c l i c k h e r e to a c c e s s t h e e n t i r e “neuroscience and fiction” issue

Review

Ziarek, Krzysztof. Language After Heidegger. Bloomington: Indiana Uni-

versity Press, 2013. 264pp.

Poetic Disinterest: Power, Movement, and Language After Heidegger

Krzysztof Ziarek’s study of Martin Heidegger calls attention to the
German philosopher’s writing and to the movement and momentum of his
poetic practice. Ziarek frames Heidegger’s thinking-writing as a practice
focused on what is revealed in the turning of words, on what appears in
the synergy between words as signs and words in their singular relation-
ship to the world. In this translation and interpretation of volumes 71
and 74 of Heidegger’s Collected Works (Gesamtausgabe, GA 71 and GA 74),
Ziarek “underscores the idiomatic character of Heidegger’s approach”
(xi). Ziarek’s discussion of these works, which were written in the 1930s
and 1940s, builds a useful bridge between Heidegger’s philosophy on
language and the performance of language itself. This distinction, which
Ziarek illustrates by way of contemporary poetry, permits readers to
consider the “inventive ‘language’ in thinking” (63) across the arts as the
material atmosphere that has mitigated the effects of our engagements
with power in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
This edition is an essential contribution to the growing array of
discourses on what has come to be known as Conceptual Poetry,1 a form
of writing that raises essential questions about innovations in the poetic
genre that are related to genealogies of power. By engaging the rigorous
body of scholarship on Heidegger’s views of how language “works,”
Ziarek treats language as a way of thinking that produces words that are,
literally, “power-free.” Ziarek’s comments on innovative poetry, which
he defines as cartographic narratives of words-in-their-situationality, are
therefore timely, providing a jargon-free contextualization of works by
Myung Mi Kim (Dura [2008] and River Antes [2006]) and Susan Howe (The
Europe of Trusts [1990] and Souls of the Labadie Tract [2007]). Ziarek’s reading
of these works will be appealing to Heidegger scholars, since they seem
to have significance that extends beyond the specificity of place. Readers
might recall Heidegger’s obsession with poetry, which impelled his own
forays into poetic writing, as evidenced in his introduction to Mindfulness
(Besinnug). Ziarek’s discussion of Kim and Howe engages Heidegger’s
notion of inflected idiom and calls attention to its productive capacities.
His study offers an exciting, original and philosophically-grounded way
of thinking of form, language, and the aesthetic entanglements of reading

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In the first half of Language After Heidegger, Ziarek builds on his un-
derstanding of idiomatic shifts and performative utterances that define
ways of configuring the spatiotemporal or the situational disposition
between Being (Sein) and Beyng (Seyn). In the book’s second half, Ziarek
offers his own analyses of the potential of language as it is revealed in
poetic practice. He draws poetry closer to philosophy via readings of
Heidegger’s own poetic language, which, Ziarek shows, hints at the
ways in which conceptual poetry refuses to “say” outright what has been
transformed in the world. His discussion emphasizes the importance
of Heidegger’s call for transformative thinking, which the philosopher
implicitly issues, for example, when he turns a word by supplementing
prefixes and by creating neologisms. Ziarek shows his readers that in their
use of language, they are charged with an address that must be thought,
and that cannot be considered in an adjacency to discourse or embodied
in our existing forms of identification.
In spite of his study’s challenging content, Ziarek explains Hei-
degger’s method in clear and accessible terms that open the philosopher’s
thought to a wide readership. In chapter one, entitled “Event | Language,”
Ziarek traces the linguistic “turn” Heidegger made following Contribu-
tions to Philosophy, pointing out the significance of the work’s last chapter,
“Language (Its Origin).” In it, Heidegger described his own unique way
of “asking the question of being” (14). This “asking” is performed in the
philosopher’s innovative way of saying which, Ziarek explains, often took
the form “of hyphenated words and word series or constellations, […]
etymological connections or the networks of prefixes and the new reso-
nances they lend to established words and concepts” (15). Ziarek shows
how Heidegger viewed language as a hospitable and ceaseless ground
from which shifts emerge that produced meaning “without transforming
our relation to language, […] our experience of what language is and how
it guides deliberation, thinking” (15). This “emergent meaning” explains
how the “idiomatic” works as a turn in thought where and when thinking
is carried out as language. One of Ziarek’s important contributions is his
demonstration of Heidegger’s turn away from the notion of zoon logon
echon, “the concept of the human as an animal endowed with language”
(15). This move challenges how Heidegger’s thought is now used in
the Arts and Humanities, shifting attention away from “metaphysical
discourses about language––its conceptions or theories” and “mak[ing]
room for an experience with and a thinking through language” (15, my
emphasis).
In his first two chapters, Ziarek focuses on different ways of concep-
tualizing the experience of what I would call “room” or “rooming.” Here,
Ziarek reveals his attentiveness to the way language is spatiotemporally

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linked to the world. Like Heidegger, Ziarek, himself a published poet in

his native Poland, embraces the idiomatic. One might argue that poetry
works idiomatically by not appropriating paradigms that establish the
kinds of relations that are preoccupied with dominance. Poetic language
appropriates the world in the word. As such, it is not reliant on the room
for thinking relationality in such predetermined forms.
Ziarek’s approach has implications for contemporary ways of think-
ing the “world” itself, which include ecopoetical and biopolitical framings
of the human relationship to the world’s identity and processes. Language
After Heidegger effectively imagines the way language draws a strikingly
recognizable portrait of how the world today has been “humanized,” that
is, how it has become economically disposed, securitized, or turned into
an object of utility to humans. Ziarek explains how Heidegger’s writing
unsettles the “disposal” of spatiotemporality via frames of the “human”
when, for instance, he speaks of “dishumanization,” a form of thinking
represented in the word Entmenschun. Ziarek analyzes Heidegger’s use
of the prefix ent- as it is “employed…in its positive sense of liberating and
releasing from the ossified construal of the ‘human,’ as it is juxtaposed
with the negative resonance of ver- in Vermenschung, which indicates a
false turn in understanding the human and the expanding detrimental
effects of such anthropomorphization” (17).
Anthropomorphization engenders a hierarchical understanding of
the world, a paradigm in which language serves as a tool of dominance,
especially when morphing processes (the Greek morphe signifies “form”)
become complicit in the exercise of power. Ziarek demonstrates how the
human qualities of language reveal themselves positively in the “dishu-
manizing” forming of Heidegger’s thought.
Ziarek’s study contributes to the body of scholarship that emerged
between 1990 and 2010 following the publications of Heidegger’s Collected
Writing (Gesamtausgabe). This corpus includes Dennis Schmidt’s Between
Word and Image: Heidegger, Klee, and Gadamer on Gesture and Genesis (2013),
an attentive analysis of the experience of “appearance” as it is understood
in aesthetics. Schmidt also considers the ways in which words form think-
ing about being as belonging within the “enigmatic.” Rather than referring
to that which cannot be articulated in words, the enigmatic suggests a
way of understanding Ziarek’s focus on idiom as poetic or situated words
and his view of idiomatic saying as a performance of Heidegger’s ein-. In
Ziarek’s reading, the prefix “enacts the one-fold as each time an in-fold,
which renders the conversation, or the dia-logue, as a mono-logue” (57).
In examining the “solitude” of language, Einsamkeit “draws together the
various valances of ein…bringing uniqueness in its temporal sense of one-

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time occurrence together with the infold (Einfalt) as the key signposts of
language (57). The movement that turns solitude into uniqueness shows
a momentum towards an appearance. Yet, as Ziarek shows, “uniqueness”
indicates how the event “in its coming to word” is “neither one nor two,
neither simply identical to itself nor differing form itself,” thus dispelling
the repetition and difference of event in late twentieth-century thought
(57). Isolating, so as to “dispose” (arrange), ein- this way, Ziarek reveals
“a novel ‘logic’ of language and thinking” that is not dialogical or mono-
logical, nor “anthropo-morphizing,” but rather gespräch (conversation)
“as Einfalt,” or “in-fold” (58).
What is “dishumanizing” here is how we come to “the claim of the
word” Beyng (Seyn) raised in “conversation” as “the clearing for mani-
festation” (58). Readers may find this to be the most interesting turn in
reading Heidegger, because suddenly the “clearing,” thought so distant
from the paradigmatic contexts previously seen as spatiotemporal reality,
makes room in a manner of room-ing. Spatiotemporality clears the way for
a coevolving in how we address the question of time concurrently with
the clearing of room (space), towards the attentive “disposal” of the in-
fold (Einfalt). It is in poetry and its idiomatic identity that this “disposal”
happens between Anwort, a neologism Heidegger invented to convey
the notion of the “pre-word,” and Antwort, a term signifying “human
answer” (59). Ziarek shows that Heidegger understands “word” to mean
not the structure of signs functioning in paradigmatic contexts of power
or domination, but rather as the performance of writing itself. Language,
or “words,” do not exist merely as a set of “tools for signifying”:
While the sign relies on relations among objects and other signs, the
word is the agitation of the clearing, its breaking open – literally its
Anstimmen, intoning or initial tuning – that is, the initial disposition
of the clearing’s topographic, whose onset and emergence is indicated
by the prefix an-. Anstimmen recalls here the imparting of words into
signs, which Heidegger indicates through the coined “Anwort,” or
“oncoming word.” (93)
Ziarek notes that the resonance between signs and words in language
unveils the primordial necessity of poetic thought and poetic attunement.
Ziarek takes up this issue in chapter three when he considers the word
stillness and its spatiotemporal resemblance to the emergent meaning
of silence, which for Ziarek, is tied to the notion of “reticence” (148). Ac-
cording to Ziarek, Erschweigung, or “reticence that holds silence,” directs
us to the “clearing where the saying finds itself already moving” (148).
For Heidegger, “language speaks (in) signs, and it speaks and writes
only signs.” In other words, language makes the “task of making ‘words
of being’ audible or visible very difficult” (98). Our attentiveness to and

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use of language­­––not only in the creative act of composition but also in

its general deployment in reading, speaking, or thinking––requires “less
conceptual or propositional exactness than a poetic rigor and stringency”
(175). This explains Ziarek’s inclusion of poetry in his study, which is
categorized as a “difficult” or experimental form of language. However,
once it is defined idiomatically as both ‘difficult’ and as a ‘form,’ the true
signature of Ziarek’s interpretation reveals itself as new ways of consider-
ing, and indeed valuing innovative poetry because it draws our attention
to thought as a way-making of the saying. More importantly, we become
attuned to what is already ‘saying,’ rather than what is already the said in
‘difficult forms’ of political identity where these forms find expression in
the spatiotemporally expanding experiences of lived, not produced, life.
For Ziarek, the implications for this way of thinking about Hei-
degger’s work include how we frame and live with the “unprethinkable
and the unsayable” in relation to the “new” and its “letting be unfolding
from event” (103). As a way of framing aesthetic innovation, the “new”
then reveals what is essential to the ways innovative poetry preserves
our exposure to the difficulty of the idiomatic, which, if we are to accept
Ziarek’s interpretation, is not a description of that which is inarticulate
or lacks fluency, but is rather a non-appropriating, non-dominating mode
of the event where and when it finds expression in form.
In Ziarek’s analysis, the “new” comes to evoke in rather interesting
ways the relationship to others as well as to space/place which partici-
pate in the way contemporary poetics refigures our becoming in a world
shaped by geography, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and political identities.
These new readings of Heidegger consider an understanding of the ethical
in a spatiotemporal situation that alters our shared coordinates of active
decisions, directing them away from moral-philosophical examples or
analysis and towards a commonality that lies outside, or, in an alternative
arrangement, in the current idioms of ethics itself. Ziarek invokes Hei-
degger’s inventive play with language to argue for a new way of thinking
about Heidegger’s project in relation to poetry. In this dishumanization
of form, poetry is fundamentally spatiotemporal in the radical sense of
a ‘lingering’ and ‘spanning.’ When we are exposed to radical forms, we
encounter a kind of play. Heidegger plays on this dynamic in his idiom-
atic construction of key verbs such as verweilen, which, Ziarek observes,
“Heidegger uses as transitive in order to point out that the thing ‘stays’ for
a while… [that it] abides or lingers awhile” (103). This “awhile” evolves
into “weitende Weile,” which is in the “feminine key” of the masculine
“while” (or the temporal) as “a spanning while,” and reciprocally, “the
feminine spatiality unfolds as a weilende Weite, a ‘lingering span, modified
with the masculine inflection of temporality” (105). This is perhaps one

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of Ziarek’s key insights which readers will want to see expanded. Ziarek
himself notes how Heidegger’s writing reveals, within itself, an “account
of language where the question of sexual difference could be drawn out
and elaborated” (105).
Ziarek shows how the idea of being with poetry “a spanning while,”
and of reading a poetic form’s “lingering span” opens new critical terrain
concerning the confluence of Heidegger philosophy of language and that
formed by Jacques Derrida. While Ziarek’s work does not pursue this
avenue of inquiry, he does spend ample time in chapter two, “Words
and Signs,” developing a useful description of Heidegger’s “idiomatic
enveloping and transforming of difference through the event under-
stood as the play of nearness and remoteness” which he distinguishes
from Derrida’s “notion of différance as the productive, spatiotemporal
momentum of the unfolding of differences” (109). Ziarek stipulates that
his reading of Heidegger and his analysis of the philosopher’s focus on
the “fold between words (Worte) and words taken as signs (Wörter or
Wörterzeichen),” clarifies “how poetic thinking thinks not only in signs
but also, and primarily, in words” (109).
Language After Heidegger is an essential companion for scholars
engaged in the study of conceptual art or contemporary poetics and
who attend to the ways in which aesthetic form intersects with the social
forms of embodiment that remain outside conventional discourses. It
is a valuable reference for scholars who see and experience an ethical
“disposal” in these avant-garde forms of writing, which included expres-
sions of available (situational) identities, and available expressions of
“attunement” (dissent/consent beyond argumentation). Illuminated by
Heidegger’s idiomatic transformations, Ziarek reads into the “giving”
of words where and when they themselves emerge as the thinking. In
his view, Gewalt, or power and violence becomes Gelassenheit, an “idiom
of gentleness” (214). The deeper significance of Ziarek’s work reveals
itself in this study’s last chapter through his reading of Herrschaft, maj-
esty, and the way Heidegger’s shifts “reframe[e] the notion…in terms of
the mildness or gentleness (Milde) that informs being’s ‘essentiality,’ its
Wesentlichkeit,” which Ziarek contrasts “with the notions of mastery, rule,
and sovereignty” (213).
Let me close by considering the ethico-aesthetic implications of
Ziarek’s contributions to Heidegger studies and poetics and to our under-
standing of the way Heidegger’s idiomatic shifts work into juxtapositions
that remain preserved from the modes of adjacency in power-oriented
relationships. Machenschaft, which codifies “the complex and global scope”
of twentieth-century history, turns where language itself drifts in its span-
ning into “the gentle binds” of “event-like relations, which bind beings

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in the modality of Gelassenheit” (213). In seeking to understand this “gist

and drift,” Ziarek writes, it is important to consider the latter “modality
of gentleness and mildness (Milde)” outside paradigms preoccupied with
the centrality of dominance or power as binary (213). In other words, in
the final analysis, it is a question of either having or not having dominance
or power. As Ziarek observes: “Heidegger is very clear in stating that
gentleness is machtunbedurftig: it has no use for power” (214).
José Felipe Alvergue
University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire

Note
1. I refer to the identity of Conceptual Poetry broadly outlined by scholars like Craig Dwor-
kin (No Medium, 2013), Marjorie Perloff (Unoriginal Genius, 2010), Kenneth Goldsmith
(Uncreative Writing, 2011), Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place (Notes on Conceptualisms,
2009), Judith Goldman (“Re-thinking ‘Non-retinal Literature’” [2007], and most recently
defended by Rachel Galvin and Drew Gardner in the Boston Review, respectively, “Lyric
Backlash: Thoughts on the Oulipo and César Vallejo in Response to Calvin Bedient’s
Complaint,” and “Flarf is Life: The Poetry of Affect,” both online).

SubStance #140, Vol. 45, no. 2, 2016

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