Due to his particular style and use of language the work of Martin Heidegger is often dismissed – perhaps most famously by Rudolph Carnap – as metaphysical nonsense. Even some of Heidegger's more sympathetic commentators take issue with his use of ‘flowery’ language, the excess of metaphor and his penchant for inventing terms to satisfy his philosophical needs; it makes his work – they say – appear closer to literary prose than rigorous philosophy. And, as David Nowell Smith tells us in Sounding/Silence – a recent addition to Fordham's Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series – Heidegger is also passed over in the domains of literary criticism and poetics. Writing at the limits of both disciplines, Heidegger seems to fall between them and apparently satisfies no one. Smith, however, seeks to set this right. In this concise volume, he aims to bring together Heideggerian scholarship and poetics in such a way as to ‘benefit them both... [and] open up possibilities and exigencies for a philosophical poetics to come.’ (18)

The book is divided into four chapters. The first takes as its starting point Heidegger's 1935/1936 essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, offering a convincing argument for the ontological significance of the formal features of artworks. Beginning with painting and sculpture and moving on to poetry, Smith analyses how the artwork brings about an openness of beings that, whilst not dependent on the formal features of the work, would nevertheless be impossible without them. The formal features and the way artists use their medium (Heidegger argues that artworks use but do not use up their ‘work material’) are thus presented by Smith as the ‘groundless ground’ of the unconcealedness of beings engendered by works of art – i.e. that which ‘is at once the Grund (ground) of our openness to the world’, but at the same time ‘withdraw[s] from this openness and only show[s] itself as nothing’ (31). Here Smith's analysis is at its strongest, as he ties this insight gleaned from the essay back to Heidegger's discussion of anxiety and the groundless ground of Dasein's Being in Heidegger's magnum opus, Being and Time. Smith argues for continuity between these two texts and continues in this vein throughout the subsequent chapters, highlighting connections not only between these works, but throughout Heidegger's oeuvre. Smith avoids making the strict and impassable distinction between the ‘early’ and ‘later’ Heidegger, which has become commonplace in much Heideggerian scholarship, and instead regards his body of work with a more holistic eye.

The result of this approach is seen most fruitfully in chapter two in Smith's discussion of the bodily articulation of language. Here he argues that Heidegger's later insights into ‘naming’ – the verbal articulation that engenders intelligibility – can help reconcile the different conceptions of ‘voice’ – poetical discourse and the silent call of conscience – found in Being and Time. Moreover, Smith observes that this conception of naming resists the division of language into, on the one hand, a lexico-syntactic system of reference, and on the other paralanguage – that which is ‘meaningful without necessarily having a determinate signification’ (62). This results in the conclusion that, for Heidegger, language is necessarily bodily. Although bodily articulations such as hand gestures, winks and nods may not be referential in the same way linguistic utterances are, they nevertheless serve to bring us into an openness of beings. In Heidegger's discussion of the gesturing hand, for example, we see the possibility of gesture to ‘set[] about a movement that will first permit humans to comport themselves towards beings, and the human body becomes the site of this comportment.’ (76) Bodily articulations such as these, then, are not relegated to the status of paralanguage, but instead are taken on an equal footing with linguistic utterance to give a picture of language as a whole, constituted as a mode of both linguistic and bodily openness. Poetical discourse comes to occupy a privileged position because of its ability to bring to light this dual openness and, in Smith's words, ‘engage with the opacity of the human body’ (98). If language is to be understood as inextricably bound up with the human body and its articulation, as Smith suggests, then this has significant consequences for Heidegger's work as a whole. As Smith intimates, it overcomes the apparent lacunae of embodiment in Being and Time, but also shows that Heidegger is rethinking not only language, but also the human body, which is now ‘no longer a physiological organism receiving sense data, but is always already oriented in an intelligible world, open to every horizon in which something like “sense data” can first appear.’ (121) Although these insights are present in Heidegger's work, Smith's way of framing them and bringing them to the fore, means that Sounding/Silence should be of interest not only to those concerned with the aesthetic dimensions of Heidegger's work and his exploration of language, but also those involved in Heideggerian scholarship more generally.

Chapter three builds on the connection between bodily and linguistic forms of meaning and Heidegger's resistance to oppositional thinking, through an exploration of metaphor in Heidegger's texts. Smith argues that one can appeal to the internal logic of Heidegger's thought in order to salvage a conception of metaphor that overcomes the apparent contradiction of Heidegger's seeming use – but also explicit rejection – of this device. Smith suggests that Heidegger is critical of the traditional use of metaphor, which he believes shuts us off from the ‘unsettling effects of language’ (117) via the deployment of a figurative/literal binary. However, he suggests one can nevertheless appeal to what Derrida deemed ‘the metaphoric power of the Heideggerian text’ (103) in order to salvage a conception of metaphor that draws us towards, rather than away from, the unsettling effects of language, and demands them to be thought. Chapter three also functions obliquely as an engagement with the criticism so often levelled at Heidegger by ‘analytic’ philosophers. Namely, that his use of language is obtuse, contorted and full of unnecessary jargon. Via the discussion of metaphor, Smith explores the philosophical significance of Heidegger's style, asking why he writes in this way and what possibilities it opens up. Smith concludes that Heidegger's unconventional use of language is, in essence, an attempt to ‘practice what he preaches’. Recognising the philosophical import of certain poetical ways of writing and their ability to disclose the world in new and different ways, Heidegger deploys these techniques in his own work, ‘all the while refusing to have such strangeness simply categorized, and domesticated, by recourse to the concept, trope, or philosophical constellation of metaphor’ (113). Again, then, we see Heidegger occupying the space between the philosophical and the poetic in order to open up new avenues of thought.

However, as Smith argues in the final chapter, despite the possibilities Heidegger's work opens up for poetics and literary criticism, he fails to exploit these to their full potential and ‘read in accordance with the exigencies of his [own] thought’ (134). Chapter four thus presents us, not with the limits of poetics, but with the limits of Heidegger's thought, demonstrating how Heidegger's work is of the greatest service to poetics when one reads both beyond and against what is explicitly said. Smith's emphasis in this chapter is on the role of ‘preservation’, which explores the relation between the human being and the work of art, examining our ability (or inability) to ‘stand within’ the openness of beings that the work brings about (143). Preservation is distinguished from connoisseurship, which does not submit itself to the work and thus is not receptive to the openness it engenders. However, Smith questions whether Heidegger himself fully submits to the poems with which he engages in the way his thought demands. The ‘central paradox’ of preservation, Smith argues, is that ‘Heidegger must remain outside the poem, even as he attempts to stand within the openness it brings about’ (162). Smith then turns Heidegger's analysis back on itself, asking not how Heidegger can transform our readings of the poems with which he engages, but how ‘the poems mark, and even fragment, Heidegger's readings of them’ (162). Through close analysis of Georg Trakl's poems ‘Ein Winterband’ and ‘In stillste ruh’, Smith explores how these works infiltrate Heidegger's philosophy and come to shape his thinking.

In this final chapter, as in the work as a whole, Smith offers a detailed and rigorous analysis of Heidegger's encounter with poetry and poetry's encounter with Heidegger. This book will thus undoubtedly be of interest to anyone concerned with the intersection between these domains. My primary concern, however, is that in his engagement, Smith himself is writing at the margins of both philosophy and literary criticism, employing two sets of very specific terminology, which, whilst explained and elucidated with great care, may still be off-putting to the unfamiliar reader; thus leaving the invaluable insights – not only into Heidegger's views on poetics – but into literary criticism, poetics and Heideggerian scholarship more generally – themselves unthought, which would be a great shame for such a rigorous and instructive work as this.