Volume 17

The Holy Mourning of Physis: Hölderlin’s Testimony in the Last Instance

29 October 202523 November 2025By Rafael Fernandez

Philippe Lynes
University of Dundee/ University of Glasgow

Volume 17, 2025

Im Tragischen nun ist das Zeichen an sich selbst unbedeutend, wirkungslos, aber das Ursprüngliche ist gerade heraus. Eigentlich nämlich kann das Ursprüngliche nur in seiner Schwäche erscheinen, insofern aber das Zeichen an sich selbst als unbedeutend = 0 gesetzt wird, kann auch das Ursprüngliche, der verborgene Grund jeder Natur sich darstellen. Stellt die Natur in ihrer schwächsten Gabe sich eigentlich dar, so ist das Zeichen, wenn sie sich in ihrer stärksten Gabe darstellt, = 0.

Friedrich Hölderlin, “Die Bedeutung der Tragödie”

Erde, ist es nicht dies, was du willst: unsichtbar in uns erstehn? – Ist es dein Traum nicht, / einmal unsichtbar zu sein? – Erde! Unsichtbar!/ Was, wenn Verwandlung nicht, ist dein drängender Auftrag?

Rainer Maria Rilke, “Die Neunte Elegie”


Friedrich Hölderlin’s poetry, Martin Heidegger suggests, opens a transition beyond nihilism by recognizing its origin in the abandonment, dearth or plight of beyng. What Hölderlin’s poetizing calls ‘the holy,’ Heidegger writes in his 1941 treatise On Inception, names the same as beyng in that both are anterior to gods and humans. Both beyng and the holy thus name what Heidegger calls the other inception, in contrast to the first inception of φύσις that precedes all philosophy. ‘Nature’ (die »Natur«) in Hölderlin’s As When on a Holiday… was an early name for the holy, a name which arose from “that which, thinking-ahead into the history of being, must be creatively said as appropriative event [das Er-eignis] and thought as the in-between [das Inzwischen], from whose time-space all beings and their fundamental configuration come to issue.”1 However, Heidegger adds, 

Hölderlin still did not think this in-between as a developed concept. The intimation of the holy experiences the abandonment of the ‘earth’ by the ‘world,’ and the distance of the gods, and the straying of the human. But this abandonment [Verlassenheit] is not recognized as the abandonment of beings from being, and beyng is not thought as relinquishment [Loslassende], and the relinquishing is not thought as rejection [Verweigerung]. So, therefore, there lurks around the poetry of Hölderlin’s Hymns a danger [eine Gefahr][.]2 

Our own natural crisis implores us to deepen Hölderlin’s poetic testimony through this abandonment, relinquishment and rejection, to hear it anew in its tragic emptiness and inhumanity in the last instance. But this requires problematizing Heidegger’s thought of the appropriative event by way of a different distancing and expropriation. It necessitates an interruptive rereading of the in-between by way of a non-relational nothingness, as we find in the work of Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida. Blanchot sees Hölderlin’s well-known descent into madness not as the mere symptom of an individual struck by the lightning of the gods; rather, Hölderlin is himself “the demand that doomed the poet to collapse, such that collapse in turn took on the sense of poetry […] He does not seek to realize (to surpass) himself in a Promethean tension that would doom him to catastrophe. It is not his destiny that he decides, but that of poetry.”3 Hölderlin founds the very destiny of poetry upon the impossibility at its heart, engaging “a poetic existence so strong that, once its essence was unveiled, it was able to make itself the proof that it was an impossibility, and to extend itself out into nothingness and into the void, without ceasing to accomplish itself.”4 

In his reading of Heidegger’s “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry” in the second year of his Secret et témoignage seminars (1992-1993), Derrida recalls that Hölderlin divides poetic language between the most innocent of occupations and the most dangerous of goods. Hölderlin’s “Notes on Oedipus” remark that “because such men live in violent circumstances, their language too, almost like the Furies, will speak in a more violent configuration.”5 Split between innocence and danger, language is given to the human so that it may bear witness to what it itself is; 

so that creating, destroying and perishing, and returning to the everliving, to the mistress and mother, he may bear witness to what he is/ to have inherited from her, learned from her, her most divine gift, all-sustaining love [damit er schaffend, zerstörend, und untergehend, und wiederkehrend zur ewiglebenden, zur Meisterin und Mutter, damit er zeuge, was er sei/ geerbt zu haben, gelernt von ihr, ihr Göttliches, die allerhaltende liebe].6  

If the poet constitutes the witness par excellence for Derrida, its testimony to this all-sustaining love – “l’amour qui conserve l’univers,” as he translates it – is essentially threatened, threatening and violent, it does not go without destruction [Zerstörung] and decline, perishing or downgoing [Untergang].7 As Heidegger asks, “what should man testify to? To his belonging to the earth. […] The attestation of belonging […] occurs through the creation of a world and through its rise, as well as through its destruction and decline.”8 Heidegger elaborates in Hölderlin’s Hymns: Germania and the Rhine that language constitutes the human Dasein alone as the witness of beyng in its nothingness, “he testifies on its behalf, stands up to it, and falls victim to it. Where there is no language, as in the case of animals and plants, there, despite all life, is no manifestness of beyng and, for this reason, there is no non-being either and none of the emptiness belonging to the Nothing.”9 The poet is cast out or exiled between gods and mortals, earth and world in what Derrida calls the madness of a double bind or double bond, “bound in a twofold sense [zweifacht gebunden].”10 But it is from this very ‘between’ that gods and mortals come to be what they are – only from this interstitial non-site can the poet attest to what the human is; “the between is its proper site but the between cannot be a proper site, by definition, it is a site of exclusion or expropriation, the proper site of expropriation.”11 In this absence of any proper site alone can a responsible decision regarding the overcoming of nihilism be undertaken, since this decision must undergo the impossible trial of the undecidable. The poet bears the responsibility of testimony “insofar as it bears the decision in its proper site, to wit the undecidable of the between, between what is no longer and what is not yet.”12 Torn between this void of past and void of future, the poet cannot even attest to what takes place in the present; it testifies to what will take place in, or rather return as the future-to-come. If it is difficult to imagine how one might bear witness to a future, Derrida suggests that the dimension of futurity is inextricable from every witness’s commitment to tell the truth; “the poet-prophet-witness only predicts the future by having already seen it and thus by having apprehended it as having already happened, as to-come as it remains [tout à-venir qu’il reste].”13 Such is Derrida’s understanding of Hölderlin’s lines “…the bold spirit flies, like the eagle/ Ahead of the thunderstorm, prophesying/ The coming of the gods […fliegt, der kühne Geist, wie Adler den/ Gewittern, weissagend seinen/ Kommenden Göttern voraus].”14 By determining the essence of poetry as a testimony to an impossible future-to-come that returns from an anarchic past that has never been present, Hölderlin opens what Heidegger calls ‘a new time’: “it is the time of the gods who have fled and of the god who is coming. It is the time of need because it stands in a double lack and a double not: in the no-longer of the gods who have fled and in the not-yet of the god who is coming. […] But he holds firm in the Nothingness of this night [Aber er hält stand im Nichts dieser Nacht].”15


