A Purely Spoken Monologue

A Purely Spoken Monologue: The Poem and Heidegger's Way to Language
Author(s): Elizabeth Caldwell

Source: The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, New Series, Vol. 23, No. 4 (2009), pp. 267-
284
Published by: Penn State University Press
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JSP
A Purely Spoken Monologue:
The Poem and Heidegger's Way to Language
Elizabeth Caldwell
UNIVERSITY OF OREGON
In rare moments, usually after spending a long time alone, I am struck,

arrested, the first time I hear someone speak. Something strange has just
transpired. It is not necessarily what was just said or how I am supposed
to reply?it is simply that something has been said, that I understood it,
that I am able to and will reply, and that all this has passed without the
bat of an eyelash. Rare moments indeed, these experiences stop me in my
tracks (or rather, in my speech), and I relish their un-ordinariness. Even
stranger are attempts to articulate such experiences, to convey to even the
most sympathetic of listeners what I have just undergone. It is this kind of
experience that leads me to the opening of Heidegger's 1959 essay "The
Way to Language":
At the outset we shall hear some words of Novalis. They stand in a

text he entitled Monologue. The title directs us to the mystery of lan
guage: language speaks solely and solitarily with itself. One sentence
in the text goes as follows: "Precisely what is peculiar to language?
that it concerns itself purely with itself alone?no one knows."
If we grasp what we shall now try to say as a sequence of asser
tions about language, it will remain a concatenation of unverified and
JOURNAL OF SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY, VOL. 23, NO. 4, 2009

Copyright ? 2010 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
268 ELIZABETH CALDWELL
scientifically unverifiable claims. If on the contrary we experience the

way to language in terms of what transpires with the way while we are
underway on it, then a kind of surmise could awaken, a surmise by
which language would henceforth strike us as exceedingly strange.
(1993? 397)
Using this passage to outline Heidegger's instigation as well as mine,

I will attempt to draw out what we might find strange about language, or
what Heidegger hopes we might undergo in experiencing the way to lan
guage as something strange. But why should this be strange, when we speak,
write, converse?use language?all the time? Precisely that we cannot pro
vide an account for it, we cannot escape its web to put a label on it from
outside its bounds. That we do not and cannot understand the peculiarity
and self-referentiality of language, making it conceptually transparent in a
way that remains faithful to what language does, is what I hear Heidegger
(and Heidegger's Novalis) telling us. Further, we understand it all the less
the more we try to think it through rational formulas, pin it down with con
cepts, or derive a definition from categorical characteristics. Each of these
will lead us further away from the essence of language, Heidegger asserts;
but we may come closer to it through finding a way that can undergo an
experience of language as we undergo the experience ourselves, leading
us more intimately into the house we live in but do not really know. How
ever, this is not to say that we will become more comfortable in this home.
Rather, it is to say that having our comforts of language unhinged?if these
comforts include a feeling of command over language?may bring us to
experience something like the speaking of language that Heidegger claims
comes prior to our own speaking.
In an attempt to get at this strangeness of language and its pecu
liarity of speaking only to itself, I will sketch out an explanation of
Heidegger's claim that language is monologue, a claim I receive as
quite strange. What does this mean, and why monologue and not dia
logue or polyphonic conversation? How does language speak to itself
alone? In addressing these questions, I will bring another of Heidegger's
claims to the table, the refrain of his 1950 essay "Language": "language
speaks."1 I will attempt to show how this claim and the discussion that
attends it shed some light on what it means to say that language is mono
logue. Specifically, if language is always speaking to itself, how do we?
speakers?come into the conversation? What, then, is our speaking?
A PURELY SPOKEN MONOLOGUE 269
Heidegger uses the language of the poem (Georg Iraki's "A Winter
Evening") as a way into language, showing how our relationship to lan
guage can be transformed by what we find there. I will try to show how
Heidegger's text arches toward a similar transformation and how, by
undergoing this transformation ourselves, we may hear his claim that
language speaks by performing a monologue and that experiencing this
phenomenon both begins and ends by highlighting the strangeness of
our relationship with language.
"Yet Language Is Monologue"
Heidegger's reading of Novalis holds that the mystery of language is that

