Study Notes: Narcissism and Dispersion in Heidegger’s 1953 Trakl Interpretation

I. FAILURE AS METHOD

The question of failure inhabits Land’s text from its opening lines. What would it mean for Heidegger to “succeed” in his interpretation of Trakl? Such success would presuppose a model of reading as mastery—the philosopher’s dominion over the poem, its reduction to a philosophical “use-value.” Land identifies this presupposition as a symptom of “a profound and positively constituted illiteracy” inherited from the Platonic-Christian tradition, which insists on thinking “poetry as the product of a poet, and, derivatively, as something to be ‘used’ by a philosopher for the purpose of illustrating representational concepts.”

This critique of reading-as-mastery opens onto the question of Trakl himself, whose life registers as a series of failures: he “failed to organize his desires according to the laws of his civilization, failed to keep a job, became addicted to opium, enmeshed in alcoholism, failed to defeat his psychosis and died of a cocaine overdose.” Yet this failure is not merely negative but “a violently traumatic condition” that actively dissolves “every criterion for evaluation”—a process that is also manifest in Trakl’s poetry, which presses “language into the shadows” and undermines the aesthetic distinction between content and form.

Land thus establishes a methodological principle: to learn from Trakl is to “write in ashes,” to inhabit failure as a positive condition rather than a default. This principle guides Land’s approach to Heidegger’s essay, whose structure he describes not as an argumentative progression but as a wave motion, “which describes motion coiling into an enigmatic pulsion and cyclical repetition.” The peaks of this motion reveal distinct themes that momentarily crystallize before shattering “into blinding foam” and sinking “into swirling depths.” Land’s reading will not evaluate Heidegger’s “success” but track the tensions and breaks in his engagement with Trakl—the points where his reading both illuminates and retreats from the poet’s “delicate, futile ardour.”

II. THE CIRCLE OF LANGUAGE

Heidegger’s approach to poetry is characterized by “the refusal to participate affirmatively in the discourse of European aesthetics, and the associated project of rigorously bracketing subject-object epistemological categories.” Against the distinction between normal language and meta-language that traditionally structures interpretation, Heidegger pursues “the uttermost erasure of terminological distinctiveness.” Poetic language is not to be translated into philosophical terms but guided “into a relationship with itself.” This guidance is not executed by “the thinker qua subject, but that of an impersonal thinking which is no longer disguised in the cloak of philosophy.”

This approach finds its articulation in Heidegger’s citation of Novalis: “Precisely what is most peculiar about language, that it only concerns itself with itself, nobody knows.” Language’s self-relation becomes the starting point for Heidegger’s meditation on poetry. Yet this self-relation must be distinguished from narcissism: “As saying, the weft of language is the propriative showing, which precisely deflects its gaze from itself, in order to free what is shown into its appropriate appearing.” Language’s circling back to itself is not self-mirroring but the condition for manifestation.

Land identifies a crucial historical crossroads in this formulation. Heidegger must ward off a potential psychoanalytic misreading that would reduce language’s self-relation to “a theory of narcissism,” where language relates to itself like “a subject enraptured by its own reflection.” At stake is the interpretation of Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence. Heidegger seeks to distinguish his reading of eternal recurrence—”as the last attempt to conceive the temporality of beings, as recapitulation of the history of being, as the circle of language”—from the psychoanalytic interpretation of recurrence as “the ‘death drive’, as the economy of desire, and as the return of the inorganic.”

The question of return thus emerges as “perhaps the crucial thought of modernity,” one that must now be read differently. The dissolution of humanism “is stripped even of the terminology which veils collapse in the mask of theoretical mastery” and “must be hazarded to poetry.” This hazarding constitutes the background for Heidegger’s encounter with Trakl’s poem.

III. GEISTLICHE DÄMMERUNG: THE DARK BEAST AND THE SHATTERED MIRROR

Land observes that Geistliche Dämmerung is the only poem Heidegger cites in its entirety, suggesting “a special difficulty, one that obstructs the process of assimilation and resists the hegemony of the site” that Heidegger attempts to establish as the unifying principle of Trakl’s work. The poem opens with a dark beast (dunkles Wild) at the forest’s rim, which Heidegger identifies with the “blue beast” that negotiates “the difference between animality and the opening of the horizon of being.”

