The Vicinity of Poetry and Thought

The Vicinity of Poetry and Thought Sven-Olov Wallenstein 1. Heidegger’s Turns On the Way to Language contains texts and lectures from the 1950s, the last phase of Heidegger’s path of thought, when the relation between language and poetry becomes decisive in a new way. The precise meaning of this relation is however less easy to pinpoint. What does it mean to be on the way to language, instead of having a theory of language, as in the case of linguistics and the philosophy of language, and in what sense could poetry guide us along this way? And if there is such an intimate relation between them, which Heidegger often talks of in terms of “proximity” or “vicinity,” relating them not in terms of a subsuming or an identity, but rather in terms of a distance or diference that is just as small as it is radical, what is this relation, and in what element does it unfold? The way is a recurrent igure in Heidegger, and we encounter it not only in On the Way to Language, but in many other works, such as Holzwege and Wegmarken, and emblematically in the motto that he selected for the collected works: “Paths, not works” (Wege, nicht Werke). If “All is way” (Alles ist Weg),1 this implies that we must retrieve another dimension of the movement of thought, in opposition to the modern idea of method that was developed from Descartes onward. For Heidegger, this 1. Unterwegs zur Sprache, Gesamtausgabe 12 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1985), 187. On the Way To Language, trans Peter D. Herz (New York; Harper & Row, 1982), 92. Henceforth cited as UZS (German/ English). I have often chosen to modify the translation. Other volumes in the Gesamtausgabe are cited as GA, volume and page. 257 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought modern method – of which the priority of the mathematical is only one, albeit central, aspect – depends on a technological view of thought that understands it as an instrument, as a means to an end. To retrieve the openness of the path as opposed to what method has become, is one of the basic meanings of being “on the way to…” – we are not on the way to some faraway goal that we one day may reach due to an increasingly subtle and discerning intelligence in the service of an increasingly precise science, but to a “site” (Ort) or “realm” (Ortschaft) where we already are, although without being able to see it. “If in what follows we relect, then, upon the way of thoughtful experience with language,” Heidegger writes, “we are not undertaking methodological considerations. We are even now walking in that region, the realm that concerns us” (UZS 168/75). This return to the closest and yet most distant and unknown site will however not be simple, and even the igure of the circle, recurrent in Heidegger’s earlier work, in fact seems too limited: it is only a “particular case of the interlacing in question,” and only imposes itself if we “consider language as information” (UZS 231/113). In a marginal note in the GA edition (230, note e), Heidegger expresses a distrust in both terms: if interlacing (Gelecht) is a “bad name,” then circle is “worse,” and instead he hints at “folding” (Falten) and “folding together” (zusammenfalten), as in “folding one’s hands” (Hände falten), as other possible terms. In order to “bring language as language to language” (Die Sprache als die Sprache zur Sprache bringen, 230/112) – a formula that, as Heidegger notes, uses the same word three times, each time saying something diferent and yet the Same – we must not push the interlacing aside, but enter into it, abandon ourselves to it, and discern the “unbinding bond” (entbindende Band, 231/113) that traverses language and liberates it into its own dimension. Heidegger’s own path too, as it unfolds through his works, is just as little as the way to language a linear progression towards a goal, but rather a series of turns and returns, reinterpretations and reformulations of earlier problems in the light of 258 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought later questions, all of which has generated a long and probably never-ending debate on the relation between various phases in his thought.2 Here it may suice to point to a few crucial signposts, where the idea of language and its relation to thought is transformed, and in this also the role of poetry and poetic language. The project of fundamental ontology in the 1920s, as it is formulated in Being and Time (1927) and the lecture series from the same period, can be understood as a retrieval and transformation of the transcendental philosophy of Kant and Husserl. The task is to overcome – but in this movement also to found – epistemology, with its point of departure in the subject or in consciousness, and to develop an ontology based in the hermeneutics of the everyday, in the being-in-the-world of Dasein. In this, the analysis of speech or language (Rede) plays an important part, and Heidegger describes it as an articulation of our understanding, which grows out of an ante-predicative level. Pre-linguistic meanings (Bedeutungen) grow into words, and the subsequent judgments are a way of synthesizing and rendering explicit a more basic relation to the world. The judgment “S is P,” resting upon the emphatic and apophantic as – to say something about something (ti kata tinos), and thereby to see something as something, ultimately “being as being” (to on he 2. Heidegger’s own statements on this point tend to vary. In this context, where the issue is to chart the transformed relation to language in the later writings, the idea of “site” becomes crucial, i.e. something to which we return and which is at once close and far away. In the seminar in Le Thor in 1969, Heidegger distinguishes “three steps on the path of thinking”: the question of the meaning of being, the question of the truth of being, and inally “the question of the site or region of being” (GA 15, 344), which in some of the later texts is described as a topology of being. The latter term irst appears in a series of aphorism from 1947, and it is explicitly connected to poetry: “Thought’s character of poetry is still concealed. / But where it shows itself, it for a long time looks like the utopia of a semipoetic understanding. / But the thinking poetizing is in truth the topology of being (Topologie des Seyns). / This says to being the region its essence.” “Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens,” in Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, GA 13 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983), 84. For the development of Heidegger’s term topology, see Otto Pöggeler, “Heideggers Topologie des Seins,” Man and World Vol. 2, No. 3 (1969). 259 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought on), two formulas both rooted in Aristotle’s logic and metaphysics – grows out of the preceding hermeneutic as, where we do not grasp things as isolated objects, available for the predication of properties, but as “equipment” (Zeug) that forms a nonthematic part of our activity. In Being and Time, language is not directly in focus, but irst and foremost part of an equipmental totality (Zeugganzheit) comprising all entities that are part of a particular use, which in turn means that it only in a secondary sense can be taken as a means to communicate thoughts or mental contents that would precede it or exist independently of our everyday activity. In what is rejected (Cartesianism, mentalism, a pure and non-worldly subject), there is an unmistakable proximity between Heidegger and the later Wittgenstein, but also a connection to pragmatism as a larger philosophical movement. This alliance has exerted a profound fascination on many contemporary interpreters: language is part of life, or a life- or world-form that we share with others, and not the expression or externalization of representations that would irst exist in some inner, private, and mental sphere; the positive claims, particularly the attempt to found ontology in a new analysis of temporality, however tend to disappear in these interpretations, which ultimately provide a distorted picture of Heidegger’s project as a whole. In Being and Time we do not ind the claim that would become crucial in many later texts, i.e. the priority accorded to poetry, or better to the poetic dimension of language (which need not be identiied with a particular literary genre, poetry as opposed to prose, or even with the modern idea of “literature”). On the contrary, in the framework of Being and Time the poetic use of language would be a modiication of everyday equipmental use. Even though Heidegger never proposes it explicitly, we may here even see the possibility of an aesthetic – or, using the Husserlian terminology that Heidegger employs with respect to the other sciences, a regional ontology for the aesthetic object, as an extension of the list of regions cited in § 3 – i.e., a particular investigation that would show how the equipmen260 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought tal character of language and its speciic mode of disclosure is modiied when used in a poetic fashion. This is hinted at in § 34, when Heidegger, almost in passing, notes that the communication of the existential possibilities of Dasein’s disposedness (Beindlichkeit), occurring in the “tone, modulation, and tempo of speech, ‘in the manner of speaking,’” may become the “proper goal of ‘poetic speech’” (dichtende Rede). Beginning in the early ‘30s, Heidegger turns away from the idea of a transcendental foundation, and eventually – in the published works explicitly in Einführung in die Metaphysik (1935) – also from the term ontology. This shift has been understood in highly diverse ways, but regardless of how it is seen, a decisive moment is the new conception of history, in which the “oblivion of being” no longer results from a structural and inescapable tendency of Dasein to understand itself in a reiied fashion (a tendency that would be akin to Kant’s “transcendental illusion”), and instead becomes a historical process beginning somewhere in ancient Greece and unfolding until it reaches its end in the modern world. This is a what Heidegger calls the “history of being,” i.e. a sequence of epochs in which being gives itself to thought in a movement of granting and withdrawal, of “sending” (Geschick), which inally reaches its end and so poses the task of thinking the end of metaphysics rather than its re-founding through ontology. The challenge to thought is no longer to clear away sedimented layers of traditional interpretations so as to disclose a ground, but rather to reach into the non-ground, the abyss of the “unthought” (das Ungedachte) that permeates metaphysics since its inception in Plato, or even earlier, and to discern the possibility of that which returns to us as an other or second beginning (andere Anfang), hidden inside the irst and merely chronological beginning (often referred to as Beginn). This turn to a transformed sense of history also results in a radical new approach to the work of art. This irst necessitates a critique of aesthetics, understood by Heidegger as a way to enclose the work in a subjective sphere organized around con261 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought cepts like experience, taste, and pleasure, and to deprive it of its capacity for disclosing truth.3 It is only by overcoming the aesthetic relation, which on one level is a correlate to modern subjectivity, that the thinking of art may reach the dimension of the truth of the work as disclosure of a world, and understand it as a event that not just takes place in history, but founds history. In Heidegger’s interpretation, aesthetics is however not just a product of a subjectivist, Cartesian modernity, but more profoundly already set on its course by the Platonic divide between the sensible and the supersensible, where the aistheton is subjugated to the noeton as an imperfect and transient image, which renders the concept of aesthetics inapt for a thought that wants to overcome this separation. (Here we must note Heidegger never seems to acknowledge the speciic trajectory of the very term “aesthetics” from Baumgarten to Kant, and even though this is arguably because his problem is to think the unthought essence of metaphysics and not to produce a history of concepts, it nevertheless produces a distorted and insuicient picture.4) To overcome Platonism in this particular respect means that we must return to the quarrel between philosophy and poetry to which Plato briely alludes as the context of his debate with mimetic art in The Republic – in fact he claims to have inherited it from a more distant past, and qualiies it as “ancient” or “immemorial” (palaia diaphora, 607b). This quarrel, which 3. See for instance the postface to “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” where Heidegger says that “experience” (Erlebnis), the modern, subjectivized, and aestheticized version of the Greek aisthesis, is the element in which art dies, even though this process may take hundreds of years to be completed. But, he adds in a marginal note, this does not mean that art would come to an end after having been domesticated by philosophical aesthetics, as in Hegel, only that we have to ind another “a wholly diferent ‘element’ for the becoming of art” (Holzwege, GA 5 [Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977], 67, note b). 