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When Silence Strikes: Derrida, Heidegger, Mallarmé

Abstract

This paper attempts to rethink difference and divisibility as conditions of (im)possibility for love and survival in the wake of Derrida's newly discovered—and just recently published—Geschlecht III. I argue that Derrida's deconstruction of what he calls ‘the grand logic of philosophy’ allows us to think love and survival without positing unicity as a sine qua non. This hypothesis is tested in and through a deconstructive reading of Heidegger's second essay on Trakl in On the Way to Language, where Heidegger's phonocentrism and surreptitious nationalism converge in an effort to ‘save the earth’ from a ‘degenerate’ Geschlecht that cannot survive the internal diremption between Geschlechter. I show that one way of problematizing Heidegger's claim is to point to the blank spaces in the ‘E i n’ of Trakl's ‘E i n Geschlecht’, an internal fissuring in the very word Heidegger mobilizes in order to secure the future of mankind.

As soon as one pays exclusive attention to human speaking, one holds it merely as the sounding of human interiority […], and then the essence of language can only appear as a human expression* and activity.

*expression (Mallarmé) [Marginal annotation in Heidegger's hand]

—Heidegger, On the Way to Language¹

In 1953, Heidegger published two essays on Trakl, one of which deals with the possibility of a more harmonious mode of coexistence between Geschlechter or everything this word designates. Meaning sex, type, genus, species, lineage, house, family, generation, race, people, humanity, the word ‘Geschlecht’ functions as a polysemic amalgam in Heidegger's text where the apparently irreducible plurivocity of ‘Geschlecht’ is unified on the basis of Heidegger's reading of Trakl's phrase ‘Ein Geschlecht’ (One Geschlecht).² This unicity or uniqueness of ‘Geschlecht’ is something Heidegger finds confirmed by the fact that this ‘Ein’ of ‘Ein Geschlecht’ seems to be the only typographically emphasized word in the whole of Trakl's poetry, a typographical singularity expressed by the by-now antiquated practice of ‘italicizing’ a German word by inserting blank spaces between its letters, as opposed to actually putting them in italics. In this paper, I try to call attention to Heidegger's phonocentric reading of Trakl's ‘E i n’, whereby Heidegger skips over this typographical spacing as he displaces it towards the more acoustic language of betont (meaning ‘emphasized’) and the idiomatic associations with Grundton, the ‘tonic’ or ‘fundamental tone’ from out of which every one of Trakl's poems springs and towards which they in turn ‘flow back’ in accordance with Heidegger's determination of the poetic rhythm of Trakl's poetry or of the poetry of any ‘great poet’, for that matter (DSG, 74; DSG, 33–34). I argue that the blank spaces introduced between the letters of ‘E i n’ enable us to resist Heidegger's powerful reading that claims the supposed unicity of ‘E i n Geschlecht’ as the necessary condition for ‘saving the earth’ from a ‘degenerate’ Geschlecht that will not survive the internal diremption between Geschlechter (DSG, 37; DSG, 70). The blanks in ‘E i n’ open up a space for thinking about love and survival in a way that need not posit unicity as a condition of possibility, a gesture that mirrors Derrida's deconstructive reading of Heidegger in the newly discovered Geschlecht III where Derrida will lay out what he calls the ‘grand logic’ of philosophy to which Heidegger falls prey and which Derrida calls into question by arguing that unicity is always already divided, a division without which neither the love between nor the survival of any Geschlechter would ever be possible.³

Heidegger begins his essay titled ‘Language in the Poem: A Placement (Erörterung) of Georg Trakl's Poem’ by displacing the ordinary sense of the German word ‘Erörterung’—meaning ‘discussion’ or ‘debate’—into the more literal sense of place (Ort), the main function of which is to gather all of Trakl's poems into the source whence they sprang and towards which they in turn ‘flow back’ (DSG, 33–34). The place (Ort) as a gathering point or point of gathering is what Heidegger is after throughout his placement (Er-örterung) of Trakl's poem, the single and silent Gedicht that resonates in every one of Trakl's spoken or written poems (Dichtungen) and that accords upon each of them a singular fundamental attunement, what Heidegger calls the ‘tonic’ or ‘fundamental tone’ (Grundton) of Trakl's poetry in general (DSG, 35). Towards the end of the essay, Heidegger will claim to have located the exact place in Trakl's poetry where this Grundton finds shelter. Commenting on the first two words of the penultimate verse of the poem ‘Western Song’, Heidegger writes:

After a colon, a simple word follows: ‘One Geschlecht.’ The ‘one’ is emphasized [betont]. It is, as far as I see, the only spaced-out [gesperrt] word in Trakl's poems. This emphasized ‘One Geschlecht’ shelters the tonic [Grundton] from out of which the poet's poem silences the mystery. The unity of the One Geschlecht springs from the strike which […] innocently gathers the discord [Zwietracht] of the sexes unto the simple fold [einfältig] of the gentler twofold [Zwiefalt]. (DSG, 74)

Though the 1938 edition of Trakl's poetry that Heidegger references throughout his second essay on Trakl in On the Way to Language does stay faithful to Heidegger's typographical characterization of this ‘simple word’—‘the only spaced-out word in Trakl's poems’—Heidegger's own text erases the blank spaces between the letters of ‘E i n’, simply putting the word in italics (‘Ein’), a gesture that reveals itself to be phonocentric as Heidegger implicitly hears the emphasis on the ‘E i n’ (be-tont) as indicative of the fundamental tone (Grund-ton) of Trakl's poetry as a whole.⁴ In other words, even as Heidegger claims to pay close attention to the punctuation of Trakl's poems, and even as he initially notices the typographical singularity of the ‘E i n’ and describes it as such, he and his own text will go on to eliminate any importance of the graphic element (qua blank spaces) in what he seems to think are the two most important words in the whole of Trakl's poetry. As Heidegger had put it earlier in the beginning of the essay, the point of having a ‘dialogue’ (Gespräch) between thinking and poetizing was to ‘call forth [hervorzurufen] the essence of language’, a calling that can only happen if we manage not to ‘disturb’ the ‘saying of the poem’ and, instead, ‘let this saying sing from its own repose’, it being the task of Heidegger's Erörterung ‘to render our hearing as question-worthy as possible’ (DSG, 34–35).

