Poetics of History, Logics of Collapse: On Heidegger's Holderlin

The question of Heidegger's Nazism has been raised and reignited across the history of the philosopher's reception. Scholarly accounts of the relationship between Heidegger's philosophy and politics abound, but relatively few focus their attention on the substantial connection between Heidegger's reading of Holderlin and the ideology that facilitated his choice to follow Nazism. Those who acknowledge this connection generally tend toward careless confusion of Heidegger's interpretation and Holderlin's actual thought, despite ample evidence that Heidegger's reading amounts to a radical distortion of the poet's words. This essay accounts for Heidegger's misreading through the apocryphal poem "In lieblicher Blaue," which Heidegger mistakenly attributes to Holderlin. This is followed by a critique of Heidegger's interpretation through an exposition of Holderlin's theory of Greek tragedy and the poetics of his late hymns. Theory and praxis alike stand opposed to Heidegger's aesthetic enterprise, and they defy any attribution of proto-Nazism to Holderlin himself.