Language After Heidegger by Krzysztof Ziarek (review)

Krzysztof Ziarek’s study of Martin Heidegger calls attention to the German philosopher’s writing and to the movement and momentum of his poetic practice. Ziarek frames Heidegger’s thinking-writing as a practice focused on what is revealed in the turning of words, on what appears in the synergy between words as signs and words in their singular relationship to the world. In this translation and interpretation of volumes 71 and 74 of Heidegger’s Collected Works (Gesamtausgabe, GA 71 and GA 74), Ziarek “underscores the idiomatic character of Heidegger’s approach” (xi). Ziarek’s discussion of these works, which were written in the 1930s and 1940s, builds a useful bridge between Heidegger’s philosophy on language and the performance of language itself. This distinction, which Ziarek illustrates by way of contemporary poetry, permits readers to consider the “inventive ‘language’ in thinking” (63) across the arts as the material atmosphere that has mitigated the effects of our engagements with power in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.