Words in Blood, Like Flowers

Babette Babich

Description

Why did Nietzsche claim to have "written in blood"? Why did Heidegger remain silent after World War II about his participation in the Nazi Party? How did Hölderlin's voice and the voices of other, more ancient poets come to echo in philosophy? Words in Blood, Like Flowers is a classical expression of continental philosophy that critically engages the intersection of poetry, art, music, politics, and the erotic in an exploration of the power they have over us. While focusing on three key figures—Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger—this volume covers a wide range of material, from the Ancient Greeks to the vicissitudes of the politics of our times, and approaches these and other questions within their hermeneutic and historical contexts.

Working from primary texts and a wide range of scholarly sources in French, German, and English, this book is an important contribution to philosophy's most ancient quarrels not only with poetry, but also with music and erotic love.
Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Illustrations

PHILOSOPHY, PHILOLOGY, POETRY

1. Philosophy and the Poetic Eros of Thought

2. Philology and Aphoristic Style: Rhetoric, Sources, and Writing in Blood

3. The Birth of Tragedy: Lyric Poetry and the Music of Words

4. Nietzsche’s “Gay Science”: Poetry and Love, Science and Music

5. Pindar’s Becoming: Translating the Imperatives of Praise

MUSIC, PAIN, EROS

6. Philosophy as Music

7. Songs of the Sun: Hölderlin in Venice

8. On Pain and Tragic Joy: Nietzsche and Hölderlin

9. Nietzsche’s Erotic Artist as Actor/Jew/Woman

ART, NATURE, CALCULATION

10. Chaos and Culture

11. The Ethos of Nature and Art: Hölderlin’s Ecological Politics

12. The Work of Art and the Museum: Heidegger, Schapiro, Gadamer

13. The Ethical Alpha and Heidegger’s Linguistic Omega: On the Inner Affinity Between Germany and Greece

14. Heidegger’s Beiträge as Will to Power

Notes
Bibliography
Name Index
Subject Index

Sujets

• Philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2007
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780791481332
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Words in Blood
Like Flowers
Philosophy and Poetry,
Music and Eros in
Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger
B A B E T T E E. B A B I C HWords in Blood,
Like FlowersSUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy
Dennis J. Schmidt, editorWords in Blood,
Like Flowers
Philosophy and Poetry, Music and Eros in
Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger

Babette E. Babich
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESSPublished by
State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2006 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic,
electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise
without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Cover illustration: Dionysus detail. Attic red-figured amphora, 490 BCE.
Kleophrades Painter (500–490 BCE).
Staatliche Antikensammlung, Munich.
For information, address State University of New York Press
194 Washington Avenue, Suite 305, Albany, NY 12210-2384
Production by Diane Ganeles
Marketing by Susan M. Petrie
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Babich, Babette E., 1956–
Words in blood, like fowers : philosophy and poetry, music and eros in
Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger / Babette E. Babich.
p. cm. — (SUNY series in contemporary continental philosophy)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7914-6835-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844–1900. 2. Heidegger, Martin, 1889–1976.
3. Hölderlin, Friedrich, 1770–1843. I. Title. II. Series.
B3317.B22 2006
193—dc22 2005029298
10 9 876 54 32 1Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xiii
Abbreviations xvii
Illustrations xix
PHILOSOPHY, PHILOLOGY, POETRY
1. Philosophy and the Poetic Eros of Thought 3
2. Philology and Aphoristic Style: Rhetoric, Sources, and
Writing in Blood 19
3. The Birth of Tragedy: Lyric Poetry and the Music of Words 37
4. Nietzsche’s “Gay Science”: Poetry and Love, Science
and Music 55
5. Pindar’s Becoming: Translating the Imperatives of Praise 75
MUSIC, PAIN, EROS
6. Philosophy as Music 97
7. Songs of the Sun: Hölderlin in Venice 117
8. On Pain and Tragic Joy: Nietzsche and Hölderlin 135
9. Nietzsche’s Erotic Artist as Actor/Jew/Woman 147
ART, NATURE, CALCULATION
10. Chaos and Culture 171
11. The Ethos of Nature and Art: Hölderlin’s Ecological Politics 185
12. The Work of Art and the Museum: Heidegger, Schapiro,
Gadamer 199
13. The Ethical Alpha and Heidegger’s Linguistic Omega:
On the Inner Affinity Between Germany and Greece 227
14. Heidegger’s Beiträge as Will to Power 243
Notes 265
Bibliography 343
Name Index 373
Subject Index 381Preface
The title of this book, Words in Blood, Like Flowers, repeats the language
and the passions of Friedrich Hölderlin and Friedrich Nietzsche. For it
was Nietzsche who wrote of living with ideas as one lives with
companions—as real as flesh and blood—and he spoke more forcefully of writing
in blood, telling us that of everything written, his Zarathustra “loves”
only “what one has written with one’s blood. Write with blood and you
will learn that blood is spirit” (Z, “Of Reading and Writing”). Hölderlin,
in his poem Bread and Wine, uses the language of “words, like flowers”
and writes variously, as only a poet can, of the “flowers” of the mouth
and “the flowers of the heart.”
Written, as we say, with one’s heart, words in blood express the
passion that for Heidegger belongs to philosophy at its inception as
thaumazein, as pathos itself, which Heidegger understood as the key to
the attunement [Stimmung] of philosophic astonishment, the sustained
wonder or amazement that things are, that what is is as it is—and not
otherwise. One can keep this wonder only in “authentic questioning,” a
questioning “that opens up its own source” (I, 6). In this self-rending
tension, philosophy “never makes things easier but only more difficult”
(I, 11). This same difficulty is the reason Heidegger thinks that
philosophy might, indeed, “if we concern ourselves with it, do something with
us” (I, 12).
Using the language of writing in blood, Nietzsche does not fail to
underscore its Faustian implications, on the one hand in teasing, as
Nietzsche liked to tease Goethe, on the other hand in all seriousness. If
one writes in blood, one surrenders one’s soul. But if these authors put
themselves into what they write, we will see that they claim the same
from the reader.
The conjunction between philosophy and poetry, not to mention
music and eros, is a complicated one. And this limits, if it also
constitutes, its appeal. For if the reading I propose between the poet Hölderlin
and the philosophers Nietzsche and Heidegger will speak to some
readers, it is just as obvious that this approach will not appeal to others. Here
viiviii Preface
I can have little to say as these other readers will be unlikely to have read
even this far or if they do read further, will likely dip and pick, leaving
out context and sidestepping all such complications as inherently belong
to the themes of philosophy and poetry, music and eros in Hölderlin,
Nietzsche, and Heidegger and so constitute the substance of this book.
To summarize the chapters to follow, I begin with a discussion of
Heidegger and Nietzsche on philosophy, poetry, and love, including
some everyday reflections on philosophical affairs. I then note Nietzsche’s
aphoristic style and the role of rhetoric in order to raise the question of
how the spirit of music would account not only for the heart of Nietzsche’s
first book on tragedy but also for his singular insight into the sound of
ancient Greek itself and his emphasis on language with respect to the
sounds of its words, its meters and its rhythms, likewise articulated and
exemplified (this similarity is no accident) in the beauty of Hölderlin’s
poetry. For Nietzsche had discovered nothing less than the “breath” or
spirit of music in the words of Greek tragedy, which was also his
testament to oral culture in antiquity. Yet this discovery, particularly as
Nietzsche chose to illustrate its consequences for modern culture (a very
classical, indeed classicist’s programme, precisely in the spirit of Erwin
Rohde, and contra Wilamowitz, as Karl Reinhardt would also attest, the
same Reinhardt whose father had studied with Nietzsche in Basel and
who had even urged his son to take up Nietzsche’s cause precisely as a
“classicist”), drew little resonance from his readers (be they specialists or
not). This may have been the reason Nietzsche began with the same
focus in The Gay Science, drawing on the example of the troubadour and
yet another oral tradition of poetic or song composition.
I particularly attend to Nietzsche’s life-long preoccupation with
Pindar’s poetic word: Become the one you are! Nietzsche hears this
word in the enigmatic voice of conscience (GS §270), a creator’s
conscience, spoken with the utter innocence of the creator. “That one
becomes what one is presupposes that one does not have the remotest idea
what one is” (EH, “Why I am so Clever,” §9). The philosophically
reflexive point here, taken in connection with the resonant influence of
poetry (that is: the heart “of what is music in it” [GS §373], to use
Nietzsche’s own language), underscores the inevitable limits of a reading
that would reduce everything in Nietzsche (or in the Greeks) to prior
sources, a project which not only disregards the transformations of style
but excludes the same spirit of “music” as well as what Nietzsche
regarded as historical reflection—a judgment on the critical sense of history
Nietzsche had in common with Herbert Butterfield, a scientific historian
in almost the same sense that Nietzsche was.Preface ix
When Nietzsche reflects on his writing, he reflects on the Greek
convention of the poetic muse or inspiration,“the idea that one is merely
incarnation, merely mouthpiece” (EH, Z §3), as this idea inheres in the
ecstatic essence of Dichtung. This is what works in or through him quite
apart from his own will: “One hears, one does not seek; one takes, one
does not ask who gives; a thought flashes up like lightning, with
necessity, unfalteringly formed—I have never had any choice” (ibid.). In this
fashion, the same Nietzsche who celebrates the primacy of the active
artist above the passive spectator and who assumes the determining
superiority of the wealthy (for Nietzsche, the rich are not merely
consumers but those who impose their stan