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The world and image of poetic language: Heidegger and Blanchot

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Abstract

This essay engages ways in which the manifestation of ‘world’ occurs in poetry specifically through images, and how we can conceive of the imagination in this regard without reducing the imagination to a mimetic faculty of consciousness subordinate to cognition. Continental thought in the last century offers rich resources for this study. The notion of a ‘world’ is related to the poetic image in ways fundamental to the Heidegger’s theory of language, and may be seen in Continental poetics following Heidegger, including Blanchot’s examination of poetry in his account of the space of literature. By means of images, I shall demonstrate, poetic language is exemplary in relation to ‘world’ in two ways. (1) Images, poetically arranged, generate and open up a sense or experience of a world, specific to that poem, for its reader. Poetic images then, exhibit a generative evocation of world. (2) Through images, a poem may evoke the way in which space and time are inhabited as a world of human dwelling in an ontologically or existentially meaningful way. The relation of images to world is, then, an illumination or a disclosure of world. The first of these relations remains, to a large extent, immanent to the poem, but may be seen as an analogue of the essentially human experience of inhabiting a world. The second relation transcends the poem and relates the poem immediately to the existential framework of human dwelling.

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Notes

  1. Heidegger (1959, 1962, 1971a, b, 1977, 1992, 2000).

  2. Sartre (2004), Dufrenne (1989), Merleau-Ponty (1994).

  3. Blanchot (2004, 1955), Bachelard (1994, 2004).

  4. For a recent discussion of their relation see Allen (2009).

  5. Heidegger (1971a, p. 72).

  6. See Krummel (2007, p. 262).

  7. For a recent discussion of Heidegger and modernism, see Foster (2007). On Heidegger and modernity, see Young (2007). Also relevant for a discussion of Heidegger and modern poetics remain treatments by Bové (1980) and Rosenfeld (1976).

  8. Heidegger (1971a, p. 132).

  9. Heidegger (1971a, p. 132).

  10. On this formulation see Taylor (2004).

  11. Lafont attempts an analytic description of Heidegger’s view of language (2000, p. 104).

  12. Heidegger (1971a, p. 75).

  13. Heidegger (1971a, p. 132).

  14. Heidegger (1977, p. 61).

  15. Heidegger (1971a, p. 73, 1977, p. 60).

  16. Heidegger (1977, p. 21).

  17. Clark (1986, p. 1013).

  18. Heidegger (1977, p. 26).

  19. Heidegger (1977, p. 27).

  20. Heidegger (1977, p. 31).

  21. Heidegger (1977, p. 30).

  22. Heidegger (1977, p. 40).

  23. Heidegger (2000, p. 180).

  24. Heidegger (1977, p. 269).

  25. Heidegger (1977, p. 272).

  26. Heidegger (1977, p. 300).

  27. Heidegger (1971a, p. 132). Emphasis added.

  28. See my alternative account of Rilke’s Weltinnenraum, contextualized within the development of Rilke’s understanding of poetic space, in Gosetti-Ferencei (2007).

  29. While Heidegger relies on Rilke’s description of Weltinnenraum from Rilke’s letters, Rilke’s own poetic citation of ‘Weltinnenraum’ issues in the following poetic lines: ‘Durch alle Wesen reicht der eine Raum:/ Weltinnenraum. Die Vögel fliegen still/ durch uns hindurch./ O, der ich wachsen will,/ ich seh hinaus, und in mir wächst der Baum.’ (‘Through all beings spans only one space:/ World inner space. The birds fly quietly/ Though and beyond us. O, that I could grow,/ I see without, and in me grows the tree.’) Rainer Maria Rilke (1996, p. 113).

  30. Heidegger (1971a, p. 72, 1977, p. 60).

  31. Heidegger (1971a, pp. 73–74, 1977, p. 61).

  32. Rilke (1996, pp. 201, 363, 396).

  33. Bachelard’s notion of an exterior that is ‘une intimité ancienne perdue’ seems quite close to this author’s description, but it would be beyond the ‘dialectique du dehors et du dedans’ in the context of which his comment on Rilke arises, La poétique de l’espace (2004, p. 206).

