MASTER THESIS
‘The engagement of poetry that withdraws from reality: preparing a “reading attitude” for an interpretation of contemporary Dutch poetry consulting Heidegger and Blanchot’
Dr. Aukje van Rooden Philosophy University of Amsterdam June 29th 2017 Kim Schoof 10162283 21092 words
I write as if sleeping, and my entire life is an unsigned receipt. - Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
To write is to lose myself, yes, but everyone loses himself, because everything gets lost. I, however, lose myself without any joy – not like the river flowing into the sea for which it was secretly born, but like the puddle left on the beach by the high tide, its stranded water never returning to the ocean but merely sinking into the sand.
- Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
It’s one of those unpleasant opioid feverish half-sleep states, more a fugue-state than a sleep-state, less a floating than like being cast adrift on rough seas, tossed mightily in and out of this half-sleep where your mind’s still working and you can ask yourself whether you’re asleep even as you dream. And any dreams you do have seem ragged at the edges, gnawed on, incomplete.
- David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
We await, I predict, the hero of non-action, the catatonic hero, the one beyond calm […]. - David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Contents
1 Introduction: ‘engagement without engagement’………4
2.1 The poem as founding myth: Lacoue-Labarthe on Heidegger’s conception of poetry...9
2.2 Poetry as an essentially preparatory exercise………..12
2.2.1 The structure of plight: plight without a sense of a plight………...14
2.2.2 Poetry’s ‘taskless’ task……….18
2.2.2.1 Poetry’s task in an era of plight……….18
2.2.2.2 Poetry’s task as restricted to preparation………...………22
2.2.3 The preparation of ‘the passing of the last god’………...25
3.1 Blanchot on Heidegger on Hölderlin………..28
3.2 Awaiting literature: a preparation for Blanchot’s radicalization of Heidegger…………..32
3.3 Literature’s task to be passive: Blanchot’s radicalization of Heidegger……….……37
3.4 Restlessness: the ‘resemblance’ between literature and dreams……….41
4 Conclusion: the engagement at the heart of engagement-lacking literature………..45
Literature……….……..48
1 Introduction: ‘engagement without engagement’
The reflection of the bathroom mirror shows us the poet, engaged in the process of rhythmically brushing his teeth. In a following scene, the poet switches on the light on his bed stand, and lies down to read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah for a while. The poet interrupts his reading session to take up his phone and write an e-mail, addressed to himself, containing a note about the Isenheim Altarpiece that, according to the note, depicts the crucified Christ as a plague patient. In the reflection of his bedroom mirror, we see the poet plugging in his phone and putting away his book. A shot of Utrecht during nighttime is followed by an extensive infra-red shot of a dark bedroom that shows the poet lying in bed, sleeping, moving a bit and kicking at the blankets in his sleep. Throughout the video clip, a voice-over, done by the poet himself, reads the poem ‘List of removals’, which holds the stanza: ‘My faith in Jesus was removed by Jesus,/ with his sad little face./ His removal and refusal/ sit at night with their blood-stained snouts/ on my bed.’1
Maarten van der Graaff (1987), a contemporary Dutch poet who has published two collections of poetry, Vluchtautogedichten in 2013 (‘Getaway Car Poems’), which won the C. Buddingh’-prize for the best debut collection of the year, and Dood werk in 2015 (‘Dead work’), had himself filmed by the Dutch television broadcasting organization VPRO2. VPRO has a YouTube-channel with a series of video clips that give an impression of what keeps contemporary Dutch poets busy in their everyday lives. According to his video clip, Van der Graaff is kept ‘busy’ mainly by one of the least busy activities: sleeping. The video of Van der Graaff’s colleague Hannah van Binsbergen3, whose first collection of poetry, Kwaad gesternte (‘Bad Omens’) came out in 2016 and was immediately awarded the yearly VSB-prize for best poetry collection, follows Van Binsbergen on a dark winter evening. The poet is hanging around in her old and not very neatly maintained house in downtown Amsterdam, wearing an old-fashioned wool sweater, reading Bonjour tristesse and cooking a traditional Dutch meal for her room mates, which is consumed by candlelight in a dining room that a post on literary weblog Tzum describes as ‘a kind of second-hand/junk shop’.4 A voice-over with Van Binsbergen’s voice reads the fourth poem from Kwaad gesternte, ‘Nu is ook nu’ (‘Now Is Also Now’), a title that is granted an ironic flavor by the archaic setting of the video clip.
Whoever does not know much about these poets and has only seen the VPRO video clips might be surprised by the way they are labelled in literary criticism. For the poetry anthology Dichters van het nieuwe millennium (‘Poets of the New Millennium’), compiled in 2016 by three literary scholars, Jos Joosten, professor of Dutch literature at the Radboud
University of Nijmegen, wrote a chapter on Maarten van der Graaff that contains a reflection on the critical reception of his work: ‘Van der Graaff’s poetry, because of its involvement with contemporary social reality, has been labelled ‘politically engaged’ quite often’.5 According to Joosten, many critics agree that Van der Graaff is a political poet and that his poetry ‘engages’ with political and societal issues. Comparable statements are made about Van der Graaff’s colleagues, for whom, Joosten states, the group name ‘New Politicals’ has already been coined. Indeed: the report of the jury that selected Hannah van Binsbergen’s Kwaad gesternte (‘that is clearly related to the poetry of generational partner Maarten van der Graaff’) as last year’s best poetry collection noted that ‘Van Binsbergen’s poetry is rooted firmly in our time’,6 implying that, as a poet, she is occupied with the contemporary (political) situation.
I would say that the main question arising from the example in the above is: if the generation of poets that Van der Graaff and Van Binsbergen are part of produces poetry that shows itself actively concerned with contemporary societal and political issues, why would these same poets simultaneously be so eager to express their urge to withdraw from contemporary society by having themselves filmed either sleeping or ostentatively leading a vintage life? Put differently, as the former phrasing may suggest that ringing these poets’s doorbells and asking them right away could solve the issue: what kind of (political or societal) engagement do Van der Graaff and Van Binsbergen carry out in their work, taking into account that they engage with and withdraw from political or societal reality?
This question has formed the starting point for a twofold research project, of which the following pages contain the first part. The overall aim of the project is to develop a theoretically embedded ‘reading attitude’ that allows for giving readings of Dood werk and Kwaad gesternte that shed light on the way these collections of poetry can be said to ‘engage’, thereby contributing to the discussion that is held in contemporary Dutch studies about how to study the engagement of literature. Although the part of the project that lies in front of you can legitimately be called the first part, the additional part does not qualify so much as the second but rather as the other part: it was written simultaneously and its argument depends just as much on the findings in the first part as it does the other way around.