4. “Western relection on art begins (beginnt) as aesthetics,” Heidegger writes, although “great Greek art remained without a corresponding thought and conceptual relection, which need not be identical to aesthetics” (Nietzsche I [Pfullingen: Neske, 1961], 95). In the brief historical sketch outlined in the same volume, Heidegger moves directly from Descartes to Hegel, which seems to imply that aesthetics is only an efect in, a kind of inner luctuation of, the unfolding of the metaphysics of subjectivity. 262 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought for Nietzsche, at the other end of metaphysics, appeared as a “raging discord” whose conditions he set out to reverse by proposing that art is worth more than truth, is one of the central themes in the lectures on “Nietzsche and Will to Power as Art” in 1936. Heidegger’s interpretation begins in a positive fashion, and even though Nietzsche in the end remains a Platonist in spite of himself, his conception on perspectivism and the body as way of exploring the world are initially seen as opening onto a productive transformation of the hierarchy rather than simply an inversion of it. 5 As the lectures progress throughout the ‘30s, the Nietzschean opening seems to close, and in the last lectures, he is treated almost unequivocally negatively. But if Heidegger’s revocation of the Platonic verdict on the poets in the end parts with Nietzsche’s airmation of will to power, the then he just as little takes the other traditional route, i.e. to follow Aristotle in rationalizing their activity through a theory of poetics, which would prove that their use of katharsis and mimesis is in fact beneicial to the city in providing their audience with a stepping-stone on the way to philosophical reason. The implicit claim is rather that the attempt to free art from the yoke of aesthetics – which is present in diferent although complementary ways in Aristotelian poetics and Nietzschean airmation – must begin by stepping back in order to reveal the connection between Plato’s negative determination of art and the passage staged in his writings from truth as the fold of openness and concealment to truth as a presence posed in rela5. See Nietzsche I, above all 231-254. Earlier Heidegger also emphasizes the role of language, not only because “the founding words are historical” (171), but also, and with a dismissal of aesthetics that comes close to “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” because of its materiality: “Since language as a sounding signiication from its foundation roots in our earth, and places us in, and binds us to our word, relection on language and its historical power is always an act that shapes our Dasein. The will to the originary, to rigor, and to providing measure to the word, is therefore not aesthetic play, but a work in the essential core of our Dasein as historical.” (169) In spite of this, Nietzsche’s own use of language in all of its sensuous, afective, rhetorical, etc, dimensions, play little or no role in the following interpretation, which mainly deals with how his claims are linked to a set of Platonic metaphysical theses on the conceptual level. 263 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought tion to a corrected, accommodated, and “ortothetic” gaze. It is only if we are able to retrieve the moment of aletheia inside Plato’s ortothes that we can understand the truth that belongs to art, which is why Heidegger’s reading of the allegory of the cave, even though not containing any references to art, can be taken as a necessary correlate to his attempt to twist art free from its Platonic imprisonment.6 That Heidegger pays no attention to Aristotle’s Poetics would then be due to his general view, at least in this period, of Aristotle as almost wholly dependent on Platonic concepts: it is as if, in the Poetics, the bets have already been placed, and in order to overthrow the game the rules themselves must be changed. If the attempt to think art outside of metaphysics and aesthetics is to succeed, it must return us to something like an originary scene, since it is only this that allows us to rethink the essence of art as inextricably intertwined with the essence of metaphysics. Platonism is one such scene, and perhaps the decisive, but it is not the only one – it echoes and repeats other earlier phases, as Plato himself acknowledged. 2. Mythos and Logos From the point of view of a separation between philosophy and poetry occurring sometime in the archaic phase of thought, and of which Plato would be a consequence, the retrieval of the exchange as a positive possibility might take the form of a suspension of the diference between mythos and logos, between experience as narration of the origin, and the origin as timeless structure, principle, and order. In the introduction to Being and Time, Heidegger cites Plato’s demand in The Sophist that we should not “tell a story” (mython tina diegeisthai, 242c) as one of philosophy’s founding gestures, and he locates his own project in the wake of this injunction, understood as the demand that being should not be derived from a particular being. Later, after the turn away from ontology, mythos undergoes a reevaluation, 6. See “Platons Lehre von der Wathrheit,” in Wegmarken, GA 9 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann , 1976). 264 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought and the question of the origin instead returns us to a concept of originary myth that must be liberated from all of its traditional determinations. The origin is nothing “primitive,” Heidegger emphasizes in Einführung in die Metaphysik, and precisely for this reason it remains outside of the grasp of history, anthropology, archeology, or any other positive science, and can only be understood as “mythology” (GA 40, 165). In this proposal some have perceived a massive ideological claim. Myth, so Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, is fundamentally political, and when Heidegger “without any hesitation utters the word mythology, I cannot avoid hearing the voice of, for example, rector Krieck.”7 Heideggerian mythology would then constitute an echo, perhaps a more subtle one and yet an accomplice, of all the other myths of Germany that were being proposed at the same time by the oicial party philosophers. But even though the political dimensions of the concept are often unmistakable, it seems misleading to establish a direct link to the contemporary party ideologues.8 At irst, Heidegger’s vocabulary seems closely ailiated to early romanticism and the mythology envisioned in “The Oldest System Program of German Idealism,”9 where it was determined as a temporary stage in the return from the divisions of modern philosophy and politics to a primordial, and thus also inal, state. A few years later, Schelling, in his System of Transcendental Idealism, would simply call this state “poetry” (Poesie).10 For the anonymous 7. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger: La politique du poème (Paris: Galilée, 2002), 22. 8. For a detailed discussion of the term “mythology” and its various uses in Heidegger, see Sommer, C. “‘Nämlich sie wollen stiften / Ein Reich der Kunst’: Zum Verhältnis von Kunst, Mythos und Politik in Heideggers Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks (1935/36) und Hölderlins Hymnen ‘Germanien’ und ‘Der Rhein’,” Internationales Jahrbuch für Hermeneutik, vol. 11, 2002. 9. The text is anonymous, but contemporary consensus opts for Hegel as the most likely author. For an edition of the text with a series of commentaries, see Mythologie der Vernunft: Hegels “Ältestes Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus,” ed. Christoph Jamme and Helmut Schneider (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984). 10. “If it is only art that may succeed in making that which that philosophy can only represent subjectively into something objective with universal validity, then it can be expected, to once more draw this conclusion, that 265 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought author of the “System Program,” the position of a Mittelglied meant that mythology here operated as a preparatory way of providing Kant’s ideas of reason with a sensible presence, so that they could be given back to “the people,” through the complementary means of the “polytheism of imagination” and the “monotheism of the heart.” This conception remains within a Kantian framework, although with the view to ground it in a more profound unity based in poetry, in which the state and the political sphere are included. But while it is true that Heidegger’s mythology undoubtedly echoes the “System Program,” it nevertheless aims at something diferent: the diference between poetry and thought is not to be submerged into an “ocean of poetry,” but rather intensiied, so that the two acquire a deeper relation through this diference, while the exact location of politics seems more diicult to decide, at least in the proposals in Einführung in die Metaphysik. In Heidegger, mythology appears as a tentative way to name an essential and consitutive connection between two terms, poetry and philosophy, it points towards an element that would be the origin of both poetry and philosophy, neither one nor the other, and yet not a undiferentiated unity. We ind this unity in diference, this entanglement of terms that precedes their coming into their respective unity, in pre-Socratic thought, as in the Poem of Parmenides where philosophy and myth cannot be pried apart, in Greek tragedy, where concepts assume a plastic philosophy – in the same way that it once, in the infancy of science, was born out of and nourished by poetry – and with it all the sciences that through it are guided towards perfection, after their completion will low back like so many separate rivers into the general ocean of poetry from which they sprang forth. It is in general not diicult to grasp what will be the internediary (Mittelglied) for the return of science to poetry, for this intermediary has existed in mythology, before the – as it now appears – irrevocable separation occurred. But how a new mythology, which is not an invention of a singular poet, but belongs to a race that we can only represent as it were in the image of an individual poet (eines neuen nur Einen Dichters vorstellenden Geschlechts), itself is to appear, this is a problem whose solution we can only expect from the future destiny of the world and the future course of history” (Friedrich W. J. von Schelling, System des transzendentalen Idealismus [Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1962], 300 [SW ed. 1856, III 629]). 