The Present Personal by Kenaan Hagi;

Author:Kenaan, Hagi;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LAN009000, Language Arts and Disciplines/Linguistics, PHI038000, Philosophy/Language
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2005-02-08T16:00:00+00:00

The transformative experience by which Heidegger seeks to approach language and to ground a new understanding of the appearance of meaning is twofold. On the one hand, it consists of a radical turning away from the common sphere of intelligibility—a magnetic field—dominated by the mirroring poles of the pragmatic and the propositional.9 At the same time, it consists of a deliberate turn toward the poetic, which Heidegger understands as the original source and the purest manifestation of meaningfulness as such.10 The turn to the poetic, i.e., the shift by which the poetic becomes the grounds of our experience of language, is thus meant to open the possibility of reflecting on “language qua language,” of speaking (philosophically) of “speech qua speech.” From a different perspective, it is meant to allow “language itself [to] bring itself to language,”11 to open the possibility through which “language . . . delivered into its own freedom, can be concerned solely with itself.”12

We cannot really come to terms with Heidegger’s understanding of the poetic unless we examine how he reads poetry. This will not be done here, for the novelty of Heidegger’s aesthetic insight is of less importance to the present project. Heidegger’s shift to the poetic concerns us, rather, because of what it excludes. There is a lesson to be learned from what Heidegger’s aesthetic position structurally effaces. And, yes, it effaces the personal. To put this schematically, we may say that the very gesture of delivering language “into its own freedom” severs the phenomenon, almost by definition, from its roots in the speaking individual, in the breath of his mouth, her voice, or the hand that writes. The same Heideggerian gesture that releases the intelligible from its captivity in the domain of everyday use, from its submission to daily human concerns, also leaves language bereft of any trace of the singular individual whose body allows language to resonate in the first place. In retrieving language’s original grounds in the purity of speech—in “what is spoken purely”—Heidegger ends up privileging a domain of intelligibility that is purged of all signs of the individual’s attachment to language. Heidegger wishes to recollect language onto itself and in so doing leave behind its cognitive, pragmatic, communicative, and expressive functions. But the poetic vision of the origins of language is so sweeping that it ineluctably deprives the phenomenon of language of its whole human physiognomy. Hence, in construing the poetic without the concreteness of individuals, Heidegger makes no distinctions between persons who on occasion use and manipulate language (as one employs a tool) and those who, in speaking, give voice to their intimate rapport with language, who put themselves into the hands of language, and who depend on language as one depends on friends. Heidegger’s rejection of individuality is wholesale. In turning to analyze Trakl’s poem, “Winter Evening,” for example, Heidegger notes the fact that “the poem was written by Georg Trakl” and then immediately qualifies his remark in the following way: “Who the author is remains unimportant here, as with every other masterful poem.

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