Heidegger & the Political

4
The Free Use of the National

Not even do we renew the world by taking over the Bastille I know that renew it only those who are founded in poetry.

Guillaume Apollinaire, “Poème lu au manage d’André Salmon.”

They, with a Hydra’s vile spasm at hearing the angel Giving too pure a sense to the words of the tribe.

Stéphane Mallarmé, “Le tombeau d’Edgar Poe.”

The year 1934 does not only mark Heidegger’s resignation as Rektor of the University of Freiburg. It is also the year in which, for the first time in his philosophical itinerary, and in a gesture that initiates a decisive turn in his thought, Heidegger decides to devote an entire lecture course to poetry. This does not mean that Heidegger’s turn toward poetry was not announced in previous texts and lecture courses: the brief allusion to the motif of “Homesickness” (Heimweh) in Novalis and the characterization of poetry as the “sister” of philosophy in the 1929–30 Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics,¹ the crucial reference to Aeschylus’ Prometheus in the rectoral address are only examples of such incursions in the domain of poetry. Yet such references remained occasional and marginal. How are we, then, to understand Heidegger’s first systematic engagement with Hölderlin’s Dichtung in 1934?² All commentators seem to agree on the fact that this choice carries a political significance, even though the 1934/5 lecture course on Hölderlin’s hymns Germanien and Der Rhein (GA 39) is not devoted to questions of an explicitly political nature. Yet what this significance amounts to in particular is something that remains open for discussion. An immediate response would be to interpret Heidegger’s poetic turn as a move away from political activism, as a retreat into the secluded and sheltered sphere of “pure” poetry. Yet this hypothesis proves unsustainable when one looks at the specific poems to which Heidegger turns, namely two national hymns from Hölderlin’s later period. This indication can help forge yet another hypothesis, one that would focus on the national dimension of the poems themselves, and that would help raise the following question: How are we to understand the fact that, having endorsed the cause of National Socialism a year before, and having himself deployed a discourse that appealed to the forces of blood and soil of the particularly German Volksgemeinschaft, Heidegger now finds it necessary to turn to Hölderlin so as to raise this question of the national anew? Does the very move toward the question of poetic language and, more specifically, toward Hölderlin’s singing of the Heimat and the Vaterland, mark the recognition of a historical (and political) possibility in excess of both the specifically Nazi nationalism of the Blut und Boden and a more philosophical nationalism, such as the one developed by Fichte?³ Is the move to Hölderlin, then, a move away from the questions addressed in 1933, or is it an attempt to raise these same questions in a more originary manner? And what does this tell us about the relation between philosophy, poetry and politics? Such, then, is the hypothesis governing this chapter: by way of a sustained reading of Hölderlin, a reading that is in no way homogeneous nor limited to the 1934–5 lecture course, Heidegger launches the question of the national anew, away from the politics of nationalism.⁴ Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin’s great hymns, of his correspondence and his theoretical fragments, corresponds to the elaboration of the national question according to its proper ground (not the soil, or the blood, but the earth, and the divine) — a question which is entirely historical-destinal (geschichtlich) and this means, ultimately, not onto-theological, but aletheophanic. At stake, then, in this reading, is the possibility of thinking the national “before” any decision regarding the nation-state and independently of the question regarding the juridical status of nationality. The poetry of Hölderlin is unique because it is counter-metaphysical: not because it opposes metaphysics in any way, but because it has leapt ahead of and beyond the time of metaphysics into a new historical configuration, thus opening the way to what Heidegger, in the Beiträge, designates as “the other beginning.” Starting in 1934–5, the true Führung is to be found in poetry understood as Dichtung. The poetry of Hölderlin reveals Germany’s historical situation to itself: abandoned by the gods, the country sinks ever deeper into the prosaism of its busy everydayness, and no longer has an eye for what is essential. The poetry of Hölderlin names the central and decisive event of the time, this very event which Nietzsche will later designate as “the death of God.” This is an unprecedented event, the full measure of which still needs to be grasped. It presupposes and demands a disposition or a “fundamental tone” which Hölderlin designates as “sacred mourning” and “fervor.” This tone, which sustains Hölderlin’s poem, is in itself a response to the event, a way of sheltering and preserving it, not like an irreversible loss that would arouse in us nostalgia and lament, nor like a momentary crisis awaiting to be overcome, but rather like a lack or a default in the light of which everything comes to be measured, like an absence more present than any actual presence, like a destitution (Not) that is at the same time an urgency (Not) and a necessity (Notwendigkeit), a lack that signifies the very actuality of a place and of an epoch and which, consequently, far from calling for its own erasure, is awaiting the affirmation of its own urgency and necessity. To affirm this event is to endure it, to dwell on and in it: it is to find there one’s proper dwelling. It is to this new inhabiting, through which the earth comes to be revealed in a new light, that Hölderlin’s poetry invites us. The fundamental stake is indeed that of a proper dwelling for man on earth. And if Hölderlin designates this dwelling as poetic, then this is primarily because of the recognition of the fact that the nature of this dwelling is first decided in language (Sprache), and that our relation to the earth, and this means to the world where the whole of being comes to manifest itself, is primarily a relation of language. Language, in this case, is not to be understood as a means of exchange and expression, as a principle of semiotic economy, but as this given in which we are invited to dwell, as this originary place from which presence arises for man. The question of man’s dwelling, in the world or on earth, a question that never ceased to haunt Heidegger’s text, from the early days of fundamental ontology to the rectoral address, is now brought back to the site of its originary disclosure: poetry. And insofar as the question of the homeland and the national is itself sub-ordinated to this originary dwelling, it too comes to be determined in the sole wake of the question of poetry. The state — if one can thus designate the space not of the management of an accidental encounter between individuals, but of the sharing of a common event in a community whose sole common being would be this very sharing — is itself secondary with respect to the unfolding of such an event, which it necessarily presupposes.

The Poet of the Poets

We recall that one of the central motifs of the rectoral address, indeed the motif that sustained the whole of Heidegger’s discourse on the nature of the German university was the concept of Wissen, which Heidegger understood as the translation of the Greek technè, in which the great Greek beginning was most economically captured. Technè, as we recall, was the concept in which the logic of mimesis governing Heidegger’s discourse was made most visible. What appeared to be most decisive about that concept is that it was in no way reducible to a naming of the essence of the German university: it designated the very origin of history, an origin to the height and challenge of which the German people as a whole was to elevate itself. This historical concept of technè is one that Heidegger will retain as a central axis of his thought until the very end, particularly in the question concerning technology and the possibility of its own overcoming:

From earliest times until Plato the word technè is linked with the word epistèmè. Both terms are words for knowing in the widest sense. They mean to be entirely at home in something, to understand and be expert in it.

