Ian Alexander Moore, Dialogue on the Threshold: Heidegger and Trakl. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2022; xxi + 398 pp. ISBN: 9781438490663.
Reviewed by Harris B. Bechtol, Texas A&M University – San Antonio
How does a threshold show itself? A threshold is the connection or connecting of two different spaces: the inside from the outside, the family from the stranger, the host from the stranger, the host from the enemy, etc. As both an entry and exit between spaces, a threshold’s liminality marks a concomitant gathering and separation of two other spaces. A threshold, then, participates in the polysemy of the French partage—separating and sharing. Ian Alexander Moore’s Dialogue on the Threshold: Heidegger and Trakl is a meditation upon numerous conceptual thresholds opened by Martin Heidegger’s two lectures on the poetry of Georg Trakl— “Language” (1950) and “Language in the Poem” (1952). Moore places us at the threshold between Heidegger and Trakl inorder to place us before additional thresholds between poetry and philosophy, language and philosophy, the ontic and the ontological, history and philosophy, handwritten marginalia and published works, Christianity and philosophy, gathering and dissemination, the foreigner and the native, the female/feminine and the male/masculine, pain and gentleness, colour and being, the animal and the human, and Derrida and Heidegger. Moore holds a discussion or a dialogue about these thresholds, which, following his reading of Heidegger, means to offer an Erörterung of the various sites (Orten) of the threshold. Moore is placing or emplacing, two ways of understanding the verbal Erörterung (see 27), each Ort of the threshold before us while also situating (Erörterung again) us at these thresholds in order to display how each topic simultaneously moves back and forth with one another in deconstructive fashion. In this, Moore’s book is a surprising display of Derridean différance that blazes new trails for Heidegger scholarship. Accordingly, while Moore elucidates much about Heidegger, particularly Heidegger’s later approach to being and language, and our reading of Heidegger, each glimpse into the threshold becomes a critique of Heidegger. Moore’s book is masterful from its scholarship to its argument even if it left me wanting more.
His book consists of an introduction, seven main chapters, a postscript, and four appendices. First a note on the appendices. The first three appendices are gifts to Heidegger scholarship grounded in Moore’s extensive archival work. In Appendix 1, Moore offers not only the history of Heidegger’s copy of and hand written marginalia in Trakl’s collected works, which is “in a locked, secluded library of the Meßkirch Castle, with no label to distinguish it” and which few people have even looked at (215), as well as a transcription and translation of this marginalia. These marginalia, drawn upon extensively in the seven chapters, provide “valuable insight” into Heidegger’s “reading of the spirit of Trakl’s poetic work and into the place in which Heidegger situates it” in his own thinking (215). In Appendix 2, Moore provides a chronological organization of “most of Heidegger’s occasional references to Trakl” outside of his two lectures on Trakl (239). This includes material from Heidegger’s correspondence with Trakl’s close friend Ludwig von Ficker, “instances when people mentioned Trakl to Heidegger or provide[d] a report that sheds light on Heidegger’s engagement with Trakl’s poetry,” as well as paraphrases from archival material that scholars are not yet permitted to cite (239). In Heidegger’s second Trakl lecture, “Language in the Poem,” Heidegger references Trakl’s poetry without always citing each poem, which leaves the reader in a difficult place to determine from which poem Heidegger is drawing. So, in Appendix 3, Moore specifies “all of the [fifty-five] poems that Heidegger cites or references on each page of his lecture” (271). Lastly, in Appendix 4 Moore offers not only the German of nineteen poems by Trakl but also Moore’s own translations of them, a gift equally to both Heidegger and Trakl scholarship.
After an introduction in which Moore recalls the inspiration for his book, he discusses in chapter one the historical context of Heidegger’s two Trakl lectures. These lectures took place at the invitation from Gerhard Strooman who was the physician and head of the “posh resort” and spa Bühlerhöhe in the northwest area of the Black Forest (12). Heidegger delivered the lectures at Bühlerhöhe to an eclectic group of intellectuals interested in the study of the arts as a way of coping with the aftermath of WWII. This historical context allows Moore to begin showing how Trakl plays a key role, equal to that of Friedrich Hölderlin, in Heidegger’s development of many key ideas in his later thought. Chapter two continues this strategy with specific attention to the role that Trakl’s poem “A Winter Evening” plays in Heidegger’s first Trakl lecture, “Language,” where Heidegger develops his understanding of listening to the unspoken (das Unaussprechliche) in language. Moore explains how the later Heidegger’s understanding of the shining of phenomena from out of themselves as things and events in relation to being through the fourfold (das Geviert) finds an origin in the Trakl lectures. This threshold between Heidegger and Trakl opens the first site of Moore’s critique of Heidegger’s idiosyncratic, de-Christianized, and ontological reading of Trakl. Resting at the threshold of Trakl’s Christianity and Heidegger’s thinking of being, Moore interprets Trakl’s “A Winter’s Evening” with the goal “to take Trakl at his word” (71) by highlighting the Christian undertones and themes throughout each stanza of the poem. Moore’s critique of Heidegger highlights, in a manner that would please Søren Kierkegaard, the existential lathe in Trakl’s poem regarding the reader choosing or not choosing to participate in the movements of faith indicated in the poem. Moore’s argument shows how the Bible itself, and not just Heidegger’s favored Greek and Old High German etymologies, can be an important source for understanding “a poem’s sense” (79).