it "speaks solely and solitarily with itself."2 We should spend a moment
with this. This says that language is not speaking to anything outside of
language?when language is spoken, it addresses only itself. This would
entail that language does not address listeners, interlocutors, or readers
but only language. This could mean that speaking aims toward language
itself insofar as these particular addressees?listeners, readers?are able to
hear it and thus take it up. Further, if this is right, human beings are not
the "originators" or "owners" of language; rather, human speech comprises
a series of connected instances in which language avails itself to us. To
unpack these claims, it will be helpful to look at Heidegger's "formula" for
a way into language.
Risking what he admits is "something strange," he states his inquiry's
guiding line: "To bring language as language to language" (1993,398; empha
sis in original).3 This is how he embarks upon his "way," tuning up his
investigation. But what does this say? Each of these instances of "language"
alludes to something different, but Heidegger stresses that the unity of
the different senses, the selfsame quality that persists throughout them,
is what binds language in its peculiarity. Each of these senses, after all,
is still language. To bring language as language to language is to bring
the phenomenon (or essence) of language, in its own character and with
out distortion or imposition, to a self-saying. Put differently, Heidegger
aims to loosen the tightly woven web of language in which, without such
attention, we might collapse these differing senses into one meaning,
failing to recognize the way that we live in this tangle, without knowing
how to unwind it. In loosening this web, drawing out how we can bring
language to itself from itself?or rather, how we can let language come to
itself of itse//?Heidegger moves along a path by which he wants to "liber
ate" language. We find here another strange claim.
Finding a way "to liberate language ... in order to present it as
language" (1993, 398) implies, first, that language is imprisoned in some
way and, second, that it holds the resources of its freedom within itself (if
Heidegger's "way" poses a real possibility for its liberation).4 To the first
concern, language's imprisonment occurs through a collection of related
patterns. For Heidegger, the lack of concern with which we most often use
language, as evidenced in the everyday banter of idle talk and the way that
we view language as a possession or tool at our disposal, is a manifestation
of an underlying presumption of what language is. Pitting himself against
what he describes as the prevailing conception of language, he summa
rizes a study by Wilhelm von Humboldt (1988) that analyzes language as a
living human phenomenon, conclusions that Heidegger finds inappropri
ately anthropological: " Humboldt 's way to language goes in the direction
of man, passing through language on its way to something else: demon
stration and depiction of the intellectual development of the human race"
(1993,405).5 This view, Heidegger (1993,402) charges, overlooks language
qua language, analyzing it as a faculty of human intellectual and spiritual
life stemming from metaphysical prejudices of the day (the treatise was
written in 1863), influencing all linguistics and philosophical inquiries
of language since. Heidegger's aim to overcome this "prejudice" is at the
center of much of his work on language. The second concern, that if so
imprisoned, language contains the resources for its freedom, points toward
two things. One, it provides a hint toward his conclusion that language
is monologue?if it is true that language always speaks to itself, then it
should contain the resources to say its piece with varying degrees of open
ness, meaning that a fuller, freer speaking ought to be possible through
language's own devices. Two, it bestows us, as listeners and speakers, with
the task of allowing language its liberation, bringing its essence to the fore
ground of our attention, thus listening more faithfully and, paradoxically,
more freely to what it says. This would constitute a transformation of our
dynamic with language; as John Sallis describes, this relationship is one
that "would shatter all pretense to objectification, ... in which language
would be so freed that it might come to be overtly what, despite man's most
insistence claims, it already is covertly" (1984, 76). Liberating language in
this way, refusing to think of it as an object of our use, may allow it to
appear simply as what it is. However, this transformation would require a

letting go, a relinquishment of control over language as something "ours,"
and a struggle to open ourselves to its mystery and power.
These claims require more elucidation. However, following Heidegger's
"way," I will attempt a procession into this tangle and try to find my way out
by showing how language might be monologue. This is a strange venture,
so in order to do this, I will draw some help from the essay "Language,"
where Heidegger exhibits one way to hear the speaking of this monologue:
the language of the poem.
"Language Speaks"
The claim that "language speaks" becomes something of a hook within

"Language," appearing more than a dozen times before the essay's close.
This statement arrives out of Heidegger's determination, similar in "The
Way to Language," to reflect on language as language, refusing to take
an outside route or to ground language in something other than itself.
Heidegger writes, "We do not want to get anywhere. We would like only,
for once, to get to just where we are already" (1971, 190).6 Getting where
we are already, however, would not mean stagnating or refusing to budge.
It would be to undergo something that will show us the contours of where
we are, a place we tend to ignore. As Sallis claims that freeing language
will simply let it be what it is, such a change might let us live more fully
with it, more attentive to the relations that structure our belonging to it.
Heidegger explains, "To reflect on language thus demands that we enter
into the speaking of language in order to take up our stay with language, i.e.,
within its speaking, not within our own. Only in that way do we arrive at the
region within which it may happen?or also fail to happen?that language
will call to us from there and grant us its nature. We leave the speaking to
language" (190-91; first emphasis added, second emphasis in original). To
reflect on language, we must enter into its speaking, so that we may take up
our stay with it. "To take up our stay with language" says several things:7 it
introduces the stakes of this reflection, as to my ears "taking up" carries the
sense of an existential encounter and response to a situation. Through tak
ing up our stay with language we recognize our freedom, abiding a situa
tion as one into which we are thrown, with our conduct in this stay a matter
of receptivity and choice. This line includes that we stay with language, with
a ring of residence and habitation, as we might stay in a cottage or with a

