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When Silence Strikes: Derrida, Heidegger, Mallarmé

Rodrigo Therezo

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 Language 1

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

The Oxford Literary Review 40.2 (2018): 238–262

DOI: 10.3366/olr.2018.0254
© Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/olr
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Rodrigo Therezo 239

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

Part I—Bleachings
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]
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240 Oxford Literary Review

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
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Rodrigo Therezo 241

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
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242 Oxford Literary Review

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’
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Rodrigo Therezo 243

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.

Part II—Silence Strikes

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
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244 Oxford Literary Review

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,
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Rodrigo Therezo 245

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
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246 Oxford Literary Review

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
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Rodrigo Therezo 247

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,
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248 Oxford Literary Review

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, daßes beengt und einem den
Atem verschlägt) (BT, 180).11 Seen from this point of view, the essence
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Rodrigo Therezo 249

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.
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250 Oxford Literary Review

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

Part III—Shh! Heidegger’s Silent Sister (schweigende Schwester)

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
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Rodrigo Therezo 251

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
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252 Oxford Literary Review

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
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Rodrigo Therezo 253

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
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254 Oxford Literary Review

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)
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Rodrigo Therezo 255

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
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256 Oxford Literary Review

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
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Rodrigo Therezo 257

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
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258 Oxford Literary Review

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
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Rodrigo Therezo 259

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
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260 Oxford Literary Review

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
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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.
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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.