Ground and abyss: The question of poiesis in Heidegger, Arendt, Foucault, and Stevens

This dissertation examines the question of foundations through close readings of four works: Martin Heidegger's The Origin of the Work of Art Hannah Arendt's On Revolution Michel Foucault's The Order of Things and Wallace Stevens' "The Idea of Order at Key West." In particular, it focuses on the question of poiesis--the act of language through which things are first illuminated and made to appear as such. Each of the four works attempts to bring to light something fundamental that resists or eludes established concepts: Heidegger attempts to uncover a level of truth that lies unexperienced and unthought beneath the traditional conception of truth Arendt tries to bring out a disjunction between theory and practice in the heritage of the American revolution Foucault attempts to transform the history of ideas by bringing to light a stratum of discourse invisible to established modes of linguistic analysis and in his poem Stevens tries to illuminate the enigmatic power that gives poetic language its force. At the same time, each work tries to account for this bringing-to-light itself--the poietic power of its own language. Consequently, all the works exhibit a paradoxically self-reflexive self-grounding structure. Each one offers itself as an example of the poietic act it describes. And each one can only justify or account for itself as an act of language on the grounds that it itself brings to light. For example, the Declaration offers itself as an example of the revolutionary act of foundation it describes in the principle of revolution, but it can only justify its own act of foundation on the basis of the principle of revolution it itself lays down.My aim in the dissertation is to construct a refined and rigorous concept of poiesis. I try to do this through a genuine reading of the works. Each reading tries to proceed through three steps: first, to turn the work's concepts or figures back on itself in order to understand it in its own terms second, to locate the limits of the work's self-reflection, the point where the work cannot account in theory for what it is doing in practice and third, to refine or transform the language of the text in order to bring to light what had been invisible within it. Such a reading would itself be an act of poiesis.