Sounding/Silence: Martin Heidegger at the Limits of Poetics

Conclusion

 Conclusion A Poetics of Limit? At the end of the last chapter I observed that Heidegger’s readings of poetry are not exegeses but preservations, and moreover, that these preservations become genuine encounters with the poems they read only when they are themselves unable to gauge the shape of this encounter. This led to a paradoxical situation in which Heidegger’s readings are most compelling when they undermine his own portrayal of them. The first of these observations impacts on how we read Heidegger: if we take Heidegger’s refusal of exegesis seriously, we cannot perform an exegesis of Heidegger’s readings, but rather the preservation of a preservation. The second observation helps us to flesh this out further: to read Heidegger reading means to read against Heidegger, and beyond him; what Werner Marx has called Weiterdenken, the task of thinking further, is necessarily antagonistic. That is, we read his unthought just as he seeks to read the unthought of the philosophical tradition , and project off from his thinking as he projects off from the poems of George, Hölderlin, Sophocles, Trakl and others. I situated this preservation-of-preservation in the contours and fault lines we find when we stage an encounter between poem and reading, attending to both its points of contact and divergence, where the reading is characterized less by the claims it makes than by its lacunae, tensions, and aporiai. In particular I used Heidegger’s most powerful insights on poetry—that the form of a poem, as the singular mode in which it presences , is central to its ontological vocation, or that individual figures engage with the linguistic norms at their disposal so as to think beyond the  ■ Conclusion constraints of these norms—as a means of addressing the very absence of these insights from his readings. We found that when such insights do in- flect the encounter between poem and reading, they do so subreptitiously: Heidegger’s unthinking encounter with poetics becomes an integral part of his thinking on poetry. It is thus that we might—co-opting Heidegger’s own vocabulary—stand within the possibilities his thinking opens up, not in order to construct a Heideggerian poetics, were such a thing possible, but in order to take his thinking as a starting point for posing those questions , and lines of questioning, that characterize poetics itself. In this conclusion, I would like to sketch out some of these lines of questioning. First I will revisit some of the central arguments of the book, and indicate how they fit in with other debates in philosophical poetics. Then I will look at how Heidegger’s thinking of limit plays itself out in some of the most powerful poetry since the crisis in verse of the s—a moment at which a shift took place in the possibilities of poetry’s measure whose reverberations are still felt today. ■ In Chapter , we saw that an artwork “sets up a world” when, through its engagement with the limits of its medium, it transforms these limits and thereby transforms the limits of the open region in which we encounter beings. Although my focus was on the supposedly formal aspects of an artwork—metrical constraints, linear and painterly perspective, diatonic harmony—one might identify the same phenomenon at a thematic level, such as when Flaubertian realism transformed what was deemed acceptable literary subject matter. For Jacques Rancière, Flaubert “democratizes” literature not merely by including characters from the rural middle classes, but by rejecting subject matter as a criterion for literature as such: “There is no longer beautiful or ugly subject matter. This does not simply mean, as it did for Wordsworth, that the emotions of simple folk are as appropriate for poetry as those of ‘great souls.’ It means, more radically, that there is no such thing as subject matter, that . . . the texture of the work lies in style, which is ‘an absolute manner of seeing things.’” Like Heidegger, Rancière endows this ostensibly formal shift with epochal significance: it reframes what he elsewhere calls the partage du sensible, which, like Heidegger’s “open,” is conceived as a kind of articulation (his translators offer “distribution ” as keeping both the sense of division and of sharing/partaking) that delimits the space of possible experience. However, situating this shift within a history of democratic politics, Rancière’s thinking gives an indication of how the historicity of the artwork, which for Heidegger is bound up with the Volk’s capacity...