In this article I develop Heidegger's phenomenology of poetry, showing that it may provide grounds for rejecting claims that he lapses into linguistic idealism. Proceeding via an analysis of the three concepts of language operative in the philosopher's work, I demonstrate how poetic language challenges language's designative and world-disclosive functions. The experience with poetic language, which disrupts Dasein's absorption by emerging out of equipmentality in the mode of the broken tool, brings Dasein to wonder at the world's existence in such a way that doubt about its reality cannot enter the picture.
It would be hard to overstate the importance of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy for Giorgio Agamben’s thinking. It is not simply that the Italian philosopher turns at various points in his work to texts and
themes from early and later Heidegger, as important as this obviously is. As well as abiding interests in problems of ontology, finitude, facticity and authenticity, Agamben inherits from Heidegger a philosophical programme. That programme is the critique of Western metaphysics: the tradition founded on the neglect, forgetting and oblivion of being, and which – for Agamben as for Heidegger – has reached a point of crisis in modernity after a long historical genesis. Understanding Agamben’s debt to the Heideggerian critique of metaphysics is important for grasping the basic problematic of the Homo Sacer project, for comprehending its grounds and ultimate stakes, and for getting a clearer sense of the positive political philosophy to which he gestures at crucial moments in the series.
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