Chapter three continues this strategy in turning to what Heidegger considers to be the unifying tone (Grundton) or site “at which Trakl’s entire body of poetic works is gathered together” (81)—Abgeschiedenheit. Moore shows that Heidegger’s interpretation of Abgeschiedenheit in Trakl means a “detachment from and detachment toward” (98), that is, a gathering toward the singular meaning of the Abendland or “land of evening” in Trakl (100). This land in Heidegger’s interpretation has strong nationalistic tones of a Germany led by the Swabians who speak a singular language of Old High German (see 100-101). In response, Moore deconstructs Heidegger’s understanding of Abgeschiedenheit in order “to heed Trakl’s song” (82) regarding the relation of gathering with dispersion in Trakl’s poetry that Heidegger ignores. Drawing upon hermeneutic strategies from Derrida’s Geschlecht III, Moore challenges the emphasis in Heidegger’s philosophy on the force of gathering in its binary distinction from dispersion (82). Rather than drawing on Heidegger’s speculative etymologies of Old High German, Moore interprets Abgeschiedenheit in Trakl according to its “predominately Christian heritage” from Meister Eckhart who coined this term along with its synonym Gelassenheit (releasement). Moore shows that while Trakl and Heidegger know this lineage, Heidegger “suppress[es]” (106) it in his reading of Trakl. Understood through its historical heritage, Abgeschiedenheit means not gathering but “releasement” (107). So while Heidegger aims to use Trakl as a way to return to earth as earth through the gathering of things in their relation to being via the fourfold, Moore turns to sources known by Trakl to read him as emphasizing a releasement from earth as earth in order to let (lassen) earth be “suffused with divine spirit” (87). Placed at this threshold of gathering and dispersion, Heidegger’s reading centered on gathering without any relation to a related dissemination comes to function not as a way of thinking being but as a metaphysical transcendental signified that prevents a thinking of being (107).
In chapter four, Moore looks closely at one of Heidegger’s largely unknown, unpublished, and untranslated texts, Über den Schmerz (On Pain). Moore explains that the gathering of being for Heidegger in this text is named “the gathering of pain” (112). Drawing on the Greek term algos for pain, Moore calls Heidegger’s gathering of being via pain an “algology” to show how this idea “serves as the basis for much of the Trakl material” (112). Moore argues that Heidegger’s view of pain is an approach to pain not in the ontic, particular sense of physical, emotional, or psychological pain but in its ontological sense. Heidegger understands pain not from the perspective of beings (Seiendes) but from the perspective of “pain in itself” (117) in relation to being (Sein) insofar as pain becomes the “self-showing” of being in its own “eventuating” (128). Pain both gathers being while also happening as being’s gathering of itself in itself (132). So Heidegger discusses the pain in Trakl’s poetry as a Riß or “cleaving” that becomes “the threshold” between being and beings insofar as “pain holds things and world apart even as it holds them together” (125). Moore concludes that Heidegger’s ontology as algology anesthetizes the reader from the pain “that Trakl suffered [in his personal life] and sang [in his poetry]” (112). Such anesthetizing occurs through Heidegger ignoring another etymological history, this time of Schmerz. This etymology highlights the “singular and scattering effects” of Schmerz (133). By ignoring this etymology, Heidegger avoids both “the profound significance of irreparable, ontic pain” (134) and the pain of Trakl “in his final days” (137) as poetically remembered in his last poem “Grodek.” His experience of suffering, pain, death, and dying while at a military hospital in Krakow after the Battle of Gródek in 1914 led Trakl to pen “Grodek” and, ultimately, to his cocaine overdose.
Chapter five turns to Heidegger’s use of colour for thinking the movements of being. Moore shows how Heidegger uses his reading of the colour gold in the poetry of Pindar, specifically Pindar’s 5th Isthmian ode, to understand Trakl’s use of the colour gold and blue. Heidegger interprets these colours as ways “to characterize being and the related concept of the holy” (144) insofar as they think the dual movements of being understood as aletheia. Accordingly, the colour gold indicates the revealing movement of being from itself while blue indicates being’s concealing movement. As Moore says, “[G]old and blue are being insofar as being shines in truth and shelters in withdrawal” (163). Moore wonders, though, if Heidegger’s penchant for the gentleness of gathering, discussed in chapters three and four, causes him to miss another interpretation of these colours in Trakl that would lead not to a “poetics of the holy” but “a poetics of sacrilege” (163). Accordingly, Moore traces the discussion of madness (Wahnsinn) from Hölderlin through Trakl to Paul Celan in order to suggest that Trakl’s songs of pain can be read more in line with Derridean dissemination, insofar as Trakl’s poetry points more to “an unholy madness that leads not to redemption but to ruin” (167).