The other part is dedicated to an elaborate analysis of the omnipresence of the tension touched upon in the above: the tension between the critical reception of Van der Graaff and Van Binsbergen as poets that engage actively with current societal issues and their either sleepy or archaic self-presentation, I argue there, is exemplary for both a tension that
characterizes their work’s content and for the kind of engagement that they can be said to practice in and with their work. Since it is the other part that demonstrates how I claim this form of engagement can be written about in contemporary Dutch studies, and since this first part will only consist of a theoretical preparation of that demonstration, in what follows I will restrict myself to a quick and simplified overview of the academic field of discussion that I want to contribute to with my overall project – the extended version of my analysis of the field of research I tend to contribute to can be found in the other part of my research.
In the study of Dutch literature, the discussion about the ‘engagement’ of literature and how to study it has heated up once more in the last couple of years. New light has been shed on especially the alleged opposition between literary autonomy and engagement, for example in the extensive research project ‘De kracht van de autonome literatuur’ (‘The Power of Autonomous Literature’), lead by dr. Frans Ruiter and dr. Wilbert Smulders between 2009 and 2013. In his dissertation, Door Prometheus geboeid (‘Captivated by Prometheus’),7 Laurens Ham, contributor to this project, argued that several Dutch authors show themselves engaged with contemporary societal issues as a strategy: they do so to increase their authority, and therefore their autonomy. In a special issue of Journal of Dutch Literature, dedicated to the results of the research project about literary autonomy, prof. Thomas Vaessens, who had not contributed to the project itself but was asked to comment on the project in an article, argued in addition that autonomy and commitment or ‘heteronomy’ are not issues that can be discussed with regard to literary texts themselves, but only with regard to reader’s attitudes: ‘In a classificatory model for receptive discourses, […] these two discourses [on autonomy and heteronomy] can be distinguished by their position on the opposite extremes of an axis that signifies ways of thinking about the relation between the object (the text) and the world. A reader’s position on this scale depends on how strong the bonds between the text and the outside world are to him or her. The extremes on this axis are the autonomist position and the heteronomist position. On the ‘heteronomist’ extreme there are readers who typically try to connect the text to the world in which it was written or to the world in which it is read’.8
Although the biggest part of the current discussion on the engagement of literature in the study of Dutch literature focusses on the study of literary prose, particularly novels, some work has also been done with regard to poetry. Interestingly, in the regions of the discussion that are focused on poetry, one of the positions resembles the aforementioned point made by Vaessens. In my view – and for more than just the launch of the general terms of this view in what follows, I will have to refer to the other part of this thesis, that e.g. accounts for the fact that oppositions such as autonomy/heteronomy and autonomy/engagement do not overlap
entirely – on the current discussion about the engagement of poetry in the study of Dutch literature, basically two major paths are being carved. On the one hand, there is the path resembling Vaessens’s point: its point of departure is that of every autonomous poem can be said that it is heteronomous to some extend as well, and that it thus has to be pinpointed somewhere between the two extreme positions of autonomy and heteronomy or engagement. Scholars that have entered this path recently are, for example, Geert Buelens, who developed an instrument to determine what place poems take up on a heteronomy scale9 and Carl De Strycker, who argued that a poem by Ramsey Nasr about Shostakovich’s viola Sonata is a good example of poetry that balances undecidedly between the ‘two slopes’ of autonomy and heteronomy.10
The starting point of the other path is slightly different. One of the representatives of this other path is Johan Sonnenschein, who, in a review of several recently published academic works on Romanticism, autonomy and literature, has proposed not that autonomous poems are always simultaneously heteronomous and therefore engaged with ‘the world outside of poetry’ as well, but that the autonomy of poetry is precisely part of its engagement. It is our engagement with poetry, as readers, in which poetry’s primacy or autonomy is implied.11 Sonnenschein’s point can be seen as a reformulation of the point posed in one of the publications that his article reviews: Literatuur, autonomie en engagement (‘Literature, Autonomy and Engagement’) by Aukje van Rooden. In that book, Van Rooden proposed a new paradigm for the study of literature under the header of the ‘relational paradigm’, in which literature is seen as a specific way of being in the world, a ‘derealized’ way, that allows its reader to both be ‘in-’ and ‘outside’ of the world simultaneously.12 With regard to the study of the engagement of poetry, the relational paradigm proposes to understand a particular poem as a particular way of being in the world, suggesting that it is precisely the singularity or autonomy of the poem that depends on and is responsible for the way the poem allows its reader to be in the world.
It is to this other path that I want to contribute, for I want to suggest that the poetry that I will be discussing, i.e. the collections Dood werk (from now on referred to as DW) by Maarten van der Graaff, and Kwaad gesternte (from now on referred to as KG) by Hannah van Binsbergen, do ‘engage’ with the world, but not (only) in the passages that refer to extra-textual realities. A reading oriented toward the conceptual points of departure of Vaessens e.a. would suggest that every time an extra-textual a reference occurs, these collections would gain ‘a point’ on the scale of engagement, and that every time they explicitly refuse to engage with anything in the contemporary political or societal reality, they would lose a point. This
could be an interpretation of the engagement of the poetry collections that are central to my project, but I will be defending a hypothesis that, I think, is more intriguing: that it is precisely the modes of withdrawal from reality and the refusal to engage with it, that illustrate the kind of engagement that these collections of poetry express.
My aim for the following, i.e. the first part of my project, is to develop a theoretical embedding for a reading attitude that allows for an interpretation of the ambiguous engagement of the discussed poetry that I will, for the time being and for the sake of its paradoxicality, characterize as ‘engagement without engagement’.13 In the other part of my project, I will both demonstrate how the theory can be ‘applied’ to interpret the poetry’s engagement and argue why the approach or reading attitude that I will develop in the following is a relevant one in the contemporary study of Dutch literature. For now, I will give an overview of the way in which this first part of the project, in which I develop the reading attitude itself, is built up.
Firstly, I will argue that the ground structure of the ‘engagement without engagement’ of DW and KG can be understood in the way that Martin Heidegger understands the ‘task’ of poetry. Since Heidegger is never straightforward or specific about poetry’s task, and has written about this theme in ways that ask for interpretation, I will explicitly ‘construct’ my own perspective on Heidegger’s vision in several steps. The first step will be an examination of the way one of the main Heidegger interpreters, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, has defined Heidegger’s ideas on the engagement of poetry in his study Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry (2007). Then, in paragraph 2.2.1, I will supplement Lacoue-Labarthe’s vision with an elaboration on how Heidegger deals with the broader theme of ‘plight in a needy time’ in his Contributions to Philosophy (1999). My perspective on this text will be directed by the way Johan de Jong has read it in his dissertation, The Movement of Thinking (2015), which focusses, among other themes, on the importance of the poetics and poiesis of writing for Heidegger’s thinking. After that, in paragraph 2.2.2, I will respectively discuss Heidegger’s considerations on art in general and poetry in specific in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, and Heidegger’s readings of the poetry of Hölderlin in the light of my findings in 2.2.1. From this ‘construction’ of Heidegger’s vision on the task of poetry, I will derive the notion of poetry as an ‘essentially preparatory’ exercise, which I will underpin with an interpretation of the Heideggerian theme of the passing of the last god in paragraph 2.2.3.
