Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language

Toward a New Poetics of Dasein

Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei
Perspectives in Continental Philosophy
Fordham University Press, New York, 2004

1. Heidegger's Critique of Subjectivity and the Poetic Turn

Freedom and Erring Beyond Subjectivity

Truth and Freedom

pp. 52-53

In the writings of the 1930s and early 1940s, "decision" is neither autonomous, nor is it described as spontaneity, as in Sartre's Transcendance of the Ego, but rather as a form of submission to what the poet "instigates". When Heidegger then writes of freedom, it is to be understood not as the autonomy of a subject freed by virtue of its transcendental grounds from the causality of nature, but as the transcendance — as Dasein or as language itself — which marks Being's disclosure.

2. Heidegger's Hölderlin

Andenken and Ereignis Beyond Subjectivity

Hölderlin and the Sending of Being

p. 64

Poetic language reveals something of the world without failing to indicate that it is a partial revelation. This is the relation of poetic language to a phenomenological account of truth as aletheia [...]
[Poetic language] makes evident that language itself is a revealing — in contrast to conceptual language, which aims at transparency and total exposure of the "real".

p. 69

[Both] techne and poiesis are modes of revealing.

The Event of Thinking: From Being to the Ereignis

The "es gibt" and the Ereignis in "Time and Being" and On the Way to Language

p. 88

Language, thought poetically, is "the relation of all relations" and thus of the relation between time and Being, time and space, space and Being.

p. 92
[Ereignis: event of appropriation]

Heidegger's thinking succeeds in the "reversal" of Being and Time itself [...]: to think Being, which is "beyond beings".

Ereignis in the Lecture Course on "Der Ister" (1942)

p. 97

The origin of Saying, "which has never been spoken" is "given voice" in poetic language.

3. Poetic Subjectivity and the Elusiveness of Being

p. 99

A question that remains to be answered is whether this unique capacity of poetic language eschews all vestiges of subjectivity, as Heidegger claims in his account of the poet's role in the remembrance of Being, or whether there is not, as I argue in this chapter, an essential structure of subjectivity and selfhood at the heart of the poetic utterance.

p. 102

T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets": "I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where".

Andenken and the Poetic Subject

p. 134

Hölderlin's poetry is grounded in "poetical reflection" [...] In poetic reflection, the poet experiences "the world" and "life" from an aesthetic rather than rationalistic perspective.

p 139

In Blanchot's terms this founding is wholly overridden by an irreversible "exile" from unity or wholeness, an exile that, contrary to Heidegger's reading, knows no return home — to a destiny, a people, or an historical truth.

4. The Critique of Technology and the Poetics of "Life"

p. 144

One of the principal aims of Heidegger's poetics is to counter the technological attitude towards an objectified nature or earth by offering the poetic as an alternative configuration of human dwelling.

Technology as Fractured Poiesis

p. 147

The interpretations of Hölderlin withstand over three decades of transitions in Heidegger's thinking, from the eschatological-political aesthetics of the 1930s to the thinking of the Gelassenheit as a quiet sheltering of possibility in the 1950s and 1960s.

p. 149

The subject is for Heidegger the essence of technological, anthropocentric thinking.

Nature and Reflective Judgment in Kant's Aesthetic Philosophy

p. 152

Aesthetic judgments, Kant writes, "must involve a claim to a subjective universality" [Critique of Judgement, 212].

The Feeling for Life in Hölderlin's Poetology

p. 162

Although Kant intends aesthetic judgment to unify the transcendental system as a "bridge" between pure and practical reason, Hölderlin ultimately rejects the possibility of this unification.

5. The Politics of Sacrifice

The Sublime and the Caesura

Hölderlin's "Unheroic" Worldview

p.190

In a letter to his brother Hölderlin [...] writes:
My love is the human race [...]

The Ecstatic Quotidian,
Philo ToC
Marc Girod
Last modified: Mon Oct 24 20:05:19 EEST 2005