If in Sein und Zeit Martin Heidegger famously discusses the sense of the possibilities of existence that can arise from a minor incident in the tool-shed – for example, the notorious remarks concerning ‘the broken hammer’ – he barely mentions art at all. Yet, over the subsequent decade, he becomes more and more attentive to the role that the work of art might play in the realm of thinking, and, above all, of poetry in particular as a way to outflank the deleterious forgetting-of-the-forgetting-of-the-meaning-of-being by the metaphysical tradition that has culminated in our own epoch of the worldwide reign of technology. In our time (if not only in our time), the ancient division between technē and poiesis has metastasized to the point where nothing escapes the enframing essence of modern technology … except, perhaps, something that poetry harbours that is irreducible to such an essence. This chapter takes up the question of the development of Heidegger’s doctrines on technology and poetry by examining two key moments: Being and Time and “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In doing so, the chapter reconstructs a processual “logic” to Heidegger’s turn that links these apparently different doctrines through the figure of the broken tool becoming poetry.

This chapter explores a significant thesis that emerges in Heidegger’s reading of Kant: the linear, unidirectional form of time that Kant outlines is dependent on another model of time – the human temporality comprising three interlaced temporal capacities. The chapter argues that developing this thesis represents the central philosophical payoff of Heidegger’s Kant interpretation; Heidegger goes to Kant to develop his own account of temporal idealism. Heidegger concurs with Kant that the form of time is relative to the human standpoint, but offers a deeper account of where that form of time comes from – i.e., how it derives from the very structure of the human being. While Being and Time attempts to trace the characteristics of linear time back to the human being’s temporality, Heidegger’s account of time in the Kant interpretation elaborates how temporality produces linear time. Specifically, Heidegger outlines the process of self-affection, in which the interaction between the human being’s three temporal capacities actualizes another model of time by interpreting the time that we ourselves are. This argumentative approach foregrounds a gap between the temporality of the human being and the interpretation of time upon which we arrive, suggesting that time could be otherwise interpreted.