Fanged noumena's second chapter - Fiendish Language

[As Burroughs said language is a virus from outer space...!]

Heidegger’s relation to Trakl is not a comfortable reading of a strange poet who can be tamed and filed inside literary history, but a violent friction between a thinking that wants to rescue something of the meaning of being and language, and a poetry that drags everything toward the edge of explosion and groundlessness...Nick land's here insists first that the question “Did Heidegger succeed in representing Trakl?” is a misleading one, because it already assumes that poetry is raw material serving philosophy or an illustration of theory, whereas Heidegger, even as he reproduces certain metaphysical traditions, tries to make the poem a place where his own thinking is shaken rather than a mere object he explains from above. The illiteracy he criticizes is therefore not technical ignorance but a way of reading that only knows from poetry what can be used or sorted into boxes like "success" and "failure"

And from this perspective Trakl is not a psychological case to be explained by psychiatry, nor a portrait of a cursed poet in the romantic style, but a being in whom the boundaries that allow society to judge the individual have collapsed: job, adaptation, morality, and a balanced life His breakdown, addiction, and complex relation with his sister are not exploited as a sensational story but as a sign that language in his poetry has lost the ability to distinguish between shocking content and finished form; the poem is not a beautiful vessel for diseased material, it is a form generated from the illness itself, from shock, from a wound that can no longer be made pretty. That is why the image of writing in ashes matters: writing is not building a new house on ruins, but moving inside the trace itself, inside remains that cannot be repaired.

When Heidegger speaks of language as something that concerns itself with itself, he takes up Novalis but puts him at a dangerous crossroads: either this movement is understood as a narcissistic repetition, a closed circle of pleasure, or it is understood as another way for the world to appear, as if language when it bends back on itself, opens new gaps for things to show themselves instead of being trapped in the mirror of the self. He therefore refuses to reduce this circle to the language of psychoanalysis, even though he passes near it, and ties it instead to Nietzsche’s thought of eternal return: not as a psychological fate rather an ontological rhythm, a repetition that does not lead to a fixed identity but to a steady fire that does not go out. In this movement the poem becomes a kind of experiment at the edge of philosophy: thought tries to speak from inside the images, inside the blue water, inside the mirror, instead of imposing names and methods on them from outside.

The images this chapter wants to realese : the night pool, the blue animal, the sister, the stars...are not symbols that can be swapped out using a ready-made dictionary, but a knot binding body, language, family, and sky. The blue animal at the forest’s edge is not simply an >(animal) but a figure of a human whose definition is not yet complete, a creature suspended between animal and reason, wandering in a margin where light does not fully arrive and darkness does not fully recede. This threshold zone, where a being sees itself in the water, is where Narcissus meets Dasein: a human drawn to his own image, but in Trakl’s poetry he does not recover a reassuring picture; the pool does not reflect stable features, but a color, a strange blueness, a luminous void that throws the gaze back into an abyss. Narcissism shifts from love of the self to the moment that love collapses under the pressure of a reflection that no longer guarantees identity.

From here Nick land's takes his distance from Hegel, who tended to treat the scattering of stars in the sky as something less rational than the regularity of the solar system, a distribution that obeys no law and is therefore of lesser philosophical value. The dispersal of stars, dust, flocks of birds, all these centerless movements become for him a threat to the image of organized reason. Trakl’s reading, in the form proposed here, goes in another direction: the stars are not chaos waiting to be reduced to a higher order, but an original mode of existence, a primary strewing that precedes every attempt to arrange it into a fixed structure. At that point the level of thinking changes: instead of a metaphysics searching for a center, we speak of layers of density and dispersion, of clouds of signs that thicken and dissolve, where language itself can be seen as a kind of textual plasma that sometimes coagulates into clear meaning and then returns to a fluid state....against this background the figure of the sister appears, not as a secondary character but as a force that cuts lineage and opens onto another night. She is not only an object of longing or a family taboo; she is the doorway through which the poet exits the father’s house, the law of family and theology, toward a space no stable social order can appropriate. Her lunar voice does not lead to reconciliation but to passage, to a zone where the body itself is threatened with transformation: genders mixing, pronouns crossing, beings that do not fit grammatical gender rules or social norms of masculinity and femininity. In this light, Heidegger’s concept of Geschlecht takes on an ambiguous dimension: he wants to distinguish between a stroke that tears the human species into murderous conflicts and the possibility of a gentler duality, but this distinction as a last attempt to save a dream of purity, a dream of a lineage that could be healed of its wounds without admitting that the wound is its origin.

The unresolved tension that remains is that Heidegger, for all his radicality, still searches for a path toward purer thought, toward a language that would cleanse itself of metaphysics by returning to a deeper origin, whereas Trakl pushes the sign toward an edge where there is no origin left to return to, only a continuous night, a wandering of meaning and image that never settles. In such a landscape narcissism is no longer a surplus of self-love but the moment when the self is stripped of its own image, made to stand before waters that reflect nothing but the blue of emptiness and stars spread like a rash on the skin of the sky; and any writing that tries to be honest about this experience has to give up the dream of clear, coherent speech and accept that it too will move in the ashes, in the trace of a fire no one knows when it began or whether it will ever stop.