Poetics of History, Logics of Collapse: On Heidegger's Hölderlin

Abstract

The question of Heidegger's Nazism has been raised and reignited across the history of the philosopher's reception. Scholarly accounts of the relationship between Heidegger's philosophy and politics abound, but relatively few focus their attention on the substantial connection between Heidegger's reading of Hölderlin and the ideology that facilitated his choice to follow Nazism. Those who acknowledge this connection generally tend toward careless confusion of Heidegger's interpretation and Hölderlin's actual thought, despite ample evidence that Heidegger's reading amounts to a radical distortion of the poet's words. This essay accounts for Heidegger's misreading through the apocryphal poem “In lieblicher Bläue,” which Heidegger mistakenly attributes to Hölderlin. This is followed by a critique of Heidegger's interpretation through an exposition of Hölderlin's theory of Greek tragedy and the poetics of his late hymns. Theory and praxis alike stand opposed to Heidegger's aesthetic enterprise, and they defy any attribution of proto‐Nazism to Hölderlin himself.