THE EVENT OF THE HOLY: ON THE ESSENCE-TO-COME OF THE IMMEDIATE

Abstract

This paper investigates the relationship between immediateness, its essence (as the “holy”) and the event, drawing on Heidegger’s Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry. The article will begin by clarifying why the “immediate” can only be identified with “nature,”1 which is the “all-mediating mediatedness”. 2 Thus, the “immediate” coincides with the “mediatedness” (namely, mediation) of mediated beings. The analysis will then shift to the “holy” understood as the “essence of nature”, 3 so consequently, as the essence of the “immediate”. This will lead to the mode of presence of the holy: According to Heidegger, the holy is indeed “present as what is coming”. 4 The “immediate”, in its essence, is not an “already-been dimension” of the mediated. The holy, therefore, is not an event that has always already occurred, opening space for the emergence of mediated beings: The holy is given insofar as it is to come. This does not mean that the holy coincides with a future event, or with an impossibility that can never be. “Nature” arises from “chaos”, which corresponds to the “holy” itself. 5 The holy at the heart of the immediate is hence originary and has effectively begotten nature, being that which is coming. To grasp this dynamic, the issue of the “poetic word” as the event of the holy6 will be addressed. The poetic word does not refer to something that has been or will be: A generative dynamic is always ongoing, in which the poetic word corresponds to the event of the essencing of immediate mediation. This paper will demonstrate how, in the poetic word, “what is coming” has begotten — and continues to beget — the omnipresent immediate (mediation) in its difference from beings.