Abstract

The study is addressed to the question of whether our most primordial experience of time is narrative or poetic in character, and it asks this question by way of the early and later works of Martin Heidegger. What emerges in the Wegen of Heidegger's thinking is not a grounding of narrative structures in temporality, but rather the very overcoming of the narrative characterization of temporality. The narrative character of temporality is first broken in Heidegger's account of finite temporality in Being and Time, insofar as Dasein's momentary fulfillment in the call of conscience is undermined by an incompleteness which arises from its being to death. Dasein is said to appropriate the call in reticence . By reflecting on Heidegger's later understanding of the role of reticence in language, the study argues that Dasein's appropriation of the call of conscience in reticence does not constitute a call to narrative resolution, but rather a call to be owned by language. The notion of Dasein as the being in whose occurrence our most primordial experience of time is marginalized in the call, in such a way that language itself, and especially poetic language, comes into its own as the site in which the giving relation of time and Being can be thought, without reference to the possibilities of a subject. ;The study then turns to Heidegger's work on the poetry of Holderlin, Trakl, and George, and shows how the interplay of words in the poem evokes the nonfoundational giving that Heidegger came to see as characteristic of time. The interplay of words in the poem is our entree into thinking the Zuspiel of nearing and withdrawal that Heidegger speaks of in Time and Being, in which past, present, and future give themselves to one another and thereby bring about presencing. ;Human being does not make time through the self-reflective process of narration; rather, the giving of time reaches human being, who stands within its differencing interplay. It is this giving of time that we experience when we stand within the unsaid, as it unfolds in the nearness that abides in poetic language