#  “Logos”: On Riddles, Gaps, and Remainders in Heraclitus, Heidegger, and Lacan 

 



####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **October 10, 2024** 

 04:00PM - 04:00PM EDT 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **Barker Center, Room 133**  



 

 



 

##  [GERMAN STUDIES: NEW PERSPECTIVES](/german-studies-new-perspectives)

##  SPEAKER: Kristina Mendicino, Brown University

 “Speech” and “reason” are displaced in favor of a “riddle” (*Rätsel*) in Martin Heidegger’s numerous commentaries on Heraclitus’ *lógos*. Following the signs that he gleans from the extant fragments of Heraclitus, and especially from the fragment that could be rendered: “Having heard not me but the *lógos*, it is apt (*sophón*) to accord with it (*homologeīn*): one is all,” Heidegger arrives upon the thought that *lógos* does not primarily signify anything like ‘ratio,’ ‘verbum,’ ‘reason,’ or ‘sense,’ but rather a gathering which indicates an originary entanglement of “the essence of language” and “the essence of Being” that has yet to be thought. Such is the riddle that Heidegger draws into relief over the course of his interpretations, but that is not all that is registered as he addresses the unthought dimension of Heraclitus’ thinking. Glossing the Greek *légein* with the Latin *legere*, and then the German *lesen*, *legen*, and even *lagern*, Heidegger not only finds homophonic associations to disclose that which semantically ‘homologous’ translations of *légein* have hitherto covered over but also lets the letter silently emerge as a decisive yet unthematized instance in the transmission of what he will call truth. Another silence becomes conspicuous through Heidegger’s emphasis upon the denial that precedes Heraclitus’ mandate to ‘accord with’ (*homologeīn*) the *logos*, now concerning the affirmation that this denial, as such, entails—to say nothing of the discord that any mandate of accord would presuppose and that would persist as its excluded remainder. Nor are these the only decisive junctures in which Heidegger’s elaborations of Heraclitus’ “riddle” show themselves to be riddled with gaps. In my presentation, I offer a reading of those gaps, which speak from within Heidegger’s oeuvre for yet another articulation of the riddle involving speaking, being, and truth, an articulation that will have been made possible by Jacques Lacan’s translation of Heidegger’s essay “Logos (Heraclitus, Fragment B 50),” as well as the analytic observations that can be gathered from the ways in which the vocabulary of Heidegger and Heraclitus resonate through Lacan’s other writings.

###  About the Speaker

 Kristina Mendicino is Professor of German Studies and Chair of German Studies at Brown University. She is the author of *Prophecies of Language: The Confusion of Tongues in German Romanticism*, *Announcements: On Novelty*, and *Passive Voices (On the Subject of Phenomenology, and Other Figures of Speech)*, and she is the editor of several volumes and special issues on topics ranging from German Idealism to the literary character of phenomenology. Her current monograph in progress, which has the working title *Unfounded Truths,* addresses the precarious character of truth as it emerges in distinction from knowledge through Martin Heidegger’s philosophical wagers, Lacanian psychoanalysis, as well as the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, André Gide, and Georg Trakl.

   ![Kristina Mendicino headshot](/sites/g/files/omnuum4936/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/mahindra/files/unknown_07.jpeg?itok=NUjOuqTk) 

 



 

 



 

 See also:- [ Seminar ](/event-type/seminar)
- [ German Studies: New Perspectives ](/seminars/german-studies-new-perspectives)
 
 

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