Es Fehlen Heilige Nahmen


It is indeed the absence or lack of gods and of holy names in Hölderlin, the need of gods for mortal feelings that inaugurates a possible overcoming of nihilism in poetic testimony for Heidegger, Blanchot and Derrida. In “The Poem,” Heidegger writes that “the word ‘nature’ […] is the truly obscure, veiling-unveiling name in Hölderlin’s poetry. For the naming is ‘compelled by the holy,’ the names which it calls out must be holy names.”16 And yet, he cites the poet’s “Homecoming,” “often we must be silent: holy names are lacking [Schweigen müssen wir oft; es fehlen heilige Nahmen].”17 For Hölderlin, ‘lack [Fehl]’ “is no mere defect or flaw or weakness. This word, which Hölderlin uses on a number of occasions, indeed means a kind of missing the mark, yet one that always springs from strength, fullness, and abundance, not from weakness or wretchedness.”18 Names likewise must fail ‘us’ so that the promise of the world Derrida develops in Advances can promise in excess of all knowability or messianic awaiting; “there must be names, names must be in default, but this default will not be the negativity of a lack.”19 Hölderlin’s ‘es fehlen heilige Nahmen’ expresses for Heidegger “a thought of salvation, the salutary or the saved (heilen and Gruss). This thought refers us to a default in the god, of course, but a default that is not a lack or a deficiency (‘Deshalb ist ‘Gottes Fehl’ auch kein Mangel [thereby ‘god’s absence’ is also not a deficiency]’).”20 But Derrida wishes to lead this default beyond “every assurance or every promise of salvation [salut] as what saves, in the safe, the salvation or salutary of health [santé] (heilen, heilig)[.]”21 Blanchot develops a similar argument regarding the time-space of lack in The Space of Literature, reframing it as a nowhen and nowhere enjoining poetizing to a necessary error and erring;  

Forgetting, error, the unhappiness of erring can be linked to an historical period: to the time of distress where the gods are absent twice over, because they are no longer there, because they are not there yet. This vacant time is that of error, where we do nothing but err because we lack the certitude of presence and the conditions of a true here. And nevertheless error helps us, ‘das Irrsal hilft.’ Elsewhere, in the variant of the poem Dichterberuf, Hölderlin says likewise that God’s lack, his default helps us: ‘Gottes Fehl hilft.’ 22 

I propose to read Hölderlin’s gods not in any religious or theological sense, but rather as negative or subtractive poetic testimonies to the timespace of annihilation, as naturalized images testifying to the impossibility of testimony. Heidegger depicts the lack of gods itself as time: “Hölderlin, in his ‘remarks on Oedipus,’ speaks of the God who ‘is nothing other than time.’”23 The void of past in an oblivion that resists all memory and recollection, and the void of a future that resists all awaiting and anticipation, are personified as gods in Blanchot’s L’Attente l’oubli: “two beings from here, two ancient gods. They were in my room. I lived with them.”24 These nothing-gods of past and future likewise structure Blanchot’s interpretation of eternal return in both Friedrich Nietzsche and Hölderlin, naming the impossible non-relation between the temporality of thought and the empty time of death.

The exigency of return, impossible to think, empty future, empty past, helps us to welcome (in the impossibility of thinking it) that which could be the always already completed of dying, that which passes without traces and that one has always to await from the infinite void of the future, awaiting excluded from the present that would be only the double fall into the abyss, even the double abyss of the fall, or, to speak more soberly, the duplicity of difference. Dying, returning.25 

Like Nietzsche, Hölderlin points to these spatiotemporal paradoxes through what Blanchot calls ‘the mad god.’ Heidegger recalls that the fourth book of Nietzsche’s planned Revaluation of All Values was entitled Dionysus: Philosophy of the Eternal Return, adding that “the name of an Asian-Greek god shines above the last phase of the last figure of Western metaphysics.”26 In its lastness, the mad god beckons towards an exteriority outside all divine order, in a last word resistant to all correlational mastery.   

a mad god, as Hölderlin and as Nietzsche always knew and knew to the point of no longer knowing it, still awakens in humans of today an unmasterable thought, whether they understand it as the premonition that even divine order is under the threat of a disturbance that is ‘outside’ it while nonetheless belonging to it, or whether this thought causes to surge up, through Dionysos, in an incompatible alliance, the presence of the god that is only presence and the radical exteriority that excludes all presence, including that of the god. The mad god: the presence of the outside that has always already suspended, forbidden presence. Let us say: the enigma of the Eternal Return that, born by Nietzsche, was born no less by Hölderlin, perhaps.27 

Nihilism: Schelling, Nietzsche, Hölderlin


Heidegger sits F.J.S. Schelling and Nietzsche at the crest of philosophy as a metaphysics of the will and unconditioned subjectivity. If Schelling’s will to love and Nietzsche’s will to power conclude the first beginning of Western thought, Hölderlin’s poetry leads us in a downgoing towards its other beginning. Heidegger nonetheless seems to favour Schellingian love over Nietzschean power – a love for which words leave the thinker, wherein poetic melancholia partakes of the veil of sadness spread over nature, a love consisting in letting ground be in its abyssal ungrounding. This love, he writes in Mindfulness, “is the will that wills that the beloved be; the will that wills that the beloved find its way unto its ownmost and sways therein.”28 It constitutes a loving-in-advance, a ‘fore-loving [Vor-liebe]’ of beyng in its nothingness, “acquiescing to the distress of the abyssal ground […] outside inactivity and activity – mere tolerating and wallowing in ‘anguish’ is unknown to it.”29 But Heidegger distinguishes this fore-loving from Nietzsche’s heroic amor fati, which somewhat confusingly for him “still means loving the obscure in advance [die Vorliebe zum Dunkeln]; it is not venturing into the uniqueness of the clearing’s lighting up, it is not venturing beyng as refusal.”30 One must thus differentiate a poetic fore-loving of beyng as abyss or nothingness in distress and melancholia, willing nothingness as released intimacy, and a still-metaphysical fore-loving as the mastery of one’s fate, one that wills its eternal return anew. When Hölderlin writes that ‘life is death, and death is also a life,’ this means for Heidegger that the love of life even “includes death. Insofar as death comes, it vanishes. The mortals die the death in life. In death the mortals become im-mortal.”31 Perhaps nowhere else does Heidegger come closer to Blanchot and Derrida in articulating the impossible poetic testimony called forth by an anonymous, impersonal and neutral dying that forever remains impossible to die. 

Like Nietzsche, Heidegger too seems to refuse to believe that love is dead, but bears this horror, loneliness and longing otherwise. However, he recalls that the thought of the eternal return itself arises in the ‘loneliest loneliness’ mourned by the last man of Nietzsche’s Philosophenbuch: “when Nietzsche creates poetically the figure of Zarathustra he projects the space of that ‘loneliest loneliness’ cited at the end of The Gay Science, the loneliness that induces the thought of thoughts.”32 It is because Zarathustra is the last man standing at the reversal of the metaphysical distinction between the true and apparent worlds, at the highpoint of humanity, that Nietzsche had to poetize him. This aesthetic or poetic creation must be understood in terms of the tragic, and “the ‘only thing’ that happens in tragedy is the downgoing.’”33 Zarathustra’s own downgoing must be understood in in two senses: “first, transition as departure; second, descent as acknowledgement of the abyss.”34 He takes on the thought of eternal return by “‘becoming beneficent toward life,’ that is, affirming life in its extreme anguish and in its most rollicking joy.”35 However, by merely inverting Platonism, positing the eternal return and the will to power as a unity incapable of thinking the difference between beyng and beings, Nietzschean affirmation ultimately remains incapable of any decision concerning beyng and nihilism. The Hölderlinian affirmation Heidegger seeks – although subtly, at times almost imperceptibly different – engages a downgoing that “‘say[s] yes’ to the nihilating of the abyssal ground; it means taking over a de-cision which is beyng itself and which necessitates the distress of the groundership of man and the distress of the godhood of gods.”36 If Nietzsche turns to Dionysian affirmation in the last Western determination of beyng as power, Hölderlin’s Dionysos “is the Yes that belongs to life at its wildest, inexhaustible and in its creative urge, and he is the No that belongs to the most terrifying death and annihilation.”37 Heidegger thereby carefully differentiates Hölderlin’s ‘earth’ from Nietzsche’s, the latter of which does not break from the Platonico-Christian split between the true world of being and the sensuous world of becoming, but merely posits the true as what the will to power schematizes out of chaos. Hölderlin’s earth, by contrast, “presumed to be on this side of life, is not the ‘earthly’ in the Christian or metaphysical sense, if only because the earth is divine. And it is divine, again, not in the Christian or metaphysical sense of being created by God.”38 However, this does not point to a one-world physics instantiating the ‘identity’ of the earthly and divine. Hölderlin instead recovers a lost sense of φύσις as holy chaos, an image of nature as the one non-relationally differentiating itself into relation and non-relation.

