Trechos de um artigo por vir – I

De William S. Allen, Ellipsis: Of Poetry and Experience of Language after Heidegger, Hölderlin, Blanchot:

This is to say that the occurrence of a poem does not have the certainty of a present thing, but only the doubtfulness of that which has not yet arrived, and yet this doubtfulness is also that which first gives rise to a poem; it comes about through the imminence of its own question in such a way that the poet is also drawn into its deferral as that which always succeeds it, that which only arises out of, and in response to, a poem. In this way, Hölderlin’s poetry led to “a poetic existence so strong that, once its essence is unveiled, it was able to make itself the proof that it was impossibility and to extend itself out into nothingness and emptiness, without ceasing to accomplish itself ” (PF: 121/114). This “rhythm” of occurrence and deferral seems to refer to the movement by which the words both reveal and conceal a poem’s existence, but by rendering this movement in terms of impossibility Blanchot is indicating that as close as Heidegger’s examination comes, it fails to appreciate the extent to which the lack of presence of a poem affects the poet’s own existence.

This means that a poet is in the impossible but necessary position of being both the speaker of a poem and what is spoken by the poem. For Blanchot, this contradiction “is the heart of the poetic existence, it is its essence and its law; there would be no poet, if he did not have to live out this same, endlessly present, impossibility.” The consequence being that “the poet must exist as a foreboding of himself, as the future of his existence.” In Blanchot’s eyes this is the dürftiger Zeit (needy, destitute, or distressing time) that Hölderlin speaks of in his elegy “Bread and Wine,” the time of “not yet” in which the poet must reside, waiting, never present to himself (PF: 124/117). In the poverty and misery of this time without time the poet enters the foreboding of the poem, which is itself the very condition of there being a time to come, as it is an “affirmation of something that is beyond itself ” (PF: 125/118). It is only through this double movement of coming but not arriving that a poem emerges, for in seeking to respond to the imminence of its word the poem recedes into its own imminence, such that the poem’s approach only occurs while this approach is still being sought.

This transformation inflects the language of a poem by rendering it double, as Blanchot observes in referring to a phrase from Hölderlin’s elegy “The Walk to the Country / To Landauer” (“Der Gang aufs Land / An Landauer”), which reads, “And to the opened glance the shining will be open” (Und dem offenen Blik offen der Leuchtende seyn): “The double

repetition of the word offen, open, answers exactly to the double movement that ‘the Open’ signifies: to open up to that which opens up” (PF: 119–20/113). Referring to this movement as a “double repetition” reminds us that repetition is never unitary, but proliferates, such that the opening of the shining is, by virtue of its ambiguous genitive, already double, by which ambiguity it responds to the similarly ambiguous opening of the glance. To open is always a movement that involves both an opening and an opening up, a repetition of itself that in repeating doubles itself. This doubled opening brings forth the language of a poem in such a way that it also both opens and is opened, thereby placing itself in an endlessly occurring imminence: it is always to come. In opening it sets out the conditions for its own opening, thus deferring the opening while also preparing it, so that the opening occurs but is never present; it comes but never arrives. This attention to the rhythmic movement of the words passes by Heidegger’s interest in the words themselves to focus on what arises out of their inscription, which is to answer to the poet’s own demand to seek not what was in the poem, but what was being attempted by way of it. In doing so, Blanchot is drawing the inquiry away from Hölderlin’s words toward their writing as the basis of their foreboding, and this is a distinct move away from Heidegger.


~ por espectral em quinta-feira, maio 27, 2010.

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