(TK 12–13/294)

Despite this continuity, technè, as the word that serves to designate man’s essential and originary comportment with respect to the truth of beings, begins to undergo a slight yet decisive shift in the 1934/5 lecture course, a shift that comes to be explicitly thematized only in the 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics. We have already alluded to the decisiveness of this shift in the previous chapter. What does the shift consist in? It consists in the introduction of language (Sprache), and specifically of poetry, as the determination in which the historical-destinal nature of technè comes to be grasped.⁵ On one level, after 1933, whether in Introduction to Metaphysics or in “The Origin of the Work of Art,”⁶ Heidegger seems simply to repeat what was already sketched out in 1933 on the nature of knowing: “Technè means neither art nor skill, to say nothing of technique in the modern sense. We translate technè by ‘knowledge’.”⁷ As in “What is Metaphysics?” or in “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” knowledge, far from signifying a gathering and an accumulation of information, points to that in which “the norms and hierarchies are set,” that “in which and from which a people comprehends and fulfills its Dasein in the historical-spiritual world [in der geschichtlichen-geistigen Welt].” ⁸ This latter sentence is strikingly reminiscent of the rectoral address. Yet, while reaffirming the meaning of technè as knowledge, and that is as a certain way of standing and dwelling amidst the truth of beings, Heidegger also introduces a major modification. This is how the passage from Introduction quoted earlier continues:

We translate technè by knowledge. … Knowledge in the genuine sense of technè is the initial [anfängliche] and persistent [ständige] looking out [Hinaussehen] beyond what is present-at-hand at any time. In different ways, by different channels and in different realms, this being-outside [Hinaussein] puts into work [setzt ins Werk] what first gives the present-at-hand its relative justification, its potential determinateness, and hence its limit. Knowledge is the ability to put into work [das Ins-Werk-setzen-können] the being of this or that being. The Greeks called art in the true sense and the work of art technè, because art is what most immediately brings being (i.e. the appearing that stands there in itself) to stand in something that comes into presence (in the work). The work of art is work not primarily because it is wrought [gewirkt], made, but because it brings about [er-wirkt] being in a being. To bring about here means to bring into the work [ins Werk bringen], that work in which, as that which shines forth [als dem Erscheinenden], the ruling surging forth, the phusis, comes to shine [zum Scheinen kommt]. It is through the work of art as the being that is [das seiende-Sein] that everything else that appears and is to be found is first confirmed and made accessible, explicable, and understandable as a being or a non-being [als Seiendes oder aber Unseiendes].

(EM 122/159)

What is decisive here, decisive to the point of irreversibility, is the introduction of art as a putting into work of being. This new and henceforth essential connection between art and truth as disclosedness constitutes the focus of the 1935–6 “The Origin of the Work of Art.” There, art appears as das Sich-ins-Werk-Setzen der Wahrheit, as truth’s putting itself to work, into the work — truth’s putting itself to work in putting itself into the work of art. What was, until 1934–5, the privilege of questioning (which, as we recall, is not a privilege of the question as a form of inquiry, but a privilege of the being for whom its own being is a question for it), namely the ability to stand amidst the whole of being so as to reveal it in its truth, is now equated with the power of art and, more specifically, with poetry as Dichtung. Prior to — and that is to say, older than — the thaumazein and the questioning of the philosopher is the work of the poet, whose saying constituted the originary speech (Ursprache) of the Greek historical Dasein. Such was, at the very dawn of Western history, the role played by Homer’s poetry or Sophocles’ Antigone, the thinking poetry in which the Greek Dasein was given its historical configuration. This does not mean that poetry now replaces philosophy and that, in the place of the specific task of thinking, we could install the task of poeticizing. Nor does it mean that poetry itself is not questioning, or thinking. Rather, it means that both philosophy (or rather thinking) and poetry (or rather poeticizing) are co-originary and of equal necessity, in that both find their ground in the essence of language as Sprache. Both consist in an inhabiting of language in and through which language itself is brought to its essence. It is the investigation of this ground, a ground that is absolutely non-foundational, in that it can never be secured, that forces Heidegger into a revaluation of the originarity of philosophy as technè. For to say that both poetry and philosophy, as distinct human activities, presuppose language is to acknowledge an origin that is more originary than those activities themselves.⁹

The urgent question, then, becomes: what is language? How does it unfold? What is its essence? It is in pursuing these questions that Heidegger comes to thematize the essence of language as poetry, as poietic or disclosive of the truth of beings in general. It is while thematizing the essential unfolding of language that Heidegger comes to realize that language is precisely the there of the truth of beings for man, the place in which beings are first made manifest for man. If man is still interpreted as Dasein, if man is still the being for whom being is an issue, the mode of his stance in the midst of beings, his dwelling, in other words, is now poetic: language is the condition of his ek-stasis and the Da in which being comes to shine in its truth. Language is now the there of being and the site of man’s encounter with the world. Knowledge itself presupposes the originary event of language, the site of this unfolding where presence comes to be an issue for man. It is only where there is language that there is — that a world is given, that presence is at issue for man. If man understands being, it is because he stands under it: he always falls under its yoke, withstands its power and stands by it. If man stands in the midst of beings, it is because he understands being. Man: the (under)standing being. Yet this understanding, originally understood, is poetic: being gives itself in language. Language has this poietic power, which Heidegger identifies with man’s very historicity. Poetry and philosophy themselves presuppose this initial opening, in which they are thrown, and in which they find the site of their own essence. Language, in that respect, at least when understood as originary speech (Ursprache), is an event: whenever there is language, whenever language takes form and figure, there is a world and beings come to be disclosed in their truth; whenever language unfolds, not as the language of everyday chatter, but as the language in which beings find their ontological site, a new beginning emerges, history happens, and men are disclosed in their essential togetherness and reciprocal appropriation with the truth of being. This co-belonging of being and man is what Heidegger, in the middle of the 1930s, begins to designate as Ereignis, the event of ap-propriation. In poetry, words become historically productive, poietic in the most literal sense: through them, a world actually comes to be for man. Man himself, in this happening of language, comes to be constituted as a historical existence or as a people. It is in this sense that poetry can be declared “the originary language of a people” (die Ursprache eines Volkes):

The poetic is the fundamental joint [das Grundgefüge] of the historical Dasein, and that means: language as such constitutes the original essence [das ursprüngliche Wesen] of the historical being of man. The essence of the being of man cannot first be defined and then, afterwards and in addition, be granted with language. Rather, the original essence of his being is language itself.

(GA 39, 67–8)

Poetry, then, far from being primarily a mode of expression or a literary genre, a mode of language amongst other modes, is the very essence of language, the very way in which language unfolds according to its essence. The other modes of language, whether prose or everyday language (Gerede) — that mode of language that is used to pass on information, to express feelings, desires or orders — are only “fallen” modes of language, already situated at a certain distance from the essence of language. If language is, to use Hölderlin’s own words, “the greatest danger,” it is precisely because of this double bind: language opens up a world, ex-poses man to the forces of nature and, simultaneously, allows for the possibility of the concealment of this original disclosure and ex-posedness. Language, the language that in coming into being brings a standard on earth, is always and inevitably turned into its opposite, a something that exists amongst many other things, a commodity and a tool, a “thing” readily available. Yet this non-essence of language belongs to language as its counter-essence: from the very outset, the essence of language as poetry is threatened by its counter-essence, by the fact that, from the start, what is opened up by language in a moment of irruption and disruption is closed off by the familiarity of ordinary discourse, which subsequently becomes the rule and the measure of language:

But the poetic saying falls [verfällt], it becomes “prose,” first in the true sense, and then in the bad sense, and finally becomes chatter [Gerede]. The scientific conception of language and the philosophy of language start off from this daily use of language and hence from its fallen form, and thus consider “poetry” as an exception to the rule. Everything stands on its head.