In a passage we can extend to Hölderlin’s relationship to romantic Naturphilosophie as a whole, “when Goethe says ‘nature,’ and when Hölderlin speaks the same word, different worlds reign.”39 But Heidegger’s readings of Hölderlin often feel much closer – and not just affectively so – to those he proposes of Schelling. In his 1936 seminar, he argues that the following summarizes the entirety of Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom: “In man there exists the whole power of the principle of darkness and, in him too, the whole force of light. In him there are both centres – the deepest abyss and the highest heaven. Man’s will is the seed – concealed in eternal longing – of God, present as yet only in the depths – the divine light of life locked in the depths which God divined when he determined to will nature.”40 One hears word-for-word echoes of this passage in Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin’s “As when On a Holiday…” As the ‘beautiful’ and ‘wonderfully all-present,’ Nature for Hölderlin permeates all real things, and “this omnipresence holds in opposition to each other the extreme opposites, the highest heaven and the deepest abyss.”41 Heidegger commends Schelling’s insight “into the abysses and heights of beyng, in regard to the terrible element of the godhead, the lifedread of all creatures, the sadness of all created creators, the malice of evil and the will of love.”42 But notably, he recognizes in these moods something akin to Hölderlin, citing the latter’s hymn “The Rhine” in closing the seminar: “for because/ The most blessed feel nothing themselves,/ Another, if to say such a thing/ Is permitted, must, I suppose,/ In the gods’ name, sympathetically feel,/ They need him [‘….Denn weil/ Die seeligsten nichts fühlen von selbst,/ Muss wohl, wenn solches zu sagen/ Erlaubt ist, in der Götter Nahmen/ Theilnehmend fühlen ein Andrer,/ Den brauchen sie;…].”43 In “Hölderlin’s Earth and Heaven,” Heidegger even suggests – against the majority of his claims to the contrary elsewhere, I’d argue – that the poet’s in-finite fourfold relation of earth and world, gods and mortals must be thought “in the sense of the speculative dialectic of Schelling and Hegel.”44 However, this belonging or gathering-together is not without separation; it would be erroneous “to posit ‘nature’ […] as identical with ‘spirit’ in the sense of ‘identity’ in which Hölderlin’s friend Schelling thought of it at about the same time.”45 In The Black Notebooks, he likewise distinguishes Hölderlin’s earth as much from any Nietzschean biologization of nature as from any romantic spiritualization.

Once again lying historically far ahead of all this is what Hölderlin calls ‘the earth,’ which receives a mere historiological elucidation if we conflate it with ‘Gaia’ [Γαῖα, ‘Earth.’]. Historically – i.e., as bearing future humanity – the earth can come to be only if humans are previously thrust into the truth of beyng and if, on the basis of a disclosive thinking of beyng, the gods and the humans themselves enter into the site of the battle over their destinies, from which battle the world first flashes up and the earth regains its obscurity.46 

It is thus essential to understand the absolutely singular position Heidegger reserves for Hölderlin’s poetizing of earth and nature from a beyng-historical standpoint: “the historical destiny of philosophy culminates in the knowledge of the necessity to create a hearing for the words of Hölderlin.”47 For Heidegger, ‘Nietzsche’ and ‘Hölderlin’ (and ‘Schelling,’ to a lesser degree) are not arbitrary figures of study, but those to whom we now stand in an essential relation regarding thinking and poetizing. “‘Nietzsche and Hölderlin’ – an abyss separates them. In abyssally different ways, both determine the most proximate and most remote future of the Germans and of the Occident.”48 Nietzsche completes metaphysics in planetary nihilism, in accordance with its first beginning, by thinking beings as a whole as will to power; “we are at once necessitated to think that which now is with Nietzsche as the last thinker of the modern era.”49 Hölderlin by contrast poetizes what now is, but in an infinitely different manner, in accordance with the other beginning, and does so in a manner akin to the ‘bastard,’ ‘hybrid’ or ‘impure’ discourse of the khōra in Plato’s Timaeus, outside any opposition of logos and mythos, perhaps of thinking and poetizing altogether: “the fact that this poetizing becomes necessary is the sign of the completion of Western metaphysics. Only at one other time is thinking poetized in metaphysics, albeit differently, i.e., precisely in the beginning of Western metaphysics in Plato’s thinking. Plato poetizes his ‘myths.’”50


Hölderlin’s Beyng-Historical Standpoint: Heidegger


In the Beiträge, Heidegger thus speaks of a last decision concerning beyng’s abandonment in nihilism or the promise of its truth, between its first beginning in physis culminating in the machinations of the will to power, and its other beginning – at bottom, a decision “whether nature is debased into an exploitable domain of calculation and organization and into an occasion for ‘lived experience,’ or whether, as the self-secluding earth, it bears the open realm of the pictureless world.”51 This decision regarding nature and its destruction through the techno-sciences directly concerns the absconding or flight of the gods on the one hand and their advent or return on the other; “what was nature once? It was the site of the moment of the advent and sojourning [Aufenhalts] of the gods; and that was when nature, still φύσις, rested in the essential occurrence of beyng itself.”52 Key here is that for Heidegger, “Hölderlin himself ‘is’ as the first to bring up for decision the nearness and remoteness of the former and future gods (cf. the standpoint of the history of beyng).”53 

At issue, then, “is the retrieval of humans from the intractability of nonbeings into the tractability of the restrained creation [verhaltenen Schaffens] of the site destined for the passing by of the last god.”54 This restraint (Verhaltenheit) is what Heidegger calls a “creative withstanding [schaffende Aushalten] in the abyss.”55 The human must learn to dwell in these relations of restraint and steadfastness in nearness to the last god “to prepare the time-space of the last decision.”56 The importance of this disposition of restraint for the last decision cannot be overstated: “it is hardly to be named in one word, unless that word is ‘restraint.’”57 Derrida notes this in a rare reference to the Beiträge in “Faith and Knowledge”: “Verhaltenheit (modesty or respect, scruple, reserve or silent discretion that suspends itself in and as reticence),” emphasizing “the role played by this concept in the Beiträge zur Philosophie with respect to the ‘last god,’ or the ‘other god,’ the god who comes or the god who passes.”58 As the stillest witnesses to the stillest stillness, Dasein opens the space for the transition from the no longer of the first beginning to the not yet of the other beginning, whose abyssal truth it must ground. Grounding the truth of beyng thus involves something of an Orphic downgoing [Untergang]; “our own hour is the era of downgoing. The down-going, in the essential sense, is the path to the reticent preparation for what is to come, i.e., for the moment in which and the site in which the advent and the remaining absent of the gods will be decided.”59 Put more succinctly in Mindfulness,“the last god arises out of this ‘downgoing.’”60 But the abyss of ground towards which this downgoing sets forth “is not a mere gaping hole or chasm (χάος – versus φύσις)” but rather bears the “dis-lodgements [Ver-rückungen]” of clearing and concealing.61 By grounding the abyssal time-space wherein beyng gives or grants itself in its refusal and withdrawal out of nihilating nothingness, Dasein prepares a domain of stillness for the last decision concerning the advent and absconding of the last god. But it remains unclear whether overcoming the mastery of machination or nihilism will even be recognizable as such without a deeper appreciation of the roles of dearth, lack, plight and poverty in preparing this stillness. 

The appropriating event and its joining in the abyss of time-space form the net in which the last god is self-suspended in order to rend the net and let it end in its uniqueness, divine and rare and the strangest amid all beings.