The conception of poetry as an essentially preparatory exercise will allow me to establish a connection with Maurice Blanchot’s thinking about the engagement of literature, which is more explicit than Heidegger’s, but lacks explicitness about the broader theme of the
structure of plight, for which I consulted Heidegger. Therefore, in paragraph 3.1, I will formulate an interpretation of Blanchot’s reading of Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin’s poetry that focusses on the philosophers’s shared interest in the ‘essential preparatoriness’ of poetry. In paragraph 3.2, I will elaborate on the sharedness of this interest by analyzing a text that Blanchot has written about and for Heidegger and that is about a related theme: the theme of ‘essentially awaiting’. Paragraph 3.2 will be a prelude to my argument that Blanchot’s vision is even more focused on the ‘passivity’ that characterizes the engagement of literature than Heidegger, which I will touch upon in paragraph 3.3. In the last paragraph of the first part of my project, in which I summarize my findings and highlight the main points of the developed reading attitude, I will elucidate the implications of Blanchot’s focus on the passivity of literary engagement via themes that are characteristic of his approach: the themes of sleeping, dreaming and restlessness.
Each of the paragraphs in this first part will be preceded by a thematically relevant epigraph, extracted from either DW or KG, and will be brought to a close with a short reflection upon the relevance of the paragraph’s subject to the interpretation of the engagement of these collections of poetry, referring to the exemplary epigraph. These reflections will be, at their turn, a preparation for the elaborate readings, which will be found in the other part of my thesis.
2.1 The poem as founding myth: Lacoue-Labarthe on Heidegger’s conception of poetry
1:37 I live in Holland I am a secret
that is kept by certain
communities, that do not want to share. - Maarten van der Graaff, Dood werk (46)
As mentioned in the above, the starting point of the theoretical embedding of the reading attitude I want to construct is not the idea that poetry relates to the world, such as contributors to the first path in the discussion about the engagement of Dutch literature can be said to say. It is rather that poetry is a relation with the world, which is the starting point of the representatives of the other path. Martin Heidegger may be seen, I propose, as an important, arguably even a founding representative of this other path, and as a fertile point of departure for my attempt at developing a reading attitude that allows for an interpretation of the ‘engagement without engagement’ that, I believe, characterizes DW and KG. In this
paragraph, I will construct my own interpretation of Heidegger’s conception of poetry in a few steps, taking Lacoue-Labarthe’s Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry (2007) as a starting point. Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry consist of a collection of lectures that depart from an urge to respond to Badiou’s analysis of the influence of poetry on contemporary philosophy, in which Lacoue-Labarthe aims to answer the question what the political implications of Heidegger’s conception of poetry are, taking into account the philosopher’s personal engagement in Nazism. Lacoue-Labarthe’s interpretation of Heidegger’s conception of poetry is not only a good starting point because it is explicitly concerned with the relation between politics and poetry in Heidegger’s thinking, but also because Lacoue-Labarthe emphasizes that for Heidegger, poetry does not only relate to the world, but is a relation to the world, i.e. is a founding myth of the world.
Lacoue-Labarthe’s claim is that, although Heidegger himself never states it all that explicitly, the task or mission of art and especially poetry is to found a new myth for a people:14 ‘The Poem is originary, both as language and as poetry, to the extent that it is, in a direct and immediate way, the myth by which a people is “typed” in its historial existence. The origin is properly mythical or, if you prefer, the beginning requires the forceful emergence of a “founding myth”.’15 By ‘myth’, Lacoue-Labarthe means a ‘historial inscription of a people, and the means by which a people is able to identify itself or appropriate itself as such, to see its world – and in particular its state – established or instituted, to receive and respect the gods, or even to entrust itself to them or to let itself be ruled by them – having nonetheless previously imposed them: that is, figured or “fictioned” them’.16
Lacoue-Labarthe bases his vision on the task that Heidegger assigns to poetry mostly on Heidegger’s readings of Hölderlin’s poetry. According to Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, in his Hölderlin readings, stresses time and again that Hölderlin was a prophet, or a beacon in times that are out of control.17 Hölderlin’s poetry expresses the character of the German people, and could function as a mythical ground for a true German community.18 The responsibility for poetry that follows from this conception of poetry, ‘can be called transcendental in that the possibility of a history for a people depends on it alone’.19
The idea that poetry can mythically institute a people is, according to Lacoue-Labarthe, deeply rooted in Heidegger’s thinking about the work of art and the essence of the poem: ‘Right up to his final texts, the interpretation of Hölderlin […] moved in the direction of what I would call a “remythologization.” We know the sequence: The essence of art is Dichtung, the essence of Dichtung is Sprache (both language and speech indissociably), the
essence of Sprache is Sage – which is muthos.’20 To endorse his point, Lacoue-Labarthe presents the outline of Walter Benjamin’s 1914 reading of two Hölderlin poems to indicate the difference between Heidegger’s and Benjamin’s interpretations of Hölderlin. According to Benjamin, the first Hölderlin poem suggests that the ‘task’ of poetry is to bear witness to the spiritual-intuitive structure of the world. This idea is relatively parallel to Heidegger’s idea of Dichtung and of ‘figuration’, which he writes about in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’: a poem, because it is a figuration, founds a world, ‘it is an archaic or principial configuration (Gestaltung) of the world’.21 But Benjamin elaborates further, stating that Hölderlin, who tended to rewrite much of his early poetry in his last years, deliberately rewrote the first poem in such a way that it expresses a way more sober or prosaic ‘task’ of poetry. Benjamin thus argues that Hölderlin’s later work contradicts Heidegger’s conception of his poetry: Hölderlin himself has problematized the idea that poetry is the figure of life, that it is existence itself in its figurability,22 implying that every figure is potentially mythic.23
Gestalt or figuration is, according to Lacoue-Labarthe, what allows Heidegger to think that the essence of the work of art could be the thesis of truth.24 Lacoue-Labarthe’s problem with this heideggerian notion of figuration is the clear parallel with the fascist ideology: ‘The fascist obsession is in fact the obsession with figuration, Gestaltung. It is a matter both of erecting a figure […] and of producing, according to this model, not a type of man but the type of humanity – or an absolutely typical humanity.’25 This idea that, in a destitute time, we need a transcendent power to formulate the ground for a people, a proper ground, a unifying ground, i.e. Lacoue-Labarthe’s interpretation of the task that Heidegger ascribes to Hölderlin’s poetry, bears similarities with the fascist way of thinking about the need for a new Boden.