(GA 39, 64)

If the power of the beginning is now identified with the emergence of poetry, if, in other words, the possibility of a new historical configuration is made dependent upon the disclosedness of a world in language (as was the case in Greek tragedy), the question is one of knowing how this initial moment can become the stake of a genuine repetition. Yet if that which needs to be repeated is no longer, as was the case in 1927, or in 1933, the moment of Wissen or questioning that took place in Ancient Greece under the name “philosophy,” but the still more originary moment of tragedy, in which the Greek Dasein came to constitute itself, one wonders whether it can remain a matter of repeating such a moment. For what does it mean to repeat poetry? To repeat a question, the question of being, that very question that fell into forgottenness in the very moment at which it was raised, is understandable: to take up the question, to posit it and articulate it in a more originary manner, from the standpoint of the meaning of being, to thus initiate a new beginning in the history of that question, to reorient its course and, with it, that of the West, is a project that seems entirely legitimate. Yet when the beginning is no longer simply associated with a question, but with the emergence of a particular language, the (historical) task of repetition becomes infinitely more complex. Or is it that the historical task no longer consists in repeating the Greek beginning? Or that repetition itself needs to be understood differently: not as the repetition of a pre-existing beginning (what would it mean to repeat that which has already begun?), but as the repetition of beginning itself, as the instituting of a new beginning? And if history happens in the happening of language as poetry, could it be possible that history has already begun anew? But then: where and when? Can history have begun anew, can time have undergone a transformation without our noticing, behind our back as it were? Can history be thus played out: in retreat and silently, far from the sound and fury of world-history? In 1933, Heidegger saw the possibility of such a beginning in the noisy and shattering emergence of National Socialism. Yet the world that was brought about, what was then practiced under the name “politics,” lacked the one fundamental dimension that would have transformed it into a movement of an historically decisive nature: a Dichtung, a Sprache. Instead of opening itself to the historical powers of its own language, the Germany of the third Reich trapped itself in a frenzied celebration of its forces of blood, of soil, of work and of war, without ever realizing that the way of Germany’s authentic destiny had already been opened up, in the quiet yet insistent voice of Hölderlin’s poetry, a voice that Heidegger came to recognize as the one that most urgently demanded to be heard.

The Poet of the Germans

Thus Hölderlin is not only the poet of the poets and of poetry for Heidegger. He is also the one destinally decisive voice in the history of the West after Sophocles. A German voice! Not that we would know what “German” means before or outside of Hölderlin’s poetry: it is precisely in this poetry that the German being comes to be constituted as such. Hölderlin is the poet of the Germans, in the double sense of the genitive: he is the national poet because he is the poet of the national, the poet who poeticizes and produces the essence of the German people. As a result of this twofold characterization — poet of the poets and of the Germans — Hölderlin must become a power in German history; to contribute to this latter task, Heidegger writes, “is ‘politics’ in the highest and ownmost sense.” ¹⁰ Politics, then, as a concrete human activity, is not altogether abandoned. Yet it is made entirely subordinate to the historical and destinal power of the poetic. How exactly is one to proceed in order to institute Hölderlin as a power in the German people is something that Heidegger does not seem concerned to develop. Unless this is to happen by way of an attunement to the fundamental tone of the poem, to the particular voice that speaks in the poem. The two distinct traits of Hölderlin are not disconnected: if Hölderlin is the poet of the national, it is because he is the poet of the essence of poetry; by revealing the essence of poetry, Hölderlin reveals the possibility of a new historical dwelling on earth.

With respect to the period of the rectorate, Heidegger’s poetic turn is decisive in that it enables him to address anew at least three questions that were central to the address as a whole: the first question has to do with the possibility of defining the historical present and of finding a proper response to its decisiveness, a response that is now moving away from political activism and in the direction of poetic attunement; the second question is that of the possibility of the saying of a “we,” of which we suggested that it remained unproblematized in 1933, thus allowing Heidegger’s discourse to lapse all too carelessly into nationalism; this possibility is now envisaged in the context of poetic language, which shifts the “we” of the German nation away from a metaphysics of blood and soil and, most importantly perhaps, which raises the question of the time of the “we” anew, in an attempt unprecedented since the analyses of co-historicity in Being and Time; the last and perhaps most important question is that of the stance and the mode of dwelling of man in the world: in identifying man’s dwelling on earth as poetic, Heidegger decisively turns the essence of politics away from politics itself and tries to gain a site of historical disclosure that would be more originary than that of the nation-state and of its politics. It is in the light of this originary dwelling that the questions of the Heimat and of the Vaterland — of what I wish to call the national — come to be rethought. It is to these two questions that I now wish to turn.

Historical Context: The Absence of the Gods and the Fundamental Tone

In a central passage of his rectoral address, Heidegger referred to Nietzsche’s “death of god” in a way that remained enigmatic and unthematized. This is how the passage runs:

And if our ownmost existence itself stands on the threshold of a great transformation; if it is true what the last German philosopher to passionately seek God, Friedrich Nietzsche, said: “God is dead”; if we must take seriously the abandonment [Verlassenheit] of man today in the midst of beings, what then does this imply for science?

(SDU 13/33)

In a way, the 1934/5 Hölderlin lecture course takes absolutely seriously this abandonment of man today in the midst of beings, which Heidegger refers to as the death of God. Yet the formulation that is retained in the lecture course is not that of Nietzsche, but of Hölderlin:

Gods who are fled! And you also, present still,
But once more real, you had your times, your ages!
No, nothing here I’ll deny and ask no favours.
For when it’s over, and Day’s light gone out,
The priest is the first to be struck, but lovingly
The temple and the image of the cult
Follow him into darkness, and none of them now may shine.
Only as from a funeral pyre henceforth
A golden smoke, the legend of it, drifts
And glimmers on around our doubting heads
And no one knows what’s happening to him.¹¹

Between the death of God, and the flight of the gods, the difference seems minimal. Yet it is perhaps here that the break with the tone of the rectoral address is played out. It is the same event that is named in both cases. To be more specific, both Nietzsche’s and Hölderlin’s formulations respond to the same event. As such, they are both historical: the poetic thinking of Nietzsche and the thinking poetry of Hölderlin fall under the yoke of the same historical transformation. The event is the one that Heidegger begins to describe in his address, and continues to thematize throughout the 1930s, and particularly in the Beiträge, under the name Seinsverlassenheit, “abandonement of/by being.” Yet this specific formulation is to be found neither in the address nor in the first lecture course on Hölderlin. There, Heidegger only speaks of a Verlassenheit. This Verlassenheit names the historical situation of the West (a situation which, as we shall see, is almost impossible to date). The move from Nietzsche’s specific formulation of the event of abandonment to that of Hölderlin is not only a matter of words: it is itself a move, a turn — a transformation. More specifically, it is the beginning of a transformation, one that will require some ten years and numerous volumes dedicated to the interpretation of both Nietzsche and Hölderlin to be fully completed. My intention is simply to point in the direction of this beginning. In what sense is this move more than a matter of words? What does the transformation that is slowly taking place consist in? To put it briefly and crudely: What is at stake is the move, still hesitant and incomplete, from the (Jüngerian) interpretation of Nietzsche that underlies the rectoral address, an interpretation that privileges the philosophems of will and power as ways of overcoming the historical bereavement of Europe, to a meditation on Hölderlin’s poetry in which the present, perceived as destitution (Not), calls for a response of a radically different kind: neither will nor power, neither guides nor revolutions, but “sacred mourning” and “fervor,” heilige Trauer and Innigkeit. This move away from political activism is at the same time a move into the essence of the national, which is to be thought in terms of the proximity or the distance of the sacred and the divine. Ultimately, then, the political is subordinated to the theophanic.