The translation of Wild as “beast” is inadequate, as Land notes, since the German word denotes “a feral animal, especially one hunted as game,” while connoting “wildness and wilderness” and resonating etymologically with Wald (forest). This network of associations is crucial to Trakl’s exploration of animality and Heidegger’s response to it.

For Heidegger, the dark beast is humanity itself: “The blue beast is an animal whose animality presumably rests, not in animalness, but rather in that thoughtful gaze, after which the poet calls.” Humanity emerges as “that animal caught in the play of its reflection,” positioned in the “weave of the distance separating humanity from the beasts of the wilderness” through “a type of thinking that is irreducible to adaptive biological calculation.” This thinking is “rooted in the temporalization of the ontological difference” and traditionally unified “about the thought of transcendence.”

Land then follows Heidegger’s reading of the poem’s final stanza, where “the starry sky is portrayed in the poetic image of the nocturnal pool.” Heidegger insists that “the night sky is in the truth of its weft this pool,” rejecting the notion that the pool is merely a metaphor for the night sky. This insistence is connected to “the problematic of spatiality in post-Kantian thinking, and beyond this with the Greek thought of the heavens as χαοζ [chaos].”

The pool imagery recurs throughout Trakl’s poetry, often showing humanity “its own countenance, its returning gaze.” But in the nocturnal pool, “the gaze does not return in a familiar form; it reveals instead an abyssal twilit blue” rather than a recognizable image. “The image of no thing returns. Reflection is shattered against the impersonal, against the impassive shade of a pure opening or cleft in beings.” Humanity is thus reflected as “a lack of ground or Abgrund which is the transcendental condition of any possible ontology.”

Land then traces how Heidegger’s reading suddenly shifts to the mysterious figure of the sister, associated with “the moon, and thus to the luminosity of the night.” The sister guides “the path of the wanderer throughout the nihilistic metamorphoses, during which the securities of ontotheology lose their authority and disappear into their twilight.” She represents a threshold “between the reflective order of the father’s house and the illimitative difference of the night sky.”

IV. THE LUNAR PROBLEMATIC

The appearance of the sister is accompanied by a reference to “Selanna,” the lunar woman, which Land connects to both Seléné (moon goddess) and Semele (mother of Dionysus). Following Robert Graves, Land notes that Semele was not only the mother of Dionysus but also “the sister of Agave, who tore off her son Pentheus’ head in a Dionysiac frenzy.” This mythological connection opens onto the question of Dionysus’s origins and the repression inherent in attributing a patrilinear genealogy to him.

Originally, Land suggests, Dionysus “had no father,” being associated with the toadstool-god engendered by lightning. The attribution of a father (Zeus) to Dionysus was part of the project to domesticate and regulate Dionysian intoxication: “Wine, which Plato will later accommodate even to dialectic, displaces the fungus of the Dionysian cults (Amanita Muscaria).” This represents an early instance of “the policing of social pathology” that continues into the present.

Land asks: “What is the relation between this ancient policing of social pathology and Heidegger’s interpretation of Trakl?” The answer connects to a deeper issue: “the medicalization of the history of derangement, and its reduction to the historical and psychiatric study of madness.” This regional investigation is “nothing other than the contemporary instance of that discourse of the πολις which first instituted a genealogy of Dionysus.”

The problem extends beyond a specific historical amnesia to a constitutive “delirium integral to the western graphic order,” which implies that “any possible history must arise out of the forgetting (or secondary repression) of a constitutive arche-amnesia (the ellipsis integral to inscription).” Following Klossowski, Land suggests that “western science is aphasic, because it is initiated in the default of a foundational discourse.” This default is not passive but actively administered—a “pharmaco-pathology” that constitutes “the response of the West to the writing of itself.”

In Trakl’s poem, this pharmaco-pathological dimension appears in the “intoxicated voyage across the nocturnal pool” that seems to evade Geschlecht (the general resource of typography) in favor of crossing “the starry sky, through which the lunar voice of the sister resounds.” This introduces a “problematic of the moon” that requires interpretation.

Land notes that in Trakl’s poetry, the night is associated with derangement (Umnachtung), while the moon connects to both femininity and to “lunatics and werewolves.” In the climactic lines of Traum und Umnachtung, these associations converge in a powerful image: “He found a petrified desolation in the evening, the company of one deceased as he entered the dark house of the father. Purple clouds enwreathed his head, so that he fell upon his own blood and image, a lunar countenance; and fainted petrified into emptiness when, in a shattered mirror a dead youngster appeared, the sister: night enveloped the accursed genus.”

