«Poetics of philosophy», or Henri Meschonnic’s Anti-Heidegger

The article presents an analysis of the reasons for the critical attitude
of the French philologist, thinker and poet Henri Meschonnic to the philosophical
and poetic heritage of Martin Heidegger. The conceptual objections to
the philosophy of language of the latter, laid out by Meschonnic in his book The
Heidegger’s language (Le langage Heidegger, 1990), are considered in the
context of his teaching as a whole, including his personal philosophical attitudes,
biographical circumstances and provisions of his theory. The nature of the
deep ethical and ideological contradictions that underlie the fundamental incompatibility of the philosophical-poetic discourses of the German philosopherpoet
and the French poet-thinker are elucidated.
The Meschonnic’s criticism of what he means by the term “Heideggerianism”,
defining it as a “cult of language”, is primarily based on the antiessentialist
paradigm which assumes that such historically and anthropologically
situated phenomena as language cannot and should not be viewed as a universalized
transcendental entity. In particular, the non-distinction between language
as system (langue), language as activity (langage) and language as speech (parole),
in Saussurian sense, as well as gradual elimination of the notion of discourse
(discours), in Benvenistian sense, followed by their unification by
Heidegger in the single word Sprache (to the detriment of Rede), serve to
Meschonnic as a mark of “fascist” vision of the language. Being considered as a
defining property of the human being, the language, seen in such a way, becomes
the crucial moment of poetry, arts, society and implies radically different
poetics, aesthetics and anthropology.
Methodologically, Meschonnic adopts the Kantian critical attitude but, conceptually,
rejects all post-Kantian ontology, and namely its Heideggerian version.
Furthermore, the French scholar refuses to identify himself as a philosopher
on the grounds that the philosophy as such is based on metaphysics and
consists of an infinite series of various ontologizations. Instead of such
a traditional Occidental philosophy, he suggests another approach, a kind of
“poetics of thought”. In our article, we discuss different theoretical and practical
aspects of this original concept which involves a profound reflection on the
relationship between language, thought and poetry. Using our private materials
(an autographic inscription made by Henri Meschonnic on the first page of his
book Le langage Heidegger) we try to understand and demonstrate the main
principle of Meschonnic’s “poetic philosophy”: the “homogeneity of living and
saying”.