A Purely Spoken Monologue: The Poem and Heidegger's Way to Language

In rare moments, usually after spending a long time alone, I am struck, arrested, the first time I hear someone speak. Something strange has just transpired. It is not necessarily what was just said or how I am supposed to reply—it is simply that something has been said, that I understood it, that I am able to and will reply, and that all this has passed without the bat of an eyelash. Rare moments indeed, these experiences stop me in my tracks (or rather, in my speech), and I relish their un-ordinariness. Even stranger are attempts to articulate such experiences, to convey to even the most sympathetic of listeners what I have just undergone. It is this kind of experience that leads me to the opening of Heidegger's 1959 essay "The Way to Language":

At the outset we shall hear some words of Novalis. They stand in a text he entitled Monologue. The title directs us to the mystery of language: language speaks solely and solitarily with itself. One sentence in the text goes as follows: "Precisely what is peculiar to language—that it concerns itself purely with itself alone—no one knows."

If we grasp what we shall now try to say as a sequence of assertions about language, it will remain a concatenation of unverified and scientifically unverifiable claims. If on the contrary we experience the way to language in terms of what transpires with the way while we are underway on it, then a kind of surmise could awaken, a surmise by which language would henceforth strike us as exceedingly strange.

(1993, 397)

Using this passage to outline Heidegger's instigation as well as mine, I will attempt to draw out what we might find strange about language, or what Heidegger hopes we might undergo in experiencing the way to language as something strange. But why should this be strange, when we speak, write, converse—use language—all the time? Precisely that we cannot provide an account for it, we cannot escape its web to put a label on it from outside its bounds. That we do not and cannot understand the peculiarity and self-referentiality of language, making it conceptually transparent in a way that remains faithful to what language does, is what I hear Heidegger (and Heidegger's Novalis) telling us. Further, we understand it all the less the more we try to think it through rational formulas, pin it down with concepts, or derive a definition from categorical characteristics. Each of these will lead us further away from the essence of language, Heidegger asserts; but we may come closer to it through finding a way that can undergo an experience of language as we undergo the experience ourselves, leading us more intimately into the house we live in but do not really know. However, this is not to say that we will become more comfortable in this home. Rather, it is to say that having our comforts of language unhinged—if these comforts include a feeling of command over language—may bring us to experience something like the speaking of language that Heidegger claims comes prior to our own speaking.

In an attempt to get at this strangeness of language and its peculiarity of speaking only to itself, I will sketch out an explanation of Heidegger's claim that language is monologue, a claim I receive as quite strange. What does this mean, and why monologue and not dialogue or polyphonic conversation? How does language speak to itself alone? In addressing these questions, I will bring another of Heidegger's claims to the table, the refrain of his 1950 essay "Language": "language speaks."¹ I will attempt to show how this claim and the discussion that attends it shed some light on what it means to say that language is monologue. Specifically, if language is always speaking to itself, how do we—speakers—come into the conversation? What, then, is our speaking? Heidegger uses the language of the poem (Georg Trakl's "A Winter Evening") as a way into language, showing...