In his interpretation of Heidegger’s conception of the ‘task’ of poetry, Lacoue-Labarthe, like many other interpreters have done, pays special attention to the context in which Heidegger began his lecturing on Hölderlin: it was in the winter of 1934, not long after he resigned his position as a Rector of Freiburg University. Heidegger had taken up the position as part of a campaign that attempted to establish a new National-Socialist German university-system. The Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg had declared Hölderlin to be Germany’s national poet laureate - a declaration that Heidegger can be said to have endorsed in his own work. 26
According to Lacoue-Labarthe’s interpretation of Heidegger’s readings, Hölderlin is the ‘poet mediator or the demi-god, who is the poet of poetry (that is, precisely of the essence of art) only because he is – or ought to be – the “poet of the Germans”’.27 That is, according
to Lacoue-Labarthe, what Heidegger means when he writes that we are in need of the passing by of the last god: that the figuration that makes up Hölderlin’s poetry has a divine-like power to become the myth on which the German people can build their community in the future: ‘What Heidegger is seeking in the Hölderlinian preaching – in the Sage, in myth, which, as he will say, is not the Heldensaga – is the promise of a new god: “Nur ein Gott kann uns noch retten” – ‘Only a god can save us now.’28
As for the form of engagement practiced in the aforementioned poetry collections, the epigraph prefixed to this paragraph may be interpreted as a hint at a possible problem with the conception of poetry as mythical figuration of a future community, a problem that, as I will argue in the next paragraph, Heidegger might as well have been aware of. The poem from which these lines were taken is rather clear about who is speaking: it is the poet himself, who has developed an efficient method for producing poems that he calls ‘clocked poems’, a method that he explains about in a poem titled ‘Twelfth clocked poem, in which I explain it’. The quoted poem is ‘Ninth clocked poem, in which a list is being transcribed’, a title that refers to the first section of the collection, that contains poems that are shaped as lists. One of the lists contains the lines: ‘Holland, I am not writing this for no reason,/ I am looking for your death and your community./ I am looking for your truth and hate./ I am writing poems.’29 The poet that is speaking in the poems that make up DW seems to be aware that he, as a poet, has the task of somehow figurating the national community. But, and this is expressed by the lines quoted from ‘Ninth clocked poem’, the poet is simultaneously aware of the danger of that task: foundational myths, when they are claimed by certain communities, can have an excluding effect. They can be ‘kept secret’ by ‘communities that do not want to share’, as was done by fascists. The poet that speaks in DW shows himself aware of this risk, even to such an extent that he designs a method for writing ‘clocked poems’, poems that pretend to be nothing more than the notations of time and the thoughts that the writer had during the time of writing until interrupted by having to go to the bathroom: poems that in no way pretend to be able to function as foundational myths.
2.2 Poetry as an essentially preparatory exercise
Lacoue-Labarthe interprets Heidegger’s conception of poetry as a mythical one: Heidegger has explicitly chosen Hölderlin’s poetry to elaborate on extensively because of its alleged ‘godlike’ ability to figurate a new ‘own’ ground for the German people. Lacoue-Labarthe’s interpretation is shared by e.g. Vallega-Neu, who states that Heidegger believes thoroughly in the possibility of a word that expresses ‘beyng’ purely, a word that would be proper or
unifying, and therefore carries the possibility of a new community in the future: ‘Heidegger was convinced of the possibility of such an original poietic saying. He believed that in saying the flight of the gods in his poetry Hölderlin brought to word the historical occurrence of beyng.’30 Jacques Derrida can also be said to share this interpretation of Heidegger’s belief in the possibility of something ‘whole’, as he has argued in a long footnote in his Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question that Heidegger does not question the possibility of the question, and therefore presupposes the possibility of a true or proper question: ‘The opening to the assignment of the question, responsibility, resolution with respect to the question are necessarily presupposed by questioning itself. They are not confused with it.’31
For the sake of developing a reading attitude to interpret the engagement of DW and KG, I want to propose a slightly different interpretation of Heidegger’s conception of poetry’s ‘task’. This different interpretation will arise from connecting Lacoue-Labarthe’s interpretation of Heidegger’s conception of poetry with Johan de Jong’s reading of the way Heidegger relates the themes of ‘inceptual thinking’ and ‘the era of plight’ to one another. De Jong’s reading of Heidegger focusses on the Contributions to Philosophy, an experimental text that Heidegger wrote between 1936 and 1938 with no intention of publication, from which it was accordingly withheld until 1989, the first English translation following in 1999, after which the book became considered as Heidegger’s most important work after Sein und Zeit. I think the Contributions are of special importance for my project, because it is in this book that Heidegger explicitly develops his account of ‘the highest plight: the plight of the lack of the sense of a plight’.32 This plight-structure, that can be characterized as ‘plight without plight’, I will argue, applies well to the ‘engagement without engagement’ of DW and KG. The hypothesis that I will underpin in what follows is that if we would extend De Jong’s interpretation of the mentioned themes in the Contributions to Heidegger’s thinking about the ‘task’ of poetry, a nuance could be formulated to Lacoue-Labarthe’s interpretation of Heidegger’s thinking about poetry as founding myth, a nuance that will make Heidegger’s conception of poetry more suitable for my reading attitude.
As mentioned, I will firstly explore the way De Jong thinks Heidegger’s way of relating ‘the era of plight’ and ‘inceptual thinking’ should be interpreted. Afterwards, I will indicate what consequences this interpretation has for Heidegger’s conception of poetry, taking the theme of ‘sheltering’ in the Contributions and the larger elaboration on that theme in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ as a starting point, thereby giving an alternative interpretation of Heidegger’s notion of ‘figuration’ as well. Lastly, I will formulate an interpretation of the essay ‘What Are Poets For?’ in the light of the conclusions drawn earlier,
in order to generate an understanding of the ‘task’ that Heidegger ascribes to poetry that suits my project all the more.
2.2.1 The structure of plight: plight without a sense of a plight
18:07 I am cloning a poem. I am writing the exact same poem twice.
I am therefore resisting loneliness. - Maarten van der Graaff, Dood werk (42)
One of the important topics that Heidegger touches upon in Contributions of Philosophy is ‘plight’, the translation for the German Not, which also translates to ‘distress’, ‘necessity’, ‘destitution’, ‘need’, or even ‘poverty’. In German, the word therefore does not only indicate that there is some duty to be fulfilled, but also that the current situation lacks something essential (and thus does not have a lot in common with the Kantian Pflicht). Heidegger names his own time as the era of plight and it is quite clear from his text that he attempts at responding to a plight himself, a specific plight, a timely plight:
The necessity of philosophy as meditation consists in the fact that it may not do away with that plight but must instead withstand it, ground it, and make it the ground of the history of mankind. That plight is nonetheless different in each of the essential beginnings and transitions of this history; yet it must never be taken superficially and hastily as deficiency, misery, or the like. It stands outside the possibility of all "pessimistic" or "optimistic" evaluation. The basic disposition that disposes toward the necessity is in each case correlative to the primordial experience of this plight.33
About the specific character of his timely plight, Heidegger is relatively explicit: ‘The highest plight: the plight of a lack of sense of a plight.’34 An era of plight is, according to Heidegger, especially characterized by the fact that no-one in it seems to feel like they have a plight to fulfil. Reconsidering the German word Not may take away some of the paradoxicallity of this conception of plight; Not indicating the need for and so the absence or missing of something essential, which in the case of Heidegger’s use of it adheres precisely to the absence of the sense of missing something essential.
