Destiny Symposium Response

Julia A. Ireland

In reading this Symposium I was struck by the tension between needing to contextualize destiny in terms of the Black Notebooks and the reticence of participants to entirely get rid of destiny itself. In answer to Richard Polt’s question, “Are such concepts [those that go with Geschick] still fruitful?” the answer seems to be “yes.” And the primary reason for that “yes” is the relation between an “inheritance,” or Erbe, and singularity. This is captured in Greg Fried’s nudging toward “ontic” destiny and Elliot Wolfson’s closing points about “belonging-together” and difference (what he also terms “the foreign”), as well as in Peg Birmingham’s forceful statement about the people “as the coexistence of unique singularities in a plurality with others engaged in a collective struggle to confront its history.” There is an ambiguity intrinsic to ontic destiny that can lead to an essentialist conception of the Volk or to the kind of “collective struggle” Peg points to. For Heidegger, the proper orientation to ontic destiny follows from the priority of ontological destiny. Hölderlin – whose German is an invented rather than a naturalized form – is the point at which epochal priority and ontic destiny cross.

In my own work I have wanted to elaborate some aspects of this crossing, since the Hölderlin lecture courses reflect a strange complicity with National Socialism even as Heidegger contests Nazism’s ideological reductions. The difficulty for me resides in the hyperbolic aspects of Heidegger’s ontic privileging of Hölderlin. Is there only one “point” (or poet) of ontic access to destiny, only one way the work of language takes up an inheritance as the articulate plaint of collective affect? When it comes to ontic destiny, can the death of God and the revolt of the Earth as the site of mortal habitation and “white supremacy” be read in terms of one another? (And “white supremacy” here means anti-Black racism, whose critique of capitalism has involved some of the same anti-Semitic tropes as Heidegger’s Notebooks.) What conception of singularity traverses these ontic destinies as sharing “the same world in common”?

There is a fruitful point of contact between Hölderlin and W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk with respect to their inheritance of Herder’s understanding of a “people” (Volk) that attempts to separate concepts of racial phenotype from a “national gift” as the expression of collective identity. Bracketing the manner in which the Herderian schema lends itself to a racial romanticism and its cosmopolitan teleology, in both Hölderlin and Du Bois, the gift or “endowment” (Mitgift) is differentially related to a “foreign” or “others” by way of a “task.” (Heidegger develops this as an Aufgabe that is itself an Auftrag, an assignment.) Neither foreign nor national are essentially endowed as separate; rather, these very concepts are each given through the other as the differential – which means the ontically singular – articulation of a “belonging together.” This belonging together is Geschick as the ontological site of struggle.

For Du Bois, “white supremacy” means having inherited the moral contradiction between the founding assignment of freedom, equality, and justice and chattel slavery (the term “white supremacy” is James Baldwin’s). On the one hand, the white national “gift” is exploitation as making money through brown bodies as the refusal of the founding assignment itself. On the other, the “gift” of what it means to be a “Negro” is the suffering intoned in the Sorrow Songs – the ability to have a “soul” as the call of a conscience and consciousness able to fulfill the terms of the founding assignment as a shared task. However, this shared task implies taking up singularity in the differential distribution of the inheritance as the belonging together of trauma and refusal through which ontic destiny is realized as solidarity in the struggle for justice.