Literature and Politics

Close reading of Heidegger's artwork essay shows that the text is riven by an ambiguity. This ambiguity is evidenced by Heidegger's own vacillations regarding the crucial concepts of earth and world, such that the earth sometimes appears as the ground for world, and sometimes as a disruptive materiality that juts through it. My goal in this paper is to investigate this wavering, and show how confronting it will call key aspects of Heidegger’s project into question. This takes the form of an engagement with recent French interpretations of Heidegger, including those of Alain Badiou, Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy. Working from and extending their critiques of Heidegger I work to show that the ambiguity of his political ontology stems from his equivocations on the relation between poetry and myth. His equivocation is made possible because both discourses are concerned with presenting the world as such, but if we want to move beyond Heidegger we need to recognise that they present crucially different visions of it: if in poetry existence appears in all its gratuitousness (like the rose of Angelus Silesius), then in myth it appears as something justified. The problem is that this mythical attempt at ontological justification has violence at its heart, which stems from the real ontological violence of the poetic thought it rejects; that the violent gratuitousness of the existence of the world can only be appropriated by setting off a potentially infinite process of ontic violence. Thus I argue that we need to draw this distinction as rigorously and clearly as possible, opening up the potential for a new, non-mythical thought of the earth.

Mathew Abbott is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Sydney University. He has tutored in philosophy, poetry and political theory, and will be lecturing in second semester on the philosophy of film. His thesis focuses on the philosophical and political consequences of the human ability to form concepts of the world.