The sudden extinguishing of the great fire – this leaves behind something which is neither day nor night, which no one grasps, and in which humans, having come to the end, still bustle about so as to benumb themselves with the products of their machinations, pretending such products are made for all eternity, perhaps for that ‘and so forth’ which is neither day nor night.62 

One must thus grasp beyng’s donation as refusal or sacrificial restraint, grasp the occlusion of the promise of beyng in nihilism “to experience as the most concealed gift the nihilating in beyng itself, which alone genuinely un-settles [ent-setzt] us into beyng and into its truth.”63 Or, as Heidegger puts it in Mindfulness, grasp “‘nothingness’ [as] the foremost and highest gift of beyng, which along with itself and as itself gifts beyng as event unto the clearing of the prime-leap [Ur-sprungs] as abyssal ground.”64 But this abyss of ground is not an absence, it is rather “the swaying of the distress of grounding, a distress that is neither a lack nor an excess, rather the ‘that [Daß]’ of beyng.”65 The highest plight is thus the lack of a sense of plight that has installed itself in the consummation of metaphysics as nihilism. The decision regarding the absconding and advent of the gods remains undecided because “the truth of beyng and the uniqueness of beyng have not become needful. Yet how is thinking supposed to succeed in what was previously denied the poet (Hölderlin)?”66 By grounding the time-space of the abyss in stillness for the passing of the last god, and recalling the needfulness of the truth of beyng as such, Dasein in its steadfastness “transform[s] the plight of the abandonment by being into the necessity of creating as the restoring of beings.”67 But this poetic creation and restoration of beings is not without its own lack. Words fail us, and “this failing us is the inceptual condition for the self-unfolding possibility of an original (poetic) naming of beyng.”68 Heidegger elaborates on this gift of dearth at length in The History of Beyng as a bestowal that disempowers all machination, linking “the last god. The bestowal of impoverishment.”69 The last god comes “not empty or errant but as refusal, clearing of its own accord the time-space of poverty.”70 Poverty is the  

ex-propriation [Ent-eignung] from beings and the supremacy of their power, an expropriation that is not robbery or removal but rather the essential consequence of an eventful appropriation [Er-eignung] of beyng in its truth. The intimacy of this eventful appropriation is the bestowal of the essence of beyng into sustainment, a bestowal removed from all need and deprivation. Poverty is the inexhaustibility of bestowal, abyssally decided from out of itself.71

Physis: Heidegger, Hölderlin and Heraclitus


We see a distress bordering on complete despair and hopelessness in Heidegger’s analyses of ‘holy mourning’ in Hölderlin. Because we bear the call unto the last decision regarding the flown and returning gods from such a great distance, “the enduring of such a conflict is pain, a suffering, and the calling is therefore plaintive […]: ‘… yet if/ You waters of the homeland! now with you/ The heart’s love has plaint [… wenn aber/ Ihr heimatlichen Wasser! jezt mit euch/ Des Herzens Liebe klagt].’ This pain of calling, this plaintiveness, springs from and oscillates within a fundamental attunement of mourning.”72 The poet mourns the gods that have fled and awaits their return in distress; such is the sense of a love that lets the beloved be in renunciation, leaving alone that which one unrequitedly loves while remaining in steadfast quiescence, in abandonation without indifference: “it is because these gods are too dear to him that he lets them be dead, for their flight does not destroy their having been, but rather creates and maintains it.”73 Like the fore-loving noted above, the poet suffers in advance with the gods in holy mourning, a “suffering, anticipatory understanding of that beyng that is experienced as the destiny of the demigods – suffering as suffering that sustains [Er-leiden] – a suffering that accomplishes and creates.”74 But holy mourning is not an arbitrary, individual sadness – it engages a pure disinterestedness withdrawing both from the inner affect of mourning and its object and from the relation between this interiority and its object. In its absoluteness, holy mourning removes all lived experience, self-interest and self-limitation from the common interest by poetically naming the relationality without relationality of a belonging to the earth; “from out of the Earth, it becomes possible for [the human] to experience the nothingness of his individuated I-ness.”75 To summarize,

the fundamental attunement of a holy mourning in readied distress, out of which it is no longer an ‘I’ who speaks, but a ‘we,’ is thus a truthful preserving of the heavenly that have fled and thereby an awaiting of the newly threatening heavens, precisely because it is ‘Earthly.’ ‘Earthly’ does not mean created by a creator-god, but rather an uncreated abyss within which all emergent happening quivers and remains held.76 

Such is the tragic meaning of beyng for Hölderlin; the sign of the tragic stands at the zero-point of ineffectiveness and insignificance, but allows the hidden, primal ground of nature to appear in its weakness; “if nature actually represents itself in its weakest gift, then the sign when it represents itself in its strongest gift is = 0.”77 The tragic poetic image thus preserves and releases nature to its loving self-concealment through subtraction to the point of nothingness; its task is not “to express anything, but to leave the unsayable unsaid, and to do so in and through its saying. […] Poetic saying of the mystery is denial.”78 

But if names must indeed fail us, ‘nature’ remains a good name, a good last word for our planetary crisis, still reaching us from its first Greek beginning as φύσις. For Heidegger, Heraclitus’ thought watches over Hölderlin’s entire poetizing of nature. Fragment 93 engages a precisely such a poetizing of nature as beckoning, indicating or showing through denial or refusal, withdrawing from any phenomenal clearing and noumenal concealing: “the lord, whose oracle is at Delphi [the God Apollo], neither says nor does he conceal, but rather beckons [ὁ ἄναξ, οὗ τὸ μαντεῖόν ἐστι τὸ ἐν Δελφοῖς, οὔτε λέγει οὔτε κρύπτει ἀλλὰ σημαλίνει].”79 All beings: animals, the built environment, gods, growing things, humans, stones, streams and thunderstorms for Heraclitus and Hölderlin – a list to which we could add Rilke’s earth also cited in epigraph – must be experienced in terms of their non-correlational invisibility: “everything visible in terms of the invisible – everything sayable in terms of the unsayable – everything which appears in terms of the self-concealing. Self-concealing is closer to the Greek essence than unconcealing: the latter lives by virtue of the former.”80 Hölderlin grasps φύσις in a Heraclitean sense anterior to its decline into natura; as “an emerging and arising, a self-opening, which, while rising, at the same time turns back into what has emerged, and so shrouds within itself that which on each occasion gives presence to what is present.”81 But despite these references to concealing, invisibility, shrouding and unsayability, nature for Hölderlin is also ‘wonderfully all-present [wunderbar Allgegenwärtig],’ present in all real individual things, and this omnipresence is “never the result of combining isolated real things. Even the totality of what is real is at most but the consequence of the all-present. The all-present escapes explanation on the basis of what is real. The all-present cannot even be indicated by something real.”82 As Blanchot paraphrases, nature is not “a particular reality, or even only the whole of reality, but ‘the Open,’ the movement of opening that allows all that appears to appear.”83 One could say that the nature Hölderlin poetizes is the reality of the real (die Wirklichkeit des Wirklichen) in its nihilating nothingness; “by comparison to the many things that are real, such reality itself is nothing at all – it is not real – [ein Unwirkliches] and yet, in advance of everything that is real, it is projected as the truth […]. The very reality of what is real – not itself real – is the first matter and source of poems.”84 Nature thus signals towards the thingness of the thing, rather than plural things; “with the word ‘nature,’ Hölderlin puts into his poem something else that, to be sure, stands in a concealed relation to That which was once called φύσις.”85 The Thing or Unthing of nature is “the unexperienceable That,” the centre of the whole, in-finite relation gathering earth and world, gods and mortals, the intimacy [Innigkeit] of the hidden harmony Heraclitus calls an a-phenomenal harmony, αρμονίη ἀφανής, “the joint that denies its appearance [Fuge, die ihr Erscheinen versagt],” as Heidegger translates.86 Just as Blanchot’s The Work of Fire cites Heraclitus alongside Hölderlin in epigraph, “the name of the bow is life, but its work is death [τῶι οὖν τόξωι ὄνομα ΒΙΟΣ, ἔργον δὲ θάνατος],”87 this fragment for Heidegger represents Hölderlin’s image of nature as gathering “the most extreme opposites of beyng together in one.”88

