Heidegger and the hypostasis of the performative

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Notes

Karen S. Feldman

Department of Rhetoric

University of California

Berkeley, CA 94720‐2670

USA

E‐mail: [email protected]

I am grateful to an anonymous Angelaki reviewer for constructive suggestions.

Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991) 48.

Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin's Hymn “The Ister,” trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996) 42–43. For a more thorough discussion of Heidegger's reading of this poem, see my essay “The Naming of the Hymn: Heidegger and Hölderlin” in Between Philosophy and Poetry: Writing, Rhythm, History, eds. Massimo Verdicchio and Robert Burch (New York: Continuum, 2002) 117–24. For important discussions of Heidegger and metaphor, see Ronald Bruzina, “Heidegger on the Metaphor and Philosophy” in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays, ed. Michael Murray (New Haven: Yale UP, 1978); Samuel Ijsseling, Rhetorik und Philosophie: Eine historisch‐systematische Einführung (Stuttgart: Fromann‐Holzboog, 1988) 177–80; David Halliburton, Poetic Thinking: An Approach to Heidegger (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981) 156–58; Joseph J. Kockelmans, “Heidegger on Metaphor and Metaphysics,” Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 47 (1985): 415–50; and Ernesto Grassi, Kunst und Mythos (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990) 115–28.

Heidegger, Hölderlin's Hymn “The Ister” 165.

Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979) 279; Jean Greisch, “Les Mots et les roses: La Métaphore chez Martin Heidegger,” Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Théologiques 57 (1973): 433–55 (436). Neither de Man, Greisch nor Miller takes Heidegger as exemplary for an understanding of textual events, but here I claim that Heidegger's rejection of metaphor is an indirect way to thematize the event‐like character of the text.

See, for example, Miller's essay “The Disputed Ground: Deconstruction and Literary Studies” in Deconstruction is/in America, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (New York: New York UP, 1995); and Miller's volume Tropes, Parables, Performatives: Essays on Twentieth‐Century Literature (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990).

De Man, Allegories of Reading ix.

Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996) 132.

Ibid. 133.

J. Hillis Miller, Topographies (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995) 8.

J. Hillis Miller, Speech Acts in Literature (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001) 1.

Miller, Topographies 5: “… [T]he text and its reading, it may be, are performative speech acts bringing the terrain into existence.”

J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1962) 6.

Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context” in Limited Inc, trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1988) 17: “For, ultimately, isn't it true that what Austin excludes as anomaly, exception, ‘non‐serious,’ citation (on stage, in a poem, or a soliloquy) is the determined modification of a general citationality – or rather, a general iterability – without which there would not even be a ‘successful’ performative?” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick offers extremely helpful explanations of the genealogy of performativity in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003) 3–8; and in her introduction (co‐authored by Andrew Parker), “Introduction: Performativity and Performance” in Performativity and Performance (New York: Routledge, 1995) 1–18. Also noteworthy is the role that Stanley Cavell has played in the reception of performativity and the Austin/Derrida discussion. See Stanley Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1994) 55–127.

For the difference between existentiell and existential understanding, see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State U of New York P, 1996) 12–13. Page numbers for Being and Time are referenced according to the original German pagination that is noted in the margins of the English translation.

Heidegger, Being and Time 273.

Ibid. 265.

Ibid. 287.

Ibid. 1.

Ibid. 267.

Ibid. 270–71.

Heidegger, Hölderlin's Hymn “The Ister” 33–34.

Ibid. 21. See also my “The Naming of the Hymn: Heidegger and Hölderlin.” For an exhaustive treatment of naming in Heidegger's thought, see Dieter Thomä, Die Zeit des Selbst und die Zeit danach: Zur Kritik der Textgeschichte Martin Heideggers, 1910–1976 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990) 659–84.

Heidegger, Hölderlin's Hymn “The Ister” 13.

J. Hillis Miller, “Slipping Vaulting Crossing: Heidegger” in Topographies 216–54.

Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986) 11; Miller, “Slipping Vaulting Crossing” 223, 230–31.

Miller, “Slipping Vaulting Crossing” 235.

Ibid. 238.

Ibid. 236.

De Man, Aesthetic Ideology 133.

Heidegger, The Principle of Reason 33–49.

Miller, “Paul de Man as Allergen” in Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, eds. Barbara Cohen, Tom Cohen, J. Hillis Miller and Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001) 183–204 (198).

Miller, “De Man as Allergen” 197.

Heidegger, Hölderlin's Hymn “The Ister” 142.

Ibid. 30. In Being and Time, particularly in the introductory sections, the word “being” is placed in quotation marks and italics in order to call attention, it would seem, to the catachrestic use that is being made of it. In Heidegger's writings on poetry and language where the “is” is not italicized, framed in scare quotes, or otherwise marked, it would seem that the catachrestic character of the usage of the term “is” has become thematized to such a degree that quotation marks and italics may themselves be left off – precisely because the usage of “is” and of the word “being” are presumably everywhere what is in question.

P. Christopher Smith, The Hermeneutics of Original Argument: Demonstration, Dialectic, Rhetoric (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1998). This excellent book makes no reference to Miller or to the sorts of claims that are being proposed here, but rather discusses Heidegger's work in terms of what could be called a retrieval of original argument, based mainly on Aristotle's Rhetoric. Using Smith's analysis, one could argue that the statement “the river is the poet” is not a literalization of a trope and not a confusion of the “is” of identity with the “is” of figurative equivalence, but rather a play on a trope – not a trope of substitution such as metaphor, but a diachronic trope wherein the very unfolding of the sentence is a figure, a temporal connection of elements that performatively associates the terms that are thereby connected. This operation is already rhetorical; it is not sheerly grammatical and certainly not sheerly logical.

These considerations of the literalization of the trope for performativity and specifically of the trope of construction are indebted to Judith Butler's “How Can I Deny that These Hands and This Body Are Mine?” in Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory 253–73.

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karen s. feldman

Karen S. Feldman Department of Rhetoric University of California Berkeley, CA 94720‐2670 USA E‐mail: [email protected]