ABSTRACT
Particularly the experience of language and specifically of language as revealed by the reflexivity of the inner word, enables Dante to experience time as transcended. Martin Heidegger’s discussion of Heraclitus’s Logos fragment thinks through the nature of language as consisting in a verbal tying or binding that discloses things through their relations. One thing that Heidegger shows with matchless penetration about language as unconcealment is that the unconcealing itself is always concealed and even conceals itself. The Divine Comedy’s ascent to revelation and unveiling climaxes in the Purgatorio, whereas the Paradiso turns back again to focus on language as a veil over what it ostensibly discloses. The Paradiso is more concerned with UnParadiso in and through the failure of every attempt at revelation and disclosure—which failure itself becomes a sort of second-degree revelation or disclosure. Paradiso describes both descent from the Father of lights and ascent through progressive stages or intensities of light uniting the creature to its Source.