But this intimacy must be heard alongside the chaos of nature in Heraclitus’ πάντα ῥεῖ, the oft misunderstood ‘everything flows,’ where “flowing does not here mean simply the stubborn, constant dissolution and annihilation of things, but the converse: the flowing pertaining to conflict, i.e., conflictual harmony, creates precisely subsistence and steadfastness, beyng.”89 This conflict is that of Heraclitus’ ἔρις, strife or πόλεμος, war, which Heidegger in the Beiträge deems one of the greatest insights of Western philosophy, and interprets in terms of “sheltering steadfastness. Strife as the essential occurrence of the ‘between,’ not as giving validity also to what is adverse.”90 Hölderlin’s nature is god-like in beauty because it gathers into steadfast unity the Schellingian oppositions of the deepest abyss and highest heaven out of this strife, albeit without reconciling them in any middling compromise; it takes this unity “back into that peace that lights up as a quiet brilliance from the fire of combat in which the one pushes the other into appearing.”91 Hölderlin’s Hyperion speaks of the Heraclitean ἕν διαφέρον ἑαυτῷ as the very being of beauty, “the great saying, the ἕν διαφέρον ἑαυτῷ (the one differentiated in itself) of Heraclitus, could be found only by a Greek, for it is the very being of Beauty, and before that was found there was no philosophy.”92 Likewise, nature comes to unified presence out of this originarily differentiating strife; “beauty is the original unifying One. This One can appear only if it is brought together in its Oneness as the unifying One. According to Plato, the ἕν is only visible in the συναγωγή, i.e., in the bringing together.”93 But we must be careful in analyzing this bringing-together and unification. In the Heraclitean ἓν πάντα εἶναι that obsessed Hölderlin from his youth to his madness, “‘One’ does not mean uniformity, empty sameness, and ‘all’ does not mean the countless multitude of arbitrary things: rather, ἕν, ‘One’ = harmony, is all – that which arises in each case essentially constitutes beings as a whole as diverse and in conflict with one another.”94 Hölderlin’s nature calls forth the cessation of all conflict into the tenderness and quiescence of the in-finite relation of One-All, Hyperion proposing “to end that eternal conflict between ourselves and the world, to bring again the peace of all peace, which is higher than all reason, to unite ourselves again with nature, with the One infinite whole: that is the goal of all our striving.”95 As the One-All, Hölderlin’s nature holds together law and chaos – Χάος referring to the yawning chasm whose differentiation precedes all real individuation and unification; “thought in terms of ‘nature’ (φύσις) chaos remains that gaping out of which the open opens itself, so that it may grant its bounded presence to all differentiations. Hölderlin therefore calls ‘Chaos’ and ‘confusion’ ‘holy.’ Chaos is the holy itself. Nothing that is real precedes this opening, but rather always only enters into it.”96 We can summarize these relations of harmony and strife, unification and differentiation, one and multiple in Hölderlin’s nature by what Heidegger calls the mediation of an immediate all-presence: “Immediate all-presence is the mediator for everything mediated, that is, for the mediate. The immediate is itself never something mediate; on the other hand, the immediate, strictly speaking, is the mediation, that is, the mediatedness of the mediated, because it renders the mediated possible in its essence. ‘Nature’ is the all-mediating mediatedness.”97  


The Holy Chaos of Nature: Blanchot


But how does the holy chaos of nature as ‘all-mediating-mediateness,’ ‘in-finite relation’ and ‘One-all’ fit with the non-relational instance of poetic testimony I’m attempting to develop here? On the one hand, Heidegger does seem to claim that the immediate or non-relational is never something mediate or relational, while on the other that it is itself the mediateness of the mediated, the relationality of the relational. How do these two gestures hang together in Hölderlin’s nature? Blanchot traces a linear trajectory, if not a turning, in the relations between nature and poet in Hölderlin’s earlier works like Hyperion and The Death of Empedocles and the later hymns. While Heidegger notes that the sense of nature as ‘wonderfully all-present’ is absent from these early works, Blanchot reads this itinerary in an almost entirely inverted direction. In Hyperion and Empedocles, Hölderlin posits a desire to unite himself with all that lives, with the element of fire, with nature itself; the poet is then as haunted by the notion of totality as Hegel. When the later hymns by contrast name nature, they do so not as a totality of real things, but as a multiplicity beyond the limitations of real and unreal. Nature is no longer “that to which one must surrender in a movement of unlimited abandon; it ‘educates’ the poet, but in its slumber and in the time of calm and abeyance that follows the storm (fire).”98 This interstitial time not only names the absence of the gods, but the necessity of encountering one’s ownmost in the alien and non-relational. The Death of Empedocles signals the poet’s desire to go into the invisible other world – as Blanchot cites, “for what I want is to die, and it is for man a right.”99 But the absent god we now dwell without “bends the course of nature – that course eternally hostile to man because it is directed toward the other world – back toward the earth.”100 Empedocles’ suicidal desire thus reveals itself as ‘inauthentic,’ or rather, doubles this allegedly ‘authentic,’ personal and proper death onto a deeper, anonymous, impersonal impossibility in the abyssal ground of earth, doubling the very scission between the here and the hereafter, “there where dying means losing the time in which one can still come to an end and entering the infinite ‘present’ of a death impossible to die; a present toward which the experience of suffering is manifestly oriented, the suffering that no longer allows us the time to put a limit to it – even by dying – since we will also have lost death as a limit.”101 The desire for total unification with the gods in death becomes a threatening excess and “must be bent back toward the earth. And nature, so beloved, so much sung, the educator par excellence, becomes ‘the eternal enemy of man’ because it pulls him beyond this world.”102 Nature’s enmity thus mediates without mediating the relation between this world and its other, and the reality of a deeper non-relation in the earth, “the earth closed upon its silence, the subterranean earth that withdraws into its shadow.”103 It is in this sense that, as Heidegger recognizes, Hölderlin’s divine earth as holy chaos withdraws from the Platonic amphibology between real being and ideal becoming, as well as its Nietzschean inversion, without collapsing these into a one-world physics. The human must turn away from everything: from the last god, nature, from the world of the gods that is the world of the dead, and it is thus that the default or lack of gods, holy names and homeland helps. In testifying to this tragic rendering or separating dimension of the holy, the poet becomes the mediator-without-mediation of an immediateness that is as impossible for mortals as it is for immortals, standing in the nowhere and nowhen of “the pure space of the holy, the site of the in-between, the time of the mean-while [l’espace pur du sacré, le lieu de l’entre-deux, le temps de l’entre-temps].”104

The relation between nature and poem is thus constituted according to a dual impossibility. On the one hand, the poem lies outside any notion of nature as a totality; nature needs the poem as mediator of gods and mortals to constitute itself as an all-present universe, but the poet “can come to the world only if the world is the Universe, reconciled and pacified, capable of surrounding him, embracing him, ‘educating’ him poetically.”105 The poet is forced to live its very impossibility with respect to the total accomplishment of the nature it nonetheless foresees and prophesizes; the poet needs the totality it is called upon to poetize into existence. In the fourth and final year of his Secret et témoignage seminars (1994-1995),Derrida likewise stresses that the poet does not name the holy chaos of nature as a subject names an object; naming rather preexists any relational reversal between nature and the poet, precisely because holy names are lacking.

the nomination of das Heilige is what makes the holy come about, it is it that holifies and makes come to being-holy [fait venir à l’être-sacré]. The act of naming, and this is the sense in which it is poetic, […] is what produces the holy and is thus already holy or holifying in itself. The poet is thus not the subject of an action (naming) whose object would be the holy. The object does not preexist, nor does the subject, the poetic and thus performative experience that produces the event of holiness. […] Nomination, naming is what makes come about as much the poet (das Dichter) as das Heilige.106  