friend?emphasizing the structure of belonging and the persevering bond
of this belonging. To take up our stay with language, then, means to decide
how we will shape our relationship with it, accepting this as a responsibility
and acknowledging that our decision may be formative for other relations
in our lives as well. To do so, we must "leave the speaking to language,"
emphasizing our facility in listening.8
But what does it mean to enter into its speaking? How do we find such
an entry and leave the speaking to language? Much of Heidegger's analysis,
like his deconstruction of metaphysics, works toward an articulation of what
passes unsaid in traditional interpretations, highlighting the ways in which
the conceptions hitherto explored have tended to leave out critical insights
that would speak to the enabling of such conceptual constructions in the first
place?in a sense, Heidegger is seeking transcendental conditions for the
operation of these phenomena in our experience. In performing his inves
tigations, he pushes the limits of what conventional or inherited language
is able to articulate, informing his idiosyncratic terminology and style. As
such, what he seeks in finding an entry into language's speaking is a way to
hear language speaking on its own terms. In other words, he seeks a man
ner of exploration in which our patterns of speech and methods of analysis
will not obstruct the phenomenon of language itself. Such a way would per
mit us to experience our being through its relation to language, encountering
this relation as an enablement granted to us by language. To find this entry,
Heidegger asserts, we must look for instances in which language is spoken
purely, in which the saying of language?language's speaking to us?is pre
served: "The speaking does not cease in what is spoken. Speaking is kept safe
in what is spoken. In what is spoken, speaking gathers the ways in which it
persists as well as that which persists by it?its persistence, its presencing.
But most often, and too often, we encounter what is spoken only as the resi
due of a speaking long past" (194). I take this preservation, keeping safe, to
signal the way in which what is spoken can manifest an abundance of mean
ing in a concise form, how what is spoken occurs as a culmination of the per
sisting and gathering forces that enable what is spoken to say more than what
is said. This preservation occurs when such a safe-keeping saying presents
the relation of how the ability to speak comes to pass through this particular
word or set of words. In preserving this relation, revealing the "process" of
how something came to be said, something of its mystery emanates through
what is spoken, suffiising these words with the presence of this persisting.
This event is Ereignis, the happening of language's coming into its own as
it is gathered into saying, manifesting in the instance of speech. As Sallis's
(1984, 81-82) reading of Ereignis points out, the etymological connection
between Ereignis and Eignen, owning, highlights the way Heidegger sees the
gathering force and the uniqueness of the event of language, culminating in
the "product" of speech. This relation persists with all speaking but is passed
over in the majority of discourse, leading to inattentiveness and eventual
ignorance of how this relation works its way toward speech. Thus, usually,
"we encounter what is spoken only as the residue of a speaking long past."9
We thereby fail to hear the strangeness of how language speaks.
To enter into the speaking of language, then, looking for examples in
which this relation is preserved, Heidegger leads us to the poem: "What is
spoken purely is that in which the completion of the speaking that is proper
to what is spoken is, in its turn, an original. What is spoken purely is the
poem" (194).10 Again, this requires some unpacking. To speak purely, as
I read it, means to relay in one's speaking something of the inspiration
of speaking in the first place. This is not to say that what is purely spoken
articulates accurately what one intended to say but, rather, that something
is spoken purely when it reflects, in some measure, the bond between what
it says and what it is responding to?the saying of language. In this way,
our relation with language as a particular, historically situated speech con
nects us with the phenomenon of language proper. The purely spoken thus
shows the trace of its gathering in its presentation.
Several commentators further illuminate what the purely spoken sig
nals in Heidegger's work. Highlighting how such speaking brings about an
awareness of this trace, Karsten Harries describes Heidegger's reason for
turning to poetry:
The language of poetry has its place in-between idle talk and silence.
It is a recovery of silence in the midst of idle talk. As this recovery,
poetry presupposes more familiar language. Thus we may seem to
know what the words of the poet mean, yet familiar words no longer
function as they usually do; we know and don't know what is being
said. In poetry, language reveals its essential ambiguity. The poem
places what it names before a background of silence, yet not to hide
that background, as would idle talk, but to return us to it. Thus its
life resides in the tension between what has been said and what has
remained unspoken. (1976, 504)
Because poetry dislocates words from the context in which we generally

