passage through Paris. Lacan had made complex plans to obtain specially imported
Schwarzbrot
from the Alsace, together with hard cheeses and ham. Beaufret spends some paragraphs reassuring Lacan that the Heideggers looked forward to nothing better than some croissants, café crème, and perhaps a little
tartine
. Beaufret, a tortured, closeted homosexual who spent most of his days in his pajamas, was in analysis with Lacan for five years, and this was the only time that the great psychoanalyst ever appeared to take any interest in him.
I found a large number of more conventional academic manuscripts in the first box, which kept circlingback to the problem of nihilism and to Michel’s lifelong fascination with Heidegger’s mighty two-volume
Nietzsche
, based on lectures from the late 1930s, but which had appeared in German in 1961, when Michel was in his early twenties. Heidegger himself and many of his apologists saw these lectures as the place where a critique of National Socialist ideology was being articulated after his fateful and hateful brief tenure as rector of Freiburg University when the Nazis came to power in 1933. I thought that such apologetics were bullshit. For Michel, much more interestingly, what was at stake was the question of the relation between philosophy and poetry, in particular the disclosive possibilities of nonpropositional forms of language, such as verbalized nouns and tautologies:
die Sprache spricht, die Welt weltet
, and so on, and on. To what extent was Nietzsche’s wildly inventive, poetic, and polemical thinking contained by Heidegger’s increasingly strident philosophical critique, which interpreted Nietzsche as the mere inversion of Plato and, ultimately, as a figure for our entrapment in metaphysical modes of thinking rather than a release from them? On this reading, Nietzsche was not the exit from nihilism, but its highest expression, its fulfillment (therewas a German word for this—there always is—but I’d forgotten it).
Michel kept coming back, in text after text, to the poetic dimension of Nietzsche’s language and style as that which might escape philosophy. This line of argument was continued in a series of extraordinary short handwritten papers I found on various poets: Saint-John Perse (Michel had introduced me to his long poem
Anabase
when I first met him. I still read it with T. S. Eliot’s translation), Francis Ponge (an essay on the descriptive prose poems in
Le parti pris des choses
), Wallace Stevens (on the late poems from “The Rock.” He had discovered Stevens through Elizabeth), and Rilke’s Ninth Duino Elegy (a commentary on the words “Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable”). On each occasion, Michel showed with exquisite delicacy the fragile force of poetic language as that which pushes back against hard reality and pulls free of flat-footed philosophy.
Poetry lets us see things as they are. It lets us see particulars being various. But—Michel insisted—poetry lets us see things as they are anew. Under a new aspect. Transfigured. Subject to a felt variation. The poet sings a song that is both beyond us, yet ourselves. Things change when the poet sings them, but they are stillour things: recognizable, common, near, low. We hear the poet sing and press back against the pressure of reality. I instantly thought that many of these texts could have been published, if I could have interested the increasingly flagging and beleaguered French and Anglophone academic presses. But such plans soon seemed irrelevant.
Michel had a small cult following in France and the United States, but lacked the capacity for endless and shameless self-promotion that most often defines philosophical fame. Michel slipped into his pajamas around 10:30 p.m. and slept like the dead, thanks to the chemical kindness of his liberal doctor and an understanding pharmacist. While sometimes spotted with moments of brilliance, his talks in English were usually long, rambling,
Schwarzbrot
from the Alsace, together with hard cheeses and ham. Beaufret spends some paragraphs reassuring Lacan that the Heideggers looked forward to nothing better than some croissants, café crème, and perhaps a little
tartine
. Beaufret, a tortured, closeted homosexual who spent most of his days in his pajamas, was in analysis with Lacan for five years, and this was the only time that the great psychoanalyst ever appeared to take any interest in him.
I found a large number of more conventional academic manuscripts in the first box, which kept circlingback to the problem of nihilism and to Michel’s lifelong fascination with Heidegger’s mighty two-volume
Nietzsche
, based on lectures from the late 1930s, but which had appeared in German in 1961, when Michel was in his early twenties. Heidegger himself and many of his apologists saw these lectures as the place where a critique of National Socialist ideology was being articulated after his fateful and hateful brief tenure as rector of Freiburg University when the Nazis came to power in 1933. I thought that such apologetics were bullshit. For Michel, much more interestingly, what was at stake was the question of the relation between philosophy and poetry, in particular the disclosive possibilities of nonpropositional forms of language, such as verbalized nouns and tautologies:
die Sprache spricht, die Welt weltet
, and so on, and on. To what extent was Nietzsche’s wildly inventive, poetic, and polemical thinking contained by Heidegger’s increasingly strident philosophical critique, which interpreted Nietzsche as the mere inversion of Plato and, ultimately, as a figure for our entrapment in metaphysical modes of thinking rather than a release from them? On this reading, Nietzsche was not the exit from nihilism, but its highest expression, its fulfillment (therewas a German word for this—there always is—but I’d forgotten it).
Michel kept coming back, in text after text, to the poetic dimension of Nietzsche’s language and style as that which might escape philosophy. This line of argument was continued in a series of extraordinary short handwritten papers I found on various poets: Saint-John Perse (Michel had introduced me to his long poem
Anabase
when I first met him. I still read it with T. S. Eliot’s translation), Francis Ponge (an essay on the descriptive prose poems in
Le parti pris des choses
), Wallace Stevens (on the late poems from “The Rock.” He had discovered Stevens through Elizabeth), and Rilke’s Ninth Duino Elegy (a commentary on the words “Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable”). On each occasion, Michel showed with exquisite delicacy the fragile force of poetic language as that which pushes back against hard reality and pulls free of flat-footed philosophy.
Poetry lets us see things as they are. It lets us see particulars being various. But—Michel insisted—poetry lets us see things as they are anew. Under a new aspect. Transfigured. Subject to a felt variation. The poet sings a song that is both beyond us, yet ourselves. Things change when the poet sings them, but they are stillour things: recognizable, common, near, low. We hear the poet sing and press back against the pressure of reality. I instantly thought that many of these texts could have been published, if I could have interested the increasingly flagging and beleaguered French and Anglophone academic presses. But such plans soon seemed irrelevant.
Michel had a small cult following in France and the United States, but lacked the capacity for endless and shameless self-promotion that most often defines philosophical fame. Michel slipped into his pajamas around 10:30 p.m. and slept like the dead, thanks to the chemical kindness of his liberal doctor and an understanding pharmacist. While sometimes spotted with moments of brilliance, his talks in English were usually long, rambling,
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