The event of the flight of the gods cannot be separated from what Heidegger calls the fundamental tone (Grundstimmung) of the poem in which this flight is experienced. The fundamental tone is the tone or the mood that carries the whole of the poem, the tone that pervades the poem as a whole and that gives the voice (Stimme) of the poem its particular timbre. Thus, the tone is something more than just the expression of something that exists outside of it, something more than just the repetition of a historical fact: it is a response to the event, it is a greeting and a welcoming of the event. In that sense, it is itself historical and belongs to the historical event. Heidegger characterizes the fundamental tone of the hymn Germanien as one of “mourning” (Trauer). He is cautious to distinguish this mood from any psychological determination, much in the same way in which Being and Time insisted that the moods of Dasein be understood existentially-ontologically. Thus, to mourn is not to despair; it is not mere nostalgia in the face of the absence of the gods. Nor is it an attempt to overcome the loss of the beloved. Finally, it is not this diffuse yet insistent and almost unbearable sadness that we designate under the word “melancholia.” Mourning, as sacred mourning, as Grundstimmung of a poem determined in the historical-ontological sense remains irreducible to the vocabulary and the grip of psychopathology. Rather, the tone that is at stake here serves to describe the way in which a historically decisive event — the flight of the ancient gods — is gathered and preserved. The tone that carries the poem has always exceeded the limited sphere of the personal emotions in order to become the site in which the historical present finds its shelter. At the same time, the tone of the poem opens the historical Dasein to the decisiveness of the event:

The flight of the gods must first become an experience, the experience must first hit the Dasein in the fundamental tone in which a historical people as a whole endures the distress (Not) of its godlessness and its sundering. It is this fundamental tone which the poet institutes in the historical existence of our people. Whether this happened in 1801, whether this is not yet perceived and grasped in 1934 is irrelevant, for the number of years is indifferent to the time of such a decision.

(GA 39, 80)

Thus the tone of the poem invites us to experience this event of an unmatched decisiveness, this truly historical transformation: the absence of the gods. The gods have fled, the presence of the gods is now something of the past. The time has come for us to mourn: time itself — the historical present — must become the site of this mourning. Yet precisely insofar as the relation to the gods that have fled is one of mourning, the historical present that is characterized here remains under the power of that which it mourns. As such, the renunciation of the ancient gods remains an openness to the gods to come:

To be permitted no longer to invoke the ancient gods, to want to resolve oneself to renounce them, what is it besides — it is nothing besides — the only possible and resolute preparedness for the awaiting of the divine; for the gods can be renounced as such only if they are maintained in their divinity, and the more so the greater the fervour.

(GA 39, 95)

The poet, the one who abides by the demand of the fundamental tone, lives in a time of the between, that time that is marked by the flight of the ancient gods and, in the very renunciation of those gods that have fled, by the awaiting of the new gods. Time itself, then, unfolds as the history of this double absence: the historical present itself is the site of this twofold absencing. As such, the time that is described in the poem is one of fragility and uncertainty, of abandonment (Verlassenheit), dereliction (Verödung) and absence of force (Unkraft),¹² a time that is marked by the stamp of a twofold default, that of the evanescence of a once epoch-founding event, and that of an event to come, of a future that is in no way ascertained, but only historically possible. This, however, does not mean that the historical attunement to the event of the flight of the gods ought to be one of passivity. The tone that is described here is not the buddhism or asceticism that Nietzsche characterizes as the ultimate stage of (passive) nihilism. Rather, the renunciation of the ancient gods is itself the preparation of the ground for the coming of the new gods; it is itself a certain readiness and anticipation in the face of a historical possibility, a comportment that is not unlike the vorläufende Entschlossenheit described in Being and Time. Yet this readiness is now progressively stripped from the activistic and voluntaristic overtones in which it was draped in 1933. The mourning that is at stake here is and remains a relation to the gods, both in the form of those gods which have fled and can no longer be called upon, and of those gods to come, and upon which one cannot yet call. Paradoxically, it is in the very renunciation of the gods that the divine is most preserved, and indeed treasured. It is in the name of this paradox that Heidegger can designate both Hölderlin and Nietzsche as those who, having endured the historical weight of renunciation, still dwell in closest proximity with the sacred. Such has become the task: to will and implore no longer the ancient gods so as to “enter and simply stand in the space of a possible new encounter with the gods.”¹³ Never, in a way, has the divine been more present than in this time of the absence of the gods: never has the earth been so exposed to its fundamental exposition to the sacred and the divine than in the moment of its uttermost bereavement.

What conclusions can we draw from this initial exploration of the fundamental tone of Hölderlin’s Germanien? What are the implications of the historical situation revealed in the poem? The Grundstimmung can be said to reveal something about the poem as a whole, not as an object of literary investigation, but as the site in which a historical and destinal configuration comes to gather itself. Specifically, this gathering is twofold: spatial, first of all, in that the flight of the gods has forced upon man a different relation to the earth, to his dwelling upon it, and hence to what is called the Heimat and the Vaterland (the homeland and the nation), in which man’s historical dwelling finds its particular existence; temporal, also, in that the Grundstimmung that emanates from the poem is the expression of more than just the duration of a mood, or even of a lifetime disposition: it comes from before the actual “I” of the poet and of its hymn and points far beyond the time of its own existence. The two dimensions gathered in the poem are naturally one: the “I” that speaks in the poem is not the individual “I” of the poet, but the “we” in which the German historical Dasein as a whole comes to recognize itself as a nation. To be more specific, the lament that resonates in the Grundstimmung is one with that which emanates from the depths of the homeland abandoned by the gods. It echoes and amplifies the grief of the deserted homeland. There, in the intimacy and the self-gatheredness of the poem, this grief finds its proper site. Such is the reason why the “I” of the poet so naturally comes together with the “we” of the homeland:

The “I” that speaks here is lamenting with the homeland, because this “I-self” [Ich-selbst], insofar as it stands in itself, experiences itself precisely as belonging to the homeland. The homeland — not as the mere place of birth, or as the simply familiar landscape, but rather as the power of the earth, on which man, each time according to his own historical Dasein, “poetically dwells’”[In Loveable Blue…, VI, 25, v. 32].

