Lyrical and Ethical Subjects
1996; DePaul University; Volume: 40; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5840/philtoday199640145
ISSN2329-8596
Autores ResumoAber die Thronen, wo? die Tempel, und wo die GefaBe, Wo mit Nectar gefullt, Gottern zu Lust der Gesang? Wo, wo leuchten sie denn, die fernhintreftenden Spruche? Delphi schlummert und wo tonet das grobe Geschick? Brot und Wein, 4. Strophe. From the title of my essay it should be clear that I intend to take up a theme from the justly celebrated letter that Holderlin wrote to Casimir Bohlendorff 192 years ago. I suggest that this letter is celebrated with justice for two reasons: first, however opaque and compressed it is in the point it makes, the letter nonetheless seems to speak directly from and to the heart of Holderlin's deepest and enduring concerns; second, there seems to be some special connection binding Holderlin's concerns in that letter with the needs of our time understood as marking the end of an era, yet still before the beginning of another time. A time, in other words, somehow pinned to the question of history and destiny.2 Taking a cue from Heidegger, I want to suggest that this correspondence with Bohlendorff is a sort of compact crystal in which Holderlin's own poetic experience achieves an extraordinary density that brings into focus a question pressing upon our own historical present. As you will see, my intention is to call attention to this poetic experience from and to which Holderlin writes as an experience that addresses itself with great specificity to a time such as ours in which the experience of limits reached provides the basic tonality of every experience. I do not propose to defend my characterization of the Zeitgeist of the present age as delivering us to the experience and logic of limits-let the arguments that begin with Hegel and move up to Adorno, Heidegger, and others suffice to that end-but I will try to say something about Holderlin's poetic experience of limits as the performance of that which conceptual analyses of the finite experience never quite grasps. More precisely: my intention is to take Holderlin's remarks about the poetic experience of the foreign and of one's own in the Bohlendorff letter as the axis for interpreting three limit-experiences governing Holderlin's work; namely, translation, lost love, and the withdrawal of the divine. Holderlin's way of soliciting those experiences, a solicitation that one might characterize as a welcoming of, even a love of, limits, leads Heidegger to call him the most futural of poets in whom the contours of another time and another manner of thinking become sensible.3 Preliminarily, let me suggest that the reason for this decision is that in Holderlin one finds a thinking of limits, of finite experience, that is not guided by the dialectic of the concept, but by another dialectic, one that it is not defined by the negativity of the concept, but by another, a poetic, experience of negation-an experience that Heidegger referred to as heilige Trauer. In the letter, Holderlin writes to praise Bohlendorff's play Fernando or the Baptizing of Art: A Dramatic Idyll, which Holderlin calls an authentic modern tragedy. The few remarks about Bohlendorff's play seem to be merely generous, but rather empty, praise for the work of a close friend with whom he believes he shares a destiny. But it is not Bohlendorff's play, so much as it is the nature of such closeness and the direction of that destiny that capture Holderlin's attention, thus forming the focus of his letter which struggles to speak both of how we belong to what is closest to us and of the dilemma of living in a time without destiny. The substance of the letter-which at times reads like a confession, at times like a manifesto-is found in a complex matrix of questions that start with the theme of the national and raise questions about the nature of what can rightly be said to be one's own and that to which one belongs. The passage in which this is said pointedly is clear: We learn nothing with greater difficulty than the free use of the National. …
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