hear them?against a backdrop of idle talk, which not only leaves the resi
due of these words attached to them but continues to heap it on?we no lon
ger hear them in the same way. The silence from which they emerge lights
up as well, and we hear much more than the words themselves. We hear
what is not said as the partner of what is spoken, as the tension between
these forces carries out the poem's "life."
I also wish to highlight V?ronique F?ti's conception of the purely spo
ken as "a present speaking that has fully come into its own in exercising its
'essencing and whiling'" (1992,25), bringing attention to her use of "exercis
ing" in this context. I hear this to mean that the purely spoken actively shows
its own essence or character, the manner of its coming about through this
character and the continuing demonstration of it, showing its being as the
maintaining of its presence. The purely spoken, "exercising" its presence in
this way, is not a mere repetition of language's saying or showing, nor is it
trying to parrot what the speaking of language intimates. The purely spoken
manifests a responding acknowledgment, an articulation that takes up the
limit of what a human address can say, engaging it in the most felicitous
manner possible. Following Paul de Man's claim that Heidegger's read
ing of H?lderlin wrestles with the poet's experience of trying to "say Being
itself," not only comment on Being (1983, 256), if the poet is successful in
this regard, this poetry would present what is said along with its uniqueness
of speaking, and the result would be a speaking that exhibits?exercises
its process in its product. In this way, when something of the address?of
Being?is crystallized in the reply?the poem?or when the saying of lan
guage is presented thematically along with what is said, the speaking is pure.
Moreover, Heidegger claims that the completion of the purely spoken is
an "original." One might think of originality in terms of something entirely
new, the innovative result of a creative project, or an attempt to produce
something as yet unseen. I think Heidegger is going for something slightly
different: I hear originality here to say that because language is worldly
and historical, originals come about when the bond between language's
speaking and human voice comes to presence in the uniqueness of its his
toricity. The purely spoken appears when "the completion of the speaking
that is proper to what is spoken is, in its turnt an original." Underscor
ing the turn taken by what is spoken brings the persistence of language's
speaking to the concrete particulars of human speech, marking originals
as those works that articulate language's saying in the turns (of phrase) of
a singular language and epoch. In short, an original arrives when what is

purely spoken appears in the historical language of mortal speech, which,
for Heidegger, occurs most saliently in poetry.
Heidegger then turns to a poem by Georg Trakl, which guides (or
serves) the remainder of the essay's content:11
"A Winter Evening"
Window with falling snow is arrayed,

Long tolls the vesper bell,
The house is provided well,
The table is for many laid.
Wandering ones, more than a few,

Come to the door on darksome courses.
Golden blooms the tree of graces
Drawing up the earth's cool dew.
Wanderer quietly steps within;

Pain has turned the threshold to stone.
There lie, in limpid brightness shown,
Upon the table bread and wine. (194-95)
Eschewing extensive formal analysis and honing in on how the poem's

language frames its own possibilities for thought, Heidegger seeks a way to
describe his assertion that language speaks, employing the relation between
the language of the poem and the thinking that it?or Heidegger's reading
of it?leads us upon. He stresses: "Language speaks. We are now seek
ing the speaking of language in the poem. Accordingly, what we seek lies
in the poetry of the spoken word" (197).12 When Heidegger says "the poetry
of the spoken word," this refers less to the poetic elegance of what the poem
articulates and more to the way in which the spoken word manifests poci
sis, a making or crafting that the poem demonstrates. As F?ti (1992, 13)
notes, when poeisis refers to language, it refers to a poetic articulation that
moves against the force of technicity and thus contrasts with the control
and command that such (typical) modes of being are characterized by. This
is one way in which the language of the poem presents a manifestation of
language that not only has the potential to reflect a bond between human
action and language proper but holds a central place in slowing down the
pursuit of technology that Heidegger sees contributing to our patterns of
neglect. Further, the poetry of the spoken word explicitly calls attention to
the way in which language occurs and appears, the sense it brings with it,
rather than the formal elements the poem employs or even its thematic
content, as John Lysaker (2002,19) claims. As such, recognizing its com
ing to be as the poem it is, the presence it is, is more significant for really
hearing a poem than analyzing its meter, rhyme, or "topic."13 In this way,
the poetry of the spoken word recalls us to the happening of language itself.
Coming back to Heidegger's reading of the poem in "Language," he
emphasizes, "Language speaks. This means at the same time and before
all else: language speaks" (198; emphases in original).14 This reminds us
of what Heidegger wants us to hear: not our speaking or even the poem's,
but the way in which language shows and tells of itself, bringing us back to
the question of monologue. Sketching out the moves Heidegger makes to
show how the language of the poem speaks, I will present a brief summary
of the essay's main turns before returning to this question.
The language of the poem speaks. How does it speak? It names. What
does it name? The winter evening. How does it name? It calls, it "brings
the presence of what was previously uncalled into a nearness" (198), calling
into the absence in which what is called remains.15 This calling bids things
"to come into such an arrival," inviting things to come into their presence,
"so that they may bear upon men as things" (199).16 Heidegger reads the
first stanza of the poem?the snow, the bell's tolling, the house and set
table?as calling things to presence. These things, though not physically
present, are now in our sphere of attention, thus presencing before us.
This inviting also bids the fourfold, the name for a "structure" of the world
that Heidegger takes from H?lderlin, composed of earth, sky, mortals, and
divinities. Amid the fourfold, the things "unfold world" (199), through
which the things and their relations to one another come to presence as
unified.17 Heidegger reads the poem's second stanza?the wandering ones
approaching the house, the golden blooming of the tree, drawing up the
earth's dew?as calling world to presence, situating the things within it. The
presencing of things and the presencing of world happen together, through
one another, but not as the same phenomenon?as things come to pres
ence in the first stanza and the world in the second, we hear a change not
only in what is described but also in how it is presented.
There is a rift here, a mediating element between things and world