In a very early interview, Derrida briefly alludes to ‘a certain Heideggerian phonologism’ that consists in granting ‘a non-critical privilege to a determined "substance of expression"’, an unfounded metaphysical prejudice—itself an irrepressible ‘lure’ of what Derrida in Of Grammatology calls ‘the system of hearing-oneself-speak’ (le système du s'entendre-parler)—that would explain, as Derrida goes on to say in the same interview, ‘the significant prevalence of so many "phonic" metaphors’ as well as ‘the excellence recognized to Diction [Dichtung] and to song, the disdain for literature’, a point the interviewer perceptively picks up on by linking this issue to ‘a certain irreducibility of writing or of literary "spacing"’ in Derrida's thought which is our concern here.⁵ Now it may be that the interviewer might have been thinking of the Mallarmé epigraph to Derrida's Writing and Difference—‘le tout sans nouveauté qu'un espacement de la lecture’, which foreshadows Derrida's remarks on spacing and the blanc in his essay on Mallarmé in Dissemination—or, more likely, as the interview shortly followed the publication of Of Grammatology, a passage in the latter where Derrida seems to praise glossematics and the Copenhagen School for ‘radicalizing the efforts of the Russian formalists’ who, in all their ‘attention to the being-literary of literature’, still ‘perhaps privileged the phonological instance and the models it controls’, namely, ‘poetry in particular’ (DG, 87).⁶ Glossematics, writes Derrida, ‘is better prepared to study, then, the purely graphic stratum of the structure of the literary text’, insofar as it no longer lets itself be dominated by the jurisdiction of the voice which had hitherto prevented access not only to ‘the graphic element’ but also to ‘the literary element, to what in literature passes through an irreducibly graphic text’ (DG, 87–88). It is worth pointing out that the only example of the ‘literary’ or the ‘graphic’ that Derrida gives in these pages from Of Grammatology is written in English in his text—in parenthesis, after the French word ‘espacement’, ‘(spacing)’—as he is no doubt paraphrasing the essay ‘Speech and Writing’ (originally written in English) by Danish linguist and co-founder of the theory of glossematics (with Louis Hjelmslev) Hans J. Uldall:

While also regretting that ‘the substance of ink has not received the same attention on the part of linguists that they have so lavishly bestowed on the substance of air,’ H.J. Uldall delimits this problematic and underscores the mutual independence of substances of expression. He illustrates this in particular through the fact that, in spelling, no grapheme corresponds to accents of pronunciation (for Rousseau this was the poverty and threat of writing), and that, vice versa, in pronunciation, no phoneme corresponds to the spacing between written words. (my italics, DG, 87)

About twelve pages later in Of Grammatology, Derrida will come back to the issue of what the interviewer Henri Ronse would refer to as ‘literary spacing’ in 1967, except that this time Derrida will give more examples of spacing: ‘pause, blank, punctuation, the interval in general’, spacings that ‘constitute the origin of signification’, as Derrida is now prepared to think of spacing as a non-synonymous substitution for terms such as trace, arche-writing and différance, it being perhaps not insignificant that Derrida will close this difficult paragraph by again linking spacing to literature, and again to that of Mallarmé in particular (more specifically to his 1897 ‘Preface’ to ‘Un coup de dés’ which Derrida quotes from): ‘No intention can fulfill itself at the place [au lieu] where "the "blank spaces" in fact take on the important role [‘les "blancs" en effet assument l'importance’]"’ (DG, 99).⁷ In Mallarmé’s preface, this last sentence immediately follows the phrase that Derrida used as the epigraph of Writing and Difference and immediately precedes the words ‘frappent d'abord’ (are striking at first), a strike or coup that will bring us back to the Schlag (type, blow, strike or imprint) of Trakl's ‘E i n’ Ge-schlecht.⁸

Was it Trakl's intention to call attention to the ‘blancs’ of ‘E i n’? Was that not simply Trakl's manner of ‘italicizing’ or emphasizing a German word, a typographical practice that was familiar to his German readers who most likely spent little time staring at the blank spaces of an ‘E i n’ that can be fully translated into an italicized ‘Ein’? And does Heidegger's own text not confirm this typographical translation? Does it even make sense to speak of a frappe of the blanc? Blank spaces can certainly be striking (frappant), as in Mallarmé’s poetry, but surely they themselves leave no mark or imprint on the white page. Mallarmé’s remark ‘les "blancs" frappent’ is, of course, not relying on the literal sense of frappe, much less on its German translation as Schlag. Why confuse Mallarmé’s deliberate and non-conventional use of blank spaces with Trakl's rather orthodoxical typographical practice?

Perhaps yet another typographical subtlety can rescue us from the debilitating force and necessity of these questions. The careful reader, attentive to what in French we could call la chose littéraire, will have noticed that Mallarmé puts quotation marks around the French word for ‘blank spaces’; Mallarmé’s ‘blancs’ are in quotation marks. How are we to read the ‘’ around the blanks? Is their function here merely to indicate a somewhat strange meaning of ‘blanc’ where we all ‘get’ what Mallarmé means even as the quotation marks around the plural form introduces a slight sense of imprecision, as though we lacked a more rigorous and technical word that would be able to name these ‘blanks’ while dispensing with quotation marks? Or is Mallarmé’s intention here precisely to use quotation marks in order to make a terminological distinction that would raise the ‘blancs’ to the status of a quasi-concept meant to guide the ‘naïve’ reader of ‘Un coup de dés’? However undecidable or indecipherable Mallarmé’s intention may be—which seems to give credence to Derrida's suggestion that ‘no intention’, including or especially Mallarmé’s, ‘can fulfill itself where "the "blancs" take on the important role"’—the quotation marks around ‘blancs’ seem to suggest that even the ‘blank spaces’ offer themselves to be read. Insofar as they ‘constitute the origin of signification’, as Derrida argues, the blanks are themselves implicated in the very movement they enable, so that one could venture yet another reading of the quotation marks around it: blank spaces are never really blank, they do not stand outside the movement of signification they nevertheless make possible even as signification thereby loses intentionality and becomes impossible in a certain way, an abyssal opening to which the ‘blancs’ point by leaving a trace, a white (blanc) inscription that opens up signification as being itself a part of it, so that it is the very origin of signification—which would presumably stand outside it—that is being breached or, shall we say, bleached.

It is not impossible, then, that when Mallarmé writes, les ‘blancs’ frappent (the ‘blanks’ are striking), it is also to a more ‘literal’ sense of frappe that the typographical poet par excellence might be referring, it then being not entirely unjustified on our part to link Mallarmé’s blank strikes or striking blanks to the spaces in between the letters of Trakl's ‘E i n Geschlecht’. Though Heidegger seems to ignore this typographical spacing in the text of Trakl's poem ‘Western Song’, being much more inclined to hear the emphasis on an even more unified ‘Ein’—whereas the blank spaces in the ‘E i n’ could suggest its own internal partitioning or divisibility—to accuse Heidegger of phonocentrism or ‘phonologism’ is not as simple as it might appear. On the very first page of his essay, Heidegger tells us that the poem of a poet remains unspoken (ungesprochen), a silence that somehow resonates in and through every one of Trakl's individual poems, none of which—‘not even their sum’—is able to ‘say everything’ (DSG, 33). And at the end of the essay, Heidegger will again link the poem to an irreducible silence that echoes or reverberates throughout Trakl's work as its fundamental tone or basic attunement, an implicit tonic or silent pedal point that harmonizes the whole of Trakl's poetry and accords it with what Heidegger calls ‘a singular unison’ (einzigartigen Einklang) that ‘always remains unspeakable’ (stets unsäglich bleibt), it being not that surprising that Heidegger will locate the shelter of this Grundton or Ein-klang in the ‘E i n’ of Trakl's ‘E i n Geschlecht’ (DSG, 35; DSG, 71). As Heidegger puts it, the Grundton resonates only to the extent that it remains unheard, in a silence that Heidegger wants to hear in the ‘transitive sense’ of the verb ‘schweigen’—as in Trakl's verse ‘the soul silences [schweigt] the blue spring’—as Trakl's poem is said ‘to silence the mystery’ (das Geheimnis schweigt) by way of an active ‘right strike’ (rechten Schlages) which ‘speaks the flame of Spirit into gentleness’ (der die Flamme des Geistes ins Sanfte spricht), as Heidegger paraphrases Trakl's poem ‘The Song of Kaspar Hauser’: ‘God spoke a gentle flame into his heart / O Man! [Gott sprach eine sanfte Flamme zu seinem Herzen: / O Mensch!]’ (DSG, 74–75).