(GA 39, 88)

At stake, in the togetherness of the destinal dimensions of space and time is what I wish to designate, after Hölderlin’s own formulation, as the Nationelle or the proper (das Eigene).¹⁴ On the basis of a formulation that might well capture the essence of what Heidegger meant by “anticipatory resoluteness” in Being and Time, and yet do so in a way that presupposes a radical transformation of the project initially developed in the 1927 magnum opus, it is, for Heidegger, a matter of designating the conditions under which a free relation to one’s own historical Dasein might occur.

“We”

We recall how, in his rectoral address, Heidegger repeatedly referred to a “we” that remained unproblematized: beside the “we” of the scientists, the “we” of the community of professors and students, lay the “we” of the Volksgemeinschaft, of a community bound by its forces of blood and soil. In a way, one can read the whole of the 1934/5 lecture course as an attempt to launch this question of the We anew, of turning it into a real question, of problematizing it. In the lecture course, the “we” is no longer a fact, but a question and a quest, the context of which has become the poetic saying of Hölderlin. In the Beiträge, also, one finds a section devoted to the question “Who are we?” — a question that is itself raised in the shadow of the Hölderlinian theme of the flight of the gods, even though that theme is itself subordinated to the fundamental question concerning the truth of being.¹⁵ Now the question is: why poetry? Why does poetry allow for an entry into the question of the “we” that would otherwise not be accessible? Because poetry, by instituting a relation to the truth of beings, by disclosing the whole of being to man, and by situating man within this original opening, clears the fundamental domain in which a community comes to constitute itself as such. Why Hölderlin? Because Hölderlin is the poet of the Germans, that is, the poet in the poetry of whom the German people is situated in its historical time, but also granted with a new historical beginning and a freer relation to its ownmost essence.

If, as we suggested earlier, politics indeed begins with the utterance of a “we,” this most familiar and yet enigmatic pronoun, to ask, as Heidegger does, “who are we?” is to take a step back from politics in order to reveal the question which politics would have always already answered. It is even to ask whether this “we” that is commonly referred to actually is, whether, in other words, we are sufficiently in relation to that which constitutes us as a We in order to be able to say “we.” “We.” We who? We “here” and “now”? But where and when do “here” and “now” begin? Where and when do they end? How are “here” and “now” given? We “men,” perhaps? But who is man? We, the people. What people? The German people, perhaps. But do we know what “German” means? How do we go about answering such a question, even about raising it, at a time (1934–5) when everyone knows what it means to be German, to belong to a Volksgemeinschaft and a Geschlecht, a race that has become the object of an absolutely rigorous science? Heidegger seeks his answer amidst the least expected terrains of all: poetry. Indeed, what can possibly be more “subjective” than the voice of the poet? What is more alien to the “we” of politics than the “I” of the poet? It is this paradox that Heidegger wishes to investigate, by way of a reversal of the commonly accepted state of affairs: the I that is bespoken in Hölderlin’s poems is an I that speaks from the depths of the German being and, because of that, is an I that speaks the essence of the German being. It is an I, then, that is far more historical and decisive than the I of those who daily speak in the name of the German Volk, an I in which the reality and the future of the German nation has come to settle. It is an I which, despite its apparent solitude and isolation, or rather precisely because of it, is addressed to all of those who might be able to hear it. It does not address itself directly to the German people; it does not say: “Germans!” Such is the address of the politician, or of the late Rektor Heidegger, not that of the poet. For he, the poet, knows that only language as Sprache has the power to bring a people together under a common destiny. This I that is more binding than all the blood of the Volksgemeinschaft, this I in which the destiny of the West has come to crystallize is now the true Führer, of whom Heidegger only a year before said that it “alone is the present and future German reality and its law.”¹⁶ Despite appearances, the I that speaks in Germanien is not the individual I of the poet, but the I in which the German essence comes to resonate. Such is the reason why, according to Heidegger, Hölderlin moves so freely between the use of the I and the use of the We in that same hymn.

It is of the utmost importance, then, to distinguish between the I that broaches the present and the future of a people, the I that speaks in the name of a We that remains to be founded, and the We that is so commonly used, and that refers to a present situation that is devoid of historical promise. The paradox is that, for Heidegger, the fate of a nation is not decided by a We that would gather the largest possible number of individual Is (of votes, for example), but by the solitary and adventurous creator who, transgressing the laws and the standards of his own time, broaches a new historical present and offers the people new values. In this time, which Heidegger designates as “the original time of the people,” and which he contrasts with “the measurable time of the individual,”¹⁷ something radically new, something “initial” (anfänglich), is instituted. The time of the origin is a time that originates: it is the emergence of a new beginning, an emergence that involves violence against the time of the today. In the emergence of the new beginning, history is exposed to the non-foundational foundation of its self-positing and broaches the measure of its own law. Such, then, is the contradiction with which the “creators” (die Schaffenden) are faced: insofar as they are founders, they set new standards and new laws for the future; and yet, this founding is always made at the cost of a transgression of a given time, of a violence produced against the law of the today. As a result, the creator is always ahead of his time, exceeding it, outside his time, transgressing it:

But if someone audaciously thrusts high above his own time, the today of which is calculable, if, like the poet, he is forced to thrust and to come into the free, he must also become a stranger to those to whom he belongs in his lifetime. He never knows his people and is always a scandal to them. He questions true time for his own time, and each time places himself outside the time of the today.

(GA 39, 50)

Thus the creator, amongst whom Heidegger includes not only the poet and the thinker, but also the state founder, is untimely and solitary. He is a creator, and yet his creation is brought about at the expense of an essential solitude — the solitude of those who have elevated themselves to the vertiginous height of the summits blown by the great cold winds and by the transparency of the skies. Because of his very nature, the creator cannot be at home in the time of his today. He is always beyond, in a time that negates and opposes the present time. Hence the situation of the creator is one of exile, of unfamiliarity, of Unheimlichkeit, even though his creation is precisely such as to contain the promise of a new and more proper dwelling for the historical Dasein. The very possibility of an authentic dwelling presupposes a thrownness out of the familiar into the vertiginous abyss of the uncanny. Such is the reason why, to his contemporaries, to the Hierigen and the Jetzigen, the creator himself appears to be unheimisch — strange, uncanny: monstrous. No doubt, Hitler once appeared to Heidegger as such a monster, as a tracer of historical paths. Yet is it still Hitler that is intended in the 1934–5 description of the state founder? Certain indications seem to confirm it.¹⁸ Yet the description that is given here of the position of the creator with respect to the today and to the majority of the people does not match the situation in which Hitler found himself at the time. Did Heidegger have another Führer in mind? Was he still hoping for a turn within National Socialism itself? These purely speculative questions are of no importance. What matters, on the other hand, is the description Heidegger gives of the statesman as well as the retrospective understanding that this description gives us of his political choice. The statesman is, for Heidegger, an exceptional figure, a solitary figure that is endowed with a certain vision. Politics itself is viewed as a way of bringing this “vision” to life, of putting the truth of the future into a work. Yet if this definition agrees with the one Rimbaud gives of poetry (“il faut être voyant, se faire voyant”), is it not radically insufficient with respect to politics? Can the political be made entirely dependent upon the greatness of the statesman? Is the political not always and already mediated, in relation with material forces that run through the human and to a large extent exceed it? Can the state, the polis, the community ever be conceived simply as a work and the statesman best described as a creator, or an artist? Is there not a political danger in folding the political onto the artistic? Is this not the danger of the political itself? Is it not in the name of art itself, of politics as the total work of art, that the right-wing totalitarianisms, from the Napoleonic Empire to Hitler’s Third Reich (and beyond) were justified? Is it not this plastic glorification of the great man that characterizes the fascisms of our time, a glorification to which Heidegger succumbed remarkably easily?¹⁹ In any case, the very hierarchy that Heidegger now draws amongst the Schaffenden seems to suggest a certain distance taken with respect to the political — not only a personal distance from political activism, but also a relativization of the historical decisiveness of politics in general, yet one that does not call into question the fundamental model of genuine politics as the creation of an exceptional artist:

The historical Dasein of a people — its rise, its peak, its fall — originates in poetry. From the latter [arises] authentic knowing, in the sense of philosophy. And from these two, the actualisation of the Dasein of a people as a people through the State — politics originates.

