Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language: Toward a New Poetics of Dasein (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)

Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language: Toward a New Poetics of Dasein (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)

Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei

Language: English

Pages: 326

ISBN: 2:00324200

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Heidegger's interpretations of the poetry of Hlderlin are central to Heidegger's later philosophy and have determined the mainstream reception of Hlderlin's poetry. Gosetti-Ferencei argues that Heidegger has overlooked central elements in Hlderlin's poetics, such as a Kantian understanding of aesthetic subjectivity and a commitment to Enlightenment ideals. These elements, she argues, resist the more politically distressing aspects of Heidegger's interpretations, including Heidegger's nationalist valorization of the German language and sense of nationhood, or Heimat.In the context of Hlderlin's poetics of alienation, exile, and wandering, Gosetti-Ferencei draws a different model of poetic subjectivity, which engages Heidegger's later philosophy of Gelassenheit, calmness, or letting be. In so doing, she is able to pose a phenomenologically sensitive theory of poetic language and a new poetics of Dasein,or being there.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

reflection w 3.2 Heidegger's Critique of Subjectivity of this tendency, and in its struggle to define itself as the origin of the sciences, has forgotten its origins in factical life; the latter, Heidegger thinks, should be philosophJ~'spoint of departure (Arr,!qrzt

comes to understand in a "primordially" thoughtful bvaT: that a phenomeno-ontologicaI understanding of truth can no longer ban poetic language, as metaphysics had, from the realm theretofore reserved for logical concepts. Heidegger comes to see that "poetrjr and thought, each needs the other" (OWL 70), that the liberation of language from logic was not only a task to be relegated to a future project but also the only proper ground for a thinking of Being. Thus Heidegger provides both a

the lower half "returns," as if "back to its source."46 The place established by "here" refers again, and is in fact opened out by, the temporality of the "event" of returning. In Holderlin's poem "the Ister appears, almost, to go backwrards." The river is "coming" and at the same time "vanishing," revealing a "concealed, unitary relation to what has been and what is of the future -thus to the temporal" ( D I 12). The specific place of the poem-where the narrator stands - submerges into

form, becomes an issue. Contrary to Heidegger's theory of language, "Hdderlin avoids the confusion of saying and ~ e i n g . " ~ ~ That the self admits alterity, that it is not transcendentally grounded in a simple unity, does not disqualifJr the self as individuated being which would provide a mediating receptivity for Being. The paradox of subjectivity in H~lderlinconcerns the affirmation of the poet's experience, even \\,hen experience is of the self's momentary "obliteration."26 The

lacking center -as ecstatic or eccentric -that they exist as facticity, as relationship to beings in their Being. Thus Holderlin's poetic self might be illuminated by Heidegger's Dasein, wrhose S O I as : ~the unity of ecstases Heidegger calls a "self." In the final chapter I will indeed outline a "new, poetics of Dasein" as an alternative theory of poetic subjectivity and language, and Heidegger's early work will yield structural scaffolding by which to outline a poeticalljr reconceived self.

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