David Nowell Smith

Sounding/Silence: Martin Heidegger at the Limits of Poetics

Sounding/Silence charts Heidegger’s deep engagement with poetry, situating it within the internal dynamics of his thought and within the domains of poetics and literary criticism. Heidegger viewed poetics and literary criticism with notorious disdain: He claimed that his Erlauterungen (“soundings”) of Holderlin’s poetry were not “contributions to aesthetics and literary history” but rather stemmed “from a necessity for thought.” And yet, the questions he poses—the value of significance of prosody and trope, the concept of “poetic language,” the relation between language and body, the “truth” of poetry—reach to the very heart of poetics as a discipline and indeed situate Heidegger within a wider history of thinking on poetry and poetics. Opening up points of contact between Heidegger’s discussions of poetry and technical and critical analyses of these poems, Nowell-Smith addresses a lacuna within Heidegger scholarship and sets off from Heidegger’s thought to sketch a philosophical “poetics of limit.”

Langwij a thi guhtr

Asked about his international reception, Glaswegian poet Tom Leonard said: “The same linguistic politics of colonisation and countercolonisation occurs in different and many parts of the world, throwing up the same stratagems that the locally mainstream will put into some little locally marginalised classification-box. My phonetic dialect work nowadays is sometimes bracketed—outside Scotland that is—with counter-colonial Black writers like John Agard, Jean Binta Breeze, Linton Kwesi Johnson. I’m happy enough with that.”1 His qualification—”outside Scotland that is”—is crucial: at once the poetry responds to the intricate particularities of local context, and reaches beyond that context to attain solidarity with other poetries embedded in and shaped by different histories of colonization, but whose “linguistic politics” offers up the same truths. An oppositional politics against a colonizing “locally mainstream” becomes a poetic praxis, a series of stratagems whose politics lies in its continual probing of the possibilities of poetic form.

Distending the Rhythmic Knot

This article explores the points of intersection between two forms of translation: interlinguistic and intralinguistic. It starts by offering a distinction between a broadened conception of rhythmicity, which comprehends not only non-linguistic rhythms but also the structuring motility that Benveniste and Heidegger both isolate in the pre-Socratic Greek use of the word rhuthmos, or what Mallarme is hinting at when he says “toute âme est un nœud rythmique”, as well as the prosodic structure of a particular language (stress patterns, intonation contours, quantity, pitch), and asks how a poem might use its prosodic medium in order to open onto such rhythmicity. Following Michel Deguy’s own reading of St-Augustine, I frame this question in terms of distension: the vectors of intensity and extensibility engendered by metrical deployments of stress and quantity, and yet irreducible to such stress and quantity. When I turn to seven English translations of the final couplet of Mallarme’s sonnet “L’Angoisse”, it is to look at how these translations negotiate the vectors of intensity and extensibility that pervades Mallarme’s lines—not to find equivalences beyond or behind the prosody, but rather attend to new vectors in the prosodic intertexture of the target language.

Heidegger’s Figures

This essay argues that Heideggers critique of metaphor and figurative language, both within philosophical idiom and the reading of poetry, constitutes an original and far-reaching contribution to this issue. In particular, it focuses on Heideggers insistence that the import of metaphor for philosophy and poetry lies in its structural dependence, as meta-pherein or Über-tragung (carrying-over), on the dualism between sensuous and nonsensuous realms. In this, the critique opens on to a far more developed thinking on the relation between bodily experience and linguistic cognition, and in particular an attempt to think of the body as a site for an ‘articulation’ of language anterior to any opposition of sound and sense. It is in order to think that by this bodily articulation of language the question of ‘poetic’ figure becomes particularly crucial for Heidegger, and the article ends by suggesting directions for us to take Heideggers insights into poetic figure that would reach beyond the confines of Heideggers own work.This essay argues that Heideggers critique of metaphor and figurative language, both within philosophical idiom and the reading of poetry, constitutes an original and far-reaching contribution to this issue. In particular, it focuses on Heideggers insistence that the import of metaphor for philosophy and poetry lies in its structural dependence, as meta-pherein or Uber-tragung (carrying-over), on the dualism between sensuous and nonsensuous realms. In this, the critique opens on to a far more developed thinking on the relation between bodily experience and linguistic cognition, and in particular an attempt to think of the body as a site for an ‘articulation’ of language anterior to any opposition of sound and sense. It is in order to think that by this bodily articulation of language the question of ‘poetic’ figure becomes particularly crucial for Heidegger, and the article ends by suggesting directions for us to take Heideggers insights into poetic figure that would reach beyond the confines of Heideg...

Surfaces: Painterly Illusion, Metaphysical Depth

This essay analyses the way in which the relation between surface and depth in modern painting is endowed with philosophical significance in the work of Michel Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Michel Henry. Whereas Foucault considered the work of Magritte and Manet to undermine the notion of depth as such, by showing the movement of ‘similitude’, Merleau-Ponty and Henry saw post-impressionist painting as engendering an experience of depth that exceeds the Cartesian model of space as res extensa. The motif of painterly surface thus brings into debate two significant movements in French twentieth-century thought: structuralism and phenomenology; in each case, the engagement with painterly technique becomes a way of grasping broader questions regarding the relation between perceptual experience and linguistic meaning.