Intrigues: From Being to the Other

2. Dwelling: Between Poiēsis and Technē

t w o Dwelling: Between Poiēsis and Technē We have not busied ourselves in the foregoing with the transformation of word meanings. Rather, we have stumbled upon an event whose immensity still lies concealed in its long unnoticed simplicity. —Martin Heidegger, ‘‘Logos (Heraclitus, Fragment B)’’ Thinking is itself the proper acting insofar as to act means to comply with the essential unfolding of being. —Martin Heidegger, ‘‘Die Technik und die Kehre’’ On Dwelling Although aberrant from the point of view of conventional literary scholarship and no less debatable from literary theory,1 Heidegger’s discourse on poetry and the work of art throws some light on why the project of a ‘‘metaphysics of Dasein,’’ sketched out after Being and Time and developed in the Marburg courses, veers radically into the ‘‘thinking of the Turn (Kehre).’’2 Heidegger’s series of courses and conferences on Hölderlin and the ‘‘origin’’ of the work of art have his disastrous engagement with National Socialism, as well as his attempt to disentangle himself from it, as a background. However, they reveal themselves as ideal materials to think the problematic articulation or dialogue between poetic saying (Dichtung) and thinking (Denken). Thinking here becomes a letting be (sein lassen), a bringing of being to language, understood as the dwelling or sojourn, since in being-there men ‘‘let [the world and truth] spring forth (Ursprung as entspringen lassen)’’ (KPM 136/148).3 Thinking as act becomes a ‘‘compliance with being’’ (TK 47), an ‘‘ethics’’ in the sense of guarding or keeping watch of the Open site. 38 Dwelling: Between Poiēsis and Technē 39 If in Being and Time the being-there of man (of its being or Dasein) constitutes this disclosure (Erschlossenheit), during the 1930s the work of art and poetic language (Dichtung, Ursprache) become the privileged site of disclosure. Disclosure is an Ursprung, the groundless event of coming into presence (grounding) that simultaneously withdraws itself from it, an anarchic origination that throws men into the Open. In the work of art, understood as essential language, beings as a whole (phusis) open (PLT 55); and thinking must secure this gathering in its historical and linguistic character, which in turn entails that thinking must become the recollection of the origin (PLT 74). While the question of poetic language (of essential language) is well documented in Heidegger’s critical bibliography, this is not the case with the question of ethics.4 Heidegger alludes implicitly to ethics in Being and Time, and more explicitly in the ‘‘Letter on Humanism’’ (LH/PATH);5 but these have been totally obscured by his abject political engagement.6 In the latter Heidegger seeks to define an ‘‘ethics’’ prior to any ethics, an ‘‘original ethics’’ understood as dwelling or sojourn, as the preserving of the Open in its opening. This is what the structure of care or concern (Sorge) meant in Being and Time (‫ن‬ 44), in which the proximity of being to Dasein was already in view. Unlike Husserl, for whom the world is constituted by a transcendental ego, the world is for Heidegger part of a structure proper to existence called being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-Sein). In Heidegger’s notation eksistence , the prefix ek marks the exposition at play in being-in-the-world, throwness and facticity, a form of being that goes beyond the classical opposition inside/outside. Dasein is a being for whom its being is a matter of concern and in which being-in-the-world reveals itself as a unifying structure. It is the structure of care that determines how entities come into presence, but inasmuch as the structure of care presupposes a unique relation to being, it is being that conditions the structure of our makingpresent . Later on Heidegger will say that being ‘‘gives or sends,’’ but soon after he abandons the schema of the history of being to think what ‘‘gives’’ being (Ereignis). In an existential sense the ‘‘in’’ of being-in-theworld means a ‘‘being-alongside’’ (bei) or dwelling, a relation of familiarity or proximity that is irreducible to spatial contiguity (BT 80/54). But in 40 Intrigues: From Being to the Other a more essential way, dwelling names the responsibility that certain forms of existence—the thinker’s, the poet’s, that of the founder of a people— contract with being’s unconcealing: its preservation. Later on, in ‘‘Building Dwelling Thinking’’ (1951), Heidegger defines the fundamental...