that Heidegger names the "difference."18 The dif-ference holds world and
things together, marking the separating moment between them; because
of the dif-ference, world never collapses into a mere collection of things,
and things never comprise a unity of world on their own. The dif-ference
holds them apart, and this holding apart, standing between, ensures their
togetherness. The poem's third stanza?the wanderer entering the house,
crossing the threshold (turned to stone, resounding with pain), encounter
ing the bread and wine, which are gently illuminated on the table?marks
the dif-ference, the simultaneous yet distinct coming to presence of the
elements of the poem's scene. The threshold, made stonily solid by pain,
points to this dif-ference, which, to recall Harries's language, we may hear
as the tension between the iterability of things said and the unspoken back
ground of silence. This tension unifies things and world, as it unites the
spoken and the silent, maintaining the import of each while highlighting
their partnership.
But what does all this have to do with language speaking or language
as monologue? I outline these moves to lead us to a key moment on
Heidegger's path: "The primal calling, which bids the intimacy of world
and thing to come, is the authentic bidding. This bidding is the nature of
speaking. Speaking occurs in what is spoken in the poem. It is the speak
ing of language. Language speaks. It speaks by bidding the bidden, thing
world and world-thing, to come to the between of the dif-ference" (206).
"The authentic bidding," the speaking of language, invites things and
world to come into presence, appearing out of concealment.19 This bidding,
Heidegger claims, is the nature of speaking?when language speaks, it
performs this calling. When this speaking is pure, what is spoken contains
a trace of the bidding, and something of the call shines through in what is
said. Language speaks through the language of the poem by bringing the
individual things called?the snow, tolling of the bell, house, table, wan
derer, threshold, bread and wine?into their own, making their presence
as things come to the fore. They relate to one another through settling into
a world, bringing out their stillness in it. Language speaks in the poem by
bringing each of these into our company, "creating" this winter evening
before us, so that we too can enter the house as wanderers, hear the toll
ing of the bell, encounter pain in the threshold, and find promise in the
brightness of bread and wine. In hearing the poem?as Heidegger reads
it?these words, along with our relation to them, light up as strange. We

hear each word carrying a world, each break between words showing a
threshold, a rift between said and unsaid.
Even stranger, Heidegger goes on to claim, "Language speaks as the
peal of stillness" (207; emphasis in original).20 Playing on the bell's toll
ing, with its long, resounding peal, this stillness is the happening of world
and things in the dif-ference, in their coming together, remaining apart,
persisting with and belonging to each other. But it is not enough that lan
guage peals in this fashion?the speaking, and hence, listening, of mortals
is required for the pealing of language to come to voice as a speaking, as
a poem. Heidegger explains: "The very nature, the presencing, of language
needs and uses the speaking of mortals in order to sound as the peal of
stillness for the hearing of mortals. Only as men belong within the peal
of stillness are mortals able to speak in their own way in sounds" (208;
emphases in original).21 Thus, Heidegger says that language needs us to
give the peal such resonance, so that it can come to presence as its own,
as something spofon. It is only insofar as we belong already to the nature
of language that we are able to speak, in their/our own way, through sound
and voice. Speaking in their own way I hear alongside speaking in turn?
speaking in our own way as mortals involves speaking in the turn of our
time, place, and heritage, paired with our own ways as individual speakers.
It is because, for Heidegger, we belong to language, yet are only able to
speak in our own way, that we speak thus as echoes or reiterations, partici
pants in language's monologue.
Monologue, Reiterated: "Mortals Speak Insofar as They listen"
As Heidegger makes claims about language's monological character as

bookends for "The Way to Language," I return to this issue with remarks
toward the essay's end:
Yet language is monologue. This now says something twofold: it is

language alone that properly speaks; and it speaks in solitude. Yet only
one who is not alone can be solitary; not alone, that is to say, not
in separation and isolation, not devoid of all kinship. On the con
trary, precisely in the solitary [Im Einsamen] there unfolds essentially
the lack of what is in common [der Fehl des Gemeinsamen], as the
most binding relation to what is in common_Einsam suggests the

