Abstract
Heidegger asserts that the basic feature of the saying word is celebration. Poetry, and language as such, is therefore essentially a commemoration. If language is to be regarded as communication at all, it is the communion of gods and mortals that comes to pass in language. The river from the river poems of Hölderlin is the ‘between’ that poetizes the relation between humans and gods. As the between it is a destiny and is also expressed poetically as a ‘festival’ or wedding of gods and humans. This feast is ‘uncanny’ in as far as it celebrates the relative strangeness to each other of humans and gods, humans’ finitude and their beyond. Truth as un-concealment implies a thinking of or commemoration of one and another.
‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found’.
Luke 16
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HEIDEGGER, M. Hölderlins Hymne Der Ister. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1984. GA 53 p. 13.
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The translation of Geschicklichkeit as ‘facility’ would not make sense in this context, since Heidegger uses the word in an unusual way to indicate the epochal sending by Being. ‘Fatedness ’ is another word that exists in English, but the epochs of Being, according to Heidegger, emphatically do not have the character of a fate or fatum.
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Compare the concept of the ‘ inaccessible inevitable’ (unzugängliche Unumgängliche) in Science and Contemplation (Wissenschaft und Besinnung). HEIDEGGER, M. Vorträge und Aufsätze. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000. GA 7 p. 62.
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Idem p. 157.
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Idem p. 105.
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Geertsema, M.J. (2018). An Uncanny Feast. In: Heidegger's Poetic Projection of Being. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78072-6_17
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