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4 Translating Innigkeit: The Belonging Together of the Strange Peter Warnek The concept of politics rarely announces itself without some sort of adherence of the State to the family, without what we will call a schematic of ¤liation : stock, genus or species, sex (Geschlecht), blood, birth, nature, nation— autochthonal or not, tellurian or not. This is once again the abyssal question of the physis, the question of being, the question of what appears in birth, in opening up, in nurturing or growing, in producing by being produced. Is that not life? That is how life is thought to reach recognition. Jacques Derrida Greece will have been, for Hölderlin, this inimitable. Not from an excess of grandeur—but from a lack of proper being. It will have been, therefore, this vertiginous threat: a people, a culture, constantly showing itself as inaccessible to itself. The tragic as such, if it is true that the tragic begins with the ruin of the imitable and the disappearance of models. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe A genuine repetition and retrieval erupts only from an originary transformation . Martin Heidegger In the short text that is included as an appendix to the Gesamtausgabe printing of his Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung and that bears the title “Prologue to a Reading of Hölderlin’s Poems,”1 Heidegger speaks of Hölderlin’s poetry as a destiny which awaits the response of mortals, which awaits its Entsprechung, a correspondence or a reception that is also a responsive speaking. The possibility of such a receptive speaking by mortals in response to Hölderlin’s poetic word, a possible speaking that has yet to come, would arise only in the experience of the ®ight or departure of the gods, the ®ight or departure that Hölderlin’s poetry both announces and suffers. But Hölderlin’s poetic word, according to Heidegger, says that the absent gods still protect the mortals while they are not yet able to dwell in the nearness of the gods. And this not being able to dwell in the nearness of the gods means that these mortals still lack a home. As an awakening to the absence of gods, Hölderlin’s poetry is thus also an awakening to the lack of the home, to the lack of proper being for mortal human life, an insistence upon a tragic estrangement or alienation at the heart of that life. And although Heidegger suggests that coming to dwell in the nearness of the gods would bring about “a turning in the present world condition [eine Wende des gegenwärtigen Weltzustandes]” (GA4, 195), his reading presents itself as neither programmatic nor productive. It does not promise to bring about such a transformation, does not even depict or describe the transformation, but seeks only to take the ¤rst step toward the correspondence, as a receptive responsive speaking. Here Heidegger presents the task of a reading of Hölderlin only as a preparation for something that has yet to come, an opening to the future, a world transformation that remains unimaginable, unforeseeable. But at ¤rst what is at issue is simply becoming receptive to the poetic word in a way that is appropriate to it. Such reception would already have to repeat the poetic word, but to repeat it in a way that is also responsive to it. Accordingly, Heidegger asks us to listen to several guiding words taken from Hölderlin’s poems. The ¤rst of such guiding words, which Heidegger offers here in this way, reads: “Alles ist innig.”2 This chapter can be understood simply as an attempt at the translation of this Leitwort, or guiding word. It is dedicated to revealing such a translation as a task of repetition, to opening up to what is at stake in this task. This requires in one sense only being able to hear the word itself, to listen to what it says in its own singular way—so that, as Heidegger proclaims more than once, we might be translated in the translation, transposed to another shore, transferred to another place. In the Ister lectures (1942), Heidegger speaks of translation as nothing other than interpretation itself. Not only is every translation already an interpretation, but interpretation itself is always already caught up in an originary translation, even when it only moves within one and the same language (GA54, 75/62). And although Heidegger wants to assert precisely that translation does not consist ¤rst of all in the movement from one 58...

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