Kristina Mendicino, '“Logos”: On Riddles, Gaps, and Remainders in Heraclitus, Heidegger, and Lacan'

Kristina Mendicino is Professor of German Studies and Chair of German Studies at Brown University. She is the author of Prophecies of Language: The Confusion of Tongues in German Romanticism, Announcements: On Novelty, and Passive Voices (On the Subject of Phenomenology, and Other Figures of Speech), and she is the editor of several volumes and special issues on topics ranging from German Idealism to the literary character of phenomenology. Her current monograph in progress, which has the working title Unfounded Truths, addresses the precarious character of truth as it emerges in distinction from knowledge through Martin Heidegger’s philosophical wagers, Lacanian psychoanalysis, as well as the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, André Gide, and Georg Trakl.

“Speech” and “reason” are displaced in favor of a “riddle” (Rätsel) in Martin Heidegger’s numerous commentaries on Heraclitus’ lógos. Following the signs that he gleans from the extant fragments of Heraclitus, and especially from the fragment that could be rendered: “Having heard not me but the lógos, it is apt (sophón) to accord with it (homologeīn): one is all,” Heidegger arrives upon the thought that lógos does not primarily signify anything like ‘ratio,’ ‘verbum,’ ‘reason,’ or ‘sense,’ but rather a gathering which indicates an originary entanglement of “the essence of language” and “the essence of Being” that has yet to be thought.  Read more