selfsame; in the unifying of things that belong to one another. The
saying that shows opens the way for language to the speech of human
beings. The saying needs to resound in the word. Yet man can speak
only by listening to the saying, belonging to it; only by means of reit
eration is he able to say a word. Such needing and reiterating rest on
that lack mentioned above, which is neither a mere shortcoming nor
anything negative at all. (1993, 423; emphases in original)
There is much in this passage worth unpacking, but I will limit myself
to a few main claims. Connected with the claim that language speaks,
I hope to make some sense of Heidegger's strange declaration that lan
guage is monologue.
First, language alone speaks.22 This contains the assertion we have
already seen that when humans speak, it is a response to language's call,
not to the expressed thoughts of a subject. The strangeness of this claim is
mitigated when we pose another question: Who or what else would speak?
An expected answer: human beings. However, as Heidegger outlines in
both essays discussed here, he finds the view of language based around
the human insufficient, passing over the peculiarity of our relation to lan
guage. One might also pose the question: Why monologue and not dia
logue? The main reason Heidegger would move away from the latter is
that it would put the essence of language in the human being; even if not
as a possession or faculty of humans, it would remove language from its
character as a condition to which we belong, putting it rather as part of the
movement of human intellectual life, as von Humboldt does. This is not to
say that mortal response to language qua language could not be described
as a dialogical engagement, but such an engagement would have us speak
ing back to language, and thus Heidegger's claim that language speaks to
itself comes full circle.
Second, language speaks in solitude.23 This does not mean that lan
guage speaks in a void but, rather, that its solitude occurs by virtue of its
relationality. Because in solitude the lack of what is "in common" unfolds
"as the most binding relation to what is in common," it is because language
alone speaks that what it shares (with mortals, as able listeners) forms a fun
damental (one could say, necessary) relation.24 In other words, it is because
language shares a unifying element with us that it is solitary?like the toll
ing of the bell, it resounds without an affirmation that it will be heard, but
it tolls nonetheless, inviting those who share its bond to hear it. Language
speaks to mortals in solitude because it does not face an interlocutor, await
ing an answer, but speaks without anticipation, without the guarantee of a
reply. However, insofar as language persists in its sounding, the solitude of
language needs mortals to give it voice, so that mortals may also continue
to hear its peal.
Because the saying of language enables the possibility for human
speech and language's saying needs to resound in the word, human speech
acts as reiteration. But what does this reiteration iterate? Is this to say that
my speaking, say, writing this essay, represents a repetition of something
already said, of a monologue given long ago? Yes and no. It is to say that
I draw on language as manifested around me historically?the language
of my country and society, words with which I am familiar and which I
believe have some currency, Heidegger's words and statements, Iraki's
words, and so on?so what I say is not new and involves repetition, reit
erations of terms and phrases used before. The way in which my saying is
(hopefully) not a mere repetition, but still a reiteration of language's speak
ing, is that I cannot escape that when I try to speak, I must search beyond
myself, attending to a sensibility that works within but also?and more
significantly?outside my being. If I respond to a claim from Heidegger,
for example, I attend not only to the words he writes but also to the sense
that is given along with them?what I find them to articulate and how they
connect with or depart from other things said, meshing with the totality
of my experience in the world. Thus, our words are never spoken from
nowhere, unattached to a whole?even if poetic utterances explicitly high
light the silent background from which they stand out. As Lysaker's read
ing of Heidegger emphasizes seeking the Ori of a poet's corpus, the site
or "place" from which and around which poems are "organized," this site
can be understood as exhibiting how a poetizing comes to manifest in
a poem or a group of poems, while also locating the poems themselves
within it.25 Similarly, if such an Ort can locate and circumscribe the nature
of our speaking as a whole, the site from which and within which we speak
(which we also sometimes speak "about"), then such a place or home may
prove helpful in understanding language as monological. If our speak
ing comes to pass "in our own way," then that which both compels and
draws the boundaries of this "way" may provide a unifying sense by which
particular modes of speaking glean their coherence. Though using differ
ent language, Harries parallels how the unity of such an unspoken saying
pertains to the unity of one's being in the world: "Man's being, pursued as
a task, is the one unspoken meaning which gathers what would otherwise
be a collection of fragments into one life" (1976, 501). As such, for each of
these phenomena?language, poetry, living?it appears that a softly speak
ing unity draws together the variations that shoot through each one. Like
wise, to say that language is monologue is to attest that such a singularity
of speaking gives sense to all the speaking that we do, though none of our
speaking can definitively say this sense as such.
Heidegger writes, "We not only speak language, we speak from out of
it. We are capable of doing so only because in each case we have already
listened to language. What do we hear there? We hear language speaking"
(1993, 411; emphasis in original).36 In the language of our everyday lives,
we respond to language as we hear it spoken to us. In the language of the
poem, we hear language struggling with itself to present something, a pres
ence that sustains the tension of language's sense coming to crystallize in
the word. In Heidegger's reading of the language of the poem, we hear
the thinker struggling to articulate something that our way of speaking can
not properly say. This struggle, however, points to both the bonds and the
boundaries of our relationship with language. With a willingness to release
ourselves to language and enter into its speaking, we may find something
that strikes us as strange, that gently demands our attention. By experienc
ing what it may be saying, though unable to repeat it, we may encounter
the boundary of our way of speaking. Doing so, we may be able to chal
lenge it or at least challenge our comportment toward it as boundary, per
haps thus liberating language from the prison in which we tend to keep it.
Heidegger writes, "Mortals speak insofar as they listen" (209), which I hear
as a request, asking that we strive to listen well.27
Heeding this request, taking seriously the fact that we never speak
beyond our listening, has import beyond our relationship to language
alone. Granting that our relationship to language is a formative one for
other engagements?that the way we live "in" language impacts the ways
we live in other interactions and with other phenomena?the listening well
that I suggest here, following Heidegger, alludes to the ways that engage
ment involves attention, response, and care. We do not speak, act, or live in
a vacuum, and the manners in which we accustom ourselves to listening in
one regard tend to bleed into others. This means that the comportments we
might adopt with regard to language?recognizing, say, that we speak only
to the extent that we listen?would signal that we only act with purpose to
