Читать книгу Error, Illusion, Madness - Bento Prado Jr. - Страница 13

At this point we could appeal to that notion of a life in disorder as the ground of the liberation of all its flows that is the highest expression of Bento Prato’s recovery of phusis. This places us before a strategy that would inevitably appear to retrieve some of the themes of Heidegger’s ontological project. There would be several entry points into this discussion, but I choose one that I believe would be to Bento Prado’s liking: a commentary on a poem. The poem in question is Paul Celan’s Todtnauberg, a tribute to Heidegger written after Celan visited him in the hut located in the village that gives the poem its name. If I refer to it, it is because it orients us once again toward that swampy language that meant so much to Bento Prado and pulled him apart from Heidegger and his land:

Arnica, eyebright, the

draft from the well with the

star-die on top,

in the

Hütte,

written in the book

—whose name did it record

before mine?—,

in this book

the line about

a hope, today,

for a thinker’s

word

to come,

in the heart,

forest sward, unleveled,

orchis and orchis, singly,

raw exchanges, later, while driving,

clearly,

he who drives us, the mensch,

he also hears it,

the half-

trod log-

trails on the highmoor,

humidity,

much.²⁵

It would be possible to give this poem an impoverished interpretation, treating it as a narrative or stylized account of an encounter that effectively took place between Celan and Heidegger. (They met at Heidegger’s hut, there really was a well by the entrance, there really was a book in which visitors wrote down their names …) Instead, we should view it as a clear reflection, by the poet Celan, on the philosopher Heidegger, whose thought he indeed knew well.

Celan’s poem begins by mobilizing figures of phusis, a phusis that, as Heidegger reminded us, “is a fundamental Greek word for Being.”²⁶ It is no coincidence that the first verses refer to medicinal plants, arnica and eyebright (Augentrost, literally “solace of the eyes”). Phusis appears here as care, protection, and cure, the restoration of an original form after illness. Yet the poem closes with phusis decomposing in the swamp, in humidity, in dead tree-flanked half-trod log trails. This is the decomposition of that which no longer protects us but implicates us in its liminal existence and, precisely for that reason, appears as a path, even if only a half-path.

We could say that the whole poem is a description of the movement of emergence of an “unthought” whose name cannot be heard, as we are still waiting for the word to come. It starts by opposing well and stars: the well as an archetypical image of origin, the stars as guides to our travels (as when we look to the sky for orientation). To drink from the well is to “take in what rises and bring away what has been received.”²⁷ Acting is undercut by figures of receiving, but of a receiving that places itself as a source. The received that unfolds here is the contingency that “destitutes” me, the accident that refers back to the fact that there is no destiny at the origin. Thus to drink from the well while having “dice stars” above us is to place the downward movement toward the source under the upward movement of the eyes, which discover chance in stellar constellations. These are two figures of phusis played against each other, two different images of what Heidegger describes so aptly as a “defenselessness [that] itself affords safebeing”²⁸ because it is an opening to what is not human, to what is not a mere expression of the human will.

Well and stars as two distinct figures of destiny, of a destiny that haunts us when we open the book. What names before mine? What became of them, who are now only traces? Will I remain only as trace? Against the reduction of oneself to a trace, we see a destiny that projects itself forward in the form of hope, of hope’s temporality of expectation. And what is philosophy if not that which rhymes Denkenden and kommenden, what is to come and the one who thinks? Every thought emits a throw of the dice, as Mallarmé, for whom Celan had so much respect, would say; every thought is the expectation stirred by the word.

At this point the poem brings into play some of the images that were dearest to Heidegger’s thought: the clearing as open space, the path or track through the forest. For there is no word to outline the common; neither the philosophical nor the poetic word can do that. Philosophy and the poem cannot be the space in which the common finds its word, even if this word is “Being.” On the contrary, the common will insist against the word, since it lacks a grammar of its own. For philosophy stretches language as far as its point of non-identity, where its capacity to name things collapses, and that is the true critical function that, as Bento Prado knew so well, it cannot but share with the poem. It recognizes the risk of technical domination over phusis, it knows that “[t]echnical production is the organization of the departure”;²⁹ but the source of departure is a common devoid of a proper language. This impropriety will have to implicate the one who until now has seen herself as “human,” it will have to transform her for the experience of ipseity to be reconstituted.

If orchids are the exuberant flowers that grow in the swamp in their autarkic beauty, then the poem will be the path leading the orchid to the swamp, from the most exuberant form to a living chaos in which humidity is the emergence of the many, of the multiple. There will thus be a direction that combines rawness, a time that is always other (später, that is, “later”) and the insistence of a deutlich (“clearly”) in which one can hear both clarity and the name of the soil, the German land. But this direction is a trail that remains half-trod. Paradoxically, this does not prevent it from leading somewhere. But it only gets there when, becoming conscious of the retreat of the first healing figures of phusis, arnica and eyebright, we open ourselves up to a phusis that teaches us how to love what, in us, pertains to the swamp. Nevertheless, as Bento Prado could observe on the basis of that experience of decentered ipseity with which Celan’s interrogations resonated, we will never see this form of thinking emerge anywhere near the Todtnauberg hut. This is the point at which Bento Prado’s originality can be measured.

Translated by Rodrigo Nunes