Land asks whether there is “a connection to be made between the shattering of the mirror and a movement of astronomical imagery,” suggesting that the sister functions as “a threshold between the reflective order of the father’s house and the illimitative difference of the night sky.” When the sister appears, she “breaches the family, by opening it onto an alterity which has not been appropriated in advance to any deep structure or encompassing system.” This night would be “a fully positive differentiation from the day” rather than its mere negation.

V. THE DECAYED MOON AND STELLAR DISPERSION

Land examines Trakl’s poem Geburt (“Birth”), where lunar imagery functions as “a haemorrhaging of familial interiority.” The poem pivots on the line “Sighing the fallen angel glimpsed his image,” suggesting that “the birth of the sister is to be absorbed in a retreat into the claustrophobic heart of the Geschlecht (genus/gender/generation).” But the subsequent awakening of “a pale one” described as “lunar” redirects the poem outward into the night, back to the image of “the decayed moon.”

Land offers two possible interpretations of this “ruin of the moon”: either as “a dialectical restoration of the inside” where “what had defied the inside was now falling away into self-annihilation,” or as “a protraction of the nocturnal trajectory,” where the moon’s dissolution is “a falling away of what is still too similar to the sun.” Land suggests that Heidegger supports the second interpretation, taking the meaning of the moon to be “a constriction of stellar luminescence rather than the ultimate elimination of sunlight.”

This interpretation connects to a “problematic of enormous importance” concerning “real (and astronomically evident) differences that are in principle irreducible to mathematical formalism.” Land references Deleuze’s work in Difference and Repetition on developing “a quite other and more comprehensive approach to mathematization… without any recourse to ultimate identity or equalities.” The obscuration of such differences within astronomy represents “a deferral rather than a resolution of the problem of radically informal differences.”

Land traces this problem to Hegel’s Naturphilosophie, where the philosopher seeks to subordinate the “stellar moment” to “the concrete and ordered bodies of the solar system,” and these in turn to “the development of terrestrial life.” What offends Hegel about the stars is “the irrational facticity of their distribution; a scattering which obeys no discernible law.” Hegel expresses his disdain through the word Ausschlag (“outbreak”), comparing the stars to a rash on the skin. For Hegel, the stars represent “a differentiation that is at once senseless and sensible, an outbreak of irrationality in the redoubt of reason.”

Land notes that Trakl captures this phenomenon precisely in the phrase Staub der Sterne (“the dust of the stars”). Heidegger also acknowledges “this unity of aus and Schlag as a disruption ‘of’ sentience,” but with a crucial difference: for Heidegger, “sentience is not exploded or threatened from without by the Ausschlag, it is always already under the sway of the outbreak that will be derivatively apprehended as its subversion.”

Heidegger thus provides a “hermeneutical key according to which every sentient reaction to the Ausschlag can be read as a symptom or repetition of the outbreak ‘itself’. It is no longer even that sentience is infected by irrationality; it is rather that sentience has dissolved into the very movement of infection, becoming a virulent element of contagious matter.”

VI. STRATOPHYSICS: TOWARD A MATERIALIST THEORY OF DIFFERENCE

Land extends this analysis to develop what he calls “stratophysics”—a study not dependent on “a transcendental difference” but on “a differentiation in the rate of dissipation.” This constitutes “an abyssal relativism, although not one that is rooted in subjective perspectives, but rather in the open-ended stratifications of impersonal and unconscious physical forces.”

The stars become central to this formulation, as the German word Stern derives from the Indo-European root *ster- meaning “to extend or spread out,” connecting stars to “traces of a primordial strewing; an explosive dispersion, which in its formlessness, defies mathematisation or the reduction to order.” Where metaphysics “has always fixed disorder in a dichotomous relation to an absolute principle of coherent form or ultimate lawfulness,” a stratophysics would “locate regional order within a differentiation in the rate of dissipation.”

Land notes that “astrophysics is marked by its etymology as stratophysics—a materialist study of planes of distributed intensities”—but abandons “its most extreme potentialities when it subordinates itself to mathematical physics.”

