Poetics of history

The initial inclination for thinking towards this kind of a work came from my explorations among the various ideas of history in modern thought. In my reflective gropings I came to discern a certain tendency of. thought in this constellation of discourse which could engage my critical interest at a deeper level in a sustained manner. It is the ideation of history that was born in the funeral of God. There seems to be a recurrent need for some form of monism (by which I mean, one master-idea grounding everything), but it is important to see where it is placed or misplaced and to what effect. The undermining of a central unifying idea (in this case: 'God is dead not only leads to a loss of conceptual tissue, it starves the need for the oneness of a whole. In the wake of Nietzsche, Heidegger sought to endow the idea of history with a post-theological significance similar in form to that enshrined in the biblical narratives: the contingent project of an unobjectifiable will. To that elusive power of possibility Heidegger gave, almost as an anti-definition, the name of Being. Though such an ersatz monism was primarily a response to a conceptual loss and an ontological need, it confounded the poetics of an absolute longing with the politics of absolute power. The consequences were disastrous. How such a tragic-epic confusion came about intrigued me. But the lyrical anguish of that metaphysical bereavement which gave birth to such a displaced desire continued to stimulate my interest in pursuing the study of this line of thought which eventually took the form of this book.