The Textual vs the Contextual: A Heideggerian Reading of Walid Saif’s Poem ‘Love Again’

Abstract

This article reads Love Again (1992), the last poem written by contemporary Palestinian poet Walid Saif based on Heidegger’s concept of the Dasein as detailed in Being and Time and his concept of art as detailed in “The Origin of the Work of Art” as well as in other of his works. In Love Again “togetherness,” which is the essence of the Dasein, dissolves completely into the kind of being of “the Others”. Heidegger’s definition of “the truth of being” has the tendency of combining two contesting groups of theories: the first is a modernist group that advocates an intrinsic/textual approach to read literary texts in light of new criticism and other formalist schools. The second is a group that advocates a contextual/extrinsic/political approach to read literary texts like new historicism, postcolonialism and others. A Heideggerian reading of Saif’s poem debunks the modernist claim that a detachable aesthetic experience can safeguard the poem’s “historical permanence” and transcend its political context. Unlike formalists of his time, Heidegger was not concerned with the tension that emerged between the above two groups since he took both the extrinsic and intrinsic elements of a literary work as indispensable elements towards exploring the literary work. Furthermore, the above tension does not seem to be part of Heidegger’s consciousness.