Log24

Pol Vandevelde, “Poetry (Dichtung)” in Cambridge Heidegger Lexicon,
ed. Mark Wrathall (Cambridge: Cambridge. University Press, 2021,
pp. 582-588) —

Excerpts from the Vandevelde article:

1. “Poetry” can name: (1) literary composition – what he calls “great poetry”
   (grosse Dichtung), (2) art in general, (3) the genuine character of language,
   before it is used as a natural language, and (4) a “configuration” in the sense
   that things become relevant and thus meaningful insofar as they are “poetized”
   (gedichtet) or configured within a framework.
    
2. This differentiation or this composition consists of a configuration that takes
   the form of a “thought” or an “insight.”
    
3. The fourth meaning of “configuration” is the broadest and the most powerful
   sense to the extent that poetry does something that traditionally “thinking” 
   alone is supposed to do: to draw distinctions, to make connections, to carve
   out a chunk of meaningfulness into a recognizable entity such as a judgment
   or a thought or a proposition.
    
4. This sense of poetry as configuration and thus as a competitor to thinking is
   linked to the second sense of poetry as characterizing art in general.
    
5. If “configuration” is the broadest sense of poetry, the link to language –
   the third sense of poetry as original saying – is the most crucial aspect . . . .
    
6. … language is the means of the configuration and what “gives” things their
   being in the sense that it lets them enter into being.
    
7. Poetry names the very configuration of thinking, the fact that thinking itself is
   “made” and produced, historically situated, thus not rigid and fixed in a logic or
   set of valid reasonings.
    
8. This productive use of language in order to describe what made possible our
   normal use of concepts and language is very close to a literary invention and
   is a form of poetry as “configuration.” 
    
9. Poetry cannot thus simply be configuration. It is more fundamentally a response.
    
10. Thus, the specificity of poetry is precisely to be this in-between, between
    productive configuration and productive reception.
     
11. The second contribution of Hölderlin is the fact that poetry as a configuration is
    a process or activity within language and thought.
     
12. Our understanding of ourselves is eventful, in the sense of being the result of
    an event, and it represents our response to a givenness, as a being fundamentally
    affected, as a productive configuration or poetry.
     
13. These three contributions coming from Hölderlin allow Heidegger to articulate
    the thickness of poetry in the multiple senses mentioned at the beginning:
    literature, art, genuine language, and configuration.
     
14. Language is thus at the origin of poetry as literature, art, and configuration,
    but fundamentally language itself is poetry: poetry is an “invention,” halfway
    between mere discovery and sheer fabrication.
     
15. Language as poetry is productive-receptive, configuration, art, and literature.
     
16. There is no contradiction because neither poetry nor language names an entity.
    They are rather descriptions of processes and these two processes are each
    diverse in their manifestations: language is linguistic and a configuration of
    thinking, thus a form of poetry.
     
17. Dichtung  is poetry as a literary genre or activity and a configuration that is
    most striking in poems or art in general, but poetry is also at work in thinking
    and speaking.

  🟎 See as well  The Ninth Configuration .