Heidegger and Literature: An Introduction to the Question

Summary

What if the formulation Heidegger and Literature were turned into question? What if, rather than asking about an assumed relation, the relation was problematized? Rather than linking Heidegger to the proper names of literature – as though such names as Mann, Trakl, Hölderlin, Sophocles etc., had an assumed and already determined status – what would then endure in each moment would be the presence of that relation as a question. Retaining the question would open up fields of genuine investigation. Hence the point of departure would be less Heidegger and Literature and more Heidegger and Literature? A question to which responses were not just awaited, more significantly each response would have a transformative effect both on how ‘Heidegger’ then figured and ‘Literature’ was itself understood. In other words, allowing for the endurance of the question – Heidegger and Literature? – undoes the possibility that there is a singular Heidegger that is then connected and reconnected to differing instances of the literary. Part of the significance of the chapters comprising this volume is that not only does the question of literature (and its complex relation to poetry) continue to be reconfigured, it is also the case that those processes of reconfiguration reposition Heidegger; again, a repositioning that allows for a type of plurality to attend the proper name. A cautionary word needs to be introduced here. This is not a plurality that refuses the possibility of judgement. On the contrary, it is a conception of plurality that demands that the stakes of judgement be allocated an exacting precision.