266 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought shape and become forces that confront each other on a stage – and indeed still in Plato too, whose “dramatic phenomenology” should caution us not to separate singular theses and claims from the textual web if we are not to lose sight of their constitutive multidimensionality.11 The question of such a common element of philosophy and poetry can just as little be solved by privileging one over the other, as by the creation of some new and synthetic meta-genre, but can only be approached of we ind a diferent relation to the language within which we are already situated – a relation that Heidegger later on, as we shall see, particularly in On the Way to Language, will discuss in terms of a vicinity or proximity between poetry and thought, whereas the term mythology largely tends to disappear. The interpretation of Plato’s philosophy as an inception of metaphysics that harbors a profound unthought, implicitly opens a whole series of new questions, not least concerning tragedy, where the quarrel is as it were staged from the other end, on the basis of poetry. In the readings of Sophocles’s Antigone that we ind in Introduction to Metaphysics in 1935, and in the lecture series on Hölderlin’s Der Ister 1942-43, Heidegger opposes man’s knowing (techne) to the overpowering force of physis, which we should not understand as “nature” in opposition to culture, but as the power of being as such. The truth – the clearing of a world and its order of reason – that man establishes in tragedy is always fragile, and can only be upheld in a struggle against a 11. I borrow the term “dramatic phenomenology” from Stanley Rosen; see the introduction to Rosen, Plato’s Sophist: The Drama of Original and Image (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). In the irst volume of his re-reading of Plato’s dialogs, Rosen notes: “It may be that philosophy cannot suppress poetry except by adoption of poetic means. This does not, however, entail that poetry in the usual or Homeric sense triumphs over philosophy. It does mean that we have to rethink the usual senses of both philosophy and poetry, and thereby to arrive at a more satisfactory understanding of philosophy as an activity that includes its own versions of poiesis” (Rosen, Plato’s Symposium. [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968], xxvii). In spite of Rosen’s many critical comments on Heidegger’s interpretations – most systematically presented in The Question of Being: A Reversal of Heidegger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993) – the perspective that his work opens op seems to me to be highly useful for understanding Heidegger’s approach. 267 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought power that traverses him, and which itself is nothing human. If man in the irst stasimon in Antigone (v. 332) is deined as the most “uncanny” or “homeless” (to deinotaton, das Unheimlichste in Heidegger’s translation),12 this is because the power of physis forces him outside of himself, and makes him into an errant and placeless being precisely when he appears to occupy the highest point of the polis. Unlike Plato’s philosopher, who at the summit of the state exerts his dominion (basileia), Sophocle’s man is fundamentally homeless and bereft of a secure place, and when he ascends over and above the polis in order to govern it, he becomes an outcast, hypsipolis apolis (v. 370, Heidegger translates: “hochüberragend die Stätte, verlustig der Stätte ist er”).13 Tragedy can in this sense be taken to show precisely what is repressed in Plato’s theoretical intuition of forms and the stabilizing of truth in ortothetic correctness, i.e. not only the openness of aletheia that is required for any intuition, but also that this openness is itself wrested from concealment (a process indicated by the privative a- of a-letheia), in a violent act of which man is never the master. If the duplicity and withdrawal of truth itself is withdrawn when truth is stabilized as correctness in Plato – thereby initiating the oblivion of oblivion that traverses the history of metaphysics – then tragedy allows us to experience this withdrawal and excessive violence before truth 12. The adjective used in Sophocles’ text is in fact in a comparative form: polla ta deina kouden anthropou deinoteron pelei (Heidegger translates: “Vielfältig das Unheimliche, nichts doch / über den Menschen Unheimlicheres ragend sich regt”). 13. See Martin Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik, GA 40 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983), 152-173. See also the more detailed commentary in the lectures on “Der Ister,” Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister,” GA 53 (Frankfurt am Main : Klostermann, 1984), 63-152, where Heidegger develops his analysis beyond the stasimon to the initial passages in the text. Already Antigone’s irst exchange with Ismene, Heidegger says, shows that she is “das höchste Unheimliche” (GA 53, 122-129), and such already from the outset condenses everything that will follow. This separates Heidegger from Hegel, where the conlict depends on Creon’s and Antigone’s equally valid conceptions of right, and Heidegger comes closer to Schelling, for whom the fate of the tragic protagonist in the face of existence is a highest act and airmation of his freedom, and not, as in Hegel, a moment in a historical process. See Schelling, F. W. J. Philosophie der Kunst, Sämmtliche Werke (ed. 1859), 1/V, 693-700. 268 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought has been corrected by the mastery of the theoretical gaze. A reassessment of the relation between poetry and thought might thus take its cues from the airmation of the initude and laceration of thought in tragedy, which also gives us an access to the unthought of metaphysics. 3. The Encounter with Hölderlin It could be expected that this return to the Platonic scene, before it had been regulated and domesticated by an Aristotelian poetic that subsequently would become a founding model for most classicist art theory, would have motivated Heidegger to a more detailed scrutiny of the philosophy of art in German idealism, where the quarrel between poetry and philosophy was brought to life again, and particularly so in the case of tragedy. In the wake of the eighteenth-century invention of a new experiential domain named “aesthetics,” which in its irst phase must have appeared as merely a series of marginal notes to the rationalist tradition, a radical interrogation of the very forms of thought evolved, where Kant’s third Critique may be seen as an attempt to meet the aesthetic challenge by inscribing its unruly quality in a more encompassing economy of reason. But in the immediate aftermath of Kant, in Schlegel, Schiller, Novalis, Schelling, and many others, there emerged the possibility of testing a “step beyond Kant’s line of demarcation” (in Hölderlin’s words),14 in which the new dialog between art and philosophy began to transform both into something else. Even though this is an implicit point of departure for Heidegger as well, he remains largely unappreciative of German idealism and its attempt to rephrase the ancient quarrel, since it for him represents the penultimate step (to be succeeded by Nietzsche) on the way towards the completion of metaphysics as absolute subjectivity. 14. Friedrich Hölderlin, Letter to Neufer (October 10, 1794), in Sämtliche Werke Bd. 6, ed. Friedrich Beissner and Adolf Beck (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1959), 137. The interpreters however disagree fundamentally on where this line should be drawn: between Kant’s aesthetic (subjective) idea and Plato’s (objective) idea, as the letter seems to suggest, or between sensibility and reason, or between theoretical and practical reason. 269 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought Hölderlin, on the other hand, is located as the major exception, and for Heidegger, Hölderlin’s step does not lead beyond in the sense of an intensifying and completion of modern subjectivity, but back: his “Schritt über” is a “Schritt zurück,” a step back into another dimension where the unthought essence of metaphysics begins to appear,15 even though Hölderlin takes this step as a poet, not as a thinker. Already before The Origin of the Work of Art (1935-36), this is staked out in the readings of “Germanien” and “Der Rhein” in 1934-35, and it would become a constant theme in all of the subsequent lectures on Hölderlin: he is pivotal not just because he is assumed to have stepped outside of the horizon of German idealism, but also that of Platonism and of the inception of metaphysics. His poems are not “aesthetic,” and they do not deploy “metaphors” – since this would mean to remain in the division between the sensible and the supersensible – but instead point in the direction of another thought, although remaining in the sphere of poetry. In this context it is highly signiicant that Hölderlin translates and comments on Sophocles, even through this work never becomes central in Heidegger’s many interpretations. When Hölderlin, in the comments to his translations of Oedipus and Antigone speaks of the “ceasura” of tragedy, its “counter-rhythmic interruption” and “categorical turning,” this may be read as another case of a disclosure of something in the Greek origin that resists being appropriated by philosophy (and indeed also, as many have noted, also resists Heidegger’s own appropriation of Hölderlin).16 In the constellation of poetry and thought that Heidegger wants to discern in Hölderlin we ind ourselves in a split time, 15. “The step back” is analyzed in relation to Hegel’s completion of metaphysics, in Heidegger, Identität und Diferenz (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957). To my knowledge, Heidegger never comments on Hölderlin’s letter to Neufer and its thesis of a step beyond Kant. 16. For a discussion of Hölderlin’s theory of tragedy, developing through the three successive versions of Empedocles and culminating in the translations and interpretations of Oeidipus och Antigone, see Véronique Marion Fóti, Epochal Discordance: Hölderlin’s Philosophy of Tragedy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006). 270 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought on the one hand marked by the light of gods, on the other hand by an attitude of waiting. The call of the poet opens an intermediary time that on the one hand may be seen as melancholy and backward-looking, on the other hand perceives the origin as that which still has to return to us from the future. In this, Hölderlin shares something of the experience of the thinker who thinks the withdrawal of being, which the poet poetizes in the “basic attunement” of “holy grief” (”heilige Trauer”) determined by the light of the gods (the most systematic presentation can be found in the second chapter in GA 39, § 8-11). In both of these experiences, disappearance and withdrawal are given as modes of suspended presence: neither the gods of the poet nor the being of the thinker were once simply there in order to subsequently disappear, just as little as they at some future moment will reappear after having been absent, instead the structure withdrawal-return is mode in which being and gods are present in the now. Heidegger’s many descriptions of this temporal loop in Hölderlin echo Nietzsche’s prophesy of the death of God (which for Nietzsche too is an event in the past, although it has yet to reach us in all of its implications), but he also distances himself explicitly from Nietzsche, whose diagnosis of modern nihilism for Heidegger remains entangled in Platonism and thus is more of a symptom than a remedy.17 Hölderlin, on the other hand, he suggests, thinks the “coming god” (or gods) in way that is removed from modern subjectivism and will to power, just as from every theological framework, Christian or non-Christian.18 17. Heidegger’s evaluation of Nietzsche shifts over the years, although the general tendency seems to be that the initially positive view in 1936 becomes increasingly negative. On the death of God, see Heidegger, “Nietzsches Wort: Gott ist tot,” in Holzwege, GA 5. 