Thus, as early as with the Greeks, three possible regimes for the link between poetry and philosophy have been found and named.

1. The first, which I will call Parmenidean, organizes the fusion between the poem’s subjective authority and the validity of those statements held to be philosophical. Even when certain ‘mathematical’ interruptions figure under the heading of this fusion, they are ultimately subordinated to the sacred aura of proffered speech, to its ‘profound’ value and its enunciating legitimacy. Imagery, language’s equivocity, and metaphor all escort and authorize the speaking of truth. Authenticity resides in the flesh of language.

2. The second, which I will call Platonic, organizes the distance between the poem and philosophy. The former is held in the gap that separates a dissolving fascination, a diagonal seduction, from truth; and the latter must exclude the possibility that whatever it treats could be treated by the poem in its stead. The effort to extricate oneself from the prestige of poetic metaphor is such that it demands that one find support in that which, in language, stands as its opposite – that is, the literal univocity of mathematics. Philosophy cannot establish itself except in the contrast between poem and matheme, which are its primordial conditions (the poem, of which it must interrupt the authority, and the matheme, of which it must promote the dignity). We might also say that the Platonic relation to the poem is a (negative) relation of condition, which implies that there are other conditions (the matheme, politics, love).

3. The third, which we will call Aristotelian, organizes the inclusion of the knowledge of the poem into philosophy, itself represented as the Knowledge of knowledges. The poem is no longer thought according to the drama of its distance or its intimate proximity, it is caught in the category of the object, in what, having been defined and reflected as such, delimits within philosophy a regional discipline. This regionality of the poem founds what will become aesthetics.

We might also say: the three possible relations of philosophy (as thought) to the poem are the identifying rivalry, the argumentative distance and the aesthetic regionality. In the first case, philosophy envies the poem; in the second it excludes it; and in the third it classifies it.

With regard to this triple disposition, what is the essence of the procedure of Heidegger’s thinking? I will schematize it according to three component parts:

1. Heidegger has very legitimately re-established the autonomous function of the thought of the poem. Or, to be more precise, he has sought to determine the place – a place itself withdrawn or concealed – from where to perceive the common destiny of the conceptions of the thinker and the utterances of the poet. We can say that this tracing of a community of destiny is opposed most of all to the third type of relationship – the one subsumed under an aesthetics of inclusion. Heidegger has subtracted the poem from philosophical knowledge, in order to render it onto truth. In doing so, he has founded a radical critique of all aesthetics, of all regional philosophical determination of the poem. This foundation is acquired as a pertinent feature of modernity (its non-Aristotelian character).

2. Heidegger has shown the limits of a relation of condition, which would shed light only on the separation between the poem and the philosophical argument. In fine particular analyses, he has established that during a long period, starting with Hölderlin, the poem serves as the relay of philosophy on a number of essential themes, principally because philosophy during this whole period is the captive either of science (positivism) or of politics (Marxism). It is its captive just as we said that for Parmenides it was still a captive of the poem: with regard to these particular conditions of its existence, philosophy does not create enough room to establish its own law. I have proposed to call this period the ‘age of the poets’. Let us say that, by investing this age with unprecedented philosophical means, Heidegger has shown that it was not always possible or just to establish a distance from the poem by way of the Platonic procedure of the ban. Philosophy is sometimes bound to expose itself to the poem in far more perilous ways: it must think for itself the operations by which the poem takes note of a truth of its time (for the period in question, the principal truth that has been poetically taken charge of is the destitution of the category of objectivity as the obligatory form of ontological presentation). Whence the poetically crucial theme of presence, albeit for instance in Mallarmé, in its inverted form, the isolation or subtraction.

3. Unfortunately, in this historical set-up, and more particularly in its evaluation of the Greek origin of philosophy, Heidegger has only been able to revert to the judgment of interruption, and to restore, under subtle and varied philosophical names, the sacral authority of poetic proffering – and the idea that the authentic lies in the flesh of words. There is a profound unity between, on one hand, the recourse to Parmenides and Heraclitus considered as the delimitation of a site of the presencing of being prior to its oblivion; and, on the other hand, the heavy-handed and fallacious recourse to the sacred in the most questionable of the poetic analyses, especially those of Trakl. The Heideggerian miscomprehension of the true nature of the Platonic gesture, with at its heart the miscomprehension of the mathematical sense of the Idea (which is precisely that which, by denaturalizing it, exposes thought to the retreat of being), entails that in the place of the invention of a fourth relation between philosophy and poetry, which would be neither fusional nor distanced nor aesthetic, Heidegger prophesies in the void a reactivation of the sacred within the undecipherable coupling of the saying of the poets and the thinking of the thinkers. (The Age of the Poets)