter, in the poetic condition, of sustaining and drawing out a play of countervailing forces that receive determination as they are drawn into reciprocal relation. Heidegger devotes an entire section of his lecture series to Heraclitus with this notion in view, forcing home the argument that Hölderlin

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had drawn from Heraclitus such an understanding of the self-differentiating character of the One. When Heraclitus affirms that everything flows (panta rei), Heidegger insists, he means that everything finds its proper being, its proper character, in a contentious play of differentiation and articulation that produces a profoundly dynamic unity, a “conflictual harmony.” Inasmuch as Heidegger understands the Greek notion of rhusmos in relation to such a play of definition (“articulating, impressing, fitting, and forming”16), we can understand that the statement attributed to Hölderlin, “all is rhythm,” would actually be, for Heidegger, a faithful translation of the phrase from Heraclitus. The poetic Grundstimmung, accomplished and brought into the Schwingungsgefüge as the poised sustaining of a differential relation is embodied, to be sure—it is earthly, Irdisch. But it is at the same time, in this, intensely articulated, drawn in defining anticipation of the poetic saying (and effectively already saying). It is drawn as Aufriss and Grundriss, a tracing that schematizes the reissende time of the gods in and by a participation in the mourning and the yearning of the earth, whose defining streams (“the waters in their accompanying plaint have a longing for the paths of a land that has become pathless” [HH 84/94]) are then remarked as limits by the measure taken in relation to the gods. Again, a double articulation defined by the needs of both gods and earth—feeling, for the gods, and for the earth, language, a language figured by the poet from an “ecstematic” outline of time brought to earthly determination in and as a saying anticipation of the word. Not in vain do Rivers run in the dry. Yet how? Namely, they are To be to language. A sign is needed. (HH 131/150)

“The Rhein”

To draw forth a bit further the rhythmic character of this poetic movement, let me now move into the second part of Heidegger’s lecture series and his account of Hölderlin’s poetic construction of the enigmatic turn taken by the Rhein as it veers from its impetuous course toward the south and east (Greece, of course), and cuts toward the north. I will move quickly, but remain in an expository mode since Heidegger’s lecture series is not well-known by the general reader.

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It is an account that effectively repeats the analysis of the first section of the lectures while moving back from the “aesthetic condition” sketched from the grounds of the poet’s fundamental attunement to the “origin” from which it takes its determination. Heidegger thus thinks what he termed the “metaphysical locale” for the poet’s Dichtung. The reading of “Germania,” after a long preparation on the topic of poetic language, gave a primary place to the motif of the temporalization of time and thus poet’s relation to the god, who is “nothing but time.” Then, moving through the poem it introduced the poet’s relation to the earth and the manner in which this introduced a development of the Grundstimmung, bringing it to its full unfolding as an affirmative assumption of holy mourning. The reading then halts in a rather arresting way with Heidegger’s declaration that the final figures in the poem (including the eagle that brings the “flower of the mouth,” the “token of friendship,” to the priestess) do not metaphorically illuminate something that would otherwise resist our understanding, but rather veil what he names a mystery, which is nothing other than the essence of the Heimat itself, the destinal configuration of a relation of gods and earth for a historical people. We are left with the image of a man, looking at the messenger of Zeus bringing the word to Germania—a pre-figuration of the poet from “As on a holiday . . .” to whom Hölderlin will give the words, “I waited and saw it come . . .” (HH 230/253). Whereas, in the explication of “Germania,” Heidegger successively led us through the two lines of determination at work in the double articulation of the Grundstimmung, he now instructs us to read a more profound articulation of the two relations. Ent-rückung vis-à-vis the gods, and Ein-rückung in the direction of the earth, are brought together and the reader must follow Hölderlin’s effort to poeticize and think from the difference as such in bringing to word the destiny of a “half-god” (the Rhein itself), with whom the poet must stand in suffering. The river itself will emerge as destinal (and will even be described as “poetic,” by Heidegger), when it is given figure in the poetic word. It is tempting to follow Heidegger’s account of the river’s violent origination in detail by reason of the way it anticipates the argument of “The Origin of the Work of Art.” But I will hasten forward and take my departure from the lines that open the fourth strophe of Hölderlin’s poem, lines that point to the determining conditions of the fluvial turning that was enigmatically foregrounded in the first section of the lectures via Hölderlin’s remarks on Pindar: Enigma is that which has purely sprung forth. Even The song scarcely may unveil it. For,

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Heidegger's Turn to Art As you commenced, so you will remain, However much need achieves, And discipline, it is birth That is capable of most, And the ray of light, that Meets the newly born. (HH 142/156)

These lines, according to Heidegger, give us the terms by which an apparent topographical incident (the forced break and turn in the river’s course) is given a topological form from the basis of a tragic logic. I use a phase such as “tragic logic” with an eye to Hölderlin’s “Remarks,” in which reference is made to a poetic logic founded in the relations between human faculties as they unfold in poetic presentation.17 Of course, there is also the vital backdrop of a philosophy of the tragic elaborated in the context of German Idealism (to which Hölderlin contributed). But I attend here most immediately to Heidegger’s quite excited attention to the motif of a lack, which is linked to what we have considered earlier with respect to the need of both gods and earth. I will return again to this topic below, but I refer to it here because Heidegger takes this dimension of need as the ground of the tragic relation and glimpses in it a thought that reaches back to the beginning of Western history.18 This need is an essential part of the “enigma” to which Hölderlin alludes in the lines cited earlier from “The Rhein” in that it is constitutive of the half-god’s endowment. The half-god thus knows a lack (line 44) that stems originally from the divine forces presiding over its birth. This is what Holderlin describes in “Poet’s Calling” as “God’s lack,” which Heidegger understands (firmly opposing the interpretation of Norbert von Hellingrath) not as an experienced absence of some kind, but rather as something proper to the god; it is, as he insists, “God’s lack.” The poet will know this as a form of aid, but also as the ground of his insistent “missing” of his mark and the impossibility of finding the fitting measure. We have, then, a four-fold composition of forces stemming from the two divine powers of the origin: gods and earth. The “ray of light” gives us Hölderlin’s preferred sign for the heavenly, while “birth” points to the earthly womb (that bears the abyss, as we have seen earlier). From this noble birth, we learn, the river surges forth with an impetuous will that is already destined to be restrained as the river is obliged to alter its course. This interruption of the river’s blind transport releases a “counterwill” that in its furious revolt turns back upon the origin, but in such a way as to assume both the constraining necessity of the turn

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(in Heidegger’s schema, which follows the poem, this is “need”) and an inner law by which its own force is gathered and defined (this is “discipline”). Four countervailing (and mutually veiling) forces are thus at work in the demigod’s assumption of its destiny, the last two of which derive from the origin (need clearly stems from the mother, discipline from the father) but define the turning relation against it. Each force tries to overcome and conceal the other in the strife (this theme of concealment—“Verstellung”—will reappear in “The Origin of the Work of Art”), but by virtue of the turn, itself described as a look back enabled by the illuminating ray, the demigod is able to find a destinal definition. Remarkably, Heidegger will link this look to the “eye too many” attributed by Hölderlin to Oedipus, that “poor stranger in Greece,” in his late poem, “In lovely blueness . . .”19 This allusion unavoidably underscores a form of excess and instability working through the dynamic structure schematized by Heidegger. Heidegger provides a two-dimensional diagram for this conflictual structure that involves ultimately twelve principal lines of force (when all relations are accounted for). But the entire structure must be conceived as twisting by virtue of the conflictual folding back upon the origin in and by which the river finds and maintains its figure, its Gestalt, even as it accomplishes its destiny in flowing peaceably into the German lands. It is this folding that has prompted me to evoke a “topology” in attempting to conceive of the way this figure “stands” in its very streaming and thereby manifests that reluctance to leave the origin that so inspires Heidegger in Hölderlin’s thought of the rivers (the motif will close “The Origin of the Work of Art” after another evocation of the work’s peculiar standing). It is, I would have to say, an astonishing construction of the rhythm that takes form in the river’s relation to its origin. Heidegger will not employ the term “rhythm,” as I have noted, but the account he has offered of the fourfold articulation of difference stresses the proper meaning of the term as he will define it later in the decade in his essay on Aristotle’s understanding of physis. Rhythm, as we have seen from this essay, must be thought from articulation. Heidegger’s reading is also quite evidently overdetermined by Hölderlin’s own language in the “Remarks,” in which he evokes a counter-rhythmical interruption required formally in poetic composition that answers to the poetic logic of tragedy. There is even the tour de force to which I have already alluded, in that Heidegger works with the assumption that rhythm, thought from its archaic linguistic sources, is not to be thought from the flowing of a stream or waves. This does not prohibit him from understanding a wave-like movement from the grounds of

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its structuring definition, thereby recovering a link to the Ionian philosophical tradition. That said—and I must surely have worn by now the patience of some of the more critical readers of Heidegger’s interpretations of Hölderlin with this long account of his argument—this quite magisterial presentation is not without destabilizing traits. One of these, pertaining to his schematic construction of the lines of force determining the rhythmic figure assumed by the river in its return to the origin, is quite notable, given Heidegger’s broader argument. I refer, here, to Heidegger’s astonishingly brief treatment of the motif of need in his interpretation of the lines I have cited—astonishing for the fact that need, as we have seen, is such a fundamental term for this lecture series. How can Heidegger be content with such a lack of development and casual abstraction in this context, given that the term spans the historic and historial dimensions of the poetic task, as Heidegger defines it in his account of the poet’s attunement and its originary ground? Anticipating the tragic schema Hölderlin deploys in “The Rhein” (eighth strophe), I suggested in the concluding remarks of my discussion of the treatment of “Germania” that the need of the gods for human feeling necessarily engages the mortal bond to the earth and what this entails of an ex-posure to the “abyss” it holds. With that interpretation, I leapt ahead to the poet’s relation to the origin. But Heidegger’s own treatment of the topic of need in the course of his lectures on “The Rhein” encompasses both existential and ontological dimensions of this problematic. As concerns the existential, Heidegger underscores that in the disclosure of the Dasein’s thrown being (a disclosure, we remember, that holds an abyssal enigma), the Dasein knows a form of exigency: the Dasein suffers its thrown being and must assume it.20 To put this in the broadest terms: the structure of care implies that the ex-posure suffered by the Dasein concerns it and must be projected upon (however authentically). In Hölderlin’s Dichtung, Heidegger argues, the need of historical being-with-one-another, experienced from the ground of the absence of the gods, finds its most radical disclosure and statement. And in this dürftiger Zeit, which is our time, in Heidegger’s view, there is more than spiritual disarray; this disarray manifests itself in a “horror and devastation” that afflicts the earth itself (HH 202/222). This motif will be taken over in the opening argument of An Introduction to Metaphysics quite demonstratively when Heidegger describes what he names “the spiritual decline of the earth” (IM 40/29). But the disclosure of this necessitous condition, this Not, is at the same time the condition of a turning.

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Hölderlin’s first task, as it is understood by Heidegger, is to convey that need manifests itself in the contemporary world as a needlessness (a symptom of the avoidance to which I referred): “A sign we are, without meaning,” as Hölderlin writes in “Mnemosyne.” Heidegger will give this verse several turns, in this analysis and elsewhere, but its most immediate sense, for him, relates to a failing in the task of interpreting the meaning of beyng, a (spiritual) lapse into an oblivious inauthenticity on the part of the modern Dasein. In Heidegger’s argument, the German people will only confront their destinal task if and when they confront the exigency from which the poet takes his vocation, writing “for the sake of need only and out of need” (HH 214/235; see also HH 258/284). But Hölderlin, as we have seen, pushes back to think the ground of need in the need of the origin itself. Here, as we have seen, we meet the motif of “God’s lack” and Hölderlin’s daring formulation, in Strophe VIII of “The Rhein,” of a need on the part of the gods themselves for a mortal surrogate in feeling (lines 106-114): a need and use of humans that introduces a fundamental instability in the human/ divine relation.21 “Need,” as I have indicated, takes two forms in the destinal configuration we have been considering in approaching the rhythmic figure Heidegger draws forth from “The Rhein.” There is the need of the gods to which he refers in the lines cited earlier, but also the need of the earth for language (named in the verses cited earlier: “Not in vain do/Rivers run in the dry. Yet how? Namely, they are/To be to language. A sign is needed” [cited at HH 131/150]). The origin, as I have put it, is doubly articulated in its upsurgence, and always turning inward in the articulation of what Hölderlin terms intimacy (hence the enigma of this configuration, to which only Dichtung has proper access22). Only with the conflictual turn of the demigod, drawn forth in language by the poet, is this articulation achieved; only then does the origin truly “enter its need and thereby come to itself ” (HH 214/234). As Heidegger will put it, in terms that anticipate his account of the need of truth for art in the coming essay on the artwork: “Beyng lets poetizing spring forth so as to find itself within it, and thus within it to open itself up in closing itself off as mystery” (HH 216/238). These statements of course deserve further explication in themselves, but we may glimpse already the need at the ground of the movement of Ereignis—the event of originary appropriation. Let me emphasize that Hölderlin’s manner of evoking this need points to a kind of constant aggravation of this movement, a constant de-stabilization that makes any founded order (what Heidegger would term Fug) provisional. He describes an irremediable wanting at the origin that makes his own search for a “fitting” response an impossibly fraught one. Hölderlin thus

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appears to be telling us that at the ontico-ontological level, rhythm has abyssal, unsettled grounds. Before I continue with Heidegger’s interpretation of the motif of need in his sketch of the rhythmic figure that forms in the river’s Gestalt, I should emphasize one fundamental point with respect to the conflictual and ultimately unstable character of the structure Heidegger describes. The phrase I cited earlier regarding beyng’s need for poetry (which prefigures what Heidegger will say in “The Origin of the Work of Art” about the truth’s need for the work) appears in a quite impassioned discussion following shortly after Heidegger’s presentation of his diagram. Here, Heidegger turns to a poem that he acknowledges has informed his entire reading of Hölderlin, namely “As on a holiday . . .” (HH 228-235/252-260), underscoring very forcefully that what he is describing in what I have termed “the rhythmic figure” is nothing other than the structure of the relation between physis and poiesis (or what I described loosely earlier, following Hölderlin on Pindar, as the relation between physis and “science”) as it is drawn out and founded in poetry. Heidegger will begin with a striking gesture by identifying language itself as a river and go on to claim that Hölderlin’s poetic saying speaks from the very origin of beyng (inasmuch as beyng needs poetry for its original advent), saying—configuring—the intimacy by which what Hölderlin names “nature” comes into its unity.23 A casual reader who loses sight of the broader context might grasp this relational structure, which ultimately defines the relation between physis and all human usage that is “aletheic” in character, as describing an “immediate” relation between saying and Being. Paul de Man (strikingly casual with respect to Heidegger) famously fell into such an error.24 They might also balk at the extraordinary flow of figurality wherein the poietic saying of the essence of a river affords the retroactive identification of language as a river (I will return to this motif). But at the heart of this relational structure is a rhythmic configuration punctuated by a “counter-rhythmic interruption” that articulates difference. Reading back from Derrida, we may even recognize a thought of writing (this will become more clear in the next section). But the core point I want to emphasize here is that what I am naming a “rhythmic figure” describes nothing other than the historical (or historial) articulation of the ontico-ontological difference. To return, now, to the more immediate context of Heidgger’s interpretation of “The Rhein,” we should not neglect the significance of Heidegger’s remarkably sketchy and even abstract explication of the notion of need as it appears specifically in the commentary that accompanies his diagram (HH 223/245). A first, and rather simplistic consideration that might present itself once we notice

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this oddity is that the need evoked in this specific context is not that of a human Dasein; the demigod stands between humans and gods. It is surprising that we should be asked to think of need, in the experience of the demigod, as a purely external necessity, but we would not be obliged to pause over this abbreviated treatment of the notion in this context were it not for the fact that Heidegger is at great pains to insist, throughout his analysis, that the poet suffers with the demigod and is the same as this being with respect to their poietic task. Both demigods and humans, we are told, are needed and used by the gods. And Heidegger emphasizes that the poet participates in the passion of the demigod. Yet the demigod does not know death in the manner of a human being, even if he has an “eye too many,” like Oedipus. And, as we are told, the gods, in surfeit of immortality (somehow not a feeling) need humans to feel. Hölderlin does not specify the grounds of the distinction he makes between mortals and demigods in his description of divine usage, though it is consistently established in the lines cited by Heidegger. But the problem is fairly evident. How can one think human pathos, in a Heideggerian or Hölderlinian perspective, without a reference to human mortality, and what it gives of an opening to the “abyss” of the earth? Heidegger declares near the beginning of his discussion of “The Rhein” that a destiny (a demigod, he argues is to be thought as a destiny) cannot be thought in its proper, extraordinary being, “as an apportioning and determining that sets limits,” without a fundamental experience of death: “no concept of beyng is adequate that has not set itself the task of thinking death” (HH 158/173). But the significance of this statement will not be further developed in a direct manner in the lectures. Heidegger’s attention to Hölderlin’s references to Dionysos in “The Rhein” are intriguing, but offer very little. Heidegger might insist that the human confrontation with death occurs in the poet’s act of holding himself before the terrifying breaking-forth of the demigod and the violence of its counter-turn with respect to the origin. Humans flee, Heidegger emphasizes, the poet, in his hearing, stands firm, and in this poetic, founding (stiftend) act, sets forth and sets out in advance (heraus und hinstellende) what in the origin authentically has “substance” (Bestand). He thus sets the originary into the word (“was bleibet aber, stiften die Dichter”). But Heidegger essentially leaves aside reference to the danger the poet faces in his listening (one would have expected him to pick up this motif from his earlier interpretation of “Germania”). There is not much offered with respect to mortal ex-posure. The poetic vocation takes its determination from the destiny heard by the poet (it is bestimmt thereby), but the poet’s Stimmung is little defined after the

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earlier developments in the sections on “Germania”; it is effectively subsumed in the demigod’s noble course. Has Heidegger already run into the problem that afflicts him in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” namely the “distressing difficulty” of thinking the relation between Being and human being in the context of the founding function of Dichtung? What of the experience of mortal finitude does Heidegger leave aside when he identifies the poet with the demigod, equating their suffering, but without significant exploration of the motif of dying, which is so critical to Hölderlin? (“Life is death, and death is a form of life,” Hölderlin writes in “In lovely blueness . . .”) What sublation occurs in the emergence of that properly “poetic” Dasein that Heidegger assigns to the poet when he becomes the one who “sees” in “Germania” or “As on a holiday . . .” (“I waited and saw it come . . .”). At this point, awaiting the discussion of Antigone to follow, I will limit my question simply to the following. Can it suffice to affirm that “the first-born must be sacrificed” for the national task the poet undertakes in their singular manner—their standing in for the people (as Stellvertretend) at the limit they occupy in their ex-posure, and in the isolation they suffer by the reason of the originary character of their language (liminal with respect to common usage). Is there perhaps more than a “tragic” loss here, as the poet’s suffering is subsumed in that of the demigod, in and for the “pure” difference articulated in the demigod’s turn with respect to the originary powers? In short, is that “spiritual” suffering to which Hölderlin alludes in his “Remarks on Antigone,” more profound than Heidegger allows?25 Does something of it (to which Hölderlin constantly testifies in his poetry) necessarily resist subsumption? In his quite powerful effort to offer Hölderlin’s river poems as an exemplary and quite cleanly defining form of figuration—and yes, we are close to a kind of national aestheticism in effect—Heidegger would appear to have sacrificed something of the human share of poetic truth.26 This thesis might prompt us to review the manner in which Heidegger restricts his focus to what is in fact a rather narrow range of poetic statements. The river poems might be said to meet the standard of “greatness” Heidegger sets in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” and Heidegger will in fact cite broadly from Hölderlin’s works to build his reading. But his focus is quite strictly contained. While he will recognize and draw significantly from Hölderlin’s effort to define a mode of presentation proper to German poetry, he will not enter into a detailed engagement of these efforts. Heidegger in fact concludes his 1934–5 lecture series with a brief discussion of this work with respect to what Hölderlin terms “the free use of the proper.”

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He cites here from the letter Hölderlin wrote to Casimir Böhlendorff before his fateful trip to France, outlining the chiasmic construction that Hölderlin offers for the relation between the national “endowment” (Vorgabe) and the corresponding poetic task (Aufgabe) in the cases of the Greeks and the Germans.27 His construction of Hölderlin’s words is worthy of critical attention in itself, but I will pause only over his conclusion here, which carries into what Heidegger understands of the present and is offered after a reference to what he terms Nietzsche’s “rediscovery” of the categories of the Dionysian and the Apollonian: The hour of our history has struck. We must first take what has been given us as an endowment into pure safekeeping once again, yet only so as to comprehend and take hold of what has been given as our task—that is, to question our way forward and through it. The violence of beyng [my emphasis] must first and actually become a question again for our ability to grasp. (HH 266/294)28

What is so striking about this passage, which sets the concluding note for the lecture series, is that it appears to point (in its specific context) to what I have suggested is significantly lacking from the second half of this series: a meditation on a “holy pathos” that is human. This is precisely the motif that will give to the upcoming An Introduction to Metaphysics one of its most acute accents. Readers will recall the guiding phrase from the famous choral ode in Antigone (“There is much that is strange . . .”) and Heidegger’s account of the way the uncanniness of human being is linked to human mortality. Heidegger was clearly attentive to Antigone’s own singular bond (her philia) with death. The line she utters in her confrontation with Creon regarding the Zeus to which she answers will have resonated powerfully with Heidegger, already in 1935: “Who knows, there may be another usage below.” To give my critical suspicion regarding Heidegger’s interpretation of Hölderlin’s river poems in very summary terms, I would have to say that Heidegger seems both too German and too Greek (in a classical sense). He has not fully engaged Hölderlin’s meditation on the German destiny. This meditation remains enigmatic in its formulations, but difficult to align simply with Heidegger’s monumental construction of the rhythmic figure given in “The Rhein.” I refer here, once again, to Hölderlin’s “Remarks,” which return to the question of holy pathos and a specifically modern form of presentation in the pages that follow the line I have just cited from Antigone.29 (I return to the topic of presentation in my chapter on Hölderlin’s “Remarks.”) Here, a counter-turning is described

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that could be aligned with what we read in “The Rhein,” but cannot be made to conform with the temporal construction Heidegger reads there. One might possibly argue that it is inappropriate to see Heidegger as beholden to the transformations that took form in Hölderlin’s poetic thought in the period that follows the disaster to which he testifies after his return from France. But on what grounds could Heidegger justify not following this turn, particularly in light of his use of material from this later period? How could Heidegger, at the same time, pretend to ignore the failure of the attempt made by Hölderlin to write a modern tragedy with Empedocles (which Heidegger places at the center of the founding poetic effort to which he appeals), and the subsequent turn to the project of translating the Greeks, where Hölderlin continues to seek his modern destiny as a poet?30 Reading Hölderlin as the poet of poetic language, how could Heidegger leave aside Hölderlin’s meditation on the pure word and the factical word of the tragedy, and especially the more spiritual affliction carried in the latter? The words of the third section of the “Remarks” on Antigone point to a thought of finitude that was in fact present in the very letter from Böhlendorff from which Heidegger cited at the end of his lecture series. There would be quite a lot to add on the question of rhythm itself were we to confront Heidegger’s interpretation, as I have sketched it, with a more probing reading of these passages. Further attention to Hölderlin’s later poetry and the extensive emendations he made to earlier work (the focus of a generation of scholars) would help us grasp his attempt to think this “more profound destiny” and his effort to commemorate his own path (to which he alludes in his following letter to Böhlendorff, which pursues themes from the first, but after the disaster: “May I remember how I have come to this point” [FH, 153/946]). All of this should be brought to bear in a consideration of what Hölderlin brought to the question of poetic rhythm. My own approach has been more limited in that I have tried to bring forth the broad lineaments of Heidegger’s engagement with Hölderlin in 1934 and 1935 with respect to Heidegger’s own thought on rhythm. Pursuing Hölderlin’s poetic thought and work beyond what Heidegger provides or will allow (or at least following Heidegger in his manner of constantly pointing beyond his own argument into Hölderlin’s text, and then forcing the limits of his thinking) would certainly yield quite a lot for a thought of rhythm. But my immediate aim here is to draw forth the questions posed by the problematic passage between the lectures of 1934–5 on Hölderlin’s river hymns and “The Origin of the Work of Art.” With that end in view, I reluctantly leave the enigmatic rhythms, sometimes broken, sometimes flowing, of Hölderlin’s later text.

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II. The Use of the Earth: “The Origin of the Work of Art”

At the outset of this chapter, I asked whether the analyses of the lectures of 1934–5 devoted to Hölderlin’s river hymns could be considered fully consistent (or made consistent through an interpretive intervention) with the philosophical account of the essence of art provided in Heidegger’s celebrated essay, “The Origin of the Work of Art”—an essay that advances one of the most important statements in philosophy of art of the twentieth century. So powerfully does this argument and presentation stand on its own, so powerfully is it crafted, that it is difficult not to take it as Heidegger’s defining statement on art. And if it diverges from an earlier exposition, such as the lecture series devoted to Hölderlin, one easily assumes that “The Origin of the Work of Art” is to be taken as a more advanced statement, even the definitive one—which means here more properly assuming of the “turn” that occurred in Heidegger’s thinking as he pursued the thought of Ereignis in the 1930s via an effort to think the place of art for a transformation in the very meaning of political life and a confrontation with the growing sway of Technik. Of course, we have seen that Heidegger was not fully content with his achievement in this essay. The question of human being was inadequately addressed, in his view. But would we not assume that this later essay marked a fundamental advance in his thought on art and that any insufficiencies would and should be somehow redressable within the terms of this essay? There are strong textual reasons for accepting the assumption that “The Origin of the Work of Art” marks a decisive advance in Heidegger’s work. The essay, in fact, explicitly carries forward founding assumptions that can be seen as having bracketed the presentations of the earlier lecture series. In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger will argue forcefully and insistently that any approach to the work of art requires that we proceed from the work. On the question of the artist’s work of creation, for example, Heidegger writes the following, after a brief consideration of the notion of technē and a dissociation of the artist’s work from craft: What then, if not craft, is to guide our thinking about the essence of creation? What else than a view of what is to be created—the work? Although it becomes actual only as the creative act is performed, and thus depends for its actuality upon this act, the essence of creation is determined by the essence of the work.

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Heidegger's Turn to Art Even though the work’s createdness has a relation to creation, nevertheless both createdness and creation must be defined in terms of the work-being of the work. (BW 185/47)

Reading back in the lectures of 1934–5, we find statements that point in this direction at both the beginning and near-end of the lecture series. Rejecting a standard appeal to biographical documentation at the outset of his exposition, Heidegger asserts that we must proceed “from the poetic work itself, comprehending the poetic Dasein of the poet within and for that work” (HH 6/7). The subsequent discussion of poetic language effectively supports this argument, if indirectly. A statement near the end of the lecture series then reaffirms the assertion. By this point in the lecture series, Heidegger has established how the poet will and must remain Other for his community. He then adds: “The necessity of being the Other is such only out of the need and for the need of those who actually create—that is, on the grounds of the work that is effected” (HH 258/284). It is not just that the poet, in their need, must respond as a poet, which is to say, in and from language, understood in a broad sense. The argument is stronger. It is from the work that the poetic Dasein’s engagement with language and beyng must be thought. Nothing in Heidegger’s 1934–5 lecture series actually contradicts these assertions; he will endeavour consistently to indicate, at least, the manner in which the poem embodies and effects the fundamental, founding design of the poetry. Hölderlin achieves the rhythmic figure in the text of his founding poetic acts. Or so Heidegger’s argument goes (whether it is quite sufficient, or sufficiently developed, is not our issue here). In “Germania,” the wrenching effect of the poem derives from a “whirlpool” of language. In “The Rhein,” the counter-turning of the river is embodied in the poem’s structure. If Heidegger were pressed, he would surely have to assert that the Schwingungsgefüge can only be read from the distinctive features of the work’s composition, features that are determining for this rhythmic structure, even as they take their definition from it.31 One also finds in the course of Heidegger’s reading of “The Rhein” a quite striking anticipation of an important part of the philosophical task undertaken in “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In an attack on the Nazi regime’s scientific agenda that prepares the coming articulation of the problematic of Technik, and in the context of his discussion of the manner in which Christianity and modern science denature the Greek thought of physis that informs Hölderlin’s (and a properly poietic) understanding of nature, Heidegger states that the task of bringing about a transformation of science—the task he identified in 1929

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in “What Is Metaphysics?”—requires an “experience” that exceeds the order of scientific inquiry and critique: Science as a whole can never be transformed through science, and still less through measures that are concerned merely with altering the business of its teaching, but only through another metaphysics—that is, a new fundamental experience of beyng. Such an experience entails, first, a transformation in the essence of truth; and second, a transformation in the essence of labor [my emphasis]. This fundamental experience will have to be more original than that of the Greeks, which expresses itself in the concept and word physis. (HH, 179/196)

“Experience” is a critical word here, and certainly as germane to the task of thought as it is to poetry, even as it points into a different “experience” of usage. But in the context of the reading of Hölderlin and the thought of a grounding experience of earth and nature, it points forward quite strongly to the meditation on earth to come in “The Origin of the Work of Art” and to the manner in which art constitutes an essential site for the event of truth. Rethinking work (Arbeit, here) from the basis of a rethinking of the essence of truth requires a meditation on the work of art for what it reveals of a path beyond a metaphysically determined order of production and our very understanding of reality or actuality. When Heidegger turns to the topic of the use of the earth for a poietic instantiation of the event of truth (Ereignis) in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” he is advancing, quite profoundly, a thought of the work of Dichtung and what this brings to a thought of “the inner truth of natural science.”32 My aim at this point has been to establish that Heidegger is clearly anticipating work to come on issues that shape his engagement with Hölderlin, and this as early as the start of his lecture series. He is already quite far ahead of himself. On this basis, there would seem to be strong grounds for assuming that “The Origin of the Work of Art” will in fact complement the presentations of the previous lecture series on Hölderlin. But these reasons do not suffice to guarantee that the path of thinking Heidegger is following is necessarily an unbroken one. In fact, it is quite manifest that something happens when Heidegger addresses overtly the question of the setting into work of truth in the work of art. Some insight into a resurgent difficulty occurs that prevents Heidegger from accommodating in his magisterial account his preceding thought of the poetic Grundstimmung.

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Heidegger’s own hint in the “Addendum” to the essay regarding what he has understood is actually quite precise and helpful. As I noted in my Introduction, it tells us that he has not gone far enough in thinking the relation between language and human being, a topic he will only address in On the Way to Language, notably in “The Essence of Language,” an essay that actually seems to restage, in certain respects, the argument of “The Origin of the Work of Art” with respect to the question of the earth. The subsequent essay in Heidegger’s volume on language, “The Way to Language,” then approaches the topic directly. I return to these complex and exciting discussions in the next chapter.33 For the present discussion, I believe it is simply important for me to observe what is occurring as Heidegger strips the motif of Grundstimmung from his account of art, or to note simply what goes with it. In this latter respect, the disappearance of the motif is quite stunning, for we effectively lose in “The Origin of the Work of Art” the theme of need and— for better and for worse—a vital part of the argument for the political meaning of Hölderlin’s Dichtung as a founding text for the German people. The motif of founding remains (the artwork essay approaches its conclusion with it), but the contemporary conditions that necessitate this founding act are treated only in a general manner. It might be assumed that such generality is suitable for a philosophical statement of this kind. But still in the summer of 1935, in the first chapter of An Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger would assert that we must approach the fundamental question (“why are there beings rather than nothing?”) from the preliminary one: “How does it stand with Being?” It is with respect to this latter question that Heidegger will evoke the conditions for the need for decision on the part of the German people regarding their historical destiny and that of the West. This imperative, this exigency, had informed all of Heidegger’s exhortations with respect to the conditions of reading Hölderlin’s text, or “preserving” it, as he will say in “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Perhaps we should see this development as salutary. It certainly was for Heidegger’s reception in the post-war period. It helped readers leave unexplored some of the subterranean currents that surfaced in the “Black Notebooks,” currents already visible in An Introduction to Metaphysics. The “monumental” aspect of the statement on art has effectively prevailed. But if we come from a searching reading of the lectures of 1934–5, it is difficult to escape the sense that Heidegger’s master-statement on art, in all the speculative force and brilliance with which it mobilizes the circle that helps constitute the rhythmic figure of his own thinking, is strangely wanting—incomplete, but also insufficient.34

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The place for a thought of the poetic Grundstimmung is in fact marked. Heidegger makes an explicit appeal to the pertinence of the existential analytic for both the poetic act of creative projection and the act of preservation in the latter part of his essay. And he clearly draws from it in developing the motifs of earth and world in commenting on van Gogh’s painting and the Greek temple. But the motif of Stimmung, which is fundamental in the existential analytic, goes without mention, except by aside.35 This becomes critical in the meditation on art because it is precisely by way of the theme of Stimmung that Heidegger engaged the question of the use of the human in the lectures on Hölderlin. The gods, we will recall, use humans to feel, and in this usage they draw upon the intimacy of humans with the abyss of the earth, an “intimacy” which is a dimension of their mortal being. When Heidegger elides the motif of Stimmung in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” he effectively leaves behind what Hölderlin gave to us of a meditation on death and the human body. He may also have eliminated something of the destabilizing character of the “logic” of usage. One has to wonder, after “The Origin of the Work of Art,” how we can rejoin Heidegger in his return to the figure of Antigone, who, in her “uncanny journeying” in response to her sense of a usage “below,” is declared “the purest poem.” (I will return to this topic in my third section of this essay.) Did Heidegger perhaps draw the circle (or the bow) a little too tightly in his attempt to escape a notion of production (still prevalent in his approach to art in the period of the existential analytic and his understanding of art as formative of world [weltbildend])? Was he, in the same gesture, reinforcing his effort to shed anything that might allow us to understand Stimmung with reference to some form of Erlebnis? Heidegger’s critique of the “liberal” account of cultural production, which understands the poet’s creative act in terms of a notion of expression (be this on the part of an individual psyche or drawing from some ethnic or racially determined basis) is fierce and quite powerful; it certainly cannot be ignored. And I believe one has to admire, in this context, Heidegger’s use of the lines from Hölderlin that so resonate throughout his engagement with him. “Full of merit, yet poetically man dwells”: There is much that is worthy, even awesome in human achievement, but the accomplishments of culture and industry cannot, of themselves, lead us past what Heidegger will diagnose, after Nietzsche, as nihilism. But could this critique of the metaphysics of subjectivity and this assault on the notion of production (geared increasingly to Heidegger’s gathering thought on Technik) have been enough to prompt an abandonment of the motif of a use of the human? This seems unlikely, given the strength of the turn he makes to the

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topic of the use of the earth, which I would like to explore now in a consideration of the rhythmic element of the setting into work of truth. No, I believe we must accept that “The Origin of the Work of Art” remains wanting with respect to a core element of its endeavour: to think in art a countervailing possibility to the devastation of Technik as regards the essence of human being. “The Question Concerning Technology,” of 1952 will state this endeavour quite directly in its concluding section and helps us see what Heidegger himself regarded as lacking in “The Origin of the Work of Art.” All of this said, “The Origin of the Work of Art” remains an astounding piece of philosophical writing. Entering into its rich problematic and rhythms will lift the burden of unease we may bring to it after leaving Heidegger on his holiday on the banks of Pindar’s rivers—though we might do well to move quickly past the poem on the fountain that Heidegger gives us in their stead. * I want to hasten toward my topic (the rhythmic figure), and will therefore touch only briefly on the opening section of the essay, in which Heidegger raises the question of the “thingly” character of the work of art from the basis of an effort to determine in what respect we can speak of art as something real. Is there any ground for speaking of an essence of art without appealing to some abstraction, or the widely accepted pragmatic definition (wherein art is what we agree to recognize as such)? Where does art present itself? Immediately, Heidegger sets before us a very concise statement of the challenge to thought posed by the hermeneutic circle that confronts us. Since the question of whether and how art in general exists must remain open, “We shall attempt,” he writes, “to discover the essence of art in the place where art undoubtedly prevails in a real way. But what and how is a work of art?” How, in other words, can we proceed from the work if we are not certain we can identify art as such and know that this is a work of art? A paragraph on this dilemma is then immediately punctuated by a striking declaration that affirms the necessity of embracing the exigency of the circle. Both tone and tenor suggest that what is at stake here is more than a reminder regarding phenomenological method. Not only is the rhetoric exalted; the allusion to craft is apparently inconsistent with the important remarks that will follow in the essay. Thus we are compelled to follow the circle. This is neither a makeshift nor a defect. To enter upon this path is the strength of thought, to continue on it is the feast of thought, assuming that thinking is a craft [Handwerk]. Not only is

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the main step from work to art a circle like the step from art to work, but every separate step that we attempt circles in this circle. (BW 144/3)

What is Heidegger signalling? Necessarily enigmatic in the moment of its first appearance, the statement effectively announces and celebrates the challenge to thought presented by the core thesis of the essay, namely that art presents itself— always only in a singular work of art—as a site for an originary instantiation of truth. What this means is that the work of art offers a way toward thinking the finitude of truth: its finite inscription, and thereby its historicity. The task that prompts this enthusiastic statement is to think how truth opens originarily in a finite artefact, once again, and in such a way as to give this artefact in a singular manner that makes it possible for us to say that it is, art—singularly so, and with all the “general” import of a truth-event. The hermeneutic circle will be engaged here in an exceedingly tight and powerful fashion as Heidegger effectively takes a rhythm for thought from the rhythmic becoming of the work of art that he will set forth over the essay’s long pages. The first chapter, then, starts with the topic of the “thingly” character of art, and proceeds through a rapid consideration of three broad metaphysical concepts that define the general notion of the nature of a thing. Once again, it is in this context, after a discussion of the traditional construction of the thing as a substance with attributes (a first thing-concept), that we find the sole reference to Stimmung in the essay, though it is immediately qualified with a critical exposition of a second “thing-concept” that understands the essence of a thing from the basis of our sensible experience of it, an aesthesis. The third thing-concept will then give Heidegger the ground for his attack on the form/matter distinction (cited earlier) and the inflationary manner in which it is used generally for defining our relation to the thing. Identifying the proper provenance of this binary formulation in the Greek understanding of the production of things of use (equipment, Zeug), Heidegger will proceed to establish a crucial distinction between equipment, or works of craft, and the artwork, a distinction that rests in important measure on the use of the earth in the artwork. The tool, or the thing defined by its utility, uses up (verbraucht) the earth; the artwork brings the earth forth as earth in a fundamentally different usage. Heidegger’s manner of establishing this distinction is rather delightful, though it has provoked the ire of a number of critics, and is heavily laden with the rural ideology to which Heidegger inclines in this moment.36 He proposes that instead of fleeing the opposition he has denounced, we should enter into

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it in greater depth by examining closely a piece of equipment. We don’t need an actual pair of shoes, Heidegger says, we can use a depiction in a painting by van Gogh. It is a playful feint that allows Heidegger to describe how an artwork manifests a thing in the truth of its being. He effectively performs an act of what he will call “preservation” in the latter part of his essay, and lays out how a piece of equipment, when it is (in use), can embody a human relation to both “world” and “earth” in and by what Heidegger terms the “reliability” of a piece of equipment.37 There is a quite noteworthy advance here in Heidegger’s thought of equipment, but also a rich articulation of the notions of world and earth that will form the focus of his subsequent section. This next section, on the Greek temple, is not without its own exasperating elements for the art historian, but what it offers of earth and world and the manner in which these are articulated is quite significant for our purposes. The consideration of van Gogh’s painting allowed for a first approach to the manner in which the artwork brings forth an entity in the truth of its being, here thought from aletheia, or “unconcealedness.” In the painting, the equipmentality of the shoes is first brought to appearance, bringing forward in this appearance the domain in which it appears (the world and the earth of the one who uses them). Truth occurs in this setting into the work of truth (das sich ins Werk setzen der Wahrheit). “Setting,” Heidegger tells us, is to bring to a stand (zum Stehen bringen); in this case, a pair of peasant shoes lying on an indefinite ground is brought to stand in the light of its being. The figuration of the shoes may be said to “work” well; the shoes emerge forcefully as shoes. But it is not a matter of imitative capture. What shines forth is the being of the shoes, and in this, the shining of truth itself. Heidegger will close the first section of the essay by asserting that we must think the reality and even the thingly aspect of the work from this occurrence, this event by which truth sets itself to work (or “into” the work), thereby bringing truth itself to a certain manifest “standing.” Setting, standing, and placing are so metaphysically laden in their Greek provenance and modern construction that it is easy to take them without reflection, even as we accept Heidegger’s claim that “Setzung” cannot be a positing in the sense established in the metaphysics of subjectivity. It is not a fixing in place over against, in Heidegger’s usage, but rather a placing over and into, and a laying before and out that is to be thought from legein. Heidegger will insist in the coming section that the work does not stand in its singular selfsufficiency, its pure self-subsistence, if we objectify it in any sense (scientifically, critically, economically, or aesthetically). Nor can we treat it as posited by and for

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the artist, who “remains inconsequential as compared with the work, almost like a passageway that destroys itself in the creative process for the work to emerge” (BW 166/26). Setting, on the part of the artist, is a placing before, as we will see, but only in the manner of a releasing or offering to a self-standing that is singularly independent, and precisely by reason of the way truth has been received and drawn out there, which is to say in such a way as to become the ground of the relations within which the work stands. We must continue to work at this word “setzen,” but it is vital, as Heidegger introduces the motif of placing (Stellung) to keep at bay a metaphysical notion of positing. It might help, here, to recall the challenge of thinking the appearance of the term in Übersetzung (“translation”), particularly as Benjamin works with the word, and also be attentive to the manner in which Heidegger employs the term in describing the way in which human apprehension is itself displaced in the event of truth.38 And for standing, we will do well to hold in abeyance both the frame and the stel. Heidegger’s terms easily induce in the reader’s imagination a plastic construction of the artwork; the temple, as it happens, serves particularly well in this respect. But we must recall that van Gogh’s shoes are also said to achieve a distinctive standing as they set forth and set up a relation of world and earth in their self-sufficient presence as equipment and in their appearance in the work of art (and “standing” presumably means something different in each case inasmuch as the work of art shows its createdness). A Greek tragedy, as a linguistic artefact, also achieves a certain “standing” in truth—here a definition of meaning (bearing always a trace of its uncertain grounds) is set to work, but hardly “fixed.” Heidegger’s account of the temple-work is remarkably effective, even if it was partially inspired by a black and white photograph. It conveys powerfully what Heidegger means when he asserts that “the work belongs, as work, uniquely within the realm that is opened up by itself ” (BW 167/28) and notes that the standing of what remains of such works in what might be termed their “afterlife” cannot be comparable to the self-subsistence proper to them in the now-past world they helped to ground. To hint at that prior self-subsistence, Heidegger documents with the example of the temple-work how the standing of the work will have made visible in a contrasting play the manifold emergence of physis: towering and steadfast, the temple allows all beings to appear in their distinctive shape. It discloses, also, what reserves itself in this emergence, or resists, and thereby allows for a firm ground in human dwelling—what Heidegger names here the earth:

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Heidegger's Turn to Art What this word says is not to be associated with the idea of a mass of matter deposited somewhere, or with the merely astronomical idea of a planet. Earth is that whence the arising brings back and shelters everything that arises as such. In the things that arise, earth occurs essentially as the sheltering agent. (BW 168/29)

Earth hides (as Heraclitus said, invoking something like an inclination: physis kryptestai philei)—it withdraws and in its drawing provides the first lines of definition for the advent of truth (and with this the first tracing of a rhythm). I speak of lines of definition on the basis of Heidegger’s subsequent description of the manner in which the work of art bears the traits, the Züge of the “powers” in conflict—earth and world. Each of these “powers,” as drawn out in the work, traces lines or vectors of force. My phrasing is tentative and abstract as I anticipate the argument to come in which Heidegger brings the conflict of world and earth into the “rift-design.” But I want to accent in this manner the dynamic, articulating characteristics of the work, inviting us to understand as formally as possible how the work works in its rhythmic presence. Both world and earth are developed in notable ways, even before Heidegger introduces their reciprocal determination. World, which had been presented in the existential analytic as an order of signifiability and a spatio-temporal opening, is given a far broader ethical cast with a set of terms that mark the importance for Heidegger, in this moment, of both Heraclitus and Nietzsche. It is the temple-work that first fits together and at the same time gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations [jener Bahnen und Bezüge] in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of destiny for human being. (BW 167/27–28)

Being and Time had constructed the circular course of the existential analytic with reference to the two poles of birth and death. “Thrown being toward death” spanned both and prepared the notion of “fate” that would be enabled by the thought of temporality (anticipating the notion of destiny pursued in the lectures on Hölderlin). These determining bounds of the finitude of the human Dasein—which cannot be said to have been satisfactorily grasped by Heidegger with respect to the problematic of Mitsein—are now brought into relation with broader historial conditions39 and fundamental ethical determinations that are also developed with reference to Heraclitus’s fragment 53 (BW 169/29), where Heidegger notes that the work of art will be offering to definition the meaning of terms such as holy and unholy as it sets up a world:

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The linguistic work, originating in the speech of the people, does not refer to this battle; it transforms the people’s saying so that now every living word fights the battle and puts up for decision what is holy and what unholy, what great and what small, what brave and what cowardly, what lofty and what flighty, what master and what slave. (BW 169/29)

It is in these fundamental decisions (de-cisions) that the defining traits of world are established. In another context, we would want to examine more closely the relational structure, the weave or the “jointure” to which Heidegger alludes (“the unity of those paths and relations”), thinking from their gathering unity (and the gathering of that unity itself: each set of relations will help define the others) the projective acts that assume and bring to definition, in each modality, the existential and historial conditions named there. Immense questions lurk in this challenging task, even if we stick only to Heideggerian terms (particularly as regards the notions of rank deployed with reference to Heraclitus—these cannot but remain problematic, however much we attempt to rethink them), so this must await another occasion. Having sketched roughly, but evocatively, the notions of earth and world, Heidegger moves to think how they are articulated in the work-being of the work. He proceeds from the point I noted earlier in insisting that the Aufstellung of world in a work is not a setting before for some form of objective appreciation or assessment on the part of an interested (be this “without interest”) observer. It is not set up as in and for an exhibition. In setting out the guiding traits of world, the work sets forward an event whose establishment and maintenance (as an opening of measure) the work itself, as something that is set up, enjoins: But why is the setting up of a work an erecting that consecrates and praises? Because the work, in its work-being, demands it. How is it that the work comes to demand such a setting up? Because it itself, in its own work-being, is something that sets up. (BW 169/30)

Presumably, we have a trace, in this very odd formulation, of the work’s use of the artist. Heidegger’s discussion remains overdetermined by his account of the Greek temple, so he speaks of dedication and praise in a holy festival. But the artist’s anticipatory act of giving over (“that it should be”) from a relation of reception with respect to what is happening in the work—to which the artist will have answered as soon as the first lines are traced—must be conceived as for that ever-non-objective other to which we are subject (again, this is the relation of der Brauch). Hölderlin said something of this in the poem that made him a poet, in Heidegger’s estimation: “I waited and saw it come, and what I saw, may the

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holy be my word” (“As on a holiday . . .”). The line is extraordinarily presumptive, but in the manner of an inordinate desire to be worthy, and a profound, defining grasp of what this means. It is insensé, as Blanchot will say (“mad”40), closely following Heidegger, but it is also spoken in humility. Setting up a world (Aufstellung), then, involves a definition of the Wesenszüge of the work. But this must be thought always, as Heidegger goes on to say, with a second movement that Heidegger describes as a setting forth of earth: Herstellung (a word used in earlier writings for the production of world; its deployment here is symptomatic of the distance Heidegger is taking from that earlier notion). The work does not “use up” the material from which it is created, as we have seen; rather, it draws it forth in and with the opening of world and allows it to come forward in its proper being as earth. The temple-work, in setting up a world, does not cause the material to disappear, but rather causes it to come forth for the very first time and to come into the open region of the work’s world. The rock comes to bear and rest and so first becomes rock; metals come to glitter and shimmer, colors to glow, tones to sing, the word to say. All this comes forth as the work sets itself back into the massiveness and heaviness of stone, into the firmness and pliancy of wood, into the hardness and luster of metal, into the brightening and darkening of color, into the clang of tone, and into the naming power of the word. That into which the work sets itself back and which it causes to come forth in this setting back of itself we called the earth. Earth is that which comes forth and shelters. Earth, irreducibly spontaneous, is effortless and untiring. Upon the earth, and in it, historical man grounds his dwelling in the world. (BW 171172/32)

Set up in the earthly elements proper to its mode (as poetry, music, painting, the statuary: hence word, tone, color, stone or metal, etc.), the work is thus also, always, a setting forth, and inasmuch as it lets the earth be earth in this manner, it brings forth the earth’s own withholding and sheltering character. (Once again, this setting up is something enjoined by the work itself; in this injunction, there is again the use of the poet [BW 171-172/32].) The earthly qualities brought forward in the wrought work (brilliance of color, depth of tone, the “sounding” of the word, and so forth) manifest an opacity, even where they glow—something uncapturable in technical or theoretical terms, something that will not fully succumb to analysis. The earth withholds itself from any account, and as sheltering, it also draws what is set up in the work (as it itself is set forth) into its self-secluding movement. This withdrawal will help provide to a people’s world a firm ground and thus the possibility of dwelling, Heidegger

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affirms. World is set up in and upon the sheltering earth; but earth introduces a countermovement to the opening of world, a resistance (Widerstand), as well as a shadowing resonance and opacity. Rhythm, we might say, begins here. From the first gesture of tracing the lineaments of an opening of world in whatever questioning or initiative the artist undertakes (whatever effort they make to say or project something of being in the world, in answer to need), there is already a folding back that will continue to accompany and shape the orientation of each step. Every creator will know this rhythm, I believe (as does the writer, even in philosophy), just as everyone drawn to the work will eventually know it in the strange play of advance and withdrawal that characterizes the accomplished work inasmuch as it takes its enigmatic composure (its standing within itself) from the differential tension brought to figure in the work’s Gestalt. The latter assertion requires more development of the processual nature of the setting into work of truth. But we already have an essential component for understanding the work’s rhythmic presence: every opening and tracing of measure is already carried back into a sheltering and bounding movement. In drawing forth these countervailing (and counterveiling) forces, the work of art will draw forth a difference that is fundamentally rhythmic. Heidegger’s next step, in fact, is to name the recessive movement of the earth in a passage that is quite astounding for anyone who has spent the last year with Hölderlin’s river hymns. The earth appears openly cleared as itself only when it is perceived and preserved as that which is essentially undisclosable, that which shrinks from every disclosure and constantly keeps itself closed up. All things of earth, and the earth itself as a whole, flow together into a reciprocal accord. But this confluence is not a blurring of their outlines. Here, there flows the bordering stream, restful within itself, which delimits everything present in its presencing. Thus in each of the self-secluding things there is the same non-knowing-of-one-another. The earth is essentially self-secluding. (BW 172-173/33)

Is this “restful” stream, we might ask, “pre-originary” or “post-originary” (since the origin itself was given to us in the earlier lectures as a violent upsurgence and conflictual turning)? Is this the earth in an accomplished relation with world? What alteration has occurred in the figure of the river for this occasion?41 Heidegger will refer again to the earth’s setting of bounds later in his argument, suggesting that the delimiting movement involved is a condition of the event

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(thus “pre-originary,” as I put it somewhat facetiously). But my question is ultimately misguided, because one cannot think of a movement “proper” to the earth without thinking it from its relation to world in the event of truth. Heidegger could not use a phrase such as “delimiting everything present with its presence” were he not conceiving earth from this relation. But the delimitation he is describing does have its proper character or trait in this relation and is essential to the definition of a being to the extent that this being is brought to stand in itself. There is no standing in presence that is not relational by reason of the measure brought by world (at once ethical and spatio-temporal). But art introduces a dimension of withdrawal in this relationality by its use of the earth and its manner of drawing “what opposes measure and boundary into its common outline” (BW 188/51). Let us now approach this re-marking and articulation of delineating traits. Earth and world, once again, cannot be thought properly apart from one another. Every passage in this essay will yield this point, starting with Heidegger’s preserving response to van Gogh’s shoes. But how do we think a “common outline” for the opposition of measure and boundary? Heidegger’s account, here, is not immediately helpful in that it takes a markedly “mythopoieic” cast that was perhaps already audible in the passage just cited. Earth and world are now described as striving powers that seek to surmount one another, but actually emerge only in “self-assertion” (Selbstbehauptung) through this struggle. It is a strange argument on its face. Why would the sheltering, withholding earth ever want to appear as “itself ” in the liberated surge of its self-seclusion? How can earth become something “decisive” for world, and from whence the drive to unconcealment on its own part? But again, and as I rehearsed earlier, earth is only in this relation, appearing as the sheltering movement in the emergence of physis (“emerging and rising in itself ”) in its difference from the path-defining opening of world. Each opponent seeks to deny the other, but becomes itself in relation. Moreover, it shows as emerging from this relation, which is effectively drawn out in this ongoing struggle as its shared ground. The strife, Heidegger says, thus becomes ever more intense as striving, and more properly what it is as the striving powers “let themselves go into this intimacy of simple belonging”—what Hölderlin named “Innigkeit” (BW 174/35). The argument is quite challenging in fact: “self ” knows itself with reference to the provenance of its being as “self-assertion” (Selbst-behauptung) and self-definition become surrender to the movement unfolding. Each opponent gives itself over to the relation in which it is set out from its other. Each is drawn back to the origin.

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So we have, once again, the enigmatic returning movement Hölderlin “poetized” in the river and the welling of a rhythm as the intimacy of a struggle is dynamically drawn forth. Yes, the opponents are “world” and “earth,” and all of this remains profoundly mytho-poieic. But Heidegger is also striving to think this poetic logic formally with his language of tracing and drawing. The turning we have just witnessed could not be conceived without the added “trait” and thus the traction (drawing upon Zug and Ziehen) that the work-being of the work introduces as it draws the opponents into their originary relation in drawing the common outline of measure and boundary. This is the “rift-design,” the originary schematism effected by poetic language—or to put this more precisely, in poiesis, whose essence, Heidegger will tell us at the end of his essay, is language. The “mytho-poieic” cast of Heidegger’s argument rests quite explicitly upon a thought of what Derrida will come to term, more than twenty years later, an “arche-writing.” And in the de-limiting, tracing movement of the rhythmic movement we have followed, we glimpse the ground of the “imprinting” to which Heidegger refers in taking over the pre-Socratic notion of rhythm, the ground of “typography.” Heidegger’s turn to the motif of writing will occur after his introduction of the topic of truth and his attempt to recover a more original meaning of the Greek aletheia (we are still in the section entitled, “The Work and Truth”). The gathered conflict of world and earth that is drawn out in the work and forms its unity is now thought from the play of concealment and unconcealment that constitutes the clearing of truth. Very quickly, Heidegger displaces the propositional account of truth as conformity between knowledge and the matter apprehended by observing that such conformity presupposes the evidency of the matter at hand—and not just that matter but the region in which it appears, which defines not just the presence of the thing, but our relation to it. What we presuppose in the standard notion of truth actually pre-supposes us.42 We do not need to dwell on this argument on this occasion, but it is important to observe how uncertain the lighting and clearing of the open of truth is when it occurs in the work of art. World opens and clears, but earth withholds and veils, and by their play, as drawn out in the work, there occurs a double concealment entailing what Heidegger terms “refusal” (Versagung) and dissemblance (Verstellung). Refusal is actually defined as the condition of clearing: “not simply and only the limit of knowledge in any given circumstance, but the beginning of the clearing of what is lighted” (BW 179/40). It is a withdrawal that is drawn forth in the advent of truth from the ground of the earth’s bounding, self-secluding movement. Verstellung involves a play of dissemblance that is

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particularly notable here for what it presumably brings of a destabilization (Verstellung) so unsettling that it potentially undermines the firm seat provided to the work itself by the “retraction” of refusal. The open of truth, Heidegger tells us, “is never a rigid stage with a permanently raised curtain on which the play of beings runs its course . . .” (BW 179/41). These are words that should give us pause. Were truth not occurring, as we will see, in a determinate site—allowing us to speak of this truth-event, here—Heidegger’s attribution to art of a founding design would succumb to the mimetic indeterminacy so dreaded by Plato. But there is still reason to wonder whether the second form of unconcealment does not undo any surety with respect to the foundation offered by art. How certain can the hold of truth be, given that instability and error belong originally to the event of truth? Heidegger offers little in the way of response to this concern, but he is apparently less concerned with the determinacy of the presentation of whatever is set up in and as the work of art than he is with what it presents of the finitude of the existential decisions defining the work’s import (what it casts forward), where a share of indeterminacy is essential. In decision (as in Ent-scheidung, where we may perhaps hear a use of the word that is comparable to what we meet in Entfernung, “de-distancing”) we are to hear the cutting and limitation, as well as the marking of relation. Decision itself, we might say, is not uncertain, but its grounds are without surety, else it would not be decision (“The world is the clearing of paths of the essential guiding directions with which all decision complies. Every decision, however, bases itself on something not mastered, something concealed, confusing; else it would never be a decision” [BW 180/41]—Derrida would work masterfully with this insight.). Heidegger is reticent, as we have seen, on the question of human being, but he is quite insistent in indicating how the work of art brings to the fore the finitude of human existence in its earthly dimension. This is, I would say, an invaluable dimension of his essay. Heidegger concludes his presentation of the essence of truth as aletheia by returning again to the created work, asking how it is that truth can or even must happen in art. How does the impulse [Zug] toward such a thing as a work lie in the essence of truth? What must the created work be that it can offer a site for truth (or that truth should draw it into being as such a site)? Again, I move quickly, skipping an important discussion of technē, and Heidegger’s assertion that the work of artistic creation must be distinguished from that of craft (I will return to it in my last chapter). But Heidegger will not in fact dwell on the artist’s act, insisting instead once again that creation

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must be thought from the work-being of the work, and this by reason of the essence of truth itself in its originating event. “The work’s becoming a work [Werkwerden] is a way in which truth becomes and happens [eine Weise des Werdens und Geschehens der Wahrheit]. It all rests on the essence of truth” (BW 185/46). Thus, the becoming of truth primes in this discussion, prevailing over the artist’s act and leading Heidegger into his tightest articulations of the hermeneutic circle. Heidegger is pushing so far in attempting to think from the impetus of truth that he actually gets ahead of himself. His argument is manifestly insufficient, and he must refer back to Being and Time to justify his appeal to the Greek notion of thesis in describing the peculiar establishment of truth in art.43 The reference itself is not terribly helpful (at least for this reader, as yet), so essential terms remain partially undeveloped, at least at the level of argument attained here (Setzen, Besetzen, Aufstellung). Heidegger can only assert at this point that truth requires a being in which and by which truth, as the openness of an Open, can come into a standing and a constancy as this openness. Truth must hold and be held in and for a determinate site, and in this holding it must be patent (again, appearing as this truth—holding here in its temporal schemata): patently manifesting itself as defining the conditions of appearance of this finite entity in which it shows. Heidegger will specify here that truth is “historical” in “multifold” ways, of which he will enumerate five. These are linked to the presence of a divine being, what Heidegger terms “essential sacrifice,” thought, art, and politics.44 It is not clear to what extent each of these involves an “establishment” like the one Heidegger attributes to the artwork, but the term clearly speaks to the definition of truth offered thus far as a play of clearing and concealing.45 Art is a possible way for truth to establish itself, he tells us, but only art, it would seem, brings forth the opposition of clearing and concealing as such by using the earth as it does. For its properly earthly manifestation (and truth ultimately cannot be thought as such apart from its earthly dimension), it would appear that truth needs to appear in art. Every paragraph in this section of Heidegger’s chapter requires sustained attention for the way in which it words the circling to which I have referred. In this circling, there is becoming, and in this becoming the drawing forth of a rhythm by which truth itself is properly engaged and made manifest. Consider, for example, this passage, which names the setting into work of truth as something possible for truth:

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Heidegger's Turn to Art Because it is in the essence of truth to manifest itself within beings, in order thus first to become truth, the impulse toward the work lies in the essence of truth as one of truth’s distinctive possibilities, by which it can itself occur as being in the midst of beings. The establishing of truth in the work is the bringing forth of a being such as never was before and will never come to be again. The bringing forth places this being into the open region in such a way that what is to be brought forth first clears the openness of the open region into which it comes forth. Where this bringing forth expressly brings the openness of beings, or truth, that which is brought forth is a work. Creation is such a bringing forth. As such a bringing, it is rather a receiving and removing within the relation to unconcealment. (BW 187/50)

The rhythm that forms here is to be thought at two levels. Or, to put this more precisely: we now approach the ground of the rhythmic movement already identified. There is, first, the folding we have seen whereby the entity set forward for this event of truth comes to sustain this occurrence even as it stands within it—it “occupies” the Open, Heidegger says. Thus the artwork effectively draws forth the conditions of its own appearance. Receiving and drawing forth, however, is also a drawing back into the sheltering, concealing movement that belongs to the play of truth that is drawn out in this way. It is by this folding movement, as we will see, that the work assumes its figural stature. The work, we might say, folds its event into itself (or folds itself into the event). The dynamics of this folding constitute its rhythmic presence. But the ground of this movement, which Heidegger now thinks formally, is the adjoining and articulation of the defining traits of truth. Let us recall once more that Heidegger is quite explicit in recognizing the Greek understanding of rhusmos as articulation. Such an articulation occurs here as the fundamental traits of world and earth are drawn forth in their distinction and in a unifying design. This “lay-out” is both a forceful drawing out and apart (we will remember Hölderlin’s reissen, and Heidegger’s own insistence on strife) and a drawing together into relation. In “trait” (Zug, deriving from Ziehen), we must hear, once again, a drawing or pulling. The tracing of the Aufriss is thus the draughting of the difference—the difference: the “open center” that “encircles all that is”— that traverses and defines in its lines of force everything that is drawn forth into the open and also recedes there.46 But this founding design is itself drawn into this latter movement as it is set back into its earthly element and is folded into the earth’s emerging self-seclusion (“emerging,” of course, in the setting up of

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world). Only so, in the figure or shape (Gestalt) formed by its earthly recession, is truth set in place. The more powerfully the difference in which it consists is articulated, the more defined is the figure it takes and the more forceful this figure’s earthly presence and detaching emergence. Heidegger’s statement of the formal character of the work of art culminates with the following passage: The strife that is brought into the rift and thus set back into the earth and thus fixed in place is the figure [Gestalt]. Createdness of the work means truth’s being fixed in place in the figure. Figure is the structure [Gefüge] in whose shape the rift composes itself [sich fügt]. This composed rift is the jointure [die Fuge] of truth’s shining. What is here called figure is always to be thought in terms of the particular placing [Stellen] and enframing [Ge-stell] as which the work occurs when it sets itself up and sets itself forth. (BW 89/51)

I leave to theorists more versed in music a proper commentary on Heidegger’s evident appeal to the notion of the fugue for his evocation of the work’s “composed” jointure and the possible meaning of this for a more developed thought of rhythm. Once again, I am inclined to think that we must not press the musical reference too strongly in this context, rendering it determinative, and should rather recognize in Heidegger’s claim upon this term a more fundamental design (by which I mean we must think the counterpoint of the musical form from this notion of a gathering and defining articulation that brings a figure to its peculiar standing47). Terms such a Fug and Fügung are taking on, in this period of Heidegger’s thought, a very profound reach.48 Composition, in any case, is probably a better word for artistic creation than Schaffen by reason of what it gives of a setting and a movement that is also repose. It allows Heidegger at this point to underscore the gathering character of the placing of truth, giving us Gestell (a term later taken over for the essence of technology itself [BW 209/72]). But here, I want to direct attention to the way in which Heidegger immediately underscores, after the paragraph I have cited, the motif of the use of the earth in art for the establishment of the work’s figure. In art, earth is used in such a way as to be brought forth in its proper being (brauchen and verbrauchen are foregrounded here: artistic usage is not a “using up”). It is the use of the earth, he insists, that distinguishes artistic creation from the activity of handicraft or the making of equipment. The point was previously established in the essay, but here Heidegger draws it into his final statement about the singular, self-subsistent presence of the work of art. What distinguishes the creation of the work from the preparation of the tool is that its createdness (Geschaffensein) is expressly created

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into the work. Here again, we have a manifestation of the folding movement of the work. The work’s taking back into itself of the composed rift-design sets forth the event of figuration in such a way that this event is maintained. We are thereby struck by the fact that the work is rather than is not. But the very “earthly” form of refusal involved (a sich versagen) is a manifestation, in this process, that it is as a work, which means that what is presented in this bare “that” is the fact of an event of truth. As long as the work holds in its work-being, it will sustain this dynamics of the rhythmic folding and grow increasingly stranger and stronger in its solitude: The thrust that the work, as this work is, and the uninterruptedness of this plain thrust, constitute the steadfastness of the work’s self-subsistence. [. . .] The event of its being created does not simply reverberate through the work; rather the work casts before itself the eventful fact that the work is as this work, and it has constantly this fact about itself. The more essentially the work opens itself, the more luminous becomes the uniqueness of the fact that it is rather than is not. The more essentially the thrust comes into the open region, the more strange and solitary the work becomes. In the bringing forth of the work there lies this offering “that it be.” (BW 190/53)

It will hold, Heidegger now adds, as long as it is sustained in preservation. The rhythm is for those who receive its displacing impetus and assume this impetus in their own act of resolute “standing-within” the openness of beings that occurs in the work. Those who preserve must effectively take the rhythms of the work and what these articulate of a measure for being in the world (in the lectures of 1934–5, Heidegger spoke of undergoing a fundamental change in Stimmung). The terms Heidegger employs here stem directly from the existential analytic (he cites Being and Time with respect to the motif of “resoluteness,” Entschlossenheit), but are now brought into Heidegger’s argument for the founding character of the work’s articulation of truth. Thus: Willing is the sober unclosedness of that existential self-transcendence which exposes itself to the openness of beings as it is set into the work. In this way, standing-within is brought under law. Preserving the work, as knowing, is a sober standing-within the awesomeness of the truth that is happening in the work. [. . .] Thus it grounds being for and with one another as the historical standing-out of human existence in relation to unconcealment. (BW 192/193)49

The work thus offers a common ground for the people.

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For our purposes at this point, it seems most important to underscore once again how processual Heidegger’s understanding of the setting into work of truth is in his account of the essence of art. Heidegger is providing a powerful statement of the distinctive self-subsistence of the work of art as it takes its figural stature. But its standing derives as I have tried to urge, from a profoundly dynamic articulation of forces that is only “truly” given to an act of preservation. The work’s singular rhythm only comes into being as experienced, only as it is taken: not in feeling, as Erlebnis, but in the manner of a perilous traversal (drawing on the etymology of “experience”) which is initially a Ver-setzung. Heidegger asserts that preservation has its possibility in the work’s address, and that this address will subsist even without answer, or even in a time of “oblivion” with respect to the work (he may well be thinking of the fate of Hölderlin as he writes these words). But he also states quite clearly that “what is created cannot itself come into being without those who preserve it.” To achieve its proper standing, the work must be taken up. With the account of preservation we have briefly considered, Heidegger’s formal account of the work-being of the work comes almost to completion. He will return to the topic of the work’s reality and thingly character, underscoring once again that this derives from the work’s earthly being, and adding that the earth’s self-secluding movement provides a resistance (Widerstand) or opposition that defines a site for truth in its “standing” figuration (BW 194/56). Once again, the bounding, recessive component of truth is recognized as vital to the setting into work of truth, to the securing and holding firm of a human dwelling: its setting. At the same time, what the work draws forward of the earth gives us new access to the question of thingliness itself. Heidegger’s statement here is quite striking: for an approach to the thing, we require the work. He could perhaps have added that that work is required for proper access to the question of human belonging to the earth in its bodily dimension (which takes us back, of course, to the question of Stimmung). A summary statement on creation and preservation with respect to the becoming and happening of truth in art will then complement what Heidegger has brought forward from the existential analytic regarding the resolute stance involved in preservation. Here, the creative “sketch” of truth is defined in terms of projection upon the openness that makes its advent in thrownness—the Dasein’s experience of the fact that it is (and has to be as it can be). This brief referral to the existential analytic gives little to us regarding the question of human being, but it leads Heidegger to a definition of poetry as projection (BW 197/59) and a strong word of caution regarding an inevitable temptation to understand the

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essence of projection with reference to the power of imagination. Poetry is not about fancy, Heidegger observes, but the real question here is surely whether the displacement effected with respect to a “transcendental schematism” in this notion of the tracing of the Aufriss somehow still links to a Kantian or post-Kantian notion of imagination (Einbildungskraft). Earlier in the decade, in fact, Heidegger had described the production of world as “Weltbildung”—a world-forming. An appeal to imagination risks bringing back the metaphysics of subjectivity and the related problematic of production, which Heidegger is displacing with his notion of usage. It is perhaps possible that Heidegger’s immediate turn to the question of language at this point in his essay, and even the relative briefness of his treatment of the topic (he gave us far more in his Hölderlin lectures of 1934–5), is symptomatic of his need to break from this metaphysical heritage. I do not want to overstate this point; the development of the notion of the “rift-design” had quite powerfully prepared this concluding appeal to a thought of language, and this appeal is fully integral to his argument. The statement is also very broad in its implications. But his turn at this moment, late in his essay, remains abrupt with respect to what has preceded and might be seen, from a rhetorical perspective, as indicative of the urgency of the broader turn he is attempting at this moment. As Heidegger hints in his “Addendum,” the questions involved await a development that will only be adequately undertaken in On the Way to Language, when the topic of Being and human being is addressed. But, for our concerns here, a final crucial point has been made, namely that the essence of the rhythmic movement proper to art must be thought from language. And at this fundamental level, in fact, we are carried beyond the question of art: “Poetry is thought of here in so broad a sense and at the same time in such intimate essential unity with language and word, that we must leave open whether art in all its modes, from architecture to poesy, exhausts the essence of poetry” (BW 199/62). Again, the statement is not surprising, particularly given the assertions of the previous paragraph, in which Heidegger tells us that “poetry is the saying of the unconcealment of beings,” and goes on to state that “actual language at any given moment is the happening of this saying, in which a people’s world historically arises for it and the earth is preserved as that which remains closed” (BW 198/61). But with this statement, Heidegger would appear to have moved quite far past the focal point of his essay (which concerns what the work draws forth of what is given by language), and thereby obliges a complete rethinking of terms that may or may not be relevant to the poiesis unfolding in natural language in the projection of Saying (e.g., “establishment”). There is no question

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that rhythm remains pertinent in this sense, but we would need to undertake a renewed approach to the formal traits of human linguistic usage. That said, it is difficult to imagine Heidegger undertaking such an approach without reference to what poetry, as articulated in the work, would offer by way of its createdness. But what of the notion of craft, mentioned so prominently at the outset of Heidegger’s essay? Again, we must await subsequent developments relating to the topic of language, namely Heidegger’s lengthy meditations on the notion of the human hand (which, as Heidegger tells us in What Is Called Thinking? everywhere accompanies the human use of language). But a path is indicated here that might be quite pertinent for the topic of rhythm. Heidegger will in fact take this path as he pursues the question of the “use of the human” in a more fundamental thought of Being that retrieves its most archaic glimmerings in the fragment from Anaximander he will address in 1942, or the phrase from Parmenides that will become the focus of the latter part of What Is Called Thinking?. The essay I attach on craft in this volume will start along this path. For the present discussion, I will address only one concern that may surface at this point for many readers: Can we accept that rhythm, as known in every facet of human experience, is a linguistic phenomenon (in the sense that it is to be thought from language)? Such a conclusion may be jarring for a wide range of practitioners of critical thought that have turned from language to a more embodied, material account of being in recent decades (leaving aside even the question of materiality of language itself). What of bio-rhythms and their own interaction with rhythmic patterns proper to the natural world? Are not the rhythms of human usage an epiphenomenon with respect to these far more vast and deep-running movements in which human rhythms participate? Is it not our task, in this time of ecological crisis, to effect a more fundamental displacement in the understanding of the human? Heidegger’s answer would be fairly direct, I believe, and include the observation that his thought of language moves at a level that exceeds what has been offered to us in the social sciences and humanities as a “linguistic turn” (hence what is commonly understood as “linguistic”); he would also add that his understanding of the human (with which he thinks the finitude of language itself, as we will see in the following chapter) is far more “displacing” than is usually recognized, even in the context of the deconstruction of the metaphysics of humanism. With respect to the question of “natural” rhythms, he would point out that at whatever scale these are conceived, they belong to what he names in this essay physis and “earth.” They are thus an intrinsic part of the bounding that occurs in the earth’s seclusion, and, as such, part of the element of human

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experience. However, they are known in this experience, and thereby thinkable, only to the extent that they are taken into the Dasein’s world and participate in its definition (which is not to say subsumed by it). This is not at all to reduce experience to what is allowed by the measures of world. World “itself ” cannot be thought except in relation to the earth, and language, itself very much of the earth, is what draws that relation into being. “Experience” must be thought, to the extent that it can be thought, from the limits drawn by language, thought here as an arche-writing. And at these limits, there is an ex-posure like the one to which Heidegger alludes repeatedly in his lectures on Hölderlin. Of course, the Heideggerian construction of rhythm, even in its most extreme and fundamental formulations (which we will approach) must remain open to question. Maurice Blanchot’s stark admonitions regarding the fragmenting and “unworking” dimension of rhythm with respect to any gathering measure brought by language in its tracing of relation, is quite important in this respect. The admonition extends to the Heideggerian understanding of “earth”: “We do not repel the earth, to which, in any event, we belong; but we do not make of it a refuge, or even of dwelling upon it a beautiful obligation, “for terrible is the earth.” But Blanchot approaches these formulations from his meditations on writing, and thereby gives us further impetus to return to the question of language itself.50 In short, referring the human experience of rhythm to language (even with formulations as radical as Blanchot’s) does not disable, with the thought of difference it introduces, a thought of ecology. It gives, instead, an opening for thinking the human relation to extra-human rhythms. Let us recall, here, Heidegger’s statement that we need art to approach the thing. We can carry this statement a bit further by saying that we need art to approach rhythm, even if this latter topic carries us beyond art.

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III. Heidegger’s Lectures on “The Ister,” 1942

Heidegger’s return to Hölderlin’s river hymns in his lecture of 1942 is of special interest here by reason of his way of approaching the destinal meaning of the path to language taken by the Ister (a name Hölderlin borrows from the GrecoRoman tradition for the upper course of the Donau [HHI 10/10]). The lectures, in fact, take their point of departure from the concluding words of the lecture course of 1934–5 by reading Hölderlin’s poetic transposition of the flow of the river from the terms offered by Hölderlin’s letter to Böhlendorff of December 4, 1801. We also find in these lectures clear evidence of a continuing meditation on Hölderlin’s “Remarks” and on the meaning of Hölderlin’s efforts to translate Sophocles and Pindar. The first two sections of the lecture series, in particular, show significant traces of a renewed engagement with Hölderlin’s “Remarks.” The first returns to the notion of poetic dwelling by introducing the motifs of the river’s “journeying” (a temporal passage) and its definition of a “locality” for a human abode and stay. Taking over the severity and poetic force of Hölderlin’s formulation of the manner in which the tragic event exposes the conditions of space and time, Heidegger sets in place the terms of Hölderlin’s properly poetic divergence from the foundations of metaphysical (technical) thought. Dwelling, as a matter of appropriating one’s own (and thus “becoming homely”), requires a complete recasting of the historial grounds of a spatio-temporal order, and this task is properly that of the poet. The second section of the series turns to the choral ode from Antigone which Heidegger explicated in a significant section of An Introduction to Metaphysics, in 1935. Here, Heidegger claims that Hölderlin’s articulation of the historial law guiding the appropriation of the proper (the free use of one’s own) determines his decision to undertake the task of translating Sophocles and accounts for the way in the which the “poetic truth” spoken in the choral ode constitutes a fundamental point of reference for Hölderlin’s poetic thought. This is not a matter of “influence” in any common sense of the term. Assuming his own historial task, Hölderlin cannot but answer to this “foreign” saying that is defining for the commencing Greek articulation of the relation between Being and human being. Hölderlin had understood, from his chiasmic construction of the relation between the Greeks and the modern Germans, that the Greeks could never be

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models for imitation. A thinking translation of their way of negotiating (not fully successfully!) the relation between endowment and task could, however, be of assistance to the Germans, whose proper corresponded to what was foreign to the Greeks. What “correspondence” means here precisely remains somewhat obscure. But clearly, Hölderlin saw a profound relation between the respective terms (ordered chiasmatically). Heidegger, for his part, takes this relation as determining for this thinker who is poetizing the essence of Western humankind, arguing that the Greek relation of foreign and proper already marks the origin from which Hölderlin departs and to which he returns in his task of poetic homecoming. The foreign is already present in the proper. Thus, Sophocles’s poetic articulation of Being and human being (posited by Heidegger as an event, in the strongest sense, for the Greek Dasein) must resonate for the thought of this modern poet and cannot be avoided. That foreign that relates to the return home, that is, is one with it, is the provenance of such return and is that which has been at the commencement with regard to what is one’s own and homely. For Hölderlin, the Greek world is foreign with respect to the historical humankind of the Germans. [. . .] The resonance of the first stationary song from Sophocles’ Antigone tragedy in Hölderlin’s hymnal poetizing is a historical-poetic necessity within that history in which the being at home and being unhomely of Western humankind is decided.” (HHI 54-56/67-68)

In the third section of his lectures, Heidegger will define the relation between proper and foreign in the river’s journeyings, offering what can be construed as another rhythmic figure. The argument sustains the intensity of the overall lecture series, but I will touch on it only briefly near the end of my discussion in this section, returning to the question of Heidegger’s understanding of the mythic character of the poetic act. I will concentrate here on passages from the first two sections of the lecture series for what they convey regarding the meaning of Unheimlichkeit. It is here that the question of the human is most decisively engaged. The lecture series begins with a quite powerful evocation of the unique temporal situation of the poem, set forth in its opening line: “Now, come fire.” The call, and its greeting, belong to the temporality explored in the lecture series of the previous year devoted to “Remembrance.” Here it is understood from the poet’s relation to the enigmatic configuration of the spirit of the river, of which Hölderlin writes in his poem, “The Voice of the People”: Unconcerned with our wisdom The rivers still rush on, and yet

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Who loves them not? And always do they move My heart, when afar I hear them vanishing Full of intimation, hastening along not My path, yet more surely sea-wards. (cited at HHI, 11-12/11-12)

Intimation (Ahnung—the term gathers weight in these lectures) names a relation to what comes. Vanishing names a passage down into what has been. In this going down into a time that is defined by a futurity and a having been, the rivers are of time and are time itself. The “Now” belongs to the poet’s manner of responding to this time (“always do they move my heart”)—answering and assuming it in a naming of the river. Projecting from a “Now,” the poem also defines a “here” for human dwelling (“Here, however, we wish to build”). Heidegger’s initial statement about the meaning of this dwelling is worth noting here for what it tells us about the meaning of “becoming homely,” a notion that will become increasingly challenging as Heidegger moves through his interpretation of the choral ode. At this initial point, Heidegger appears to suggest how the notion of dwelling is to be thought with respect to a trait he attributes to the essence of Being: a constancy and a resting within itself that Heidegger draws from the verb “pelein.” “Pelein” here means the concealed presencing of stillness and tranquillity amid constant and unconcealed absencing and presencing, that is, amid the appearing of change. In this the gods speak and tell of what remains in keeping it silent. Such is to be thought only in “thoughtful remembrance” [Andenken]. Pelein does not mean the empty presencing of what is merely present at hand, but means the remaining that is what it is precisely in journeying and flowing. In such a way also is—which in Greek is to say: pelei—whatever is uncanny in all beings, and in such a way the human being is most uncanny. (HHI 72/89)

Shortly after, we read: “Of the uncanny we are told: pelei [. . .]. The uncanny ‘is’ in the manner of a coming forth (looming), and in such a way that in all its stirring it nonetheless abides within the inaccessibility of its essence” (HHI 74/90). One regrets that Heidegger does not offer more on this term. How does this link to the “restful,” “self-secluding” character of the earth, and thus the rhythms of physis? Or, how might we bring this into an understanding of what Heidegger will describe in “The Question Concerning Technology” as a saving power that is preserving for the essence of human being? The preserving repose granted to human beings in this movement is also given a very striking characterization as Heidegger cites Hölderlin’s reference to the notion of an asylum:

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Heidegger's Turn to Art Dwelling takes on an abode and is an abiding in such an abode, specifically that of human beings upon this earth. The abode is a whiling. It needs a while. In such a while, human beings find rest. Yet rest here does not mean the cessation of activity or the halting of disruption. Rest is a grounded repose in the steadfastness of one’s own essence. In rest, the human essence is preserved in its inviolability. The inviolability and holiness of a locale is η ασυλια in Greek. Hölderlin speaks of “asylums” (V, 271), of the resting sites of human beings; by this he does not mean graves, but rather those locales where the activity and life of nature is “concentrated,” where “something intimative” gathers around human beings. (HHI 20-21/23)

The words are astonishingly strong and suggestive (one will recall Hölderlin’s words about the “philosophical light” that gathers around his window in the letter to Böhlendorff that follows his return from France). Heidegger then continues with respect to the poietic activity of the river: The river “is” the locality that pervades the abode of human beings upon the earth, determines them to where they belong and where they are homely [heimisch]. The river thus brings human beings into their own and maintains them in what is their own. Whatever is their own is that to which human beings belong and must belong if they are to fulfill whatever is destined to them, and whatever is fitting, as their specific way of being. (HHI 21/23)

The river both defines and shelters. The belonging that conditions human being, however, is not something simply given; it must be appropriated. Heidegger then continues with the theme of the difficulty of this appropriation, attributing to the rivers a defining assistance: Yet if the river determines the locality of the homely, then it is of essential assistance in becoming homely in what is one’s own. By “assistance” we understand here not some occasional support but something steadfastly standing by [den ständigen Beistand], this word taken in the full force of its naming, meaning that the river is in advance and everywhere there-by [da-bei] and “there” [“da”]. (HHI 21/24)

In his reading of “The Rhein,” Heidegger attributed to the poet the securing stand before the origin that enabled the need of the origin to be brought to definition. Of course, in the poet’s identification with the half-god, he is understood to participate in that spirit of the river Hölderlin described in his commentary on Pindar, where what “animates” is the firming of the river’s banks. Heidegger’s understanding of the assistance brought by the river to human dwelling is thus fully consistent with his earlier analysis. However, we find a new emphasis on the

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separation from which a firm limit is drawn. This separation is underscored as Heidegger returns to the motifs of the vanishing and intimating of the river spirit, as named in “Voice of the People.” Here, the pertinence of Hölderlin’s “Remarks” is explicitly noted, with an apparent reference to “Antigone.” One would have to say that the ecstatic/ecstematic character of “originary temporality” as it was defined in the existential analytic has been considerably radicalized. I cite again after Heidegger’s observation of the way the rivers remain “remote and foreign” to humans, “as though their flowing and tearing tore itself free from every relation to human beings” (Hölderlin’s “reissen,” once again). And yet there is a love and thus a “going along”: It is precisely that which tears onward more surely in the river’s own path that tears human beings out of the habitual midst of their lives, so that they may be in a center outside of themselves, that is, be excentric. The prelude to inhering in the excentric midst of human existence, this “centric” and “central” abode in the excentric, is love. The sphere proper to standing in the excentric middle of life is death. (HHI 28/32)

We will find words very much like this applied by Heidegger to Antigone’s excentric stance in her being unhomely, and though Heidegger does not pause over the word (he passes over it without mention, following the poet’s reference to his love for the rivers), he appears to be evoking what Antigone will name “philia.”51 Here, I suggest, the strongest link is made between the poetic experience of the going down of the rivers (into an intimating having been) and Antigone’s own course of becoming homely in what she intimates of death in thoughtful remembrance (see paragraph 20, pp. 115–122, to which I turn shortly). Heidegger then continues to read the path taken by the rivers from the basis of Hölderlin’s “Remarks” on Antigone, quite forcefully recalling Hölderlin’s statements on infidelity, and then recollection. The rivers’ intimative vanishing along their own path is like an abandonment of the realm of the human landscape, it is like an unfaithfulness toward that landscape. “And yet, who loves them not?” It almost seems as though the spirit of the river could best be retained in the form of such vanishing, as though thoughtful remembrance proper [das eigentliche Andenken] belonged to this enigmatic unfaithfulness. Here strange perspectives are opened up in the essential and sole way in which it is possible to seize the “power of nature” and the “spirit of the river,” namely by a going along with them, a going along with them, however, that in turn does not take their path and thus makes way for it. (Hölderlin, meditating on the essence of the tragic in Greek tragedy, on one

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Heidegger's Turn to Art occasion writes the following: “It is a great resource of the secret working of the soul that at the highest state of consciousness, it makes way for consciousness and that, before the god that is present actually seizes it, the soul encounters this god with a bold, and often blasphemous word, thus maintaining the sacred, living potential of spirit.”) (HHI 29/33)

It is striking that Heidegger reads the verb “ausweichen” as a “making way” that is a “going with” (Mitgehen) instead of a protective swerving (such a protective turn is what he had retained of the passage in 1934). He thereby facilitates, perhaps, the appeal to a notion of remembrance (for Hölderlin’s more enigmatic evocation of a recalling that is enabled by a turning away). But he has clearly assumed the “Not” of separation between the power of nature and the “most intrinsic” of human being. “Remembrance” thus bridges a quite radical difference in securing the “assistance” of the river for dwelling from the ground of the river’s own inner recollection (which would appear to be another version of the enigmatic turn we observed in both the lectures of 1934–5 and “The Origin of the Work of Art”).52 Let me turn, now, to Heidegger’s renewed engagement with the choral ode from Antigone. I will move quickly and largely in a summary manner because so much of Heidegger’s analysis is devoted to the equivocal, “counterturning” meaning of the terms used to explore the central motif of the ode: the meaning of deinon and to deinotaton. Here, and as throughout the lecture series, Heidegger is devoted to drawing forth the resonance of the poetic word and its singular range of meaning in its engagement with a weave of relations that cannot be captured in a calculative manner and points beyond the order of what is (das Seiendes). Commentators on Heidegger’s thought of poetry have acknowledged for decades the force of Heidegger’s claim for the singular character of the poetic. But I would argue that their recognition of the importance of poetic language and thought in Heidegger demands renewed attention in this time when the question of language has ceded ground to the forms of critical analysis that interpret for a determinate political meaning, first and foremost. Heidegger’s own reservations about a political interpretation of Hölderlin’s poetry in his lecture series of 1934/35 (noted earlier) are noteworthy, but surely compromised by the thinly veiled ideological formulations that overdetermine his thinking. Things are no better by 1942, of course, and we are now offered evidence (from the Black Notebooks) regarding the nature of this overdetermination; it would be foolhardy to pretend to “know” with any certainty where the overdetermination precisely ends and where his thinking exceeds it. But the argument is nonetheless a vital one, despite the extreme ambiguities attending it. If we allow that all meaning is

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ultimately politically determined, we cede to a totalizing abstraction that denies the existential and ontological reach of language (thereby ceding access to the grounds of the political itself). Heidegger links this abstracting and controlling drive to the imperatives of modern metaphysics, but he also recognizes that modern forms of calculative abstraction bring us to a comparable “end” with respect to the orders of meaning to which the poetic word answers. Turning, then, to the discussion of Antigone, we find at the heart of Heidegger’s long analysis of the choral ode a renewed attempt, following the famous analysis of 1935, to understand what makes humankind, among all that is, supremely uncanny. “Manifold is the uncanny, yet nothing/more uncanny looms or stirs beyond the human being” (as cited at HHI 58/72). Unheimlich can be translated as extraordinary, powerful, fearful, or inhabitual, but Heidegger’s focus goes to the reference to home that is foregrounded in the final lines of the ode, and in which the chorus pronounces an enigmatic expulsion of the unhomely one from the site of the hearth. His aim (and again, I summarize very severely) will be to explicate the “counterturning” relation between being unhomely, in the sense of the “inauthentic” assumption of human being sketched in the existential analytic, and an authentic response to the grounds of human destiny, an excentric journeying beyond the order of beings that engages the most originary meaning of being homely in being underway toward the heart of Being itself. What I have termed the “inauthentic” course is named in the second Strophe of the choral ode (“Everywhere venturing forth underway, experienceless without any way out/he comes to nothing. The singular onslaught of death he can/ by no flight ever prevent” [HHI 59/72]). The human Dasein that seeks its proper being along the ways of the polis (even at its extreme limits) will come to nothing in its efforts to rejoin its essence. Antigone finds a different path in the relation to death and even a different “nothing” as she answers to a call that comes from beyond the order of being as acknowledged by Creon. Antigone answers to a different usage (named by Hölderlin as such in his translation: “Who knows, there could be another usage [Brauch] below”53) given in an unwritten law that enjoins from beyond the orders of the human and the divine. Heidegger’s definition of this “more pure” usage and his description of Antigone herself as the “purest poem” will orient my few remarks here. Heidegger will claim that the properly poetic truth of Sophocles’s word is enunciated by the chorus. The poet speaks there, Heidegger insists, and I believe we may assume, on the basis of Heidegger’s argument, that his poetic word is properly characterized by Hölderlin when he declares, near the end of his “Remarks” that “Sophokles hat Recht.”54 Heidegger will not refer to Recht in this

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way, though he will recognize in the destinal character of Sophocles’s words an articulation responsive to a historial law (Gesetz). To make this claim, he must venture a fairly daring interpretation of the final statement of expulsion. His argument will be that in returning to the hearth, the chorus is returning to Being, and that their expulsion of the unhomely one is a refusal of a form of being unhomely that obstructs the way to a proper becoming homely of the human being. The no-exit, and no-access of a forgetting of Being along the inauthentic, but still “uncanny” path of human wile, technological achievement, and conquest, is condemned in these words, while Antigone’s more authentic remembrance is cautiously acknowledged as answering to Being. The chorus, in Heidegger’s view, speaks from a profound understanding bearing on what is deinon (all of physis in its sway), and deinotaton (counterturning between the authentic and the inauthentic), a fundamental knowledge of presencing, in and from absence. The chorus is thus read as outlining the space for the decision that constitutes the singular historial event of this tragedy. The decision (the event) comes in Antigone’s own obscure decision to risk the meaning of her being in an assumption of an “impossible”: She choses destiny as that which alone is fitting. She thereby takes upon herself to be unhomely. This experience and undertaking is the supreme action and the proper history of the humankind she belongs to, the tolma of her very essence. (HHI 109/136)

And several pages later: The closing words [of the chorus] conceal within them a pointer toward that risk that has yet to be unfolded and accomplished but that is accomplished in the tragedy as a whole, the risk of distinguishing and deciding between that being unhomely proper to human beings and a being unhomely that is inappropriate. Antigone herself is this supreme risk within the realm of the deinon. (HHI 117/147)

The decision taken by Antigone is first enunciated in the words to her sister whereby she indicates that she will endure and suffer (experience: pathein) the uncanny (deinon) that now has appeared to and in her in a kind of “counsel.” Enduring this uncanny, Heidegger declares, constitutes the entire drama of the tragedy [HHI 115/143]—a tragic course decided from the beginning. To the drama, in other words, belongs her dying and commitment to death that places her in that “excentric” position we noted earlier. (“Her dying is her becoming

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homely, but a becoming homely with and from out of such being unhomely” [HHI 104/129].) Heidegger’s description of this excentricity is worth noting here because it suggests that her passion has something of the offering Heidegger ascribed in 1934 to those soldiers who make the “supreme sacrifice.” Her dying, in any case, “lifts” her beyond her mortal condition in the polis, and into the site where the meaning of being and the polis itself are at stake: The uncanny is nothing other than this: the fact that she takes as her alldeterminative point of departure that against which nothing can avail, because it is that appearing that is destined for her, and of which no one knows whence it has arisen. In fittingly accommodating herself (pathein) to this, Antigone comes to be removed [herausgesetzt] from all human possibilities and placed [gesetzt] into direct conflict over the site of all beings and into a sublation of the subsistence of her own life [die Aufhebung des Bestandes des eigenen Lebens]. (HHI 103/128)

Antigone is thus the “supremely uncanny.” She risks the meaning of Being itself for human being in her action of defining a fitting response to what is destined to her. This latter injunction is formulated by her in terms of the demand of philia, which Heidegger insists is not to be understood with reference to the dead or to blood-relationships (let alone to affiliations relating to the polis), but to “that which gives ground and necessity to the usages required in these domains of human existence.” Here again, a lengthy citation is required: Antigone assumes as what is fitting that which is destined to her from the realm of whatever prevails beyond the higher gods (Zeus) and beyond the lower gods (Dikē). Yet this refers neither to the dead nor to her blood-relationship with her brother. What determines Antigone is that which first bestows ground and necessity upon the distinction of the dead and the priority of blood. What that is, Antigone, and that also means the poet, leaves without name. Death and human being, human being and embodied life (blood) in each case belong together. “Death” and “blood” in each case name different and extreme realms of human being, and such being is neither fulfilled in one nor exhausted in the other. That belonging to death and to blood that is proper to human beings and to them alone is itself first determined by the relation of human beings to Being itself. The mysterious poem of Hölderlin’s “In Beautiful Blue . . .” (VI, 27), closes with the words: Leben ist Tod, and Tod ist auch ein Leben. Life is death, and death is also a life. In order to remain in the realm of the Greek truth of the Antigone tragedy, we must think beyond the cult of the dead and the blood-relatedness, and retain the

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Putting aside for the moment Heidegger’s peremptory reference to the line from Hölderlin’s late poem, written with respect to the suffering of Oedipus, we can see that Heidegger understands all custom (usage) with respect to the dead and every human relation to death and blood-relatedness from the relation to Being (which, in its use of the human defines the ground of all usage). Heidegger argued in 1934 (in strict fidelity to his earlier thinking about the mortal essence of human beings), that destiny can only be thought with relation to death. But he now makes it clear that while the relation to death marks a threshold of a kind, the nature of the passage must be thought as a non-occlusive, non-obscuring opening to what is presumably most near. The play of presence and absence is not effaced, we should presume (Heidegger refers to it in speaking of the relation of being-unhomely and being-homely), but absence, and the experience of finitude in which it is known, is not marked by some irremediable loss or opacity; the path home is not interrupted— we might say that there is nothing truly “evil” about it, in the end (I refer to the famous line from “Mnemosyne”). Accomplishing fully the ‘turn” in his thinking, Heidegger tells us that the meaning of death and service to the dead is determined in a decision concerning destiny that engages the relation between Being and human being. So, Antigone will give herself to death, in philia; but for Heidegger, she knows therein a transcendence—or sublation (Aufhebung)—such that she comes to speak of the meaning of her act from her pure relation to Being. Antigone, Heidegger enthusiastically declares, is “the purest poem” (HHI 119/149]. In this manner, he seems to say, she emerges as figure (a singular Gestalt) from the purest act of poetizing. Such poetizing, he continues, is a “finding” [Er-findung]: “a supremely pure finding of a supremely pure seeking that does not restrict itself to beings” (HHI 119/149). It is pure, presumably, by the character of the transcending movement and thereby the intimate engagement with difference (which is always already revealed—beyond everything that is— for human beings and is “the nearest of all that is near”). From here, Heidegger returns to the concluding words of the ode: What is to be poetized, essentially prevailing in the poetic work, is never something that is, but rather Being. . . . The hearth is the word for Being, it is that appearing that is named in Antigone’s word and that determines everything, even beyond the gods. Being is not some thing that is actual, but that which

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determines what is actual in its potential for being, and determines especially the potential for human beings to be; that potentiality for being in which the being of humans is fulfilled: being unhomely in becoming homely. (HHI 120/150)

I move quickly here, but I cite these last words for their resonance with respect to Heidegger’s earlier meditations on death. Heidegger described mortals, from the ground of the existential analytic, as capable of death. This theme will resurface in later decades. But here Heidegger is making it quite clear that we must think this enigmatic capacity for death from the basis of the human relation to Being. And Heidegger will now, in fact, turn directly to the motif of death, recalling again the pertinent lines from the choral ode: “the singular onslaught of death he can/by no flight ever prevent.” I continue from the same page in Heidegger’s lectures: It is to this One to which Antigone already belongs, and which she knows to belong to Being. For this reason, because she is thus becoming homely within Being, she is the most unhomely one amid beings. Such being and potential for being homely is here said in poetizing. The human potential for being, in its relation to Being is poetic. The unhomely being homely of human beings upon the earth is “poetic.” (HHI 120/151)

To underscore: poetry gives us the ground to think death as “One” with our relation to Being. In her philia with death, Antigone would know this relation fundamentally, and her own being would be sublated therein. I referred earlier to Heidegger’s peremptory use of the line from “In lovely blueness . . .” It is peremptory both with respect to its bearing on Sophocles’s text and to Hölderlin’s engagement with it, for Heidegger has effectively left unattended significant portions of the play. Nothing in his account of becoming homely, for example, reflects the evocations of Antigone’s “journeying” toward death after she is condemned by Creon. Twice she refers to herself as “alien” as she is sent “living” into death: a terrible passage for which the crossing of terms (“life” and “death”) defies metaphor, even for Sophocles. Somehow, this does not become part of Heidegger’s thinking on what it means to “become unhomely” on the way to becoming homely. Tiresias’s own evocation of what is occurring in this moment is left out of account in respect to the motif of usage. And as for Hölderlin, Heidegger has simply left aside his meditation on the difference between the modern destiny with respect to death and that of the Greeks and what this means for rendering the text in translation for a modern audience; he is silent with respect to this core motif from Hölderlin’s “Remarks.” In other

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words, Heidegger has effectively failed to engage the historicity of the play, as it might be read by Hölderlin, leaving to suggestion what is given of the Greek holy pathos for the modern German poet in his desperate effort to engage the destiny of “poor Oedipus” (“In lovely blueness . . .”). Heidegger’s divergence from Hölderlin is actually marked openly in paragraph 20 of the published lectures (HHI 115/144) when Heidegger evokes Antigone’s “thoughtful remembrance [Andenken] of Being,” linking this to what the Chorus says of the hearth: “In the dialogue between Creon and Antigone that follows the choral ode, Antigone tells of where she belongs, tells of whence she knows herself to be greeted. We mean lines 449-457. Hölderlin too, though with different intentions and a different interpretation, touches on this place in his “Remarks” on Antigone (V, 254) and understands it as unmistakably the ‘boldest moment’ of this ‘work of art.’” Hölderlin is describing in this passage the moment of Antigone’s being gripped by “holy pathos,” her being seized by “the onrushing spirit of time,” wherein the latter appears “intemperate”: “not in that it spared mankind like a spirit at day, but it is relentless as the spirit of the eternally living, unwritten wasteland and of the world of the dead” (FH 110/784). Heidegger seems to have appropriated the “tearing” (as we saw already in 1934–5), but refuses “the unwritten wasteland” and the “world of the dead,” holding to the hearth of Being. This is no small divergence, and one can only hope that Heidegger has not fallen into thinking that Hölderlin has here made the “characteristic” error committed by many readers that Heidegger goes on to criticize, namely that Antigone’s explanations about her actions refer them essentially to “some reference to beings, whether the prevailing or ancient cult of the dead or the familiar blood-relatedness” (HHI 116/144). If Heidegger has read Hölderlin in this way, he has lost Hölderlin’s reference to “the spirit of time,” which guided his earlier reading and even the analysis of the essence of the river in the first part of his lecture series (HHI 28-29/32-34). Undoubtedly, Heidegger would allow that every epoch is defined by the destinal meaning of death. Finitude, “death,” takes a different figure in each destinal “sending” (I refer to Hölderlin’s line in the “Remarks on Antigone”: “The god is present in the figure of death” [FH 113/787])—in every articulation of a world of meaning, as Heidegger told us in “The Origin of the Work of Art.” But the “figure” is understood here as pointing beyond itself, without remainder; Antigone presents death in the sublation of her existence. We could certainly have hoped for something less "philosophical." Here, to think the truth of Being in a poietic figuration, Heidegger seems driven to take even the human experience of a philia as dark as that of Antigone as a portal

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and either efface the true obscurity of this mortal passage, or contain it in a shrine. The de-cision that Heidegger claims is enacted in the play is just this—a de-fining intervention that brings light to the poetic enigma, which is finally of an irreducible obscurity. The possibility of saying Being must be secured; we can accord that exigency to “philosophical thought.” But when Heidegger cites Hölderlin’s line about life and death in support of his openly divergent reading, the losses are truly glaring. It would not seem inappropriate to ask whether Heidegger’s recuperative gesture in this instance is to be read in relation to the extreme sociohistorical pressures of the moment (1942) and as a rather desperate effort to secure grounds for his destinal schemata and the role he is attributing to the poet. This is surely the case to some degree. Even in 1936, no claim to such sublated “purity” of the figure would have been conceivable. But, whatever place we accord to political (and even personal) pressures, let us underscore the fundamental at this point, namely that what Heidegger has given over in this context is nothing other than a consequent thought of finitude that does not turn from the abysses of human experience. Some might want to argue that the truth of Heidegger’s thought has actually appeared here. But this conclusion would effectively reduce his thought to “philosophy” (no offense intended), and efface not only the meaning of what he presented in a text such as “The Origin of the Work of Art” (“truth is untruth”), but everything that “distressed” him in the question of Being and human being. There is no question that a stratum of Heidegger’s text has recourse to philosophical recuperations like the one we have followed here. But, as I have reiterated, Heidegger’s thought cannot always sustain, or remain faithful to, its most radical insights or what it opens onto,, even when it is rehearsing a line such as “life is death, and death is a kind of life.” The task of reading Heidegger today dictates that one hold to these insights. It might be asked whether a consequent thought of finitude is actually even possible for philosophy, as philosophy. Does philosophy, here, need a supplementing other? I hesitate to offer a firm answer to this question, particularly as I will turn to this question of supplementation in the following chapter. But in this context, where a question as critical as death is at stake, I cannot but turn again to the work of an author such as Blanchot, who offers a way of thinking something like Antigone’s passage (or Hölderlin’s, for that matter) while holding to a thought of finite transcendence that does not render death sacrificial and allows a turn against “destiny” (under the name of malheur) that frees a language even as it cedes to the knowledge that all will be effaced. To justify this dense statement, I can only gesture in this context toward my work

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in Last Steps: Maurice Blanchot’s Exilic Writing, particularly my reading of The Step Not Beyond, emphasizing the word “thought” and also the word “perhaps.”55 I will simply acknowledge that, yes, Blanchot is a literary writer. He is also a thinker, in Heidegger’s sense of the term. * My words on the third section of Heidegger’s lecture series will be brief, but I do not want to leave this text without addressing its most challenging and insistent claim regarding the nature of Hölderlin’s poetic acts in his river hymns, namely the “sameness” of river and poet, as these—both river and the poet himself—are “poetized” in the work. This claim clearly has bearing on the meaning of what Heidegger understands of the essence of rhythm. This third section, as I have noted, returns to the “journeying” of the Ister with respect to the relation it articulates between the proper and the foreign in its enigmatic course. Flowing toward the east, it appears to the poet as actually flowing “backwards,” to the west, and thus lingering near the poet’s homeland. The poet thus reads the river as embodying the relation between “proper” and “foreign” from its origin, and thereby figuring, in a special, transitive sense, the ground of becoming homely in and through a becoming unhomely in ex-posure to the foreign. I recall once more that the necessity of this ex-posure is named in the historial law that Hölderlin articulated in his letter to Böhlendorff of December 4, 1801: “We learn nothing with greater difficulty than the free use of the national [das Nationelle frei gebrauchen]” (FH 149/940). The appropriation of the German national, which for the Germans, in Heidegger’s summary, is “the clarity of representation,” requires ex-posure to what was originally natural to the Greeks—“the fire from heaven.” To grasp their endowment in a way that frees them for their innate capacity, the Germans must “grasp the ungraspable, and grasp themselves in the face of what is ungraspable” (HHI 136/169). The encounter carries a mortal danger, as we have seen. But there is also danger in failure. “The Germans will remain exposed to the danger and the weakness of suppressing every fire on account of the rashness of their capabilities, and of pursuing for its own sake the ability to grasp and to delimit, and even of taking their delimiting and instituting to be the fire itself ” (HHI 136/169)—the fate that threatens in the era of Technik. The Germans must open to what Hölderlin names the holy—the fire from heaven—if they are to assume their historial destiny, and for this they must experience the “need” of history, which means they must come to know the need for poetry, for only poetry can

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articulate this need and answer to it. To which Heidegger adds that Hölderlin must therefore undertake his hymnal poetry of rivers, for it is the “river spirit” that experiences the journeying of being unhomely and “thinks of ” the locality of becoming homely (HHI 138/173). The river is obviously not a “figure” of this movement in the standard sense of image or symbol; rather, it opens the possibility of saying this movement (in a thinking proper to poetry) from that “excentric” position between gods and humans that Hölderlin attributes to the demigods (Antigone, as we have seen, will have entered the same space). Speaking quite strictly, the river “cuts a figure” that enables the poet’s own poetic and interpretative act, which is one of bringing to language—drawing out and reading—the sign that the river becomes in the poetry. The rivers, then, are demigods. Again: “The river is the one that poetizes between human beings and gods. That which is to be poetized is the poetic dwelling of human beings upon the earth” (HHI 142/178). The poet joins them in this movement, in “visionary faithfulness [sehende Treue]” (HHI 147/184) to the river’s concealed essence, and writes from this relation. Poetry and river, Heidegger argues, are the Same. Heidegger will push this identification very far, as we see in his interpretation of the lines from “The Ister” that evoke the manner in which the rivers “are to be to language”: (“Not in vain do/Rivers run in the dry”): Initially it seems as though it is merely the natural and living force of the water that is meant here, as distinct from the dryness and lifelessness of the land. Yet the rivers are the poets who found the poetic, upon whose ground human beings dwell. The poetic spirit of the river makes arable in an essential sense: it prepares the ground for the hearth of the house of history. The poet opens that timespace within which a belonging to the hearth and a being homely is possible in general. Yet in what way does this occur? Non in vain do the rivers run. They have in themselves a decided vocation. (HHI 147/183)

The rivers are the poet. And as Heidegger will reiterate in his concluding remarks, “the poet is the river” ([HHI 165/203]—I italicize the copula to note the strain Heidegger is placing on it to achieve the “sameness”). Heidegger will continue in the passage from which I have quoted by noting that while the poet cannot know the full nature of what the river does, his “visionary fidelity” presents a belonging from which the poet can enunciate that “they are to be to language/ A sign is needed.” Thus Heidegger will continue in Section 25 to explicate this enigmatic relation by suggesting that the sign is brought to language by the human poet, whose own showing (as a pointing sign) gives the river as sign. This must be worded very strictly, once again. For while it is clear that it is the

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act of the human poet to bring the rivers to language, the rivers themselves are already opening, we might say tracing (cutting) the possibility of their naming, which only comes to speech (a showing naming) in the human word. They will reveal themselves as having already been intimating in this manner. As we saw in the lectures of 1934–5, the gods need humans to feel (“feeling” derives from the mortal relation to the earth), and the earth needs the sign; humans, as we saw, are the “third” between gods and earth).56 As I noted earlier, then, we must give full weight to Heidegger’s suggestion that the historial meaning of the rivers for human dwelling only comes to be in the poetic word. But this word belongs to an invitation that it will give as already having occurred (for the poet’s hearing, as we have seen) in the river’s “going down” into time and toward the earth. The river, in this respect, will show in its being as poetic, though only the human poet’s seeing and hearing can draw this forth in its historial meaning. The river thus becomes poetic, and a ground for the poet’s own poetizing, from the poetic work. It comes to its poetic essence, once again, as does the poet, from the poetic saying as articulated in the work. We can well understand why Heidegger would spend the concluding section of his lecture series defending against an interpretation of this relation as one established “subjectively” by the poet. Heidegger has attributed to poetic seeing and hearing an absolutely singular form of disclosure that recovers the mythic power of originary poetic language. One may easily balk at Heidegger’s effort to claim that the river is not in some way figuratively cast by the poetic imagination or employed as a symbol. Going against all evidence, the poet claims that the river presents itself otherwise and defines originarily, in its movement, the spatio-temporal ground for human dwelling. The river is cast in this way as essentially hospitable. That is already quite a bit to take on. But putting aside the question of directions of flow, why is the river, among natural phenomena, given this distinction? (Or, more broadly, the waters?—the sea, Hölderlin tells us, takes and gives remembrance.) The rivers figured in this way in “The Origin of the Work of Art” only in the most allusive manner, so we must presume that their intimating poetic force is something apparently won singularly in Hölderlin’s poetry. This does not make their naming (or saying), by Hölderlin, subjective. But it would not seem that one can make a general rule about the poetic essence of rivers without allowing quite a few other pre-scribing physical or natural powers for poetry (in general). Now, there is no doubt that rivers are given a very special place in Hölderlin’s work. (“In lovely blueness . . .” itself reflects this singular status of the motif of streaming: the poet’s tears stream across the cosmos, and he is swept as by rivers.)

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They are dear to him in a quite unique way. But Heidegger adamantly refuses any expressive intent in Hölderlin’s use of the river. Even in the journeying of the locale, he will not draw from the “carrying” of metaphor (metapherein), nor will he evoke, it seems, anything like the originary figurality thought by Derrida from the ground of Heidegger’s own “metaphor” for language (named “the house of being”).57 The river finds its proper essence in the poetic word and thereby offers a ground for the poetic act itself, a “standing” assistance deriving from the rhythmic topology drawn forth by the poet, but no less physical. The poetic word, in this account, brings to articulation the being of physis and is thus, in this responsive saying, of the earth in a quite fundamental sense. It is a claim of astounding force, and though it is made here in extreme terms, it is entirely consistent with Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin in the previous eight years. This poetry is mytho-poieic, and, again, it is very much of the earth. The rivers are to be to language. Other earthly phenomena certainly show to human poetic apprehension and “are” to language in this way. But the rivers, for this poet, bear an essential distinction that is quite real. In this immense, uncanny act of poetic saying, the river is discovered as having been at the ground of possibility for a human dwelling that is all the more urgently required by reason of the inherent abstraction of modern technology and the oblivion it fosters. The historial relation poetized in the poet’s remembrance has the status of an event. In this event, the rivers reveal themselves to have been intimating, already there in a quite factical sense, and requiring of both poetry and thought. Perhaps we might appropriately say, following this argument, that Hölderlin is chosen by the rivers. Bringing them to language, Hölderlin himself shows as the poet of this poetizing; he emerges as the sign. He is the same as the river, because the poetizing of the river grounds his own saying. He becomes demigod with the spatio-temporal assistance of the rivers that come to language in his poetic act. The poet can become sign only because the river itself comes to the sign. This is why, once again, the river is not signifying in any traditional figural or imagistic sense. The river is no more a poetic “symbol” than is the poet himself. In their emerging, again, they signify, or rather show, but in an originary sense. The poetry is thus a saying of the holy, Hölderlin tells us, that is of the earth. Perhaps we can await, now, other poets/artists who will be claimed by the altering (and even faltering) streams of a devastated earth (and surely we must think of all streams in this respect, and think of them in a global sense). Very little of Heidegger’s nationalist construction of Hölderlin’s turn to a Greek beginning can be retained without very severe scrutiny. But such scrutiny would not even be worthwhile, I want to insist, were Heidegger not holding open for us, even

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with his fantasmatic projections of Western history, the possibility of a poetic saying that is earthly in the manner indicated by Hölderlin. The challenge, of course, is to develop the meaning of this last enigmatic phrase in a way that takes us past the more facile contemporary appeals to materialism or the objective. And this cannot be done through a simple development of what Heidegger means by earth—one must confront fully Heidegger’s account of the mythopoieic character of a saying that engages the earthly. “Object-oriented thinking” took to describing Heidegger’s thinking disparagingly as “correlationist.” One could only smile: “they have no idea . . .” The rivers are poets, the poets are rivers. The task before us is to ask: What use of language makes this possible, and what “visionary seeing”? Every engaged reader of Hölderlin knows of the visionary strength of his writing. Heidegger was certainly not the only one responding to it, as we can see in Walter Benjamin’s essay (already from 1925), “Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin.”58 The enduring question for the modern reader is what we are to make of this “visionary” force if we can allow that this is not something “subjective,” in the metaphysical sense. We are dealing here, Heidegger argues, with something beyond “imagination” (as conceived in common literary criticism or contemporary continental philosophy), something beyond the metaphysics of subjectivity in that the poetry is at grips with the ontological ground and limits of language. It is from there, of course, that the rhythms of poetry must be thought—which is to say, from a “schematism” occurring at the origin of what is named “natural” language. Some are prepared now to look to mathematics as the “language” of nature or being. But as Benjamin himself saw (as did Niels Bohr . . .), nature only speaks in translation. We cannot leave this translation solely to the physicists and their often well-sponsored spokespersons. Perhaps those closest to the poetic truth of “natural science” retain a little something of the centaur about them, or something uncanny (Heidegger concludes his 1942 lecture series by attributing to Hölderlin the epithet “deinotaton”). And perhaps we have to bring an entirely new critical rigour to texts such as Heidegger’s, interrupting the now long history of the academic reception of his text. A term such as “earth” simply cannot be rehearsed without sober examination. But the time calls for more courage on the part of critical thought, a greater willingness to attend to the broken rhythms of the poetic word. Again, what must be thought are the ontological grounds of “natural” language (in all its uncanny character) and the human experience of what is disclosed there (of the human itself). “There”—at the origins of the space and time of human dwelling (and/or exile) as drawn forth in works of language and art from an earthly ground.

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Ⅰ. Heidegger and Poetry

A brief word, to begin, on Heidegger’s use of the poem as I turn to Heidegger’s later thought. The topic of Heidegger’s treatment of Hölderlin (and poetry more generally) defines the focus of a veritable subfield of academic inquiry, with a significant part of it devoted to efforts to redress injustices done to the poet’s writing. These efforts are often justified, but many communicate concerns of a fundamental character relating to what we might term a “misuse” of poetry. Heidegger himself fully anticipated these concerns to an important degree (he warned in 1957 that poetry should not play a servant’s role with respect to philosophy [GA12 156/63]), and he understood that they would not be easily overcome. Already in the Hölderlin lectures of 1934/5, as we have seen, Heidegger cautioned that an answering approach to the poetic text (this one in particular), would require a profound transformation in our relation to language and time: a veritable revolution in thought and thinking practices. He did not understand this as a matter of coming to grips with a set of newly advanced concepts, or new perspectives offered by a “new philosophy” in a traditional sense of this term, even if he understood himself to be seeking to open the requisite paths to a “new beginning.” The transformation called for was indeed fundamental; moreover, “language,” or “history,” for Heidegger himself, were not topics that were fixed conceptually.1 Nor was the construction of thought’s engagement with the poetic text any more definitively established, at this moment or any later one in Heidegger’s course of thinking. All of Heidegger’s suggestions with respect to his approach to the poem were marked by an evolving thought of language that had bearing

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upon his understanding of the nature (and ways) of the language of thought itself, or on propositions relating to the “thinking” character of poetry and the relation between these two modes of saying. These are developments whose full scope and meaning have yet to be grasped. The question of what Heidegger was “doing” with poetry in the course of his work thus remains an open one. Let me emphasize that this claim regarding the evolving and still partially obscure character of Heidegger’s extensive engagement with poetry is not meant to imply that his various ways of calling upon the poem, or the exegeses offered, should not be subject to critical regard. Forms of what he named “errancy” or what we might simply term failings, are clearly legible. In some instances, we have to do with something close to a “forcing” of the text. It should go without saying—but it must still be said—that such problems should not be in some way minimized or discounted. For my part, I hold to the critical reservations I have expressed over the years with respect to Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin. My basic view is that Heidegger fell short of Hölderlin’s experience of finitude. I am also happy to acknowledge that other Heidegger and Hölderlin scholars have been more thoroughgoing than I have in some philological matters, and I believe it is important that they have sought to hold Heidegger to account. At the same time, I believe it is important that we not allow the evident faults to block a searching meditation on what he was attempting in the course of his extensive recourse to poetry. For the fact remains that in reading Heidegger we deal with a thought in constant transformation whose every step still presents, in itself, exceptional difficulty, given the radical character of the thinking undertaken. This is a thought that maintains a consistent daring and is insistently (if not evenly) performative in its shifting efforts to enact what it ventures to present or disclose. There are gestures here that can barely be fathomed in relation to standard philosophical usage (I will return to a breathtaking instance below), and some of Heidegger’s most fundamental conceptual preoccupations remain in some measure obscure, even for those who have sought to think in his company. Can we expect anything else with respect to a thought of epochal import that challenges the very position of the thinker? The motif of “use” itself, to return to the point from which I opened, presents a striking example of the kind of work that still lies ahead for readers of Heidegger. Where “misuse” is alleged by critics with respect to Heidegger’s interpretive gestures in the domain of poetry, there inevitably loom in the background questions regarding philosophical arrogance (or blindness), and/ or the pressure of ideological bias. With Heidegger, there is the spectre of a

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singular, obscure (at times “fantastic”), and inordinately powerful philosophical agenda that is inseparable, for at least a decade, from an ideological program of a profoundly conservative character—itself both “singular” in its speculative constructions, while in significant respects shockingly common (enough so that one cannot but wonder whether the pull of a set of crude reactionary biases is of fundamental import for the thought—even this question remains open). Then there is a matter of notable personal and ethical failures. All of this haunts the task of critical assessment of a text that is both markedly reserved (Heidegger openly recognizes that he withholds the essential in some places) and startlingly revealing—manifestly “calculating,” in any case. Obviously, there are significant grounds for suspicion with respect to Heidegger’s use of poetry, and such suspicion is supported by an extensive literature nourished by significant research and probing readings, some earnest, some with a disconcerting tone of triumph in their displays of critical acuity. There are significant exceptions to the critical attitudes to which I am pointing with respect to the topic of Heidegger’s treatment of poetry and the field of poetics, as is the case with the work of David Nowell Smith. Nowell Smith is one of a few readers who have actively sought to advance Heidegger’s initiative with respect to poetry by using it to address some of the core concepts employed in poetics (thereby reading past Heidegger’s dismissive gestures with respect to standard usage in this field and taking the measure of his contributions for a rethinking of it). “Rhythm” is one of these concepts, and I want again to acknowledge his contribution. He works with a marked critical perspicuity and a very fine ear. But even in Nowell Smith’s well-supported and developed argument, which includes a constantly searching engagement with Heidegger’s thought and due acknowledgment of the notion of usage, we find hesitation with respect to the philosopher’s “use” of poetry, which Nowell Smith names an “instrumentalization.”2 The assertion cannot but foreclose the fundamental relation Heidegger is trying to think (wherein poetry and thought need one another to think their essence and approach their shared origin). I do not want to overstate this critical observation in light of Nowell Smith’s impressive achievement; he strives generally to stay with Heidegger’s thought as regards poetry, and I mean to affirm this stance. But with this affirmative note, I mean to urge that we should continue, in one moment of reading and writing at least, to go still further in entertaining and even maintaining Heidegger’s thinking initiatives on topics of a fundamental character such as “usage,” thereby pushing past the constantly reforming critical or scholarly hurdle of taking Heidegger’s text as an object of study to which we bring suitably judicious and cautious critical

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assumptions from an environing critical consensus. Call this a suspension of disbelief, if one will. But this attitude must be complemented with something stronger—something closer to the “unlearning” to which Heidegger refers in What Is Called Thinking?—and thus something more risky with respect to the security of the standard academic critical stance. Again, this is not to suspend all critical sobriety in relation to the text. The task of entertaining Heidegger’s thought does not require a surrender of probity or careful reflection. On the contrary, it actually demands a renewed effort of attentive reading, on the basis of which a glimpse of the paths of thinking to be pursued may be offered. How far we go in taking up these paths is a matter for each reader. But Heidegger’s wegweisende gestures are there, in the text. They demand a work of reading, which actually requires that we go quite far in studying the paths to which he pointed in thinking the event of truth. To state this a bit more aggressively and borrow a phrasing from the always bold Granel—either we carry forward this task of reading, or ask ourselves why we undertook it in the first place at all. It might actually be wise to do both. Again, the topic of usage is indicative. Why, we might ask, has this topic been so neglected in the study of Heidegger in past decades? What lapse in reading occasioned this oversight with respect to a motif so pertinent to Heidegger’s persistent questions about work and human practice in the period of the 1930s and thereafter? Would I exaggerate in saying that most readers were apparently unable even to see (or at least entertain) what was on the page in this respect? When Heidegger states that we need to prepare a “new fundamental experience of beying” with a “transformation” in the essence of truth and the essence of labor (HH 179/196), his words necessarily direct us toward the thought of usage that is surfacing in his readings of Hölderlin of 1934/5. “Usage,” as we learn in the essays on language of the late 1950s (and will see later), becomes a fundamental term for thinking the notion of relation as such; in fact, it will define Heidegger’s’ approach to what he will name in “The Way to Language” “the relation.” When Heidegger says that thought “needs and uses poetry” (and reverses this phrase), we must understand him to be using the term “brauchen” in something other than a utilitarian manner. Heidegger is very clear on this point throughout the period of the 1930’s, and he is no less clear when he defines the term in his later work. My overall suggestion, here, is that our task, as readers of Heidegger, is to seek to follow through this thought—to carry as far with terms such as “usage” or “es gibt” (and there are a host of these) as possible. Critical alertness, even a suspicious one, is essential, and I am thereby urging something like the “double

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stance” Maurice Blanchot proposes with respect to the writer’s responsibilities in the area of sociocultural critique (a motif taken over by Jacques Derrida).3 But these forms of critical rigour should accompany an effort to achieve a far more consequent grasp of Heidegger’s effort to engage the question of truth and the “share” of the human in the aletheic event. “Fidelity” to Martin Heidegger is not finally the point here, even if it is Heidegger’s text we must read in its singular event. Heidegger, the individual, is not finally our concern because what is needed is fidelity to a thought that inevitably exceeds the hold of the thinker, not to mention the notable virtues or failings of the person. In this task of reading, we need to hold the text itself accountable to its most fundamental implications and open it to its most daring formulations.4 As regards thought and poetry: A proper sounding of poetry, for thought, requires an understanding of the relation thought holds with poetry at their shared origin in the saying of language itself (which is also the “source” for rhythm). And a thought of this originary relation is the condition of a step back to a thought of the human in Ereignis, which is where we find the ground of both “sounding” and “writing.” Heidegger’s path for thinking through the “distressing difficulty” he described in his Addendum to “The Origin of the Work of Art” lies here. In the coming section, I propose to return to this site as it presents itself in Heidegger’s essay of 1952, “The Question Concerning Technology,” an essay in which Heidegger accords a quite fundamental role to poetry as regards the relation between Being and human being. I will then turn to his essays on language for what they offer of Heidegger’s understanding of how poetry might fulfill that role from the ground of its relation to thought.

