Language After Heidegger // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame

23/05/15 8:57 AM

College of Arts and Letters

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2014.12.13
Author

Krzysztof Ziarek

Language After Heidegger

Published: December 09, 2014

Krzysztof Ziarek, Language After Heidegger, Indiana University Press, 2013, 243pp., $45.00 (hbk), ISBN
9780253011015.
Reviewed by Thomas Sheehan, Stanford University
The first problem in addressing the topic of Heidegger and language is Heideggers own language, especially from 1936 on,
when his technical terms and rhetoric become especially idiosyncratic.
First of all, Heidegger maddeningly gives common terms uncommon meanings, and does so without notice for example,
Ereignis does not mean event as it does in ordinary German, and Dasein doesnt mean existence. Second, Heidegger
was scandalously inconsistent in the ever-changing meanings he gave to his key term Sein and to its older spelling, Seyn.
And third, the more opaque his language becomes (the world worlds, the nothing nothings), the less he seems to offer
evidence, much less justification, for his apparently far-fetched claims.
This is not to say the later Heidegger does not make sense. The challenge, rather, is to ferret out the sense he does make
from the eccentric language and rhetoric he employs. One approach (the one that I prefer) is to hose down Heideggers
language to get at what he was trying to articulate, and then to express that in what Milton called an answerable style. An
alternative approach is the circular one of remaining within Heideggers language while attempting to explain it. This
approach, which medieval logicians called modus psittacinus (Aristotle, !"#$%& '(!!)*(+%&, Hist. anim. VIII 12, 597b27-29),
is widely favored in contemporary Heidegger scholarship and is exemplified by the work of such European Heideggerians as
F.-W. von Herrmann and Franois Fdier, and in the Anglophone scholarship of Richard Capobianco, Parvis Emad, and
contributors to the journal Heidegger Studies.
Krzysztof Ziarek is professor of comparative literature at SUNY Buffalo, where he teaches avant-garde poetry, philosophy
and literature, and literary theory. He is well known in continental circles for his earlier book on Heidegger, Inflected
Language: Towards a Hermeneutic of Nearness (1994). Those who appreciated that volume will find Language After
Heidegger a condign continuation of its rhetoric and methodology, both of which are firmly embedded in the second
approach above. Those who prefer the hosing-down approach can certainly learn something from this book but may find it
rather tough going.
The goal of Ziareks four chapters is, first, to explain Heidegger on language, using the recently published volumes 70, 71, 74,
and 85 of his Gesamtausgabe (Collected Edition), notebooks that date from roughly 1938 to 1942; and secondly, to discuss
how language might function after metaphysics and even after Heidegger, both in poetry (for example that of Susan Howe
and Myung Mi Kim) and in a somewhat generalized ethics based on the majesty and powerless power of being. In this
review I focus on the first topic because it is central to everything else the book has to say.
Ziarek argues that language is not one topic among many but the topic of Heideggers later work, something he claims no
one heretofore has spelled out. The btes noires of this volume are Saussurean linguistics and its role in post-structuralism,
the linguistic turn (the anthropologization of language), and analytic philosophies of language, precisely because they miss
the fundamental fact and this is the major thesis of Ziareks book that spoken language unfolds from Ereignis, which
is the inceptual Word, as the breaking open of language (5).
To understand what that crucial statement means, we would do well to first step back into what the scholarship has already
established about the whole of Heideggers project. That will allow us to understand his work on language and then to
https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/54620-language-after-heidegger/

Page 1 of 4

Language After Heidegger // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame

23/05/15 8:57 AM

express that understanding in a less idiosyncratic prose. I divide what follows into: Heideggers position on language both
early and late; (Ziareks articulation of Heideggers position in the period 1938-1942; and the uniqueness, and difficulty, of
Ziareks approach.
Heideggers argument
The most basic fact of Heideggers entire project is that it is phenomenological and thus has to do with meaning and
ultimately with language. For him the reality of anything (its Sein or being) is not that things existence out there in the
world but its significance to someone within the context of that persons current interests and concerns. Heidegger
reinterpreted the being of things as their meaningful presence (Anwesen) to human beings. Phenomenologically speaking,
the real (das Seiende) is the meaningful (das Bedeutsame), a position Heidegger garnered from Metaphysics II 1, 993b3031, which is the source of the medieval axiom ens et verum convertuntur. Heideggers final goal, however, was not the
meaningful presence of things but the source of such meaningfulness (die Herkunft vom Anwesen), i.e., whatever it is that
makes meaningful presence (being) possible and necessary in human comportment. Heideggers argument can be
reconstructed as follows.
To see and say This is that or This tool is suitable for that task is to express what one thinks (correctly or incorrectly) the
current being of that thing is: how and as-what the thing is meaningfully present in the current situation. However, taking
something as something (Aristotles !, *-!. !(+/& 0123(+) entails discursively traversing the open space between the thing
and its possible meanings. That open space the clearing that enables and requires us to understand and say is is the
core of Heideggers thought. The open clearing lets us take-something-as and thus understand (correctly or incorrectly)
the current being/meaningful presence of the thing.
In Heideggers idiosyncratic jargon: the clearing that makes discursive meaning possible is always already thrown open (=
it is an a priori given, without a discernible reason why), and that thrown-openness is the very essence of human being.
Heidegger calls this state of affairs appropriation (Ereignis): the ontological fact that we are a priori, and not by our own
will, brought-ad-proprium (ap-propri-ated) to our ontological status as the clearing, the open space that makes discursive
meaning possible and necessary.
Heidegger also expresses this by his signature phrase Es gibt Sein. Our appropriation to being the clearing (= Es)
ultimately makes possible (gibt), and thus is the source of, all forms of meaningful presence (Sein). That is, our thrownopenness/appropriation is the basis of all discursiveness (taking-something-as) and thus the source of all language.
Not unambiguously, Heidegger calls Ereignis Language. I capitalize it (and wish Ziarek had done the same) to show that
appropriation is not spoken language itself, or any rule-governed system of communication, but rather the ultimate source
of all such language and communication. This is the meaning of Ziareks claim that mans thrown-openness or appropriation
is the inceptual Word, the breaking open of language. Here I capitalize Word for the same reason that I capitalized
Language: to distinguish it, as what makes possible words and language, from the words and language it makes possible.
Ziareks articulation of Heideggers later position
Ziarek formulates Heideggers later position on language (which, in fact, is consonant with his earlier position) in the
idiosyncratic language that Heidegger himself used in his now-published notes from 1938 to 1942. In the mid-to-late 1930s
Heidegger began to wax metaphorical and somewhat obscure - in expressing what his project was about. (Some scholars
incorrectly refer to this reformulation of Heidegger's abiding project in the 1930s as a "turn" or Kehre in his thought.) He
started saying that Ereignis-qua-Language speaks (Die Sprache spricht), that it brings forth ($%43() language, unfolds
(ausgeht) into language, and even words [itself] (wortet) into language. Whether such tropes prove helpful or not, they are
multiplied and magnified in Ziareks presentation.
Taking Ereignis as Language (I capitalize it as above), one might choose to say with Ziarek that Language languages; or
that Language transpires as words, or that Language gives its own Word to words. One could also say that Ereignis, as the
thrown-openness of the clearing-for-meaning, is an event of Wording (again, worten) or that appropriation lets itself be
said into words. Alternately one might say that appropriation is inflected into words, or is a poietic [sic] movement into
https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/54620-language-after-heidegger/

Page 2 of 4

Language After Heidegger // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame

23/05/15 8:57 AM

language. The clearing as thrown-open or appropriated could even be called a Vor-Wort (a Word prior to any spoken
words), a word-less, sign-free Utterance that is somehow beyond the domain of living beings, even those living beings
who have language (0#2%+ 56%+!3&). Further, one might go on to say that insofar as it operates in a non-human register of
Language, the Word unfolds as a leap that endows with Being. (The object of endows is unclear: it might be either
words or things.)
Such rhetoric can tend to become somewhat opaque, as in the following quite typical (and syntactically challenged) example.
In explaining how Language becomes words, Ziarek, after a discussion of the word Riss in Heidegger, writes:
This is how the event [= Ereignis] comes to word: as a rift rising open into a design, with its traction into a pattern
of furrows related by being held, drawn together as distinctly drawn up, the event literally gives words, or more
precisely, it brings words by funneling them into signs. The outline of this rifting movement of language is critical to
understanding the distinction between words and signs, which is elaborated on in chapter 2. (56)
(The explanation might have profited from knowing that Riss in Heidegger does not mean rift but rather is his translation
of $1"-&, limit, in the sense of where something ontologically begins.)
In another such example Ziarek first cites a text of Heideggers in both German and English. (The English capitalizations are
mine):
Die Be-wgung bringt die Sprache (das Sprachwesen) als die Sprache (die Sage) zur Sprache (zum verlautenden
Wort). (GA 12: 250)
Such way-making brings Language (the essence of language) as Language (the Saying) to language (the resounding
word). (BW, 418)
Ziarek then clarifies Heideggers neologism Be-wgung (created from the Alemannic-Swabian dialect verb wgen, to clear
a way):
The idiomatically scripted and hyphenated Be-wgung . . . is indeed a strange way-making, as it appears simply to
revolve within lLanguage rather than to move anywhere or to produce anything. [Heideggers sentence] repeats the
word language [Sprache] three times, suggesting that Language keeps shifting its shape, so to speak, where as
languages essence (Sprachwesen) it [= Language] brings itself (as essential unfolding) as its own Saying into the
articulated word. This threefold movement has its essence in the events taking place das Be-wegen hat sein
Wesen im Er-eignen (GA 74, 46). As Heidegger explains, this way-making no longer means merely transporting
something on a way that is already at hand; rather, it means rendering the way to . . . in the first place, thus being
the way (BW, 418). (53-54; The last ellipsis is Heideggers)
If the above represents Ziareks claims about what Language does, how might someone respond to Language? To be
thoughtfully aware of Language and its way-making means listening and thinking poietically. What one listens to and
thinks through are not concepts or the meanings of words taken as Aristotles 78+-4 9:-+!(*-4 or Aquinas voces
significativae, since these could never signify the movement of Language. Rather, it entails listening to and thinking
through certain special words (including Heideggers own term Ereignis) that specifically instantiate the event of Languages
Utterance (Sage), i.e., the Words coming-to-word.
All of this requires transforming philosophy, which is concerned with the meaning of things, into a new thinking and a
new style that focuses on Language as the source of all meaning. In fact it requires a transformation of language
(sometimes called a transformation of our relation to language) whereby we learn to work back from words as merely
semantic marks to the poietic emergence of Word itself. In another formulation, we must displace man into the wake of
Ereignis.
The uniqueness, and difficulty, of Ziareks approach
To begin with, Ziarek is adamant that in his later reflections on language Heidegger does not present arguments and does
https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/54620-language-after-heidegger/