the extent that we observe, we only touch others to the extent that we allow
ourselves to be touched, and we live in the best possible faith insofar as we
acknowledge our limitations, our conditionings, and our belongingness to
structures beyond our scope. I find Heidegger's articulations of language
in these essays?its monological character, its solitude and stillness and
strangeness?as appeals to the kind of ethically responsive comportments
we can adopt, comportments that would give testimony to the many ways
in which language, as an element of our world, carries us in quiet ways, all
the time, playing a large part in making up our world, though often without
our notice. Thus what I glean from Heidegger's "request" is that this lack
of noticing is a detriment to our living authentically. Put plainly, losing our
ability to listen, we lose our ability to speak; losing our ability to hear the
strangeness of language, we lose our ability to innovate within it, appreci
ate it, realize its import in our world. Listening well and attending to those
"things" that carry us and appeal to us, and without which we could not be,
are requests I hear stemming from Heidegger's descriptions, and these
requests are why I find myself striving to hear his words well.
NOTES
. This line, "Die Sprache Spricht" appears many times throughout the
essay, with emphasis the first time it appears. While this stress is not retained
throughout, there is a passage that I will discuss later that highlights alternately
that "language speaks" ("Die Sprache spricht") and that "language speaks" ("Die
Sprache spricht" [Heidegger 1971,198,1985,10,17]).
2. "Sie spricht einzig und einsam mit sich selber" (Heidegger 1985, 229).
3. "Die Sprache als die Sprache zur Sprache bringen" (Heidegger 1985, 230).
4. "Die Sprache frei[zu]stellen um sie als Sprache vorzustellen" (Heidegger
1985, 230).
5. "Humboldts Weg zur Sprache nimmt die Richtung auf den Menschen, fuhrt
durch die Sprache hindurch auf anderes: das Ergr?nden und Darstellen der geisti
gen Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechtes" (Heidegger 1985, 238).
6. "Wir m?chten nur erst einmal eigens dorthin gelangen, wo wir uns schon
aufhalten" (Heidegger 1985,10). Hereafter quotes from Heidegger's "Language"
(1971) are cited by page number parenthetically in the text.
7. "Bei der Sprache ... den Aufenthalt zu nehmen" (Heidegger 1985,10).
8. "Der Sprache ?berlassen... das Sprechen" (Heidegger 1985,10).
9. "Begegnet uns das Gesprochene nur als das Vergangene eines Sprechens"
(Heidegger 1985,14).
10. "Rein Gesprochenes ist jenes, worin die Vollendung des Sprechens, die dem
Gesprochenen eignet, ihrerseits eine anfangende ist. Rein Gesprochenes ist das
Gedicht" (Heidegger 1985,14).
11. Heidegger notes that a poem's author remains insignificant, because poetry's
mastery consists in that it "can deny the poet's person and name." I understand
this to mean that a poem that speaks purely trumps the identity of the poet
because what one hears in the poem is the calling of language itself, not the
intentions of an author or subject.
12. "Die Sprache spricht. Wir suchen jetzt das Sprechen der Sprache im Gedicht.
Demnach liegt das Gesuchte im Dichtersichen des Gesprochenen" (Heidegger
1985,16).
13. There is, indeed, the possibility of a split between what the poem inspires us
to think and what the poem through Heidegger's eyes inspires us to think. This
difference and its attendant problems are a topic of debate among scholars. F?ti's
(1992) reading of Heidegger's essays concerning Trakl emphasizes the severity of
Heidegger's misappropriation of the poet's work. She claims that his practice of
reading so closely into select poems, stanzas, and individual words often comes
at the expense of the overall tone and meaning of the poems and the collections
from which they are drawn. Paul de Man also takes up this issue, though
arguing a different position. He claims that Heidegger's H?lderlin says the
exact opposite of what H?lderlin himself says, but de Man explains Heidegger's
poetics as one that "permits, even requires, arbitrariness" (1983, 250; for his
claim that Heidegger reverses H?lderlin's words, see 254-55). ^s arbitrariness,
dismissing conventional text analysis and decontextualizing poems, arises because
for Heidegger, "preserving" a work does not entail analyzing away its intent
or structure; rather, he "compares [it] to a bell; the commentator causes it to
resound" (de Man 1983, 253). This resounding need not take a work as carrying a
particular message that is not to be thwarted or revised; rather, it is to take a work
at its word. John Lysaker, agreeing that F?ti is right to point out the "violence"
that Heidegger's readings impart onto poems, highlights that Heidegger's task
includes seeking out the site or Ort of poetic gathering that enables and attunes
one's poetizing and which speaks (covertly) through each poem's emergence. As
such, gleaning this Ort requires a degree of interpretation (Lysaker 2002,13, 26).
14. "Die Sprache spricht. Dies hei?t zugleich und zuvor: Die Sprache spricht"
15. "Bringt er das Anwesen des vordem Ungerufenen in eine N?he" (Heidegger
1985,18).
16. "In solche Ankunft... kommen," "da? sie als Dinge die Menschen angehen"
17. "Ent-falten ... Welt" (Heidegger 1985,19).
18. "Der Unter-Schied" (Heidegger 1985, 25).
19. "Das eigentliche Hei?en" (Heidegger 1985, 26).
20. "Die Sprache spricht als das Gel?ut der Stille" (Heidegger 1985, 27).
21. "Das Wesen der Sprache, das Gel?ut der Stille, das Sprechen der Sterblichen
braucht, um als Gel?ut der Stille fur das H?ren der Sterblichen zu verlauten. Nur
insofern die Menschen in das Gel?ut der Stille geh?ren, verm?gen die Sterblichen
auf ihre Weise das verlautende Sprechen" (Heidegger 1985, 28).
22. "Die Sprache allein... spricht" (Heidegger 1985, 254).
23. "[Die Sprache] spricht einsam" (Heidegger 1985, 254).
24. "Des Gemeinsamen... als der bindendste Bezug zu diesem" (Heidegger
1985, 254).
25. Lysaker also uses the term ur-poem, "a poem of poetry that discloses its own
Ort" (2002, 32). While it is not a term Heidegger uses, the unwritten disclosure of
an ur-poem would be a poem or statement that locates the overall sense of a poet's
corpus.
26. "Wir sprechen nicht nur die Sprache, wir sprechen aus ihr. Dies verm?gen
wir einzig dadurch, da? wir je schon auf die Sprache geh?rt haben. Was h?ren
wir da? Wir h?ren das Sprechen der Sprache" (Heidegger 1985, 243).
27. "Die Sterblichen sprechen, insofern sie h?ren" (Heidegger 1985, 29).
WORKS CITED
de Man, Paul. 1983. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary
Criticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
F?ti, V?ronique. 1992. Heidegger and the Poets. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.:
Humanities Press.
Harries, Karsten. 1976. "Language and Silence: Heidegger's Dialogue with Georg
Trakl." Theme issue, "Martin Heidegger and Literature," boundary 24,
no. 2: 494-511.
Heidegger, Martin. 1971. "Language" (1950). In Poetry, Language, Thought, trans.
Albert Hofstadter, 187-210. New York: Harper and Row, Publishers.
-. 1985. Gesamtausgabe I. Abteilung: Ver?ffentliche Schriften ?gio-igjG,
Band 12: Unterwegs zur Sprache. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio
Klostermann.
-. 1993. "The Way to Language" (1959). In Basic Writings: Revised and
Expanded Edition, ed. David Farrell Krell, 393-426. New York:
HarperCollins Publishers.
Lysaker, John T. 2002. You Must Change Your Life: Poetry, Philosophy, and the Birth
of Sense. University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Sallis, John. 1984. "Towards the Showing of Language." In Thinking About Being:
Aspects of Heidegger's Thought, ed. Robert W. Shahan and J. N. Mohanty,
75-83. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
von Humboldt, Wilhelm. 1988. On Language: The Diversity of Human Language
Structure and Its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind. Trans.
Peter Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

