Monstrous History: Heidegger Reading Holderlin

Abstract

A sure way to ignore or to mistake what texts as texts to say about the institutions set up to transmit and about how they may or may not escape institutional strictures is not to read them. 1 Among the many strategies of nonreading, perhaps none is quite as effective, at least these days, as the easy historicizing move that would defuse and neutralize a genuinely critical thought by placing it in historical context. This is where the recently celebrated cases of Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man-in themselves very different-have a great deal in common. In both cases, gossip about the putative historical context and the biographies of individuals has taken the place of reading. This is, of course, no accident. For a reading of these texts would discover that they have much to say about history and the relation between author and work, and that what they say amounts precisely to a critique of the presuppositions behind such crude historicizing. If we read the texts, we find that we can no longer inscribe them in the same old histories of philosophy or of theory, or even less in the pseudohistories that are nothing so much as the symptoms of institutional (e.g., academic) attempts to contain thinking that tampers with the axiomatics of the institution.2 In