Page 3 of 4

Language After Heidegger // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame

23/05/15 8:57 AM

not operate via concepts or the straightforward signification of words. This makes it a bit hard on readers who prefer their
philosophy with just a dash of evidence and argumentation; but Ziarek might say that making such a demand of the later
Heidegger is a category mistake. Ziareks own approach requires us, if we hope to understand and fully appreciate both
Heidegger and Ziarek, to undergo a radical transformation of our own relation to language, something that the book itself
performs.
The way Ziarek gets at Heideggers later philosophy of language is by working through Heideggers German words and
sentences, including his peculiar (some might say quirky) use of etymologies, archaicisms, neologisms, tautologies, and
what Ziarek calls innovative scriptings and scriptural inventions. This approach gets pretty deep into the linguistic
weeds. For example, Ziarek gives considerable attention to Heideggers use of prefixes: he studies in great detail how
Heidegger employs an-, zu-, ent-, ver-, er-, aus-, etc. He even analyzes Heideggers use of the word the. He also gives
considerable attention to Heideggers employment of hyphens (something that years ago William J. Richardson dubbed
Heideggerian hyphenitis).
This original and unique approach is, of course, consonant with Ziareks own training and expertise in literature, and those
who know his work are familiar with his dazzling way with words. But those who are trained in philosophy and specifically
in phenomenology may find that the dazzle doesnt always help clarify what Heidegger was getting at. What to make, for
example, of this explanation of Heideggers phrase alles Wesen ist Wesung (perhaps: All essence is a coming-intopresence):
In other words, the only way the proper can come to be proper(ly) is precisely through the singular one-in-fold
(Einfalt), which means that it occurs as intrinsically futural and open. When the event [= Ereignis] is thought of in
terms of folds, the relatedness unfolding from the event is marked by this spatiotemporal span and its intrinsic
futurity. The scope of such relatedness can be suggested by paraphrasing Heidegger in the following way: the
onefold unfolds its singular infold as co-folds time/space, being/language, words/signs to suggest the
reverberations of the play of Einfalt and Gefalt. (28)
A paraphrase is usually employed to make a difficult text more accessible. Here, however, it explains ignotum per ignotius.
Isnt Heideggers philosophy, and especially his later work, hard enough as it is? Couldnt Ziarek have expressed these
matters a bit more straightforwardly and a tad more clearly?
Heidegger scholarship is in crisis these days, and not just because his anti-Semitism has recently been put on full display.
The crisis, rather, is that almost ninety years after his major work was published and sixty years after his best work was
finished, Heidegger scholars still cannot agree on what he was driving at. Much of the problem lies with Heideggers
idiosyncratic language including the philosophical language he used to analyze language. Regarding the book under
review here, the problem lies with the equally obscure rhetoric it employs to explain what Heidegger allegedly meant.

Copyright 2015
ISSN: 1538 - 1617
College of Arts and Letters
Notre Dame, IN 46556

https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/54620-language-after-heidegger/

Page 4 of 4