Homecoming? Heidegger and the first stasimon of the Antigone

Abstract

This paper presents a phenomenological-hermeneutic interpretation of Heidegger's reading of the first stasimon of Sophocles' Antigone through his reading of Hölderlin. I will focus on one of its fundamental aspects that Heidegger expresses with the sentence: the essence of man is the uncanny (das Unheimliche, Heidegger's translation of the Greek voice tò deinón). This aspect constitutes the phenomenological core of the problem of das Heimischwerden (the homecoming). My aim will be to show that the meaning of the sentence is only sustainable in our historical situation, so that it has no ahistorical or supra-historical scope. In doing so, I intend to offer a hermeneutic of the phenomenological aspect expressed by the word das Heimischwerden, which leads us to think about what the irremediable link with the familiar, the domestic, consists of when our historical world is that of the absence of binding contents beforehand.