A Purely Spoken Monologue

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A Purely Spoken Monologue

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A Purely Spoken Monologue: The Poem and Heidegger's Way to Language

Author(s): Elizabeth Caldwell

In rare moments, usually after spending a long time alone, I am struck,

At the outset we shall hear some words of Novalis. They stand in a

JOURNAL OF SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY, VOL. 23, NO. 4, 2009

scientifically unverifiable claims. If on the contrary we experience the

Using this passage to outline Heidegger's instigation as well as mine,

"Yet Language Is Monologue"

Heidegger's reading of Novalis holds that the mystery of language is that

appear simply as what it is. However, this transformation would require a

The claim that "language speaks" becomes something of a hook within

a ring of residence and habitation, as we might stay in a cottage or with a

Because poetry dislocates words from the context in which we generally

a singular language and epoch. In short, an original arrives when what is

"A Winter Evening"

Window with falling snow is arrayed,

Wandering ones, more than a few,

Wanderer quietly steps within;

Eschewing extensive formal analysis and honing in on how the poem's

There is a rift here, a mediating element between things and world

it?these words, along with our relation to them, light up as strange. We

Monologue, Reiterated: "Mortals Speak Insofar as They listen"

As Heidegger makes claims about language's monological character as

Yet language is monologue. This now says something twofold: it is

most binding relation to what is in common_Einsam suggests the

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