On the other hand, the poetic task of naming is made redundant in this universal communication and mediation. Hölderlin’s Empedocles claims that “Nature, divinely present,/ Has no need of speech.”107 But in this case, the pure universe “calls the human, that is to say, the poet; it calls him so that it will not lose itself in the expansive infinity of its origins that it holds: as it is, it is indeed limitless totality, and must be, but this ‘limitless’ must also become its limit […].”108 In both cases, the mediating force of the poem is better thought as the impossibility, interruption or limitation of all mediation and relation between poet and nature, thinking and being, one and multiple; the poem is thus death for the poet. “It is in the poem that he must attain the extreme moment of opposition, the moment in which he is carried away to disappear and, disappearing, to carry to the highest the meaning of what can be accomplished only by this disappearance. Impossible, the reconciliation of the Holy with speech demanded that the poet’s existence come nearest to nonexistence.”109 Or, Blanchot adds in “Madness par excellence,” the authentic poem can only be said to mediate “because in it the mediator disappears, puts an end to its particularity, returns to the element whence he comes: the anorgic.”110  

In The Infinite Conversation, Blanchot develops Hölderlin’s holy in terms of an impossible immediacy, as the reality anterior to all sensible presence, citing Heidegger on “the shaking of Chaos, which offers no support [Anhalt], the terror of the immediate, which frustrates every intrusion.”111 On his reading, “the immediate excludes everything immediate: this means all direct relation, all mystical fusion, and all sensible contact, just as it excludes itself – renounces its own immediacy – each time it must submit to the mediation of an intermediary in order to offer access. So we find ourselves denied as though on all sides.”112 We see a tripartite distinction at work here; 1) the immediate in its continuity with the mediate, the relation of relation and non-relation, continuity and discontinuity 2) the im-mediate as the discontinuous, impossible non-relation between this continuity and a deeper discontinuity, immediacy and non-relation, “a relation reserving in itself an infinite absence, an interval that nevertheless would not mediate (that should never serve as an intermediary)”113 and 3) this zero-degree of non-mediation and non-relation itself, an infinite absence and distance in excess of and excluding all presence. Hölderlin’s nature as holy chaos thus allows us to think the space-time of all relationality according to an impossible, double contradiction, “first as the distortion of a field that is nevertheless continuous, as the dislocation and the rupture of discontinuity – and then as the infinite of a relation that is without terms and as the infinite termination of a term without relation.”114 (BEI 105/74)


Conclusion: In Lovely Blueness


Despite these images of subterranean concealment and withdrawal, Blanchot remarks that Hölderlin’s chaos is not at all an experience of the night; it attests to the day, the law and light. There is nothing at all funereal or nocturnal in Hölderlin for Blanchot; the Holy is itself the day. For Heidegger, it is at the dawning of the day that Hölderlin’s holy chaos of nature differentiates itself into the oppositions of deepest abyss and highest heaven, clearing and concealing, closure and openness, dark and light, distant and proximate. “As the breaking day, nature unveils her essence in awakening. ‘And from high aether down to the abyss,/ According to firm law, as once, begotten out of holy Chaos,/ Inspiration, the all-creative,/ Feels herself anew [Und hoch vom Äther bis zum Abgrund nieder/ Nach vestem Geseze, wie einst, aus heiligem Chaos gezeugt,/ Fühlt neu die Begeisterung sich,/ Die Allerschaffende wieder].’”115 Against the metaphysical midday of eternal return that ends Western philosophy, one senses in this twilight an image of nature as primordial lastness, calling us into the downgoing that inaugurates the transition beyond nihilism, the metaphysics of the will and unconditioned subjectivity, where “night takes over the evening’s descent into dusk and brings about the rise of the dawn”116 But one must be careful to distinguish this twilight of lastness from the ‘and so forth’ of the end in a machination that itself knows neither day nor night; “the end is the incessant ‘and so forth’ from which the last, as the most primordial, has withdrawn right from the beginning and for the longest time. The end never sees itself; instead, it considers itself the completion and will therefore be least ready and prepared either to await, or to experience, what is last.”117 The lastness into which Hölderlin’s twilight leads is no such end; in it “night nights as night only when it is a receiving of the descent and a preparing of the dawn at the same time, and is thus the essential fullness of transition.”118 This timespace is thus akin to the transitional time of springtime (or fall), the twilight of the year in the March (or September) equinox when day and night are equal, and “the night, which precedes the day, has become ready to let the day and the coming of day take precedence in the transition.”119 This downgoing into dawn thus establishes nature as opening onto a different, non-metaphysical image of return, in which “nature is, ‘as once,’ prior to and above everything. She is the former – and that in a double sense. She is the oldest of every former thing, and always the youngest of subsequent things. By awakening, nature’s coming, as what is most futural, comes out of the oldest of what has been, which never ages because it is each time the youngest.”120 Although names fail us, Hölderlin quietly names the gods and nature in this pre-dawn bluing, before the light of the day becomes too overwhelming “…, only before the morning/ Begins to glow, before life in its midday/ I name them quietly to myself… […, nur ehe der Morgen/ Aufglänzt, ehe das Leben im Mittag glühet/ Nenn’ ich stille sie mir…].”121 This naming necessarily takes place in the absence of all spatio-temporal correlatability; “‘before [ehe]’ is a temporal referent, in fact to that time which grows ripe only through the advent and nearness, through the flight and withdrawal of the gods.”122 The nowhen of this ‘before’ articulates – while withholding itself from – a void of past and a void of future, indexing the nowhere of a site no-one can stand ‘before’ as the abyss wherein the last decision regarding the last god can take place, and wherein the poet ultimately disappears. The poet’s divination “thinks forward into the distant, which does not withdraw, but rather is, as what is coming. But because what is coming itself still rests in its primordiality and remains there, the divining of what is coming is both a fore-thinking and a thinking-back. In this way, the poets persist in their belonging to ‘nature’: ‘For divining too she herself is resting [den ahnend ruhet sie selbst auch].’”123 

Blanchot too draws our attention to this pre-dawn twilight glimmer, whose bluishness is indistinguishable from the dusk; “the day, but anterior to the day, and always anterior to itself; it is a before-day, a clarity before clarity to which we are closest when we grasp the dawning, the distance infinitely remote from daybreak.”124 The poem speaks from an abyss of day to prevent its light from swallowing everything into its totality; “without it the day would be there but it would not light up, without it everything would communicate, but this communication would also be at every moment the destruction of everything, lost into an always open infinity.”125 The twilight hour is referred to in French as ‘entre chien et loup,’ which Blanchot uses to translates ‘zwischen Tag und Nacht’ in “Germania” in the epigraph to The Work of Fire. This passage emphasizes the nihilating aspects of poetizing, as if to note a threefold annihilation of nature and poet and ultimately of poetizing itself as their correlation; “If, between day and night,/ One time a truth should appear to you,/ In a triple metamorphosis transcribe it;/ Though always unexpressed, as it is,/ O innocent, so it must remain [Muss zwischen Tag und Nacht/ Einsmal ein Wahres erscheinen./ Dreifach umschreibe du es,/ Doch ungesprochen auch, wie es da ist,/ Unschuldige, muss es bleiben].”126 The unsayable must be transcribed in this threefold sense, in relation to the sayable, as the non-relation between the sayable and the unsayable, and finally as the non-relational unsayable itself. As Blanchot seems to paraphrase these reflections on Hölderlin in The Writing of the Disaster, “write in order not simply to destroy, in order not simply to conserve, in order not to transmit; write in the thrall of the impossible real, that share of disaster wherein every reality, safe and sound, sinks.”127 Under the attraction of impossible real wherein any remnant of sanctity in holy chaos sunders, Blanchot writes,

the poet destroys himself, and he destroys the language he inhabits, and no longer possessing a before or an after, he is suspended in the void itself. Ruin, contestation, pure division, really jedem offen, as it is said, open to all, because he is now no more than absence and tearing, and it is thus that he speaks, it is then that he is the day, that he has the transparency of day, denkender Tag, the day become thought.128