Ⅱ. Poetry’s More Primal Disclosure It is not surprising that the turn to art in the final pages of “The Question Concerning Technology” could reinforce, for some readers, a general impression regarding Heidegger’s repudiated reactionary stance with regard to technology. The brevity of the concluding appeal to the disclosive event of poiesis can also support the view that the priority Heidegger accords to the saying of poetry over other forms of language use has a dubious basis (this is another ground of the suspicions brought to Heidegger’s use of poetry—namely that his account of poetry is mystifying and mystified, proceeding from “authority” rather than any foundation in thought). The claims of this concluding passage are undeveloped,

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and they follow extremely difficult pages in which Heidegger entertains the supposition that a thinking experience with the essence of technology might draw forth what Hölderlin named in “Patmos” a “saving power.”5 Equally 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 heart of this argument, stated briefly, turns upon a Heidegger’s evolving thought of usage, carried now into his thought of a destinal granting, wherein humankind, in its essence, is claimed for a mode of revealing. “Every destiny of revealing comes to pass from out of a granting and as such a granting. For it is granting that first conveys to humankind that share in revealing which the appropriating event of revealing needs” (BW 337/36). The claim made upon humankind in the mode of revealing of Technik is what Heidegger names das Gestell (BW 324/23). The danger faced by humanity in the order of Technik is that this latter obscures its own disclosive character as a form of truth (while giving what is as something that can be commandeered as a standing reserve), thereby driving humanity into 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. This use of the human, however, preserves a measure of freedom that is linked not to human willing, but to the destining of revealing itself. 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 more originary relation to truth that would enable 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 encompassed 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 ” (BW 339/38). He further suggests that art, and the form of thoughtful reflection that it both embodies and lends itself to, are essential to a “decisive confrontation” [entscheidend Auseinandersetzung] with technology (BW 340/39). A transformation in our relation to technology effectively requires the work of art. We need art by reason of the way art helps us gain a “free” relation to the use of the human. The counterplay to which Heidegger points in juxtaposing poiesis and Technik is quite characteristic of the writing of this period. As Heidegger proceeds in

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his effort to think from the event of appropriation (Ereignis), the appeal to what he here terms poiesis belongs increasingly to the way of thinking Heidegger undertakes. Poetry (and with it art in general) does not constitute a field of inquiry among others for ontico-ontological 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 the saying that occurs in 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 moving to the texts where this way of thought is explicitly developed, we should stay a bit longer with Heidegger’s claim, in “The Question Concerning Technology,” that art could bring the saving power “into its first shining-forth in the midst of the danger” (BW 339/37). It is striking that Heidegger does not suggest in these pages in what way 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 concluding appeal to art is brief, and the claim is not inconsistent with the extensive enquiry into art undertaken from the time of Heidegger’s lectures on Hölderlin from 1934 to 1935. There is no abrupt departure here, and Heidegger may implicitly be recalling his prior work. Indeed, 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 to 1936) devoted to the aletheic character of art (BW 209/72). But, as we have seen, even though the motif of the use of the human for the advent of truth may be traced back to the Hölderlin lectures of 1934/5 (most of the terms subsequently 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.” We know that this role is required of the creator (the event occurring in the work, grounded in truth’s need for art, demands the setting forth of earth and the setting up of world). But the issue of the relation between Being and human being remains, in Heidegger’s words from the Addendum, “unsuitably conceived” there: “a distressing difficulty, which has been clear to me since Being and Time . . .” (BW 211/73). This is, once again, a remarkable admission given its meaning for the earlier project of fundamental ontology and the turn Heidegger is taking in the mid-1930s. It reveals just how tenuous Heidegger’s thinking was with respect to the question of the human in this moment. As I have noted, there is no sure “program” in place as Heidegger turns to Hölderlin’s poetry; he is searching,

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however magisterial his presentations may appear in these heady years of the 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 “The Origin of the Work of Art” when he takes up the essence of language and poetry. But the question remains undeveloped and his remark in the Addendum appears to be anticipating work that will shortly be presented in “The Essence of Poetry,” where a crucial step is taken in a meditation on what Heidegger terms the possibility of an “experience” with language. Let me therefore return to this extraordinary essay from the latter half of On the Way to Language.6 An experience with language, as we discover from the outset of Heidegger’s essay, is an experience of human finitude of a quite fundamental kind. “Finitude” might seem an anachronistic term for some readers (more suitable to work from the period of the existential analytic). But the pertinence of the term—even here, as Heidegger attempts to think from Ereignis—will be underscored when Heidegger returns to the motif of human mortality in the latter paragraphs of his essay as he evokes an experience of the limits of language itself. As we will see, Heidegger is thinking finitude from usage. The way into this experience, we read in Heidegger’s second paragraph, 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 (OWL 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. Once again, 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” (OWL 229/111).7 Only here does the human share emerge distinctly in relation to what Heidegger termed “the destiny of revealing.” Let us begin by attending to the first 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. Two are in the mode of thought, but one, 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

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also constitutes in itself a form of thinking and lends to a thinking reflection (OWL 79/173-174). Indeed, it affords Heidegger a kind of setting for a quite far-reaching meditation on the nature of the relation between word and thing.8 The initial, thinking path of reflection with and by way of the recounted poetic experience does not, we learn, constitute an experience with language— or cannot yet be such an experience in its first steps inasmuch as it 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 remarkable 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 famous dictum from the “Letter on Humanism,” namely that language may be thought as “the house of Being.” We have here a fine 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 interpretive act such philosophy might inform. Philosophical reflection on language that does not come to terms with its own use of language is inherently 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. 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 attributable to a 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. How is thought to engage the poetic experience with language if the latter is to be taken as something other than an available source material for philosophical knowledge or some figural casting (where “figure” remains a metaphysical construction) of a philosophical concept? 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 (in ways that are not yet grasped), and that any experience with language is a thinking experience (for poetry, no less than for thought). Moreover, poetry and thought actually need each other when

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it is a matter of limits (in the “extreme”: “Beide, Dichten und Denken, brauchen einander, wo es ins Äusserste geht” [OWL 70/163]). When they turn back to think their proper relation to the essence of language (their source in language), they will always encounter their neighbour, and they require the “countering” of this other to achieve their turn. The relation to poetry is in fact essential to the very task of thinking. Thought should therefore push the “sounding” of the poem as far as possible, entering its field of resonance and movement (which is to enter, at the same time, the resonance and movement that forms in their relation) and seeking to apprehend, 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. I will cite below the famous passage in which Heidegger names the drawing design (the name, once again, is Aufriss) that opens the relation by which poetry and thought find their distinctive forms as modes of saying. What distinguishes them (what renders them “ausgezeichnete” as modes of saying), as we may recognize at this point in our study, is a differential relation to which the term “rhusmos” would be entirely applicable. “The resonance and movement” to which I referred in my last paragraph would also ground a use of the term “rhythm,” which imposes itself as Heidegger draws forth the opening for thought that occurs in and with the tracing of the counterplay between poetry and thought that occurs in the region [Gegend]. As we will see, a rhythm takes where the nearness of poetry and thought is drawn forth. But another step in Heidegger’s essay is still also required for a thinking engagement with the rhythmic movement to which I am pointing. For the path which initially moves in the setting of the poem has to be supplemented by another, a path proper to thinking, which Heidegger now sketches, in a form of counterpoint, with a reference to Nietzsche that has a remarkably poetic or figural cast, even as it places a firm accent on the role of thought and introduces a quite distinctively philosophical meditation. The import of this “counterpoint” should not be underestimated in itself, for it is clear that the thinking engagement to which I have just referred is actually being prepared by a movement in Heidegger’s own text that could be described as fugal in structure (if we take inspiration from Heidegger’s own reference to the fugue in “The Origin of the Work of Art”). The “modal” difference that Heidegger seeks to think in the relation between the two forms of saying is drawn forth in and by the counterplay produced in the “weave” of Heidegger’s meditation. It is also worth noting that this reference to Nietzsche evokes the motif of usage (der Brauch) as Heidegger took it over from Hölderlin. The link is not

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underscored by Heidegger at this point. But it is a strong one by reason of the passage’s characterization of thought’s particular form of usage, and quietly overdetermines the exposition that follows as Heidegger recalls a fundamental hermeneutic exigency (also familiar to us from “The Origin of the Work of Art”) that takes a quite distinctive form in the case of a thought of language.10 Any questioning after essence, he reminds 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 [braucht es] that language vouchsafe itself to us. If it does, the essence of language becomes the grant [Zusage—a promise or “committing to”] of its essence, that is, the essence of language becomes the language of essence” (OWL, 72/166).11 Heidegger thus proposes a transcription of his title that says what is for thought a primal granting, a “primal writ,” that may lead thought, by echo he tells us, back toward an experience with language that has already begun to occur in the neighbourhood of poetry. As thought enters the sway of what is indicated in the guideword, as thought enters this usage (provocatively answering what has addressed it and conforming to its call), it will engage a rhythm that is proper to it. I noted above that Heidegger’s thinking practice—I believe it would be appropriate to term this a “writing practice”—can be astounding. I have used “breathtaking” in another context to describe the interruptive impetus of his phrase “what is most thought-provoking is that we are not yet thinking” in What Is Called Thinking?12 Here, in Heidegger’s third path of meditation, we find a more pronounced interruption (and impetus) for thought as Heidegger proffers a guiding sentence for this path of reflection that he declares to be neither fully legible nor audible in its primal manner of bringing the essence of language to sound in and as the language of essence. He declines even to recognize it as his sentence. It will only begin to speak in the course of the meditation as we entertain the exigency it communicates by way of a quite daring supposition. The weave now undertaken by Heidegger as he returns to George’s poem after his first development of the guideword for thought defies summary and grows increasingly dense as Heidegger proceeds with a meditation guided by the 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 . . .” (OWL 81/175) and then reaches its most advanced point when he suggests that philosophy has actually been unable to think what speaks (and withholds itself) in the term “logos” because it has

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failed to think the relation between poetry and thought, a nearness that has its source in saying.13 Failing (from at least the time of Plato) to think saying in this manner, it has failed to think relation itself (OWL 83/177), 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). Here, presumably, is another word of thought. I quote again from this famous passage: But we should become familiar with the supposition [Vermutung] that the neighbourhood of poetry and thinking is concealed within this farthest divergence of their Saying. This divergence [Auseinander] is their proper countering of one another [Gegen-einander-über]. [. . .] Poetry and thinking are not separated if separation is to mean cut off into a relational void. The parallels intersect [schneiden sich] in the in-finite. There they intersect with an incision [Schnitt] that they themselves do not make. By this incision, they are first marked, inscribed in the design [Aufriss] of their neighbourly essence. This delineating diagram [Zeichnung] is the rift [Riss]. It draws poetry and thinking open [aufreisst-a tearing is also indicated here] to one another in nearness. The neighbourhood of poetry and thinking is not the result of a process by which poetry and thinking—no one knows from where—draw one another into nearness, which first comes about thereby. The nearness, which draws near, is itself the event of appropriation [Ereignis] by which poetry and thinking are directed into what is proper to their essence. (OWL 90/184-185)

The gesture demands careful consideration in itself. Can one, in the name of language, speak for the silent saying from which the name comes to speak? Heidegger is clearly inviting us to confront this difficulty and become aware of the kind of writing (and performance) required of thought 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, and even any standard notion of conceptual meaning (where language would be understood as conveying some signified content). Indeed, an entirely different use of language is deployed in this meditation as Heidegger weaves a series of terms including, in just this immediate context, reissen, ziehen, zeigen, and zeihen. Heidegger is quite manifestly thinking with and through language, as his succeeding pages will also underscore as he develops the motif

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of the “reach” and “summoning” of language (the key term here is “be-langen”) and the “ways” this summoning affords. As it happens, the linguistic play in this part of his lecture course is so intense that the translator of the English edition actually declined to render two key passages, one of which concerns usage in the relation between language and human being, while the other is addressed to the term “way” itself—which, of course, figures in the title of the volume. Striking and very significant omissions, to be sure.14 Let me cite one of these passages, which is of special importance for our study given its way of articulating the motif of usage (as incision) with that of streaming and a wave-like movement: The reflective use of language cannot be guided by the common, usual understanding of meanings; rather, it must be guided by the hidden riches that language holds in store for us, so that these riches may summon us for the saying of language. The country, as country, first provides ways. It gives way, sets underway. We hear the word “giving way” in the following sense: to provide and found ways. Normally we understand setting underway [bewegen] in the sense of: bewirken, that something should change its place, . . . . But Be-wëgen means: to furnish the country with ways. According to past usage in the SchwabishGerman idiom, wegen can mean: to cut a path, for example, through land that is deeply covered in snow. Wegen and Be-wëgen as a preparing of ways, and Way as a letting reach belong to the same domain of source and streaming as the verbs: wiegen, wagen, and wogen. (OWL 92/186-187)

Can we not presume from these words that something like the rhythmic turn of the streaming we followed in the lectures of 1934/35 is at work throughout the countering relations drawn throughout the country? But essential for our immediate purposes in following Heidegger’s path (here defined, as we saw above, against the modern notion of method, with hodos understood as progress in the Gegend) is his discreet signal that a way has now opened in and from this account of an originary tracing of the relation between the two most distinct modes of saying. This path now allows for the thinking step back into the proper place of human being in its relation to saying (OWL 85/179). The second section of Heidegger’s essay thus concludes with a paragraph that names the use of humankind by and for language, a relation that will progressively be thought from Ereignis and its use of humankind by and for itself: But if the nearness of poetry and thinking is one of Saying [des Sagens], then our thinking arrives at the supposition that Ereignis governs as that Saying [Sage] in

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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 needed and used by language [gebraucht ist], that he may speak it. (OWL 90/185—in the Gesamtausgabe, the note “der Brauch in der Eignis” is appended to the word “gebraucht” in the last sentence.)

The following section of Heidegger’s essay will then begin to approach the meaning of this assertion that Ereignis holds sway in that Saying or “Legend” (die Sage) from which language speaks in its essencing. Saying, thought in its relation to what “nears” (thus as “die Sage”) will be grasped as defining the region (Gegend) of the fourfold, whose grounding “design” has been indicated initially by the counterplay of poetry and thought just staged and named. Again, poetry and thought are the “ausgezeichnete” modes of saying (the term points to a drawing forth and accenting of traits); but their differential relation must be thought in conjunction with other forms of aletheic practice in the manifold articulations of die Sage.15 The way to language afforded to thought by the relation between poetry and thought belongs to a larger rhythmic articulation proper to the way-making that defines the fourfold itself. Language (“als die Welt-bewëgende Sage”) will thus come to be described, as Heidegger approaches his conclusion, as the “relation of relations” (OWL 107/203): 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. David Nowell Smith has offered a very rich account of what this means for the “sounding” of poetry, developing Heidegger’s indications regarding the bodily use of the human in sound and gesture and the rhythmic import of this earthly dimension of the poietic act.16 Again, Heidegger is not illustrating his thought with Hölderlin; the rapid sequence of citations (only briefly commented upon in this passage) 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 of his essay. 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 neighbourhood of poetry and thought has revealed of Saying (as die Sage). In the “nearness” of the neighbourhood toward which the guideword hints, we will find access, he suggests, to what enables thought in an experience

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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 in the silent sounding of the difference between these two modes of saying, which is nothing other than the nearing of die Sage itself. Regarding the sway of Ereignis, implicitly indicated as what “moves” in the regioning of die Sage, 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 the way-making proper to die Sage 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” (OWL 92/187). (These words come immediately after the passage I cited above concerning the wave-like movement of Be-wëgung.) 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 (OWL 92/187). 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 die Sage, 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. Here is the last step in Heidegger’s thought of usage. It does not suffice to underscore the displacement for thought implied in thinking language as “the relation of relations” and thereby the necessity of situating our own being within the fourfold configuration brought into being in die Sage. To think the use of the human, Heidegger must ask in what manner language requires us (for its articulation in speech), and he must address the additional question of how humankind can be given to such usage. How will humankind have been distinguished in the play of the fourfold (as a condition: speaking logically, not temporally) for the saying of that play? Again, the step offered is anticipatory, but passing now from a reference to humans as “die Menschen” to “die Sterblichen”

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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” (OWL 107-108/203). What does “unthought” mean here? Do Heidegger’s earlier appeals to human mortality still have some pertinence for this analysis? Shortly, I will suggest that they do. 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 humankind for the advent of language. In this event, wherein Ereignis finds its own “proper mode,” there is something like a movement of co-appropriation: 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, comes about in a kind of “double articulation,” and the joint of this articulation is death.”17 It is essentially with the acknowledgment of this dimension of the facticity of the human that Heidegger is led to displace his concluding statement from “The Essence of Language” about language 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 [OWL 111/229]). The core of 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 (now thought from Ereignis). The topic of mortality 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 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” [OWL 136/256). These citations, Heidegger tells us, 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. He will call upon literature, Novalis and Hölderlin, in particular, but he will not undertake quite so concerted a use of it in the

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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 event, involving the propriation of both language and human being (the “double articulation” to which I have referred) is the ground of human “Gelassenheit” (releasement) and what releases language itself, in Be-wëgung, 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 (OWL 133/253), 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 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” (OWL 134/254). The declaration does not now deny the use of the human for the speaking of language. On the contrary, it says the need of die Sage 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” [OWL 134/254]), to which humankind, in its relation to death, is singularly brought. (This is what I designated above as being “given” to language.) 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.18

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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. (OWL 134/255)

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 for the speaking of language: “Lauten und Leiben—Leib und Schrift.” We know it, that is to say, 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 an original fashion by poetry in its thinking manner of engaging the earth, which includes the bodily participation of human being in the movement of physis; philosophy (as thought) itself is no less open to it by reason of its own original ex-posure to poetry and to what properly engages thought in the speaking of language (as we saw in Heidegger’s “guideword” in “The Essence of Language”). But, the way afforded to thought by its experience with language discloses that language can only “use” us (bodily) for its speaking because we are released to this usage in the freeing bond contracted by Ereignis in its articulation of 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” (we will return to this motif in the coming chapter).

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Heidegger’s appeal to human mortality in these late steps of his language essays requires extensive treatment in itself. It calls for an inquiry that reaches back again into the existential analytic for a consideration of the function of being-toward-death in that analytic with respect to the structure of finite transcendence. The relation to death marked an opening: both an interruption in everyday ontic dealings, and an ex-posure to the grounds of the Dasein’s being. This ex-posure, as Heidegger sought to describe it in the lectures of 1934/5 with respect to the experience of the poet, would become an opening to the grounds of “beyng,” and thus to a silencing prior to the articulation of language itself.19 For this Schweigen, does Ereignis not need the human relation to death no less than what of the human lends itself bodily to language’s speaking? And can the use of the human body (for the saying of beying, as Heidegger put it in the 1930s) even be understood apart from that “silencing” event in which human mortality is in play?20 What, then, of that originary articulation defining the relation between language and human being? Is the question of rhythm still pertinent at this level of reflection (where we are thinking the “appropriating” movement of Ereignis “for itself ”)? Let me also undertake a brief summary here in an attempt to establish a final link between the topic of rhythm and Heidegger’s “distressing difficulty.”

Ⅲ. Toward a Conclusion The complexity of the texts I have moved through in this section is such that the reader might be excused for finally wondering how we are finally to grasp the rhythmic configuration of Heidegger’s provisional resolution of his difficulty regarding the human share in the relation of Being and Saying. I dare hope that I might be excused in return for any distress that I might have caused by obscurities or unnecessary complications in my effort to address this difficulty as precisely as possible and to sketch its meaning for the problematic of rhythm itself. I will be turning, in my next section, to a further development of the thought of usage as it is presented in a treatment of the question of craft in What Is Called Thinking? But as I will essentially leave the question of rhythm, it may be useful for me to sum up what I have tried to suggest about the place of rhythm in Heidegger’s effort to draw forth the “way” of a thought of language from the setting into movement of language itself in its ways of Saying.

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The way taken by Heidegger in “The Essence of Language,” as we have seen, is one of counterpoint. Consequently, Heidegger’s very meditation has a marked rhythm that it underscores by its quite demonstrative manner of drawing forth a fundamental difference in the modalities of language usage proper to poetry and thought. The privilege Heidegger attributes to poetry throughout his work is here complemented by a comparable distinction accorded to the language of thought; thinking the privilege of either mode, as it turns out, requires a thought of the relation that inheres between them. Truth, Heidegger told us in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” needs and uses art for its advent. (In the lectures of 1934/35, as we have seen, this relation was conceived in terms of the origin and its need). The same argument will be made for thought in What Is Called Thinking? on the basis of a fragment from Parmenides (as we will see in the next chapter): language and thought are required for the relation between “Being and to be.” The need/use is distinctive in each case, but occurs in such a way that a relation of need opens between poetry and thought in such a way that neither one has access to its origin without use of the other (though Heidegger focuses in this essay only on thought’s turn to its source in die Sage). They can only properly sound in their respective modes from the difference that defines their relation. We have, in Heidegger’s thought of this difference, a striking instance (and deployment) of what the ancient Greeks termed rhusmos. The marking of this difference opens to Heidegger the possibility of thinking die Sage as such, and its way-making in the region of the fourfold. The tracing of ways envisaged here recaptures the “streaming” that Hölderlin first figured in “Germania,” though Heidegger now carries the image into a thought of the general articulation of the fourfold. Again, a thought of rhythm is suggested in the manner in which the ways (the “waves”) of Be-wëgung trace the structure of the fourfold. But the question of the human share in the advent of this relational structure requires (once its ground is thought in the essence of Saying) the thought of a still more fundamental articulation, namely that of humankind and die Sage itself—a structure of usage that is prior to the “use” of human speech in saying for the articulation of saying. The origin of whatever rhythms unfold in the differential design of die Sage (in its diverse Bewëgungen) inheres in the manner in which the human essence is appropriated in Ereignis for the advent of Saying. We now touch on Heidegger’s thought of what he termed “das Verhältniss” in his notes to the late essay, “The Way to Language.” A brief text from 1972 suggests that even here the Greek thought of rhythm has something to offer.21 Honoring words from René Char’s remarks

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in his introduction to an edition of collected works by Rimbaud (words in which Heidegger finds something Wegweisendes), Heidegger dwells upon two sentences cited by Char in an effort to approach Rimbaud’s statement that a poet remains “living” to the extent that poets to come take up from the horizon they have reached, which is the “Unbekannten.” The lines address the relation between ancients and moderns on the topic of poetic rhythm. The first reads, as cited by Heidegger: “En Grèce . . . vers et lyres rhythment l’Action” (“In Greece . . . verse and the lyre bring rhythm to Action”). The second responds as follows: “La Poésie ne rhythmera plus l’action; elle sera en avant!” (“Poetry will no longer bring rhythm to action; it will be out ahead”). Heidegger will decline to offer more than “suppositions” in the form of questions, asking what “action” might mean in these sentences. Does Rimbaud refer to human doings (das Handeln und Wirken des Menschen), or the real in its totality? And what would it mean to bring to the real its rhythm in the sense of a harmony or proportion (im Sinne des Gleichmasses)? Is the “en avant” meant temporally or does it evoke some priority or precedence (Vorrang) of poetry with respect to a world defined by industrial society—a precedence that is perhaps without prospect, given that what is at stake is relation to an unknown? Perhaps, Heidegger says (“vielleicht”—we are still in the mode of supposition), we must translate these singular propositions of the poet in a reflective way as follows: “The nearness of the inaccessible [Unzugangbar] remains the region [Gegend] to which the now unwonted poets retreat, to which only they first point [weisen]. This, however, in a saying that names that region. Must this naming not be a calling that calls into the nearness of the inaccessible, and can so call because it belongs already ‘in advance’ to this nearness and from this belonging brings the whole of the world into the rhythm of poetic language?” To address Rimbaud’s situation of poetry en avant, Heidegger effectively thinks a poetic calling back into a countering nearness into which poetry has already been drawn. This call, in itself countering in its naming, will attune the futural project (Entwurf) by which the poet brings a world to come into a poetically ordered, a “rhythmed” configuration. The structure will be quite familiar to us, but we will also recognize here a remarkably unqualified appeal to a notion of rhythm (even though Heidegger is effectively translating Rimbaud). This is not “what will appear to metaphysics as rhythm,” but rather what constituted the source of the wave that Heidegger heard in George’s poetry, thus something to which metaphysics lost access. For this more original thought of rhythm, Heidegger turns for support to a famous phrase from Archilochus: Gignoske d’oios rhythmos anthropous exei. Heidegger: “Learn

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to know, however, that a form of relation [Ver-hältnis] holds men.” Heidegger proceeds then to ask whether rhuthmos, as originally understood in the Greek sense, is “the nearness of the inaccessible and as this region, the relation that holds men”? Poetic language would draw forth its rhythmic path in and from the nearness of the impassible, which is where humankind would experience the contracting of its bond with saying. Rhuthmos is thus to be thought from usage in its most primordial form and structure. Will the structure of this relation [Gefüge—what gathers [Ge-] all jointure], Heidegger goes on to ask, become the ground upon which the coming poets build their Saying, thereby preparing for humankind a new stay upon earth? This is an astonishing statement after what we have read thus far. But why, we might ask, did Heidegger wait so long before appealing openly to the term “rhythm” in this way? Did he have to traverse the long path of thinking I have outlined in these chapters before allowing himself this word in this manner; is this an almost casual conclusion to a hard-won thought? One might ask whether the appeal to Archilochus is not telling in some respect. Yes, he moves back from the “musical” construction of rhythm suggested by Rimbaud’s lines (“verse and lyre”: the Greeks would have set “Action” to a form of music) to a more archaic notion of binding and articulating. At the same time, he captures an ethical tonality (to which he may be personally quite sensitive at this late moment in his life) that communicates with his notion of ethos—where ethos is dwelling. He didn’t turn to the Prometheus of Aeschylus for a comparable, but considerably more severe notion of the binding. And we don’t have the tragic modality proper to the reading of Antigone from the lectures of 1942 (where the same usage is thought). The prevailing rhythm evoked by Archilochus partakes rather of the measuring we see Heidegger evoke in his stunning seven pages on Protagoras in his Nietzsche, though the tonality is decidedly of another epoch in Heidegger’s life. Do we hear in this text on Rimbaud the Stimmung of a late thought? This last reflection may be frivolous or perhaps just banal. I hope the reader will pardon me for struggling with the almost casual appearance of Heidegger’s gesture— this manner of stating quite simply that the structure of usage manifests what the Greeks understood as rhuthmos. But I hope, in any case, that it will be apparent how this brief text on Rimbaud still resonates with Heidegger’s early thought of a temporal schematism whose rhythms would hold in their sway the entirety of an existence. Heidegger once said that a thinker is held by only one thought: rhythm clearly belongs to this thought inasmuch as it bears on the finitude of human being.

4

The Uses of Craft

There is unlearning in any true learning In June 2017, the Philosophy, Art and Critical Thought Division of the European Graduate School hosted a cross-disciplinary seminar devoted to the topic of craft that featured the construction of a cello. EGS students suddenly presented with the question of the precise meaning of “thought” in Saas Fee in 2017 (in recently renamed programs with titles such as “Philosophy, Art, and Social Thought” or “Literary, Musical, and Visual Thought”) found themselves confronted with the phrase offered here as an epigraph. Making craft properly a concern for thought in these conditions—not a mere topic for reflection but something that engages it, even implicates it—had the inevitable effect of bringing both craft and thought into question. Thought, here, could not preserve the traditional remove from which it claims its capacity to assay meaning any more than craft could find its traditional harbour in the cultural values customarily attached to it. Both suffered ex-posure in the consideration of what is required of thought when it begins to understand itself as craft and addresses the question of craft as it presents itself in the contemporary world. At the same time, an ex-posure of another order occurred inasmuch as both forms (taken abstractly as distinct modes of activity) present in their respective ways the question of the limits of mastery. In a coda to the present essay that I introduce with a remarkable letter by Paul Celan, I will try to address the grounds for this latter point.

That Cello Is No Instrument “The Cello Project” began with a kind of challenge proposed by Robert Brewer Young. If I would agree to conduct a seminar on craft based on my work on Heidegger, Robert would bring instrumentation (in the form of two exceptional

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violins), performance (by his friend Gilles Colliard), and an introduction to his work in philosophy of geometry that would serve to link the form of the violins and some of the music they carried to the environing architecture in Valletta, Malta. The arrangement proved more than fruitful for all concerned, and the intellectual joy it stimulated was appropriately celebrated at the end of the Malta session when Gilles Colliard played a Stradivari while standing in sections of a Fibonacci sequence sketched in the squares of a plaza facing a chapel whose architecture reflected the pattern sketched in charcoal at Gilles’ feet. I record this wonderful conclusion to our first foray in the question of craft only to note that the experience served as a kind of training.1 I noticed that I began to attend with new insistence to the sounds produced by individual violins. I do not believe that I would have been prepared, otherwise, for another challenge brought to us by Robert when he arranged to have the “Circle” Stradivari of 1701 played in the continuation of the Cello Project in Saas Fee in August of 2018. Listening to that “period” instrument, I had the striking feeling, first, that I was listening to a dated recording (on vinyl). I could not account, otherwise, for its distance. But as I shook off this unfortunate impression (worthy of a kind of slap on the cheek), I heard more clearly that the instrument was withdrawing, in its intensely wooden timbre, into its very presence, a presence conveyed in notes of an exquisite character that filled the EGS meeting room (a room of a size comparable to the performance spaces for which this violin was created at the start of Stradivari’s golden era). The more I listened, the more the instrument’s distinct beauty resounded, and the more it withdrew into the space it transformed. I could only apologize, at the moment, for such a Heideggerian phrasing for this account of my experience. But, however “schooled” my attempt at articulation, that is the way I heard it, and I realized immediately that this instrument would have to be considered more art than craft, according to Heidegger’s categories in his great essay of 1935, “The Origin of the Work of Art.” As it was played, this violin became something more than an “instrument,” if the latter term is understood with reference to the instrumental character of equipment, as Heidegger defines it in that essay. A piece of equipment should be absorbed by the activity for which it serves as means; the “instrument” should lend itself unobtrusively to the practice it enables. If this instrument should come to the foreground in this practice and demand our attention in itself, then it has effectively interfered in that activity. One could hardly call the singular tonality of the violin in question disruptive. But it drew my attention

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to its thingly independence in a way that is characteristic of the work of art, in Heidegger’s account, for the instrument itself withdrew into the space it contributed to opening with its distinctive resonance. One might well argue that this situation can be accommodated quite easily in Heidegger’s argument, and I will return to the detail of this issue shortly. Also, the observation I report is not terribly revolutionary with respect to available reflections on the relation between art and craft. But I would like to explore this point with respect to Heidegger’s strict distinction between art and craft in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” because I would like to show how, despite its severity, Heidegger’s discussion gives us the terms for approaching his apparently contradictory use of the term “handicraft” near the beginning of his essay. While craft, with respect to art, remains relegated to the sphere of equipment in the course of the argument, the meaning of the term never fully settles for the fact that Heidegger declares from the outset, as I noted in my earlier discussion of the essay, that the task presented by thinking a distinction like this one will call upon a strength that is proper to thought when it is understood as a form of Handwerk. It is quite difficult to imagine that the colourful rhetoric employed in this early declaration blinded Heidegger to the manner in which it opens the question I seek to pursue here. Indeed, it seems more likely that the rhetoric was serving as a kind of signal. “The Origin of the Work of Art” effectively turns upon the distinction between equipment and art in its early moments inasmuch as Heidegger undertakes from the outset to dismantle the grounding assumptions of aesthetics by attacking the dominion of the form/matter pairing—a kind of linchpin for the metaphysics of representation. Heidegger doubts the value of the two terms of this hoary binary opposition (so laden are they with metaphysical assumptions). Of even greater concern to him, however, is the generalization of this opposition for all considerations of the thing, be it a piece of equipment, a work of art, or a “mere” physical entity. Its provenance in the Greek notion of production lends it its universal character, which effectively blocks thought’s access, Heidegger claims, to the thingly nature of the thing. As we have seen in the second chapter, an important part of Heidegger’s effort in this essay will be to regain access to the thingly character of the work of art, and thereby honor the “use of the earth” that is proper to artistic creation (a “use” Heidegger will later attribute to craft in What Is Called Thinking?). Foregrounding this use, Heidegger will effectively displace the notion of production that has governed the metaphysical understanding of work and redefine the meaning of both praxis and poiesis, as these terms might be applied to any art or practice.

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Even this description of the high philosophical stakes of Heidegger’s displacement of the metaphysics of production remains a bit reductive. The larger ambition of the essay, devoted to answering Hegel’s dictum that art is no longer a need for spirit, concerns the question of art and truth, and the latter’s “evental” character. But the point noted above about the use of the earth in art will give us access to Heidegger’s firm claim, in mid-essay, that the Greek practice of referring to both craft and art with the term “technē” does not indicate that they share the same “origin” or even that they share some common recourse to a form of practical or technical skill. “Technē,” Heidegger insists, is a mode of knowing that inevitably conditions both art and craft, but in their divergent ways of bringing something forth in its appearance.2 The artwork proceeds from a work of creation (Stiften) that is to be distinguished from any making (Schaffen) of equipment, which is where Heidegger clearly situates craft in this discussion. The former engages the event of truth in a way that the latter cannot. Both “compose,” in their way, a relation of what he calls “world” and “earth” (the artwork essay innovates in this sense by ascribing to equipment a character of “reliability” [Verlässlichkeit] which involves this relation). But the articulation of this relation is transformative and founding (for a people) in the place and time in which the artwork emerges. The artwork draws out the difference between world and earth and thereby draws forth each of these “powers” in their respective essential traits. Instantiating this dynamic opposition in figure (Gestalt), it sets in place the open of truth in a singularly patent manner. It shows that truth has happened, and is happening in the dynamism of the work’s uncanny presence. The presence of craft, for its part, must be of an entirely different character as long as it remains the product of a form of making—it can only emerge from within the order (a measure and an ethos) opened by art. Serving pragmatic purposes defined by that latter order, it can perhaps recall in an important way the use of the earth that presides in the poetic act (how else can one account for the attention to the use of natural materials in a craft such as instrumentmaking?). But even this statement exceeds what Heidegger seems to allow in the course of his exposition in the artwork essay, since it is a defining characteristic of equipment that it uses up earth (verbraucht) in its striving for an optimally effective instrumentality, while its reproduction of schemata (in conforming to what a thing is to be if it is crafted with an idea to what it is truly to be) can be no more than innovative, and if rendered craftfully can stand out by no more than “quality” and possible aesthetic attributes. “Poetically man dwells,” Heidegger will declare, citing Hölderlin; craft, for its part, attends to the “merits” of humankind.3

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One might well want to contend that my experience with the “Circle” Stradivari was made possible by the music and its performance—that it presented itself (to my hearing) only from that creative ground, that it was the rendition of the musical compositions (established pieces of “great art,” to use Heidegger’s expression) that ultimately made possible the singular resonance of the strings. If I were to insist that what withdrew in that experience was the instrument itself, that I was hearing, beyond any fugal compositions or other musical structures, the singular “Fügung” inherent in the articulation of the instrument in all the pressures of its taut jointure, the aesthetically minded purist would simply retort that what I want to take as a special instance of hearkening was in fact quite distracted, that what should have been a dis-interested hearing was in fact skewed by interest in an instrument of staggering financial value and historical significance. The charge would be difficult to overcome. But Heidegger himself might just allow in response that craft, in this instance, was carried into art, or becoming art, even while preserving something of its essence as craft, that the presence I sensed in this “object” was actually disrupting any “objectifying” drive or interest I might have brought to the experience. Yes, he might grant, craft here joined art, as craft. But then a new question has to emerge: how, precisely, are we to understand the craft that was brought forward for me in this instance? And what does this tell us about the craft in art? Heidegger’s exposition in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” cannot quite suffice for these questions, even if it does not foreclose them. I also ask these questions in full awareness that I cannot address them adequately on this occasion. But I will stay with them in an indirect manner in what follows as I turn to What Is Called Thinking? to approach the “higher” meaning of craft that Heidegger invoked at the beginning of his artwork essay in naming thought a Handwerk. The reference back to this essay is indicated by the fact that the later lecture series takes its point of departure from the question of what it means to learn to think, comparing the latter process with learning a craft: in this case, cabinet-making, which is distinguished, Heidegger tells us, by its use of wood: “Perhaps thinking, too, is just something like building a cabinet. At any rate, it is a craft, a handicraft.”4 One could dwell at very long length over the handicraft Heidegger himself displays in this lecture series (this is quite ostensibly the craft of the writing thinker, as well as that of the teacher), and the remarkable moves Heidegger makes in juxtaposing a meditation on the essence of thought (as handicraft) with Nietzsche’s reflections on nihilism and the spirit of revenge. But let me simply concentrate here on the import of Heidegger’s definition of what it means to learn,

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repeated three times in early moments of the lecture series: “to learn means to make everything we do answer to whatever essentials address themselves to us at the given moment” (WCT 8/9). The task, as Heidegger emphasizes immediately, will require an unlearning of what we have traditionally taken thought to be inasmuch as it involves the necessity of rethinking its relation to language and the exigency for thought that speaks in that language: we must grasp how essence “addresses” thought and how thought is summoned to its guide in all proper forms of human practice, all human “handlings.” We will recognize that we are close, here, to the guideword from “The Essence of Language” considered in the preceding chapter. What is meant, in this context, by “Handlung”? The argument of What Is Called Thinking? indicates clearly that the term must be thought in relation to that form of drawing forth we encounter in the artwork essay when Heidegger describes a proper “use” of the earth in art: one that brings forth the essence of the earth as earth as it brings it into a configuration of truth. The echo of this understanding of the artist’s practice will be heard clearly in What Is Called Thinking? when we read of a “use” of the thing that does not debase it (as in the commandeerings of modern Technik), but rather lets it unfold in its essence, as is required by the essence that it draws forth and maintains: “Using” does not mean a mere utilizing, using up, exploiting. [. . .] When we handle a thing, for example, our hand must fit itself to the thing. Use implies fitting response. Proper use does not debase what is being used—on the contrary, use is determined and defined by leaving the used thing in its essential nature. But leaving it that way does not mean carelessness, much less neglect. On the contrary, only proper use brings the thing to its essential nature and keeps it there. So understood, use itself is the summons which demands that a thing be admitted to its own essence and nature, and that the use keep to it. To use something is to let it enter into its essential nature, to keep it safe in its essence. (WCT 187/190)

One will note again that use is required of humans—indeed, this requirement (here named a “summons”) is usage in its most original or “proper” sense. (In “The Anaximander Fragment,” Heidegger will declare that in the term he translates with “der Brauch,” usage, there appears the oldest name for Being: Chrē.) Human usage, in turn, always a matter for the hand, follows in fitting response. To learn, as we see now, is to learn a proper usage, in and as a form of handicraft. It is, as Heidegger will assert elsewhere, to learn the freedom of the enjoined handicraft guided by thought, itself a handicraft.5

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We have seen that when Heidegger gives an ontological reach to the notion of usage, he draws a kind of inspiring support from pre-Socratic thinking.6 The latter portion of What Is Called Thinking? is devoted to a phrase from Parmenides that he transcribes paratactically in translation as follows: “Needful: the saying also thinking too: being: to be.” “Needful” translates the Greek Chrē, whose derivation he describes as follows (we encounter a very similar demonstration in “The Anaximander Fragment”): “Chrē comes from the verb crao, chresthai. The word derives from ‘cheir, the hand; chrao, craomai means: I handle and so keep in hand, I use, I have use for. Starting with this use that is practiced by man, we shall try to point out the nature of using” (186–87). The same approach to the problematic of usage will guide his exposition in his lectures on Parmenides of 1942–3, where we find a startling discussion of the nature of the human hand, as indicated by the Greek term “pragma”: Pragma means neither the thing for itself, nor activity for itself (praxis). To pragmata is here rather the word for the one originally inseparable totality of the relations between things and man. We translate pragma as action. This word, however, does not mean human activity (action), but the unitary way that at any time things are in hand and at hand, ie., are related to the hand, and that man, in his comportment, ie., in his acting, by means of the hand, is posited in relation to things. From this, it is clear how the hand in its essence secures the reciprocal relation between beings and man. There is “hand” only where beings as such appear in unconcealedness and man comports himself in a disclosing way toward beings.7

The same understanding of the hand’s aletheic destination guides Heidegger’s claim in What Is Called Thinking? that thought is a form of handicraft. The being that thinks can and must have hands. But Heidegger brings an ethical accent to What Is Called Thinking? that is essential to our concerns here. Evoking the distinctiveness of the human hand immediately after his discussion of the role of the teacher (a role which is defined as “letting learn”—and we may now understand teaching as involving a singularly free usage and introducing to a craft relation), Heidegger writes: But the craft of the hand is richer than we commonly imagine. The hand does not only grasp and catch, or push and pull. The hand reaches and extends, receives and welcomes—and not just things: the hand extends itself, and receives its own welcome in the hands of others. The hand holds. The hand carries. The hand designs and signs, presumably because man is a sign. Two hands fold into one, a gesture meant to carry man into the great oneness. The hand is all this, and

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this is the true handicraft. Everything is rooted here that is commonly known as handicraft, and commonly we go no further. But the hand’s gestures run everywhere through language, in their most perfect purity precisely when man speaks by being silent. And only when man speaks, does he think—not the other way around, as metaphysics still believes. Every motion of the hand in every one of its works carries itself through the element of thinking, every bearing of the hand bears itself in that element. All the work of the hand is rooted in thinking. Therefore thinking itself is man’s simplest, and for that reason hardest, handiwork, if it would be accomplished at its proper time. (WCT 16-17/18-19)

I cite at length if only to ask: has the thought of handicraft ever actually gone this far? But this remarkable statement of the relations in which the notion of handicraft is traditionally grounded must nevertheless be complemented, I would argue, by Heidegger’s insistence that what distinguishes human being is its relation to mortality (I will be returning to this point). The gesture of the hand that cares for the other also belongs to this account of “true handicraft” if we are to grasp its ethical dimension. But Heidegger has also another sense of ethos in view that is prepared by the relations evoked in this last passage. This is his understanding of ethos as dwelling, which surfaces later in the lecture series as Heidegger comments on the phrase from Parmenides cited above.8 The meaning of chrē may be approached, he tells us, through the work of that “modern” poet inspired by the Greeks, Friedrich Hölderlin, and two passages are brought forward that Heidegger had commented (among others no less evocative) in the period of his composition of the artwork essay. Lines from the last sentence of “The Ister” are given particular attention. It is useful for the rock to have shafts, And for the earth, furrows. It would be without welcome, without stay. (WCT190/193)

To which Heidegger gives the following commentary, after noting that “useful” does not connote some necessity: Shafts are no more necessary to the rock than furrows to the earth. But it belongs to the essence of welcome and being at home that it include the welling of water and the fruits of the field. “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. (WCT 191/193)

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I move terribly rapidly but I hope it will now be clear that Heidegger, in What Is Called Thinking?, but also essays such as “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” and “The Thing,” has effectively brought the “handling” of craft to the place previously reserved to poetry (“Full of merit, yet poetically man dwells”). In fact, he goes even further than this once he declares thought a handicraft; because, at this point, handicraft effectively joins poetry with respect to the event of language. There are nuances to be drawn here, undoubtedly (we would want to return to the questions of work and createdness, for example), but he has clearly made handicraft essential to the cultivation of this site of dwelling. In its accomplishment of the exigency of usage, it signifies an admittance into essence, by which habitation on earth is granted and assured to mortals, that is, kept in safety for them. Handicraft does not displace poetry (as Dichtung) with respect to human dwelling, but it clearly joins it, once again, as a form of thinking usage that answers to the “high” sense of the latter term: admittance into essential nature, which includes drawing out the welcome and the stay that mark the dwelling of mortals on earth.9 In fact, handicraft joins art in such a fundamental fashion in this latter respect that one must in fact return to the question of art and its origin (but this is for another occasion) to grasp its singular role with respect to the event of truth. “Handicraft” would thus govern any relation of “Handlung” that answers to what requires thought. And all handicraft must be thought with respect to an understanding of a very profound hospitality (we see the implication of this point when we consider that “es gibt,” is to be thought from “es brauchet”: the “gift” of Being is to be thought from usage [WCT 115/187]). Again, has a thought of handicraft ever gone this far? And are we quite ready to take this up? But we must go farther. It will not suffice to rehearse terms such as “earth” as though their meaning is somehow given. Heidegger himself did not fall into such an error, even with all his political compromises in the period in which the term was first brought forward. Clearly, we must seek an entirely different understanding of our relation to what he termed “earth” in this destitute time of severe ecological crisis, a crisis left largely unaddressed by political thinking governed by vengeful agendas. Then there are terms such as “welcome,” and even the notion of the hand (what embodiment must be rethought here?). And this exposition has not even touched the relationality Heidegger invites us to consider in placing a notion of language use, defined from the Greek “legein,” at the basis of thinking usage. For this notion of a laying forth and a laying out that gleans with the articulation it brings to the Being of what is (that it should be) obliges a radical shift away from the notion of positing and setting-before proper to the

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metaphysics of representation and its modern avatar in the “commandeerings” of Technik that govern the exploitative processes in which humankind is itself entrapped. As in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” where Heidegger demonstrates that the peculiar standing forth in presence proper to art obliges a rethinking of the Greek notion of thesis and any thetic “placings” or “framings,” his argument for a saying/handling usage in What Is Called Thinking? invites us to conceive the “showing” of beings in ways that depart from the modern understanding of “objective” or “effective” presence. This, also, is an essential part of what it means to dwell. So, we must learn to hear and practice in “handicraft” a form of “letting lay before”—a relationality—that is not “quietist” or “passive” despite the connotations of “letting” (again, the gleaning and articulating proper to legein is essential to this thought). What is at stake—what is invited—is nothing other than a profound transformation in our relation to all human handlings: an opening to a different form of engagement with things and others that is in fact always already there in our everyday dealings or the presence of our habitable element to some degree, however rarely it is recognized or assumed.10 Where do we begin in the task of making this concrete, given that we have hardly begun to think or grasp our doings in this sense? The “high” meaning of craft adduced by Heidegger would seem to make it a practice of extreme rarity in the contemporary world, and something extremely precarious (the artwork essay can have the same effect with respect to art itself). This impression is reinforced if we turn to a text such as “The Question of Technology” and consider the extraordinarily slim measure of freedom Heidegger allows to the relation of usage as regards the human share in the forms of exploitation enjoined by the governing order of Technik (recovering this “human share”—which involves a use of the hand—is the condition of any passage through this general order, any deliverance; and only art, according to this text in its far-too brief conclusion, offers a hint of this promise). If Technik, organized today in the processes of Capital, is genuinely governing in its manner of enjoining humankind to a process that can only end in ecological ruin, and so totalizing in reach, then how are we to begin to disinter and cultivate this other relation to handicraft to which Heidegger points? There is no overestimating the difficulty of these questions. But, once again, there may be a starting point in considering that handicraft, in the sense sought here, is perhaps not so rare. As I have just noted, what is spoken in “there is” is quite broadly available to us, even if it holds mystery. Is it possible that we can draw from a far broader latent grasp of the expanded meaning of handicraft to which Heidegger points? And is craft itself, in all its forms, perhaps far

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more prevalent than can be recognised by its ideological construction in contemporary culture (a construction that lends it the dubious value of a quaint refuge, always and easily exposed to capitalization). In any case, it is clear that when Heidegger opens the possibility of thinking dwelling from usage (all thinking use of the hand), he invites a radical re-envisioning of what counts as craft. In short, the presence of craft, the possibility of craft, remains to be disclosed and invented. This will only happen as the question of craft continues to be developed in tandem with those of thought and art; as Heidegger asserts in “Building Dwelling Thinking,” a mutual “listening” is required, an exploration of difference and relation. Those who have persisted with the work of the hand, in surgery, in wood-work, in writing, may have a great deal to teach one another and the thinker in this respect, as they undertake unlearning. * Dear Hans Bender, thank you for your letter of May 15 and your friendly invitation to contribute to your anthology, My Poem is my Knife. I remember telling you that once the poem is really there, the poet is dismissed, is no longer privy. Today, I suppose I would formulate it differently, with more nuances, but in principle I still hold this—old—view. True, there is the aspect that people currently, and so blithely, like to call craft. But—if you will allow me to condense much thinking and experience—craft, like cleanliness in general, is the condition of all poetry. This craft most certainly does not bring monetary rewards, does not have the “golden bottom” of the proverb. Who knows if it has any bottom at all. It has its depths and abysses, and some people (alas, I am not among them) even have a name for that. Craft means handiwork, a matter of hands. And these hands must belong to one person, i.e., a unique, mortal soul searching for its way with its voice and its dumbness. Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem. Don’t come with poiein and the like. I suspect that this word, with all its nearness and distance, meant something quite different from its current context. True, there are exercises—in the spiritual sense, dear Hans Bender. And then there are, at every lyrical street corner, experiments that muck around with the so-called word-material. Poems are also gifts—gifts to the attentive. Gifts bearing destinies. ”How are poems made?”

