This is what Heidegger ignores: this dark, torturing other side of our dwelling in language - and this is why there is also no place for the Real of jouissance in Heidegger's edifice, since the torturing aspect of language concerns primarily the vicissitudes of libido. This is also why, in order to get the truth to speak, it is not enough to suspend the subject's active intervention and let language itself speak - as Elfriede Jelinek put it with extraordinary clarity: "language should be tortured to tell the truth." It should be twisted, denaturalized, extended, condensed, cut and reunited, made to work against itself. Language as the "big Other" is not an agent of wisdom to whose message we should attune ourselves, but a place of cruel indifference and stupidity. The most elementary form of torturing one's language is called poetry - imagine what a complex form like the sonnet does to language: it forces the free flow of speech into a Procrustean bed of a fixed shape of rhythm and rhyme. So what about Heidegger's procedure of listening to the soundless word of language itself, of bringing out the truth that already dwells in it? No wonder late Heidegger's thinking is poetic. Recall the means he uses to do this: can one imagine a torture more violent than what he does in, say, his famous reading of Parmenides's proposition "thinking-speaking and being are the same"? To extract the intended truth from it, he has to refer to the literal meaning of words (legein as gathering), to counter-intuitively displace the accent and scansion of the sentence, to translate single terms in an idiosyncratic, descriptive way, and so on.

¶ 8:38 AM