destiny. This historical site of Da-sein is the “pole” of the polis, from which human beings receive their stance and status in the state and acquire their stature in each of their historical instantiations. This “ ‘politics’ in the supreme and authentic sense” thus takes place at the supreme site of radical historical transition displayed by the Greek tragedy, which glosses the oxymoronic status of the tragic heroine (Antigone) as hypsipolis apolis, at once far beyond and without home and site, unhomely, lonesome, uncanny, singled out for lofty greatness by creating a new home for her people, as well as for the precipitous destruction which was also the fate of Heidegger’s more contemporary heroes: Hölderlin, Nietzsche, van Gogh, and Schlageter. Around this core of history, Da-sein as polis, not only statesmen and thinkers, but also poets and prophets are gathered together in unity and lonely, untimely, tragic, and contentious dialogue. Politicians (or better, statesmen) are not the only creators of the polis and so the political. Especially in the “land of poets and thinkers,” Hölderlin’s “fatherland,” politics finds its origins in poetizing and thinking: “It is from these two prior activities that the Dasein of a people is made fully effective as a people through the state—politics.”12
It is from this archaic vantage of Da-sein that Heidegger now criticizes the Nazi claim of the totalitarian character of the political: “These [Nazi] enthusiasts are now suddenly discovering the ‘political’ everywhere. . . . But the polis cannot be defined ‘politically.’ The polis, and precisely it, is therefore not a ‘political’ concept. . . . Perhaps the name polis is precisely the word for that realm that constantly became questionable anew, remained worthy of question, and necessitated certain decisions whose truth on each occasion displaced the Greeks into the groundless or the inaccessible.”13 Aristotle saw clearly that man was a political animal because he was the animal possessed by speech. But he did not see the full uncanniness that membership in the polis brings, far outstripping the rhetorical as well as the political of a people’s state. Hölderlin’s poetic words, “Since we are a conversation / and can hear from one another,” refer to the thoughtful dialogue among solitary creators (poets, thinkers, statesmen) at the very abysses of being. Language here is the original institution of being in the violent words of poetic origin and not just a means of communication for the sake of quick and easy agreement, rhetoric. The community of creators is a combative community of struggle over the extreme issues of being. Hearing from one another, listening to one another, reciprocally involves radically placing each other in question over the radical issues at stake. Rapprochement here is contention, contestation, war, pole-mos. Coming to an understanding is combat: “Conversation here is not communication, but the fundamental happening of radical exposure in the thick of beings.”14
12. Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein,” GA 39: lecture course of Winter Semester 1934–35, ed. Susanne Ziegler (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1980), 214, 51.
13. Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister,” GA 53: lecture course of Summer Semester 1942, ed. Walter Biemel (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1982), 98f, 102. Translated by William McNeill and Julia Davis as Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister” (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 80, 83.
14. Heidegger, GA 39, 73.