Versuche des Mitseins: Hoelderlin, Heidegger und die Gemeinschaft der Sterblichen (German text, Friedrich Hoelderlin, Martin Heidegger)

Community has traditionally been understood as a form of identity guided by the phantasm of a common substance. Following this image, the ideal community would be a unity within which every difference has been dissolved by the experience of oneness. However, the totalitarian conception of the unified community as “Deutsche Volksgemeinschaft” has made a rigorous re-thinking of community inevitable. Moving from the deconstruction of the community formulated in the work of Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, this project explores how being-with-others can be thought from a primordial difference. Friedrich Hölderlin's hymn-fragment “Der Mutter Erde” demonstrates how his poetry deconstructs the idea of community as communion and approaches a completely new form of being-with-others. The notion of Gesang offers a model for this new idea of community, as a being-open to the other, a merging of listening and responding which never culminates in an absolute union. Yet such a subversive reading of Hölderlin cannot elide the National Socialists' appropriation of his poetry. Thus the question arises how Hölderlin came to be (ab)used as an advocate of an ideology which, in tempting the annihilation of the other, carries the traditional understanding of community to its most violent extreme, while at the same time serving as literary witness for a movement of fundamental openness to the other. These opposing interpretations resonate in Martin Heidegger's lectures on Hölderlin's poetry. Here the deconstruction of the subject clashes with the attempt to re-install such a subject in the form of “the German people”. In his attempt to construct the “origin” of “the German people,” Heidegger ultimately does violence to the text in closing the primordial difference exposed by Hölderlin's poetry. However, Hölderlin's poetry and the unfinished tragedy on Empedocles demonstrate that for Hölderlin such a closure is not possible. The only way to relate to the other is a fundamental being-open, a vulnerability which cannot be closed by Empedocles' sacrifice, but is instead opened up in all its consequences precisely by his impending death.