University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

This book is intended as an interdisciplinary study, bringing together literary studies, continental philosophy, and linguistics. As the title indicates, it explores both language according to Heidegger, or in other words Heidegger’s idiomatic approach, and also language after Heidegger, that is, how we can think differently about language thanks to Heidegger. This is the case because Heidegger’s approach to language is non-Saussurean. To put it most simply, Heidegger does not base his conception on the notion of the sign (signum) and signification. Language for him is not a system of signs, but rather on the way to signs, and cannot be thought, therefore, within the perspective of the metaphysical notions of phone semantike and zoon logon echon. By contrast, much of the reception of and response to Heidegger’s work in English has been mediated by the work of French post-structuralist thinkers who have formulated and have been themselves formed by critically responding to structuralism, both inheriting and reformulating Saussure’s famous account of language as a system of signs. Against this backdrop, his study articulates the singular and innovative—poietic--approach offered by Heidegger. Krzysztof Ziarek is Professor of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is the author of Inflected Language: Toward a Hermeneutics of Nearness (SUNY ), The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the Event (Northwestern), and The Force of Art (Stanford). He has also published numerous essays on Clark Coolidge, Susan Howe, Myung Mi Kim, Stein, Stevens, Heidegger, Benjamin, Irigaray, and Levinas, and co-edited two collection of essays, Future Crossings: Literature Between Philosophy and Cultural Studies (Northwestern) and Adorno and Heidegger: Philosophical Questions (Stanford). He is the author of two books of poetry in Polish, Zaimejlowane z Polski and Sąd dostateczny. He is currently working on a manuscript entitled “Language After Heidegger.” His other current work focuses on the “disappearance” of world in the age of globalization and on the post-Heideggerian notion of being human.