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Some years ago, I had the occasion to witness, and, later, to watch from a certain distance, how “making” turns by and by into “making it,” and thence into machinations. Yes, there is this, too. Perhaps you know about it. It does not happen by accident. We live under dark skies and—there are few human beings. Hence, I assume, so few poems. The hopes I have left are small. I try to hold on to what remains. With all good wishes for you and your work, your Paul Celan Paris, 18 May, 196011

Western thought since Socrates, Heidegger famously claims in What Is Called Thinking?, has taken refuge in writing (WCT 17/20). But his description of thought’s handicraft in the same text (inspired in its later pages by a pre-Socratic thinker) clearly indicates that this practice involves writing in an essential way. What calls to thought (draws it—and poetry is caught in this same draw) is drawn forth by thought; what thought thus contributes to the “outline sketch” (Aufriss) that Heidegger eventually describes as the essence of language serves that “marking out” that brings to the dwelling of mortals a measure. Thought proceeds originally from an incisive inscription that is fully accomplished in the drawing out of letters, grammata.12 The hand that is guided by thought becomes a hand in lending itself to this primary writing, this tracing design required by the usage that conditions human dwelling. Presumably, the hand belongs even to that usage to which mortals devote themselves as mortals: Mortals dwell in that they initiate their own nature—their being capable of death as death—into the use and practice of this capacity, so that there may be a good death. 13

I have noted that there is an ethical orientation to Heidegger’s account of the way the craft of thought serves the ends of dwelling (the earth would be “without welcome,” without “stay,” otherwise). And, as we have seen, Heidegger is not indifferent to the question of what it means to receive the welcome of the other, even if he showed a terrible incapacity in his ability to receive the approach of Celan himself. We need not return to this failure on this occasion. But I recall it (after my citation of his letter to Hans Bender) in order to point to another dimension of hospitality and ultimately another dimension of what must be learned in that “care” to which Heidegger refers in speaking of a proper use of mortality. Heidegger never understood “usage” to involve a care of the self, except insofar as such care would involve the self ’s discovery of its own finitude

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(and thus ex-posure to alterity). Craft, for him, could never be a cultivation of the self; it would be rather a way of letting into relation. But he remained remarkably reserved in thinking this latter relation where it involves human being-with. Celan refers, in his letter to Bender, to the searching—with true hands—of a mortal soul. As Celan taught, the poem seeks another, goes out toward this other, and in this very movement brings a gift. Hospitality, in the sense of this term I want to approach, involves such a reaching, and essentially involves opening and reserving a place for the other. It is with this latter consideration that I turn to another name that Celan himself would most certainly have taken as vitally important to his own thinking. I suspect Celan would have taken strong inspiration from Maurice Blanchot’s own efforts to think and perform a hospitable writing had he been able to engage texts by Blanchot such as The Infinite Conversation and The Step Not Beyond (and even if Blanchot did indulge in naming the “abysses” of poetry).14 The words I want to cite from The Infinite Conversation actually radicalize what Celan gives in his letter with respect to the question of hospitality as they take up the question of writing and mortality. These words conclude an intense dialogue that meditates on the relation between mortality and alterity with an enigmatic proposition addressing one who is prepared to commit to writing. and thereby inscribe their death. To write (one’s death) is to open a place for the other: ++ Will you, as a self, accept taking this self as problematic, as fictive, and nonetheless more necessary in this way than if you were able to close up around yourself like a circle, sure of its center? Then, perhaps, in writing, you will accept as the secret of writing this premature yet always belated conclusion that is in accord with forgetting: that others write in my place, this place without occupant that is my sole identity; this is what makes death for an instant joyful, aleatory.15

Blanchot’s The Step Not Beyond, published in 1973 (three years after Celan's passing), may be read as an effort to think and pursue such a “usage” of one’s death. What becomes of the task of writing if it involves a mortal soul’s ex-posure to the other? A scene of encounter presented in that volume (where one in fear passes their endangered thought to the hands of another in requesting help) gives this usage its full ethical import and prepares us to grasp the ethicopolitical meaning of the “effacement” that Blanchot describes in evoking what was taken by various distinguished critics to imply the “death” of the author. This is not the occasion for returning to Blanchot’s difficult text, but it is important to note that when Blanchot evokes this “passage” in writing (from I/je to he/il) by

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which the self slips from a position of authorial command, thereby opening to what he terms “an other relation,” he is doing far more than describing a literary experience. For Blanchot, “effacement” describes an essential disruption of the discursive or symbolic order that is inherent to its very constitution. The “world,” in Heidegger’s sense, or that order collected and gleaned in thought (to recall Parmenides’ terms), cannot escape its effacement, and Blanchot’s ambition in writing is to think and affirm the ethico-political meaning of this “disaster” for thought. That affirmation will lead into a rethinking of the notion of community. I must pass over a broad range of textual sites that mark the stations of Blanchot’s meditation on the motif of effacement. I will pause over just one: Blanchot’s astounding commemorative statement for Georges Bataille, which attempts to disallow any appropriation of Bataille’s living presence by those who survived him. That presence, Blanchot declares, was made possible by its very ex-posure to mortality; death, when it came, removed it from us forever. For this life/death, “there are no witnesses.” Those who seek to serve can only follow and watch over this passing: Vainly do we try to maintain, with our words, with our writings, what is absent; vainly do we offer it the appeal of our memories and a sort of figure, the joy of remaining with the day, life prolonged by a truthful appearance. We are only looking to fill a void, we cannot bear the pain: the affirmation of this void. Who could agree to receive its insignificance, an insignificance so enormous that we do not have a memory capable of containing it and such that we ourselves must already slip into oblivion in order to sustain it, for the time of this slippage, into the very enigma this insignificance represents? Everything we say tends to veil the one affirmation: that all must fade [que tout doit s’effacer] and that we can remain loyal only so long as we watch over this movement that fades [qui s’efface], to which something in us that rejects all memory already belongs.16

To write one’s death, then, is to write one’s belonging to effacement and the anonymous relationality this implies. It also means accepting, ultimately affirming, a “law” that speaks there: que tout doit s’effacer—a phrase whose colloquial phrasing can mask the enigmatic imperative that echoes in it. Affirming (and writing) effacement, once again, will belong to the ethicopolitical imperative I have described. It can take joyous articulations in Blanchot’s text, and others that are more grave (though always still borne in affirmation). The invitation Blanchot leaves us with respect to the affirmation I have described and a politics without revenge are surely of immense importance today. But the fact that there is a law stated in this phrase, of an “ontological” order, is what

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particularly holds my attention here. The sentence does not just enunciate some necessity acceptable to common sense (which will also easily accommodate the standard English translation: “all must fade”). It brings to speech something enjoined, and it does so in a manner that is almost archaic. In fact, it is strangely reminiscent of the kinds of pre-Socratic phrases meditated upon by Heidegger. I think in particular of “the Anaximander fragment,” since the fragment in question may be read (with some interpretative freedom) to enunciate a comparable law. “Tout doit s’effacer” could thus be read as a quite radical transcription of the oldest Western statement about the “usage” that governs a just order in which beings give due heed to one another in order to surmount the “injustice” that is proper to their inclination to insist on perdurance.17 The latter usage enjoins “heed” even as it “conjoins” the disorder to which they incline. It brings jointure to what is always also, in some (im)measure, “out of joint.” I make this admittedly tenuous connection in order to gesture toward a point that is potentially lost in the account of the handicraft of thought I have pursued thus far. Following the later pages of What Is Called Thinking?, we may understand the relation between Being and human being as one of a collecting gathering. The handicraft to which thought is enjoined by usage is nothing other than the articulation of the relation between Being and beings (the ontological difference): the “jointure” of beings. But Heidegger reminds us in his essay on Anaximander that this is not a relation that humankind can pretend to hold with surety or command, whatever strength it deploys. It too must heed the exigencies of finitude that speak in this governing order. Its “handicraft” must remain answerable to these exigencies, drawing them forth, even as it explores the modalities of its articulations through its writing. The lectures and demonstrations of Robert Brewer Young during the Cello Project returned insistently to the problem of “irrationality” that haunts philosophy of geometry. His frequent reference to Jain logic and his reflections on the problematic of thinking “0” echoed the same problematic. As though he wanted to remind us, or could not help but remind us, that craft is also a kind of negotiation with the irrational, or what exceeds our grasp, in ways craft cannot or should not pretend to evade (because it somehow exposes this irrational). Somehow, the problematic of craft drives this master luthier incessantly to the question of the unmasterable. When Blanchot writes “tout doit s’effacer,” he appears, at first, to honor a necessity that is at work at the foundations of discourse itself (and the order it sustains). Writing on the dialectic in The Writing of the Disaster, he explains that everything produced in and by the work of the negative in dialectic

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necessarily remarks something that exceeds the grasp of the negative. With such foundations, no construction can hold—everything must give way to fragmentation. But where the craft of writing, as Blanchot thinks it, engages this unworking foundation of all dialectical work, it encounters another impetus— precisely the impetus for the affirmation to which I have referred and the exilic passage onto which it opens. With this latter passage to the outside, terms such as “dwelling,” “hospitality,” or “a good death” undergo a profound transformation. I want to conclude by noting that there is a usage to be learned here too.

Appendix

Aristotle’s Poetics, Hölderlin’s Remarks

Part One

The Rhythmic Schema Reading Aristotle from Hölderlin

In the third section of his “Remarks on Oedipus,” Hölderlin offers a definition of the object or affair (die Sache) of tragic representation. It is a kind of catharsis, the purifying separation, as Hölderlin puts it, of a monstrous union of the divine and the human. The “separation” may be read as a movement of absolute reflection, but it is no less a catharsis, as Hölderlin indicates when he interrupts his exposition with a reference (in Greek) to Aristotle: The presentation of the tragic rests principally upon this, that the monstrous, how God and Man couple, and limitlessly the natural force and the innermost of man become one in anger, is conceived in that the limitless becoming-one purifies itself through limitless separation. Tes physeos grammateus en ton kalamon apobrechon eunoun.1

There are other echoes of the Poetics in Hölderlin’s “Remarks,”2 enough to suggest that Hölderlin is engaging in his own manner in the kind of speculative appropriation of Aristotle that Schelling pursued in the tenth of the Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism. But the citation from Suidas indicates that the Poetics has offered more to Hölderlin's reflections than what could be simply at that time a set of conventional tropes for the discussion of tragedy (or, as Peter Szondi would say, the tragic).3 The astounding and almost brutal alternation of tones that occurs as Hölderlin passes into Greek sets Aristotle off in almost quaint relief. And yet Hölderlin seems also to be telling us that Aristotle was writing as a Greek what Hölderlin has just written (I refer to the definition of tragedy) as a modern; or, to put this in more compact terms, that the Poetics rest in their own (Greek) manner on such a “conception” of the tragic. Aristotle, “nature’s scribe,” would thus have been articulating the structure of tragic Darstellung as a presentation of the tragic essence of Being—inscribing “naively,” perhaps, but in generous understanding, the mimesis of physis itself.

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But is there actually a reading of Aristotle implied here, a.reading in the strong sense of a confrontation with the Poetics? Or is Hölderlin simply remarking, magnificently, the historial difference that requires a new reflection on the tragic, a reflection that will account for and answer to the vaterländische Umkehr? A satisfying answer to this question would require a full consideration of Hölderlin’s reading of Aristotle within the framework of his understanding at this time (the time of the translation of Sophocles) of the relations between the Greeks and the “Hesperians.”4 For this occasion, I will try merely to suggest the possible reach of the question by sketching something of what happens if we return to the Poetics in the light of the “Remarks.” For if we bear in mind Hölderlin's description of the manner in which the tragic transport articulates itself in a rhythmic structure,5 we are offered an intriguing solution to what has traditionally been the fundamental problem in the reception of the Poetics, namely, Aristotle’s understanding of catharsis. Catharsis is not defined in the Poetics and is referred to there at only one point (though a very significant one, in conjunction with the very definition of tragedy in chapter 6: “. . . in a dramatic, not in a narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions”).6 Aristotle tells us at various moments in his discussion of plot what structures are most pitiable or frightful and best produce “dia mimeseos” [1453b12] the proper effect of tragedy. But he does not really tell us how this effect is produced by these structures, and he never defines the effect itself. The only other significant reference to catharsis in Aristotle is to be found in Book 8 of the Politics, where Aristotle takes up the place of music in education. The discussion is brief, and Aristotle promises us further development “when hereafter we speak of poetry” (1341b38). But he tells us nevertheless that music has an effect on character because its melodies and rhythms involve a mimesis of qualities of character and provoke a kind of sympathetic movement in the listener.7 He recognizes also a cathartic effect that is not due to an “intellection” regarding such mimesis (an “aesthetic” contemplation of form) but, rather, due to something like a medical treatment (“hosper iatreias..​.k​ai katharseos” [1342a15]) that also provides an innocent pleasure.8 This is hardly the place to review the history of the application of these remarks from the Politics to the interpretation of catharsis as a homeopathic process. But I will note simply that recent readings of the Poetics informed by formalist principles (and many of the best readings since Gerald Else’s may be characterized this way) have disregarded the discussion of catharsis in the Politics, and this despite the fact that Aristotle offers a genealogy of tragedy in

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the Poetics that links it to forms of song and dance in which, as Aristotle says in Chapter 1, characters, actions, and emotions were represented by rhythm given form, dia skhematizomenon rhuthmon (1447a27). They have turned instead to Aristotle's statements about the cognitive function of poetic mimesis and have emphasized in particular Aristotle’s statement in Chapter 4 regarding the pleasure we take in the graphic depiction of form. The lines in question from Chapter 4 follow Aristotle's assertion that the origin of poetic art lies in the natural human inclination to mimesis, an inclination that takes two forms—the first deriving from the fact that humans, as the most imitative of animals, learn from mimesis, the second being that humans naturally take pleasure in mimesis (1448b6-9). He continues: The truth of this second point is shown by experience: though the objects themselves may be painful to see, we delight to view the most realistic representations of them in art, the forms, for example, of the lowest animals and of dead bodies. The explanation is to be found in a further fact: to be learning something is the greatest of pleasures not only to the philosopher but also the rest of mankind, however small their capacity for it; the reason for the delight in seeing the picture is that one is at the same time learning—gathering the meaning of things, e.g. that the man there is so and so; for if one has not seen the thing before, one’s pleasure will not be in the picture as an imitation of it, but will be due to the execution or coloring, or some similar cause. (1448b9-19)

The pleasure we take in mimesis, then, is essentially a “philosophical” pleasure of recognition. An image presents to us the form of an object in such a way that we can recognize that object in its nature, and indeed learn to recognize that object. It is the recognition of form that gives us the principle pleasure in mimesis, not the sensible qualities of the presentation (a fundamental point for the Poetics, as we see in the almost constant derogation of spectacle [cf. 1450b17-20]). Moreover, this is a pleasure that transmutes a kind of pain—the pain we have, Aristotle says, (the example is not without interest in the context of a discussion of tragedy), in seeing ignoble animals and cadavers. Roselyne Dupont-Roc and Jean Lallot, who offer in their superb critical edition of the Poetics what I take to be the most thoroughgoing and careful version of what I have called the formalist argument, conclude from this passage in Chapter 4 that the catharsis of pity and fear effected by tragic mimesis is to be understood from the basis of an analogy between the distillation of forms that occurs in painting and the synthesis of facts and events that occurs in the formal composition of the tragic muthos.9 For tragedy, as Aristotle argues, also presents

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forms of action. This, of course, is why he says that tragedy is more philosophical than the chronicle; its action obeys the logical criteria of the probable and the necessary. And for the purpose of producing its proper effect (which is the pleasurable catharsis of pity and fear), it offers something like the form of the pitiable and the fearful—a sequence of events that moves us by the way in which it concerns us (for it occurs to someone more or less like us) but that transforms the emotions it stirs through its ordering of these events, however terrible that order might be.10 The pitiable and the fearful are inscribed, we might say, in the “syntax” of the facts that constitute the muthos—a system of facts, as Aristotle puts it in Chapter 14 (systaseos ton pragmaton) that follows the schema outlined in Chapter 13, that is to say, the passage from fortune to affliction of a man who is not eminently noble, but better rather than worse. This tragic metabole, entailing in the best of cases a reversal (peripeteia) and a recognition, is a form of the pitiable and the frightening. Our apprehension of it, or simply our conception of it (because in a good tragedy we should need no more than to hear the facts of the muthos (1453b1-7; cf. 1462a13]), effects catharsis—a purification that is, in this reading, more of an ordering of feelings through intellectual satisfaction and aesthetic gratification than a release offered by a homeopathic process. From the basis of the analogy between the apprehension of form in a painting and the apprehension of the logical form of the tragic action, Dupont-Roc and Lallot are inclined to see the tragic sequence as forming a kind of tableau for an aesthetic vision.11 They recognize that a certain participation in the tragic movement is required of the spectator (their acknowledgment that the spectator must be able to identify with the protagonist, their emphasis given to the notion of surprise and their convincing articulation of this notion with Aristotle’s remarks on the complex structure, finally their reading of the description of spectacle in Chapter 17, all point in this direction). But they nonetheless finally privilege the analogy with painting by emphasizing the spectator’s aesthetic experience of tragedy. They are certainly not violating Aristotle’s text in doing so. The remarks on organic form and the criteria for its beauty in Chapter 7 obviously lend themselves to such an interpretation. But I would suggest that there are strong reasons for suspecting that this formalist interpretation of the tragic effect cannot suffice. My doubts here are the same ones I have regarding the interpretation offered by Dupont-Roc and Lallot of the cathartic effect of music—an interpretation that seems to me insufficiently dynamic.12 Aristotle is insisting too heavily on the engagement of the spectator in the tragic action for the aesthetic interpretation of catharsis to be quite adequate. Two of the points I mentioned a moment ago

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as being acknowledged by Dupont-Roc and Lallot are worth emphasizing here: the motif of surprise (to thaumazein) in the tragic action and the problem of spectacle. I will go quickly over the first, and then pass to the second since it is a long-standing source of difficulty for the interpretation of the Poetics. Dupont-Roc and Lallot argue quite convincingly (both on philological and interpretive grounds) that Aristotle’s remarks on the effect of surprise in Chapter 9 are to be linked to his remarks on the structure of the complex plot in Chapters 10 and 11. Aristotle states in the last paragraph of Chapter 9 that pity and fear are most strongly evoked when a sequence of events linked causally occurs against all expectation and when we perceive in an astounding and seemingly chance occurrence a certain design. Now, we might stress the fact that the perception of order in the most extreme circumstances is what intrigues Aristotle: pity and fear will be most stirred when the intellect is pushed to its limits and is offered a glimpse of order in the most startling chance event. Pleasure would come from the tension between chance and necessity and its resolution in the perception of an orderly design. But I would suggest that insofar as Aristotle links surprise with the elements of peripeteia and anagnorisis—that is, insofar as he seeks to inscribe the surprising event in the ironic turn that occurs in a complex plot structure wherein a causal sequence suddenly turns about—he is also taking into account the spectator’s engagement in the action. If the complex structure is best suited to producing the catharsis of pity and fear, and if the element of surprise that occurs as a “causal sequence of events comes about against all expectation” is an integral part of this structure, then the effect of surprise must come from more than a kind of intellectual astonishment. There must be something like a movement in a causal sequence that provokes us to shudder at the course of events (even if we only hear the tale told) and wonder at their design. Again, my suggestion, here, is that catharsis must proceed from a certain movement—an engagement in the tragic action (and particularly its metabole, its turn)—that involves something more than contemplation. We must be taken by the tragic turn of events. Now, when Aristotle comes to describe the poet's attention to the tragic spectacle in Chapter 17, he is apparently thinking of precisely such an engagement, and this is why I want to look closely at his discussion of this point. The topic of the spectacle is another classic problem for interpretations of the Poetics. At least twice (Chapters 6 and 14), Aristotle suggests that spectacle, though the most seductive part of the presentation, has little to do with art—and these statements are quite consonant with his emphasis on the structure of the muthos and his subordination of all other elements to it, including character.

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But in Chapter 26 (1462a15), he appears to contradict himself by describing the resources of the spectacle as one of the elements that make tragedy superior to epic, and in Chapter 17 he advises the poet to place the action before his eyes so that he can guarantee its coherence for the spectator. Here, consideration of the spectacle becomes a determining element in the very process of composition. The first paragraph of Chapter 17 reads as follows: At the time when he is constructing his plots and engaged on the diction in which they are worked out, the poet should remember to put the actual scenes as far as possible before his eyes. In this way, seeing everything with the vividness of an eye-witness as it were, he will devise most effectively what is appropriate and avoid incongruities. [Aristotle goes on to provide an example of precisely such an unhappy incongruity and then continues.] As far as may be, too, the poet should even act his story with the very gestures [skhemasin] of his personages. Given the same natural qualifications, he who feels the emotions will be the most convincing: distress and anger, for instance, are portrayed most truthfully by one who is feeling them at the moment. Hence it is that poetry demands a man with a special gift for it, or else one with a touch of madness in him; the former can easily assume the required mood and the latter may be actually beside himself with emotion. (1455a22-33)

So Aristotle tells us here first that the poet must visualize the scene in order to avoid contradictions and to give the action a maximum of coherency. The visualization Aristotle recommends has a kind of controlling function. But Aristotle also says very precisely that one who sees the action as though they themselves were a spectator will find or invent with the most efficacy [energestata] what is most fitting—by which Aristotle probably means, what is most fitting for the diction. The poet who sees most precisely will be most inspired, we might say, or the most energetic in finding the fitting words. So Aristotle’s recommendation has more than a controlling function. Aristotle then makes a second recommendation. To give a finished form to the tragedy, the poet must not only see the action, they must also have recourse to gestures that will evoke in them the emotions they are attempting to convey in their writing. Aristotle recommends such gestures in the Rhetoric in suggesting how the orator must interpret the text in order to give it a vividness that will provoke pity (2.1386a32). But here in the Poetics, Aristotle is actually recommending to the poet a kind of theatrical exercise designed to awaken in them the passions they are attempting to portray. A technique of mimesis (in the sense of this term that so worries Plato in the opening books of the Republic) is recommended to the poet so that they may work themselves into a state of

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possession that will make possible the effect of truth in the verbal representation of passions. But how are we to conceive the relation between the poet's mimetic activity and their writing? Dupont-Roc and Lallot suggest that this relation is in fact already implied in the word skhemata, for in the Greek aesthetic vocabulary, the word designates both corporeal and linguistic forms: figures of dance (as I noted, the word is used in this way in Chapter 1) and figures of expression. Throughout the Greco-Latin rhetorical tradition, they remark, there is a strict affinity implied in the word schemata between gesture and speech. “Before being a codified figure and fixed ‘figure,’” Dupont-Roc and Lallot write, “the skhema is to language what the gesture is to the body—movement and rhythm.” They cite Cicero’s reference, in this regard, to the Greek notion of skhemata as “gestures of discourse.”13 There is thus a link between gesture and expression, and Aristotle would appear to be proposing to the poet a physical technique of auto-suggestion (the rehearsal of gestural skhemata) in order to promote an effective lexis—one that produces the effect of truth on the listeners and brings them to share the passions portrayed. As Dupont-Roc and Lallot put it, “To give the work its accomplished expression [. . .] is to imprint in the text itself [. . .] the expressive forms, the ‘figures,’ which, in transposing the emotive movements from which they have issued, will lend themselves in turn to the vocal and gestural retranslation that defines the interpretive function of the actor. [. . .] Whether it is grasped in the moment of invention, at the moment of writing, or in that of interpretation, the skhema appears always as a dynamic form, a movement and rhythm of the body [. . .] the text [. . .] and elocution.”14 So we are back to rhythm, at least as concerns the diction—a secondary element of composition vis-à-vis the invention of the muthos, but nevertheless that element of the mimesis that produces an effect of truth and engages the auditor by communicating to them the represented passions. Still, the good tragedy, Aristotle suggests, should be able to produce its proper effect even without a well-composed diction, let alone spectacle. We need only hear the general line of the story, the general schema, we might say. In the paragraph immediately following, Aristotle makes a third recommendation corresponding to the fundamental thesis of his argument: “His story, again, whether already made or of his own making, he should first simplify and reduce to a general schema, before proceeding to lengthen it out by the insertion of episodes” (1455b1-3). In translating ektithestai katholou as “general schema,” I am following the French version of Dupont-Roc and Lallot (McKeon gives

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“universal form”). Strangely enough, the French authors do not justify their use of the term “schema” here (though they normally justify everything) and do not note the possible connection between the skhema in the sense of the rhythmic figure and the “general schema” they have Aristotle propose to the poet. The apparent oversight is remarkable in the light of the extensive and even daring commentary they devote to the word “skhema” in the commentary of the preceding paragraph. Why translate ektithestai katholou as “general schema” in the first place and why not remark upon (if only to dismiss) the relation between gestural schemata and plot schemata? I want to suggest that we are witnessing a kind of return of the repressed here, and that Dupont-Roc and Lallot are unwittingly pointing to a further dimension of the source of catharsis produced by the tragic muthos. For, I would argue that in defining the “general view” as a schema, they are re-introducing the question of rhythm at the level of plot. They implicitly suggest that the “mainspring” of the play, which, as we have seen, is a form of the pitiable and the frightening, a kind of logical schema, is comparable to a skhema in the sense of a gesture or expression, and thus that listening to the main lines of the plot will be equivalent to engaging with a kind of rhythmic movement in discourse. If the general movement of the play is comparable to a rhythmic figure, would it not be reasonable to suppose that tragic catharsis is effected at least in part through participation in a rhythmic movement? No doubt there is an important dimension of intellection and a certain aesthetic experience accompanying the experienced order of movement presented in the tragedy. Yet the tragic experience offers more than a theoretical or aesthetic contemplation. As Hölderlin observes, there is also the experience of a rhythm. Did Hölderlin observe this in Aristotle? The reference to Aristotle in the “Remarks” appears immediately, as I have noted, after an allusion to the notion of catharsis. “Nature's scribe, dipping his benevolent reed.” I cannot help recalling here in conclusion Benveniste’s remarks on the word “rhusmos.”15 Rhuthmos (or rhusmos—the Ionian form), he argues, does not originally connote rhythm in the modern sense, but connotes, rather, form. The word is used by Democritus and Leucippus in a technical sense to designate one of the ways in which bodies distinguish themselves by their form or configuration. It is Aristotle who identified and preserved this usage in his Metaphysics, explaining its meaning with an example from Leucippus. The letters A and N, he notes, differ from one another by their skhema, which Aristotle equates with the word rhusmos. Everywhere in Greek prose up to the fifth century, and even in Plato and Aristotle, we find rhusmos designating a notion of form. But the root reo, which

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means “to flow,” and originally prompted the spurious interpretation of rhusmos as deriving its meaning from the regular movement of the sea's waves, seems to have leant the word to designations of fluid and transient forms. Plato was then the first to give it the meaning of rhythm in the sense of a recurrent form that is measurable or countable, as in dance or music. “Nature's scribe, dipping his benevolent reed.” Might the conjunction of letters and a certain fluidity (there is ink, of course, but perhaps even an association of “reed” and water) point to rhusmos? This is not a connection to force. Nor more than I would want to suggest that we might easily return to Hölderlin’s “Remarks” and seize the essence of what he was doing with his own notions of catharsis and rhythm from the basis of what we have seen in Aristotle (the link, as we will see in the next chapter, is more tenuous). We might well say that for Aristotle what requires purification is a kind of monstrous confusion (the preeminent tragic event is the murder of a family member). But he certainly does not think of catharsis in terms of a separation of the human and the panic power of nature—a separation that for Hölderlin takes the form of time. Still, for Hölderlin, the presentation of this separation occurs in a rhythmic structure that follows (but also defines) something like a calculus of the rhythm of what Aristotle would have called the soul. Catharsis, for Hölderlin, appears to involve something like a measuring of the diverse human faculties by which the human being (in the person of the hero) learns to “count time.16 I suspect that Aristotle in his own way thought of catharsis as a kind of measuring. But as a Greek of the fifth century BC, he could not think time as a transcendental condition of human sensibility and obviously could not think the veering of time that required the vaterländische Umkehr in the modes of representation. Only a modern could propose a definition of the tragic (and its Darstellung) wherein beginning and end would no longer rhyme.

Part Two

Returning to Hölderlin with the Question of Rhythm and Catharsis In the last section, I asked what Hölderlin’s “Remarks” might offer to a reading of Aristotle’s Poetics. This led, as we have seen, to a reconsideration of the question of catharsis. Turning this approach about, now, let me return to the two parts of Hölderlin’s “Remarks” with this last question in view. Once again, I will not seek to build a strong philosophical link between the texts of the two authors, some common ground or even some chiasmic relation. The philological effort will proceed, to the extent that Aristotle is concerned, from a more modest comparison of a few elements of the respective arguments that are suggestive for an approach to Hölderlin’s fascinating, but forbidding, accounts of Oedipus and Antigone. We will see that Hölderlin’s approach to the question of catharsis is in fact comparable to Aristotle’s, and perhaps informed by it, but also profoundly divergent in its distinctly modern character. The questions raised by that “modern” trait form my real interest in this exercise. We have seen that Hölderlin appears to understand catharsis from the ground of a purifying separation. I quote again from Section 3 of the “Remarks on Oedipus,” this time drawing on Pfau’s more syntactically faithful rendering: The presentation of the tragic rests primarily upon this, that the monstrous, how God and Man couple, and limitlessly the natural force and the innermost of man become one in anger, is conceived [dadurch sich begreift] in that the limitless becoming-one purifies itself through limitless separation. Tes physeos grammateus en ton kalamon apobrechon eunoun. (FH 107/735-736)

The third section of the “Remarks on Antigone” returns to this difficult, yet fundamental, statement: As has been hinted at in the remarks on Oedipus, the tragic presentation has as its premise that the immediate god is all at one with man (for the god of an apostle is more mediate, is highest intellect in highest spirit), that the infinite enthusiasm conceives of itself infinitely, that is, in consciousness which cancels

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consciousness, separating itself in sacred manner, and that the god is present in the figure of death. (FH 113/787)

In both sections from which I have quoted (and let me underscore that the organizational structures of the two sets of “Remarks” are identical, though the text devoted to Antigone is more developed), Hölderlin goes on to stress that the separation is presented in a dialectic of contending interventions that includes the protagonists as well as the chorus. The separation is thereby played out in the course of the tragic action as a whole, and catharsis—if are to retain this term for Hölderlin—has to be understood accordingly. It thus presents itself in terms of a redressing of the relation between the divine and the human: a redefinition of limits and a restoration of balance or equilibrium. The reference to “purification” (particularly if taken in light of Hölderlin’s earlier work on the figure of Empedocles) suggests a more archaic understanding of this “effect” of catharsis, though it also links, as we will see (in relation to Schelling), to a contemporary philosophical approach to the tragic. But the initial statements of the first sections of the respective “Remarks” on the poetic logic at work in Oedipus and Antigone (Hölderlin speaks also of “tragic laws”) would seem to suggest that Hölderlin has actively sought to follow Aristotle in attending to the overall structure of the tragic form. The principles at work in this form must be grasped with respect to the entirety of the actions presented. Let us continue to follow Hölderlin’s argument in his opening section, which introduces his understanding of the objective (we could say “phenomenological”) character of these principles as they relate to the rhythmic course of human faculties in the tragic action.1 By grasping a “lawful calculation” based upon “the way in which a sensuous system, man in his entirety develops as if under the influence of the element, and how representation, sensation and reason appear in different successions,” the poet, Hölderlin suggests, gains a sure basis for approaching their task, which is an articulation of “living meaning” with what is calculable (FH 101/729-730). In the case of tragedy, this living meaning, “which cannot be calculated” involves the transport of which Hölderlin speaks in referring to the joining and purifying separation of human being and god. Because this transport is “unrestrained” or “boundless” in tragedy, the poet, Hölderlin writes, must have recourse to a formal device Hölderlin names the “caesura”: Thereby, in the rhythmic sequence of the representations [Vorstellungen] wherein the transport presents itself [sich darstellt], there becomes necessary what in poetic meter is called the caesura, the pure word, the counter-rhythmic

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rupture; namely, in order to meet the onrushing change of representations at its highest point in such a manner that very soon there does not appear the change of representations [der Wechsel der Vorstellungen] but the representation itself [die Vorstellung selber]. Thereby the sequence of the calculation and the rhythm are divided and, as two halves, refer to one another in such a manner that they appear of equal weight. (FH 102/730)

He continues with a description of the way the caesura is placed in Oedipus and in Antigone, noting that in both plays the speeches of Tiresias bring this counterrhythmic interruption. He then ends the section with the following words about the role of Tiresias: He enters the course of fate as the custodian of the natural power, which, in a tragic manner, removes man [reisst] from his own life-sphere, the center of his inner life, into another world and into the excentric sphere of the dead. (FH 102/731)

These extraordinary paragraphs evidently merit long commentary. At this point, let me underscore only that Hölderlin understands the calculable law defining the play of human faculties engaged in the action as having a rhythmic foundation,2 and sees the tragic action as assuming a rhythmic character that becomes precipitous in its embodiment of the tragic transport. The play’s movement thus requires a counter-rhythmic intervention whereby the elements of the action, what Hölderlin names the “representations,” are subject to a governing arrest that brings the audience to attend not just to the course of the action, in its full unfolding, but to the representation itself—its nature and fact.3 The formal character of the tragic work, then, appears as such for an audience that finds in it a form of overall balance. The “proper effect” of the tragedy for the audience, to the extent that this effect has formal grounds, must be thought from this equilibrium within which the play presents itself as a whole (as representation); it does not derive from the turnings of a powerful narrative structure that holds to the order of probability, as in the Aristotelian account. But Hölderlin also places at the heart of the tragic action (and gives this a central position in the two “Remarks”) a description of the manner in which the principal protagonists suffer separation. The second sections of both sets of “Remarks” are devoted to the turn in which a sacred enthusiasm is interrupted. Aristotle, of course, also gives significant emphasis to the character and fate of the hero. But Hölderlin actually describes the experience of the protagonists in terms that strongly echo his account of the purifying separation. This is

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particularly visible in words that appear at the end of the third section of the “Remarks on Oedipus” that evoke the human experience of this separation: At such moments, man forgets himself and the god and turns around like a traitor, naturally in a saintly manner.—In the utmost form of suffering, namely, there exists nothing but the conditions of time and space. Inside it, man forgets himself because he exists entirely for the moment, the god [forgets himself] because he is nothing but time; and either one is unfaithful, time, because it is reversed categorically at such a moment, no longer fitting beginning and end, man, because at this moment of categorical reversal he has to follow and thus can no longer resemble the beginning in what follows. Thus Haemon stands in Antigone. Thus Oedipus himself in the tragedy of Oedipus. (FH 108/736)

Whatever Hölderlin understands by “catharsis,” it appears to be intimately linked to the character and form of the tragic suffering presented in the play. Indeed, readers such as Lacan and Heidegger appear to discover the principle cathartic effect in Antigone in what Hölderlin himself named the “beauty” of Antigone’s condition as she suffers the categorical reversal.4 Her attitude, Hölderlin writes, is “among other things, also based on the superlative of human spirit and heroic virtuosity” (FH 111/785). Therefore, as we seek the meaning of Hölderlin’s appeal to Aristotle with respect to catharsis, and consider his understanding of the play’s embodiment or instigation of its effect, we must give sufficient weight to both dimensions of Hölderlin’s account: the human experience presented, and what is given through the dialectic presented in the structure of the presentation as a whole, wherein the tremendous “conceives itself.” Now, in the case of Oedipus, the turning suffered by the hero, which is presumably to be experienced by the spectator rhythmically from the grounds of Hölderlin’s description of its temporal ordering (the tempo of the succession of representations), constitutes the whole of the tragic action. Oedipus’s manner of “interpreting too infinitely” the message brought from the oracle, and then his “furious curiosity” (FH 104/732) give way, after the confrontation with Tiresias, to a growing insecurity and confusion, “a desperate struggle to find himself,” and finally an “insane questioning for a consciousness.” The action of the tragedy, with its metabole, coincides roughly with the hero’s experience. Antigone offers a more complex form with respect to the relation between the experience of the protagonists and the structure of the play. One will have noted this already from the fact that Haemon is identified, in the “Remarks” on Oedipus,” as the figure in the play who suffers a fate comparable to that of

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Oedipus. Haemon’s own course of experience conforms generally, in fact, to the movement of the play as a whole, which Hölderlin describes as a civic rebellion. (“The course of events in Antigone is that of a rebellion, where, to the extent that it is a patriotic cause, it is important that everything senses itself as being seized by infinite reversal and, being deeply affected, senses itself in an infinite form within which it is affected. For patriotic reversal is the reversal of all modes and forms of representation” [FH 114/789].) Of course, Antigone sets the movement underway and defines it in significant measure; it is difficult to grasp the “infinite” character of the reversal without her intervention, stemming as it does from her manner of answering to a “different usage” that would hold sway in the realm of the dead.5 “Patriotic reversal” (FH 114/789) clearly indicates something more profound in this case than a political revolution in the sense of a reordering of structures of rule (with accompanying representations). But there is, indeed, revolution: the action in the play, for Hölderlin, effectively turns when Haemon names his father’s transgression with respect to his role in the city (his failure to honor “god’s name”)—a declaration that Hölderlin names an “autonomous word” (FH 111/785). It is a compelling reading in the sense that Haemon appears to offer legitimate evidence of public support for Antigone’s actions; a form of witness (in a moment of extreme personal duress, to be sure) that will be confirmed by Tiresias in his confrontation with Creon. Tiresias speaks from a very different place and order, as “custodian of the natural power,” but his interruptive word also speaks to the same reality. Haemon thus brings to speech the political turning that occurs in the play with his “autonomous word,” and his fate will in fact follow the turning Hölderlin describes in the concluding paragraph of Section 3 of the “Remarks” on Oedipus. He is seized in the moment (by Eros, according to the chorus) and then follows a categorical reversal of time. But Haemon’s fate is nonetheless difficult to compare with that of Antigone, who will suffer the divine seizure and the turning of time in a manner for which Hölderlin, as we have seen, reserves his greatest admiration. It is striking that Hölderlin gives relatively little attention to the movement in which Antigone “approaches the Aorgic” (FH 112/786) in the sacred enthusiasm that inspires her act of according burial rites to her brother Polyneices. There is little in Hölderlin’s account that touches upon Antigone’s evocation of philia and the meaning of her denial of this relation to Ismene.6 It passes by her astounding appearance at the burial site and the performance of the rite. Hölderlin speaks only of the way she must suffer “the onrushing spirit of time,” summarizing all in a single powerful evocation of this temporal tearing: “intemperate [in that] it is relentless as the spirit of the eternally living, unwritten wasteland and world

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of the dead” (FH 110/784). Immediately thereafter, Hölderlin will cite the line that I have noted above, which speaks to the core of Heidegger’s reading of the play (“Who is to say; there may be a different usage/down there” [FH 111/785]), but he gives relatively little attention to the grounds of Antigone’s act of fidelity to her brother and the extremity of her actions, concentrating rather on the way she follows the categorical turn. Hölderlin thus compresses Antigone’s experience of a “categorical reversal,” essentially isolating it in the moment of the kommos when she stands before the chorus and gives voice to her lamentation.7 Is he seeking to capture, in the sublimity of this moment, something of the instantaneity of the coupling and separation that defines the overall movement of the play? What we have in this astounding passage, however, is essentially the turning and “going down” of the protagonist as they follow time. The god is present “in the figure of death” as Antigone begins her descent, in lamentation, and even doubt. This moment, as it happens, coincides with what could be taken as a cathartic expression on the part of the chorus (“Now I am carried beyond all bounds./ My tears will not be checked./ I see Antigone depart/to the chamber where all men sleep” [lines 801-804]).8 This turn, this following down, is of the most extreme severity, but presumably to be understood as obeying a rhythmic order (again, as indicated by Hölderlin’s opening words in the first sections of each set of remarks regarding the “calculable law” governing the depiction of human faculties and the logic of their succession in tragic experience). And the broader law Hölderlin articulates at this point in his description of Antigone’s experience may be understood as defining (in advance of the summary statements of Section 3 I have quoted) the general form of this turning—in short, Hölderlin’s account of the “rhythmic figure” of tragedy, be this ancient or modern, as it involves the protagonist and their “suffering of time” (FH 112).9 Of course, Hölderlin’s words are addressed to the action in Antigone, which Hölderlin takes to be the more archaic of Sophocles’s works. But it is striking that Hölderlin introduces at this point a consideration of the difference in modes of representation proper to each period, noting that he has altered the text in such a manner as to bring forth the Greek experience for the modern audience in a more intelligible, compelling, or “conclusive” manner (“beweissbar”). He may even be suggesting that he has sought to serve the original Greek text itself. It is a highly paradoxical endeavour, in any case, inasmuch as Hölderlin is seeking to render a profoundly divergent form of experience, in its difference from the modern, in terms that are properly modern (not more familiar for the modern, but more fitting in a destinal sense—

