Heidegger, Holderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language: Toward a New Poetics of Dasein

A New Poetics of Dasein

A New Poetics of Dasein In letters discussing poetic strategy, the French poet Arthur Rimbaud repeatedly uses the follo~ving phrase: "je est un autre,"or "1is someone else."' This formulation might suggest, at first glance, an ecstatic abandonment of self, confirmed perhaps in the multiple viewrpoints the poet assumes in "Enfance,"a poem from his Ill~~17zi1~tztio when he proclaims: J e suis le saint, en priPre sur la terrasse comme les b&tespacifiques . . . J e suis le savant au fauteuil sombre . . . J e suis le pigton de la grand'route . . . J e serais bien I'enfant abandonn6 sur la jet6e . . le petit valet suivant I'allke dont le front touche le ciel. I am the saint at prayer on the terrace like the peaceful beasts . . . I am the scholar of the dark armchair. . . I am the pedestrian of the highroad . . . I might well be the child abandoned on the jetty. the little farm boy following the lane, its forehead touching the One surely cannot anchor Rimbaud's poetry, its sj~mbolism of shim- . . merlng Images, to a singular biography of self. Yet when Rimbaud describes his poetic procedure in his letters, involving the upsetting of ordinary perceptions, even the disorientation of the senses that accompanied and afforded his early eruptions of genius, what is implied is a self or subject "in process." Explaining his method, he writes, The poet makes himself a visionary through a long, a prodigious and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering , of madness; he searches lait7z,~e(f:he consumes all the poisons in him, keeping only their quintessences. Ineffable torture in which he will need all his faith. . . .For he arrives at the unknown! Since he has cultivated his soul-richer to begin with than any other! He arrives at the unknobvn:and even if, half crazed,in the end, he loses an understanding of his visions, he has seen The disorientation that Rimbaud describes need not be aimed exclusively at the fantastical or the sublime, as we find it in Rimbaud's work, in Charles Baudelaire, in Guillaume Apollinaire, and in the writings of Franz Kafka. For us it can signify any rupture of a prosaically practical or epistemologically appropriative horizon through bvhich the bvorld appears, disenchantedly, bvithin the framewrork (Heidegger bvould say GeLfteII> of the subject's own production, its exhaustive knowledge, or as there for its utilization. Contrary to Kristeva, in my view it is not knowledge as such but rather the e s b t z r r ~ t i r ~ e t z ~ ~ ~ f ~ f of an appropriative, prosaic attitude tobvard the bvorld that poetic subjectivity challenges. Rimbaud clarifies further that although in some instances of visionary seeing the understanding may be lost, there bvill be other poets wrho "will begin at the horizons where he has succumbed," so that work toward foraging into the unknown will have nonetheless been accomp l i ~ h e d . ~ Attendance to the unknown or ineffable suggests that, flickering through the quotidian real, another, more elusive aspect of things is glimpsed. We could describe an examination of such in somebvhat phenomenological terms. This attendance invokes the defixation of a prominently foregrounded familiarity;a release of the previousljr receding background; an alteration of focus illuminating the background itself; the bridging of logicalljr disparate images and sensations which brings forth into imagined actuality \\,hat bvas heretofore merely receding into potentiality; and a resultant but contemporaneous state of stepping outside one's owrnordinary mode of seeing. These are some possible nuanced stages of a poetical suspension of the natural attitude. This is clearly what Rimbaud has accomplished through language by way of a disorienting but strangely luminous assemblage of images, to quote from one of his poems, through an "unlooked-for logic" ("de 238 A New-Poetics of Dasein logique bien i m p r & v ~ e " ) . ~ The point is not to revel in disorder, but to "arrive at the unknown through the disordering.'I6 Beyond revolutionary poetics, the break with the prosaic is, from the poetical point of view, an accomplishment of what Rilke thought to be "the right kind of seeing"; it can serve, as in Rilke and Holderlin, newrforms of clarity and structures of attunement.' This break bvith the prosaic points to the ecstatic nature of the self, the being-drawrn beyond the sphere of immanence by the discovery of the otherness, the mj~steriousness, of...