Date: 	Tue, 6 Aug 1996 19:06:56 -0400
From: paul.murphy-AT-utoronto.ca
Subject: Re: Verhaltenheit/violence/Seinsdenken


On Tue, 6 Aug 1996, Tom Blancato wrote:

> 
> 
> Pronunciation, the musicality of a language, is something that isn't
> brought in to this question much, I guess. I have to somehow make this
> comment with a number of provisos, since it could easily be taken as
> xenophobic, superficial, etc. But it seems to me that phonically German is
> a very strife-ridden language. I get the impression that the gutteral,
> consonant sound somehow matches Heidegger's mood, or perhaps he works, in
> some way, perhaps on only a minute level, to acheive a musical-poetic
> unity with the wresting sound of the langauge, its unrest. 

Not to get wildly off topic, but I've heard a tape of Heidegger reading 
"Der Satz der Identitaet" (from _Identity and Difference_) and it was 
quite interesting: Heidegger reads very slowly, his pitch-intonation 
varies widely, ascending the heights for emphasis, achieving a kind of 
hypnotically musical intensity at times, while his contrastive 
connectives ('allein', 'dennoch') are barked out like cymbal crashes. His 
soft Swabian accent is also 
evident in many places (r's, 'ig' endings). Not quite like hearing Joyce 
reading "Anna Livia Plurabelle", though.

I once saw a record in a Freiburg bookstore of 
Heidegger reading Hoelderlin, but I didn't buy it. 

Cheers,
Paul N. Murphy


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