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and in this respect serving modern thought and experience; they are not more familiar, because this more fitting language is what the moderns must learn for a “free use of the proper”). The opening paragraphs of the next section (Section 3) will concentrate on the epochal divergence in play, and thus the extremity and difficulty of the task of translation undertaken. I will return to this point in discussing Hölderlin’s understanding of the linguistic character of the tragic event presented. I would simply underscore at this point that Hölderlin is clearly attending to the meaning of this event for the modern audience. And there is every reason to assume that he is considering its meaning in the context of both contemporary historical developments (particularly in France) and the philosophical ones he knew intimately (having contributed to their development in the close proximity of friends such as Hegel and Schelling). Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has suggested in rigorous and compelling terms that Hölderlin’s severe account of “categorical reversal” is drafted with an eye to the unifying drive of Idealism, and that the tragic experience described entails a thought of human finitude that radicalizes Kant (“the Moses of our nation”). Hölderlin would thus be pursuing in his tragic thinking a “caesura of the speculative,” and catharsis would have to be considered accordingly.10 For Hölderlin, as we have seen, the tragic event has a transcendental, “speculative” character in that it involves a scission and self-conception at the level of spirit that is infinite. (With respect to Oedipus,: “das Ungeheure [. . .] dadurch sich begreift, dass das grenzenlose Eineswerden durch grenzenloses Scheiden sich reiniget” [FH 107/736]; and with respect to “Antigone”: “das die unendliche Begeisterung unendlich, das heisst in Gegensätzen, im Bewusstsein, welches das Bewusstsein aufhebt, heilig sichscheidend, sich fast” [FH 113/787]). It defines the transcendental conditions of human experience, giving the fundamental definition of human finitude. Heidegger himself noted in Hölderlin’s thought such a turn from the speculative drive in its contemporary manifestations. He fully acknowledged the severity and radical character of Hölderlin’s description of an event wherein “nothing remains but the conditions of time or of space,” the profound interruption and going down involved (though “forcing down” might be more appropriate). But he was unable to confront the suffering evoked in Hölderlin’s understanding of the hero’s (here, the heroine’s) experience of this scission and “their firmest staying in the face of changing time, this heroic hermit-life” in anything but a profoundly sublimated form, as I noted in my reading of his 1942 lectures on “The Ister.” Again, Heidegger appears to locate the effect of catharsis in precisely this sublimation of the tragic figure. But he will not give sustained attention to what Hölderlin evokes of a modern destiny

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“under a more real Zeus” and to the distinct linguistic usage required for its proper saying (however much one might have expected this from him). Here are Hölderlin’s words: For us, existing under the more real Zeus who not only stays between this earth and the ferocious world of the dead, but who also forces the eternally antihuman course of nature on its way to another world more decidedly down onto earth, and since this greatly changes the essential and patriotic representations, and since our poetry must be patriotic so that its themes are selected according to our world-view and their representations patriotic, for us, then, the Greek representations change. (FH 113/788]

A proper consideration of what Hölderlin evokes here demands a far more extensive consideration of his late thinking and poetry than is appropriate in this context. But it is clear that we cannot begin to approach the question of what the “healing” or purging effect of catharsis might mean for a modern existence (how catharsis, for example, might be understood not only as a purifying separation in the sense of an interruption of the speculative drive, but also as contributing to an assumption of the scission involved) without considering how this effect is brought about in and through an historically defined structure of representation. Before approaching this last question, let me reiterate that the singular, “real” experience of this tragic figure must be grasped within the context of the entire course of this separation they suffer, which unfolds through the play as a whole.11 The presentation of this “purifying” separation, as we have seen, involves the entire (interrupted) dialectic of representations, wherein the sequence of representations is brought into a properly tragic configuration following a tragic “law” that joins “living meaning” with the calculable dimension of human experience in its rhythmic coherence. The hero’s tragic experience, “under the influence of the element” (FH 101/730), takes a rhythmic form in itself, to be sure, however brutal the turn. And the sublimity of this figure (as in the case of Antigone whose “human spirit and heroic virtue,” in their “beauty” require the “superlative”) may well contribute in a significant way to the cathartic effect.12 It may well be essential to our capacity to bear the brutality of the events—thus “sublimating,” we might say. But this rhythmic figure contributes to the general catharsis brought by the action of the play only inasmuch as it is brought within the balanced configuration achieved by the counter-rhythmic interruption of the “pure word.” The succession of representations are brought to manifest the

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“living meaning” they embody or carry when their sequence is countered by the “pure word” that is brought in the intervention of Tiresias. As so offset, the sequence of representations comes to appear in what Hölderlin will go on to term in his “Remarks on Antigone” a “factual” or “factical” word: faktische Wort (FH 114/788—I will employ “factical,” though Pfau adopts “factual,” which is perfectly appropriate). Hölderlin introduces this term in the third section of the “Remarks on Antigone” after his restatement of his understanding of the Darstellung of the tragic action. (The term does not appear in the earlier “Remarks on Oedipus”; it thus presents itself in this respect as a development in his thinking.) Defining this “factical word,” he writes of it as something “which, being more a relation than something that is stated explicitly, moves by destiny from the beginning to the end; in the specific course of events, in the grouping of characters against one another, and in the mode of reason which is formed in the terrible weariness of tragic time” (FH 114/788). The representations (Vorstellungen) to which Hölderlin referred in his formal account of the construction of the tragic action in the first section of the “Remarks on Oedipus” are effectively subsumed in this dimension of the tragic logos as it appears in the full unfolding (which includes the “folding” of the representation upon itself that occurs with the caesura) of the tragic Darstellung. What is meant by “factical”? Is it to be understood simply in contrast to what Hölderlin names “pure” in that word introduced into the action by Tiresias? Since the factical appears to refer essentially to the order of human experience, the oppositional definition seems pertinent; “factical” would define the human over against the divine. Hölderlin’s first employment of the term in this section of the “Remarks on Antigone” also points in this direction. The tragic action as presented in the Greek manner “concludes in a necessarily factical manner in the sense that the word turns more mediately factical by taking hold of the sensuous body; following our time and mode of representation [Vorstellungsart], more immediate by taking hold of the more spiritual body. The Greek tragic word is deadly-factical, for the body which it seizes truly kills” (FH 113/787). This fatal issue is comparably “factical” in the modern or “Hesperian” form; there is again a word that brings death. But it is more immediate, as we have seen, in that it “takes hold of the more spiritual body.” So, whether it appears in the Greek or Hesperian forms, the factical word defines the tragic experience by the manner in which it seizes or strikes the human body. That said, does it not, in this very “seizure,” manifest the “presence of the god in the figure of death”? In this way, it must be thought as properly of the scission between the divine and the human that is the object of the presentation

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in the tragic action (and would be what Heidegger would term a “saying” of this scission). The factical and the pure are indissociable constituents of what I have called the “tragic logos.” (It is for this reason that my preference goes to the term “factical,” because we must not confuse the “facticity” of this word, with all its dialectical import in the context of the tragic agonistics, with the order of “fact” in the normally accepted sense of this term.) Let me add an additional word on the term “pure,” which may bring us back to the question of the cathartic effect of the tragic presentation. The pure word, as we have seen, issues from an extra-human order, namely, from the realm of that order of natural power that seizes or wrenches humankind—reisst (a word, once again, that seizes Heidegger himself)—in the tragic event. It might well be argued that Tiresias’s word is as much factical as it is pure, since it is effectively provoked by Oedipus and thereby shapes the course of the tragic action. It thus belongs to the dialectic of the action (“speech against speech” . . .).13 But, for Hölderlin, its effect is “pure” with respect to the overall order of the action, for with its arrival beginning and end “can no longer rhyme.” It is clear that there is temporal disjunction for each of the tragic heroes who suffer the reversal in time. Again, the character’s experience reflects the general one. But overall, the time presented in the tragedy cannot be referred to a probable or logical ordering following cause and effect, and the pure word must be seen as “governing” (by its interruption and protective weighting) the general movement of the play and the relation of beginning and end. As far as catharsis is concerned, the tragic event can only give satisfaction, as formally presented in the tragedy, in its balance of weighting, its equipoise. Could Hölderlin have seen in such a satisfaction something comparable to the cathartic effect described by Aristotle, as stressed in the formalist interpretation (where a satisfaction with respect to an astounding but still rationally coherent outcome contributes to a redressing of affective equilibrium) or even the formal interpretation (involving rhythmic schemata) I offered in the preceding section? Possibly. However, we must take full account of the divergence in the orders of experience involved. The ground of catharsis, in Hölderlin’s account, is something profoundly of the time of the action; something that grips the world of the presented event (defining its spatio-temporal order). It is something the characters suffer, to be sure, and the turning (metabole) they experience is indeed awesome (as in Aristotle, where reason is taken to the limits of a rational construction of being in the world). But the “tremendous,” in Hölderlin’s account, is still of a different ontico-ontological order from what is addressed by Aristotle. The fundamental ground of any catharsis known by the spectator or

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auditor is their relation to the presentation of this scission of spirit that occurs for the world that suffers its event.14 With his account of a catharsis at the societal or world level, Hölderlin apparently returns to the ritual origins of tragedy, origins of which Aristotle was, of course, quite aware, even as he turned to a more medical construction of the cathartic effect. At the same time, the language, in Hölderlin’s account, even in its reference to the divine (“which is nothing but time”), is distinctly modern. The “purifying separation” occurs at the level of spirit, as conceived in the philosophy of his time. How, precisely, Hölderlin could have understood the equipoise achieved in the formal articulation and configuration of this event as offering some healing or sublimating effect for the audience (auditor, reader, or even observer) is not fully clear. Is this balance seen to touch, in the spectator, a possible “cohering of the more autonomous parts of the various faculties,” which Hölderlin calls “rhythm, in the higher sense”? We would have, in this case, an adoption and enhancement of the experience of the beautiful as described by Kant, where a harmony of the faculties of sensibility and understanding is produced by a particular formal disposition. Does Hölderlin’s evocation of this “higher rhythm” indicate thereby a fidelity to the aesthetic tradition (Kantian, first of all, but ultimately linking back to Aristotle)? The conclusion is intriguing, but still not quite satisfying inasmuch as it does not suffice with respect to Hölderlin’s concern with the historial conditions of the tragic Darstellung. In this respect, we must perhaps attend further to the conditions of the formal balance Hölderlin evokes, namely, the fact that it is achieved when the caesura interrupts the sequence of representations in such a way as to bring to appearance the “representation itself.” I cite the relevant passage again: Thereby, in the rhythmic sequence of the representations [Vorstellungen] wherein the transport presents itself [sich darstellt], there becomes necessary what in poetic metre is called caesura, the pure word, the counter-rhythmic rupture; namely in order to meet the onrushing change of representations at its highest point in such a manner that very soon there does not appear the change of representation but the representation itself. Thereby the sequence of the calculation and the rhythm are divided and, as two halves, refer to one another in such a manner that they appear of equal weight. (FH 102/730)

One can only marvel at the strangely modern character of this statement, and I believe one does well to entertain precisely its modernity. Let us underscore once

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more that Hölderlin has understood the tragic presentation as a linguistic event. A “pure word” interrupts the course of relations brought to articulation in what appears as a ‘factical” word (in Antigone, the action turns, for Hölderlin, on an “autonomous word”), and our immediate relation to the action unfolding in this factical word is thereby suspended or somehow sublated. We achieve a certain transcendence with respect to the action which allows us to relate to the play’s overall balance, and hence experience the aesthetic effect. But where representation appears as representation, it remarks and points beyond itself. The tragic logos becomes sign, thereby indicating, allegorically, what the play actually presents (darstellt) or says, which is the tragic separation. It indicates in the same movement the distinctive historial character of this very mode of representation. Let me repeat this challenging argument. The appearance of representation as representation detaches the reader/observer from the dramatic action, and points toward what is truly occurring in that action, the event of separation (which exceeds any direct representation). From this perspective, the caesura, which is given to us essentially as a formal device, might be understood as actually marking something of the fundamental occurrence of the tragedy.15 But where representation appears as such, there is also the indication of its distinctive character for its time. We know that Hölderlin undertook the task of translating Sophocles partially in order to work toward the meaning of a proper form of representation for his epoch and people, urging that it would not suffice for the moderns to “imitate” the ancients, all the while stressing the necessity of learning from them. Could he have understood the disclosure of the form of representation that occurs in the tragic presentation, this particular form of the work’s linguistic “createdness” (to recall Heidegger’s description of a distinctive feature of the work of art), as potentially conditioning the audience’s capacity for grasping and assuming what is presented there? Schelling understood tragic catharsis as helping its (Greek) spectator to “bear the contradictions of its tragedy.” Could Hölderlin have envisioned the production of a comparable form of “rational comfort” in the manner in which tragedy aids the spectator in assuming the task of finitude presented? The meaning of such an appearance for the Greek audience is stated at the end of the “Remarks on Antigone”: Sophocles is right. It is this the destiny of his age and the form of his fatherland. One may indeed idealize, e.g., choose the most opportune moment, yet the patriotic modes of representation, at least as regards the subordination, must

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not be changed by the poet who depicts the world on a reduced scale. For us, such a form is relevant precisely because the infinite, like the spirit of the states and of the world, cannot be grasped other than from an askew perspective. The patriotic forms of our poets, where there are such, are still to be preferred, for such do not merely exist in order to comprehend the spirit of the age but in order to grasp and feel it once it has been understood and learned. (FH 115-116/790)

Sophocles was achieving the “form” of his “fatherland” in his depiction of the world in a reduced scale. And this act may have allowed the Greek “to comprehend the spirit of the age.” For us, in any case, the distinct character of the presentation, the “askew perspective,” is critical; we cannot grasp the spirit of the states and of the world without understanding the form of representation proper to our time. We will not portray these fittingly without such an understanding, and we will not concretely grasp what is presented without it. We may also presume that, for Hölderlin, we moderns will not attain such a capacity without a firm grasp of the difference in our manner of representation from that of the Greeks. We will not become modern without attention to the “firm letter” and the modes of representation suitable to a time whose destiny diverges so profoundly from that of the ancients. Moreover, we must use this divergence.16 Where these modern forms are comprehended and deployed, however, another relation to this destiny is possible. Let me cite again the lines we have just read that conclude the essay: The patriotic forms of our poets, where there are such, are still to be preferred, for such do not merely exist in order to comprehend the spirit of the age but in order to grasp and feel it [my emphasis] once it has been understood and learned. (FH 116/790)

As for tragedy, the mode among these forms that is concerned with death, it is essential to acknowledge, as Hölderlin insists, that the very meaning of a phrase such as “the god is present in the figure of death” shifts profoundly from the ancient to the modern period. Can there be catharsis, in any traditional sense, if the language in which this presence is conveyed (“more mediately factual in taking hold of the sensuous body” in Greek presentation, “more immediate by taking hold of the more spiritual body” in our time and mode of representation) does not strike its audience as “conclusive”?17 To develop in depth the ground of the divergence between the Greek and modern forms of representation, it is necessary to enter into the chiasmic historical structure Hölderlin proposes in his letter to his friend Casimir Ulrich Böhlendorff (December 4, 1801) and related materials.18 I do not believe it is necessary to return to the intricacies and obscurities of this complicated

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structure at this point. But I do think it is vital to underscore that it is difficult to approach the full meaning of a term such as “catharsis” without considering how the presence of the god is given as “intelligible or appropriate living form” and without grasping the character of the word or the sign in which this presence is embodied. Even if the cathartic effect for the observer or listener is grounded in a form of satisfaction relating to a formal balance achieved in the presentation of the action (and possibly supplemented by the sublime stature of the suffering hero), the mode of representation in which this balance is embodied will be significant. In failing to attend to this in our relation to a text such as that of Sophocles, we fail to translate (in the full sense of the term), and we risk thereby mistaking things in a Greek manner. Heidegger seems to fall into this error to some degree, and I believe we might use his own terms as a needed corrective; in other words, we must think the work of the play and the proper effect of catharsis from the event whereby language comes to language as such.19 The task of a translation that is “serious” with respect to the requirements of its time is one that brings the text to speak for its audience in a fitting manner, while giving itself as so fitting. It must point to the modern historial fate if it is to be transformative (and thereby “patriotic”). The question of form thus becomes a question of a proper language. Tragedy, to conclude, brings us to confront suffering of the most extreme form (once again, a separation that comes in a form of death), but also to find poise before the experience involved. For the modern audience, in Hölderlin’s understanding, it affords the possibility of thinking/suffering a kind of destinal pain to which we are normally oblivious. Where the language is more conclusive, this pain will be more defining and more disclosive of the meaning conveyed in the tragic logos. Let us recall again the words Hölderlin wrote in a draft for “Mnemosyne”: A sign we are, without interpretation. Without pain we are and have nearly Lost the language in the foreign.

So yes, from this basis we might say that Hölderlin gives us a “formalist” approach to catharsis. But he understands this effect at a level that diverges significantly from what the tradition has drawn from Aristotle. His thought of catharsis points toward the possibility (or a least the necessity) of gaining access to our language and the sense of our modern destiny—a destiny, as conveyed in tragedy, “not as impressive” as that of the Greeks, who expiate in flames, “but more profound.”

In the Guise of a Conclusion “I want you to get together. . . .” In the opening chapter of this volume, I pointed to rhythm as the ground of any “form of life” and, ultimately, any form of community. I was broaching, in this way, the question of rhythm and Mitsein as it presents itself in the existential analytic of the 1920s. In the subsequent chapter, I suggested that at the heart of the “turn” in Heidegger’s thinking that begins in the course of the mid-thirties with the advent of the thought of Ereignis, we find an account of a folding back (here is Hõlderlin’s river) whose own structure, in art, is rhythmically articulated. This folding, as we see in Heidegger’s subsequent meditations on language, governs his developing thought of usage: his later “pragmatics” and his attempt to pose the question of relation in general as it involves human being. Again, we find an appeal to rhythm that reaches even into Heidegger’s latest account of relation (written as Ver-hältniss). At each step in this reading, we encounter references to a thought of mortality, though they grow increasingly brief and enigmatic. (The meditation on Antigone represents something of an exception in this regard.) But Heidegger consistently maintains that the human relation to death is fundamental for the relational structure he sees to think. It is even something like the last word in his approach to the essence of language and the fraught topic of the relation between Being and human being. Here again, his words remain rather allusive. On the topic of Mitsein, this indirection was present from the start. Heidegger does not fail to acknowledge, in Being and Time, that the relation he names Mitsein is constitutive for the human Dasein. But its place in the argument, while analytically consistent, remains little developed. My reading of this topic in Heidegger: Thought and Historicity, presented initially in Strasbourg in 1979, and guiding my contribution to a thought of community and a “retrait du politique” in that context, had to proceed by a kind of textual weaving. It was ultimately predicated on the argument that the relation from which the Dasein opens originally onto its own death is a relation that has been shared. In “the voice of the friend,” I suggested, there has been something like a communication

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of mortality. It is only on this basis that the other Dasein can assume the position of the voice of conscience for the individual Dasein. The originary relation to which I am referring is something communicable. Heidegger will point to such a communication, a communication of difference, in the long discussion of language (and poetic language) that forms part of the introduction to Hoelderlin’s poetry in the lectures of 1934/5. The immediate context is apparently drawn from a reflection on the experience of soldiers at the front in the First World War, though his words have a troublingly timely character. But his point is noteworthy in light of the little we have on the question of Mitsein. The condition of a “community” or “comradeship” in soldiers, he says, is their shared experience of the nearness of death, and what this experience, in “free sacrifice,” gives as each individual is “exposed in advance to the nearness and distance of the essence of things”—the “same nothingness” that is the opening of a common world. “Community,” he writes, “is through each individual’s being bound in advance to something that binds and determines every individual in exceeding them. Something must be manifest [Solches muss offenbar sein] that is neither the individual taken alone nor community as such” (HH 66/72). To the extent that this “thing” is manifest, it must communicate itself in the relation it enables; it must, once again, be communicable. In Heidegger’s late reflections on language, he will emphasize that a thought of language must proceed from the way to language given by language. If the approach to the essence of language is by way of the language of essence, and if this essence involves the use of the human (for its opening and for its articulation, its “setting underway”), then language necessarily “says” something of the rhythm that takes form in its setting underway when this essence is drawn forth. It must say, or remark, the use of the human, which is bodily, as we have seen, and conditioned by human mortality. In its rhythms, language must convey something of the sharing (the originary articulation) that makes possible community. How broadly can such a community be conceived? We may assume, following Heidegger, that the rhythms of each “region” of language usage are distinct. Heidegger did not really address in a consequent way the question of the diversity of human languages, even if he did not hesitate to make special claims for the German language in relation to the Greek. But we may also assume, once again, that the opening of rhythm at the origin of each language is itself communicable and, in some measure, translatable. We must think here what Benjamin named a Relationsbegriff—a “concept of relation.” Translation, for Benjamin, was such a concept.

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For Heidegger, there is no “true” or higher language to which such a concept of relation points. Heidegger’s thought of finitude (as it bears on Ereignis itself) forbids this. But there is a structure of articulation to be thought in the relays of language, and their rhythms. For the task of thinking a “common ground” in this moment of critical ecological and ethical need (Not), which means thinking Mitsein in the attending existential danger, I want to argue that we must push farther into the relational structure examined here—we must push farther, as I asserted at the outset of this study, into an analysis that captures the rhythms of usage and what they articulate, including our bodily participation in the many currents of the earth (global and regional) and our mortal ex-posure to the other. Such a project does not offer the answer to the possibility of coming together in the face of extreme need; but it may help make this possibility manifest. Showing that there is such a possibility is already to relay the call from which this study began: I want you to get together. . . . put your hands together. . . . I would add that we must not assume that Heidegger’s thought can suffice for this broader ambition. As I evoke the motif of Mitsein, I am drawn back to the contributions of Emmanuel Levinas, whose own meditation on ethical usage (admittedly, I push here with respect to the words that form the focus of his essay, “The Temptation of Temptation”: “n’aseh venishma”—“we will do and we will hear”) could prove invaluable for the tasks at hand. Even for the relation to the earth to which I gesture, his thought of an opening acquiescence is vital. I have asked in this study why we would continue to read Heidegger, and I have implicitly suggested that it is in part for a thinking assumption of his legacy. In pointing to that legacy as it appears even in a site such as the text of Levinas, I mean to efface anything that resembles a conclusion for the questions broached in this book.

Notes The Rhythms of Usage 1 My formulation must remain provisional, here, and will only find its proper articulation as I approach Heidegger’s writings on language. The question of rhythm, I want to suggest, presents a challenge related to the one presented by that of language itself. Let me note that while I am struck by the ambition of a project such as that of Henri Meschonnic, my own phenomenological inclinations, together with my habits as a reader, lead me in a very different direction. Ultimately, in reaching for the fundamental level to which I refer, I strive for a concreteness that offers itself only at the limits of the philosophical concept or what is normally thought of as theory. Those limits, as regards rhythm, manifest themselves in fascinating ways when we engage the question of human finitude. I would have to acknowledge that any work I might produce on a topic like this one could never have the “overviewing” quality of a standard treatise. And a more immanent analysis with a general ambition would require a bit more than a lifetime. 2 This became clear to me in my work on Francis Bacon (in Infant Figures [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000], pp. 11–46). See Deleuze’s very important twovolume study, Logique de la sensation (Paris: Editions de la différence, 1984). 3 Evidence of this growing attention to the topic of rhythm may be found in the journal Rhuthmos, available online. 4 In the title essay of The Claim of Language: A Case for the Humanities, I seek to explain why I use the word “theory” cautiously. To return to the point I made in my first footnote to this introduction: I am essentially wary of the way contemporary theory constructs the object or field of its inquiries. Rhythm cannot be an object of study for Heidegger. In approaching his construction of it as a “phenomenon” (still using the language of Being and Time) we must first attend to the way he works with the notion in his writing. It only emerges in this evolving textual work, and “it” is no object; the term ultimately helps Heidegger think difference, and relation itself. 5 Let me note that I am far from being the first to take up this topic in Heidegger. David Farrell Krell, recognizing the contributions made by figures such as Beda Allemann, F.G. and Ernst Jünger, and Emil Staiger, brought the question back to the fore for contemporary continental philosophy in his Lunar Voices (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 55–82. David Nowell Smith has carried this work forward strongly in Sounding/Silence: Martin Heidegger and the Limits of

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Notes Poetics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013); see in particular pages 46–59. Nowell Smith’s book is distinguished by its manner of demonstrating a complex reality behind Heidegger’s dismissals of traditional poetics and the importance of the analytic tools fashioned in this tradition for understanding the rhythmic determination of poetic saying. There is some divergence, but also strong affinity in our respective efforts to engage this problematic; I should add that I have quite enjoyed the dialogue that has taken shape in our published work. “In the rubric ‘the setting-into-work of truth,’ in which it remains undecided but decidable who does the setting or in what way it occurs, there is concealed the relation of Being and human being, a relation that is unsuitably conceived even in this version—a distressing difficulty, which has been clear to me since Being and Time and has since been expressed in a variety of versions” (BW, 73/211). I use the word “return” here, because I will be drawing significantly from analyses presented in Language and Relation: . . . that there is language (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). “We are still far from pondering the essence of action (das Wesen des Handelns) decisively enough” (BW, 217). I address the essay in my discussion of Derrida’s account of “jointure” in Specters of Marx in “Acts of Engagement,” in The Claim of Language: A Case for the Humanities (Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 2004), 31–7. The essay, originally published in Unterwegs zur Sprache (Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 12), and dating back to 1950, is collected in the Poetry, Language, Thought, ed. Albert Hofstadter. See p. 208 for Heidegger’s appeal to the notion of usage in this context. Let me acknowledge that when I turned to this topic in Language and Relation: . . . that there is language (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996) in an effort to address Heidegger’s use of Hölderlin’s famous phrase regarding a “free use of the proper,” I was actually taken aback at its importance in Heidegger’s later thought. In fact, this importance only became fully clear to me in the course of an experience of reading that showed me once again to what degree Heidegger must be read “literally”—by which I mean with attention to every textual feature. Heidegger’s essay “The Essence of Language” brought home to me how Heidegger invites us to think through language (again, in a quite literal sense—meaning not by attention to signified content, but through a relay of terms and what they offer, both semantically and etymologically). “The Way to Language” then revealed to me, through striking grammatical ambiguities, the degree to which Heidegger was straining, syntactically, to think and articulate with “der Brauch” something that resisted conceptual presentation. Little attention, as I have noted, has been paid to this notion in the secondary literature. In my early work, I could see awareness of it in Lyotard, Derrida, and Lacan, though scant development (as concerns Heidegger’s text). Foucault’s

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attention to the problematic of the “care of the self ” in his late work offered an important avenue that was eventually taken over by Giorgio Agamben. (See, for example, The Use of Bodies, trans. Adam Kotsko [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015]). Unfortunately, Agamben’s grasp of the meaning of usage in Heidegger’s later work is rather weak. In fact, one can glimpse in Agamben's inability to conceive the relation between use as it is deployed in the existential analytic and Heidegger’s later understanding of it as a “fundamental ontological dimension” (p. 46) a significant problem in his grasp of that later thought as a whole. For a separate critique of Agamben’s treatment of Heidegger on the topic of usage and a consideration of the meaning of the shortcomings in his reading of Heidegger for his larger project, see Gert-jan van der Heiden’s “On Use and Care: A Debate between Agamben and Heidegger,” The International Journal of Philosophy and Theology, Vol. 81, No. 3, 2020, 310–27). I do note a gathering awareness of the problematic in the literature. See, for an early example, Michiko Tsushima, “Weighing the Fold—Heidegger’s Thought on Language,” collected in The Space of Vacillation: The Experience of Language in Beckett, Blanchot and Heidegger (Peter Lang, 2003). “Vacillation,” here, connects with Schwingung, a key term for my treatment of Heidegger’s thought of rhythm. See “The Echo of the Subject,” trans. Barbara Harlow in Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed. Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 139–207; “L’écho du sujet” in Le sujet de la philosophie: Typographies 1 (Paris: Flammarion, 1975), 217–303. Evelyne Dupont-Roc and Jean Lallot, eds., La poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1980). “La notion de ‘rhythme’ dans son expression linguistique,” in Problèmes de linguistique générale, 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 327–35. “The Legibility of the Political,” in Heidegger: Thought and Historicity, expanded edition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 230–49.

Chapter 1 1 Some will recognize that the piece I heard on the radio (for the first time) was “Rose Rouge” by St Germain. 2 I noted in my introduction that my “primal experience” regarding rhythm probably involved music. (As a child, I was a drummer; it was my father who announced to me one afternoon, after what must have been tortuous years for him, that I “had it.” “What?,” I asked. “Rhythm.” Exchanges like this one, as goes without saying, can be marking.) I will take up briefly the notion of the “fugue” in the coming discussion of “The Origin of the Work of Art,” and I am quite aware of the importance of the notion of melos in Heidegger’s thought of language. However, I have not given

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Notes special focus to the theme of music in Heidegger for the reason that I do not want the reference to music to become somehow paradigmatic for the notion of rhythm I am pursuing. I am treating it as a modality of art (among others, but with everything this implies, following Heidegger’s argument in “The Origin of the Work of Art”). That said, I am open to a musicologist’s argument that it perhaps deserves a preeminent place with respect to this topic. In all candor, I must say that I am not yet satisfied with my grasp of what Heidegger might have named the “essence” of music. In an earlier version of this essay, published in German (trans. Elias Torra) and considerably modified here, I paired the driving experience from which I started with another that occurred during the events of 9/11/2001 and in the immediate aftermath. There, I briefly recounted the experience of driving in a time out of joint (I will be returning below to the Heideggerian motif of “jointure”), entertaining briefly, in this way, the question of the rhythms of trauma. A proper rhythmanalysis must also attain this dimension of the phenomenon. I thank Barbara Naumann for inviting me to contribute that early version of my essay to her edited volume, Rhythmus: Spuren eines Wechselspiels in Künsten und Wissenschaften (Wurzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005), 109–122. The project of fundamental ontology, of course, will be interrupted, for reasons that far exceed the context of this discussion, but which are not unrelated to the way the question of usage comes to displace key references to a notion of production and “world-formation.” The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 208; Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1978), 268. The phrase I employ here is derived from Heidegger’s discussion in paragraph 41 of Being and Time. I enter into some detail with this assertion, but it harbors a vital point, namely Heidegger’s claim that the “signifying” structure of the Dasein’s being in the world has a unified character wherein the Dasein’s relation to its own “for-the-sake-of-which” is bound to (or better, perhaps, “secures”) the “relevance” to which it frees beings (BT 185-6/192). This synthesis will be indicated by Heidegger’s reference to the schema of the “if then” relation in paragraph 69 of Being and Time, very shortly before the section devoted to the schemata of originary temporality. Heidegger indicates, in this conjunction of uses of the term “schema,” that the articulation of the meaning of something as something finds its defining ground in the articulation of temporality. Meaning, in this way, is always articulated (in understanding—the term employed is Gliederung), and is ultimately animated by the sway that governs the Dasein’s existence. The interpretation (Auslegung) at work in understanding “lays out” this articulation. And we may therefore see that the legein at work in Rede (discourse), has, in fact, a

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rhythmic ground deriving from the schematism of primordial temporality. We do not need to wait for Heidegger’s later thought on language to see the pertinence of rhythm for poetic usage (as Heidegger noted in paragraph 34 of Being and Time). Heidegger’s development of the earthly dimension of this usage in his Hölderlin lectures, and then in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” will open new possibilities for thinking the upswelling wave at work in the poem; it will offer a new way of thinking the articulation at work in the poiesis of the artwork. But there is a link to be explored in the rhythmic construction of temporality at work in the existential analytic (in the “schematism” it describes) and the thought of articulation (Fügung) brought to the notion of the artwork’s Gestalt. In exploring this link, it is important, also, to attend to Heidegger’s return to the question of temporality in his reading of Hölderlin’s “The Ister,” in 1942. For this reason, I hesitate before claims that we need to move “beyond” Heidegger’s earlier accounts of temporality to grasp the rhythmic ground of poetry. Or to put this in a more nuanced way (because there is indeed a very significant development in Heidegger’s thinking as he moves beyond the existential analytic, and it is vital to take into consideration what happens as he addresses the question of the “work-being” of the art work and then the “way” of language): it is essential to hold in mind Heidegger’s early engagement with Kant’s thought of schematism— particularly with respect to the tracing and articulating involved—as we entertain what happens in his turn to art (in his emerging thought of Ereignis) via Hölderlin. As almost always with Heidegger, there is advance in the ways of his thinking; the term “beyond” is thereby justified. But there is always also a returning and a re-marking in the rhythms of this movement. 7 This reference to Kant is brought home shortly after the paragraph on Schwingung cited above when Heidegger defines the world as something that “is there.” “The ‘there is’ which is this not-a-being is itself not being, but is the self-temporalizing temporality. And what the latter, as ecstatic unity temporalizes is the unity of its horizon, the world. [. . .] We see then the peculiar productivity intrinsic to temporality, in the sense that the product is precisely a peculiar nothing, the world. Kant, for the first time, came upon this primordial productivity of the “subject” in his doctrine of the transcendental productive imagination” (The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 210). 8 “Leucippus and his associate Democritus say that the full and the empty are the elements, calling the one being and the other non-being—the full and solid being being, the empty non-being (whence they say being no more is than non-being, because the solid no more is than the empty); and they make these the material causes of things. And as those who make the underlying substance one generate all other things by its modifications, supposing the rare and the dense to be the sources of the modifications, in the same way these philosophers say the differences

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in the elements are the causes of all other qualities. These differences, they say, are three—shape and order and position. For they say that the real is differentiated only by ‘rhythm’ [rhusmos] and ‘inter-contact’ [diathige] and ‘turning’ [trope]; and of these rhythm is shape [or form: schema], inter-contact is order [taxis], and turning is position [thesis]; for A differs from N in shape, AN from NA in order, from in position. The question of movement—whence or how it is to belong to things—these thinkers, like the others, lazily neglected.” (The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 697.) In the essay by Benveniste to which I will turn shortly, the link between rhuthmos (or rhusmos, the Ionian form) and schema (which Benveniste normally translates with “forme”) is constantly underscored. Summarizing after citing the passage from Aristotle I have just quoted, Benveniste notes that “There is no variation, no ambiguity in the meaning that Democritus assigns to rhuthmos, which is always “form,” understanding thereby the distinctive form, the characteristic arrangement of parts in a whole. Once this point is established, there is no problem in confirming this in the totality of ancient examples.” He goes on to note that one will also find the term employed to describe the forms or dispositions of human character or humors (citing Anachreon, Theognis, and Theocritus). Rhuthmos, understood as “form” is aptly translated by schema; the latter term, however, tends to be applied to fixed forms, whereas rhuthmos serves to designate a form assumed by something in movement, something fluid or changeable. 9 Heidegger would have been aware of the debate on this topic at least from Werner Jäger’s Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, from 1933. Allow me to cite a very rich paragraph in which the topic is addressed in Jäger’s text. Commenting on the famous poetic sentence by Archilochus (as translated in the English edition of Paideia: “Neither exult openly in victory, nor lie at home lamenting in defeat; but take pleasure in what is pleasant, yield not overmuch to troubles, and understand the rhythm which holds mankind in its bonds”), Jäger writes the following: “The ideal on which this proud independence is built is not the purely practical counsel of moderation as the safest course in daily existence. It is the universal conception that there is a ‘rhythm’ in all human life. That is the foundation on which Archilochus bases his exhortation to self-control and his warning to avoid excessive joy or grief—he means, to avoid feeling excessive emotion for eternals, for the happiness or unhappiness which comes from destiny. This sense of ‘rhythm’ is probably an early trace of the conception which first appears in Ionian natural philosophy and historical thinking—the idea that there is an objective law of averages in the natural course of existence. Herodotus expressly speaks of the ‘cycle of human affairs,’ thinking chiefly of the rise and fall of human fortunes. We must not be misled by his words into thinking that Archilochus’ rhythm is a flux—although the modern idea of rhythm is something which flows,

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and some derive the word itself from reo, ‘to flow.’ The history of the word warns us against that interpretation. Its application to the movement of music and the dance (from which we derive our word) was secondary, and something concealed the primary meaning. We must first inquire as to what the Greeks took to be the essence of dancing and music; and that is clearly shown by the primary meaning, which appears in Archilocus’ lines. If rhythm ‘holds’ mankind—I translated it ‘holds in bonds’—it cannot be a flux. We must rather think of Prometheus in Aeschylus’ tragedy, who is chained immovably in iron fetters; he says, ‘I am bound here in this ‘rhythm’’; and of Xerxes, of whom Aeschylus says that he chained the current of the Hellespont, and ‘changed to another form (“rhythm”)’ the watery way across it: that is, he transformed the waterway into a bridge, and bound the current in strong bonds. Rhythm then is that which imposes bonds on movement and confines the flux of things: just as it is in Archilochus. Democritus too speaks in the true old sense of the rhythm of the atoms, by which he means not their movement but their pattern—or as Aristotle perfectly translates it, their schema. That is the interpretation which the ancient commentators correctly give for Aeschylus’ words. Obviously when the Greeks speak of the rhythm of a building or a statue, it is not a metaphor transferred from musical language; and the original conception which lies beneath the Greek discovery of rhythm in music and dancing is not flow, but pause, the steady limitation of movement.” Let me observe, in preparation for a later note, that “pause” might give a French commentator “arrêt,” and thus a glimpse of what Maurice Blanchot grasped in rhythm. 10 Martin Heidegger and Eugen Fink, Heraklit (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1970), 91–2. In this discussion, Heidegger takes up the work of Thrasybullos Georgiades, following references to Jäger’s citations of Archilochus and Eschylus (Prometheus). (Here, to repeat, to be “rhythmed” is to be held.) 11 For the history of the term rhuthmos or rhusmos (the Ionian form), see the essay by Émile Benveniste to which I referred in note 4 earlier: “La notion de ‘rhythme’ dans son expression linguistique” (in Problèmes de linguistique générale, 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 327–35. I return again to this important reference in the appendix to this volume in my treatment of Aristotle’s Poetics. Let me simply note here that Benveniste’s inspiring analysis focuses primarily on pre-Socratic usage, while drawing forth the manner in which our modern understanding of rhythm is shaped by Plato and Aristotle. I should add here that the derivation of rhusmos from rein is questionable, as Benveniste demonstrates persuasively, only at the semantic level, not the etymological one. Here is his argument: “No morphological difficulty is presented in linking rhusmos and reo, by way of a derivation we will have to consider in detail. But the semantic link that is established between “rhythm” and “flowing” through the intermediary of “the regular movement of waves” shows itself

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Notes to be impossible at the first examination. It suffices to observe that reo and all its nominal derivatives [. . .] indicate exclusively a notion of flowing, whereas the sea does not “flow.” Never is rein said of the sea, and rhuthmos is never employed for the movement of waves. Entirely different terms depict this movement” (p. 328). Of course, with that semantic issue in mind, it is intriguing to see what Hölderlin will claim to observe in the rivers to which he devotes hymns. Here, Michel Serres’ haughty (and quite problematic) objection to Benveniste is potentially of interest— though again, Serres sees Benveniste (and others including Montaigne) as sadly inexperienced in nautical and fluvial matters, when Benveniste is in fact focusing on Greek linguistic usage (see Michel Serres, La naissance de la physique [Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1977], 190). For an informed critical response to Serres, see Pascal Michon, “Michel Serres and the Rhuthmoi of the Flow,” in Rhuthmos, December 22, 2019, https://rhuthmos​.eu​/spip​.php​?article2486. When Benveniste returns to the morphological question (after having established that (1) rhusmos never signifies rhythm, from its origin up until the attic period; (2) that it is never applied to the regular movement of waves; (3) that its constant meaning is “distinctive form, proportionate figure, disposition,” he notes that what requires our attention in the derivation of rhuthmos from reo is the formation, (th) mos, which indicates a particular modality of a form of accomplished action as it is given to observation: orchesis, for example, is the fact of dancing, orchethmos is a particular dance seen in its unfolding. (Chresis, for another example, is consultation with an oracle; chresmos is the answer obtained from the god—the example is rather intriguing in the context of the motif of usage, to which I will turn later in this volume.) Here, Benveniste points to an important distinction between the notion of “form” that is indicated by rhusmos, and that signified by schema “Schema, in relation to echo (“I hold (myself)” (compare the relation in Latin: habitus: habeo) is defined as a form that is “fixed,” realized, posed as an object.” Rhuthmos, on the other hand, will be used to designate a form assumed by something in movement—something flowing or changeable. Rein, Benveniste continues, is the essential predicate for describing nature in the Ionian philosophy from the time of Heraclitus forward. “Democritus thought that, as every being is produced by atoms, only their different arrangements produce the difference between forms and objects. One can therefore understand that rhusmos, meaning literally “a particular manner of flowing,” should be the most apt term for describing “dispositions” or “configurations” without fixity or natural necessity, and resulting from an arrangement always subject to change” (333). This last point throws a very interesting light on Heidegger’s manner of taking over the reference to form and disposition in rhusmos while retaining the reference to a flow or streaming. We will see in his reading of Hölderlin of 1934/1935, the singular importance Heidegger gives to Hölderlin’s relation to Heraclitus.

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This reference does not suffice for understanding the work he does with the notion of rhythm, but it helps account for the way he dissociates rhythm from a notion of flowing, even while insistently evoking a wave-like movement (even in “Be-wëgung”). There is a reading of Being and Time to be undertaken that follows Heidegger’s consistent recourse to the defining traits of the self-showing of the phenomenon, and thus his early deployment of the series of terms and constructions that includes zeichnen, ziehen, zeigen, and Züge. I use the word “line” itself with an eye to the topic of rhythm on the basis of work I did with Jonathan Appel (and “Company Appel”) in the early 1990s on the lines traced in dance, be this by the solitary dancer, or by interactions that articulate distinctive lines of force. I hope to return to this work, with further reflections on driving and other sports. Nietzsche, vol. II, 135–41. An important reference to Archilochus will appear in a very late text by Heidegger on Rimbaud, to which I return at the end of my penultimate chapter. The famous early fragment he comments upon reads as follows, in his translation: “Learn to know, however, that a form of relation [Ver-hältnis] holds men.” For commentary on this fragment, see Pierre Sauvanet, Le rhythme grec: d’Héraclite à Aristote (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999), 11–14. Sauvanet has a peculiarly limited reading of Heidegger; while pretending to familiarity with the text, he claims that Heidegger fails to think together the notions of rhythmic flow and rhythmic structure, available in the Greek use of “rhusmos.” This remarkably inadequate reading is then accompanied with a spurious attack on Heidegger’s deconstructive readers (or scholars he takes as such) who supposedly indulge in “confusionism” by finding the lacking thought of synthesis in Heidegger’s manner of writing. Again, Sauvanet seems to have no clue about the rhythms of Heidegger’s argumentation or even his use of language (see pp. 59–61), and little grasp of what was at stake in deconstruction (at least as launched by Jacques Derrida). We find a meditation on Archilochus in Vincent Barletta’s Rhythm: Form and Disposition (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 2020), 1–4 and passim. Barletta draws generously from extant commentary on the Greek sources for thinking rhythm (e.g., Benveniste, Serres, Sauvanet) and modern reflection on the term since the nineteenth century, but, remarkably, has almost nothing to say about Heidegger and less about Hölderlin, even while using the title “Rivers Stopped or Flowing Backward” for one of his chapters. For Blanchot, it seems that the following suffices: “Rhythm strips us of our subjectivity (a very literal disaster). . . .” (146); what “rhythm” actually means for Blanchot goes without discussion, as does the meaning of “disaster.”