18. This is particularly emphasized in Beiträge zur Philosophie, GA 65 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1989). Heidegger here develops a vocabulary to speak of God (or god) and gods, the content of which is even more diicult to grasp than in the case of Hölderlin, where the Christian references can hardly be left out. It is diicult to see how these terms can be emptied of all theological content and yet remain operative, even as almost formal structures of temporality. Ways of developing these igures even further can be found in Derrida’s “messiancity without messianism,” although 271 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought But is it at all possible for thought to follow the trail of Hölderlin, and what does this imply for the relation between thought and poetry? If the poet names the holy in – or as – its own absence, is it then possible for thought to relect this poetic experience without making into another objectiied theme and depriving it of its strangeness? This possibility is crucial for Heidegger, and this is his ground for rejecting the idea of poetic images and metaphors, since they always imply the possibility of a translation into a proper meaning, i.e. the sublation of poetry’s sensible images into the intelligible medium of the philosophical concept, as Hegel would say. Thus, to the extent that we at all may speak of a “connection of images” in Hölderlin, we should instead attempt to “receive it in its veiling power” (GA 39, 119), and such images “should not clarify, but veil, not render familiar, but strange, nor bring closer, but place at a distance” (116). The reception of Heidegger’s encounter with Hölderlin for a long time largely rested on the essays collected in Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung (a irst version was published in 1944, a second and enlarged one in 1951, and then several subsequent editions with new material). This volume however only gives an indirect picture of Heidegger’s successive readings during the ‘30s and ‘40s, which can now be traced in the lecture series on “Germanien” and “Der Rhein” (1934-35), on “Andenken” (1941-42), on “Der Ister” (summer 1942), in the fragmentary series on “Dichten und Denken” from 1944, interrupted when Heidegger at the end of the was called into military service, and inally in the notes and unpublished manuscripts from 1939 onward, published under the title Zu Hölderlin (GA 75). Apart from the principal philosophical question, the relation between poetry and thought, these lecture volumes also evince much more clearly the strong political claims being made. Hölderlin they are in the end just as ambivalent, and have generated a long debate about a possible religious turn in Derrida’s late work. See, for instance Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx (Paris: Galilée, 1983) and La religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Paris: Seuil, 2001). 272 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought has a message to the Germans of the present, and in poetizing a future Germany he asks whether the Germans are ready for his words, if they are able to enter into a fundamental history. Hölderlin’s poetry, Heidegger says, is a “decision concerning time, in the sense of the originary time of diferent peoples (GA 39, 51).19 Even though these claims about the originary are often presented in opposition to the political debates of the moment, they are still at crucial moments directly connected to immediate events, so that sudden raging attacks on the “American lack of history and self-destruction” that motivates the US entry into the “planetary war” after Pearl Harbor (GA 53, 68) may be inserted into explications of Sophocles. When Philippe LacoueLabarthe summarizes his extensive work on Heidegger, he suggests that it is these texts that we ind Heidegger’s proper political philosophy, and the “national aestheticism” that led him to understand the state as a work of art is developed above all in the dialog with Hölderlin.20 The tonality of these lectures shifts between the demand for heroic action and, as the war progresses, an increasing sense of desperation: the apocalypse, the dramatic decision concerning the fate of the West – often, though not always, identiied with the fate of Germany – is close. At the end, in the inal lectures from 1944, the question of nihilism and the death of God, as a question of the loss of direction and ground in the contemporary moment, inally settles on the constellation NietzscheHölderlin, and the possibility to understand the sense of the “Now” (was ist Jetzt?), can only come through a more profound 19. The theme of historicity is central throughout the ‘20s, and after the turn it becomes a question of the history of being, which can no longer be thought on the basis of Dasein’s existential structure. In the mid ‘30s it also becomes a question of the particular historical fate of Germany, as “metaphysical middle” (metaphysische Mitte) between the Soviet East and the American West. For the theme of historicity in the Hölderlin lectures, see Susanne Ziegler, Heidegger, Hölderlin und die Aletheia: Martin Heideggers Geschichtsdenken in seinen Vorlesungen 1934/35 bis 1944 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1991). 20. See Lacoue-Labarthe, La politique du poème. The concept “national aestheticism” is ist discussed in Lacoue-Labarthe, La iction du politique: Heidegger, l’art et la politique (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1988). 273 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought understanding of their relation. There is a “peculiar necessity in the mutual historical relation” between Nietzsche and Hölderlin – “Nietzsche, who as a thinker is a poet,” and “Hölderlin, who as a poet is a thinker” (GA 50, 96) – in such a way that they both go beyond us and our present, but in this also come toward is from the future. The irst diicult in discerning their relation is that they are “ininitely separated,” as if there would be an ininite diference “in that which is, namely being itself” (103), and it is only through this diference that we may understand what is hidden in the insigniicant “and” that connects poetry and thought. The second diiculty is that the question is posed from the point of view of thought, and “that we, as thinking and relecting, when relect on thought and poetry, already are placed on one side of the relation between thought and poetry, so that everything that is to be said in advance becomes one-sided.” (145) The lectures end by stating these diiculties, and we seem have ended in an aporia. The 1944 lectures thus mark the endpoint of the irst phase in Heidegger’s dialog with poetry, both in terms of external biography and internal thematic development. When this thread is picked up again after the war, the tonality is diferent. This is also where many have seen a third phase in Heidegger’s thought in general, where the key problems would no longer be the critical thinking through of the history of metaphysics, but the essence of technology, man’s possibility of dwelling in the world, and a transformed relation to language. Even though all of these themes are present earlier, there is undoubtedly a new approach, where the activist and apocalyptic attitude of the writings from the later ‘30s to the end of the war, which emphasized a set of concepts tinted by voluntarism, such as project, projection, decision etc., is succeeded by a more meditative stance bases in listening, waiting, letting-be (Seinlassen), and release (Gelassenheit). The question whether the poet, in the words from “Andenken” that were chosen as the epigraph to the irst Hölderlin lectures from 1934-35, can found that which remains, or lasts, depending on how we understand the German (Was 274 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought aber bleibt, stiften die Dichter), now appears in a diferent light. Even though earlier interpretations too insisted on questioning, on the experience of waiting, expectancy, and absence, there is still a shift, where the founding of the poet is called into question. The seminal essay on Rilke in the immediate aftermath of the war, ”Wozu Dichter” (1946), testiies to this. If Hölderlin, Heidegger reminds us at the end of the essay, is still the one who in advance sets the measure for the poet’s search of the holy, “which is why no poet in our age can surpass him” (GA 5, 320),21 then Rilke’s attempts to grasp the holy in the form of the angel remains caught up in a Nietzschean philosophy of life. But at the same time, Rilke’s attempt to follow the traces of the holy into an inner space – which for Heidegger, the poet’s various turns notwithstanding remains a space of consciousness – seems to constitute our inescapable predicament, and in this sense Rilke points to a limit of the modern poetic project, also in Heidegger’s own thought.22 4. The Later Dialog Between Poetry and Thought The later essays that we ind in On the Way to Language are not in the same way as the readings of Hölderlin inserted into a 21. In many of Heidegger’s statements, Hölderlin remains the very model of the poet, although he no longer plays the same role as historical break with metaphysics, as can be seen by the rather sparse references to him in On the Way to Language. The key document in this transformation is the uninished manuscript “Das abendländische Gespräch” (1946-48), Zu Hölderlin; Griechenlandreisen, GA 75, (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000). For a discussion of this shift in a general context, see Robert Savage, Hölderlin After the Catastrophe: Heidegger, Adorno, Brecht (Rochester: Camden House, 2008). 22. The ambivalent attitude in 1946 is a considerable displacement from the more unequivocally negative remarks in the lecture series on Parmenides 1942-43, where Heidegger wholly rejects all ainities between the openness in aletheia and “the Open” in the eighth Duino Elegy; see Parmenides, GA 54, (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1982), 226f. Heidegger and Rilke can be made to communicate in other and perhaps more fertile ways, for instance through the idea of “becoming-thing” (Dingwerdung) in Rilke’s earlier work, and Heidegger’s relections on technology; see Christoph Jamme, “Der Verlust der Dinge,” in Martin Heidegger: Kunst – Politik – Technik, ed. Christoph Jamme and Karsten Harries (Munich: Fink, 1992). 275 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought historical project to overcome metaphysics. Even though such claims are not entirely absent, as in the interpretation of Trakl in “Language in the Poem,” where the motif of “going under” is understood as “going over” into an “early time,” the dramatic overtones of a momentous historical decision have been considerably subdued. What is at stake here is not the dismantling of metaphysics, but rather what Heidegger later will propose in the lecture “Zeit und Sein” (1962), to “leave metaphysics to itself” and instead to approach the “clearing” (Lichtung), the appropriation, and openness as a constant possibility, which indicates an abandoning of the idea of something originary that would have been withdrawn from thought at some point in time.23 Rather than a rereading of the history of philosophy in search of the unthought, the task is to approach the world and man’s dwelling in it. The fourfold (Geviert) of mortals and immortals, heaven and earth, is the new constellation that describes our way of being in the world, and the exchange with poetry is conducted in order to elucidate this condition. If language, as Heidegger famously says in Brief über den Humanismus (1946) is the “house of being” (GA 9, 313) and thinkers and poets are its custodians, who bring the openness of being to language and preserve it in language, the question becomes how we should understand our dwelling in language, and what language must be if it is to give us guidelines for dwelling. Once more the poem leads the way, which is now explicitly a “way to language” as a site or place to inhabit. As we shall, this spatiality is not simply an analogy: if the dialog requires an openness, a vicinity that opens and holds together the in-between in which it may unfold,24 then this will be connected in a particular and emphatic way with dwelling 23. See “Zeit und Sein” and “Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens,” in Martin Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1976). 