Abstract
Writing consciousness, being intelligence, is identified with Russia and America; non-writing consciousness, being spirit, is identified with Germany; writing consciousness as animality; poetry provides access to Being, traditional philosophy causes forgottenness of Being; two kinds of people: metaphysical man (man as subject) and pre-metaphysical man (man as Dasein); spirit’s fall and degeneration into intelligence (extension, number, the Reckoning Order of Representation); modern consciousness, vulgarity, the masses; spirit as true and proper, intelligence as semblance; originary spirituality vs. modern culture; spirit is holistic whereas intelligence is fragmented; world and worldlessness; modern consciousness as improper, unhuman, devoid of Being, as falsified spirit; originary spirit as resolute attunement to Being; Trakl’s poetry: Heidegger’s ontological reading of ‘apartness’ as the aletheic space; the call of Being as a summons to ownmost selfhood; the distinction between spirited and spiritual; rejection of the metaphysical–Christian understanding of spirit; pre-metaphysical spiritedness as flame, as being outside, as Dasein’s ek-static ek-sistence, as enflaming consciousness; writing consciousness as metaphysical spirituality, as framing, as reification; the receptiveness of the flaming and encountering gaze; withdrawal to apartness as the shedding of falsified spirit; schism: the decomposed kind (metaphysical man, modern man, man as subject), vs. the proper, unborn kind that withdraws to apartness; withdrawal to apartness as returning to the originary Occident; apartness’ gathering force is the unifying force of Ereignis; unifying difference; post-metaphysical man’s return to the human essence; the German people is the sprit-restoring race; philosophy as fundamental ontology; our Dasein; the event of history; transformation of the call of Being into the call of history; German nationalization of spirit, the question of Being, even humanness itself; Germany’s historical mission: saving Europe–the Occident, humanity–from spirit’s degeneration and the looming threat from the outside; Russia and America as technological pincers, Marxism on one side, positivism on the other; Heidegger’s opposition to communism and capitalism; demonization and de-humanizing of Russia and America; the human and the animal; Russia and America as a metaphor for Germany’s Other; Heidegger’s guilt; Heidegger’s Nazism; Plato and Heidegger on the pharmakos; Russia and America as Heidegger’s pharmakoi; metaphysics and Heidegger’s Nazism; the dream of purity and Heidegger’s logocentric racism.
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Notes
- 1.
In his essay “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” Heidegger identifies both poetry and history as associated solely with “our Dasein ”: only the German people is poetic, and since poetry grounds history, only the German people is historical; see Heidegger (2000a, 59–60).
- 2.
- 3.
“At vespers the stranger loses himself in black November destruction” (Heidegger 1971a, 171).
- 4.
- 5.
This line is quoted several times, see, e.g., Heidegger (1971a, 161–62).
- 6.
In the English translation of Heidegger’s essay on Trakl , Hertz renders “geistlich” as “ghostly” and “geistig” as “spiritual.” As we will see in the next chapter apropos Derrida, there is indeed a close connection between Geist and “ghost .” Yet the terms are not identical: “ghost ” is usually used to refer to the dead, whereas “spirit” is used for the living. Hence “geistlich” has been translated here as “spirited,” an adjective derived from the same English noun—“spirit”—as the adjective “spiritual,” as is the case with the German adjectives “geistlich” and “geistig,” both of which are derived from the noun “Geist.”
- 7.
Hertz’s English rendering of this phrase—“shatters”—fails to capture the crucial notion of a “frame” or “framework” (Fassung) connoted by the German term.
- 8.
The poems in question are “Occidental Song” and “Occident”; see Trakl (2005, 76, 96).
- 9.
The question, raised in the philosophical sense, has a Leibnizian formulation: “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?” (Heidegger 2000b, 1). Raised in the historical sense, the formulation is Nietzschean: “How does it stand with Being?” (35).
- 10.
Derrida is apparently referring to Heidegger (1995).
- 11.
At the start of the eighth Duino Elegy, in comparing the human to the animal, the “creature” (die Kreatur), Rilke highlights the former’s lesser capacity for seeing “the Open ”:
With all its eyes the natural world [die Kreatur] looks out
into the Open. Only our eyes are turned
backward, and surround plant, animal, child
like traps, as they emerge into their freedom . (Rilke 2009, 40)
Man has no access to the Open , whereas animals see it right before their eyes. Humans can see the Open only in liminal situations, e.g., in childhood or when near death. In Rilke’s critique of modernity—which bears a striking affinity to Heidegger’s—the capacity for seeing the Open is taken from humans as soon as they come under the yoke of culture, which distances them from their originary, pre-cultural nearness to Nature. For Heidegger’s reading of the eighth Duino Elegy, see Heidegger (1992, 151–61).
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Pimentel, D. (2019). Writing and The Politics of Race. In: Heidegger with Derrida . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05692-6_8
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