Collective absence of indebtedness is particularly found when (self-)knowledge is considered to be already at hand: ‘The lack of a sense of plight is greatest where self-certainty has become unsurpassable, where everything is held to be calculable, and especially where it
has been decided, with no previous questioning, who we are and what we are supposed to do.’35 The lack of a sense of a plight thus correlates to the lack of the sense of the need for questioning one’s ‘knowledge’. Heidegger characterizes the time in which a logic of self-certainty prevails as ‘the age of complete absence of questioning’.36
Questionlessness is the primary characteristic of what Heidegger calls ‘machination’, a central term of the Contributions that can be defined as something like ‘the all-pervasive situation of Western metaphysical mankind’.37 It is the absence of a sense of plight to question this situation that causes the distress out of which the Contributions have arisen: ‘Machination is so pervasive that the inability to conceive its limits is not even experienced as a plight, and this itself is the distress out of which Heidegger’s questions are born’.38 Machinational logics are characterized by the conviction that ‘everything “is made” and “can be made,” if only the “will” to it is summoned up’.39 These kind of logics reduce beings to their representability, prescribe that beings are knowledgeable to the extent that they can be represented: ‘So machination signifies the will that wills a certain choice from among the ‘options’ that are (already) present-at-hand, that have been limited beforehand from among the ‘options’ by their representability to that will.’40 Criteria that characterize the logics of machination include e.g. calculation, productivity, and representation.
The prevalence of these logics goes ‘way back’: ‘The emergence of the machinational essence of beings is historically very difficult to grasp, because that essence has been in effect basically since the first beginning of Western thought.’41 Heidegger diagnoses all Western philosophy with machinational inclinations: ‘We know little enough of machination, despite its dominating the history of being in the previous Western philosophy, from Plato to Nietzsche.’42 ‘Previous Western philosophy’ for Heidegger means basically all of the Western philosophical tradition before he himself had started contributing to it, and he alternates the terms with indications like ‘metaphysical thinking’ and ‘the first beginning of philosophy’: ‘[T]he first beginning (the history of Western metaphysics).’43
In the modern era, in meditating on modern science and its machinationally rooted essence, the prevalence of the logics of machination may become noticed.44 The way we should understand the ‘becoming noticed’ of these logics, is not by assuming they have become representable after all. Rather, they become ‘noticed’ when we acknowledge that when we lack a plight of questioning who we are, we will certainly not think of asking the question of being. At the most, we will know what characterizes us as particular beings, but overall, we are characterized by forgottenness of being: ‘The forgottenness of being does not know anything of itself; it supposes itself to be in touch with “beings”, with the “actual”, […]
since the forgottenness of being knows only beings.’45 The fact that our mere preoccupation with particular beings and not with being itself does not alarm us, but allows us to reside in our lack of a plight, implies that the forgottenness of being is a hidden part of the dominant ‘understanding’ of being: ‘To this forgottenness of being, […] there corresponds the prevalent understanding of being; i.e. the former is as such first completed and hidden to itself through the latter.’46 From this point onwards, as announced, I will be explicitly following De Jong’s reading of the Contributions, which focusses on the idea that questioning the forgottenness of being ‘coincides with catching a glimpse of machination itself, the limits of what one is ‘in”.47
The idea that forgottenness of being is not the negation of being but a hidden part of the prevailing understanding of meaning, makes of the ‘noticing’ of machinational logics not a ‘bringing to light of what is hidden’ or a representation of what has not been represented earlier, for that would indeed mean reproducing the machinational logics of representability. In juxtaposition with ‘forgottenness of being’, Heidegger often uses the terminology ‘abandonment by beyng’ (which Heidegger deliberately writes with an ‘y’ to distinguish it explicitly from the prevailing understanding of being) to stress that having forgotten about the question of being is not something that we have done and can now undo to achieve some state of unforgottenness.48 It is rather the withdrawing of being from our attention, our abandonment by being, that should itself be understood as the essential occurrence of beyng. Machination is thus a mode of the essential occurrence of being:49 the mode in which being essentially occurs as withdrawal.50
Seen from De Jong’s perspective on Heidegger’s text, meditating on machination means that we are already approaching it with a knowledge of ‘the other beginning’.51 Heidegger introduces ‘the other beginning’ of philosophy as an alternative to ‘the first beginning’ of philosophy, the beginning dominated by machinational logics. It seems that he chose the term ‘other beginning’ deliberately, since a more ‘logical’ (and in this case, a less suitable) formulation would have been ‘the second beginning’. Meditation from the other beginning already makes ‘appear by way of recollection the concealed power of this forgottenness as forgottenness and [brings] forth therein the resonating of beyng. The recognition of the plight’.52 Plight is therefore not an instrument with which a certain goal should be achieved: ‘When at issue is that to which we belong, that toward which we are hiddenly compelled, then what about “plight”? That which compels, and is retained without being grasped, essentially surpasses all “progress”, for that which compels is itself what is genuinely to come and thus resides completely outside of the distinction between good and evil and withdraws itself from all calculation.’53
Accordingly, inceptual thinking is not a bringing to light of the hidden parts of the prevailing understanding of being that characterizes the first beginning in order to overcome them, but a meditation on its conditions. This kind of meditation already implies thinking out of the other beginning of philosophy. Rather than an overcoming of the first beginning in which machinational logics prevail, inceptual thinking is a meditation on its roots, which, precisely because it questions the conditions that in the first beginning are taken for granted, already happens from out of the other beginning: ‘The point, however, is that the meditation to be carried out in inceptual thinking does not take the selfhood of humans as given, as something that can be attained immediately by representing the "I" and the we and their situation.’54 Inceptual thinking is therefore rather than an attempt at overcoming, a confrontation between the first and other beginning: ‘[I]nceptual thinking is necessary as a confrontation between the first beginning, which is still to be won back, and the other beginning, which is to be unfolded.’55
This means that inceptual thinking does not announce a transition to some new world beyond the present machination-dominated one. Inceptual thinking is rather marked by the recognition ‘of one’s own limits so as to be able to relate differently to one’s own [world]’.56 This relating to one’s own limits, instead of attempting to overcome them, implies that Heidegger thinks of his entire project as an anticipatory one: the Contributions prepare for a future in which machinational logics may no longer prevail,57 but explicitly regardless of the possibility of such a future: ‘It is indeed my claim that the Beiträge are necessarily only an ‘attempt’, that its ‘anticipation’ does not anticipate a “realizable future”, but rather that it is to indicate something of the limits of the realizability of what is to be said.’58 The implications of this preparatory character of inceptual thinking will be cleared up in paragraph 2.2.2, which will propose a possible parallel between the way De Jong interprets the Contributions as a necessarily preparatory exercise, and the ‘task’ that Heidegger thinks poetry has to fulfil in a destitute time. For now, it would be good to keep in mind that the different relation to the same world that Heidegger is after entails paying attention to the machinational unconcealment of the truth of being as well as to the mode in which beyng essentially occurs, namely as concealment: ‘Instead of taking something out of its concealment (showing), the concealment of the inceptual must be “preserved”. This preservation of the concealment of the inceptual is what Heidegger calls “sheltering” (Bergung, bergen, verbergen).’59
To wrap up, a quick reflection upon the specific ‘concealment’ that I think is ‘preserved’ in the fragment of poetry that serves as an epigraph for this section. The lines were taken from ‘Fifth clocked poem, in which production is going on’, a poem in which the
poet proudly reports about his ‘work’ of the day (‘With a coat rack I walk the streets./ This is the work that I do today./ Walking, in the sun, down the streets, with a coat rack/ is good work./ Because people are getting happy/ and are making comments about my coat rack/ it is good that I do this work.’) and asks himself longingly whether poetry could possibly be written, sang and passed on ‘without us noticing’. The poem reflects upon the logics of productivity that dominate every domain of society, that even dominate the structure of the poem itself: the poem tells about the poet’s own way of being productive: he clones a poem, makes two poems out of one. It is and stays unclear whether the last line of the poem, ‘I am therefore resisting loneliness’, is ironic or not: producing the exact same entity twice might be way of abolishing loneliness according to the logics of productivity, but any other kind of logics might say that for loneliness to be abolished, only an ‘other’ entity that is in no way produced or calculated by oneself offers a solution. By allowing for both a serious was well as for an ironical reading, one can say that this poem does not try to overcome the logics of productivity, but rather explores its boundaries.