24. The dialog would in this sense face the same problem as dialectics, since every dia-legesthai requires an In-Between, a Zwischen, as Heidegger notes in “Hegels Begrif der Erfahrung,” Holzwege GA 5, 183, 201. That Hegel, at least as Heidegger sees it, inally forgets this in-between would be one of the reasons for the one-sided in his relation to the poem. 276 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought and the dimensionality of the world. The conversation (Gespräch) or dialog (Zwiegespräch) takes place in language, but it cannot be governed by the rules of literary studies, linguistics, aesthetics, or some other discipline that studies our way of handling language; it belongs to thought, and even more to that which forces itself onto thought as a necessary task. This was emphasized already from the irst lectures on Hölderlin onward, it recurs from one end to the other of Heidegger’s work, and one of the last cases is the laconic preface to the third edition (1971) of Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung: “The present Elucidations do not claim to be contributions to research in the history of literature or to aesthetics. They spring from a necessity of thought” (GA 4, 7).25 In the earlier versions of this claim, this airmation of thought’s autonomy was made in the name of a historical necessity and destiny that governed the exchange between poetry and thought; later, it is based on the fundamentally diferent relation that thought has to language. Many objections can and have been voiced against such claims. It is by no means self-evident that we must accept such a division of labor between literary studies and philosophy, or the kind of immunity here claimed by “thought” to philological questions and criticism developed on the basis of techniques of textual analysis. Modern phenomenological, hermeneutic, and deconstructive literary theories have developed many of Heidegger’s themes in a way that opposes the one-sided nature of the exchange; others have shown how Heidegger’s readings in many cases rest on philological decisions that cannot be justiied simply by an appeal to the necessity of thought. Similarly, the determination of aesthetics that underlies Heidegger’s claims – that it is a theory framing and specifying a particular type of experience of pleasure, for which truth is irrelevant – is by no means undisputed, as is demonstrated by Adorno’s aesthetics, and in particular by the important role played by 25. English translation by Keith Holler, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry (Amherst: Humanity Books, 2000), 21. 277 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought Hölderlin in Adorno’s account of modern art. And as we noted earlier, Heidegger’s own historical genealogy of aesthetics can be questioned on many points, not just because of lacking historical precision, but also because it neglects the transformative potential that exist in the early forms of aesthetics in the eighteenth century, and have accompanied modern philosophy as a constant subtext. On the question of one-sidedness that Heidegger himself brings up, it may at irst seem like a trivial necessity; Heidegger is a philosopher and makes no claim to be a poet.26 And furthermore, the position accorded to thought in this exchange is not simply one of superiority – neither a conceptual subsumption nor a lifting up into the concept, as in Hegel – but one of listening in a particular way, so that a truth unfolds that belongs to neither of them as such, only to the in-between. In this Heidegger continues a line of thought originating in early German idealism, and that he extends as far as possible, which is what ultimately renders his meditations on poetry so refractory to discursive classiication. Thought must relect poetry in itself, not in order to master it though a relective relation that only inds its own projections, but in order to be led along by the poetic word, and from the resonances created by the parallel of the two modes of saying extract something that it would not be able to say in its own. To be sure, there is a danger that thought overinterprets – but this danger, Heidegger says, above all lies in “that we will think to little, and reject the thought that the true experience with language can only be a thinking experience.” And he continues: 26. Similarly to the lectures from 1944, Heidegger notes en passant that there are other types of dialogs, for instance the one between poets, which he here even calls “the true dialogue”: “Only a poetic dialogue with a poet’s poem is a true dialogue – the poetic conversation between poets.” (UZS 34/161). Consequently, if only in order to complete the cycle of permutations, there might then be a dialog between poet and thinker occurring from the poet’s point of view, and belonging exclusively to the latter without laying any claim to be thought. Heidegger provides no examples, but perhaps the latter might be exempliied by Hölderlin’s writings, particularly those on tragedy. 278 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought But if what matters irst of all is a thinking experience, then why this stress on a poetic experience? Because thinking in turn goes its ways in the neighborhood of poetry. It is well, therefore, to give thought to the neighbor, to him who dwells in the same neighborhood. Poetry and thought, each needs the other in its neighborhood, each in its fashion, when it comes to ultimates. In what region the neighborhood itself has its domain, each of them, thought and poetry, will deine diferently, but always so that they will ind themselves within the same domain. (UZS 163/69) Before we look more closely on the enigmatic vicinity of art and poetry, or on the element in which their unity in diference unfolds, we must pose the more general question of language as such – although, as we will see, the idea of “generality” is possibly misleading, and here too Heidegger’s relections on language articulate themselves through a reading of a particular poet. The essay that opens Unterwegs zur Sprache, “Die Sprache,”27 is organized around a reading of one poem of Trakl, and although the themes extracted have an obvious bearing on the whole of his claims about the structure of the world, they remain attached to a particular interpretation, although one that, as we will see, constitutes an example with exemplary value. One of the most common and traditional determination of man is that he is the zoon logon echon, the living being endowed with reason or language – this is what makes us human, as Humboldt once claimed. We are always speaking, Heidegger notes at the outset, we speak we are awake, in dreams, even when we are not uttering a single word, and in this sense language permeates out being beyond the linguistic in a limited sense. But what is man, so that language can belong to him in such an intimate way? Language is indeed in the “closest vi27. This text is not included in On the Way to Language, and is here cited in the translation of Albert Hoftstadter, in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1971). 279 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought cinity to the human being” (“die nachste Nachbarschaft des Menschenwesens,” UZS 9/189), Heidegger says; but how are we to approach this vicinity and this essence? Traditionally, essence has been understood as generality, but Heidegger cautions us that we should not force any general framework onto language, since this brings it under the rule of framing and positing, of Stellen and Vorstellen – and thus ultimately under the rule of technology as framing, as Ge-Stell, which for Heidegger is the horizon of all modern philosophies of language and linguistic theories. The task for a thought that is “on the way to…” is rather to approach the site of language, which means to situate (erörten) it and thereby bring us closer to the site. In bringing us closer, it also shows how language approaches us as a gathering in the enownment or appropriation (both of which have been proposed as translations of Ereignis), that which makes possible a new relation to being because it has always been there as the unacknowledged background of all metaphysical representations. This means that we must approach language itself, without attempting to ground it in something else,28 for instance in the view that its source would be in us, since we are the ones who use it for our own aims. At irst this reversal appears as an empty tautology: “Language itself is: language and nothing else. Language itself is language.” (“Die Sprache selbst ist: die Sprache und nichts ausserdem. Die Sprache selbst ist die Sprache.”) (10/190) This approach is however also the way in which language approaches us, its essence as presencing, or es28. Similar formulas are frequent in Heidegger’s later work, for instance in the essay “Das Ding,” where the thinghood of the thing is brought back to its own mode of presencing in the duplicative formula “the things things,” das Ding dingt. Already in the 1919 lectures Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, GA 56/57 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1987) we ind an early instance of a similar verbal construction, “es weltet” (GA 56/57, 73), and in the published works it appears for the irst time in the aftermath of Being and Time, in “Vom Wesen des Grundes” (1928), when Heidegger stresses that “Welt ist nie, sondern Welt weltet” (GA 9, 219): the world is never something that is, it “worlds,” and must be thought on the basis of its own presencing instead of as a collection of objects. 280 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought sencing, according to Heidegger’s understanding of wesen as verbal, “coming-into-presence.” This is the speaking of language itself: “Language speaks” (ibid), in a formula whose duplication is even more striking in the German: Die Sprache spricht (ibid). This overturning of the formula implies that we must neither understand language irst and foremost as a tool among others, which was basically the conception of Being and Time, nor as an objective system that precedes the speaker’s individual moves in the game, as in various structuralist theories, for instance Saussure’s langue. Both of them would be diferent instances of a technological view of language that prevents us from seeing how we inhabit it as the ones who addressed by, caught in, the Zuspruch of its essence (Zuspruch, “address,” can also mean “promise,” as if the coming-toward-us of language is also a promise given to us in which we must trust).29 From the point of view of classical (and modern) foundationalist metaphysics, the step back from grounding and into presencing may seem like falling into an abyss. This was in fact how also language began to appear on the horizon of modern philosophy, most famously in Hamann’s rejoinder to Kant, “Metakritik über den Purismus der Vernunft” (1784). As Hamann claims, any determination of a transcendental sphere already presupposes language, also in the empirical sense of natural languages, and Kant’s a priori universalism necessarily draws on temporally and spatially located signiications whose 29. Heidegger’s dismissal of linguistics and modern philosophies language, together with the absence of “technical” rigor in his meditations, can of course give rise to a vast spectrum of criticism, of which he is not unaware. Ultimately it has to do with his stance on modern technology, which he in the case of language sees as embodied in “metalinguistics”: “Metalinguistics is the metaphysics of the thoroughgoing technicalization of all languages into the sole operative instrument of interplanetary information. Metalanguage and sputnik, metalinguistics and rocketry are the same.” (UZS 150/58) As Derrida notes, the insistence on language as always already there not only renders objectiication and metalinguistics impossible, but also displaces the priority of the question, which had been a guiding motif throughout all of Heidegger’s earlier writings. See the long note in Jacques Derrida, De l’esprit: Heidegger et la question (Paris: Galilée, 1986), 152f. 281 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought priority seems impossible to account for in transcendental philosophy. In Hamann, this criticism however relects an empiricist motif that is foreign to Heidegger, who cites a more dramatic letter of Hamann to Herder, where he speaks of the identity of reason and language as an “abyss,” the key to which can only be provided by an “apocalyptic angel” (Hamann, cited in UZS 10f/191). The abyss, Heidegger suggests, however only appears as something negative if our quest is for a ground. If this is given up, the vertiginous hovering described by Hamann instead allows us to “fall upward, to a height,” and to open up a new depth, both of which measure a “realm” in which we may feel at home, since the speaking of language constitutes the “dwelling place” (Aufenthalt) for mortal human beings (ibid/191f). Before approaching this place, Heidegger briely overviews a series of traditional conceptions of speaking, not in order to reject them, but rather to understand them as derived from a more originary level. The most basic view of language in modernity is that of an activity whose external side is made up of physiological features, but on the inside is in the service of the communication of inner movements of the human mind. In this is presupposed the idea of speech as an expression of an inside in an outside, that speaking is a particular human activity, and that man in his expressions represents and presents what is real or unreal. Other and more traditional conceptions emphasize a divine origin, or the basis in images and symbolism, so that theology, anthropology, poetics, and a host of other disciplines can be summoned to contribute to a study of man as a creator of symbolic orders. Both of them for Heidegger however belong to a traditional metaphysical view that has remained the same since antiquity, and which may indeed be correct (Richtig), precisely because it moves in the sphere of truth as correctness and correspondence established by Plato, but that does not reach the dimension of truth, language as language, which is the “oldest essential characteristic” (die älteste Wesensprägung, UZS 13/193). 