Readers of Of Grammatology might be inclined to take Heidegger's emphasis on silence—or silencing—in a way that is similar to Derrida's reading of Heidegger in the first chapter of that work, in the section titled ‘L’être écrit’. One of the gestures that Derrida makes in that admittedly very difficult section is to call attention to ‘the ambiguity of Heidegger's situation’ vis-à-vis phonocentrism and, more broadly, ‘metaphysics of presence and logocentrism’ (DG, 36). Though Derrida will say in the interview shortly following the publication of Of Grammatology that ‘the remarkable meditation by means of which Heidegger repeats the origin or essence of truth never questions the link to logos or phonē’, something that Derrida finds confirmed by Heidegger's statements in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ which claim Dichtung (poetry in the broad sense) as ‘the essence of art’, of all other art forms such as architecture or sculpture which would only unfold in ‘the space of "language" or of the "word"’, in this section of Of Grammatology Derrida is much more generous to Heidegger, being prepared to write the following:

For, on the other hand, it is the question of being that Heidegger poses to metaphysics. And with it the question of truth, meaning, logos. The incessant meditation of this question does not reinstate any guarantees. On the contrary, it dislodges them at the depth that is theirs, which is more difficult, when it comes to the meaning of being, than is often believed. By interrogating the past of every determination of being, by shaking up the securities of onto-theology, such a meditation contributes, as much as the most current linguistics, to dislocating the unity of the meaning of being, that is to say, in the final instance, the unity of the word. / It is thus that, after evoking the ‘voice of being,’ Heidegger recalls that this voice is silent, mute, soundless, wordless, originarily a-phonic [die Gewähr der lautlosen Stimme verborgener Quellen…]. The voice of the sources is not heard. A rupture between the originary meaning of being and the word, between meaning and the voice, between the ‘voice of being’ and the ‘phonē,’ between the ‘call of being’ and articulated sound; such a rupture, which both confirms a fundamental metaphor and suspects it by pointing to its metaphorical gap, translates well the ambiguity of Heidegger's situation with respect to metaphysics of presence and logocentrism. It is both contained within this metaphysics and transgresses it. (DG, 35–36; P, 20)

A little earlier in the same section, Derrida had entertained the diametrically opposed hypothesis that ‘Heidegger's thought would not unsettle but instead reinstall the jurisdiction of the logos and of the truth of being’, which would acquire the status of a transcendental signified or even of the transcendental signified par excellence, ‘implied by all the categories or by all the determined significations, by every lexicon and by every syntax, thus by every linguistic signifier, not simply confusing itself with any of them, letting itself be pre-understood in and through each of them, remaining irreducible to all the epochal determinations it nevertheless makes possible’, a trans-historical or trans-epochal transcendental signified that is outside the movement of signification or, ‘in any case, is not constituted in its sense by its relation to the possible trace’ (DG, 33). According to Derrida's initial hypothesis, Heidegger's thinking of being would in the end hypostatize being as the ultimate transcendental signified, as ‘the first and last resource of the sign’ which would ensure that ‘the difference between signifier and signified is somewhere absolute and irreducible’, it being not an ‘accident’, as Derrida goes on to say, that ‘the thinking of being, as the thinking of this transcendental signified, manifests itself in the voice par excellence’ (DG, 33–34). For it is in the voice, writes Derrida, or ‘in a language of words’, that the signifier will vanish in ‘in the time of breath’ as it seems to generate itself ‘spontaneously, from within the self’, all the while constituting, by means of an auto-affection that seems to ‘borrow no accessory signifier from outside of itself, in the world or in "reality"’, an ideality that can dispense with the empirical and lay claim to a universal signified (DG, 31). ‘In its greatest purity’, writes Derrida, this ‘experience of the erasure of the signifier in the voice’ will take place in the word ‘being’:

Within the closure of this experience, the word is lived as the elementary and indecomposable unity of the signified and the voice, of the concept and a transparent substance of expression. This experience would be considered in its greatest purity—and, at the same time, in its condition of possibility—as an experience of ‘being.’ The word ‘being,’ or in any case the words designating the meaning of being in different languages, would be, with several others, an ‘originary word [Urwort],’ the transcendental word guaranteeing the possibility of being-word to all other words. […] No doubt the meaning of being is not the word ‘being,’ nor the concept of being, as Heidegger ceaselessly recalls. But as this meaning is nothing outside of language and the language of words, it is bound, if not to a given word or to a given system of languages (concesso non dato), at least to the possibility of the word in general. And of its irreducible simplicity. (DG, 34).

At this point in the argument—which will reveal itself to be an overly simplistic reading of Heidegger—Derrida sketches an alternative that he will immediately go on to complicate: given Heidegger's attachment to the indecomposable unity of the word in general, and of the word ‘being’ in particular, one might be tempted to think either a) that Heidegger practices what Derrida calls ‘an old linguistics of the word’ when he tries to think or question being or that, conversely, b) a modern linguistics that ‘shatters’ the unity of the word would no longer have anything to do with language in the Heideggerian sense, leaving intact what Derrida calls ‘the model of Heidegger's questions’ in Being and Time according to which linguistics would always be circumscribed by the more fundamental question of being which it would always naively presuppose and never be able to ask ‘qua ontic science or regional ontology’ (DG, 34).

