Language after Heidegger

Introduction

Introduction As the title indicates, this book explores both language according to Heidegger : Heidegger’s idiomatic and innovative approach to words and language , and also language after Heidegger, that is, how we can think about language differently thanks to Heidegger’s work. In this way, while considering Heidegger’s main ideas on language, the book examines the crucial role Heidegger’s distinctive language explorations and inventions play in shaping not only his approach to language but also his idiomatic way of thinking. For what is critical to Heidegger’s enterprise is developing a manner of thinking through language, that is, thinking that opens up new avenues and discovers unexpected insights less by way of concepts or arguments than by a specific way of listening to and being guided by language and its intrinsic ingenuity. There are several reasons why such a study is both important and timely. To begin, there is no current book devoted to tracing adequately this mutually formative relation between language and thinking in Heidegger, one that would do justice to the complex and innovative, in fact, unique, approach to language and to thinking via language Heidegger develops, especially as it has come into sharper focus in the texts from the 1930s and 1940s, which only began to appear in print in 1999: Vom Wesen der Sprache, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 85 (1999); Über den Anfang, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 70 (2005); Das Ereignis, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 71 (2009); Zum Wesen der Sprache und Zur Frage nach der Kunst, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 74 (2010). These volumes show that Heidegger’s conception of language, known up to now mostly from his post–World War II lectures on language and poetry, collected in English in On the Way to Language and Poetry, Language, Thought, was already developed in the late 1930s and early 1940s.1 These writings often offer Heidegger’s most radical and linguistically most daring explorations, which fuse new paths in think- 2 | L A NGUAGE AFTER HEIDEGGER ing with an inventive and transformed experience of language. For these reasons, we must revise what we have learned about language in Heidegger on the basis of works available before these more recent publications, and indeed radicalize our understanding.2 This critical interlacing of language and thought aside, all too often scholarly responses either pay scant attention to language in the discussion of Heidegger’s work, or such deliberations become too quickly limited to either the analysis of Heidegger’s idea of language or the consideration of his engagement with poetry and art. In either case, language ends up playing “only” the role of one of Heidegger’s themes rather than being explored as the “engine” of Heidegger thinking, as the way this thinking advances, escapes metaphysical determinations, or occasions critical breakthroughs. At the same time, in the discussions of Heidegger that are situated between continental and analytic perspectives, the matter of language becomes telescoped into the problematic of ordinary language or of logic or both, as though the aim was to try to domesticate Heidegger’s thought back into philosophically familiar and recognizable categories and terms. As a result, the latter approaches tend to evacuate precisely the very impetus of Heidegger’s thought toward a transformation of our relation to language, a transformation that specifically requires changing the terms and the ways in which we experience language and thinking, as well as encounter ourselves in them.3 Examining and developing further not only Heidegger’s understanding of language but also his practice of writing and thinking through language is important for several other reasons. First, language is not simply one of the topics or issues in Heidegger’s vast work but constitutes the issue of Heidegger ’s work in the literal sense: Heidegger’s thinking issues from language, from its signature trait of having always already arrived into signs, into speech and writing, into poetry (Dichten) and thinking (Denken).4 Though this approach is already in evidence in Being and Time, especially in the book’s initial attempt to understand language in terms of Rede, or discourse, it is from Contributions to Philosophy onward that much of Heidegger’s thought proceeds literally by way of language. What this means is that Heidegger does not simply “use” language to express or represent ideas, including his own account of language, but rather that, carefully listening to language, he allows his thinking to unfold from it and be guided by it. Quite often his thinking literally receives its impetus from the German terms he follows and develops...