"Der Ister" quote (was:RE: Hoelderlins Anzeige)

[Iain Thomson]

Paul has already begun what I was hoping for:
> Heidegger's
>aversion to American 'ahistoricality and self-devastation' is hardly unique
>to him...
Later in this text (in a section on "the law of history"), Heidegger
distinguishes between "the unhistorical" [das Ungescichtliche] and "the
ahistorical" [das Geschichtlose]:  "Nature is ahistorical.  Unhistorical,
and therefore catastophic in a way that nature never can be, is, e.g.,
Americanism" [Der Ister 143/GA53 179].  Heid's use of "catastrophic"
[katastrophenhaft]--after the return to Sophocles to elucidate Hoelderlin,
and in the context of a discussion of history, is surely not accidental.
(In the Nietzsche lectures the catastophe was the impending historical
crisis about which a decision must be reached, perhaps rooted in the event
of nihilism and certainly closely connected to Heidegger's support for
National Socialism.)  In Sophocles the kata-strophe is the sudden Turn or
end, a close or conclusion, of death, e.g., Antigone's, e.g..  Is the
sudden turn here the turning tide of the war (is it turning yet in 1942?),
the turn of fortune against Heidegger (his feeling of the ineffectuality of
his attempted political intervention)?

Can there be any doubt that Heidegger takes himself to be Antigone in this text?
The Q, it seems to me, is what does this unheimlich identification mean?
(See the first pages of the lecture--I'll say more about this another
time.)

>More context is needed, however, to make sense of the passage you quote.
>The 'historical humankind of this commencement' (McNeill / Davis) is the
>Greeks; Heidegger is discussing the pre-eminence of tragedy for the Greek
>world, in terms of which the appeal to 'the pain of sacrifice' comes to be
>meaningful,

Yes, especially since "Sacrifice" is Opfers here, also "Martyr."  Who is to
be sacrificed here?  The students fighting on the front
lines/Heidegger/Antigone?  For what are they giving their lives?  National
Socialist "Soil" or Heideggerian "Earth"?

>since this passage comes at the very beginning of the section
>titled "The Greek Interpretation of Human Beings in Sophocles' Antigone".
(The section titles are the editor's.)
>This is why, in this lecture course, the interlocution with Hoelderlin
>mutates into an encounter with Sophoclean tragedy, such that 'awaiting the
>advent' is alone made possible by thinking-back to the provenance of the
>Occident.
>Paul
This is to read this lecture within the larger themes Heidegger was
pursuing in the late Thirties and early Forties (as I did above). But the
precise 'spin' with which Heidegger justifies the return within this
particular text is very interesting; he returns to Soph as a way of
pursuing a homecoming through a necessary encounter with the
foreign/strange (Dallmayer's _The Other Heidegger_ is very good at picking
out some of the political implications of this theme).

        I would translate Aufenthalte as Odyssey instead of Abode, so that
the Homeric resonances of this
becoming-at-home-via-passage-through-the-foreign become explicit
(Aufenthalte is the title Heidegger later gave to the travel journal of his
trip to Greece; to me the idea of existence as an Odyssey, abidance, or
stop-over into Being is a very powerful one).

Iain




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