Derrida's complication of this all too simple alternative will bring us back to ‘the ambiguity of the Heideggerian situation’ vis-à-vis phonocentrism. For if, on the one hand, Derrida thinks that ‘the linguistics that works towards the deconstruction of the constituted unity of the word no longer has to wait, de facto or de jure, for the question of being to be posed in order to define its field and the order of its dependence’—so much so that, insofar as it ‘deconstitutes the founding concepts-words of ontology, of being’, this ‘opening’ (percée) would no longer be relegated to an ontic science (or even the regional ontology of that ontic science) and would perhaps ‘join the question of being itself’—on the other hand, Derrida will radically complicate his initial hypothesis that Heidegger's thought qua thinking or ‘question’ of being would simply reaffirm a metaphysics of presence by calling us to listen (hören) to the voice of being in and through a thinking that remains obedient (gehorsam) to this voice (DG, 35). For Derrida goes on to remind us that Heidegger's voice of being is ‘silent, muted, inaudible, wordless, originally a-phonic’, being avowedly impressed with Heidegger's emphasis on silence and speechlessness (Sprachlosigkeit) throughout the 1943 Postscript to the 1929 essay ‘What is Metaphysics?’ (DG, 36). In both texts, Heidegger idiomatically links a certain mood or attunement (Stimmung) that surfaces when Dasein is brought face-to-face with its own finitude, namely, the Befindlichkeit of anxiety, to a mysterious silent voice (lautlosen Stimme) that ‘attunes us toward the horror of the abyss [die uns in den Schrecken des Abgrundes stimmt]’, an attunement that keys into the ground of beings—a Grund which is more like an Ab-grund—as ‘something’ which is not itself a being (ein Seiendes) and that Heidegger will call either being (Sein) or ‘the nothing’ (das Nichts).⁹

In Being and Time, Heidegger develops his analysis of anxiety in the hopes of finding an ‘exceptional’ mode of disclosure in and through which Dasein—the being that we ourselves are, the being for whom its own being is each time an issue—is able to show itself of its own accord, in a manner that reveals Dasein's structural unity as a fully grasped whole.¹⁰ Anxiety lets Dasein's being bring itself to the fore so as to provide a ‘simplified’ access to its being, meeting the methodological demand for a kind of phenomenological transparency in and through which Dasein's being as a whole becomes manifest without there being the slightest possibility of concealment or distortion, a sort of incorruptible simplicity that anxiety, as ‘one of the most far-reaching and original possibilities of disclosure that lies in Dasein itself’, makes apparent to Heidegger's phenomenological view (BT, 176). Perhaps the main reason why anxiety has such a preeminent status in Heidegger's Being and Time, and elsewhere in his thinking, has to do with the way in which anxiety discloses nothing or, more precisely, ‘the nothing’ (das Nichts) as a threat to Dasein, being able to ‘retrieve’ Dasein from its immersion into its everyday dealings with its immediately surrounding world by attuning Dasein to a threat that seems to come from ‘nowhere’ in the world, and that thus renders inner-worldly beings like or unlike Dasein—and thus Dasein's involvement with them—‘completely irrelevant’ insofar as they ‘can offer nothing more’ to Dasein when the latter faces the nothing in anxiety (BT, 181). As Heidegger puts it:

In anxiety, ready-to-hand beings in the surrounding world sink away, and so do innerworldy beings in general. The ‘world’ can offer nothing more, nor can the Dasein-with of others. Thus anxiety takes away from Dasein the possibility of understanding itself, falling prey, in terms of the ‘world’ and the public way of being interpreted. It throws Dasein back upon that for which it is anxious, its authentic potentiality-for-being-in-the-world. Anxiety individuates Dasein to its ownmost being-in-the-world […]. (BT, 181)

Contrary to fear—an attunement in which what is feared is a particular innerworldy being whose impending threat closes in on Dasein from a determinate region in the world, it being in principle always possible for Dasein to escape that which frightens it in the end—‘that in the face of which’ (wovor) one has anxiety is not an innerworldly being that encroaches upon Dasein from a determinate ‘here’ and ‘there’, the danger of which Dasein may hope to evade (BT, 180). A certain hopelessness of anxiety seems to assail Dasein from nowhere, being nevertheless ‘so close’ to it—ineluctably there (da) —‘that it stifles and takes away one's breath’ (es ist so nah, daß es beengt und einem den Atem verschlägt) (BT, 180).¹¹ Seen from this point of view, the essence of anxiety is decidedly anti-pneumatological, which would begin to explain why the voice (Stimme) of this attunement (Stimmung) is silent: having been deprived of what Heidegger here calls ‘the public way of being interpreted’—a euphemism, no doubt, for what Heidegger elsewhere vitriolically describes as ‘the prattling and gossiping’ (Weiter- und Nachredens) of idle talk (Gerede)—in anxiety, Dasein runs out of breath and stops speaking the parroting talk of the everyday, attaining a certain reticence (Verschwiegenheit) which ‘strikes down’ (niederschlägt) idle talk and ‘gives rise to the genuine potentiality for hearing and to a transparent being-with-one-another’ (BT, 163; BT, 159).¹² ‘So originally’ does this silencing (Schweigen) resonate in Dasein's being that it lets Dasein hear in an authentic way for the first time—as opposed to the ‘hearsay’ and ‘eavesdropping’ of the everyday—which for Heidegger seems to mean ‘hearing the voice of the friend whom every Dasein carries within it’ (Hören der Stimme des Freundes, den jedes Dasein bei sich trägt), a listening or hearkening that amounts to nothing less than ‘the primary and authentic openness of Dasein to its ownmost potentiality of being’ (BT, 159).

Later on in Being and Time, Heidegger will come back to this friendly inner voice that every Dasein ‘always already’ hears, this time describing it as ‘something like a foreign [fremde] voice’ that, even though—or precisely because—it ‘gives the heedfully curious ears nothing to hear that could be passed along and publicly spoken about’, strikes a direction (Einschlagrichtung) that unequivocally ‘calls Dasein back to the reticence of its existent potentiality-of-being’ (BT, 262–263). What Heidegger calls ‘call of conscience’ is a silent voice that will ‘rob’ Dasein of its ‘shelter and hiding place’ in the hustle and bustle of the everyday, exposing it to a more original unhomeliness that Heidegger will associate with ‘the nothing of the world’ to which anxiety attunes Dasein, calling it to hear this abyssal and uncanny silence by means of which Dasein is able to ‘break’ free from the ‘dictatorship’ (Diktatur) of ‘the they’ (das Man) (BT, 123). As section 55 of Being and Time makes clear, the way in which Dasein lets ‘the they’ dictate to it how and what to do or think is primarily by ‘listening’ to it:

In this way Dasein, absorbed in the they, has let itself be given such possibilities as are prescribed by its public way of being interpreted. But this prescription is existentially possible through the fact that Dasein as understanding being-with can listen [hören] to others. Losing itself in the publicness of the they and its idle talk, Dasein mishears [überhört] its own self in listening to they-self. If Dasein is to be brought back from this lostness of mishearing itself, and if this is to be done through itself, it must first be able to find itself, to find itself as something that has misheard itself and continues to do so in listening to [Hinhören] the they. This listening must be broken, that is, the possibility of another kind of hearing that interrupts that listening must be given by Dasein itself. (BT, 260–261)

