10 - Heidegger and Blanchot

Summary

When Martin Heidegger famously rose in 1946 to pay tribute to Rainer Maria Rilke on the twentieth anniversary of the poet’s death, it was hardly by accident that he framed his interpretation of Rilke’s work by quoting Friedrich Hölderlin’s now canonical question (‘Wherefore poets…’) regarding the task of poetry in the time called the present, lines that also enabled Heidegger to voice his own distress at the state in which postwar Germany found itself and, more obliquely, the extent of his own involvement in the events of the previous decade and a half. During these postwar years, there were arguably few more attentive or perceptive readers of Heidegger’s writings on poetry than the French novelist, critic, and thinker Maurice Blanchot, whose own opposition to National Socialism was from the outset forceful and unyielding. This chapter examines Blanchot’s borrowings from Heidegger (as deployed in Blanchot’s account of the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé), his rigorous and probing criticisms of Heidegger’s thinking, and contrasts with that of Heidegger Blanchot’s own significantly divergent interpretation of the work of Hölderlin and Rilke.