We know the old story: God was once the name for the unnameable, for what comes to language, to determination. The sacred, with Hölderlin, is a name which no longer covers up the unnameable. It is a placemarker for what the poet cannot name except as the unnameable, maintaining it there, keeping the space open. This is what according to some (Heidegger, for one – and perhaps Blanchot, too) Hölderlin achieved, and, after him the authentic poet stands guard over the absence of the gods, maintains this space, the sacred, as the sacred (the absence of the gods). And over the name God (the name God in Hölderlin’s poetry – the Christian God of the poetry whom Heidegger will always play down)?
The great danger of the modern period is that the death of God is confused by the movement through which creation, the power to create, is isolated by the most important trait of God, the one the human producer wants most to imitate. Art, for example (it’s not just any example) is seen to be a matter of the powers of human creativity – but here the human creator is only an imitation of one aspect of God. Whence Feuerbach’s critique and its aftermath: the death of man must follow the death of God, etc. etc., we’ve all heard this. And if the isolation of the power to create was a sign of an alienation of the human being from itself? Of a transformation of the sense of work, of the power to transform the world, to produce? Then the death of God and the death of man both name phantasms, for what has died can only be thought in terms of that which occured with the appearance of homo laborans. The death of God, the death of man name an attempt of human beings to kill themselves and be reborn under a new sky, and not a sky without God, without gods. To be reborn on a new earth.
What happened in the period of these great discourses (Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx …)? The determination of the human being as the worker. The elevation of the status of work. What died? The death of God and the death of man are only the death spasms of a particular conception of the human being. What does the name God name? And the human being? Before any affirmation of theism or atheism there is the question of what trembles in the name of God and in the name of the human being. Of what these names allow to tremble. And of what of the gods? What trembles in their names? Or even in their collective name: the gods?
(Heidegger helps and hinders with respect to these questions. On the one hand, he passes over the question of Hölderlin’s Christianity. On the other, he provides an account of the appearance of homo laborans as part of a broader determination of being as actualitas. Hegel and Marx, according to Heidegger, answered to this conception. Reread them from this perspective (hasn’t Axelos done this?) But Heidegger himself neglects to provide a theory of commerce and his conception of the political is too narrow. On the other hand, the appearance of the gods, of the last God in his later work …)
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