As Heidegger goes on to argue, it is the call of conscience that ‘breaks’ with Dasein's inauthentic listening, belonging and enslavement (Hörigkeit, Zugehörigkeit) to ‘the voice of the they’ (die Stimme des Man), awakening ‘another kind of hearing’ more attuned to the foreign voice of Dasein's friend which, qua call of conscience, ‘speaks solely and constantly in the mode of silence’, pressing Dasein into what Heidegger will call ‘the reticence of itself’, the same silent reticence from out of which Dasein listens to ‘its ownmost potentiality of being’ as this silence strikes down (nieder-schlägt) idle talk, as it strikes Dasein and takes away its breath in anxiety (einem den Atem ver-schlägt), as it strikes an unswerving direction (sichere Einschlagsrichtung) along which Dasein is called forth and summoned (gerufen, angerufen, aufgerufen, vorgerufen) to a ‘cold certitude’ according to which it is always already safe and sound, on its way home (BT, 263).¹³

If we now come back to the 1943 Postscript to ‘What is Metaphysics?’—as well as to the lecture itself—we can detect more traces of this ‘cold certitude’ meant to set Dasein on a homeward journey, at the end of which Dasein will arrive at ‘the locality [Ortschaft] of the human essence within which humans remain at home [heimisch] in that which endures’ (PWM, 234). As Heidegger points out in a passage from the Postscript that refers to the human as the only being called or summoned (angerufen) by ‘the voice of being’, something about this voice seems to attune Dasein not only to ‘the horror of the abyss’ but also to a kind of reserved comportment (Scheu) whereby a certain ‘entranced tranquility’ (gebannte Ruhe) seems to pervade anxiety, letting Dasein feel at home even as it stares into the recesses of the abyssal nothing of its finitude (WM, 90). Anxiety, argues Heidegger, lets Dasein see—or hear—‘simple relations’, a tranquil simplicity that Heidegger will explicitly thematize in 1953 with the ‘gentleness of the simple twofold’ (Sanftmut einer einfältigen Zwiefalt) of Trakl's ‘E i n Geschlecht’, to which we will come back in a moment (DSG, 46). First, let us measure the stakes of our excursus into these Heidegger texts for Derrida's overall argument in the first chapter of Of Grammatology concerning ‘the ambiguity of Heidegger's situation’ vis-à-vis phono-logocentrism.

As we saw, what seems to have interested Derrida was a kind of metaphorical doubling down according to which Heidegger both ‘confirms’ a fundamentally phonocentric metaphor and at the same time ‘suspects’ it by intensifying the metaphorical procedure: to the already metaphorical ‘voice of being’, Heidegger adds the metaphorical adjective ‘silent’, a gesture that would seem to neutralize the voice as a privileged substance of expression even as it initially relies on it, making it impossible to ‘parse’ Heidegger's irreducibly ambiguous situation simply into what either escapes or confirms Western metaphysics (DG, 35). As Derrida points out at the end of this sequence, this Heideggerian ‘hesitation’ is not an ‘incoherence’ but instead ‘a trembling proper to all post-Hegelian attempts and to this passage between two epochs’, a necessary schema whereby deconstruction happens by ‘operating from within, borrowing from the old structure all the strategical and economic resources of subversion’ which, in Heidegger's case, seems to be primarily metaphorical, echoing Borges's hypothesis that ‘universal history is perhaps the history of the different intonation [entonación] of a few metaphors’, the phonic metaphor—as attested by its very intonation in Borges's formula—being not simply one metaphor among many (DG, 37–38).¹⁴

It would appear, then, that Heidegger's metaphorical subversion of phonocentrism—a kind of ‘war of language against itself’ whereby ‘language freely assumes its own destruction and casts metaphors against metaphors’, a process that paradoxically ‘destroys metaphor’, always with ‘another metaphor’, by ‘pointing out the metaphorical gap’ or ‘the origin of metaphoricity as such’ (VP, 13)—follows closely the deconstructive movement of Derrida's own thought.¹⁵ All the more so, one might argue, as Heidegger's metaphorical (in a non-rhetorical sense) double gesture with regards to phono-logocentrism is just about everywhere in his text. Suffice it to point to two examples from ‘What is Metaphysics?’ and the Postscript where Heidegger will again both subscribe to and transgress what Derrida—in the wake of Heidegger himself, of course—used to call the metaphysics of presence.

The first example concerns anxiety and its relation to the breath: even though he stresses in section 40 of Being and Time that ‘anxiety strikes and takes away one's breath’ (einem den Atem verschlägt), in ‘What is Metaphysics?’ Heidegger alludes to anxiety's breath that ‘quivers constantly through Dasein’ (ihr Atem zittert ständig durch das Dasein), problematizing our earlier statement that the essence of anxiety is anything but pneumatological (WM, 93). The second example also deals with anxiety, and again in relation to its strike (Schlag), except that what is being taken away this time is not just Dasein's breath but also therefore its words (die Angst verschlägt uns das Wort), even the most special word of all as ‘every saying of the "is" falls silent in the face of anxiety’ (schweigt im Angesicht seiner jedes ‘Ist’-Sagen), a silencing that might very well makes us think that Heidegger's thinking of anxiety decidedly breaks with the logos—even, or especially, the logos of the ‘is’—and logocentrism as a whole (WM, 89). Except that ‘Heidegger's situation’ is never decidedly anything, never simply transgressing or remaining inside metaphysics. For Heidegger will do all he can to affirm the exceptional status (Auszeichnung) of the word ‘being’ in relation to all other words—as well as the ontological priority of certain Urwörter such as ‘Weg’—or, as he does in the Postscript to ‘What is Metaphysics?’, ascribe a mysterious word to being itself, a word not to be confused with the ordinary sense of word, a wordless word but a word (Wort) nevertheless:

Originary thinking is the echo of the grace of being, a grace in which a singular event is cleared and lets come to pass that beings are. This echo is the human response [Antwort] to the word [Wort] of the silent voice of being. The response of thinking is the origin of the human word, which word first lets language arise as the sounding of the word into words. (236)

Just a little later in the Postscript—a Nach-wort that he wants us to hear in the sense of ‘a more incipient foreword [Vorwort]’—Heidegger will come to the phrase Derrida cites in Of Grammatology, ‘the bestowal of the silent voice of concealed sources [die Gewähr der lautlosen Stimme der verborgener Quellen]’, a citation (itself without a fully referenced source) meant to convince us that Heidegger's voice of being is, among other things, ‘wordless’ (sans mot), which admittedly goes a little against the letter of Heidegger's text which, as we just saw, does refer to ‘the word of the silent voice of being [das Wort der lautlosen Stimme des Seins]’ (PWM, 237). However, as it is clear that the word of being is not yet in language but only ever on its way towards it (unterwegs zur Sprache), to the extent that this wordless word generates a reverberating echo that responds (ant-wortet) to it in a resonance that will sound through the words of language, ‘letting language arise as the sounding of the word into words’, we can extend Derrida's argument concerning ‘the ambiguity of Heidegger's situation’ with respect to the silent voice of being—a necessary ambiguity which he, Derrida, did not think he himself was exempted from—to the impossible logic of the wordless word that is supposed to reverberate in silence. Similarly, the breath of anxiety that will make us breathless as it strikes and quivers through us, would, too, be a perfect example of Heidegger's metaphorical subversion of logo-phonocentrism, a necessarily double and ambiguous gesture which seems to have greatly impressed the Derrida of the late 60's, despite his less than generous remarks on this subject in the interview with which we began.