282 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought 5. The Exemplary Example But how are we to approach this speaking? Here we ind the claim for a priority of poetry, established in a series of moves that we must follow more closely. First, speaking can best be found in the spoken, where it has completed and gathered itself. But any random instance of the spoken cannot suice, since it mostly appears as the past of an act of speaking, as a mere remainder. We must rather ind something that is “spoken purely” (ein rein Gesprochenes, UZS 14/194), where perfection, Heidegger says, is also a beginning (which implicitly signiies a location outside of everyday temporality, although it is not developed here), as is the case in the poem. Further on, Heidegger suggests that poetry is not primarily a higher and more achieved form of everyday language – which would suggest that the poetic dimension, perfection notwithstanding, is an extension, and as such superluous in normal use – but that everyday language is a “forgotten and used-up poem” (28/208) whose call can barely be perceived anymore. In a substitution reminiscent of Plato’s Symposium – where Socrates notes that we often name the whole, poiesis as production in the most general sense, bringing something from non-being into being, after the most eminent part, poiesis as poetry – Heidegger’s poetry (Dichtung) is not identical to literature or a genre of literature (Poesie), and yet it bears no other name than Dichtung. It is the origin of language, and not one its speciic uses, which is why it unfolds in a time of its own that does not simply pass, but preserves the spoken as the possibility of new beginning. But if “poem” does not denote a particular literary genre, and prose can be just as “poetic,” why should then a particular poem be our guide? Is the selection of poetry, and furthermore of one speciic poem, not simply arbitrary? Heidegger here performs a move that we can recognize from Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, in claiming that we must always begin at a particular place, in front of a singular work, which then opens up a truth that belongs to its own way of speaking. This is a circular movement in which we must trust, Heidegger says in Der Ursprung; here, he suggests that the speaking of language has already been thought to us (zuge283 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought dacht) in the manner of an approach that guides us onward. In Der Ursprung, van Gogh’s painting was one example of how an artwork can open a truth, but also an exemplary initial example, in showing us the more general structure of earth and world that is subsequently developed in relation to the Greek temple. Similarly, in discussing Trakl’s poem, “A Winter Evening,” Heidegger traces, through its particular features, a spatial and temporal movement that describes the structure of the world, and that will be decisive for his further meditation on language as an opening onto the fourfold. From the irst stanza that speaks of what is outside, to the second that sets up an opposition between those that are home and the “wandering ones,” and the third that brings the two together by inviting the wanderer into the house, where the table is set with “bread and wine,” the basic regions of the fourfold are outlined, and in this sense Trakl’s poem too is an exemplary example with a general signiicance. And while it is true that the dialog intended by Heidegger to some extent can disregard the question of generality, if the latter simply would be derived from concepts given in advance – it does claim to be a general theory of literature, or an aesthetic that lays down general features of literary experience, but something like the record of a singular encounter that forces thought to respond – the choice of a particular poem as a guide to the general structure of the world still seems in need of further elaboration, also on the historical level. How, for instance, should we locate Trakl with respect to the lineage extending from Hölderlin to Rilke? Is Trakl a speciically modern poet, or does he occupy an even more exorbitant position than his two predecessors? Does Trakl’s “purely spoken,” outside of the low of everyday occurrences, point to founding of that which remains, as in Hölderlin? Heidegger stresses that we need to hold traditional concepts of the poet’s individuality at bay if we are to grasp how the poem can constitute an opening to the world. If the poem just as little as language as such can be understood as an expression of “movements of the mind,” i.e. an expression of the poet’s inner states, neither can it be grasped on the basis of the imagi284 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought nation that “imagines” something in the domain of representation. But if expression, imagination, and representation as such are insuicient to situate the essence of language, and the only measure for this situating is given by the singularity of poem, then this in turn constitutes a limit for thought, a given that cannot be further explained, only experienced as a hint or indication: ”The poem cited has been chosen because, in a way not further explicable, it demonstrates a peculiar itness to provide some fruitful hints for our attempt to situate language” (USZ 17/198). There is something like a logic of examplarity at work here, where the example (the Beispiel) it at once only an example, something located alongside, even outside the movement of showing, and wholly essential, since its particular features is what orients the whole of this movement.30 The reading, which I here will follow in some detail, focuses on particular words and locutions of Trakl’s poem, which reads as follows: Window with falling snow is arrayed, Long tolls the vesper bell, The house is provided well, The table is for many laid. Wandering ones, more than a few, Come to the door on darksome courses. Golden blooms the tree of graces Drawing up the earth’s cool dew. 30. This “not further explicable” is akin to the intrusion of a seemingly insigniicant “And yet” (Und dennoch) in Der Usprunf des Kunstwerkes. On one level we are caught in a aporia – the context of van Gogh’s shoes is too indeterminate, we cannot go any further – and yet, there is a light that begins to glow from inside the shoes, and the following ekphrasis is just as much an epiphany, where we are transported “elsewhere,” as Heidegger writes. The idea of exemplarity is developed in great detail in Derrida, and I borrow it from the reading of Kant’s third Critique proposed in La vérité en painture (Paris: Galilée, 1974). Derrida is also attentive to the rhetorical details in Heidegger’s van Gogh ekphrasis, though the idea of exemplarity is only hinted at; see whole of chap 4, “Restitutions,” but especially 365f. 285 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought Wanderer quietly steps within; Pain has turned the threshold to stone, There lie, in limpid brightness shown, Upon the table bread and wine.31 The irst stanza names both thing and world, and calls upon the mortals, and in this it preigures the following. A founding claim of Heidegger’s reading is that this naming of things bids, calls or summons them (Rufen and Heissen are uses throughout) into word and language, instead of being added to already given entities as linguistic ornaments. What is called into language is brought close, or rather placed in a particular proximity that includes both presencing and absencing, the near and the distant. These are given a new dimension in being brought into language: the falling snow and the evening bell in the poem are both here, although not in the same way as things in everyday life, and when Heidegger rhetorically asks which of the two modes of presence is the highest, we may no doubt read him as saying that the presence that unfolds in the poem is the eminent one. Even though the sentences in the poem, in using what appears like a determining “is,” may seem like propositions that record or propose facts, they rather bring entities into presencing. (This, we might add, is what is insuiciently understood when one speaks of poetry as constitutive of an imaginary world, since this always is a modiication, no matter how autonomous, of a real and already given world outside of language.) The call of the poem bids things to come, not simply as present things among other things, but to a diferent “place of arrival” (Ort der Ankunft, 19/199) – a place or site that will be fourfold. 31. Eng. translation by Hofstadter, from Poetry, Language, Thought. German original: ”Wenn der Schnee ans Fenster fällt, / Lang die Abendglocke läutet, / Vielen ist der Tisch bereitet / Und das Haus ist wohlbestellt. // Mancher auf der Wanderschaft / Kommt ans Tor auf dunklen Pfaden. / Golden blüht der Baum der Gnaden / Aus der Erde kühlem Saft. // Wanderer tritt still herein; / Schmerz versteinerte die Schwelle. / Da erglänzt in reiner Helle / Auf dem Tische Brot und Wein.” 286 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought After these initial remarks, Heidegger’s reading will proceed to show how the three stanzas of the poem gradually unfold the structure of the world as the fourfold. The igure of Fourfold, which comprises heaven and earth, the immortals and the divine, is one of the decisive ideas in Heidegger’s later work, and it may seem like a relapse into a crude mythology that simply takes leave of all recognizable philosophical explication, not least the element of phenomenological “showing” and “intuition,” and instead extrapolates from particular types of poetry, or even particular poems. Most readers of Heidegger have attempted to derive this idea from Hölderlin, who uses many similar of not wholly identical expressions, and other sources in the philosophical tradition have also been cited, for instance Plato, Aristotle, and even Kant.32 Regardless of what the sources may be, authors from the history of philosophy or particular poets or poems, in the present context it is important to follow how Heidegger, to be sure on the basis of a single poem, develops the new idea of world.33 As an originary unity, the fourfold revolves around the thing, which is not an object for a consciousness, but has an active way of presencing that Heidegger calls “thinging” (dingen). Thinging is what “gives world,” i.e. allows to the world to appear to us as that of which we are already a part, also in a temporal sense that, 32. The relevance of this historical background has been argued in great detail by Jean-François Mattéi, Heidegger et Hölderlin: Le Quadriparti (Paris: PUF, 2001), and L’ordre du monde: Platon – Nietzsche – Heidegger (Paris: PUF, 1989). Here we must also note a shift from the earlier readings of Hölderlin that, as we saw, emphasized the absence and distance of the holy in terms of grief, whereas the fourfold seems to signal a kind of return, although in a way that transforms the earlier question rather than providing a response to it. 33. Unlike