But the day only becomes thought in an after-the-last word in which poet and poem concealingly harmonize as nothing; death and poetizing here so close that to poetize is to die a death whose dying will always exceed it. The blue of sky is thus where Blanchot situates the very task of the poetizing that says its void, “which belongs neither to the day nor to the night but is always spoken between night and day and one single time speaks the truth and leaves it unspoken.”129 It’s in this sense that Hölderlin, at the peak of his madness, would have finally fulfilled his desire to unite with the day, fire and nature, “this metamorphosis that, with the silent speed of a bird’s flight, bears him henceforth through the sky, flower of light, star that burns, but innocently blooms into a flower.” 130 

Both Heidegger and Blanchot thus link Hölderlin’s poetizing of nature with an anteriority that names the latest lastness, an image as removed from diurnal phenomenality as nocturnal concealing. Heidegger suggests that Hölderlin engages a harmony or intimacy in disjunction between the real and the dreamlike or possible, beyng and nonbeyng, whereby aesthetic and poetic language attests to the real’s basis in nothingness. As he cites Hölderlin’s “Becoming in Dissolution,” “[in] the state between beyng and nonbeyng, […] the possible everywhere becomes real, and the actual ideal, and this, in the free imitation of art, is a terrifying, yet divine dream.”131 On the one hand, this seems to posit a certain reciprocity between the becoming-real of the possible, a materialism of the ideal, and the becoming-ideal of the actual, a spectralization of the real: “the dreamlike concerns the becoming real of the possible in the becoming ideal of the actual. The actual recedes into recollection as the possible, namely as that which is coming, binds our expectation.”132 But beyond any reversal of no-longer and not-yet, Heidegger lets us hear the void of past and future as the nihilating reality of the calculable, objectified real, as reality in its abstraction: “the nonreal for that reason is never a mere nullity because it can be either the no-longer-actual or the not-yet-actual. The nonreal contains this either-or, and, moreover, is for the most part undecided between them.”133 The dreamlike is more real than the commonplace real of the everyday, the habitual, the phenomenal; it interrupts the absolute communication of pure day and light. But this dream is itself a nightmare, terrible and terrifying, because it is the image that remains when there is nothing, and ultimately itself disappears into nothingness, letting the unthinged remain what it is: unknown. This dream shares more with oblivion than any awaiting of the not yet or remembrance of the no longer; “dreaming without memory, in such a way that every temporary dream would be a fragment of a response to an immemorial dying.”134 This image, Heidegger adds in “Poetically Man Dwells…,” withheld from the Platonic opposition between the model and its copy, “lets the invisible be seen and so imagines the invisible in something alien to it. This is why poetic images are imaginings in a distinctive sense: not mere fancies and illusions but imaginings that are visible inclusions of the alien in the sight of the familiar.”135 It is in the image, then, that we may bear witness to what Nietzsche called that most uncanny guest that is nihilism, haunting the home of Western metaphysics in our era of planetary devastation.  