2.2.2 Poetry’s ‘taskless’ task
16:24 How to make a clocked poem?
Look at the clock. Write down the time. 16:25 Write a poem.
When you stop writing and mooch about for a while you have to write down the time again when you continue. When you have to go to the bathroom or want to go outside the poem is finished.
- Maarten van der Graaff, Dood werk (50)
2.2.2.1 The task of poetry in an era of plight
Which are the ways and modes of presenting and communicating the conjuncture of inceptual thinking? The first elaboration of the conjuncture (The resonating – The last god) cannot avoid the danger of being read and taken as a diffuse “system.” The focusing on the individual questions (the origin of the work of art) must dispense with a uniform opening up and elaborating of the entire domain of conjuncture.
To take both ways as supplementing each other ever remains only an emergency path. Yet are there other ways in the era of plight? What good fortune is there reserved for the poet! Signs and images are allowed to possess the poet’s very heart, and what is essential to the “poem” can in each case be incorporated into visible form?60
In sections like 23 quoted here, Heidegger suggests that there are linkages between plight, inceptual thinking and poetry. Like I have shown at the end of the last paragraph, inceptual thinking and the concealment that belongs to it must be preserved:61 ‘[T]he truth itself, essentially occurs only if sheltered in art, thinking, poetry, deed. It therefore requires the steadfastness of the Da-sein that repudiates all the semblant immediacy of mere representation.’62 Most of the sections dedicated to the subject of sheltering in the Contributions refer to another text by Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, written around the same time the Contributions came about and published several times in the successive decades in slightly altered versions. The Contributions refer to this essay especially for further elaboration on what is meant by sheltering, how it relates to inceptual thinking and what poetry has to do with it. ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ is also the text in which Heidegger develops his idea of ‘figuration’, the theme that allows Lacoue-Labarthe to argue that Heidegger’s thinking about poetry is linked directly to his affinity with Nazism.
The sheltering of the concealment that belongs to the truth of being happens through what Heidegger calls ‘the strife of world and earth’. What Heidegger wants with the terms ‘world’ and ‘earth’ and their strife exactly is hard to decide. I will be following the thorough though comprehensible interpretation given by Jonathan Dronsfield. According to this interpretation, ‘world’ belongs to a work of art to the extent that a work of art makes a world visible.63 The work of art does not make world visible as something that was there already, only visible in the presented mode of viewing, but it makes the world visible by founding the means by which humans can perceive the world. Therefore, the work of art is essentially historical; it allows human beings to see the world again, but for the first time. In the work of art, the world, thus, worlds:
To be a work means to set up a world. […] The world is not the mere collection of the countable or uncountable, familiar and unfamiliar things that are just there. But neither is it a merely imagined framework added by our representation to the sum of such given things. The world worlds, and is more fully in being than the tangible and perceptible realm in which we believe ourselves to be at home.64
But then there is also the materiality of the work. Other than the material out of which ‘useful things’ are made, the materials out of which an artwork is made do not disappear into the form of a thing that is fabricated to be useful. The material of the artwork comes forth in the work of art; for the first time, it is made visible in the world that the artwork sets up.65 This materiality is what Heidegger calls ‘earth’. Earth is not a ‘resource’ for the work of art in the
way that materials can be a resource for a useful object: earth is the primal and abysmal ground that simultaneously allows a world to be founded on it, and, by being abysmal, undermines the founding of a world on it.66 The work of art sets up a world by setting forth the earth as its abysmal ground.67 This means that we will perceive the earth through the work of art as that which is essentially self-concealing.
The relation between world and earth established by the work of art is one of strife, in the sense that world and earth are two components of the work that belong together in an intimate way: ‘The setting up of a world and the setting forth of earth are two essential features in the being of the work. They belong together, however, in the unity of work-being.’68 The world unconceals the self-concealment of the earth, while the earth works to draw the world into its concealment:69 the strife between the two is a movement of concealing-unconcealing, of showing-withdrawing.
An artwork is a being that is brought into the open, and in that movement of bringing it forward, a world is revealed. At the same time, the materiality of the artwork (earth) forces itself into this openness, as a self-concealment. It is in the form of a figure, namely the particular way in which the material that makes up the artwork is composed, that the strife between world and earth is structured in such a way that its material is not ‘used up’, cultivated productively, but ‘set free to be nothing but itself’. 70 Such is the composed rift of world and earth. Thus, the process of (artistic) creation relates to the essential occurrence of truth as participation in the occurrence of truth by the composing of the matter that does not use up the matter but stands out from the matter: ‘Figure is the structure in whose shape the rift composes and submits itself. This composed rift is the fitting or joining of the shining of truth.’71
In the work of art, the happening of truth is at work, a happening that Heidegger compares with the writing of a poem: ‘Truth, as the clearing and concealing of what is, happens in being composed, as a poet composes a poem.’72 Poetry, he clarifies, is meant here in a very broad sense: ‘All art, as the letting happen of the advent of the truth of what is, is, as such, essentially poetry.’ Poetry is ‘one mode of the lighting projection of truth, i.e., of poetic composition in this wider sense’. But, Heidegger continues, ‘[n]evertheless, the linguistic work, the poem in the narrower sense, has a privileged position in the domain of the arts’.73
Poetry has such a privileged position because ‘language preserves the original nature of poetry’;74 language preserves poetry in the broader sense. Put differently: ‘[L]anguage alone brings what is, as something that is, into the Open for the first time. Where there is no language, as in the being of stone, plant, and animal, there is also no openness of what is.’75
Language, by claiming us, houses and makes perceptible the fact that being appears to us.76 Poetic language (i.e. poetry in the narrow sense) preserves this original essence of language (i.e. poetry in the broader sense): poetry in the narrow sense provides us with language that is attuned to the originary speaking of language and therefore to the truth of being as it is unconcealed to us in its concealment.77 I will elaborate more on the implications of this relation between language, being and poetry from 3.1 onwards, where I will discuss Blanchot’s response to Heidegger’s readings of Hölderlin’s poetry, and some of Blanchot’s writings that are explicitly about what literature is and does.