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Chapter 2 1 I qualify this statement as I have in light of the way Heidegger subsequently misrepresents the meaning of his reference to the “inner truth and greatness” of the National Socialist movement in the 1952 edition of An Introduction to Metaphysics. I take up this fraught topic in the Postface to the second edition of Heidegger: Thought and Historicity. It is simply very difficult to read Heidegger’s relation to the fundamental concept of National Socialism he evokes in the mid-1930s as informed by a grasp of its link to the unfolding of the modern historial order of Technik and its meaning for Western humanity. There is no question that Heidegger would come to understand the Nazi movement in these terms, and the apparent critique of the Nazi regime in The Introduction, together with his standing preoccupation with the institutionalized agenda of scientific research in this period and his understanding of the metaphysical character of modern scientific inquiry (addressed firmly in 1929 in “What Is Metaphysics?”), might suggest a developing understanding along the lines he suggests in 1952. It is for this reason that I have phrased the matter somewhat ambiguously. As it happens, the infamous phrase concerning the “inner truth” of the National Socialist movement was first employed in the Hölderlin lectures, and mistaken by Heidegger’s brother (by reason of the abbreviation employed in the manuscript) as a reference to “national science.” The fact that Hermann Heidegger could have made such a mistake is noteworthy with respect to the preoccupations to which I have referred. Julia Ireland is responsible for uncovering this error. See “Naming Physis and the ‘Inner Truth’ of National Socialism: A New Archival Discovery,” Research in Phenomenology, Vol. 44, No. 3, 2014, 315–46. 2 “Because Hölderlin plays this concealed and difficult role of being the poet of poets as poet of the Germans, he has not yet become a force in the history of our people. Because he is not yet such a force, he must become such. In this process, we must keep in mind “politics” in the highest and authentic sense, so much so that whoever accomplishes something here has no need to talk about the “political” (HH 195/214). 3 Jacques Derrida drew attention to this point quite powerfully in his magnificent essay “The Double Session,” in Dissemination. For an incisive critical discussion of this topic and relations between Mallarmé, Heidegger, and Derrida on the question of the “trait” and the text, see Rodolphe Gasché’s essay, “Joining the Text,” collected in Of Minimal Things (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 221–41. 4 Shortly after this statement, he will also insist that any reading of poetry such as Hölderlin’s requires a struggle, which is first of all a struggle with ourselves (“insofar as in the everydayness of Dasein we are expelled from the poetry, cast blind, lame, and deaf upon the shore, and neither see nor hear nor sense the surge of the waves

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in the sea”). We must work to grasp “the overarching resonance that oscillates in the word” (HH 24/22)—a work that is existential, but also philological, and not without a strict attention to the letter. Heidegger’s image is telling for the question of rhythm, of course, but it is also difficult for me to avoid comparing it with the scene from which Blanchot’s relation to literature begins. I think, of course, of Thomas facing the sea. 5 This point has informed and guided my work on Heidegger from the start, defining both my relation to his understanding of the event of art and his politics. (Here, I was in profound accord in the early 1980s with the spirit of Lacoue-Labarthe’s famous phrase, “transcendence ends in politics”—a phrase which, in French, points to a notion of “finite transcendence.”) For this reason, I was quite surprised to see David Nowell Smith suggest, in Sounding/Silence (p. 22), that my first account of the figure in the “The Origin of the Work of Art” pointed to a clear-cut (thereby problematic) distinction between the formal and the ontological dimensions of the artwork (a motif to which Nowell Smith returns at several points [cf. p. 48]). My argument in the passage was meant to suggest only that Heidegger was proceeding to another level of analysis once he thought the tracing of the “rift-design” as the event of truth. But one cannot separate the “formal” from the “ontological” in Heidegger’s thinking (bearing in mind, of course, Heidegger’s reservations about the notion of form). My point may not have been articulated clearly enough in the passage from which Nowell Smith cited in Heidegger: Thought and Historicity (though it was stated explicitly when I addressed the uncanny effect of the event of truth in the work’s “composure” on that page [p. 146]), but one of the core features of my reading of Heidegger’s essay was offered in a phrasing that should have made the point clear: “the work is a figure of nothing, other than itself” (truth being no thing that is). Our divergence on this point may actually derive from our respective views of what Heidegger designates with his notion of the ontico-ontological difference, but this is a point that requires some extensive discussion. What I believe should be stressed here is that the work of art, in its material instantiation and configuration, shows difference—it manifests that truth has happened, and happens, here. What Heidegger will celebrate in his opening pages of the artwork essay in referring to the “craft of thought” is the task of thinking this material inscription and its ontological or “aletheic” import. The thought of usage I am pursuing in this volume will help underscore that while Heidegger is constantly moving back in his thinking, he does not leave the order of what I might term (with an eye to the problematic of rhythm) material articulation. Truth needs the hand and the voice. For a sensitive and deeply researched study on the last topic as concerns Heidegger and his legacy, see Michael Eng’s The Scene of the Voice: Thinking Language after Affect (Albany: State University of New York, 2023).

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6 In references to “beyng,” I follow the usage of McNeill and Ireland in their translation of the 1934/5 lectures. Elsewhere, I capitalize in referring to das Sein (“Being”). In this choice, I am conforming to established usage for the benefit of the general reader (while recognizing that McNeill and Ireland, excellent translators, are working on firm grounds). 7 With respect to an earthly determination of beyng, and thereby human attunement, it is striking that Heidegger will state, in the paragraph following the one from which I have quoted, that “a godless time is not nothing, but an uprising of the Earth” (HH, 73/80). 8 In concentrating on the rhythmic determination of the Schwingungsgefüge that Heidegger describes in approaching “Germania,” I will leave aside a considerable part of Heidegger’s analysis and give only brief consideration to the poem itself. But let me cite here the opening lines that evoke the poet’s renunciation: Not those, the blessed ones who once appeared, Divine images in the land of old, Those, indeed, I may call no longer, yet if You waters of the homeland! now with you The heart’s love has plaint, what else does it want, The holy mourning one? For full of expectation lies The land, as in sultry days Bowed down, a heaven casts today You longing ones! its shadows full of intimation round about us. Full of promises it is, and seems Threatening to me also, yet I want to stay by it. (HH 14/10) 9 A reference to a “schwingende Fortriss” appears in the passage I now cite that perhaps suggests to the translators their intriguing translation of “Stundengang” (literally, “hourly course”) as “rhythm.” I cite here again the striking passage from the Metaphysical Foundations that deploys the full sway of Schwingung: “Temporality is the free oscillation [Schwingung] of the whole of primordial temporality. Time reaches [erschwingt] and contracts itself [verschwingt sich-selbst]. (And only because of momentum [Schwung] is there throw [Wurf], facticity, thrownness; and only because of oscillation [Schwingung] is there projection [Entwurf].)” 10 ”Messianic” may be too easily applied in this extraordinary passage that goes on to describe the divine grounds of temporality from the basis of lines from Hölderlin’s hymn, “Conciliator,” which describe a “passing over” of the God: Thus everything heavenly passes quickly. Yet not in vain. And even knowing the measure, with protective hand, a God Touches the dwellings of humans. (cited at HH 101/111)

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One might wonder what a reading of this passage that more openly recalls the reference to Pessach might render for a thought of what Heidegger calls in this section an “authentic time.” 11 I deeply regret I never had the chance to present this passage to my friends in the Carnegie Natural History Museum in Pittsburgh—I would have used it to approach that thorny (and strangely unaddressed) question of what one might mean with the phrase “natural history.” Let me cite here the paragraph of commentary Heidegger offers on Hölderlin’s reading of Pindar: “The river violently creates paths and limits [Bahn und Grenze] on the originally pathless Earth. (Since the flight of the gods, the Earth has been pathless.) This perspective already illuminates to what extent mourning and plaint are a mourning precisely with the rivers of the Earth of the homeland: because, through the arrival of the new gods, the entire historical, earthly Dasein of the Germans is to be pointed on a new path and created a new determinacy and orientation. The river spirit is not an opposition of water to land; rather, the waters in their accompanying plaint have a longing for the paths of a land that has become pathless. They tear the entire land toward an encounter with the awaited gods” (HH 84/93). The tracing of paths by the centaurs (an incipient drawing of bounds that will be remarked in what Heidegger names “Aufriss” in “The Origin of the Work of Art”) will be taken up again by Heidegger in What Is Called Thinking? when Heidegger invites his auditors to consider Hölderlin’s grasp of the usage named by Parmenides in the fragment under consideration in this late section of Heidegger’s lecture “Needful: the saying also thinking too: being: to be” (WHD 182/186). Here, usage (der Brauch) is thought as the condition of human dwelling. But again, the reference to the Hölderlin’s commentary on Pindar’s fragment in the lectures of 1934/5 remains rapid and surely enigmatic for most who come upon it. In this instance, Heidegger gives particular emphasis to the motif of incision with reference to the centaur’s spear (kentron) (WHD 190/193). 12 A comparison between remarks in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1927) devoted to a passage from Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (BP 171173/244-247) and the discussion of the shoes of the peasant woman in “The Origin of the Work of Art” (BW 159-160/19) will help to clarify, partially, what I suggest here. As it happens, the comparison is virtually called for by the curious fact that both passages, in which an artistic disclosure is involved, carry the assertion that what is revealed in them is not a subjective projection—on the part of Rilke in the first case, Heidegger in the second. Whether or not the echo is inadvertent, it is strong. The passage from the Notebooks cited by Heidegger recounts the protagonist’s anguished reaction in discovering the site of a past dwelling (the absence of this past home, marked by sordid traces of the physical effluvium of life on an adjoining wall,

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Notes now a memory uncannily “at home” in him). Heidegger introduces it by noting that “poetry, creative literature, is nothing but the elementary emergence into words, the becoming-uncovered, of existence as being in the world”—this, after noting that we know ourselves primarily via intraworldly things that are suffused with world, and a rare reference to childhood in which he observes that “even what we encounter only fragmentarily, even what is only primitively understood in a Dasein, the child’s world, is, as intraworldly, laden, charged as it were, with world.” Then, after citing more than a page of text, Heidegger conveys that he is struck by “how elemental a way the world, being-in-the-world—Rilke calls it life—leaps toward us from things.” It is indeed a remarkable moment in Heidegger’s lecture series. However, when read retrospectively (with the later development of the concept of earth in “The Origin of the Work of Art” in mind), it is strikingly apparent that Heidegger’s statement is not sufficiently prepared by the long, preceding exposition. What of these “things” from which “life” emerges—the stained walls that still evoke the “noondays and the illnesses, and the expirings and the smoke of years and the sweat that breaks out . . .”? Are they simply vehicles for “signs” of the life “deposited” in them? Or is there a more elemental involvement at work here, something perhaps even possibly related to what Heidegger hesitated before in discussing the presence of the object for the primitive Dasein in Being and Time? Is there an “elemental,” earthly dimension of existence that Heidegger is failing to reach in his analytic, something to which Rilke accedes only in flight? (“Well, I’ve been talking all along about this wall. You’ll say that I stood in front of it for a long time; but I’ll take an oath that I began to run as soon as I recognized the wall. For that’s what’s terrible, that I recognized it. I recognize all of it here, and that’s why I goes right into me; it’s at home in me.”) One might also reverse this observation and note that what Heidegger recognizes in Rilke’s grasp of “the philosophical content of the concept of life, which Dilthey had already surmised” quite exceeds what he evokes of the life of the peasant woman in the later essay. There is a notable continuity, but a crucial dimension of human finitude that is simply missing in Heidegger’s account of a bodily existence. The peasant woman’s shoes are laden with affect tied to the challenges of facing natural forces over which the woman has no mastery, and thus ex-posure to the menace of death. She knows, in the very equipment (its “reliability” [Verlässlichkeit]), what the earth gives and takes. Let me offer a conceptual experiment here: Could Heidegger have developed this “elemental” knowledge to a point comparable to what he glimpses in the passage from Rilke by moving through the entire equipmental context of the woman’s existence (considering the knowledge borne in each piece of equipment belonging to her pragmatic context)? Could such an account of the woman’s earthly knowledge, however exhaustive, extend to what Rilke’s narrator glimpses (and recalls) of an uncanny real?

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The brief comparison to which I have pointed here would suggest that Heidegger’s account of the human experience of earthly finitude is in need of considerable development. Heidegger’s account of what he will call the “abyss” of the earth would appear to require far more attention along these lines. Later in this essay, in a footnote, I will cite remarks by Heidegger made about the messiness of human birth (as opposed to that of a demigod) in his reading of “The Rhein.” But I believe that there may be more than “messiness” at stake here. Following Rilke’s experience of the uncanny (in the passage cited), it would seem that we need to go farther in thinking human participation in what Heidegger terms the “self-refusal” of the earth. A path for exploring this passage (toward the “elemental”) is opened by Maurice Blanchot in his reflection on the image in The Space of Literature (and then pursued throughout this work): “The image speaks to us, and seems to speak intimately to us of ourselves. But the term ‘intimately’ does not suffice. Let us say rather that the image intimately designates the level where personal intimacy is destroyed and that it indicates in this moment the menacing proximity of a vague and empty outside, the deep, the sordid basis upon which it continues to affirm things in their disappearance. Thus it speaks to us, a propos of each thing, of less than this thing, but of us. And, speaking of us, it speaks to us of less than us, of that less than nothing that subsists when there is nothing.” See “The Two Versions of the Imaginary,” in The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 254. 13 It is quite striking how so many of the key components of Heidegger’s reading go without significant development. Every lecturer will be painfully cognizant of the inevitably partial character of the university lecture (whatever efforts are made). But it remains striking to me that so many essential problems go unaddressed or insufficiently developed in what is nevertheless a very searching lecture series. Heidegger will tell us quite explicitly that he is not saying a great deal. To which I can only respond, in this context, that there is an abyss here too. How do we assess the grounds of these silences, that can be entirely contingent (by reason of personal circumstances and an accumulation of interfering duties—Heidegger famously complained of this), philosophical (Heidegger does not have everything resolved, or avoids certain implications), or political? On this latter point, we face deep complexities that I will not attempt to return to here. But I would note that the kind of reading developed by Adam Knowles (Heidegger’s Fascist Affinities: A Politics of Silence [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019)) remains rather shortsighted and quite impoverished from a philosophical point of view (there is not even a consequent consideration of Heidegger’s own thought of silence). Suspicion regarding Heidegger’s politics is certainly called for; but a reading that allows itself to be overwhelmed by this topic can only lead into its own form of silencing. That

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is certainly a sufficient end for many when it comes to Heidegger’s politics. But it is not a philosophical one that actually entertains the reach of Heidegger’s thought, be this in the realm of the political or any other area. I ask again: Why should we read Heidegger today, even on the topic of the political? Let me underscore that I consider the answer to be linked, first, to his legacy. For contemporary thought, this legacy involves all that Heidegger enabled in that extraordinary movement that is loosely and quite insufficiently referred to as “post-structuralism.” Recent work prompts me to point in particular to Blanchot, who undertook a virtual re-writing of Heidegger in certain texts (a procedure only partially recognized even by distinguished commentators). The gesture is patent in The Step Not Beyond, as I suggest in Last Steps: Maurice Blanchot’s Exilic Writing (New York: Fordham U. Press, 2013). We will not grasp the contributions of Blanchot at the level they deserve without an understanding of this act of thought. And these contributions should, in turn, be brought back to bear on Heidegger. 14 It is noteworthy that Heidegger will give little attention to “biography” while underscoring quite powerfully the place of the mother in Hölderlin’s poetic experience. Unfortunately, the attention to gender and familial structure is not terribly revealing in this analysis. Heidegger’s mention and citation of the poet’s letters to his mother in the first section on “Germania” is intriguing, but his treatment of the topic seems rather typed in the analysis of “The Rhein,” where the earth and the heavenly occupy standard positions. As Avital Ronell reminds me, the overall silence on the topic of the mother in Heidegger is broken in Lecture V of What Is Called Thinking? (p. 48) when Heidegger addresses the question of how the mother teaches her boy the meaning of obedience. Having recalled his core topic (what calls for thinking?) Heidegger describes how the mother—if she is a proper mother—must find a path other than lecturing or scolding: “Her success will be more lasting if the less she scolds him; it will be easier, the more directly she can get him to listen—not just condescend to listen, but listen in such a way that he can no longer stop wanting to do it. And why? Because his ears have been opened and he now can hear what is in accord with his nature.” Without exploring this intriguing scene further at this point, let us call this a good motherly usage. 15 The essay is included in Elucidations of Holderlin’s Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller (Amherst: Humanity Books, 2000), 176; it appears in Vol. 4 of the Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1981), 154. 16 These words are drawn from Heidegger’s essay, “On the Essence and Concept of Physis in Aristotle’s Physics B, I,” in the course of a discussion of Antiphon and his understanding of rhusmos. See Pathmarks, trans. Thomas Sheehan, ed. William McNeill (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 204.

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17 I push with the word “logic,” all the while recalling that a dear friend and respected colleague at Binghamton U. once objected violently to my use of the term with reference to Heidegger’s thought (but I persist). It is striking, in any case, that when Hölderlin employs the word in his “Remarks on Antigone,” he juxtaposes it with the term “rhythm”: “Just as philosophy always treats only one faculty of the soul, such that the presentation of this one faculty constitutes a whole and that the mere cohering of the parts of this one faculty is called logic, so poetry treats the various faculties of man, such that the presentation of these various faculties constitutes a whole and that the cohering of the more autonomous parts of the various faculties can be called rhythm, in the higher sense, or the calculable law.” (FH 109/783) Let me add that if I will be allowed the phrase “tragic logic,” then there should be no objection to my reference to a topology. But I am hesitant as to whether its genesis can be suitably described in mathematical terms (without claiming real competence in this question). For this issue, we might seek the help of an artist and thinker such as Agnes Denes, whose work I had the pleasure of engaging in the 2020 science colloquium hosted by the European Graduate School. 18 “With strophe VIII, the poet’s thinking scales one of the most towering and solitary peaks of Western thinking, and at the same time of beying. [. . .] What Hölderlin thinks poetically in strophe VIII is the supreme question-worthiness within the essence of beyng as it opened itself up within our history, though more frequently and continually it was buried” (HH 244/269). 19 “In lovely blueness . . .” is cited by Heidegger early in his lecture series as he sketches what he means by “the essence of poetry.” The poem is vital to Heidegger for lines such as “Full of merit, yet poetically/Humans dwell upon this Earth” (lines 32,33), and then the concluding line that follows the reference to the “eye to many”: “Life is death, and death is also a life” (line 99). In my first treatment of Heidegger’s readings of Hölderlin (in Heidegger: Thought and Historicity), I foregrounded this late poem, and spent some time with the curious simile offered with respect to Oedipus: “The sufferings of Oedipus endured seem thus: as when/A poor man laments that he lacks something.” The fact that Oedipus will be described in the subsequent line as “poor” (“poor stranger in Greece!”) makes this statement all the more abyssal. But, it is the “lack” named in these verses that is now particularly striking to me. Given Heidegger’s recollection of the reference to Oedipus from this poem in his commentary on the lack suffered by the half-god in “The Rhein,” we might wonder whether Heidegger had in mind this other reference to the lack. It is also worth noting here the importance of rivers in this poem: “Like streams the end of something tears me away,/That stretches out like Asia. Naturally/Oedipus has this too.” It remains unclear to me how Heidegger can accommodate this unsetting identification with Oedipus in his broader meditation on the river hymns. I take Heidegger’s insistent attention to this poem as a sign that we must never conclude

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21

22

23

Notes too rapidly with respect to his very conservative appropriation of Hölderlin’s poetry. It marks something like a consistently unraveling thread in his readings. I recall again Heidegger’s presentation of this notion in Being and Time: the primordial disclosure of Befindlichkeit presents the Dasein with the fact that it is, and has to be (BT 130-132/134-135). Heidegger rehearses the structure of “thrown projection” at HH 159-160/174-176 in the context of his discussion of the “suffering” of destiny, immediately after noting (a point to which I will return) that we cannot think destiny without “an experience of death, and the knowing of death” (HH 158/173). I use the rather neutral term “instability” because it is not clear to me that the use of the human (which becomes an increasingly important theme in Heidegger’s thinking) must take a tragic turn. I believe there is a thought of comedy to be pursued here as well. But for the Heidegger of 1934/5, reading Hölderlin, the use in question can only be thought tragically, by reason, it would seem, of the violence of beyng itself. I do not pause over this motif in this essay, though I do want to note that it is of central importance in the lecture series. Heidegger is at considerable pains to establish that the saying of poetry is singular for the necessity it confronts of saying “what can scarcely be unveiled.” Not only is poetry a use of language without object; what it says essentially withholds itself from disclosure. In the light of “The Origin of the Work of Art” (with its meditation on the earth), this claim will become more clear. In the current context, it is explained with reference to the way the lines of force of the conflict that is at the origin strive to overcome and conceal one another. Clearly, the gathering, “turning-in” of the structure of intimacy shapes the rhythm of the Gestalt Heidegger describes. And does rhythm itself not thereby have something veiled about it—something that makes it ultimately irreducible to technical measure (in art at least)? I will be returning to this notion in my reading of “The Origin of the Work of Art” as I approach the rhythmic character of the structure of “folding” Heidegger describes. The statement that language is a “river” does not undermine the claim that the river is of the earth, and not only for the reason that language itself is in its essence earthly. To put this difficult notion too abruptly, the river is river only by language, whose own “riverly” and poietic character is drawn out in poetry and the thought that unfolds there. In and from poetry, river and language can be thought as the same, and a figural transposition becomes available (or imposes itself—as we see in Hölderlin) in a manner that does not follow the metaphysical construction of metaphor. Again, there is a figure here, in a tropological sense, but the turn of such figuration cannot be grasped from a standard construction of metaphor. Jacques Derrida approached this question powerfully in “The Retrait of Metaphor,” attending to Heidegger’s work with the motif of the “house” of Being. I take up

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Derrida’s important argument on metaphor in Language and Relation: . . . that there is language (see pages 63 and 283–4). The statement I want to underscore in the body of my text is made succinctly by Heidegger when he refers to Hölderlin’s reference in “As on a holiday . . .” to nature as a “teacher”: “All teaching is grounded in a relational being drawn into the origin. Everything is only within the conflict of powers [here, earth and the divine] itself, within the intimacy of nature. The latter, however, is herself counter-turning as the poetic saying, not simply within this saying, for the saying arises from the “storms” (line 39) that “drift between heaven and Earth and among the peoples” (line 42). The saying of the poetizing arises from beyng, yet only so as to preserve such beying within itself and thus “bear witness to both” (line 49), to the gods and to humans, as whose midst there prevails in its essence what has purely sprung forth: the mystery, intimacy” (HH 232/256). 24 Rereading de Man’s essay on Heidegger and Hölderlin (collected in Blindness and Insight, ed. Wlad Godzich [Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 1971]) is an unsettling experience today. In the peremptory tone with which de Man mobilizes poorly informed assumptions, one hears an attitude that would have a profoundly limiting effect, as it was propagated, on North American deconstructive thinking and practice. This would be no more than regrettable were it not for the losses that ensued with respect to the reception of continental thought (even that of Derrida). Of course, the casual attitude toward Heidegger manifested in North American deconstruction and those associated with this movement was undoubtedly reinforced by Derrida’s own deconstructive reading, which, despite its complexity, was assumed largely without question, or simply naively, and allowed readers to presume that Heidegger had been contained in metaphysics. But we also find this “containing” tendency in less casual readers. I think here of an astonishing statement by Werner Hamacher, in Two Studies of Friedrich Hölderlin, ed. Peter Fenves and Julia Ng [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020], 40) to the effect that Heidegger does not recognize a form of “Verstellung” in his appeal to a notion of the “Open” (and related terms, including “beyng”) as he brings this to bear in his reading of Hölderlin and the thought of art (this point is forcefully underscored by Peter Fenves in his afterword, pp.168–169, as he brings forward the deconstructive tenor of Hamacher’s work). But the appeal to a notion of Verstellung is in fact already at work in the Hölderlin lectures of 1934/35 and foregrounded dramatically, as we will see, in “The Origin of the Work of Art” (just before Heidegger declares that “truth is untruth”). What Heidegger names a “clearing” or “opening” is described by Hamacher as “unproblematically self-identical” and therefore caught in Idealism and a thought of original synthesis. Hamacher’s text is a relatively early one, but his error is remarkable, given his overall brilliance as a reader. There is a symptom here.

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25 I will return to Hölderlin’s “Remarks” in the appendix to this volume, and will note here simply that Hölderlin attributes to modern tragedy a more “spiritual” suffering than the “deadly factual” one found in ancient tragedy. He points to Oedipus at Colonus to illustrate his meaning (see p. 114 from the Essays on Letters and Theory [Werke und Briefe, 788]), and it is from this reference that we must undoubtedly read the description of the Oedipus with whom the poet identifies in “In lovely blueness . . . ,” the Oedipus for whom “life is death, and death is a form of life.” I do not want to rush to interpret these words and their potential meaning for Hölderlin’s understanding of the more “spiritual” dimension of modern human destiny. The questions here are immense, for Hölderlin appears to be thinking through, after Kant, the structure of modern human finitude, particularly in its temporal determination, turning aside, in this way, from German Idealism (Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe quite aptly described this as a “caesura of the speculative”—a reading that Heidegger himself appeared to advance). But the suffering Hölderlin describes with the figure of Oedipus would seem to lead us further into a reflection on something I have tried to name, after Blanchot, the “passions of finitude,” for the link of finitude and mortality implied here engages a thought of dying that is profoundly disruptive for Heidegger’s own account of human mortality. Here we touch on “the death that is the impossibility of dying.” 26 I use the word “cleanly” to bring forth a sense of sharpness or clarity—a precisely defined articulation (as in a “clean cut”). This notion is vital for Heidegger’s understanding of the rhythmic articulation of beyng. But as this term might concern the question of human finitude, consider Heidegger’s remarks regarding the birth of the demigod and that of the human infant: the former distinguished by its purity: “The powers of origin, Earth—Thunderer (birth—ray of light) are those of the pure origin: precisely for this reason they can least of all ever be separated out individually—a view one might have, were one to think Earth in isolation and gods in isolation. But the truth lies in the opposite direction: The purer these powers, the more essential, and that means, the more necessary, is their reciprocal relation. This pure origin is, after all, the origin of the demigods, in whose beying the arc spanning their provenance and the future does not stay fastened halfway or remain a mixture of the two. Certainly in the realm of habitual humankind too we still see a pale reflection of the necessary reciprocal relation between birth and ray of light. There too mere birth remains dim and obdurate and a mere seething, without the illuminating look and the law-giving of that which accords with the essence and that which opposes the essence. Likewise, the ray of light remains fragile and empty, fluttering and playful without the pressing force of birth that in turn closes off. The more pure the origin, the more pure and unconditional is the conflict with the powers of the origin. The originary character of the conflict is all the more genuine the more such conflict conceals itself ” (HH 221/244). The least one can say is that

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this leaves little space for a searching thought of human infancy (following Lyotard, Blanchot, or Hölderlin himself). Human finitude, in any case, clearly remains a messy business in the “habitual domain” to which Heidegger refers; somehow he was not informed that there is no such thing as a “habitual” birth, or even a habitual human infancy. 27 I recall that the opposition between Greek and German, with respect to the respective relations between the “proper” and the “foreign” is structured chiasmically by Hölderlin. This historial construction is presented in the letter to Böhlendorff of December 4, 1801, as well as in the “Remarks.” Here are Hölderlin’s words from his letter: “It sounds paradoxical. Yet I argue it once again and leave it for your examination and use: in the progress of education the truly national will become the ever less attractive. Hence the Greeks are less master of the sacred pathos, because to them it was inborn, whereas they excel in their talent for presentation, beginning with Homer, because this exceptional man was sufficiently sensitive to conquer the Western Junonian sobriety for his Apollonian empire and thus to veritably appropriate what is foreign.” Hölderlin continues in the following paragraph, emphasizing why this will not provide the ground for a simple imitation of the Greeks: “With us it is the reverse. Hence it is also so dangerous to deduce the rules of art for oneself exclusively from Greek excellence. I have labored long over this and know by now that, with the exception of what must be the highest for the Greeks and for us—namely, the living relationship and destiny—we must not share anything identical with them” (FH, 149-150/940). 28 Compare here Heidegger’s words on Nietzsche’s engagement with the relation between the Apollonian and the Dionysian in the first volume of Nietzsche (N, 103-104/124 [I cite Vol. 1 of Nietzsche, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), and Nietzsche, Erster Band (Pfullingen: Günter Neske, 1961)]). Here Heidegger links Nietzsche’s thought with Hölderlin, after suggesting that Nietzsche had glimpsed the lineaments of the meaning of this opposition for the Greeks in the research of Jacob Burckhardt. He continues: “Of course, what Nietzsche could not have realized, even though since his youth he knew more clearly than his contemporaries who Hölderlin was, was the fact that Hölderlin had seen and conceived of the opposition in an even more profound and lofty manner.” Heidegger does not clarify the basis of this statement, but then continues with a reference to the letter to Böhlendorff of December 4, 1801. “Here,” he writes, “Hölderlin contrasts “the holy pathos” and “the Occidental Junonian sobriety of representational skill” in the essence of the Greeks. The opposition is not to be understood as an indifferent historical finding. Rather, it becomes manifest to direct meditation on the destiny and determination of the German people. Here we must be satisfied with a mere reference [. . .]. It is enough if we gather from the reference that the variously named conflict of the Dionysian and the Apollonian,

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of holy pathos and sober representation, is a hidden stylistic law of the historical determination of the German people and that one day we must find ourselves ready and able to give it shape.” 29 Here are Hölderlin’s words from the “Remarks” following his account of the way consciousness veers after its ex-posure to the god: “For we have to present the myth everywhere more conclusively. The golden stream of becoming apparently refers to the rays of light which also belong to Zeus to the extent that the time referred to is more calculable through those rays. This, however, it is whenever time is measured in suffering, for then the soul follows, feeling much more with the change of time and thus understanding the plain course of the hours, without the intellect anticipating the future based on the present” (FH, 112/786). We do not find in Heidegger’s commentaries a reflection on this “heroic hermit-life” that Hölderlin understands to be known by Antigone. His reference to the modern German tragic destiny is still more enigmatic: “For this is the tragic to us: that, packed up in any container, we very quietly move away from the realm of the living, [and] not that—consumed in flames—we expiate the flames we could not tame. And indeed! The former moves the innermost soul just as well as the latter. It is not such an impressive, yet a more profound destiny, and a noble soul guides also such a dying [one] with fear and empathy and holds up the spirit amidst wrath” (FH, 150/940). 30 The topic will only be broached in the lectures on “The Ister” in 1942. 31 Early in his presentation of what Hölderlin’s poetry requires of us (the section is entitled, “Working our Way through the Poem as a Struggle with Ourselves”), Heidegger emphasizes the necessity of confronting and dwelling with the poem’s Schwingungsgefüge, and not just treating it as something that can be disregarded once the meaning it supposedly carries, as a vehicle of some kind, is seized from it (as might follow from a traditional understanding of the relation of “spiritual content” and “form”). To the contrary, Heidegger writes: “The more powerfully the poetry comes to power, the more the telling the word prevails in pressing upon us and tearing us away. And when it does so, the poem is no longer a thing lying present before us that can be read and listened to, as it appears initially whenever we regard language as a means of expression and reaching agreement” (HH 24/22-23) He goes on to note that while “everyday things” are worn out in usage, “Hölderlin’s poems become more inexhaustible, greater, stranger from year to year—and can nowhere find definitive classification. They still lack their genuine historical and spiritual space. This space cannot come from without; rather, the poems must create this space for themselves” (HH 24/23). The argument is entirely consistent with what we will read in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” and it is perfectly clear that the Schwingungsgefüge is to be grasped from the language of the poem.

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32 I say this in recollection of Hölderlin’s commentary on Pindar and in something of a playful spirit, since the line I pretend to cite is an emendation of a mis-interpreted abbreviation on the part of Heidegger’s brother. 33 When I speak of “returning,” it is by reason of the fact that I will take up again material addressed in Language and Relation: . . . that there is language in commentary that proceeds at many points almost line by line. The language essays (but then, this is true of a great deal of Heidegger’s work), require nothing less. 34 With a flip in perspective, one might shift this evaluation. “The Origin of the Work of Art” presents an account of what art has been and can be in response to Hegel’s dictum concerning art as “something past.” In the latter respect, it has something almost utopic about it; if the possibility of great art were thought, and if such art were preserved, it would have a transformative effect for its time and place. “Utopic” is evidently a problematic term, given the way this text requires a rethinking of placement, but it may help to convey my point. The essay is quite astonishing if one considers it in relation to the brief concluding words on art of a text such as “The Question Concerning Technology.” The latter essay surveys the grounds of the fundamental condition of modernity (the historial order of Gestell), leaving precious little place for the possibility offered by art, to which it points in its conclusion. “The Origin of the Work of Art” develops that possibility at remarkable length. 35 This occurs in Heidegger’s description of the second predominant interpretation of the thingness of the thing. Noting the limits of the first concept, which proceeds from the Greek notion of the hypokeimenon, Heidegger writes: “Yet even before all reflection, attentive dwelling within the sphere of things already tells us that this thing-concept does not hit upon the thingly element of the thing, its independent and self-contained character. Occasionally, we still have the feeling that violence has long been done to the thingly element of things and that thought has played a part in this violence, for which reason people disavow thought instead of taking pains to make it more thoughtful. But in defining the essence of the thing, what is the use of a feeling, however certain, if thought alone has the right to speak here? Perhaps, however, what we call feeling or mood, here, and in similar instances, is more reasonable—that is, more intelligently perceptive—because more open to Being than all that reason which, having meanwhile become ratio, was interpreted as being rational” (BW 151/9). 36 For a striking instance of this ideological bias, see, for example, Heidegger’s statement, Why I Stay in the Provinces, trans. Thomas Sheehan (New York: Routledge, 2017), 16–18. 37 I referred to this passage earlier in discussing Heidegger’s treatment of the peasant woman’s shoes. The statement on reliability reads as follows: “The equipmental being of the equipment consists indeed in its usefulness. But this usefulness itself

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40 41 42

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Notes rests in the abundance of an essential Being of the equipment. We call it reliability [Verläßlichkeit]. By virtue of this reliability the peasant woman is made privy to the silent call of the earth; by virtue of the reliability of the equipment she is sure of her world. World and earth exist for her, and for those who are with her in her mode of being, only thus—in the equipment. We say “only,” and therewith fall into error; for the reliability of the equipment first gives to the simple world its security and assures to the earth the freedom of its steady thrust” (BW 160/19). “It is not we who presuppose [veraussetzen] the unconcealment of beings; rather, the unconcealment of beings (Being) puts us into such a condition of being [versetzt uns] that in our representation we always remain installed within and in attendance upon [eingesetzt/nachgesetzt] unconcealment” (BW 177/39). For example, we might read “endurance and decline” with reference to Heidegger’s appropriation of Hölderlin’s essay, “Das Werden im Vergehen” and the poem “The Voice of Peoples”; the terms must thereby be understood with reference to what Hölderlin thinks as the “time of peoples” (hence my reference to historial conditions). See Maurice Blanchot, “The Great Refusal,” trans. Susan Hanson, in The Infinite Conversation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 40. I refer to the “occasion” because Heidegger will return to draw again upon the river’s allegorical/poietic function in his 1942 lectures on Hölderlin’s “The Ister.” I cite here the German: “Aber nicht wir setzen die Unverborgenheit des Seienden voraus, sondern die Unverborgenheit des Seienden (das Sein) versetzt uns in ein solches Wesen, dass wir bei unserem Vorstellen immer in die Unverborgenheit einund ihr nachgesetzt bleiben” (GA 39). “In referring to this self-establishing of openness in the open region, thinking touches on a sphere that cannot yet be explicated here. Only this much should be noted, that if the essence of the unconcealment of being belongs in any way to Being itself (see Being and Time, section 44), then Being, by way of its own essence, lets the space of openness (the clearing of the There) happen, and introduces it as a place of the sort in which each being emerges in its own way” (BW 186/49). “One essential way in which truth establishes itself [sich einrichtet] in the beings it has opened up is truth setting itself into work. Another way in which truth occurs [west] is the act that founds a political state. Still another way in which truth comes to shine forth [zum Leuchten kommt] is the nearness of that which is not simply a being, but the being that is most in being. Still another way in which truth grounds itself [sich gründet] is the essential sacrifice. Still another way in which truth becomes [wird] is the thinker’s questioning, which as the thinking of Being, names Being in its question-worthiness” (BW 186-187/49). In the 1934/5 lectures, politics, art, and thought were named as singular sites for the event of truth, and each, in fact, is conceivably understood as a form of

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historical occurrence. It seems feasible that all three could be recognized as forms of “establishment” (Einrichtung). But it is difficult to see how all five sites for the event of truth (which include the presence of a divine being, and an “essential sacrifice” that is presumably on the part of a soldier) involve establishment (Einrichtung) in the manner of a “setting into work.” We did see the topic of the nearness of a divine being in Heidegger’s reference to the statue in the temple-work. But how can “standing” at the front before the enemy in combat be construed as establishment, unless one adopts a highly formal construction of martial struggle? To be sure, martial arts could lend themselves to such a construction, as Yukio Mishima dreamed. Following that path, one might even go on to entertain a ritual form such as bullfighting, however unsavoury this might be for many (of course more than a few artists of Heidegger’s generation were thinking this way). It is noteworthy that Heidegger referred to the singular community among soldiers facing death in combat in his lectures on Hölderlin (HH 66/72-73). He illustrated in this manner an essential form of Mitsein, and we might thereby understand this community as illustrative of a form of the truth of existence. But there was no mention here of a truth-event. Let me merely add here the observation (referring back to the previous footnote) that as Heidegger enumerates the five forms, he employs different verbal constructions that are not very visible in the English translation. 46 “Strife [between world and earth] is not a rift (Riss) as a mere cleft is ripped open; rather, it is the intimacy with which opponents belong to each other. This rift carries the opponents into the provenance of their unity by virtue of their common ground. It is a basic design (Grundriss), an outline sketch (Auf-riss), that draws (zeichnet) the basic features (Grundzüge) of the upsurgence of the clearing of beings. This rift does not let the opponents beak apart; it brings what opposes boundary and measure into their common outline” (BW 188/50). 47 David Nowell Smith does this marvelously in Sounding/Silence (pp. 46–7) when he describes the “temporal frame” of the fugue, emphasizing how the entry of melodic strands in the movement of counterpoint marks an emergence from absence. “It is notable in this regard that the subjects of most of Bach’s fugues took extended upbeats as their starting point, as though to perform its movement from silence toward the cadence that would signal its arrival. And, within the fugue’s broader structure, the subject’s movement from absence into presence, and its recurrence in differing forms, cuts against the forward propulsion of the fugue as a whole, so as to create a highly wrought temporal frame. Without this forward propulsion the counterpoint of these different voices would lose its intricacy; without the counterpoint, the forward propulsion loses its urgency. The movedness of the work, then, demonstrates beings’ entry into appearance to be guided by a specifically fugal rhythm.” He will go on to suggest how the kind of rhythm to which he refers

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here inheres in the “texture of manifestation” of the work’s Gestalt in other forms of art. He exemplifies this point in turning to an analysis of the effect of weight conveyed by the brushstrokes in Cezanne’s portrait of the gardener Vallier, a weight that becomes a formal organizing principle for the painting as a whole which offers Vallier himself as figure. (In a poem written long after, Heidegger will evoke the “standing-within/ Stillness of the figure of the old gardener.”) These are indeed beautiful pages in Nowell Smith’s presentation. 48 Let me refer the reader to section 39 of Heidegger’s Beiträge zur Philosophie, “Das Ereignis” (Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012], 64–6). Here, we find an account of the “fugal” structure of Heidegger’s own thinking endeavor in this book. I refer the reader to the German because of the intense manner in which Heidegger works the registers of Fügungen in his account of the singular path allowed to him in this major work of the later thirties (1936-38). In evoking this Fügung, as a structural articulation, I will tend to refer to “jointure,” or an “adjoining relation.” “Die Fuge” designates a joint or seam (of a ship); fügen is to attach, or join. The verb can also be employed to designate the act of decreeing or ordaining, and in a reflexive form it can suggest a yielding to or conforming. Fug connotes right or order (as in the phrase “mit Fug und Recht”: “with justice,” or “by rights”); Heidegger will give the term significant ontological weight in this respect in “The Anaximander Fragment” when he describes Anaximander’s thought of dikē and adikia and addresses the meaning of the words he takes to mark the proper opening of the fragment: “. . . according to usage.” Once again, Das Gefüge, as we read about it in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” names a differential articulation of defining traits drawn forth in a gathered unity (in figure) in such a way as to draw out the difference at play in them. This articulation of difference is rhythm. As noted earlier, such a thought of rhythm is already at work in the Hölderlin lectures of 1934/5; it is implicit in the notion of a ‘Schwingungsgefüge” and will have been very much in Heidegger’s mind as he emphasized the Heraclitean dimension of Hölderlin’s thinking. One might consider, in this respect, the possible significance of Norbert von Hellingrath’s work on Hölderlin’s translations of Pindar and his suggestions about Hölderlin’s use of “harte Fügungen” for Heidegger’s gathering understanding of rhythm as involving articulation and jointure (see Pindarübertragungen von Hölderlin [Legare Press, 2022]). Heidegger’s references to von Hellingrath are quite generous, but in my recollection he does not refer to von Hellingrath’s study of Hölderlin and Pindar, though it would have been available to him. Kevin McLaughlin offers significant remarks on the importance of von Hellingrath’s notion of harte Fügungen in Philology of Life: Walter Benjamin’s Critical Program (New York: Fordham U. Press, 2023) for Benjamin’s famous

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study, “Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin. These remarks shed an interesting light on the topic of the notable proximity of Heidegger’s and Benjamin’s respective understandings of what Benjamin names the “poetized” of the poem (das Gedichtete)—a topic that I cannot address in detail here, though I will note that there is clearly a thought of rhythm linked to what I am pursuing in this study latent in what Benjamin describes as the “force of mythic elements straining against one another.” For this topic, see page 30 of McLaughlin’s rich volume. 49 We do not need to pause over Heidegger’s appeal to the existential analytic here, but it is noteworthy that this section gives us the strongest statement about human existence in the essay. 50 Blanchot’s remarks on rhythm are brief and highly allusive, but are nonetheless of considerable weight. In the latter part of The Writing of the Disaster, Blanchot introduces the theme with an astute observation regarding the role accorded to it by Leroi-Gourhan, who finds a rhythmic configuration at the ground of writing (and art), thereby inscribing a “rhythmic” drive at the heart of the separation between language and object that Blanchot interrogates. (I take up this motif of a “primordial schematism” in a commentary on Leroi-Gourhan in my essay, “Lascaux and the Question of Origins,” Poiesis, Vol. 5, 2003, 6–19.) He pauses here (or interrupts—he is writing in a fragmentary mode) to consider the etymology of rhusmos as analyzed by Benveniste) before interrupting again to take up Hölderlin. I will cite this fragment: “Let us recall Hölderlin. ‘All is rhythm,’ he supposedly said to Bettina according to a report from Sinclair that she perhaps imagines. How are we to hear this? This is not the cosmic in an already ordered totality for which maintaining a belonging together belongs to rhythm. Rhythm does not follow nature, language, or even ‘art,’ in which it seems to predominate. Rhythm is not the simple alternation of Yes and No, of ‘giving-withdrawing,’ of presence-absence, or of living-dying, producingdestroying. Rhythm, even as it brings forth the multiple whose unity escapes, and even in appearing regulated and imposing itself according to rule, menaces this latter, for it always exceeds it by a reversal that implies that in being in play or at work in measure, it does not thereby measure itself. The enigma of rhythm— dialectical, non-dialectical: no more the one than the other frees itself from it—is the extreme danger. That in speaking we should speak in order to make sense of rhythm and render sensible and signifying the rhythm outside meaning, there is the mystery that traverses us and from which we will not deliver ourselves by revering it as sacred.” For the material I have covered rapidly here, see L’écriture du désastre (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), 171–5 (the English translation is provided by Ann Smock in The Writing of the Disaster [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995]), 111–14).

