On the Essence of Language and the Question of Art

This volume invites us to follow Heidegger as he thinks on paper and to join in his explorations of being, language, and art. Adam Knowles' thoughtful translation conveys the dogged inventiveness of these texts. --Richard Polt, Xavier University These starkly polysemic notes on language, poetry, and art dramatically elaborate Heidegger's later phenomenological understanding of how poetry gives rise to both art and language, how that emergence gets disastrously eclipsed and forgotten by Western metaphysics, and what it means to rediscover being's poetic emergence today. Here Heidegger finally thinks clearly through the distinction between 'the being of entities' (or 'beingness, ' the domain of metaphysics) and 'beyng' (or 'being as such, ' the heart of the matter for poetic thinking), that crucial distinction which both destroys the early 'metaphysical' project of Being and Time and launches his later work of thinking beyond metaphysics (and the nihilistic history metaphysics underwrites). --Professor Iain Thomson, University of New Mexico