A reconstruction of the considerations in paragraph 2.2.1 and 2.2.2 up until now results in the following: the lack of a sense of a plight indicates the prevalence of machinational logics, which disqualify entirely the question of beyng. This overall questionlessness unconceals beyng as our abandonment by it. Thinking beyng inceptually, thereby relating to beyng differently in a machination-dominated era means being sensitive to the way it occurs essentially as withdrawal, i.e. sheltering the concealment of beyng. Relating to beyng in a sheltering way is done through the artwork: in the artwork, earth and world strife in such a way that the material of which the artwork consists is not used up but stands out of it. Thus, its figuration consists in that its concealing-unconcealing movement stands out of the artwork. A poem is an artwork that consist of language, and language being the condition of our openness to what is, poetry, as a visible artistic form of language, preserves precisely our openness to what is.
Heidegger’s considerations about language and what poetry does with language express, according to some of his interpreters, including Vallega-Neu, that he ‘believed in the possibility of a thinking word that would arise purely from enowning and would simply say enowning […]’.78 This alleged belief corresponds to Lacoue-Labarthe’s critique of Heidegger’s readings of Hölderlin: Heidegger has read Hölderlin as the inventor of a new language, which could serve as the instituting ground for a new German people. The last few pages of ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ do point in this direction, e.g. in formulations like these: ‘Whenever art happens - that is, whenever there is a beginning - a thrust enters history, history either begins or starts over again. History means here not a sequence in time of events of whatever sort, however important. History is the transporting of a people into its appointed task as entrance into that people’s endowment.’79
However, as we have seen in paragraph 2.2.1, inceptual thinking, according to De Jong’s interpretation of the Contributions, does not aim at overcoming the machination-dominated world and instituting a new one. I want to explore how the interpretation of
Heidegger’s vision on the part that poetry plays in ‘instituting’ a ‘new world’ for a ‘new people’ can be nuanced, by giving a reading of Heidegger’s essay ‘What Are Poets For?’, published first in 1950 after its being delivered as a lecture four years earlier, in the light of De Jong’s interpretation of Contributions as an essentially preliminary exercise. De Jong, as I have shown, argues that inceptual thinking relates to machinational logics, that are characterized by the overall idea that ‘everything “is made” and “can be made,” if only the “will” to it is summoned up’,80 through meditating their conditions. In ‘What Are Poets For?’, a lecture given on the occasion of Rainer Maria Rilke having died 20 years earlier, Heidegger discusses the extent to which Rilke’s work expresses the prevalence of a certain notion of ‘will’: Rilke is, Heidegger argues, a ‘machinational’ poet because of his notion of ‘will’. This becomes even clearer from the way Heidegger compares Rilke’s poetry to Hölderlin’s, who he thinks is a poet ‘of the future’. From this comparison, I think we can see clearly that De Jong’s idea that the Contributions are necessarily preparatory may be extended to the way that Heidegger thinks about poetry: it being an essentially preparatory exercise. Emphasizing the essential preparatoriness of poetry would nuance Lacoue-Labarthe’s vision, because it would not ascribe to Heidegger’s thinking a deep belief in the possibility of a word that expresses a whole and proper mythical ground for a people.
As a closing of this paragraph I will reflect upon its epigraph, which stems from a poem already mentioned in the above. The material out of which this poem consists could not have been standing out of it more clearly: ‘Twelfth clocked poem, in which I explain it’ is an explanation and a demonstration of the method the poet has designed for producing the poetry in DW. Even more than the other poems in the collection, that follow the same method but do not always thematize the method itself, this poem is explicit about being made out of the language that is written down by a person that followed a certain writing method. The poem thus makes perceptible to us a world in which poetry is being made, and it does so without concealing that its ground is language. But in showing us what it is made of, the poem shows also us its abysmal character: although the poem tells us explicitly that it consists of language, written down in a certain way, we do not get to know where the method came from, why the poetry in DW is written according to this particular method, etc. The poem presents us its origin as a concealment. N.B.: as the next paragraph will only contain a further elaboration of this same point, there will be no new epigraph to discuss at the end of the paragraph.
The introduction of Poetry, Language, Thought, the collection of essays in which ‘What Are Poets For?’ is published, explicates the author’s conviction that Heidegger ascribes a unifying ability to poetry, the ability to take the measure of the world: ‘At the basis of man's ability to build in the sense of cultivating and constructing there must be, as primal source, his poetic ability, the ability to take the measure of the world.’81 In ‘What Are Poets For?’, Heidegger himself formulates the alleged task of poets more idiosyncratically: ‘To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods.’82
‘What Are Poets For?’ examines an untitled poem by Rilke from 1924 ‘in order to fathom whether and in what way Rilke is a poet in a destitute time’.83 Heidegger reads the poem ‘as a matter of thinking’,84 which he says should be done with poems written ‘at this moment of the world’s history’. From the poem, Heidegger extracts a couple of terms, such as ‘Nature’ and ‘venture’ and argues why Rilke’s use of those terms and the thinking about those terms behind their use, unequivocally refer to a language of metaphysics, because they ‘name that is, as such, as a whole’.85 Rilke’s use of the term ‘the Open’ indicates that Rilke means with it ‘the great whole of all that is unbounded’.86 Beings that relate to Rilke’s ‘Open’ ‘do not dissolve into void nothingness, but they redeem themselves into the whole of the Open’. They are thus not directly in the open, but the relate to the Open by opposing themselves to it, by putting it before themselves, by drawing it into a representation:
For Rilke's poetry, the Being of beings is metaphysically defined as worldly presence; this presence remains referred to representation in consciousness, whether that consciousness has the character of the immanence of calculating representation, or that of the inward conversion to the Open which is accessible through the heart.87
A great part of the essay is a meditation on the implications of the metaphysical way of thinking that Rilke’s poem refers and contributes to. More so than in the Contributions, Heidegger sketches linkages between different characteristics of metaphysical thinking here, which roughly correspond with what Heidegger writes about machination and the first beginning in the Contributions. In the poem, there is also a strong sense of the prevalence of ‘willing’: ‘Rilke's poem thinks of man as the being that is ventured into a willing, the being that, without as yet experiencing it, is willed in the will to will.’88 Heidegger relates this sense of willing directly to the sense of representation: ‘To put something before ourselves, propose it, in such a way that what has been proposed, having first been represented, determines all the modes of production in every respect, is a basic characteristic of the attitude which we know as willing.’89 More than in the Contributions, emphasis is put on the prevalence of
productivity: ‘By such willing, modern man turns out to be the being who, in all relations to all that is, and thus in his relation to himself as well, rises up as the producer who puts through, carries out, his own self and establishes this uprising as the absolute rule.’90
According to Heidegger, Rilke’s poem shows itself indebted to a thinking that ‘establish[es] all things as producible in the process of production’.91 Like what Heidegger writes about machination in the Contributions, in modernity, the dominance of precisely these logics of productivity can become noticed:
The unconditioned establishment of the unconditional self-assertion by which the world is purposefully made over according to the frame of mind of man's command is a process that emerges from the hidden nature of technology. Only in modern times does this nature begin to unfold as a destiny of the truth of all beings as a whole; until now, its scattered appearances and attempts had remained incorporated within the embracing structure of the realm of culture and civilization’.92
Put in the terms that Heidegger uses in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, Heidegger thinks Rilke’s poem does not really shelter beyng, since the language of which it consists can be conceived of as an instrument of representation, and not of an ‘attunement’ to the originary speaking of language. With regard to this, Rilke’s poem forms a contrast with Hölderlin’s poetry, which Heidegger thinks ‘is a manifestness of Being, a manifestness which itself belongs to the destiny of Being and which, out of that destiny, is intended for the poet’.93 Hölderlin’s poetry is thus not indebted only to a logics of productivity, which makes it impossible for Heidegger to argue that Hölderlin’s poetry responds ‘more accurately’ to the destitution of our time, since claiming that a poet reacts accurately to a pressing problem would imply that his poetry is productive after all, namely with regard to ‘overcoming’ the logics of productivity (N.B.: even the phrasing ‘more accurately’ is indebted to the logics of productivity).
