Heidegger and the Critics

Abstract

This paper uses the unpublished correspondence between Heidegger and Eduard Lachmann to contextualize Heidegger’s 1939 talk “‘Wie wenn am Feiertage…,’” which has been the focus of an excoriating critical response to Heidegger’s Hölderlinrezeption. Contra the protestations of critics like Paul de Man, the paper shows that Heidegger was fully aware of the intricacies of the hymn’s final manuscript page, using the correspondence with Lachmann to offer a reading of Heidegger’s inclusion of the variant referring to Semele’s ashes. It argues that Heidegger’s characterization of Semele’s incineration as a “Gegenspiel,” or counter-play, orients the possibility of a reception “without danger” that collapses the event of the hymn’s language into the treatment of the poem as an objective text. The paper’s central claim is that “danger” orients the mortal finitude of the hymn’s reception, whose excess as text becomes readable only against the testimony of Semele’s ashes.