Writing Things: Literary Property in Heidegger and Simic

Abstract

a common question, and one that is usually posed from within the borders of philosophy rather than poetry. In recent times, it is true, this question has come under scrutiny from various positions and in different ways: by Husserl who, in recalling ontology to the bounds of the Lebenswelt, uncovered a vantage point from which the limits of the question is . . .? come into view; by Heidegger, who recognized that poetry can think in a deeper way than enabling us to step outside a long and powerful tradition of identifying thought with reason; and by Derrida, who sees in literature a means of exposing the divided borders between philosophy and literature. With the benefit of hindsight, this sequence from Husserl to Derrida can be seen as a successive demystification of our opening question, a demonstration that its very form repeats a classical philosophical gesture, the ti esti, which cannot help but structure the answer in terms of essence and truth, and thus accord preeminent value to things in general, to the question of Being. Yet even if one allows that this phenomenological tradition involves a criticism of philosophy, it is nonetheless true that the criticism proceeds from a context largely determined by philosophical rather than issues. It is a frequent complaint amongst critics that Heidegger's elucidations of Hl1derlin, for example, tell us very little about the poems and a great deal about Ereignis; and even when Derrida--by far the most literary of the three-writes about Francis Ponge or Maurice Blanchot, questions of sense and reference, or dialectical appropriation, tend to organise the discussion, albeit from a distance. So the question arises, What if we enquire into the relations between poetry and philosophy from the other side, from within poetry? Not that the dividing lines between the two discourses are so straight and clear that we can always know for sure which side we are on. Nonetheless, besides asking what happens when a philosopher reads poetry, we can also ask what occurs when a poet reads philosophy. Here we are not so much interested in poetry being used to interrogate phi-