Notes

  1. Martin Heidegger, Über den Anfang, (Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann, 2005), 157; trans. Peter Hanly as On Inception (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2023), 130. ↩︎
  2. Heidegger, Über den Anfang, p. 157/130. ↩︎
  3. Maurice Blanchot, “La Folie par excellence” in Karl Jaspers, Strindberg et Van Gogh, Swedenborg – Hölderlin (Paris, Minuit, 1970), 23; trans. Michael Holland as “Madness Par Excellence” in The Blanchot Reader (Oxford, Blackwell, 1995), 120. ↩︎
  4. Maurice Blanchot, La Part du feu (Paris, Gallimard, 1949), 121; trans. Charlotte Mandell as The Work of Fire (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1995), 114. Translation modified.  ↩︎
  5. Friedrich Hölderlin, Essays and Letters (London, Penguin Classics, 2009), p. 323. ↩︎
  6. In Martin Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung (Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann, 1981), 35; trans. Keith Hoeller as Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry (Amherst, Humanity Books, 2000), 54. ↩︎
  7. In these readings, Derrida notes the influence of Christopher Fynsk’s chapter “Hölderlin’s Testimony: An Eye Too Many Perhaps” in Heidegger: Thought and Historicity (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 174-229. ↩︎
  8. Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, 36/54. ↩︎
  9. Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein” (Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann, 1980), 62; trans. William McNeill and Julia Ireland as Hölderlin’s Hymns ‘Germania’ and ‘The Rhine’ (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2014), 58. ↩︎
  10. Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, 45/63. ↩︎
  11. Jacques Derrida, “Répondre—Du secret /Témoigner,” unpublished. Jacques Derrida papers. MS-C001. Special Collections and Archives, UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California. Box 117, folders 13–19; box 118, folder 1. Session 10, page 1.  ↩︎
  12. Derrida, “Répondre—Du secret /Témoigner,” session 10, page 6.  ↩︎
  13. Derrida, “Répondre—Du secret /Témoigner,” session 10, page 3.  ↩︎
  14. In Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, 46/63.  ↩︎
  15. Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, 47-48/64-65. ↩︎
  16. Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, 188/216.   ↩︎
  17. In Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, 188/216. ↩︎
  18. Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein,” 209/191. ↩︎
  19. Jacques Derrida, “Avances,” preface to Serge Margel, Le Tombeau du dieu artisan: Sur Platon (Paris, Minuit, 1995), 42; trans. Philippe Lynes as Advances (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 53. ↩︎
  20. Derrida, “Avances,” 42n22/53n1. ↩︎
  21. Derrida, “Avances,” 42n22/53n1. ↩︎
  22. Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire, 258-9/245. ↩︎
  23. Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein,” 54/52. ↩︎
  24. Maurice Blanchot, L’Attente l’oubli (Paris, Gallimard, 1962), 48; trans. John Gregg as Awaiting Oblivion (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 31. ↩︎
  25. Maurice Blanchot, Le Pas au-delà (Paris, Gallimard, 1973), 151; trans. Lycette Nelson as The Step Not Beyond (Albany, SUNY Press, 1992), 110. Translation modified. ↩︎
  26. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsches Metaphysik (1943-2). Einleitung in die Philosophie – Denken und Dichten (1944-45) (Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann, 1990), 107; trans. Phillip Jacques Braunstein as Introduction to Philosophy – Thinking and Poetizing (Bloomsbury, Indiana University Press, 2017), 17. Emphasis modified.  ↩︎
  27. Blanchot, “La Folie par excellence,” 31-32/127. Translation modified. ↩︎
  28. Martin Heidegger, Besinnung, (Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann, 1997), 63; trans. Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary as Mindfulness (London, Bloomsbury, 2016), 49. Translation modified. ↩︎
  29. Heidegger, Besinnung, 64/49. Translation modified. ↩︎
  30. Heidegger, Besinnung, 120/95. Translation modified. ↩︎
  31. Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, 165/190. ↩︎
  32. Heidegger, Nietzsche: Erster Band, 154/2 34. ↩︎
  33. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: Erster Band (Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann, 1996), 251; trans. David Farrell Krell et al. as Nietzsche [four volumes] (San Francisco, Harper San Francisco, 1991), Volume 2, 31. ↩︎
  34. Heidegger, Nietzsche: Erster Band, 279/2 59.  ↩︎
  35. Heidegger, Nietzsche: Erster Band, 254/2 34. ↩︎
  36. Heidegger, Besinnung, 119/95. Translation modified. ↩︎
  37. Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein”, 189/173. ↩︎
  38. Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister” (Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann, 1984), 36; trans. William McNeill and Julia Ireland as Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister’ (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1996), 31. ↩︎
  39. Heidegger, Nietzsche: Erster Band, 146/1 145. ↩︎
  40. In Martin Heidegger, Schelling: Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1809) (Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann, 1988), 93; trans. Joan Stambaugh as Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom (Athens, Ohio University Press, 1985), 53. Translation and emphasis modified. ↩︎
  41. Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, 53/76. Emphasis modified. ↩︎
  42. Heidegger, Schelling: Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, 284/164. Translation modified. ↩︎
  43. In Heidegger, Schelling: Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, 285/164. Translation modified. ↩︎
  44. Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, 163/188.  ↩︎
  45. Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, 56/78. ↩︎
  46. Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen VII-XI (Schwarze Hefte 1938-1939) (Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann, 2014), 73-74; trans. Richard Rojcewicz as Ponderings VII-XI: Black Notebooks 1938-1939 (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2017), 56.  ↩︎
  47. Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann, 1989), 422; trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniella Vallega-Neu as Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event) (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2012), 334. ↩︎
  48. Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymne “Andenken” (Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann, 1982), 78; trans. William McNeill and Julia Ireland as Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘Remembrance’ (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2018), 70. Both Nietzsche and Hölderlin attempted to think the future role of art for the Germans. The former did so through the opposition of the Dionysian and the Apollonian, the rapture of chaos, dance, emotion, excess and intoxication and the dreaminess of clarity, logic, harmony, order, reason and restraint. Hölderlin likewise distinguished the Greeks, who poetized according to the fire from the heavens, and the Germans, who poetized according to the clarity of presentation. However, “the distinction made by Nietzsche and its role in his metaphysics of the will to power is not Greek but rather rooted in the metaphysics of modernity. Hölderlin’s distinction, by contrast, we must learn to understand as the harbinger of the overcoming of all metaphysics.” (GA 52 143/122) While Nietzsche poetizes his thinking with his Zarathustra, Hölderlin’s poetizing dwells in a unique nearness to thinking, as did Pindar and Sophocles. ↩︎
  49. Heidegger, Nietzsches Metaphysik (1943-2). Einleitung in die Philosophie – Denken und Dichten (1944-45), 97/7. Emphasis modified.  ↩︎
  50. Heidegger, Nietzsches Metaphysik (1943-2). Einleitung in die Philosophie – Denken und Dichten (1944-45), 104/14.  ↩︎
  51. Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie, 91/72. ↩︎
  52. Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie, 277-78/218. ↩︎
  53. Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie, 463/365. ↩︎
  54. Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie, 7-8/9. ↩︎
  55. Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie, 36/30. ↩︎
  56. Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie, 13/13. ↩︎
  57. Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie, 395/313. ↩︎
  58. Foi et savoir, suivi de Le Siècle et le pardon (Paris, Seuil, 2000), 66n26; trans. Gil Anidjar as “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone” in Acts of Religion (London, Routledge, 2002), 85n31. ↩︎
  59. Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie, 397/314. ↩︎
  60. Heidegger, Besinnung, 293/216??. Translation modified. ↩︎
  61. Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie, 381/301. ↩︎
  62. Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie, 263/207. Emphasis modified. ↩︎
  63. Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie, 267/210. ↩︎
  64. Heidegger, Besinnung, 295/254. Translation modified. ↩︎
  65. Heidegger, Besinnung, 295/254. Translation modified. ↩︎
  66. Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie, 12/12. ↩︎
  67. Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie, 18/16. ↩︎
  68. Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie, 36/30. ↩︎
  69. Martin Heidegger, Die Geschichte des Seyns (Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann, 1998), 28; trans. Jeffrey Powell and William McNeill as The History of Beyng (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2015), 26. ↩︎
  70. Heidegger, Die Geschichte des Seyns, 105/89. ↩︎
  71. Heidegger, Die Geschichte des Seyns, 110/93. Translation modified. ↩︎
  72. Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein”, 81/74-5. ↩︎
  73. Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein”, 94/85. Emphasis modified. ↩︎
  74. Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein”, 185/169. ↩︎
  75. Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein”, 88/80. ↩︎
  76. Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein”, 107/97. ↩︎
  77. Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, p. 316. ↩︎
  78. Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein”, 119/108. ↩︎
  79. In Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein”, 127/114. ↩︎
  80. Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, 179a/206-7n5.  ↩︎
  81. Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, 56/79. ↩︎
  82. Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, 52/75.  ↩︎
  83. Maurice Blanchot, La Part du feu (Paris, Gallimard, 1949), 119; trans. Charlotte Mandell as The Work of Fire (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1995), 113. ↩︎
  84. Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, 90/114. Emphasis modified. ↩︎
  85. Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, 57/80. ↩︎
  86. Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, 179/202-3. Given my limitations in German, I’m not certain where the translator rendered ‘the That’ from the following: “Hölderlin dichtet in dem wort ‘die Natur’ ein Anderes, das wohl in einem verborgenen Bezug zu Jenem steht, was einstmals φύσις gennant worden.” Or the ‘die’ Heidegger writes of as “Unerfahrbaren […] Was ist dies?” The Daß is, however, occasionally mentioned in the beyng-historical treatises. ↩︎
  87. In Blanchot, La Part du feu, 7/xi. ↩︎
  88. Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein”, 124/111. ↩︎
  89. Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein”, 127/113. ↩︎
  90. Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie, 265/208. ↩︎
  91. Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, 53-4/76. ↩︎
  92. Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion and Selected Poems, ed. Eric L. Santner (New York, Continuum, 1990), 67. ↩︎
  93. Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, 135/156. ↩︎
  94. Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein”, 128/114. ↩︎
  95. In Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, 134/156. ↩︎
  96. Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, 63/85. Translation modified.  ↩︎
  97. Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, 62/84. ↩︎
  98. Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire, 284/269. Translation modified.  ↩︎
  99. In Maurice Blanchot, L’Entretien infini (Paris, Gallimard, 1968), 64; trans. Susan Hanson as The Infinite Conversation (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 45. ↩︎
  100. In Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire, 286/270. ↩︎
  101. Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, 64/45. ↩︎
  102. Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire, 286/270-271. ↩︎
  103. Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire, 233/225. ↩︎
  104. Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire, 290/274. Translation modified. ↩︎
  105. Blanchot, La Part du feu, 124/117. ↩︎
  106. Jacques Derrida, “Sécret témoignage,” unpublished. Jacques Derrida papers. MS-C001. Special Collections and Archives, UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California. Box 118, folders 13–15; box 119, folders 1–7. Session 10, page 7. ↩︎
  107. In Blanchot, La Part du feu, 128/122. ↩︎
  108. Blanchot, La Part du feu, 129/124. ↩︎
  109. Blanchot, La Part du feu, 135/131. ↩︎
  110. Blanchot, “La Folie par excellence,” 26/123. Translation modified. ↩︎
  111. Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, 71/92. ↩︎
  112. Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, 53-54/38. ↩︎
  113. Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, 54/38.  ↩︎
  114. Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, 105/74. ↩︎
  115. Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, 59-60/82. ↩︎
  116. Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymne “Andenken”, 87/77. ↩︎
  117. Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie, 416/329. Building on this thought in Mindfulness, “this futurality is entirely different from any kind of ‘eschatological’ attitude, that is, from an attitude that […] aims at awaiting an ‘end of time.’” Heidegger, Besinnung, 245/210. ↩︎
  118. Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymne “Andenken”, 88/77. ↩︎
  119. Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymne “Andenken”, 88/77. ↩︎
  120. Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, 63/85. ↩︎
  121. In Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, 189/216. ↩︎
  122. Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, 189/216.  ↩︎
  123. Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, 55/77-78. Emphasis modified. ↩︎
  124. Blanchot, La Part du feu, 127/121. ↩︎
  125. Blanchot, La Part du feu, 131/125. ↩︎
  126. In Blanchot, La Part du feu, 7/xi. ↩︎
  127. Maurice Blanchot, L’Écriture du désastre (Paris, Gallimard, 1980), 65; trans. Ann Smock as The Writing of the Disaster (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 38. ↩︎
  128. Blanchot, La Part du feu, 134/129. Translation modified. ↩︎
  129. Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire, 291/275. ↩︎
  130. Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire, 292/275. ↩︎
  131. In Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymne »Andenken«, 120/102.  ↩︎
  132. Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymne »Andenken«, 121/103. ↩︎
  133. Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, 113/136. ↩︎
  134. Blanchot, L’Écriture du désastre, 61/35. ↩︎
  135. Martin Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze (Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann, 2000), 204; trans. Albert Hofstadter as Poetry, Language, Thought (New York, Harper Perennial, 2001), 223. ↩︎

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