All would be well and good with Heidegger's metaphorical emphasis on silence, as far as Derrida is concerned, were it not for the recent discovery and subsequent publication of the long thought to be missing Geschlecht III, the third installment of Derrida's four-part series on Heidegger and Geschlecht where Derrida will problematize the notion of silence as deployed by Heidegger in the aforementioned ‘Language in the Poem’ essay. As we shall see, much of what Heidegger says about silence in the 1953 essay overlaps with the passages from Being and Time and ‘What is Metaphysics?’ (including the Postscript) that we discussed above, except that the nationalistic character of Heidegger's silence becomes explicit as he tries to mobilize Trakl's poetry for the purposes of ‘saving the earth’ from a ‘degenerate’ Geschlecht that will not survive the internal diremption between Geschlechter, a discord (Zwietracht) that the ‘right strike’ (rechtes Schlag) of ‘E i n Ge-schlecht’ is supposed to transform, as it ‘silences the mystery’, unto ‘a more gentle twofold’ (sanftere Zwiefalt) that will gather all Geschlechter—in all senses of that word—unto ‘the quieter home of the homecoming Geschlecht’ (DSG, 76). As Derrida shows, the home (or Ortschaft) promised by this silence, as well as this silence itself, are irreducibly German, as is the one big family that Heidegger envisions as he tries to appease the conflict between family members who will then love one another as brother and sister if this O n e Geschlecht is to survive. It will be our task in these concluding pages first to demonstrate how Heidegger's silence is nationalistically German and, secondly, to suggest that the spaces opened up by the ‘E i n’ of Trakl's text might, in the wake of Derrida's Geschlecht III, help us think about love and survival without positing an indissoluble unicity as their condition of possibility.

Right about halfway through Geschlecht III, Derrida recalls his answer to a question asked by one of the auditors of his seminar, Hachem Foda, who seems to have wondered how there could possibly be a linguistic nationalism in Heidegger's reading of Trakl when the latter emphasizes that the ‘source’ from out of which Trakl's poems spring and towards which they in turn ‘flow back’ remains ‘unspoken’ (ungesprochen), a silent mystery meant ‘to speak the flame of Spirit into gentleness’ as we saw Heidegger paraphrase Trakl.¹⁶ How could silence be idiomatically determined? And would not the silence Heidegger asks or calls us to hear from beginning to end of his career precisely hollow out every idiom in turn, perhaps even especially the very idiom Heidegger spoke? Is Heidegger's silence really a German silence?

Derrida's suggestion is that it is. He writes:

It has to be the case that the place of the unspoken Gedicht, if it is not something other than what springs from it, is essentially affiliated, in its very silence, to the German idiom, namely, Old High German. Its silence is German, it speaks German. But since in this silence, as Heidegger understands it, it does not only speak from out of German place but a place that in turn situates the place of the West, the Christian West as well as the West of Platonic and post-Platonic metaphysics—and thus of what Heidegger calls metaphysical theology—it has to be the case that the German place holds here an absolute privilege vis-à-vis the Platonico-Christian West it allows one to think […]. (GIII, 102)

As Derrida shows throughout Geschlecht III, in ‘decisive moments’ of his démarche, Heidegger unfailingly has recourse to Old High German when he is trying to awaken the ‘original’ (ur-sprünglich) meaning of certain keywords in Trakl's poetry, by means of which Heidegger hopes to situate (er-örtern) the place or source (Ort or Ur-sprung) of Trakl's poetry as a whole, an ‘ever more concealed source [den stets verhüllteren Ursprung]’ Heidegger claims to have access to in and through an eye-leap, a Blick-Sprung destined to catapult us into a more tranquil and thoughtful (besinnlicher) kind of hearing whereby we are able ‘to let the saying of the poem sing from out of its own repose’ (DSG, 34–35). As Derrida points out, this amounts to a ‘doubling’ according to which the original meaning of words in a given language is equated with the essence of language as such, an essence Heidegger thinks is the sole aim of his dialogue (Zwiesprache) with Trakl's poetry ‘to call forth [hervorzurufen], so that mortals learn again how to dwell in language’ (GIII, 63; DSG, 34). Just as he is calling us to hear this silent essence of language, Heidegger thinks Trakl's poetry effects a similar ‘singular calling of the right strike’, the ‘prevailing quieter quietude’ of which will speak a certain gentleness into ‘man's heart’ as we hear the silent fundamental tone or tonic sheltered in Trakl's ‘E i n Geschlecht’ (DSG, 74–75). What Derrida calls attention to is that this original silence is ‘essentially affiliated’ to a certain German idiom—which will then ‘hold an absolute privilege’ in regards to humanity and the West—that Heidegger deploys throughout his text, the idiom ‘Geschlecht’ having a special significance in this context as its Schlag seems to be irreducibly tied to the silence Heidegger calls us to hear in so many of his texts, for example in the passages from Being and Time and ‘What is Metaphysics?’ that we discussed above and where schlagen—in nieder-schlagen, ver-schlagen, Einschlags-richtung—each time describes, in the language of the only Geschlecht which can say Schlag or Ge-schlecht, a striking silence that, in the 1953 essay, Heidegger will relate to how ‘the soul silences the blue spring’ as it is called to go under ‘in silence and repose’, a downgoing (Untergang) which will bring us back to an early dawn (die Frühe), a spring or sunrise (Aufgang) towards which the Schlag will ‘let the soul strike a path’ (indem er die Seele in ‘den blauen Frühling’ einschlagen läßt) (DSG, 38; DSG, 74–75).¹⁷

This last particular German idiom, einen Weg, eine Richtung einschlagen (to strike a path or direction), will assure a powerful coherence to Heidegger's own path, the first steps of which begin with Trakl's verse ‘The soul is something foreign on earth [Es ist die Seele ein Fremdes auf Erden]’, prompting Heidegger to ask about the ‘authentic’ meaning of ‘fremd’ (foreign, strange) which Heidegger, paradoxically and problematically, claims to have found in the Old High German ‘fram’ meaning ‘ahead towards elsewhere, on the way to […] towards what has been held in store in advance [anderswohin vorwärts, unterwegs nach […] dem Voraufbehaltenen entgegen]’ (DSG, 37). This determination of the foreigner—according to which the Fremdes is given a determination (Bestimmung), precisely, a fixed destination as ‘it already follows the call to the way toward its proper’—will reappear just a few pages later in Heidegger's text, determining this time the meaning of meaning (Sinn) itself, via the Old High German ‘sinnan’, as ‘to travel, to strive towards […], to strike a direction [eine Richtung einschlagen]’, a path-breaking that will idiomatically invest the meaning of Fremdes and Sinn with the Schlag of the Geschlecht in whose language alone this can be said, ‘only in the idiom that signs this whole discourse (Schlag and the idiomatic expression that associates it to Weg: untranslatable)’ (DSG, 49; GIII, 151). As Derrida points out in his condensed summary— ten pages or so—of Geschlecht III at the end of Geschlecht II, ‘here things get worse since it is the very sense of the word "sense" which seems untranslatable, linked to an idiom […], which sees itself suddenly rooted in only one language, family or Geschlecht of languages, outside of which it loses its originary sense’, a loss that would render translation ‘a priori illegitimate’ as no other language could claim to have access to this irreducibly German sense of sense as einen Weg, eine Richtung einschlagen (GIII, 39).¹⁸

