What is called literature? Heidegger, responsive figuration, and the aspect of be-ing

Abstract

From the metaphysical orientation of Western thinking, being is understood as presence, truth as correspondence, and language as representation. This understanding inclines reflections on the nature of literature towards the question “What is literature?”, and calls for responses that seek determinative commonalities between literary objects. In this thesis, I attempt a different approach to the being of literature, prompted by Heidegger’s thinking, which understands being dynamically and non-substantively as the self-withholding clearing which grants beings their appearance. Language does not unfold primarily in meaningful references between objects, but in dis-closure; it responds to the aspect of be-ing, showing beings in their being by showing the possibility of meaninglessness in every appearance. This is what clears and holds open a reach for referential play. Language therefore entails a response to the self-withholding of being, and in that sense itself speaks. In this light, “What is called literature?” becomes a question concerning how being calls on language to respond as literature, and human beings are called on to participate responsively in this dialogue. Two different but interconnected ways in which literature calls are investigated. On the one hand, literature promises a reach of discursive representability; it demands the disclosure of beings as orderable and immediately available. On the other hand, literature figures a rift, a drawing in the sense both of a meaningfully gathered marking, and of a drawing open which draws away. I read William Blake’s The First Book of Urizen to trace how it literalizes the tension between these callings of literature. It figures a rift, and puts into play a differencing relation between a poetic attunement to delay and non-arrival, and the demand for arrival arising from its positioning within the realm of discursive availability which characterizes the contemporary field of literature.