Chapter six focuses on the polysemic term Geschlecht in Heidegger’s Trakl lectures, a topic discussed extensively in secondary literature thanks to Derrida’s four Geschlecht essays. Moore adds to this scholarship by discussing two issues that arise from this term’s polysemy— sexual difference and the human-animal distinction—showing how Heidegger’s engagements with Trakl’s poetry cause Heidegger to complicate his received understanding of these issues. Regarding sexual difference, Heidegger has famously claimed that Dasein is without any sexual difference and that such sexual difference is unimportant for Dasein’s understanding of its own being or of being itself. Moore traces Heidegger’s discussions of this sexual difference in the Trakl lectures to raise many questions and provocations regarding the secondary or possibly even the primary role of the feminine and gender identity in the later Heidegger’s question of being. Likewise, while Heidegger has famously claimed that animals, in contrast to humans, are not only poor in world but also cannot think being, speak, or experience their own death as death through the individuating mood of anxiety, his interpretation of Trakl’s use of the German Wild causes him to challenge these claims. For when Trakl describes the wild animal as “a figure for the promise of a life free from malice and malediction” (190), a representation of Christlike suffering and “gentle forbearance” (190), and the hope for an enduring “possibility…of penitence and redemption” (193), Heidegger develops, Moore contends, a “humanimality” and “animality to come” (199) in which the animal as animal would think, ponder, develop a face that beholds holy being, and represent mortals in their mortality. Moore concludes that had Heidegger continued to follow “the animal more closely in Trakl’s poetry,” he may not have subordinated the animal to the human or even the feminine to the masculine (200). Moreover, Heidegger’s momentary recognition of “the sexed animals that we are,” even if he “ultimately sets these limits back in place,” is “nothing short of astounding” (200).
In his final chapter, Moore returns to the threshold of gathering and separation to argue that Heidegger’s logic in the Trakl lectures opens “the idea that spirit is inherently and insuperably riven” (201) rather than whole in a gentle movement of gathering. The site of this gathering and/or separation of spirit occurs, once again, in Heidegger’s understanding of the Abendland in Trakl. This Abendland for Heidegger is the land of Germany in which a people (a Geschlecht) to come listen to language and think being and things according to the fourfold rather than the machinations of modern technology. Yet Heidegger opens another reading that challenges this understanding of the land and people to come insofar as the Abendland in Trakl includes the possibility that the spirit (Geist) of this land and its people is gheis or outside of itself and self-destructive. Yet Heidegger maintains without justification that this latter possibility of riven spirit gets resolved in the more originary, gentle gathering. Hence, following the Derridean logic of the supplement, Moore argues that at spirit’s origin gathering and dissemination are always already affecting one another. So when Heidegger chooses without justification to favor gathering, he succumbs to the metaphysics that he diagnoses in Platonism and Christianity (209), thereby, again, developing his own metaphysical, transcendental signified.
In conclusion, Moore’s text is a tour de force of the later Heidegger’s thinking of being. Moore provides access to much of Heidegger’s thinking, sources, and marginalia on Trakl that have heretofore either been unavailable or unavailable in English. Beyond this, he develops trenchant critiques of Heidegger via an engagement with Derridean deconstruction. And yet as I finished Moore’s book, I wanted more concerning the question of Heidegger and religion, particularly Christianity, that returns time and again throughout Moore’s book. This theme arises due to Trakl’s self-avowed faith in Christianity, covered in chapters one and two, and Heidegger’s overt move away from this Christianity in his reading of Trakl. Each time that Moore addresses and challenges Heidegger’s idiosyncratic move away from Trakl’s Christianity, Moore’s critique seems to be building toward an interesting rapprochement with Christianity. However, Moore stops short of a full argument here, resorting instead to some thought provoking questions that ask for further fleshing-out. The apex of this development occurs at the end of chapter three regarding Abgeschiedenheit. After showing that Heidegger knowingly ignores the etymological link of detachment and releasement, Moore recounts Heidegger’s impromptu speech in 1960 at the birthday celebration of Trakl’s friend, Ficker. Inspired by Ficker’s own speech on love, Trakl, and the “insufficiency of the scientific worldview” (108), Heidegger uses a quote in French from Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince and a quote in Latin from St. Augustine’s City of God to conclude that avoiding the pitfalls of calculative thinking, which characterize the modern age of technology, requires learning to love understood as a “letting be [Sein-lassen]” (108). French, Latin, the Christian Bishop of Hippo, love, and the lassen present in Ge-lassen-heit—all of this leads Moore to say that these appeals from Heidegger “suggest a different way of reading Trakl” (109). Moore asks, “What would such a reading look like?” (109). And he concludes with a series of provocative questions that gesture toward this suggested reading, but he does not declaratively provide this different reading. He certainly provides many of this reading’s threads through his book, but I would have enjoyed being placed at the threshold of this site, this Ort, for a longer discussion, Erörterung, about what Moore understands to be on either side of this opening and what we are to do now that we have been situated at their threshold. Perhaps, though, this will be Moore’s next book. If so, I am looking forward to it.