(GA 39, 51)

Heidegger will not be long in calling these creators “the future ones” (die Zukünftigen), thus emphasizing ever more strongly the temporal aspect of their being. Yet when this happens, in the Beiträge, the state founders will no longer be designated amongst them. By 1937 or 1938, politics no longer seem to designate a genuine possibility of bringing about the historical transformation necessary for the rescuing of the essence of the West. It is no longer Hitler, or any statesman, but Hölderlin, who now fulfills the role of the historical hero as it was presented in Being and Time:²⁰

Those to come [die Zu-künftigen] are those future ones [jene Künftigen] toward whom, insofar as they await and hold back in the sacrificial restraint, the sign and the imminence of the remoteness or the proximity of the last god approaches.

(GA 65, 395)

Neither men, nor gods, but demigods, the future ones are primarily designated as the poets. And the most futural of them all is Hölderlin: “Hölderlin is the most futural one [der Zukünftigste], because he comes from farthest and in this farness travels farthest and most transforms.”²¹ Because Hölderlin has stepped ahead of his time, transgressed it, so as to open the possibility of a new relation to the earth, to the gods and to history, because his time is that of a time to come, the one in which the earth again will provide the place for the coming of new gods, because Hölderlin’s poetry is entirely driven by this event to come, an event which is already coming, already approaching, Hölderlin is the most promising of all poets, the poet in which the promise of a new historical beginning is sheltered. In the face of the vain and nervous agitation of the statesmen and the servants of technology, in the face of what, in the Beiträge, Heidegger begins to call the “machination” that has taken possession of the earth, poetry appears as the site of a different encounter with the earth and with history. The poet stands beyond and before this frantic activity, not because of some incapacity to act and to respond to the events of his time, but because of his conviction that, in Apollinaire’s words, only those “who are founded in poetry” can “renew the world.” Yet poetry only indicates this way and prepares the way for the coming of the new god. In no way can it summon them to present themselves. Man is left powerless in the face of his destiny, for destiny itself is a gift of history. The future does not belong to us; it is not ours. We cannot say when or even if the gods will visit anew. To say that Hölderlin’s poetry is still ahead of us, that it awaits us as this word that shelters the promise of a “we,” does not mean that this poetry can become the object of a political program, that it can be actualized and translated into the concrete world. It does not mean that it is to come in the sense of a not yet awaiting its now. Rather, his poetry is already, in the sense that it unfolds from the beyond into which it has already leapt. Commenting upon the opening line of Hölderlin’s der Ister — a line that begins with “Now come, Fire!” — Heidegger says the following:

For the “Now” of his poetry there is no calendar date. Neither is there any need for a date. For this called and self-calling “Now” is itself a date in an originary sense, that is — something given, a gift.

(GA 53, 8)

The “now” of the time of rescuing (Rettung) does not call for a date. For it is itself a datum, a gift. It is something that gives itself, something that sends and destines itself. It is, literally, a present: something that is in the way of a gift, yet a gift of something that will perhaps never be ours. And thus a promise, the promise of a future, indefinitely promised. In the “now” of the poem, then, it is not a matter of defining a precise instant. Rather, it is a matter of seeing how both future and past are gathered in the present, in a kind of future anterior in which what is happening has long since been sent, and hence decided, and which thus opens up the future. Such would be the structure of the event:

The “Now come” shines from out of the present to speak into the future. And yet it first speaks in what has already happened. “Now” — that means: something is already decided. And this precisely, that which has already occurred [was sich schon “ereignet” hat], alone sustains all the relations to what is coming. The “now” names an event [Ereignis].

(GA 53, 8)

The National

The event that is here in question, the event that describes who “we” are, is the unfolding of this time of the between, this time that remains suspended and torn between the flight of the gods and the coming of the new gods. In this time of distress and destitution, the earth itself is revealed in a specific way: it is no longer the earth that is loved and cherished by the gods, no longer the earth that is inhabited by men in proximity to the presence of the divine, but the earth that is abandoned to what Heidegger, in his Nietzsche lectures, begins to call the “will to will,” the will that culminates in the planetary domination of the technological. The earth that comes under the control of the will to power and is exposed to its “machination” is a world that is no longer inhabited, but simply subjugated. As such, the earth ceases to be the site of an encounter in which both men and gods are revealed in their essential relation to the truth of beings. The earth is no longer an abode, no longer the site of this originary dwelling in which beings find their proper place through poetic language. The land that is now revealed is not a homeland, not the land that can be inhabited, since genuine dwelling occurs only in the appropriation of the moment of disclosure of the whole of being. Being and the gods have abandoned the earth to its own dereliction, thus turning it into a planetary wasteland. What Heidegger sees in Hölderlin’s poetry is a way of returning to the earth, of instituting a different relation to it, one whereby the earth will again become the site of an originary dwelling. Yet in this return, in this homecoming or Heimkunft, it is not a matter of returning to a point of lost origin, to a space-time that would have remained untouched by the abandonment of the gods and of being. Rather, it is a matter of creating the conditions for a free relation to the earth, of preparing the ground for the gods to come. Homecoming, then, does not mean to go back home, as if the home designated the site of a preserved and uncontaminated origin. Rather, homecoming points in the direction of an origin to come, of a primal leap or an originary source, beyond the devastation of the desacralized earth, beyond the space-time of destitution. Hölderlin is the poet who has leapt ahead of his time into the time of homecoming, the poet whose saying approaches and addresses us from afar, from the reality of a time to come, thus revealing the essence of his time as abandonment (Verlassenheit) or homelessness (Heimatlosigkeit). And if man today is homeless, if he is without a home or a homeland that corresponds to his essence, it is not because of the loss of his national identity, a loss that can be seen as the result of military invasions, or of a cultural and economical homogenization of the planet as a whole. Rather, it is because of the abandonment of being that is now threatening man’s very essence as the “there” of the unfolding of being. In other words, this is a “double homelessness” insofar as we are not even at home with — and that is to say, we do not even recognize — our own homelessness.