the concept of world in Being and Time, the fourfold can no longer be understood as a moment in the projective structure of Dasein and its temporality. There is also an important displacement in relation to Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, where the world as unconcealment was set against the earth as concealment. As can be seen in some propositons in Der Ursprung, and more clearly in the reading of Sophocles in Einführung in die Metaphysik, openness must be achieved through power or violence (Gewalt), whereas the world in the later texts is described in terms of release, stillness, and rest. 287 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought in consonance with the purely spoken in the temporality of the poem, points to the permanence and continuity of the world: things linger and abide (währen). The call of the poem is what calls things to thinging, i.e. allows this dimension to be seen and understood in showing us how things give a world by bearing it to us, giving birth to it, in what Heidegger calls their “gestures” (Gebärde here plays on the closeness to gebären, giving birth, both of which, as we shall see, signal the material, corporeal, and earthly dimension, and why the insistence on language is not a linguistic idealism). “Thinging, they gesture – gestate – world” (“Dingend, gebärden sie Welt,” UZS 19/200), Heidegger writes in a compressed formula. The second stanza begins from the point of view of the mortals. While death and mortality is not explicitly mentioned in the poem, which speaks only of “wandering ones,” Heidegger interprets this as a mode of erring and straying connected to initude. The wanderers are thus those who are capable of dying, of a death that “has already overtaken every dying” (UZS 20/200). The mortal ones are however not singular, isolated igures, riveted to their own fate, but reach out to the others, and in this they can be understood as igures of the poet that we can recognize from the earlier readings of Hölderlin, where the idea of poet as a mediator is a persistent theme. Their wandering and their relation to death are for the sake of the many, in order to show them that their belonging to a home and a place is illusory if it has not passed through the exterior and the foreign, i.e. has been exposed to the possibility of loss inherent in initude. The second part of the stanza moves on to name that which binds the four in the fourfold together to a world, the “tree of graces.” Here we also encounter the moment of beauty, as a radiance (Schein) that belongs to the world and the poem alike, which indicates that it must be thought outside of aesthetics that reduces beauty to mere sensuous appearance.34 Rather than 34. Heidegger refers the “golden” in Trakl’s poem to Pindar, Isthmian V, and the radiance that permeates everything. Already in Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes Heidegger referred to beauty as above all related to shining 288 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought an ornamental or accessory dimension, beauty’s radiance is what grants things their essencing, and is a dimension of the way in which the poem bids thing and world to come together into a unity. This unity is however not identity: world and thing come together in that they both traverse a “middle” (Mitte, 22/202) through which they achieve unity, intimacy, or a common depth (Innigkeit).35 The in-between (das Zwischen) makes possible a being-together where the parts remain separated in their unity and united in their diference: it is the Unter-Schied, or the dif-ference. This dif-ference is of a unique kind: it is not a general concept that subsumes particular diferences; it not the diference of distinction added by a relection in representation, or an empirical diference between objects, but that which appropriates world and thing and releases them into their own; it gives a dimension to thing and world, as both turned toward and away from each other. It is One, unique and singular, in prying the middle apart and bearing world and thing onto each other, which also means to decide their relations (this dual dimension of tragen is distributed to two terms, zutragen and austragen), or the Diaphora in the eminent Greek sense of the term, and radiance, and in many places he would point to Plato’s determination of the idea tou kalou as the most shining and enrapturing, to ekphanestaton kai erasmiotaton (Phaedrus 250d); see, for instance, the interpretation of Hölderlin’s “Wie, wenn am Feiertage…” in Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, GA 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1981), 53. Heidegger’s critique of Plato notwithstanding, the idea of beauty as that which gives visibility and presence to worldly things is a motif that underlies his rejection of aesthetics. 35. The idea of a formative middle, a Mitte that unfolds as the poles of an opposition, and this sense “hovers” between them, is of course a pervasive theme in German Idealism from the early readings of Kant in Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, and it is the guiding thread in Heidegger’s reinterpretation of the concept of imagination as the middle ground or common root of reason and sensibility in Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik from 1929. Already here, Heidegger however presents his own reading as situated at the same level as that of idealism, although moving in the opposite direction (§ 27, note 196). Innigkeit, on the other hand, while a common term in religious language, here comes from Hölderlin, and Heidegger understands it as a belonging together that preserves the difference. Heidegger comments on the theme at length in Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein,” GA 39 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1980), § 19, esp. 248-259. 289 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought which takes us back through Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin’s das Eine in sich selber unterschiedne to his interpretation of the inception of early Greek thinking in Heraclitus.36 The third stanza probes further into the middle of world and thing and how their intimacy is decided. It is the moment when the wanderer enters into the interior, through the gate that opens unto an inner stillness. But here the poet adds a line that marks a strong division between inside and outside, which is crucial for Heidegger’s reading: “Pain has turned the threshold to stone” (“Schmerz versteinerte die Schwelle”). The pain belongs to the past (and it is also described in the poem by the only verb in the past tense), it precedes the moment of passing, but in this also determines it, and signals the decisive dif-ference inside the movement of the poem. The threshold is thus the very igure of the in-between, and its permanence and prevailing power is signaled by the stone, not as a mode of mere inertia, but of continuing presencing. The pain of dif-ference that has petriied the threshold is never simply past, but is equally active in the present: it rends and tears, it is the rift (Riss) that both tears apart and joins together, the “joint” (Fuge) of the intimacy of thing and world. In this sense, pain may be understood as that which holds the fourfold together and pries it apart, it is both diastema and systema in one, and cannot be reduced to an anthropological or psychological state. As dif-rence it determines the clearing of the world, it provides luminosity and radiance to the “bread and wine” that adorn the table inside the house, so that they may shine in their “onefold” or simplicity (Einfalt) and, as gifts of the gods to the mortals, gather the four of the fourfold and allow it to linger and acquire an abiding presence. 36. The traditional formula hen diapheron heauto stems from Heraclitus fragment 51: ou xuniasin hokos diapheromenon heoutoi honomologeei . palintropos harmonie hokoster toxou kai lures (“for they do not understand how that which of from itself difers accords; harmony turned against itself, like the bow and the lyre”), which was transmitted to posterity through the citation in Plato’s Symposium 187a. The paraphrase das Eine in sich selber unterschiedne comes from Hölderlin’s Hyperion, a work that in Heidegger’s reading belongs to a phase when Hölderlin was still struggling to emancipate himself from German idealism. 290 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought This bidding, which gathers thing and world, is the essence of speaking, which as have seen presences in an eminent sense in poetry. Language speaks by bidding thing and world into the in-between of dif-ference, and in this it “expropriates” or “enowns” (enteignet) the thing into the repose of the fourfold, which however does not mean to deprive the thing of something, but to elevate it into its own. The dif-ference stills (stillt) the thing in the world, allows it to rest in the “favor” (Gunst) of the world, but it also allows the world to achieve satisfaction in the thing. Together, these two aspects make up stillness (Stille), which is not meant as a mere silence and absence of sound, but as a rest (Ruhe), itself more in motion than any particular motion.37 Similarly, the bidding that calls thing and world into the rift of the dif-ference is not just simply the production of sound, but draws on something like the origin or condition of sounding, which Heidegger calls the gathered sounding of stillness, or the “peal of stillness” (Geläut der Stille, 27/207). This gathering sounding – which does not in itself signify anything in particular, but can be taken as the resource of all sense and signiication – is nothing human, it is not something in our possession but rather something that possesses us. The human being is something linguistic in the sense that it has been appropriated (ereignet) out of the speaking of language, and thus handed or given over to (übereignet) the presencing of language. The peal of stillness “needs and uses” (braucht, 27/208) mortal speech for its articulation,38 and only as belonging to a gathered stillness 37. These seemingly contradictory claims draw on Heidegger’s many earlier readings of movement and rest in Aristotle, where entelecheia is not just a cessation, but an eminent gathering of the movement of ousia towards its telos, “having-oneself-in-the-end,” as is the literal meaning of Aristotle’s neologism. Similarly, eidos and morphe are not the outer limit, geometric contour or shape – as the Cartesian forma – but the deining moment that makes the thing into what it is. See, for instance, Heidegger, Nietzsche I, 404. 38. “Use” here irst signals the reversal of the idea of man as the user of language, but in other texts it also refers to which in which worldly things are distributed in time and beings are related to being, as in the reading of the Anaximander fragment, “Der Spruch des Anaximander,” GA 5; see also the texts assembled in Der Spruch des Anaximander, GA 73 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2012). 291 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought are we capable of articulated speech. Human speech thus always rests on the speaking of language, which is made invisible as long as we represent speaking as the articulation of inner states. This however leaves open the more precise relation between the peal of stillness and human articulation, which necessarily breaks this stillness. In any case, Heidegger claims, voicing (Verlautbarung) cannot be decisive, and the articulation of speech rather comes out of the dif-ference of stillness in the form of a mode (melos), a particular form that exists against a background of that which has no particular form. In this way, the mortals speak by corresponding and responding (entsprechen), and they must irst have listened to the bidding. Every word speaks out of a listening to language, which also implies a certain withdrawal, a holding back of saying, which marks everything said with a lack or absence. 