Come, follow this way; follow
on your blind feet, father, where I lead you.
— Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus, Antigone, ll. 180–811 In his 1976 translation and interpretation of René Char’s poem, The Shark and the Gull, Reiner Schürmann gives voice to a sense of incipience that opens the possibility of a politics other than that founded upon archic domination. This other incipience is described as “nuptial,” a signifier that appears momentarily in that essay, only to be indelibly, although almost indiscernibly, inscribed into the tension between the dual traits of natality and mortality that animates the topological analytic of ultimates in Schürmann’s Broken Hegemonies. The symbol of the nuptial, which will be heard to give voice to the dynamic and asym-metrical union of natality and mortality, appears as Schürmann attempts to locate the origin of Char’s poetry. This origin is situ-ated in the poem itself, in the event of its articulation.2 There a
1 Sophocles, Sophoclis Fabulae (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).
2 Reiner Schürmann, “Situating René Char: Hölderlin, Heidegger, Char and the ‘There Is,’” boundary 2 4, no. 2 (January 1, 1976): 513–34, at 518. For Schürmann, and for this chapter, to situate a text means to locate “the place from which it speaks” (518), that is, the topos of its logos. He writes: “To situ-ate a script, that is, a way of writing determined by an understanding of
be-world begins, opened by and in a hermeneutical relation that brings to language an originary experience of the origin capable of transforming the meaning and nature of politics itself.3
Schürmann suggests the transformative power of the herme-neutical relation when he writes: “[T]o read is to interpret, to interpret is to exist in a new way. The hermeneutical relation concerns our reality, for the text interprets us.”4 Hermeneutics is transformative because it is rooted in what Schürmann calls
“symbolic praxis.” “Symbols,” he writes, “effect the translation of discourse into a course, a path.”5 Symbols accomplish this trans-lation by gathering discordant phenomena into retrans-lation in ways that point beyond themselves and enjoin a certain interpretive response. Symbolic gathering thus manifests a phenomenologi-cal difference — symbols show how phenomena withdraw as
ing, one has to give some thought to the locus out of which the poet speaks and writes… . To situate a work of prose or poetry is to raise the question of its beginning: where is the place from which the script originates?” (513).
3 Schürmann is always careful to articulate the many ways the origin is said and it is important here in the middle to attend to the difference between these ways of saying the beginning. In his Heidegger book, Schürmann writes: “The origin is said in many ways: the metaphysical archai and prin-cipia, and phenomenological ‘original’ and ‘originary’ — the original rise of a mode of being (Seiendheit, beingness) and the originary rise which is the event of being.” Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 151.
The nuptial, as will be heard, articulates the originary as opposed to the original: “The original modes of appearing are countless; they are as numer-ous as the disjunctive moments in history. The originary mode of appear-ing, on the other hand, has no history.” The nuptial describes the originary origin: “The originary origin, ‘the rise that presences at the same time as it withdraws into itself,’ is always implicated in what we live and understand.
But it is rarely grasped for its own sake.” See ibid., 140. The nuptial speaks the originary origin for its own sake, though of course, without grasping it conceptually. The political importance of the nuptial will be discernible in the way it poetically articulates a community rooted in a union that appears as an event of originary presencing.
4 Reiner Schürmann, “Symbolic Difference,” The Graduate Faculty Philoso-phy Journal 19/20, no. 2/1 (1997): 28.
5 Ibid., 33.
they enter into constellation.6 In so doing, symbols undermine every attempt to impose a univocal order of meaning upon the gathering of phenomena into community. The political signifi-cance of symbols can thus be felt in the way the phenomenologi-cal difference they bring to expression enjoins a response other than that of archic domination. By awakening us to the origi-nary duplicity of appearing, symbols set us on a path of response capable of transforming existing realities and opening us to new possibilities of relation.7 Schürmann thematizes symbolic praxis and the response it invites in terms of a certain poietics:
The phenomenology of the symbol gives one food for thought: it is speculative insofar as it reflects the origin which shows itself while it hides. The poietics of the symbol give one something to do. Symbols create. The praxis which they invite us to is not inaugurated by man, but by the sym-bols themselves.8
6 Ibid., 15. There Schürmann insists that to which the symbol refers “mani-fests and hides itself at the same time.”
7 Schürmann thus refers also to a “symbolic difference” which he is careful to distinguish from the “ontological difference.” This latter refers, of course, to Heidegger’s insistence on a distinction between “‘being’ as the ‘being of being’ and ‘being’ as ‘being’ with regard to its own proper sense, that is, with regard to its truth (clearing).” See Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klosterman, 1985), 110. Schürmann suggests that if the ontological difference gives being to be thought, the symbolic difference gives “being to be thought, insofar as it calls man onto his originary path. The symbolic difference is not thought in the service of man, any more than the ontological difference. But it says more than the ontological difference: it states the itinerant-wandering which being inflicts on existence awakened to symbols.” See Schürmann, “Symbolic Difference,”
34. Thus, symbolic difference points already to a kind of praxis that emerges as a response to phenomenological difference.
8 Reiner Schürmann, “Symbolic Praxis,” The Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 19/20, no. 2/1 (1997): 39–65, at 39–40. Schürmann writes “poietics,”
it seems, to gesture to the duplicity of the Greek poiēsis discussed in chapter 2. See Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting, 136 and 303. In speaking of a “poetics of politics” rather than a “poietics of politics,” we do not deny the duplicity of poiēsis. However, to speak of a “poetics” is at once to empha-size the creative openness endemic to symbolic praxis and to insist that the
Symbolic praxis, then, involves an invitation to action com-municated to human-beings awake to the duplicitous gather-ing of symbols. As symbolic, it is a praxis rooted in ambiguity and yet held accountable to the play of appearing articulated by and in the symbol itself. To enter into dialogue with the symbol is to be mobilized by a praxis that is other than the politics of domination which seeks to consolidate authority under a univo-cal order of meaning, a politics bound ineluctably to the tragic denial endemic to all thetic legislation.9
Perhaps, then, a dialogue with the symbol of the nuptial as it announces itself in Schürmann’s reading of The Shark and the Gull will itself set us on a path toward another politics. This other politics would be poetic insofar as it opens us to new pos-sibilities of relation rooted in a responsive attunement to the happening of truth in the gathering of community.