If we keep following Heidegger follow Trakl's wandering stranger for just a little longer, we might run into that friend whose foreign voice ‘every Dasein carries within itself’, a voice that Heidegger calls us to hear as he ‘hearkens’ (nachlauscht) to Trakl's stranger ‘descend[ing] the skeletal steps of the mountain of Mönchsberg’, becoming first a ‘friend’ and then a ‘brother’ to the stranger, who then in turn lets his brother hear ‘the "lunar voice" of the sister’: ‘But insofar as the hearkening friend sings the "Song of the Departed" and thus becomes the brother of the departed, the stranger's brother, in and through this stranger, first becomes the brother of his sister’, it being tempting to think, as Derrida suggests in Geschlecht III in relation to different passages in Heidegger's essay, that Heidegger is here ‘speaking of his own démarche’, that he is at once the brother hearkening to Trakl's sister and our sister to whom he (she?!) calls us to hearken and become a brother, in the hopes of finally arriving at that ‘quieter abode’ in which we can all dwell as one united family or undivided House, ‘E i n Geschlecht’ (DSG, 45; DSG, 64–66; GIII, 86–87).¹⁹

In Geschlecht III, Derrida remains extremely suspicious of ‘the innocence of a sexual difference without war’ that Heidegger seems to be fantasizing via the figures of brother and sister in Trakl's poetry, indicating that this ‘integrity’ is on the same side as that of ‘the proper place’, the ‘phantasm’ of which Derrida seems prepared to equate with death itself:

If there were only gathering, sameness, uniqueness, place without path, this would be death without phrase. […] To say that there is divisibility does not come down either to saying that there is only divisibility or division (this, too, would be death). Death lies in wait on both sides, on the side of the phantasm of the integrity of the proper place and the innocence of a sexual difference without war, and on the opposite side, that of a radical impropriety or expropriation, or even a war of Geschlecht as sexual dissension. (GIII, 107)

Derrida sketches two diametrically opposed ‘sides’ of what he ironically calls ‘the grand logic of philosophy’ according to which it is thought possible and desirable to keep essence and accident apart, as though the unicity of the essence depended on ‘the exteriority between essence and accident, pure and impure, proper and improper, good and evil’ (107). What Derrida shows is that, were the unicity of Trakl's ‘E i n’ as tight and indivisible as Heidegger would like it to be, there would be ‘no desire or movement towards the place of gathering’, no path to strike as no distance remains to be traveled, as no space remains to be opened, precipitating a paralysis that would congeal ‘the moving wave’ that springs from the source of Trakl's poetry and animates it as whole, culminating in what Derrida calls ‘death without phrase’ (DSG 34; GIII, 106). Conversely, were there to be just movement and nothing else, no place in which to dwell as though we were condemned to ‘a radical expropriation’ where love between the sexes is no longer possible as ‘the war of Geschlecht as sexual dissension’ takes over, ‘this, too, would be death’, says Derrida, reminding us that the simple inversion of a metaphysical schema remains just as problematic as that initial set-up which is not disturbed in the slightest if we simply choose in favor of the other side of the same coin (GIII, 106–107). Thus, rather than merely inverting the metaphysical binary—or the ‘grand logic of philosophy’—according to which unicity is good and difference is bad, Derrida proposes to think these relations otherwise, which will entail ‘a sort of incessant negotiation and compromise’ that will deconstruct ‘the implicit logic which seems to guide Heidegger’ (GIII, 106–107).

It is not simply the case that Heidegger denies that the unicity of Trakl's ‘E i n’ might be compromised; to the contrary, Heidegger ‘recognizes this possibility’ but does so while wishing this were not the case, according to an axiomatics that will go so far as to call this divisibility the ‘curse’ or ‘malediction’ (Fluch) that strikes an otherwise innocent Geschlecht, a plague—from the Greek plēgē, as Heidegger indicates—that contaminates the purity of the ‘E i n Geschlecht’ by introducing dissent into it as something that may well happen but ‘should not’ in the best case scenario (DSG, 46; GIII, 105). According to Heidegger's good-and-evil logic, two strikes befall Geschlecht, one that molds and casts Geschlecht into a type—which will itself be internally differentiated between the sexes—and another that shatters this type into individuated broken pieces, into Geschlechter whose internal diremption (Zwietracht) no longer allows them ‘to find the right strike [den rechten Schlag zu finden]’. Over and against this second evil strike, Heidegger concocts a third strike that will come to ‘save’ humanity, ‘casting it into its still reserved essence [der das Menschengeschlecht in sein noch vorbehaltenes Wesen verschlägt, d.h. rettet]’, a salvation meant to rescue the Geschlechter from the roiling turmoil (Auf-ruhr) that afflicts them by bringing them to a more restful abode where the silent mystery is allowed to resonate in the ‘E i n’ of Trakl's ‘E i n Geschlecht’ (DSG, 76).

What happens to this ‘E i n’ as it is written or, in this case, typed? What if the spaces opened up by Trakl's ‘E i n’ allowed us to see more easily—and not so much hear—in the irreducibly graphic dimension of his poetry, spacing as both ‘the essential condition of possibility and of impossibility of desire, of the place or the Gedicht’, as Derrida suggests of divisibility more generally? Is this divisibility not more saliently at work to a pair of foreign eyes, not very accustomed to this irreducibly German typographical practice that threatens and constitutes the very unicity of a unified German Geschlecht, precisely? Do not the spaces of the ‘E i n’ essentially compromise the very unicity that this ‘E i n’ promises, bespeaking a kind of internal fissure in the very word meant to secure this unity? Could we foresee a kind of mise-en-abyme effect whereby the unicity of all words is called into question as the integrity of unicity itself is breached or, as we suggested before, bleached? And would this bleaching not help erase the politically troubling status of Heidegger's German silence meant to ‘save the earth’?

Notes

1 Martin Heidegger, ‘Die Sprache im Gedicht: Eine Erörterung von Georg Trakls Gedicht’, in Unterwegs zur Sprache (GA 12), ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1985 [1959]). All further references to this essay will be indicated by ‘DSG’ in the main body of the text, followed by the pagination of the German Gesamtausgabe edition. All translations of Heidegger and Derrida are mine throughout, unless indicated otherwise.