This notion of strata applies not only to cosmological phenomena but to language itself: “Each stratum is a dimension of dispersion, flattened like a spiral galaxy,” and the “stacking of organizational levels” becomes “the basic form of any possible energetic surplus… redundancy.” This stratification produces what Land calls “graphic redundancy”—for example, “that stored in the difference between letter and word”—which allows “energy to be unevenly distributed within a stratum, and intensities generated.”

Trakl acknowledges this through imagery of sinking, where “signs and stars sink quietly in the evening-pool.” Land suggests that “stratification is the complex physiological process, the only one, in which the distinction between matter and meaning cannot be sustained.” This materialist approach to meaning connects the astronomical imagery in Trakl’s poetry to a broader critique of the metaphysical tradition.

VII. FLAME AND CONTAGION: HEIDEGGER’S RETREAT

In the final section, Land examines how Heidegger approaches the themes of “exile into the night and astronomical dispersion” through the image of “flame.” The flame represents “the outside itself, that which lightens and lets gleam,” but which can also “expand voraciously so that everything is consumed to become white ash.” Land notes that Heidegger’s focus is on the “or” between gentle illumination and “uncontrolled devastation,” suggesting that Heidegger hopes the “Weiterfressung” (voracious expansion) “can be deflected or suspended in contingency.”

Land then turns to Heidegger’s analysis of Trakl’s expression das verfluchte Geschlecht (“the accursed genus”), connecting it to the Greek word πληγη (“curse”), which is also translated by the Latin plangere (the root of the English “plague”). According to Heidegger, the curse of the “decomposed genus” is that it is “cast apart into the discord of genders,” each striving “for unleashed revolt in an always individuated and naked wildness of the beast.” The curse is not “the twofold” itself but “the discordance of the two.”

Land notes that Heidegger’s question—”what is this cast, this curse or epidemic?”—finds its answer in Trakl’s own vocabulary: Aussatz, meaning “leprosy, infection, and (thus) exclusion.” Yet Heidegger makes no mention of “the frequent references to leprosy throughout Trakl’s poetry,” despite its profound accord with “the ecstative orientation of Heidegger’s reading.”

Land traces this omission to Heidegger’s attempt to distinguish between two types of duality: a cursing cast associated with “antagonistic or conflictual binarity” (Zwietracht) and a “gentle sanft binarity” (Zwiefalt) that escapes “the contagion of the curse.” Drawing upon a thought of pain (Schmerz) as a threshold and relation, Heidegger seeks to ameliorate “the pathological scorching of the stars”: “gentleness is, following the word das Sanfte, the peaceful gatherer. It metamorphoses discord, in that it turns what is injuring and searing in wildness to soothed pain.”

Land critiques this distinction as “an attempt to establish pure and dichotomous distinctions that both explicate and escape the history of oppositional thought.” By holding Zwietracht and Zwiefalt apart, “and refusing to abandon the hope that formal or ultimate dichotomy might be redeemed by a future thinking,” Heidegger engages in what Land calls “a ‘gentle critique’ of the history of metaphysics, a grotesque recapitulation of Kant’s compromise with ontotheological tradition.”

This compromise represents for Land “the sterile hope of an aging philosopher with Platonic instincts, the delusion that the climactic dissipation of Western civilization can be evaded, and that the accumulation of fossilized labour-power can found an eternally reformable social order.” Although not “completely unaware of the profound struggle between the weary regimentation of the patriarchal bourgeoisie, and a fluctuating pool of insurrectionary energy,” Heidegger “felt nauseous at the thought of losing control, and perhaps he still believed in God.”

VIII. COSMIC DISPERSION AND THE HORIZON OF THOUGHT

Land’s critique of Heidegger reveals a fundamental tension within the philosophical tradition: the tension between cosmic dispersion and the horizonal containment of thought. Trakl’s poetry, with its astronomical imagery and its “delicate, futile ardour,” opens onto a space of “stellar dispersion” that resists incorporation into philosophical systems. The stars in their scattered distribution represent a radical form of difference that cannot be reduced to formal opposition or dialectical negation. They enact what Deleuze would call “difference in itself”—a difference that is not subordinate to the identity of concepts.

Heidegger’s reading of Trakl, while sensitive to the poet’s imagery and its implications, ultimately retreats from the full force of this dispersive energy. His attempt to distinguish between a “discordant” duality (Zwietracht) and a “gentle” duality (Zwiefalt) represents a last effort to contain difference within a philosophical framework, to redeem it for future thinking. This gesture recapitulates the fundamental move of metaphysics: the subordination of difference to identity, of dispersion to unity.