  34. See Gosetti-Ferencei (2007).

  35. Clark (1986, p. 1010).

  36. Heidegger (1971a, p. 197).

  37. In reference to Hölderlin, Heidegger writes: ‘Das Gedichtete ist keineswegs dasjenige, was Hölderlin von sich aus in seinem Vorstellen meinte, es ist vielmehr Jenes, was ihn meinte, als es ihn in dieses Dichtertum berufen hat. Streng genommen wird der Dichter von dem, was er zu dichten hat, allererst selbst gedichtet’ (1992, p. 13). The poet Octavio Paz suggests similarly that: ‘The poet is not served by words. He is their servant. In serving them, he returns them to the plentitude of their nature, makes them recover their being. Thanks to poetry, language recovers its original state.’ Paz (1973, p. 37).

  38. Heidegger (1971b, p. 188).

  39. Heidegger (1971a, p. 226).

  40. Blanchot (2004, p. 254).

  41. Blanchot (2004, p. 255).

  42. Blanchot (2004, p. 254).

  43. Blanchot (2004, p. 255).

  44. Blanchot (2004, p. 258–259).

  45. Blanchot (2004, p. 259).

  46. Blanchot (2004, pp. 260–261).

  47. Blanchot (2004, p. 262).

  48. Blanchot (2004, p. 262).

  49. Clark (1986, p. 1005).

  50. Heidegger (1971a, p. 198).

  51. Heidegger (1971a, p. 199).

  52. Lake points out the metaphorical nature of this common root (1999, p. 71).

  53. Heidegger (1962, p. 138).

  54. Podro (1993, p. 56).

  55. Heidegger (1962, p. 136).

  56. Lake (1999, p. 73).

  57. Henrich (1994) has argued, in interpreting Heidegger’s view of Kant, for a continuity between the first and second editions of the Critique (or the A and B deductions), an argument revisited in recent scholarship. See also Angelova (2009).

  58. Heidegger (1962, pp. 237, 239, 247).

  59. Heidegger (1962, p. 233).

  60. Heidegger (1962, p. 180).

  61. Heidegger (1962, p. 138).

  62. Heidegger (1962, p. 139).

  63. Heidegger (1962, p. 181).

  64. See Gosetti-Ferencei (2004, chapter 3).

  65. This point is argued by Espen Dahl (2010).

  66. See Krummel (2007).

  67. For Heidegger ‘the poetic projection of truth is never carried out in the direction of an indeterminate void…’ (1971a, p. 75, 1977, p. 63).

  68. See Adorno (1992).

  69. Heidegger (1971b, p. 192).

  70. That Heidegger renders the ‘inexpressible’ in philosophical terms is criticized by Adorno (1966, p. 116). For a recent discussion, see Foster (2007, p. 200).

  71. In his account of the ambiguity of poetic language, Heidegger admits the essential manifold nature of poetic evocation, that ‘green’ in Trakl’s poem is decay and bloom, white is pale and pure, black is gloomy and sheltering. Yet Heidegger argues that these ‘multiple meanings’ have an ambiguousness which can be brought to ‘unison’ ‘determined by poetry’s innermost site.’ Heidegger contends that the ‘multiple ambiguousness of the poetic saying does not scatter in vague equivocations [but] arises out of a gathering, that is, out of a unison which, meant for itself alone, always remains unsayable. The ambiguity of this poetic saying is not lax imprecision but rather the rigor of him who leaves what it is as it is, who has entered into the ‘righteous vision’ and now submits to it.’ There are traces here of resoluteness in Being and Time in such assertions as: ‘The peerless rigor of Trakl’s essentially ambiguous language is in a higher sense so unequivocal that it remains infinitely superior even to all the technical precision of concepts that are merely scientifically unequivocal.’ Heidegger (1971b, p. 192).

  72. See, for instance, Gosetti-Ferencei (2004).

  73. Heidegger writes: ‘Even when we understand what is spoken in the poem in terms of poetic composition, it seems to us, as if under some compulsion, always and only to be an expressed utterance.’ Heidegger (1971a, p. 197).

  74. See Gosetti-Ferencei (2011).

  75. Paz (1973, p. 13).

  76. On Rilke and Stevens see Gosetti-Ferencei (2010).

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Gosetti-Ferencei, J. The world and image of poetic language: Heidegger and Blanchot. Cont Philos Rev 45, 189–212 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-012-9217-x

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