thinking of Ereignis or "propriation." ("Later" here means from 1935 onward; see especially the remarks on language in Readings IV, V, and IX.)
In Being and Time Heidegger had emphasized the primary importance of discourse or talk (die Rede) for language, and the secondary or "derivative" character of assertions and propositions—the discourses of science and philosophy, but also of journalism, politics, and culture generally. He also stressed the importance of our listening to and heeding speech, suggesting that the silence that enables us to listen is more significant than all the noise of signification. (His remarks on silence in Being and Time receive a noteworthy qualification in the present essay.)
"The Way to Language" too takes its orientation from the spoken rather than the written word. After all, a long line of thinkers from Aristotle to Wilhelm von Humboldt set their written seal of approval on the primacy of speech for language. Language speaks. The Romantic writer and thinker, Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772-1801), who contributes the phrase that opens Heidegger's "Way," tells us that language "concerns itself purely with itself alone." If language speaks, its speech is a "monologue." Heidegger's own way to language begins with this dual inheritance. Language speaks. Language speaks. Yet its monologue is not a self-absorbed mumble. Language says something when it speaks, and such saying (sagen, die Sage) will be Heidegger's major concern in "The Way to Language." As simple as that sounds.
By saying something, language addresses people and things in the world; it points to them, as it were, showing them to be matters of concern. The showing and pointing (zeigen, die Zeige) that language perform constitute the very essence of language. They delineate its profile, its rift-design (der Auf-Riss: see Reading IV). Through its saying, showing, and pointing, language lets people and things be there for us, allows them to come into their own and radiate in presence. Monologue never simply upstages the things. It owns up to the fact that its saying becomes telling only when it lets a being come into its own.
What about this "owning up" and its "owning"? Perhaps the most hazardous turns on Heidegger's way to language involve the words own and owning in their many cognate forms. "Own" is eigen in German, and it is the root of a whole series of resonant words for Heidegger: eigentlich, the crucial epithet of Heidegger's analysis of