The question of Aussatz—leprosy or contagion—marks the limit of Heidegger’s engagement with Trakl. The philosopher cannot follow the poet in naming ecstative eruption “leprosy,” despite its profound accord with his own ecstative orientation. This reluctance indicates a deeper hesitation before the implications of Trakl’s poetry: the possibility that the “stellar dispersion” it evokes might not be containable within any philosophical framework, that it might represent the dissolution of philosophy itself.

Land’s reading, by contrast, embraces this possibility. His notion of “stratophysics” represents an attempt to think difference without subordinating it to identity, to conceptualize dispersion without reducing it to unity. The “abyssal relativism” he proposes is not rooted in subjective perspectives but in “the open-ended stratifications of impersonal and unconscious physical forces.” This represents a radical materialist alternative to the metaphysical tradition, one that takes seriously the implications of Trakl’s “cosmic dispersion.”

In the end, Land suggests, Heidegger’s retreat from Trakl’s more radical implications is not merely a philosophical failure but a symptom of a deeper cultural anxiety: the fear of losing control, of surrendering to the “fluctuating pool of insurrectionary energy” that lurks beneath the “weary regimentation of the patriarchal bourgeoisie.” Heidegger’s attempt to distinguish between “gentle” and “discordant” duality represents a last effort to contain this energy, to channel it into a framework that would preserve the possibility of philosophical mastery.

Land’s alternative is not a new form of mastery but a surrender to dispersion, a writing that accepts its own status as “ashes.” This is not a nihilistic gesture but rather an attempt to think from within dispersion, to inhabit the space of difference without subordinating it to identity. It represents a form of thought that is no longer “disguised in the cloak of philosophy” but hazarded to poetry, to the materiality of language itself.

The implications of this move extend beyond the interpretation of Trakl or Heidegger to the very possibility of philosophical thought in an age of dispersion. If the stars in their scattered distribution represent a form of difference that cannot be reduced to philosophical concepts, what becomes of philosophy? Perhaps, Land suggests, it must become something else—not a system of knowledge but a practice of inhabiting dispersion, a form of thought that no longer seeks to master its object but to participate in its dissemination.

This is the challenge that Trakl’s poetry poses to philosophy, and it is a challenge that Heidegger, for all his sensitivity to the poet’s language, ultimately refuses. In his retreat from the implications of Trakl’s stellar dispersion, Heidegger reveals the limits not only of his own thinking but of the philosophical tradition itself. The image with which Land concludes—Heidegger “exhausted and uncomfortably feverish,” laying down his copy of Trakl’s poems and closing his eyes—captures not just a moment of readerly fatigue but the exhaustion of a mode of thought that can no longer contain the dispersion it confronts.

IX. CONCLUSION: WRITING IN ASHES

Land’s engagement with Heidegger’s Trakl interpretation ultimately returns us to the question of failure with which the essay began. What would it mean to “succeed” in reading Trakl? If success means mastery—the reduction of the poem to philosophical concepts, the containment of its dispersive energy within a system of thought—then perhaps failure is the only appropriate response. To “learn from Trakl” is indeed to “write in ashes,” to accept the dissolution of every criterion for evaluation, to inhabit the space of dispersion without seeking to master it.

This does not mean abandoning thought but rather reconceiving it—no longer as a system of knowledge but as a practice of inhabiting dispersion. The “stellar dispersion” that Trakl’s poetry evokes is not the opposite of thought but its condition, the space in which thinking occurs. To think from within this space is to accept that thought itself is always already dispersed, that it participates in the very dissemination it seeks to conceptualize.

Land’s essay thus proposes not just a reading of Heidegger or Trakl but a reconception of philosophical practice itself. The alternative to Heidegger’s retreat is not another form of mastery but a surrender to dispersion, a thinking that accepts its own status as “ashes.” This is not a nihilistic gesture but rather an attempt to think from within dispersion, to inhabit the space of difference without subordinating it to identity.

The final image of Heidegger closing his eyes is thus not merely a critique but a challenge: to open our eyes to the dispersion that surrounds us, to think from within the scattered distribution of the stars. This is the challenge that Trakl’s poetry poses to philosophy, and it is a challenge that remains as urgent today as it was when Land wrote his essay. To meet it is not to succeed where Heidegger failed but to embrace failure itself as the condition of thought in an age of dispersion.