4 - From Tool to Poem

Summary

If in Sein und Zeit Martin Heidegger famously discusses the sense of the possibilities of existence that can arise from a minor incident in the tool-shed – for example, the notorious remarks concerning ‘the broken hammer’ – he barely mentions art at all. Yet, over the subsequent decade, he becomes more and more attentive to the role that the work of art might play in the realm of thinking, and, above all, of poetry in particular as a way to outflank the deleterious forgetting-of-the-forgetting-of-the-meaning-of-being by the metaphysical tradition that has culminated in our own epoch of the worldwide reign of technology. In our time (if not only in our time), the ancient division between technē and poiesis has metastasized to the point where nothing escapes the enframing essence of modern technology … except, perhaps, something that poetry harbours that is irreducible to such an essence. This chapter takes up the question of the development of Heidegger’s doctrines on technology and poetry by examining two key moments: Being and Time and “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In doing so, the chapter reconstructs a processual “logic” to Heidegger’s turn that links these apparently different doctrines through the figure of the broken tool becoming poetry.