This chapter focuses on the poetological prose texts and drafts that make up Friedrich Hölderlin’s unfinished tragedy, Empedocles. In line with Empedocles’ plunge into Aetna, these texts reflect attempts to translate, not a language, but a fire, which elemental force turns out to be both the precondition for speech and its preclusion. For Hölderlin, the tragic logos is the prophetic analogos that follows upon (ana) a moment of burning—be it the fire-sacrifices that a Greek mantic translates, the fires of Aetna, or the fiery “dissolution” of an entire fatherland. At the extreme, however, the language of Aetna’s flames is unspeakable. For beneath Aetna lies Zeus’ last Titanic rival, the fire-breathing Typhon, who has a hundred heads and at least as many tongues, as Hölderlin knew from Hesiod and Pindar. The pure possibility of tragic language is not an ideal totality, but a titanic one, in which all languages speak at once. And although Hölderlin would never complete his drama, its very inachievement demonstrates the perils of an experience of foreignness in language, where the limits and origins of speech are not only thought and spoken—but also silenced, dissolved, and disrupted, in their constitutive plurality.
God as pure possibility and the wonder of possibilisation.
