The Postmodernity of Heidegger

Abstract

Why discuss postmodernity of Heidegger? There is good reason: for many American readers Heidegger appears as regressive, as a mystic or a crank. His interpretations of poetic texts are often taken as ideosyncratic exercises which would merit no attention at all were they not by a man whose major accomplishments were philosophy. His imitators and literary disciples do not come off as well; their efforts are viewed by establishmentarians as bypassing rigors of exegesis for abstruse musings about the happening of Truth and the e-mergence of Being. Hermeneutics is mistaken to be a new and wrong way to go about task of interpreting texts, a dangerous tendency that may tempt unwary student away from text and into strictly hypothetical musings about nature of language which do not rightly deserve name either of philosophy or of literary interpretation.1 Others, more continentally inclined, hold that French structuralist thought has superseded Heidegger's views on language, and that his poetical and expressionistic exegeses have little to do with disciplined procedures and fine distinctions one finds in structuralism. The