At stake, then, in Hölderlin’s Dichtung, are the conditions of an authentic dwelling on earth, of what, in the most essential sense, this poetry calls the Heimat, the homeland. This alone should suffice to indicate that the national that is here in question is one that has already exceeded any nationalism and any nationalistic politics, that the dwelling that is here at stake does not concern Germany as a geo-politically and, least of all, racially constituted entity, but as the place in which the essence of the time is endured. But even this is not to say enough. For what is at stake in this thinking of the national is not even Germany or Germanness (das Deutsche) as such, but the destiny of the West as a whole. To a patriotic discourse that would sing of the homeland in the horizon of a national egoism, that would be grounded in a metaphysical and historiographical concept of the political, Heidegger wishes to oppose a discourse that would point to the essence of the homeland as grounded in the historical-destinal essence of being. To a homeland conceived in terms of “a mere space delimited by external borders, a natural region, a place as the possible scene on which this or that event would take place,”²² Heidegger opposes a conception of the homeland as the site in which man’s essential relation to the truth of being — this fundamental event that Heidegger designates as the event of the mutual appropriation of man and being: Er-eignis — is brought about. Heidegger’s view concerning the national is perhaps most clearly expressed in the following passage from the 1946 Letter on Humanism:

The word [“homeland”] is thought here in an essential sense, not patriotically or nationalistically, but in terms of the history of being. The essence of the homeland, however, is also mentioned with the intention of thinking the homelessness [Heimatlosigkeit] of contemporary man from the essence of Being’s history. … When Hölderlin writes “Homecoming” he is concerned that his “countrymen” [Landesleute] find their essence in it. He does not at all seek that essence in an egoism of his nation [seines Volkes]. He sees it rather in the context of a belongingness to the destiny of the West.

(Wm 334–5/217–18)

Is the nation or the homeland “the West,” then? Is the homeland to which Hölderlin is referring actually the sum of the nations that are normally characterized as “European”? Is Hölderlin a “European” before his time? Yet is “the West” the same as this conglomerate of nations — whether united or at war, whether geographically, economically, politically or racially defined — commonly referred to as “Europe”? Do we know where, when and with what the West begins and ends, do we even know whether it has begun or whether it has already ended? The passage from the Letter continues, in a series of statements that turn the question of the national into one of immense complexity:

But even the West is not thought regionally as the Occident in contrast to the Orient, not merely as Europe, but rather world-historically out of nearness to the source. We have still scarcely begun to think of the mysterious relations to the East which found expression in Hölderlin’s poetry. “German” [das “Deutsche”: not the German idiom, the language that one possesses or learns, but Germanness, or the German (essence) in the sense of “the national”] is not spoken to the world so that the world might be reformed through the German essence; rather, it is spoken to the Germans so that from a fateful belongingness to the nations [Völkern] they might become world-historical along with them. The homeland of this historical dwelling is nearness to being.

(Wm 335/218)

Such, then, would be the paradox: Hölderlin, the poet of the Germans, is, for that precise matter, the poet of the West; yet in poeticizing the West, Hölderlin poeticizes more than just the destiny of Europe: he actually poeticizes the essence of world-history. But is not that the most blatant type of cultural imperialism, the most obvious sign of Heidegger’s Euro-Germano-centrism? Is Heidegger not simply deriving world-history from a purely European experience? Is he not simply replacing nationalism with a concept of “the West” that is as imperialistic and totalizing as the politics he is attempting to move away from? Or, on the contrary, is he suggesting that the essence of the destiny of the West is in itself not specifically and exclusively Western? This essence, which Heidegger designates as the origin, and the proximity to which Hölderlin situates himself, might indeed be seen as an origin that exceeds its Western appropriation: the origin is none other than the truth of being, a truth that might very well be more essentially experienced, better preserved and more genuinely understood in the East, an origin that might very well be alive and actual in the East. The East, perhaps, has found a homeland on this earth, a way to dwell on earth, and not simply to rule over it. Hölderlin, in that respect, insofar as he himself dwells near the source, might be closer to the distant East than to the homelessness that characterizes the time of the West, even though, of course, his homecoming is itself the experience of the West’s essential homelessness. From out of this nearness to the source, Hölderlin’s Dichtung might echo distant voices (Eastern, perhaps), either past, present or future, that also spring from out of this very nearness. There is, perhaps, after all, a secret communication between summits and heights, a communication that bypasses the traditional constructions of cultural identities and historical ensembles. The time and the space of world history (of the history of being) allow perhaps for what, with Baudelaire, we could call secret correspondances, the absolute proximity of voices and destinies despite infinite distances.

The homeland, then, is nearness to being. Yet what does nearness mean? How is this proximity brought about? Nearness to the origin or the source is not a given: the nearness itself is not originary. Rather, nearness is a nearing, a movement of approach in which what is most foreign is appropriated and through which a historical Dasein enters the sphere of its essence. The homeland, therefore, is not simply given from the start, but affirmed in the very movement of becoming at home (Heimischwerden) or homecoming (Heimkunft). Every homeland is a coming home as a coming into the proper, but in such a way that the coming into the proper presupposes the ap-propriation of that which is most foreign: to be at home is to return beyond the experience of the foreign (das Fremde), which is an experience of the Unheimisch or the unhomelike. This suggests that this movement of return is not a movement of returning to something that was originally, but that the origin itself is constituted through this movement of return. In the return, one does return to some properness that would have remained untouched by the movement of exile or encounter with the most foreign. Rather, it is precisely in the movement of exile that the proximity to the source comes to be. Proximity, then, or nearness, is to be understood as an approach, as a coming close: not as that which is given from the start, but as that which comes to be in the very movement of that return. The departure that takes place in the journey (in)to the proper does not simply leave the origin behind; rather, the departure away from what is simply given and into the unhomeliness of the alien is itself the movement of return to the proper in which the homeland comes to be experienced as such. This, of course, presupposes that, from the start and for the most part, man is not at home in the world, but simply wanders forgetfully at the surface of the earth, that the world is not immediately the home of man, but that man comes to be at home in the world by way of a relation to what is most alien to him, by way of a journey through the alien. This, according to Heidegger, is the way to understand Hölderlin’s sojourn in the south-west of France, where the poet came to experience what the actualization of a truly German essence lacked most, and through the experience of which that essence was first revealed:

The love of not being at home with a view to becoming at home in the Proper is the law of essence of the destiny through which the poet is destined in the founding of the history of the “Fatherland.”

(EHD 83)

Hölderlin’s poetry is the founding word of the German nation, because, as Heidegger puts it in the 1942 lecture course on Hölderlin’s “der Ister,” “coming to dwell in the proper is the only concern of Hölderlin’s poetry.”²³ The proper is nothing other than the national itself, nothing other, that is, than the ability to dwell and be at home in proximity to the earth. This, according to Heidegger, is what Hölderlin’s “river poems” (Stromdichtungen) achieve: they are not a representation of the proper, or of the movement of coming into the proximity of the proper, but are the very movement of homecoming, the very movement whereby das Deutsche comes to enter the domain of its essence. The singing of the Danube or of the Rhine in Hölderlin are not metaphors for the Heimat, but they are the very movement of ap-propriation of the origin whereby the German Dasein as a whole comes to dwell in proximity to the earth and in the homeliness of the homeland.

