On Nancy, Hölderlin, the Fragmentary and the One

Abstract

Even though his texts do not refer to the poet as frequently as is the case with Nancy’s friend Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, the importance of Friedrich H€ olderlin’s writing and thought for Nancy’s philosophy can hardly be overrated. As the present essay attempts to show, it is precisely the relation between writing and thought that is at stake in the two authors’ intertextual relation. To that end, the essay will deal with two of Nancy’s texts explicitly concerned with H€ olderlin, ‘Hyperion’s Joy’ and ‘The Poet’s Calculation’, as well as with the essay ‘Art, a Fragment’ from The Sense of the World. The reason for the inclusion of the latter text, which contains only one passing reference to H€ olderlin in a footnote, from the perspective of the present essay is, again, twofold: on the one hand, it can be shown that the (or ‘a’) specifically Nancean conception of the philosophical problem of unity lies at the core of his interpretation of H€ olderlin’s poetics as well as of Nancy’s own conception of the fragmentary. On the other hand, this insight invites the attempt to fill an obvious gap left by the two essays on H€ olderlin: while these are almost exclusively concerned with the philosophical implications of H€ olderlin’s poetics and – to a lesser extent, and with a stronger accent on the novel Hyperion than on the poetry – his literary writings, it appears promising to approach H€ olderlin’s specific practice of fragmentary writing, characteristic of the decisive period of his work between 1802 and 1806, in the light of Nancy’s theory of the fragmentary. The attempt to interpret H€ olderlin’s writings through and as philosophical thought, as practised in Nancy’s essays, could thus be supplemented, chiastically as it were, by highlighting the latter’s philosophical conception of the fragmentary through the study of the poet’s concrete literary and artistic practice. Of course, this cannot be done extensively within the scope of the present essay; I shall restrict myself in this respect to two examples taken from the Homburger Folioheft, a manuscript collection of fragments, and drafts of H€ olderlin’s planned cycle of poems in free rhythm, the Vaterl€ andische Ges€ ange.