Heidegger’s figures

This essay argues that Heidegger's critique of metaphor and figurative language, both within philosophical idiom and the reading of poetry, constitutes an original and far-reaching contribution to this issue. In particular, it focuses on Heidegger's insistence that the import of metaphor for philosophy and poetry lies in its structural dependence, as meta-pherein or Über-tragung (carrying-over), on the dualism between sensuous and nonsensuous realms. In this, the critique opens on to a far more developed thinking on the relation between bodily experience and linguistic cognition, and in particular an attempt to think of the body as a site for an ‘articulation’ of language anterior to any opposition of sound and sense. It is in order to think that by this bodily articulation of language the question of ‘poetic’ figure becomes particularly crucial for Heidegger, and the article ends by suggesting directions for us to take Heidegger's insights into poetic figure that would reach beyond the confines of Heidegger's own work.