The formulation that Heidegger does use to contrast Hölderlin’s poetry with Rilke’s is that Hölderlin’s poetry does not re-present, but ‘remains as a once-present being’.94 Hölderlin is not the poet that responds productively to the prevailing logics productivity, but is ‘the pre-cursor of poets in a destitute time’:
The greater the concealment with which what is to come maintains its reserve in the foretelling saying, the purer is the arrival. It would thus be mistaken to believe that Holderlin's time will come only on that day when “every man” will understand his poetry. It will never arrive in such a misshapen way; for it is its own destitution that
endows the era with forces by which, unaware of what it is doing, it keeps Hölderlin’s poetry from becoming timely.95
Hölderlin’s poetry does thus not anticipate something of which we know it can be established, it is essentially preparatory. His poetry does not overcome productivity, it ‘overcomes from the start all perishability’.96
I want to argue that Heidegger does not think that poetry, in a destitute time, mythically grounds a people in a possibly unifying and proper way, for the sense of ‘overcoming’ the old not-unifying nor proper ground that resounds in that conception would reproduce the productivity-logics that it allegedly ‘overcomes’. Rather, poetry, just like De Jong interprets Heidegger’s project in the Contributions, is ‘a kind of “overcoming of overcoming” in order to arrive at an inceptual inquiry into the essence of metaphysics’.97 It thus does ‘not consist in finding a language that would finally succeed in speaking out of the truth of beyng, but rather in recognizing and preserving an inherent failure-to-say with respect to beyng’.98 Heidegger’s thinking itself and his conception of poetry in a destitute time ‘is not transitional because it at some point arrives at a ‘realizable future’; it is inherently preliminary, anticipatory, and an ‘attempt’, because it structurally relates to our limits or to what is irreducible to prevailing norms.
2.2.3 The preparation of ‘the passing of the last god’
There is no center, only surroundings; everything else has to be a gift.
- Hannah van Binsbergen, Kwaad gesternte (46)
From the perspective developed in the last two paragraphs arises an understanding of Heidegger’s ‘task’ of poetry that differs from Lacoue-Labarthe’s understanding of it. This perspective nuances the problem that Lacoue-Labarthe formulated with Heidegger’s idea that Hölderlin’s poetry carries the hope for a unifying and proper grounding of the German people. It nuances his problem with poetry’s alleged ability to ‘figurate’ the world in a proper and unifying way, and with Hölderlin playing the part of a mediating demi-god: it stresses that Heidegger’s conception of ‘figuration’ may not indicate the hope for a new world which is grounded properly, but that it may indicate a preparation for the possible coming of a new world. The acknowledgement that poetry can do nothing more than preparing for the possible coming of a new world implies that from its language, its own limits are outed; that its
language stays true to what withdraws from its reach. This means that poetic language, aware of its limits, already relates to the same world in a different way. I will now dedicate a few last words to this implication of the essential preparatoriness of poetry by referring to the passages in the Contributions that touch upon ‘the passing by of the last god’.
‘The Last God’ is the title of the sixth ‘joining’, the sixth way in which Heidegger approaches the central themes in the Contributions. It is a rather obscure theme, and I will not get into it too deeply, but I will allude to it because the reference to a god-like task of poetry is quite central to Lacoue-Labarthe’s interpretation of Heidegger. In section 256, Heidegger writes:
The last god is not the end; the last god is the other beginning of the immeasurable possibilities of our history. […] The preparation of the appearance of the last god is the extreme venture of the truth of beyng. […] The creative ones, in the restraint of care, must already prepare themselves hourly for stewardship in the time-space of the passing by. […] The runners must all be fore-runners […]. What compels […] is only that about the event which cannot be calculated or fabricated – in other words, only the truth of beyng.99
From this section one can derive the emphasis that Heidegger puts on the essentially preparatory character of a possible relation to this ‘last god’. This indicates the plausibility of the idea that Heidegger would not think Hölderlin himself to be the godlike one that figurates the world with his poetry, but that he is rather the one whose work prepares for the coming of a new world, a coming that itself cannot be calculated, that could possibly not come at all. Poetry as preparation means ‘bringing up for decision’, rather than expressing the hope that a unifying and proper ground for the world is possible: ‘[…] Hölderlin poetizes the future poet, that Hölderlin himself “is” as the first to bring up for decision the nearness and remoteness of the former and future gods (cf. the standpoint of the history of beyng).’100 It is as an essentially preparatory exercise that poetry allows for being in the same world in a different way, i.e. a way that stays true to all things in life that cannot be calculated.
Taking all this into account, the interpretation of the quote from Heidegger’s Spiegel-interview that Lacoue-Labarthe mentions should be adjusted a bit: from this perspective, ’Nur ein Gott kann uns noch retten’ does not refer directly to Hölderlin, the demi-god who provides Germany with its brand new grounding myth, but to the last god, whose passing may be prepared for by Hölderlin’s poetry. Still, the work of art would never be able to assure, or even express hope towards it, since the passing of the last god is precisely that which is absolutely incalculable.