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51 I have discussed the singular importance of this term for what Heidegger terms the “drama” of Antigone in a brief essay entitled “Antigone’s Friendship” in Infant Figures. 52 “Certainly, according to habitual opinion, we only ever have an intimation of what is to come. What has been, however, also lets itself be intimated. We attain what has been as that which has been, and thus as that which essentially prevails [als das Wesende], only in inner recollection [Erinnerung]. Yet inner recollection proper is an intimating; for genuine inner recollection does not exhaust itself in merely returning to something bygone and remaining there, becoming ossified in such remaining with whatever is bygone. So long as recollection merely gazes at something, it is not yet inner recollection at all. It does not pursue that which turns inward in whatever has been, nor does it take whatever turns inward in its relation to the inner middle from which recollection itself comes” (HHI 29/34). The passage made by Heidegger between the terms “Andenken” and “Erinnern” (to which he attributes “intimation”) is striking, though I will not try to tackle it here. 53 Hölderlin: Werke und Briefe, ed. Friedrich Beissner and Jochen Schmidt, Vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1969), 754. 54 Essays and Letters on Theory, 115. 55 Last Steps: Maurice Blanchot’s Exilic Writing, 160–86. 56 Citing the eighth strophe of “The Rhein” late in his 1942 lectures (“There must, presumably, if to say such/ Is allowed, in the name of the gods/Another partake in feeling/Him they need”), Heidegger continues: “An Other must be, who is other than the gods and in his being other must ‘tolerate unequals.’ This Other is needed to ‘partake in feeling’ in the name of the gods. Partaking in feeling consists in his bearing sun and moon, the heavenly, in mind and distributing this share of the heavenly to humans, and so standing between gods and humans, sharing the holy with them, yet without ever splitting it apart or fragmenting it. Such communicating occurs by this Other pointing toward the holy in naming it, so that in such showing he himself is the sign the heavenly need. For ‘feeling’ and ‘bearing in mind’ belong to humankind” (HHI 155-56/193). 57 Jacques Derrida, Psyché (Paris: Galilée, 1987), 63–94. 58 In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 18–36.

Chapter 3 1 Of course, we witness an alarming hardening in Heidegger’s thought with respect to socio-historical matters in this decade. But we must still acknowledge the degree

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to which the thought of language and time itself were very much in development as Heidegger engaged his thought of Ereignis. Sounding/Silence, 152. I pursue this question of a “double stance” with respect to critical judgment and thought in Last Steps: Maurice Blanchot’s Exilic Writing (New York: Fordham, 2013). See, for example, pp. 1–3. I evoke here both a recovery of Heidegger’s farthest-reaching insights (bringing them to bear on subsequent steps) and a reading back from the basis of what the text discloses in its late advances. Heidegger’s failure to bring forward what he advanced with respect to the thought of Mitsein in his formulation of das Volk (a topic I took up in Heidegger: Thought and Historicity) is an example of what I mean in the first case. Reading the later thought of releasement back into the existential analytic (I suggested something like this in Infant Figures with respect to the topic of infancy) is an example of the second. Reiner Schürmann, in his major contributions to the interpretation of Heidegger, taught us a great deal with respect to that second path. Martin Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1990); Basic Writings, 340. In portions of this chapter, I am relying upon detailed analyses undertaken in Language and Relation: . . . that there is language. The reader who seeks a closer and fuller analysis of Heidegger’s language essays and his understanding of Handlung will find these in the three long chapters devoted to Heidegger at the opening of the volume. Let me note also that an earlier version of a portion of this chapter, which also draws on the analyses to which I have referred, and which has been considerably revised and expanded here, has been published in a chapter of the Cambridge Companion Series, Heidegger and Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024). The last clause in this sentence is omitted in the English translation offered by Peter Hertz. As we will see, 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 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 “Darsellung” (a term normally used to distinguish literary or artistic

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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. 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. 10 The reference to Nietzsche appears after Heidegger concludes his paragraph on the relation between thought and poetry with the observation that calculative thinking will hardly be prepared to entertain what he is attempting to suggest in this paragraph, and most immediately with the term “neighbourhood.” Hence, I believe, the rhetorical provocation that follows as Heidegger moves into this new paragraph (which strongly draws thinking into the neighbourhood of poetry while asserting something about thought proper): “Thinking is not a means to gain knowledge. Thinking cuts furrows into the soil of Being. About 1875, Nietzsche once wrote (Grossoktav WW XI, 20): ‘Our thinking should have a vigorous fragrance, like a wheatfield on a summer’s night’” (OWL 68/163). The discussion of the notion of usage in What Is Called Thinking?, to which I return in my next chapter, will underscore the pertinence of this notion for Heidegger’s evocation of thought’s cutting of furrows. Heidegger is clearly drawing the figure from lines we have considered in his reading of Hölderlin (“It is useful for the rock to have shafts,/And for the earth furrows”—from “The Ister”). But let me also observe that the hermeneutical exigency to which I am attending in “The Essence of Language” will be echoed in What Is Called Thinking? in a way that is explicitly linked to usage. I refer here to his definition of learning (thrice offered), which runs as follows: “To learn means to make everything we do answer to whatever essentials address themselves to us” (WCT 10/8) We should compare this with the definition of use given in the same volume: “‘To use’ means, first, to let a thing be what it is and how it is. To let it be this way requires that the used thing be cared for in its essential nature—we do so by responding to the demands which the used thing makes manifest in the given instance” (WCT 191/194). In the “folding” structure of this form of “handling,” there is an incipient rhythm. Once again, in the section of “The Essence of Language” we are considering, Heidegger is describing what is required of thought if it is to think language.

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11 I have underscored the reference to usage in this citation by noting Heidegger’s use of brauchen. Since the motif is working at so many levels in the essay I am reading, it might be helpful for me to distinguish these. Let me underscore at the outset that with the notion of usage, Heidegger is rethinking the concept of relation, and with this, all relation. We will find it in every dimension of what we might call the pragmatics of the event. In referring to the use of the human in the event of destinal revealing, Heidegger refers to the way humankind is enjoined to answer a call. He is here touching on the human role in the relation of Being and Saying, as he referred to it in his Addendum. Our relation to Being is given to us by language, a “giving” that occurs with the becoming of language itself in its speaking. Humankind is enjoined to answer this speaking, and is in fact needed for its articulation, its coming to sound. Heidegger’s essay “Language in the Poem” defines this use of the human quite powerfully. (I explore this essay in my essay “Noise at the Threshold,” the first chapter of my treatment of Heidegger’s later thought of language in Language and Relation: . . . that there is language, 17–38). But in “The Essence of Language,” Heidegger moves back in beginning to think how humankind is used in Ereignis for the originary advent of language itself. When he evokes the relation between thought and poetry (their need and use of one another), he is at the level of what I have just termed the “articulation” of language. But the very possibility of this articulation requires the “use of the human” in Ereignis. Heidegger will say that Ereignis uses the human “for itself.” Thus, I have suggested that the setting into movement of language that Heidegger will call “Be-wëgung” in “The Essence of Language” actually involves a kind of “double articulation.” It is at this most originary level that we encounter the relation between language and mortality that I will address near the end of this essay. In sum, Ereignis uses the human for the “propriation” of language, and language, in turn, uses the human for its coming to speech. All human usage, in turn, will find its possibility from the relation between Being and Saying, be this in what Wittgenstein named “language games” or “forms of life.” 12 Language and Relation, 121–2. 13 In “Perhaps: A Modality,” collected in Of Minimal Things, 172–91, Rodolphe Gashé gives careful attention to Heidegger’s use of “Vermutung,” in “The Essence of Language.” The date offered by Gasché for the composition of this excellent essay suggests to me that we were actually writing on this topic at almost the same time. Let me note today that I can only regret that the opportunity to compare notes slipped by us. 14 I discuss this astonishing gesture in Language and Relation, 68.

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15 “Speaking, as saying, belongs to the design [Aufriss] of the essence of language, the design which is pervaded by all the modes of saying and of what is said, in which everything present or absent announces, grants or refuses itself, shows itself or withdraws. This multiform saying from many different sources is what runs through the design of the essence of language. With regard to the manifold ties [Bezüge] of saying, we shall call the essence of language in its totality die Sage—and confess that even so we still have not caught sight of what unifies those ties” (OWL 122-123/253). 16 I took up this question of the bodily use of the human as it appears in “The Way to Language,” in Language and Relation, drawing upon a footnote to Heidegger’s attempt to define how the human is used in Ereignis. “Lauten und Lieben: Leib und Schrift,” Heidegger writes in this note to one of the densest passages in the text. See Language and Relation, 96–9, along with the lengthy discussion of the hand that follows. David Nowell Smith has carried forward this question of “bodying” very nicely in Sounding/Silence. 17 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 (1) human kind is appropriated to language (in Ereignis) (2) 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. As I have noted, a telegraphic footnote to “The Way to Language” in the Gestamtausgabe (GA12 249) defines how the human is used: “Lauten und Leiben: Leib und Schrift” (translated literally: “Sounding and Bodying: Body and Writing”). 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 (“death” representing the more primordial dimension). 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. 18 I should note again 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 211/192). Consider also the line from “The Departure”: “Yet the world’s meaning thinks a different lack” (cited at GA 39 235/215).

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19 I draw here from a passage in Heidegger’s lecture series of 1934/5 that reviews Hölderlin’s experience of language as one of extreme danger (“In it, beyng first opens itself up to humans and in this way transports them into the realm of a threatening of beyng in general” [HH 198/217]) while recognizing an opposing peril, wherein language lends itself to debasement in common usage. In its essence, Heidegger underscores, language is the most original poetizing, and what is poetized is the language of a people. He then continues with a step back: “If we were to reflect philosophically still further back here regarding the essence and origin of language as originary poetizing, we would have to recognize that language itself has its origin in silence. It is first in silence that something such as ‘beyng” must have gathered itself, so as then to be spoken out as ‘world.’ That silence preceding the world is more powerful than all human powers. No human being alone ever invented language—that is, was alone strong enough to rupture the sway of that silence [die Gewalt jenes Schweigens zu brechen], unless under the compulsion of the God. We humans are always already thrown into a spoken and enunciated discourse, and can then be silent only in drawing back from such discourse, and even this seldom succeeds. Insofar as we stand within existence [Dasein], we ourselves are only a dialogue, and in such dialogue experience something like a world” [HH 199/218]. The phrasing here suggests that there would be a silencing prior to, or without the human (topologically speaking). But Heidegger’s later thought of Ereignis and Brauch, I believe, engages more profoundly the share of the human (and what Heidegger meditates upon in his lectures as “God’s lack”), which is to say human mortality. The condition of the silence to which Heidegger refers would be the human relation to death. It is not just a matter here of the human accession to this originary silence. This relation is needed in Ereignis. 20 We have, perhaps, a correlate to this argument in Heidegger’s discussion of “Gelassenheit,” when he takes up the question of usage and remarks that truth needs and uses the human because the human has no power over truth. (I discuss this statement in Infant Figures in relation to the motif of infancy.) There is no question that the reference to the human relation to death in the language essays radicalizes this proposition to some degree. But I am inclined to think, now, that the same “logic” is at work. 21 A broad-ranging essay by Yuk Hui on the topic of Heidegger and rhythm (which takes its departure with respect to the motif of rhythm from Benveniste and Heidegger’s thought of Fügung) has drawn my attention back to this text. See “Rhythm and Technics: On Heidegger’s Commentary on Rimbaud,” Research in Phenomenology, Vol. 47, 2017, 60–84.

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Chapter 4 1 Let me note that there have been several iterations of our craft seminar. Another, even more groundbreaking, followed when we undertook the assembly of prototypes for a violin of conservatory quality designed to be distributed at a very low cost to children in various parts of the world (in kit form) under the auspices of the non-profit “Open Strings” project. 2 “Technē signifies neither craft nor art, and not at all the technical in our present-day sense; it never means a kind of practical performance. The word technē denotes rather a mode of knowing. To know means to have seen, in the widest sense of seeing, which means to apprehend what is present, as such. For Greek thought the nature of knowing consists in aletheia, that is, in the uncovering of beings. It supports and guides all comportment toward beings. Technē, as knowledge experienced in the Greek manner, is a bringing forth of beings in that it brings forth present beings as such beings out of concealedness and specifically into the unconcealedness of their appearance; technē never signifies the action of making” (BW 184/46-47). 3 Heidegger refers frequently to the two lines in question, which stem from the late poem, “In lovely blueness . . .” (Full of merit, yet poetically, man/Dwells on this earth” [aber dichterisch wohnet der Mensch]). An essay devoted to these famous lines is contained in Poetry, Language, Thought, 211–29. 4 Heidegger’s description of the craft of cabinetmaking reads as follows: “A cabinetmaker’s apprentice, someone who is learning to build cabinets and the like, will serve as an example. His learning is not mere practice, to gain facility in the use of tools. Nor does he merely gather knowledge about the customary forms of the things he is to build. If he is to become a true cabinetmaker, he makes himself answer and respond above all to the different kinds of wood and to the shapes slumbering within wood—to wood as it enters into man’s dwelling with all the hidden reaches of its nature. In fact, this relatedness to wood is what maintains the whole craft. Without that relatedness, the craft will never be anything but empty busywork, any occupation with it will be determined exclusively by business concerns. Every handicraft, all human dealings are constantly in that danger. The writing of poetry is no more exempt from it than is thinking” (WCT 14-15/17). The reference to “shapes slumbering within wood . . . as it enters into man’s dwelling” establishes an immediate link to the discussion of the way art uses the earth in “The Origin of the Work of Art.” 5 From this point forward, it will be clear that all craft must be thought from handicraft, to the extent that it answers to the injunctions of usage. 6 Though he is also quite attentive to modern resonances, from Marx (“use-value”) to (possibly) Wittgenstein, for whom meaning is use. His developments on the topic

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of usage challenge every pragmatism and every notion of production—particularly “cultural”—as well as sociological or anthropological understandings of custom. Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 117; Vol. 54 of the Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1982), 79. For the definition of ethos as dwelling, see also the “Letter on Humanism” (BW 256). “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, and what in thus arriving resides in nearness to him, to appear.” Compare Heidegger’s words near the end of “Building Dwelling Thinking” (Poetry, Language, Thought, 160–1), which will also serve as an echo of my opening remarks about how the Cello Project represented a fundamental challenge for a program with a strong philosophical orientation: “Building and thinking are, each in its own way, inescapable for dwelling. The two, however, are also insufficient for dwelling so long as each busies itself with its own affairs in separation instead of listening to one another. They are able to listen if both—building and thinking—belong to dwelling, if they remain within their limits and realize that the one as much as the other comes from the workshop of long experience and incessant practice.” Some of the most difficult pages in What Is Called Thinking? concern the relation of laying before and letting-lie to which the Greek “legein” answers. Their difficulty inheres to an important degree in the simplicity of the propositions. For example: “Every statement remains in a mysterious manner related to all that can be called up by a ‘There is . . .’ [there follows a series of lines containing the phrases of a rather haunting character: ‘There is a light that the wind has put out,’ . . . ‘There is a vineyard, burnt and black with holes full of spiders . . .’]. Heidegger then continues: “This is not written in a textbook of logic, but elsewhere. Laying, thought as a letting-lie in the widest sense, relates to what in the widest sense lies before us, and speaks without a sound: there is [es gibt]” (WCT 206/209). The essence of saying must be thought from “es gibt,” which speaks everywhere in language. Paul Celan, Collected Prose, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop (New York: The Sheep Meadow Press, 1986), 25–7. I touch here upon a topic of considerable breadth and complexity opened (but not adequately developed with respect to Heidegger) by Jacques Derrida. In this context, let me merely cite a passage in which Heidegger recognizes writing as something more than expedient, at least in our time: “Everything depends upon this alone, that the truth of Being come to language and that thinking attain to this language. Perhaps, then, language requires much less precipitate expression than proper silence. But who of us today would want to imagine that his attempts to think are at home on the path of silence? At best, thinking could perhaps point toward the truth of Being, and indeed toward it as what is to be thought. It would

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Notes thus be more easily weaned from mere supposing and opining and directed to the now rare handicraft of writing. Things that really matter, although they are not defined for all eternity, even they come very late still come at the right time” (Letter on Humanism [BW 246-247/344]). “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 151; Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Verlag Günther Neske, 1954), 145. In the context of the Cello Project (in the first week), I led a seminar on Blanchot dedicated to the notion of a “politics beyond resentment.” I have allowed results from that seminar to guide this meditation on writing as a form of handicraft. From The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 1993), 313; L’entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 458. Maurice Blanchot, Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 289; L’amitié (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 326. As Heidegger observes in “The Anaximander Fragment” (trans. David Farrell Krell, Early Greek Thinking [New York: Harper and Row, 1975], 131; Gesamtausgabe 5, Holzwege [Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977], 321) Nietzsche’s translation of the fragment is close to that offered by Diels: “But where things have their origin, there too their passing away occurs according to necessity; for they pay recompense and penalty to one another for their recklessness, according to firmly established time.” Heidegger’s version focuses only on that part of the fragment he takes to be genuine: “. . . along the lines of usage; for they let order and thereby also reck belong to one another (in the surmounting) of disorder.”

Part One 1 The German, even more complex by reason of the syntactical play of the reflexive “sich begreifen” (which prompted me to speak of absolute reflection”), reads as follows: “Die Darstellung des Tragischen beruht vorzüglich darauf: dass das Ungeheure, wie der Gott und Mensch sich paart, und grenzenlos die Naturmacht und des Menschen Innerstes im Zorn Eins wird, dadurch sich begreift, dass das grenzenlose Eineswerden durch grenzenloses Scheiden sich reiniget. Tes physeos grammateus en ton kalamon apobrechon eunoun" (Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Friedrich Beissner [Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1952], 5: 201; hereafter, SW). The Greek phrase is from a Byzantian encyclopedia of the tenth century falsely attributed to Suidas of Athens. As Thomas Pfau notes in his edition of the “Remarks” (Friedrich Hölderlin, Essays and Letters on Theory [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 174), Hölderlin has altered the phrase by changing the Greek eis noun to eunoun, giving “Nature’s scribe, dipping the well-meaning reed” instead of “dipping the reed into meaning.” (Pfau offers “quill” rather than “reed,” but kalamon would appear to

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indicate the latter.) Eunoun is perhaps most difficult to translate here; “benevolent” is appropriate, but there is also a suggestion of sound understanding. Beyond the very concern with tragic Darstellung, I am thinking principally of Hölderlin’s reworking of the tragic metabole and the consequent disruption of Aristotle’s famous “organicist” description of the relation between beginning, middle, and end (see “Poetics,” 1450b.26). At the moment of the categorical turn, Hölderlin writes, “Man forgets himself because he is simply within the moment, the god because he is nothing but time; and on both sides there is infidelity, time, because in such moments it veers categorically and beginning and end can no longer rhyme with one another at all; man, because in this moment he must follow the categorical reversal and hereby cannot at all resemble the beginning in what follows” (“Remarks,” 202). Peter Szondi, Versuch über das Tragische (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1961). See “The Notion of the Tragic in Schelling, Hölderlin, and Hegel,” in Peter Szondi, On Textual Understanding and Other Essays, ed. Michael Hays, trans. Harvey Mendelsohn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 43–55. Important groundwork for this question is provided by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in his two essays, “La césure du spéculatif ” and “Hölderlin et les grecs,” in L’imitation des modernes: Typographies II (Paris: Galilée, 1986), 39–69, 71–84. These essays (“The Caesura of the Speculative,” trans. Robert Eisenhauer) and (Hölderlin and the Greeks,” trans. Judi Olson) are collected in Typographies: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed. Christopher Fynsk, intro. Jacques Derrida (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 208–35, 237–47. I am referring, of course, to the opening pages of the “Remarks on Oedipus” (as well as to the corresponding opening of the “Remarks on Antigone”), where Hölderlin describes a kind of calculus of human finitude (“. . . how a system of sensibility, the entire human being develops as when under the influence of the element”) that is characterized in tragedy by an “equilibrium” and represented (in the sense of Darstellung) as follows: For the tragic transport is properly empty and the most unbound. Thus, in the rhythmic succession of representations wherein the transport presents itself, there becomes necessary what in meter is called the caesura, the pure word, the counter-rhythmic interruption, in order to meet the racing exchange of representations at its summit, in such a way that it is then no longer the exchange of representations that appears, but representation itself. Thereby, the succession of the calculus and the rhythm are divided, and relate to one another in such a way that their two halves, as of equal weight, appear. (FH 101-102/196)

6 I will cite the translation of the Poetics by Ingram Bywater collected in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941). Citations of the Politics will be drawn from the same volume.

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7 “May [music] not have also some influence over the character and the soul? It must have such an influence if characters are affected by it. And that they are so affected is proved in many ways, and not least by the power which the songs of Olympus exercise; for beyond question they inspire enthusiasm, and enthusiasm is an emotion of the ethical part of the soul. Besides, when men hear imitations, even apart from the rhythms and tunes themselves, their feelings move in sympathy. . . . Rhythm and melody supply imitations of anger and gentleness, and also of courage and temperance, and of all the qualities contrary to these, and of the other qualities of character, which hardly fall short of the actual affections, as we know from our own experience, for in listening to such strains our soul undergoes a change” (Politics, 1340a7-20). 8 Politics, 1341a21: “Besides, the flute is not an instrument which is expressive of moral character; it is too exciting. The proper time for using it is when the performance aims not at instruction, but at the relief of the passions.” Politics, 1342a: "In education the most ethical modes are to be preferred, but in listening to the performances of others we may admit the modes of action and passion also. For feelings such as pity and fear, or, again, enthusiasm, exist very strongly in some souls, and have more or less influence over all. Some persons fall into a religious frenzy, whom we see as a result of the sacred melodies—when they have used the melodies that excite the soul to mystic frenzy—restored as though they had found healing and purgation. Those who are influenced by pity or fear, and every emotional nature, must have a like experience, and others in so far as each is susceptible to such emotions, and all are in a manner purged and their souls lightened and delighted. The purgative melodies likewise give an innocent pleasure to mankind.” Nietzsche was, of course, quite attentive to this line of Greek thought regarding the pedagogical and medical virtues of rhythm, as he notes in The Gay Science when addressing the topic of rhythm with respect to the origin of poetry. I extract just a few words from the discussion in Section 84, which takes up the issue of the “utilitarian” virtues of rhythm in poetry (including its coercive power with respect to the gods). “There was an even stranger notion that may have contributed most of all to the origin of poetry. Among the Pythagoreans, it appears as a philosophical doctrine and an artifice in education; but long before there were any philosophers, music was credited with the power of discharging the emotions, of purifying the soul, of easing the ferocious animi—precisely by means of rhythm. When the proper tension and harmony of the soul had been lost, one had to dance, following the singer’s beat . . .” (The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Vintage, 1974], 139). 9 Roselyne Dupont-Roc and Jean Lallot, eds., La poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1980). 10 Dupont-Roc and Lallot speak of an “expérience émotive épurée.” La poétique, 193.

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11 I use the term “aesthetic” here in view of the modern appropriation of Kant’s reflections on the apprehension of form. Dupont-Roc and Lallot refer in this respect to a “contemplation of represented form” and describe catharsis as being of an “aesthetic nature” (La poétique, 193). 12 Dupont-Roc and Lallot are inclined to attribute musical catharsis to a mere neutralization by aesthetic pleasure of the pain music produces homeopathically as a mimetic form. A “more immediate” and “less elaborate” form of mimesis than theater, its cathartic effect, they acknowledge, may be conceived by "analogy" with that of the latter, where catharsis results from a “contemplation of represented forms” (La Poétique, 193). But the pleasure afforded by musical catharsis is attributed principally to music’s ”hedonic” effect. This argument is difficult to square with the lines I have cited above (note viii). But more significant, I believe, is the fact that the explanation offered by DuPont-Roc and Lallot fails to account for the important assertion that feelings "move in sympathy" with music. Music, as such, may well play a supplementary role in tragedy, most importantly where it reflects character and action (character itself playing a secondary role in the effect proper to tragedy), but also where it contributes to the delight in the representation as a kind of “seasoning.” Yet the question I want to raise is whether the mainspring of catharsis is not a kind of rhythmical movement engaged by both theatrical representation and music—that is, whether catharsis is not fundamentally a matter of sympathetic movement and some form of rhythmic ordering of feelings. Such a notion would provide the link that Else finds lacking when he writes, “I can see no bridge leading from the structural-objective concept of the Poetics to the therapeutic subjective concept of the Politics” (Aristotle’s Poetics: The Argument [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. Press, 1957], 441). Of course, this explanation would not exclude the dimension of pleasure defined by DuPont-Roc and Lallot. 13 La poétique, 283. 14 Ibid., 284. 15 Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, Florida: University of Miami Press, 1971), 17. 16 “It [time] is always more [calculable] when it is counted in suffering” (FH 112/786).

Part Two 1 “Among mankind, one has to make sure with every thing that it is Something, i.e., that it is recognizable in the medium (moyen) of its appearance, that the way in which it is delimited can be determined and taught” (FH 101/729).

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2 Hölderlin returns to the rhythmic ordering of human faculties in the second paragraph of his “Remarks on Antigone”: “Just as philosophy always treats of only one faculty of the soul, in such a way that the presentation of this one faculty constitutes a whole and that the mere cohering of the parts [die Glieder] of this one faculty is called logic, so poetry treats the various faculties of man, such that the depiction of these various faculties constitutes a whole and the cohering of the more autonomous parts [der selbstständigeren Teile] of the various faculties can be called rhythm, in the higher sense, or the calculable law” (FH 109/783). 3 Note that Hölderlin refers in these paragraphs to the manner in which the “transport” presents itself (sich darstellt) in representations (vorstellungen). But the appearance of “representation itself ” would appear to be inseparable from what Hölderlin will call “die Darstellung des Tragischen” in the definition cited above from the first paragraph of the third section. I will return to Hölderlin’s use of this term “representation,” but let me note that when Hölderlin first speaks of “representations” [Vorstellungen], he appears to refer to a dramatic element or moment of the action containing some distinctive manifestation of “sensation, representation, or reasoning,” as we read in a preceding paragraph of the opening section of the “Remarks on Oedipus”: some aspect of the way “a sensuous system, man in his entirety develops as if under the influence of the element.” Such “representations” will become precipitous in their succession, requiring the counter-rhythmic interruption. 4 Heidegger, as we have seen, grasps in Antigone’s stance, her Gestalt, the “pure poem.” Lacan is no less taken by this awesome presence, in which he recognizes the incarnation of a “pure desire” (a desire for death), as we see in the lengthy discussion of the play in Book VII of his Seminar Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Book VII, Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1986). (Katharos, as Lacan reminds us, is one who is “pure.”) I have taken up this discussion in Infant Figures: The Death of the Infans and Other Scenes of Origin (Stanford University Press, 1996) and will only add that catharsis (as an “effect of the beautiful on desire,” as Lacan puts it) is hardly to be understood here with respect to any standard notion of aesthetic pleasure. The pure desire visible in the eyes of Antigone (Lacan refers to her “éclat”) is both revealing and concealing (actually confounding) in its manner of indicating a “beyond” that cannot be faced. (Antigone’s beauty is foreign to any aesthetic configuration.) Both Heidegger and Lacan are in fact very much in accord with Hölderlin as concerns what Lacan calls Antigone’s “desire,” and her position, as Lacan puts it, with respect to “Being.” (“We will rediscover the place of this point, which is the one where the false metaphors of the ontic are distinguished from what is the position of Being, articulated as such, as a limit, traversing the length of the text of Antigone” [Le Séminaire, 291].)

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5 In Hölderlin’s translation of line 541 of Antigone : “Wer Weiss, da kann doch drunt’ ein andrer Brauch sein” (in Hölderlin Werke und Briefe, ed. Friedrich Beissner and Jochen Schmidt (Frankfurt am Main, 1969), 754. I comment on Heidegger’s intriguing allusion to this line (as translated by Hölderlin) in his essay, “The Word” (from 1958, collected in On the Way to Language) in Language and Relation: . . . that there is language, 111–12. Heidegger could not have overlooked these words in his return to Hölderlin’s reading of Antigone in 1942, though he does not pause over them in his lectures. But in grasping this notion of usage at the ontological level, we can understand the force of Hölderlin’s claim that all modes of representation shift once this new relation is brought to bear in the civic space. 6 I undertake, in Infant Figures, 131–43, an analysis of a series of textual sites in Antigone in which the word “philia” is in play. The confrontations between Antigone, Ismene, and Creon effectively turn upon their respective understandings of the burden of this term. I returned to this reading of the play in a seminar presented in May 2020 online for the European Graduate School (https://egs​.edu​/ biography​/christopher​-fynsk/). 7 Something occurs in Hölderlin’s commentary that is not immediately pertinent to my analysis in this essay, but still worthy of note with respect to the other chapters in this volume devoted to Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin’s river hymns. Referring to Antigone’s manner of comparing her fate to that of Niobe in the moment of separating from the god, Hölderlin notes the following: “It is a great resource of the secretly working soul that at the highest state of consciousness, it evades consciousness and that, before the present god actually seizes it, the soul confronts him with bold, frequently even blasphemic words and thus maintains the sacred living potential of the spirit. In a high state of consciousness, then, it always compares itself to objects that do not have any consciousness, yet which in their destiny assume the form of consciousness. [. . .] As everywhere, the destiny of innocent nature which, in its virtuosity, everywhere moves into the overly organic to the extent that man approaches the aogic under heroic conditions and sentiments” [FH 112/786]. Is it possible that the poet’s turn to the river could be read in these terms (with all due allowance made for the difference between an “archaic” Greek consciousness and a modern one)? It could well be that these words do not conflict with Heidegger’s interpretation of the “poietic” character of the river, but a treatment of this topic would require significant consideration of Hölderlin’s late philosophy of nature. At this point, I am only inclined to add that Hölderlin’s remarks here seem in accord with some of the more “visionary” transpositions at work in his poetry and thereby of particular interest. 8 Antigone, trans. Elizabeth Wyckoff, Sophocles I, ed. David Grene and Richard Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), 187. Let me acknowledge

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that I use “cathartic” here in what is largely an anachronistic (contemporary) sense; this expression of unbound pity is, at this point, a form of release. 9 The full citation reads as follows, after Hölderlin’s reference to Niobe and her manner of counting time: “Whether more or less determined, one apparently has to say Zeus. To be serious, rather, say: “father of time or: father of earth,” for it is his character, opposing the eternal tendency, to reverse the striving from this world to the other into a striving from another world to this one. For we have to present the myth everywhere more conclusively. The golden stream of becoming apparently refers to the rays of light which also belong to Zeus to the extent that the time referred to is more calculable through those rays. This, however, it is whenever time is measured in suffering, for then the soul follows, feeling much more with the change of time and thus understanding the plain course of the hours, without the intellect anticipating the future based on the present. However, since this firmest staying in the face of changing time, the heroic hermit-life, the highest state of consciousness is real, the following chorus is motivated as purest universality and as the essential point of view where the whole must be grasped (FH 112/786). 10 I refer the reader to Lacoue-Labarthe’s powerful essay, “The Caesura of the Speculative,” trans. Robert Eisenhauer, in Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed. Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 208–35. The reader will also want to consult “Hölderlin and the Greeks,” trans. Judi Olson, in this same volume, 236–47. Lacoue-Labarthe’s analyses are of a singular density and defy summary in this context; he lays out in an uncompromising manner the extremely paradoxical position Hölderlin occupies in both contributing to contemporary speculative thought, and interrupting it. Here, I would like simply to note Lacoue-Labarthe’s argument with respect to Hölderlin’s recovery of the meaning of catharsis (the proper “tragic effect” as elaborated by Aristotle) for modern thought. An important dimension of what is at stake in the emergent dialectical thought of the period, he argues, is an account of how reason can confront the contradictions facing it and “convert the negative into being.” Here is Lacoue-Labarthe’s conclusion (which closely follows the analyses of Peter Szondi) as regards this gesture in the tenth of Schelling’s Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism: “Recall the question with which Schelling began his text: How was Greek reason able to bear the contradictions of its tragedy? And substitute for just a moment—while thinking, for instance, of the fear and pity Aristotle speaks of—“passion” for “reason.” It is difficult not to see that in both places it is basically a matter of the same question [. . .]; “How was Greek reason (that is, basically, “How was philosophy . . .”) able to “purify” itself of the menace which the contradiction illustrated by the tragic conflict represented? Can we avoid seeing, in other words, [. . . that] the question bearing on the tolerance, or the capacity for tolerance, in general, of the unbearable (death, suffering, injustice, contradiction) governs, in

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14 15

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both cases, the entire interpretation?” (p. 218). There, in sum, is an important part of the broader philosophical perspective on catharsis which I am entertaining in this essay, even as I attend to its formal conditions in Hölderlin’s thinking. Immediately after his remarkable pages on the figure of Antigone in her going down” Hölderlin broadens the perspective: “However, since this firmest staying in the face of changing time, the heroic hermit-life, the highest state of consciousness is real, the following chorus is motivated as purest universality and as the essential point of view where the whole must be grasped. For as contrast to the all too inward of this preceding passage, the chorus contains the highest impartiality of the two opposing personalities who delimit the actions of the other characters in the play” (FH 112/786). I use the term “sublimity” in close proximity to a reference to Kant’s understanding of the beautiful in light of the “Nietzschean” phrase from Rilke’s “First Elegy,” so dear to Heidegger: “Beauty is the beginning of the terrible . . .” (cited in the first volume of Nietzsche, trans. David Farrell Krell [New York: Harper and Row, 1979], 117. I hope to offer soon a reading of Oedipus which focuses on this event of provocation, which is determinative for the course of the action. I believe we should weigh fully Tiresias’s words when he suggests that the course of events unfolding is not a necessary one. It is properly at this level that we must consider the force of a phrase such as “the caesura of the speculative.” One finds, in some critical discussions of Hölderlin’s formulations in his “Remarks,” a reference to the caesura as something that affects the hero, when in fact Hölderlin is quite clear in specifying that it is to be understood with respect to the formal structure of the action in the tragedy. This employment of the term is perfectly understandable from a rhetorical perspective. But I am trying to be careful in grasping its possible application in this context. I cite again from the letter to Böhlendorff: “Yet what is familiar must be learned as well as what is alien. This is why the Greeks are so indispensable for us. It is only that we will not follow them in our own, our national, since, as I said, the free use of what is one’s own is the most difficult” (FH 150/941). Hölderlin will reinforce the point about the difference in modes of representation as he continues in his exposition (Section 3 of the “Remarks” on Antigone”’). Oedipus at Colonus, he will observe, is a more modern play (FH 114/788). A trace of this thinking is found in a passage from which I have already cited concerning the modern existence under a “more real Zeus” who forces the “eternally anti-human course of nature on its way to another world more decidedly down to earth.” Hölderlin then continues: “[. . .] and since this greatly changes the essential and patriotic representations, and since our poetry must be patriotic so

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that its themes are selected according to our world-view and their representations patriotic, for us, then, the Greek representations change insofar as it is their chief tendency to comprehend themselves, which was their weakness; on the other hand, it is the main tendency in the mode of representation of our time to designate something, to possess a skill, since the lack of destiny, the dysmoron is our deficiency” (FH 114/788). 19 Wittgenstein, I recall, understood such an occurrence as the only possible instantiation of a properly ethical language—and, of course, considered this impossible. I discuss this point, and Wittgenstein’s proximity to Heidegger, in the opening pages of Language and Relation: . . . that there is language (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986).

Abbreviations

Martin Heidegger BP  Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana U. Press, 1982; Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, Vol. 24 (Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann, 1975) BT  Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010); Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1979) BW  Basic Writings, ed., David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 1993); for “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” see Holzwege, Vol. 5 of the Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1977), 1-74; for “Die Frage nach der Technik,” see Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1990), 9-40 HH  Hölderlin’s Hymns, “Germania” and “The Rhine,” trans. William McNeill and Julia Ireland, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014); Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein,” Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 39 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1980) HHI  Hölderlins Hymn, “The Ister,” trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis (Bloomington: Indiana U. Press, 1996); Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister,” Vol. 53, Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 53 (Frankfurt am Main: Klosermann, 1984) OWL  On the Way to Language, trans. Peter Hertz (New York: Harper and Row, 1971); Unterwegs zur Sprache, Vol. 12 of the Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1985) WCT  What Is Called Thinking?, trans., J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968); Was Heisst Denken (Pfullingen: Neske, 1990)

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Abbreviations

Friedrich Hölderlin FH  Friedrich Hölderlin: Essays and Letters on Theory, ed. and trans. Thomas Pfau (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988); Hölderlin Werke und Briefe, Band 2, ed. Friedrich Beißner and Jochen Schmidt (Frankfurt am Main, Insel Verlag, 1969

Index of Names Achilles  36 Aeschylus  114, 165 Agamben, Giorgio  161 Allemann, Beda  159 Anaximander  120–1, 128, 184 Antigone  49, 55, 75–85, 89, 143–6, 148, 180, 186, 198, 199, 201 Antiphon  174 Appel, Jonathan  166 Archilochus  113, 114, 164–7 Aristotle  7, 20, 43, 132–42, 150, 154, 164, 165, 174, 195, 200 von Arnim, Bettina  39 Bach, Johann Sebastien  183 Bacon, Francis  159 Barletta, Vincent  166 Bataille, Georges  8, 128 Bender, Hans  126–7 Benjamin, Walter  59, 92, 156, 184 Benveniste, Émile  7, 21, 139, 164–6, 185, 191 Blanchot, Maurice  10, 62, 74, 87–8, 97, 127–31, 165–6, 169, 173–4, 178, 179, 182, 185, 194 von Böhlendorff, Casimir Ulrich  48, 50, 75, 78, 88, 153, 179, 201 Bohr, Niels  24, 92 Celan, Paul  115, 126–7, 193 Cézanne, Paul  184 Char, René  112–13 Chiron  36 Cicero  136 Colliard, Gilles  116 Creon  49, 81, 85, 86, 145, 199 Deleuze, Gilles  1, 10, 159 de Man, Paul  46, 177 Democritus  20, 46, 139, 163, 165, 166 Denes, Agnes  175

Derrida, Jacques  10, 65, 66, 91, 97, 160, 166, 168, 176, 177, 186, 193 Dionysos  47 Dreyfus, Hubert  16 Dupont-Roc, Roselyne  7, 134–9, 161, 196, 197 Else, Gerald  133, 197 Empedocles  99, 142 Eng, Michael  169 Fenves, Peter  177 Fink, Eugen  21, 165 Fitzgerald, Ella  20 Foucault, Michel  10, 160 Gasché, Rodolphe  168, 189 George, Stefan  21, 100, 103, 110, 113, 188 Haemon  143–5 Hamacher, Werner  177 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich  26, 118, 181 von Hellingrath, Norbert  42, 170, 184 Heiden, Gert-jan van der  161 Heraclitus  21, 39, 60, 61, 166, 184 Herodotus  164 Hertz, Peter  187 Hölderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich  28–56, 75–92, 132–3, 139–54 Homer  32, 179 Hui, Yuk  191 von Humboldt, Wilhelm  108 Ireland, Julia  168 Ismene  145 Jäger, Werner  164 Jünger, Ernst  159 Jünger, Friedrich Georg  159

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Index of Names

Kant, Immanuel  20, 34, 72, 147, 151, 163 Knowles, Adam  173 Krell, David Farrell  159 Lacan, Jacques  10, 143, 160, 198 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe  7, 147, 169, 178, 195, 200 Lallot, Jean  7, 134–9, 161, 196, 197 Laotse  107 Leroi-Gourhan, André  185 Leucippus  139, 163 Levinas, Emmanuel  157 Lyotard, Jean-François  12, 160, 179 Mallarmé, Stéfan  30, 31, 168 Marx, Karl  8, 192 McLaughlin, Kevin  184–5 McNeill, William  170 Meschonnic, Henri  159 Michon, Pascal  166 Mishima, Yukio  183 Mitrovic, Nemanja  7 Montaigne, Michel de  166 Nietzsche, Friedrich  48, 60, 102, 119, 179, 188, 194, 196, 201 Niobe  199–200 Novalis  108–9 Oedipus  43, 46, 84, 86, 143, 144, 150, 175, 178 Parmenides  112, 121, 122, 128, 171 Pfau, Thomas  141, 149, 194 Pindar  36, 46, 66, 78, 170, 184

Plato  17, 104, 139–41 Polyneices  145 Prometheus  165 Protagoras  23–4, 41, 114 Rilke, Rainer Maria  171, 172, 201 Rimbaud, Arthur  113–14, 166 Ronell, Avital  174 Sauvanet, Pierre  167 Schelling, F. W. J.  132, 142, 152, 200 Schürmann, Reiner  187 Serres, Michel  166 Smith, David Nowell  95, 159, 160 Socrates  126 Sophocles  75, 76, 81, 85, 133, 146, 152–4 Staiger, Emil  159 St Germain  161 Stradivari, Antonio  116 Suidas  194 Szondi, Peter  132, 195, 200 Tiresias  85, 143–5, 149, 150, 201 Trakl, Georg  21, 28 Tsushima, Michiko  161 van Gogh, Vincent  55, 58, 59, 64 Wittgenstein, Ludwig  15, 24, 189, 192, 202 Xerxes  165 Young, Robert Brewer  8, 115, 129 Zeus  41, 49, 148, 180, 200, 202

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