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2 Hiding Figures of Cryptophilia in the Work of Art Language is charged with the task of making beings manifest and preserving them as such—in the linguistic work. Language gives expression to what is most pure and most concealed, as well as to what is confused and common . . . The word as word never offers any immediate guarantee as to whether it is an essential word or a deception. On the contrary—an essential word, in its simplicity, often looks like an inessential one. And on the other hand, what shows itself in its finery in the appearance of the essential is often merely something recited and repeated by rote. Thus language must constantly place itself into the illusion which it engenders by itself, and so endanger what is most its own, genuine utterance. —Heidegger, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” 2nd April 1936 Heidegger started making notes on the origin of the work of art in 1931; further notes followed in 1934 and the first public lecture was given in November 1935, before the essay as we now know it was delivered as a series of three public lectures in Frankfurt am Main in November and December 1936.1 But Heidegger was never completely satisfied with this essay as is evinced by the epilogue and addendum that were added to it over the next twenty years, the latter coinciding with his concession that the whole work now needed a “second part” if it was to take account of certain developments in modern art, notably the work of Klee and Cézanne.2 In his later years the question of art and its current direction would continue to attract him, leading to some six further lectures between 1956 and 1970. The lectures of 1936 thus come out of a stream of thinking that persisted for much of his career and so in reading them 59 we have to be aware of their provenance. The first lecture, in Freiburg 1935, is a continuation of the inquiry begun in his course of the previous semester, Introduction to Metaphysics, where his examination of the changing relation between phusis and logos since Heraclitus was punctuated by a long analysis of the second choral ode from Sophocles’ Antigone. For Heidegger , the poet’s word exposes us to the uncanniness of our existence, which is persistently unsettled by the “strife” or polemos between phusis and logos. His understanding of the work of art in the Freiburg lecture pursues this Heraclitean line, emphasizing the violence with which the logos of art, as a technē logos, emerges, but a year later this has changed. The significance of this transition lies in the fact that it indicates a greater change at work in Heidegger’s thinking in the 1930s, a change that will lead directly into the project of his later years. The sources of this transition are numerous but we can begin to enumerate them by considering what occurs in the year between the first and the final lectures. To begin with, Heidegger’s lecture courses following on from Introduction to Metaphysics cover Kant’s first critique, in an analysis of the nature and spatiality of a thing, then Schelling’s treatise on the essence of human freedom, which not only covers the abyssal ground of freedom but the relation of good and evil to this ungrounding, and then Nietzsche’s notes on the will to power as art. Furthermore, 1936 also sees Heidegger condensing his 1934–35 lectures on Hölderlin’s hymns into a public lecture given in Rome, and the beginning of his private meditations on the nature of Ereignis . Just as important is the increasing unease Heidegger is feeling in relation to the direction of the National Socialist regime, which has not only begun to make his academic life more difficult as he is put under surveillance for possible subversion, but also, as the Four Year Plan announced in September 1936 indicates, seems to be heading toward the total technological mobilization of the country. Each of these developments bring a greater caution and subtlety to Heidegger’s lectures at the end of 1936, for the nature of a thing and the event of its being place the polemos of his earlier reading under pressure. To highlight this change, I will explore “The Origin of the Work of Art” through three Heraclitean terms (phusis, polemos, and logos) that form Heidegger ’s figures of earth, draw-ing (Riß), and poetry, but in doing so I...

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