The poet as destiny: The inauguration of Heidegger's dialogue with Holderlin

This dissertation offers an analysis of Heidegger's 1934/35 inaugural lecture course on the poet Friedrich Holderlin, Holderlin's Hymns "Germania" and "The Rhine." It combines exegesis of Heidegger's individual interpretations of Holderlin's hymns, while arguing that Heidegger's radical reconceptualization of Holderlin as a destiny is central for understanding Heidegger politics. It thus advances the thesis put forward by Dominique Janicaud in The Shadow of That Thought that Heidegger's thinking undergoes a "tearing revision" in the 1930s. Chapter One locates this revision in the tension between Dasein's individual fate and its common destiny in Being and Time, arguing that Heidegger's privileging of death generates an insoluble impasse evident in Dasein's inability to carry through on the disclosure of its authentic possibilities in language. The dissertation makes the strong claim that Being and Time generates an aporia between language and death that informs and situates Heidegger's subsequent turn to Holderlin as a destiny. It takes up this claim through a series of chapters that focus on the way the "Germania" and "The Rhine" course both revises and inaugurates a terminological vocabulary sustained in Heidegger's later thinking. Chapter Two explores what Heidegger means by "dialogue," understanding this in terms of a chain of mediation between poet, thinker, state-creator, and people. Central to this is Heidegger's analysis of Holderlin's mediation of the gods' language through Holderlin's founding of fundamental attunement. Chapter Three extends this analysis by tracing out the disclosive movement of the attunement "holy affliction, mourning yet readied" in relation to the gods and the Earth. This chapter asserts that Holderlin's poetry makes the Earth available in a way that allows Heidegger to answer the aporia generated by language and death in Being and Time. Chapter Four considers what it means for Heidegger to assert Holderlin as a destiny through an interpretation of the poet as demigod and between. The dissertation includes original work on Heidegger's analyses of holy mourning, the demigod in connection to the "as"-structure, and Being's need and use of Dasein.