But what is this element of foreignness through the ap-propriation of which the German essence comes to constitute itself in its proper-ness? What is the other of Germanness, in the relation to which Germanness comes to enter the sphere of its own essence? And what is closest or most natural — what is simply given — to the German Dasein? The answer to this question lies in the famous letter to Böhlendorf dated 12 December 1801, in which Hölderlin writes the following:

We learn nothing with greater difficulty than to use the national freely. And the way I see it, the clarity of representation is as original to us as the fire from heaven was original to the Greeks. Yet the proper itself must be learnt, as much so as the alien [das Fremde]. For that reason the Greeks are to us indispensable. Now in our proper [unserm Eigenen], our nationell [Nationellen], we shall precisely not follow up on the Greeks, because, as I have already said, the free use of the proper is what is most difficult [das Schwerste].²⁴

If Heidegger refers to this precise passage on several occasions,²⁵ it is because it captures the very essence of what it means and takes for man to dwell historically on earth or to have a homeland. The passage reveals the fundamental chiasma-structure of history understood according to its essence: for a people to have a history, and not something that is simply immediately given to it as its historical heritage (the national), it is of the utmost necessity for that people to relate to that which is most alien and foreign to it. This is the most difficult task, and the reason why Hölderlin calls the homeland “the most forbidden fruit.” Whether the national, or what is given from the start, be the ability to be struck by the fire from heaven or the power of being, as in the case of Ancient Greece, or whether it be the ability to grasp clearly and represent, as in the case of the Germans, the truly historical occurs only when the national is able to struggle so as to gain for itself that which is least natural for it. History, then, happens only in this coming together of the two historical extremes, which Heidegger designates as “a conflicting harmony” [eine widerstreitende Innigkeit] between “heritage” [das Mitgegebene] and “task” [das Aufgegebene]. The question is: does Heidegger frame history in such a way that it appears as essentially Greco-German? Are the two extremes or historical possibilities mentioned by Hölderlin interpreted in such a way that the whole of Western history seems to be echoing a voice that emanated from ancient Greece some two thousand years ago and to which, on the basis of some unquestioned metaphysical privilege, the German ear would be particularly attuned?²⁶ Or are “Greece” and “Germany” here names for an asymmetrical relation, where Greece stands for the model of a relation to the foreign or the alien, a model that remains actual only in that respect, that is, as an ability to relate to otherness, and where Germany stands as an historical task, as something to be achieved, and thus not as something that is quite yet historical? Isn’t the difference between Greece and Germany, then, that Germany is still to come, that it has not yet begun, and that it can begin only by repeating that which marked the beginning of the history of the West, namely the ability to relate to what is most alien to it in such a way that what is closest to it becomes its own? Isn’t this what Heidegger meant when he wrote that, “insofar as we fight the struggle of the Greeks, but in an inverted front, we do not become Greeks, but Germans?”²⁷ The law of history is such that it is only in the inversion of the struggle by which ancient Greece emerged as a historically and destinally decisive configuration that Germany can happen as a repetition of that initial moment. But whether Germany will be able to awaken itself to its opposite, to wander into the site of the unhomely, and thus to freely use its national, is something that remains absolutely undecided. Whether Germany will become the site of an encounter with the new gods, whether it will be able to place itself under the light or the truth of being, or whether it will drift ever further into the homelessness of contemporary man and continue to devastate the earth is precisely the point around which the very possibility of another beginning hinges; yet it is something that can neither be predicted nor simply declared.

In the letter to Böhlendorf, then, it is not so much a question of affirming some secret, transhistorical and privileged relation between the Germans and the Greeks, as if this relation were de facto given, as if “Greece” and “Germany” were themselves simply given. Rather, it is a question of acknowledging that what is most lacking in Germany in order for it to become the site of a historical dwelling is what was most immediately accessible to the Greeks, of acknowledging an infinite distance, then, between the two, yet a distance which is precisely and paradoxically the condition of possibility of a repetition of the Greek moment: it is only in the affirmation of this distance, which presupposes the journey to the site of the otherness of the other, that the proper of Germany can be freely appropriated and can thus become truly historical. What is most lacking in the German soul, what makes it unable to become a fate, is “the fire from heaven,” the proximity to the gods and thus the ability to be struck by the godly power of heaven; what is closest to it, on the other hand, is the “clarity of representation” and the power of conception. In this opposition one recognizes what Nietzsche later identified as the synthetic and essentially tragic opposition of the Dionysian and the Apollonian, an opposition that characterized the Greek destiny as a whole. Specifically, this destiny consisted in gaining a free relation to its Dionysian essence by way of an appropriation of the Apollonian which it originally lacked. Only through the difficult conquest of the Apollonian were the Greeks able to bring the fire of heaven into the sheen of creative representation. From out of the rigorous shaping of the poet, of the thinker and of the artist, the gods, the mortals and all the other beings came into existence and were made to bear on the destiny of the Greek people, thus ordering it into a nation. As for the German situation, it seems to be the exact reversal of the Greek one: what is most immediately proper or natural to the Germans, and yet most difficult to use freely, is the clarity of representation:

The ability to conceive, the art of the project, the construction of scaffoldings and enclosures, the placing of frames and compartments, the carving up and the regrouping — this is what carries the Germans along. Yet this natural trait of the Germans is not what is genuinely proper to them so long as this ability to conceive is not faced with the necessity to conceive the inconceivable and, in the face of the inconceivable, to bring itself into its own “constitution.”

(EHD 84)

In order to use this gift freely, the German task and only possibility of historical salvation from its homelessness — the only way for it to be a homeland — is to appropriate the fire from heaven. For only this fire, this exposure to the power of the divine and the holy can provide a Dasein with a destiny. Without this double movement, there can be no future for the German people, for, in Hölderlin’s own words, “the absence of destiny, the dysmoron is our weakness.”²⁸ The historical task, through which the German Dasein becomes a nation and gains a homeland is entirely contained in this formulation: to learn the free use of the proper. This learning to use the proper freely is precisely that which presupposes the jouney abroad, the appropriation of the most alien and distant, the counter-essence. Freedom, then, as well as national identity, presuppose a relation to the absolute other, an other which is other and uncanny, but which is also the other of ourselves, and through the relation to which our own properness is revealed and appropriated. It is only in the encounter with the unfamiliar and the alien, only in the experience of essential otherness in exile that the movement of appropriation of the proper is made possible. Such is the historical stake of Hölderlin’s poetry and of his own experience of the alien in the south of France, which he recounts in the following verses:

The Northeast wind blows,
The loveliest amongst winds
To me, for it promises to the navigators
Firing Spirit and farewell.

(“Andenken,” I, v. 1–4)

On their way to the far-off country, the poets are those navigators led by the north-east wind, the wind that blows in the direction of the southwest and that clears the skies, thus bringing a new light on earth, the wind that is the promise of the encounter with the fire from heaven in the foreign country. It is only by living under the skies thus disclosed that the poet can experience what is most proper to him and appropriate this proper. It is only by being exposed to the otherness of the other that he can return to his proper in a movement that is itself a founding of the homeland. If the poet can withstand the test of the burning fire, he will be ready to return home and found a new historical beginning at the site where the clarity of representation is preserved.