Abstract
Logocentrism in Heidegger’s thought; language as proximity to Being; the privileging of the phonic; Being/the voice of Being as the transcendent signified; metaphorics of the voice as expressing man’s relation to Being; the hand and the thing: human action as bringing about presencing; the hand and the gaze as the site of the disclosure of Being; theoretical and practical comportment toward Being; equipmental totality, concerned engagement with equipment, utilitarian purpose; work, handwork, and world; theoretical gazing attunement vs. practical manual attunement; the hand as the locus of humanness; the hand and the word; language and poetry as paradigmatic presencing; signification as pointing toward presencing; handwriting as a manual gesture of sending forth into presencing; handwriting as imparting form without reification; condemnation of machine-writing as derivative, concealing, and alienating; technology and the forgottenness of Being; mechanization, imprintment, reification, contamination; the logocentric divide between handwriting and mechanical printing; the encountering gaze, with its emphatic limitation, vs. the conquering gaze’s un-emphatic limitation; writing as the conquering gaze, as reifying representation, as contamination of the aletheic space; writing as human doubling of Being that causes loss of Being; the other consciousness and the other writing afford access to Being; the possibility of the infinite’s appearing within the finite; writing as limitation, as the masking of beings; giving and taking: openness to the Gift; authentic and inauthentic handiwork and thought; proper thought gives Being the freedom to bestow its Gift; metaphysical man and pre-/post-metaphysical man; openness to the Gift, humanness, animality.
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- 1.
Recall that as shown in Chapter 2, Heidegger also links the hand with Being in “The Anaximander Fragment.” He does so on the basis of the etymological connection between one of Being’s names, chreon , which Heidegger translates as “usage” (Brauch), and the word for hand, cheir, both of which are derived from the root chrao, which he interprets as meaning ‘involvement with something.’
- 2.
On Heidegger’s interpretation of the original meaning of logos , see Heidegger (1984, 59–65).
- 3.
Indeed, Heidegger commented on Plato’s myth of the origin of writing, see Heidegger (1997, 235–40).
- 4.
- 5.
Derrida draws an indirect connection between writing and limitation, but does not develop it as a comprehensive theme; see Derrida (1981, 109, 162).
- 6.
As pointed out in Fóti (1992), Hölderlin also identified writing with limitation of the infinite. Hölderlin translated and put forward interpretive reading s of several Greek tragedies. In his “Remarks on Oedipus ,” he identified the artistic endeavor, especially poetry and tragedy , with writing. According to Hölderlin’s personal mythology regarding the deferral of the coming of the gods , the limitation inherent in writing reflects the proper manner in which mortals should relate to the gods (“the heavenly ones”). In the poem “Mnemosyne,” the gods are identified with the “unlimited” or “infinite” (Ungebundene) for which mortals yearn. Hölderlin’s equating of writing with poetry and tragedy , Fóti argues, is based on his idiosyncratic paraphrase of an ancient metaphor likening Aristotle to “the scribe of nature immersing his pen in sense” (Fóti 1992, 125). The actions of the poet and the dramaturge, like those of the philosopher, are identified with the process of writing, which is a limiting, by means of artistic design, of Nature, the gods , and the infinite. According to Hölderlin , this limiting is a necessary process, without which there can be no art. For without it, the artist risks the personal catastrophe of self-destruction. Acceptance of the gods’ gift of poetic memory is possible only when the potential recipient is indeed ready to receive that gift, and only if she is able to use her talent for artistic design to protect herself from the gods’ destructive wrath. For the gods are not the only ones who can fail, by way of omission, to make themselves manifest to mortals. The poet can similarly be responsible for an omission, namely, the loss of writing, that is, loss of artistic creativity (Fóti 1992, 72). According to Fóti, this situation where the creative impulse is lost is “Mnemosyne”’s thematic axis. The imperative expressed in “Mnemosyne” is to use poetic commemoration as a means of preserving the divide (halftig) “between man and divinity” (Fóti 1992, 69), and as a means of saving the poet from the “Law of the all-consuming … heavenly fire into which all things must enter”—fire that, Fóti contends, calls to mind “both the Heraclitean fire and the Stoic ekpyrosis” (67).
- 7.
In German, existential assertions can be formulated by means of the idiom “es gibt x” (“there is an x”). The literal translation of this phrase is “it gives x.” Heidegger exploits this duality to highlight the givingness implicit in Being, using “es gibt” to refer to Being. See, e.g., Heidegger (1993, 238).
- 8.
Derrida argues that Hegel understood the notion of a mental concept (Begriff) as a sublation (Aufhebung) of grasping by hand (greifen), i.e., as an intellectual structure that “comprehends” the physical act of grasping, getting one’s hands on, mastering, manipulating (Derrida 1987, 172).
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Pimentel, D. (2019). Being Written. In: Heidegger with Derrida . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05692-6_7
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