6. Figures of Vicinity In the above reading of Trakl’s poem, a constantly underlying theme is the proximity of thought and poetry: both of them are moves in language, ways of listening and responding – to be sure not by merging thought and poetry into an indistinct unity, but nevertheless in such a way that something can be transferred from one to the other. This is as it were the condition for the exchange, and in order to elucidate it, we must attempt to approach the neighborhood or vicinity (Nachbarschaft) of poetry and thought, the region (Gegend) in which they unfold. Earlier, this proximity was thematized as mythology, and occasionally this vocabulary recurs in the later writings, although it rarely brought to the fore as a historical hypothesis. An exception would be the lecture series Was heißt Denken? (195152), which belongs to same period as On the Way to Language. Here Heidegger once more returns to the relation between mythos and logos in the context of a discussion of Hölderlins “Mnemosyne” – one of the Titans, and according to Hesiod, the mother of the muses – and suggests that we must not understand the poem as “mythical” in a limited sense, but as that 292 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought which allows the radiannce of presencing: “Mythos means: the saying word. Saying for the Greeks mean: to reveal, allow to appear, namely the radiant and that which presences in radiance, in its epiphany. Mythos is that which presences in its saga: the radiant in the address of its unconcealment.”39 The term mythology is here connected to the “saga” (die Sage), which is the term that will play an increasingly important role, also in On the Way to Language. The term is frequent also in the earlier texts, although it seems to have a more emphatic function in the later work. For Lacoue-Labarthe, the saga is in principle identical to mythos, as it was put forth in Einführung in die Metaphysik, and thus only a verbal variation on the theme of national aestheticism. Even though a certain continuity cannot be denied, one should not overlook the diferences. Sage should rather be understood as a way of relating the two types of saying (Sagen, which must be distinguished from Sage), i.e. poetry and thought; it is a way of approaching that which has not yet been diferentiated, even though it only be rendered visible and come to language as already diferentiated. Something similar applies to the term Dichtung, which in many cases does not refer to a particular mode of writing, but to a “linguisticality” belonging to all the arts, sometimes even in the form of an Urdichtung that also draws together poetry and thought.40 39. Was heißt Denken? (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954), 6. The same suggestions can be found in the 1942-43 lectures on Parmenides (GA 54, 89f, 103f). In a later essay on Parmenides (1952), where Heidegger brings up the question whether we should understand the goddess as a personiication, he proposes a distinction, and says that “we have hardly even considered the mythical, above all not that mythos is saga (Sage), while saying (Sagen) is the bidding bringing-to-radiance. “Moira (Parmenides, Fragment VIII, 34-41),” in Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954), III, 44. 40. For Dichtung as a category that includes the other arts, see the inal sections of Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, GA 5, 59-65. The term Urdichtung appears in the interpretation of the Anaximander fragment: “Thought is nevertheless a poetizing (Dichten), but not just a poem (Dichtung) in the sense of poetry (Poesie) and song. The thought of being is the originary form of poetizing. In this, what irst of all comes to language is language as language, that is, its essence. Thought says the dictation (Diktat) of the truth of being. Thought is the originary dictare. Thought is the originary poetizing 293 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought In order to become useful, Sage must be liberated from its everyday use, which Heidegger exempliies by Grimm’s dictionary, where it is deined as “witnesses of past events that lack historical credibility,” or a “naïve storytelling and tradition, which through its transmission from generation to generation is reshaped by the poetic capacity of popular sensibility.”41 In the essay “The Way to Language,” Heidegger comments: We have a tendency today to use the word “Saga” [Sage; the Eng. trans. here and in the following erroneously gives “Saying”, which renders the whole passage incomprehensible], like so many other words in our language, mostly in a disparaging sense. Saga is accounted a mere say-so, a rumor unsupported and hence untrustworthy. Here “Saga” is not understood in this sense, nor its natural, essential sense as “legends of gods and heroes.” But perhaps as in “the venerable saga of the blue source” (Georg Trakl)? In keeping with the most ancient usage of the word we understand saga on the basis of saying, in terms of showing, and in order to name the saga, to the extent that the order of language rests upon it, we use and old, well-attested although extinct word, die Zeige. (UZS 242/123) The Sage is not a narrative, not even in the form of a “In the beginning was the Word,” rather its role is to establish a bond between the two sayings, that which they must have in com(Urdichtung) that precedes all poetry (Poesie), but is also the poetical (das Dichterische) in art, to the extent that this turns into a work in the domain of language. All poetizing in this wider sense, in the more narrow sense of the poetical, is at bottom a thought. The poetizing essence of thought preserves the abiding of the truth of being.” (GA 5, 328f) In the earlier use of the term in the ‘30s, where it is close to “mythology,” Urdichtung signals a collective dimension, as in early epic poetry (Homer is the case in point), and Heidegger claims that “language is the Urdichtung on which a people poetize being.” Einführung in die Metaphysik, GA 40, 180, my italics. 41. In vol. XIV (1893), cited in the article “Sage,” Lexikon des Mittelalters, vol. 7 (Munich-Zurich: LexMA-Verlag, 1995), col. 1254-1257. 294 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought mon in order to pursue their respective paths. The way back to language, understood as showing (Zeigen, Zeige), which should be connected to the recurrent idea of “gesture,” takes us into a region of communality that we encounter, to be sure not a standing-against, as the ob- of the ob-ject, the Gegenstehen of the Gegenstand, but as the openness that is the condition for all possible relations. This realm, Heidegger says, is a “region” (Gegend) that “encounters” or “comes up against” (gegnet) us, and in turn should be understood as a clearing that sets free, the diferentiating tracing (be-wëgen) of the paths that belong to the region. In the third part in the essay on Stefan George, “The Essence of Language” (the English title given in On the Way to Language, “The Nature of Language,” is misleading) Heidegger directly addresses the possibility of such an experience, in which we are ti become acquainted with the “vicinity” in order to transform our relation to language. We are indeed already there, in the place which is our abode, and yet we are not there: we have yet to approach that which concerns our essence, and in this sense we must always be on the way to language, without ever assuming that we could ever fully posses it or become accustomed to it. This is where the Sage shows us the way. It is that which presences in the diferent forms of saying, without itself being reducible to any of them; it is the possibility of separating and relating them, and appears as their vicinity. Poetry and thinking take on their respective forms in the proximity of the Sage. This is why proximity and Sage can be said to be the Same (das Selbe), which remains diicult to think, Heidegger notes, since it is not any determined content, nothing that is said in the Sage, which is probably also why the term mythology in the end appears misleading. What more can then be said about the proximity that holds vicinity together? We must not understand it in terms of distances that could be measured numerically, Heidegger says, which may seem a superluous remark, but once more links his mediations on language to the spatiality of the world, and to building and dwelling, which might seem to belong in a dif295 WallenStein | the vicinity of Poetry and thought ferent context.42 These themes are however fundamentally connected, also in showing that we are not enclosed in language in a way that would sever us from the outside world; that language speaks does not mean that our agency is transferred to an alien subject or power, or that we are caught in some “prison-house of language,” as in some versions of structuralism and linguistic culturalism. Language is that which bears world to us, lets it presence, and the region is wherein we always move. All measuring and calculating of distances that thinks proximity on the basis of metric magnitudes belong to the “parametric,” a measuring of something via something else, and as long as parametric thoughts holds sway, the proximity of the vicinity remains closes to us, just as the proximity between poetry and thought. Proximity is thus not a distance between two things in the world, but belongs to the fourfold of heaven and earth, mortals and immortals. Just as little as the Sage does the fourfold ofer a narrative or a particular content: it is the way in which the four regions open onto each other, the tracing of their being-together, their relation (Verhältnis, sometimes written Ver-hältnis, in order to indicate the appropriation that precedes the related parts; sometimes Heidegger prefers Bezug). If the Sage appears to be the inal word on the essence of language, this means that it is the relation of all relations, that which holds the world together as a diferentiated unity. In relation to poetry and thought, the Sage is their unity and diference; it is the element of their belonging together, but also 42. These themes are developed above all in “Bauen Wohnen Denken” (1951), in Vorträge und Aufsätze. In his lectures at the Sorbonne in 1959-60, “Husserl aux limites de la phénoménologie,” Merleau-Ponty connects the texts in On the Way to Language (largely focusing on “Die Sprache,” whose irst pages he discusses in some detail) in a productive fashion to Husserl’s theory on the origin of geometry and the “orginary earth” as a ground for all ideal objects, and suggests that Heidegger’s project is best understood as an attempt to show how the layer of linguistic signiication cannot be understood without an embodiment that relates to the earth and to materiality, a “depth” or “verticality” that is the proper sense of the “abyss” that Heidegger speaks of in connection to Hamann. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Notes de cours sur L’origine de la de géometrie de Husserl, ed. Renaud Barbaras and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Paris: PUF, 1998). 296 that which parts into two forms of saying, so that divergence is the relation – not a fusion of the two into one, not a form of mutual exchanges and borrowings, but a “”delicate yet luminous diference” (zarte und helle Differenz, UZ 185/90) between two parallels. They are ininitely separated, and yet, as Heidegger somewhat enigmatically proposes, intersect “in the in-inite” (im Un-endlichen, ibid);43 they intersect in a section that none of the make, just as they emerge out of Sage that splits – has always already split – up. They do not move into a proximity, a vicinity or neighborhood that preexists then, instead the proximity is the event (Ereignis) do their relation, letting them emerge, each for itself. Poetry and thought can neither be uniied nor separated once and for all, since what is propriated or enowned, that which is the eventful in their relation, is their constantly changing separation on the basis of an impossible unity that guides their unceasing and mutual encircling. 43. The hyphenated in-inite (which has disappeared in the English translation) must obviously be distinguished from the ininite, and should probably be linked to Heidegger’s claims that initude must be thought through itself, without any relation to the ininite, which Heidegger somewhat surprisingly claims still was the guiding idea in the analytic of initude in Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (1929); see the seminar on “Zeit und Sein” (Zur Sache des Denkens, 58). In this sense, the negation “in-” would signal a transcendence that remains within an even more radical initude that belongs to the Ereignis.