That Is to Say: Heidegger's Poetics

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by Marc Froment-Meurice,

Translated by Jan Plug

Stanford University Press

Due/Published October 1998, 292 pages, paper

ISBN 0804733759

That Is to Say is an analysis of Heidegger's poetics as expressed in pertinent chapters of Being and Time, the lectures on Hšlderlin, ÒThe Origin of the Work of Art,Ó and On the Way to Language. Stanford tells us that the book is guided by a question that no other writer on Heidegger has yet asked: Why should poeisis provide a privileged access to the specificity of the poetic? With this question guiding his inquiry, Froment-Meurice sheds new light on every aspect of Heidegger's philosophy. The analyses devoted to Heidegger's idea of a proximity between thinking and poetry, his conception of Hšlderlin as the poet, of poetic experience, and of the privilege he accords the name reveal a series of presuppositions and necessary assumptions in Heidegger's conception of poetry that not only remain unthought by Heidegger himself, but that cannot be thought in terms of what Heidegger understood by thinking. Froment-Meurice points to the limits of poetics with regard to the work of art, and in particular the literary work. In doing so, it gestures toward new ways of doing justice to the literary and to art in general.

Series: Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics