Readings in Interpretation: Holderlin, Hegel, Heidegger (Theory and History of Literature)

289 Pages·1987·17.05 MB·English

by  Andrzej Warminski

Readings in Interpretation
Theory and History of Literature
Edited by Wlad Godzich and Jochen Schuite-Sasse
Volume 1. Tzvetan Todorov Introduction to Poetics
Volume 2. Hans Robert Jauss Toward an Aesthetic of Reception
Volume 3. Hans Robert Jauss
Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics
Volume 4. Peter Burger Theory of the Avant-Garde
Volume 5. Vladimir Propp Theory and History of Folklore
Volume 6. Edited by Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich, and Wallace Martin
The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America
Volume 7. Paul de Man Blindness and Insight:
Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism
2nd ed., rev.
Volume 8. Mikhail Bakhtin Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics
Volume 9. Erich Auerbach
Scenes from the Drama of European Literature
Volume 10. Jean-Francois Lyotard
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
Volume 11. Edited by John Fekete The Structural Allegory:
Reconstructive Encounters with the New French Thought
Volume 12. Ross Chambers Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and
the Power of Fiction
Volume 13. Tzvetan Todorov Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle
Volume 14. George Bataille Visions of Excess: Selected Writings,
1927-1939
Volume 15. Peter Szondi On Textual Understanding and Other Essays
Volume 16. Jacques Attali Noise
Volume 17. Michel de Certeau Heterologies
Volume 18. Thomas G. Pavel The Poetics of Plot: The Case of English
Renaissance Drama
Volume 19. Jay Caplan Framed Narratives: Diderot's Genealogy of the
Beholder
Volume 20. Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thebaud Just Gaming
Volume 21. Malek Alloula The Colonial Harem
Volume 22. Klaus Theweleit Male Fantasies,
1. Women, Floods, Bodies, History
Volume 23. Klaus Theweleit Male Fantasies,
2. Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror
Volume 24. Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement The Newly Born
Woman
Volume 25. Jose Antonio Maravall Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a
Historical Structure
Volume 26. Andrzej Warminski Readings in Interpretation:
Holderlin, Hegel, Heidegger
Readings in Interpretation
Holderiin, Hegel Heidegger
Andrzej Warminski
Introduction by Rodolphe Gasche
Theory and History of Literature, Volume 26
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis
The University of Minnesota Press gratefully
acknowledges the financial support of the
Frederick W. Hilles Publication Fund of Yale University.
Copyright © 1987 by the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
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Published by the University of Minnesota Press
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by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, Markham.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Warminski, Andrzej.
Readings in interpretation.
(Theory and history of literature; v. 26)
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Hermeneutics—History. 2. Holderlin, Friedrich, 1770-
1843—Philosophy. 3. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831.
4. Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976.
I. Title. II. Series.
BD241.W36 1987 121'.68 86-1310
ISBN 0-8166-1239-0
ISBN 0-8166-1240-4 (pbk.)
The following chapters, in revised form, are reproduced with permis-
sion of the original publishers: Chapter 2, "Holderlin in France,"
Studies in Romanticism (Summer 1983): 173-97, reprinted courtesy of
the Graduate School and Trustees of Boston University; chapter 4,
"'Patmos': The Senses of Interpretation," MLN 91 (April
1976): 478-500; chapter 5, "Pre-positional By-play" Glyph 3
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 98-117; the
final pages of chapter 6 appeared under the title "Reading Parentheses:
Hegel by Heidegger," Genre (Winter 1983): 389-403; chapter 7,
"Reading for Example: 'Sense-certainty' in Hegel's Phenomenology of
Spirit," Diacritics 11 (Summer 1981): 83-94; and the epilogue, "Dread-
ful Reading: Blanchot on Hegel," Yale French Studies 69
(1985): 267-75.
The University of Minnesota
is an equal-opportunity
educator and employer.
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Reading Chiasms: An Introduction Rodolphe Gasche ix
Prefatory Postscript: Interpretation and Reading xxvii
I. READING HOLDERLIN
1. Endpapers: Holderlin's Textual History 3
2. Holderlin in France 23
3. Heidegger Reading Holderlin 45
4. "Patmos": The Senses of Interpretation 72
II. READING HEGEL
5. Pre-positional By-play 95
6. Parentheses: Hegel by Heidegger 112
7. Reading for Example: "Sense-certainty" in
Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit 163
Epilogue: Dreadful Reading: Blanchot on Hegel 183
Notes 195
Index 223
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Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of several of the essays previously appeared in periodicals:
chapter 2, "Holderlin in France," in Studies in Romanticism (Summer 1983):
173-97; chapter 4, "'Patmos': The Senses of Interpretation," in MLN 91
(April 1976): 478-500; chapter 5, "Pre-positional By-play," in Glyph 3
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 98-117; the final pages
of chapter 6 as "Reading Parentheses: Hegel by Heidegger," in Genre (Winter
1983): 389-403; chapter 7, "Reading for Example: 'Sense-certainty' in Hegel's
Phenomenology of Spirit," in Diacritics 11 (Summer 1981): 83-94; and the
epilogue, "Dreadful Reading: Blanchot on Hegel," in Yale French Studies 69
(1985): 267-75. Permission to reprint is gratefully acknowledged.
I am indebted to those who read this book, whether in dissertation form or
as an expanded book manuscript: J. Hillis Miller, Karsten Harries, Rainer
Nagele, Wlad Godzich, Lindsay Waters, Samuel Weber, and Rodolphe Gasche.
I am also grateful to Virginia Hans for her careful copy editing. My greatest
debt is to my teachers at Yale, in Freiburg, and in Paris, in particular Paul de
Man and Jacques Derrida, to whose teaching and example I owe what I have
understood about reading (and writing).
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Reading Chiasms
An Introduction
Rodolphe Gasché
Coming to a text (or, for that matter, a collection of texts), the reader-critic
normally expects that its constellation yields to the unity of a configuration of
thought. Yet, if a work deliberately situates itself between figures, themes, or
motifs that could, and normally would, authoritatively confer unity, what,
then, is its status? Indeed, what sort of unity does an in-between establish, in
particular if the work does not occupy the precise middle of that interspace? If,
on the contrary, it is at once in-between and to the side? If the figures of
thought at the crisscross of which the work places itself are neither identical to
one another nor in a relation of otherness, the difficulty of the work increases
considerably. This is definitely true when those figures are themselves inquiries
into the intricacies of the in-between. The work we are speaking of, then, sides
with an irreducibly endless series of interfaces. Lacking a determining negation
by the other, not one of these figures of thought can reflect itself into mere
identity; rather, the work in question remains suspended betwixt and between,
to the side of, by right, only a virtual middle between nonidentical interfaces. It
follows that the question of the (literal and figural) unity of such work must
take a different turn.
Although Readings in Interpretation invites its reader to think about such a
turn, this work must also be regarded as a book on Holderlin, Hegel, and
Heidegger. It is, no doubt, a major contribution to the history of German
idealism and romanticism, since it is engaged in the task of reassessing the dif-
ferences between some of its outstanding exponents—the singular place of
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