The Event’s Foreign Vernacular: Denken and Dichten in Heidegger

The significance of Heidegger’s engagement with poetry reaches beyond his remarks on poetic texts and the role of poetic composition, whether we consider his lecture courses on Hölderlin, his reflections on Greek tragedy, or his later essays on language and poetry. His view of Dichtung cannot be categorized under the rubrics of philosophical aesthetics, hermeneutics, phenomenological theory of art, or literary interpretation, as his unique investment in poetry and his idiomatic approach to Dichtung have in view a transformation of thought: a preparation of a non-metaphysical style of thinking, characterized by a new, non-conceptual rigor, which can be called “poietic.” Sketching this “other” thinking against the backdrop of the then most current techno-scientific developments, whether in cybernetics, physics or genetics, Heidegger insists on its preliminary scope and preparatory character. That is why the importance of Dichten in Heidegger’s work, especially its role in taking philosophy toward an otherwise to thinking can only be properly appreciated when we give its due to the “poetic” valence of his texts, which includes innovative textual composition, the syntactical and lexical texture of writing, its typographical experiments and verbal inventions, etymological explorations, and the inventive use of hyphens or quasi-tautological syntactic phrasing.