2 This phrase occurs at the beginning of the penultimate verse of the poem ‘Western Song’ / ‘Abendländisches Lied’; for an exquisite translation of the poem, as well as the German text, see David Krell, Phantoms of the Other: Four Generations of Derrida's Geschlecht (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015), 292–293.

3 Jacques Derrida, Geschlecht III, ed. Geoffrey Bennington, Katie Chenoweth and Rodrigo Therezo (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2018), 106–107. For a detailed philological account of the archival discovery of Geschlecht III as well as an editorial rationale for publishing it as such, see my ‘Préface’ in Derrida, Geschlecht III, 7–28. An English translation of Geschlecht III by Katie Chenoweth and myself is due to appear in 2019 with the University of Chicago Press. As the translation is still forthcoming, I shall be providing only the French pagination of Geschlecht III.

4 Georg Trakl, Die Dichtungen (Salzburg: Otto Müller Verlag, 1938), 139–140.

5 Derrida, Positions (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1972), 19–20. For Derrida's remarks on the ‘system of hearing-oneself-speak’ and its irrepressible ‘lure’, see Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1967), 17, 23, 34, 136, 146, 201–202. See as well Derrida, La voix et le phénomène (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967), 88–89, 96, 115. On Heidegger's ‘disdain for literature’, or for writing in general—‘Socrates was the purest thinker of the West. That is why he wrote nothing’—see Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Gray (New York : Harper & Row, 1968), 17–18. For Derrida's reading of this passage, see Derrida, ‘Heidegger's Hand (Geschlecht II)’, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. II, trans. John Leavey and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 47–48.

6 For Derrida's essay on Mallarmé, see Derrida, ‘La double séance’, in La dissemination (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972). David Wills has written beautifully on the subject of spacing in Mallarmé’s ‘Un coup de dés’, the ‘scriptural deployment’ of which, he argues, ‘can be seen to represent poetry's ultimate rupture from its oral origins’; see his Inanimation: Theories of Inorganic Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), esp. 111–116. For a powerful and insightful reading of Derrida's difficult essay on Mallarmé, see Geoffrey Bennington, Interrupting Derrida (New York: Routledge, 2010), 47–58.

7 It would seem, then, that Derrida would have radically disagreed with Heidegger's quick dismissal of Mallarmé—as attested by the epigraph of this paper—as a poet merely concerned with the expression and fulfilment of some kind of human interiority. See Heidegger's marginal annotation in ‘Die Sprache’, in Unterwegs zur Sprache, 28.

8 Stephane Mallarmé, ‘Un Coup de dés jamais n'abolira le Hasard’, in Œuvres complètes, vol. I, ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 391.

9 Heidegger, ‘Postscript to "What is Metaphysics?"’, trans. William McNeill, in Pathmarks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 233.

10 Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2010), 178. I have occasionally modified Stambaugh's translations throughout.

11 David Krell has brilliantly related Dasein's ‘Angst’ to a certain anginal ‘narrowness and constriction in the throat and lungs’, an Enge whose glottal ‘ng’—not too far from Derrida's ‘gl’ in Glas—chokes and strangles Dasein as it ‘stifles’ (be-engt) its breath. See his canonical Daimon Life: Heidegger and Life-Philosophy (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1992), 68.

12 One could relate this ‘parroting talk’ to a certain Brazilian parrot Geoffrey Bennington discusses in his essay titled "The Perfect Cheat: Locke and Empiricism's Rhetoric," in Legislations: the Politics of Deconstruction (London: Verso, 1994), 119–136; or, more seriously, to the problem of what Bennington calls ‘psittacism’ or ‘the becoming-psittacism of the logos’ in Heidegger's thinking. For the latter, see Scatter I: The Politics of Politics in Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 108–116.

13 There is at least one more instance in Being and Time where schlagen and silence—or quietness—co-implicate each other as ‘the quiet force of the possible’ (die stille Kraft des Möglichen) is said to ‘strike’ (hereinschlägt) Dasein's factical existence from out of its futural having been (BT, 375–376). In a terrific essay, Will McNeill has related this ‘quiet force of the possible’ of Being and Time to Heidegger's remarks on possibility at the opening of the Letter on Humanism. In the latter, as McNeill argues, ‘the quiet force of the possible is now thought as that of being itself, as the "element" that "enables" [ermöglicht] thinking’. McNeill, however, does not tease out the idiomatic specificity of ‘herein-schlagen’ in this context, translating it with the verb ‘impact’, which denationalizes the quiet voice of being and what it enables. See Will McNeill, ‘Rethinking the Possible: On the Radicalization of Possibility in Heidegger's Being and Time’, published in the Condition of Possibility, theory@buffalo 13 (2009), 105–125. http://wings.buffalo.edu/theory.

14 Derrida invokes Borges's essay ‘La Esfera de Pascal’ twice when discussing the metaphor of light in his early essay on Levinas, ‘La violence et la métaphysique’, in L’écriture et la difference (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967), 137.

15 Even though the formulation ‘war of language against itself’ is taken out of Derrida's discussion of ‘the purely metaphorical relation between empirical and transcendental life’ in Husserl, I believe the same ‘logic’ is at work in Derrida's reading of Heidegger. One could relate this ‘casting of metaphors against metaphors’—in the sense of the metaphorical ‘before it is seized upon by a rhetoric or a technique of expression’—to Derrida's espousal in Of Grammatology of Bergson's desire ‘to multiply the antagonist metaphors’, a metaphorical war that will tap into the very essence of language as metaphoricity itself. On this, see DG, 98–99. For Derrida's remarks on Heidegger's ‘destruction of metaphor’, see Derrida, Heidegger: The Question of Being and History, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 62, 189–190, 223–224. In an essay soon to appear, Geoffrey Bennington and I deal more extensively with the issue of metaphor and analogy in Derrida and Heidegger.

16 For Derrida's discussion of Heidegger's inconsistent and highly problematic use of the word ‘spirit’ (Geist) in his writings, and especially in his second essay on Trakl, see Derrida, De l'esprit (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1987).

17 In an earlier essay, I call attention to Derrida's denunciation in Geschlecht III of a ‘national-humanism’ in Heidegger's thought that is ultimately grounded in Heidegger's appropriation of German in general and of the idiom ‘Geschlecht’ in particular. The essay also deals with the politico-philosophical context of Derrida's 1984–85 seminar from which Geschlecht III is extracted. See my ‘Heidegger's National-Humanism: Reading Derrida's Geschlecht III’, in Research in Phenomenology, Vol. 48, No. 1 (2018): 1–28.

18 Derrida, ‘Heidegger's Hand (Geschlecht II)’, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. II, trans. John Leavey and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 61. Translation slightly modified.

19 In an essay soon to appear in Philosophy Today, Vol. 63, No.3 (2019), I follow Derrida's suggestion that Heidegger nevertheless privileges the figure of the brother—who seems to be the ‘only’ figure capable of ‘gathering the song’—in his reading of Trakl's poetry, ultimately calling for a fraternity to come. See Derrida, Geschlecht III, 175–176.