Ellipsis: Of Poetry and the Experience of Language after Heidegger, HLderlin, and Blanchot

What is the nature of poetic language when its experience involves an encounter with finitude; with failure, loss, and absence? For Martin Heidegger this experience is central to any thinking that would seek to articulate the meaning of being, but for Friedrich Holderlin and Maurice Blanchot it is a mark of the tragic and unanswerable demands of poetic language. In Ellipsis, a rigorous, original study on the language of poetry, the language of philosophy, and the limits of the word, William S. Allen offers the first in-depth examination of the development of Heidegger's thinking of poetic language-which remains his most radical and yet most misunderstood work-that carefully balances it with the impossible demands of this experience of finitude, an experience of which Holderlin and Blanchot have provided the most searching examinations. In bringing language up against its limits, Allen shows that poetic language not only exposes thinking to its abyssal grounds, but also indicates how the limits of our existence come themselves, traumatically impossibly, to speak. Book jacket.Allen, William S. is the author of 'Ellipsis: Of Poetry and the Experience of Language after Heidegger, HLderlin, and Blanchot', published 2007 under ISBN 9780791471517 and ISBN 0791471519.