Abstract
Heidegger's reading of Georg Trakl, though not as well-known as his reading of Hölderlin, is an epitome of his later thought and reveals the underlying nature of his dialogue between “thinking” and “poetry.” From the standpoint of overcoming Western metaphysics, John D. Caputo finds in this dialogue a brutal quality that is rooted in the “myth of Being”: an obsession with “essence,” an indifference to suffering, a disregard for the weak, and an erasure of the body. Caputo calls Heidegger's view a “phainesthetics” of unsentimental essentialism, which replaces the “calling of suffering” with the “call of Being,” and focuses on the history of Being rather than on the historical being and its factual pain and suffering. For this reason, Caputo takes Heidegger's essentializing interpretation of Georg Trakl's poetry as an example. He demonstrates the specific mechanism of “phainesthetics” by revealing how Heidegger, through a metaphysical and allegorical reading strategy, sublimates factual pain and thereby transmutes a mourning for life into a celebration of the truth of Being. This critique highlights that the deficiency of metaphysics lies in its neglect of the factual suffering of the weak. It suggests that “thinking” may only truly listen to “poetry” when metaphysics is overcome, the metaphysical grammar of “thinking” is deconstructed, and the essentialism of “phainesthetics” is abandoned.
Keywords
overcoming metaphysics, Martin Heidegger, Georg Trakl, John D. Caputo, hermeneutics of facticity, phainesthetics
First Page
171
Last Page
178
Recommended Citation
Chen, Long. 2025. "How Can “Thinking” Truly Listen to “Poetry”?: A Critique of Heidegger's Interpretation of Georg Trakl." Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 45, (3): pp.171-178. https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol45/iss3/17
