Language after Heidegger

Notes

Introduction 1. Critical responses to Heidegger have begun addressing his shift in the understanding of language in the mid-1930s, especially in the context of Contributions to Philosophy. It is significant that in the volume of proceedings from the 2004 colloquium on Beiträge zur Philosophie, no fewer than six essays are devoted to the problem of language: John Sallis, “The Manic Saying of Beyng” (75–84); Ivo de Gennaro, “Entmenschung und Sprache” (329–340); François Vezin, “Expérience de la parole, expérience de la traduction” (341–355); Jean-François Aenishanslin, “La logique, la pensée, le silence” (359–366); Ivan Kordić, “Das Sagen des Seyns und die Sprache” (367–382); Marco Casanova, “Die Sprache des Ereignisses” (383–392). All these essays share an emphasis on the critical need to (re)think language from the event, that is, as already “saying” and delivering itself to words. Although I return occasionally to these texts, my overall approach is informed by the same critical stance, emphasizing the importance of transforming (our relation to) language precisely from the event. 2. There are of course many earlier essays and book-length studies that predate the publication of these texts by Heidegger and pave the way for my study. Among them, I want to mention three that hold particular importance for my approach here, in order of their appearance: Bernasconi, Question of Language, my own Inflected Language, and Fynsk, Language and Relation. These studies share an understanding that language in Heidegger cannot be accounted for simply in conceptual terms, that is, presented as a theory or a philosophy of language, but that, taken beyond representation and expression, language comes to transform thinking, so that thought no longer “uses” language to present its findings but issues from language and responds to it. I also treated the issue of language in Heidegger in the two books that followed Inflected Language and several essays, not only on Heidegger but also on Heidegger and avant-garde poetry. Some of my intuitions about Heidegger ’s approach have been borne out, in particular by the publication of volumes 71 and 74 of the Gesamtausgabe, which allow us to comprehend better and develop the critical transformation of language sketched in Contributions to Philosophy and Mindfulness. NOTES 222 | NOTES TO PAGES 2–14 3. Robert Bernasconi emphasizes this notion of transformation in his essay “Transformation of Language at Another Beginning,” where, rereading Derrida’s critique of the “presence” of phone and logos in Heidegger’s thinking on language, he instead draws parallels between the two thinkers, insisting that “The end of philosophy , or rather its closure (Verendung), takes place in both Heidegger and Derrida , therefore, only as a transformation of our relation to previous thinking” (205). Bernasconi, Heidegger in Question, 190–210. 4. My point here is that the publication of the series of manuscripts following from Contributions to Philosophy has made both possible and necessary the reappraisal of the manner in which Heidegger’s thought proceeds from language, and thus from the event. Thus I revise and expand here my remarks about the poetic rigor of thinking and the relation of the “infold” (Einfalt) as constitutive to language in Inflected Language, 21–42. Fynsk is similar in his approach, as he frames his discussion of language as relation with regard to how in Heidegger “thought begins to proceed from language itself.” Fynsk, Language and Relation, 4. 5. In Inflected Language, I emphasize the strangeness involved in the withdrawal or retraction of language from signification, the ways in which this retreat inflects meaning and helps change thought into poetic thinking; see 10 and 27–42. Fynsk makes a similar point about how Heidegger’s account of language extends beyond the play of signification: “Thus Heidegger’s target in his deconstruction of the traditional concept of language is the sign structure, conceived as the articulation of a phonic (or even written) substance and the meaning it would convey.” See Language and Relation, 78. My approach differs importantly from Fynsk’s in my emphasis on Heidegger’s rethinking of difference in terms of nearness and departure (Abschied), and on the dependence of this account on Heidegger’s critical distinction between words (Worte) and signs, or “dictionary words” (Wörter). The texts published in the Collected Works since 1999, especially GA 74, allow us to flesh out much more clearly Heidegger’s position, especially his rethinking of the notion of the sign with regard to Heidegger’s critique of difference, which I develop...