Heidegger’s poietic writings are approached here as a distinctive kind of philosophical production: manuscripts withheld from public view, composed in the late 1930s and early 1940s, whose internal ambition is to discover a manner of saying in which the “event” of being’s historical happening can come to articulation without being turned into an object. Vallega-Neu’s central question concerns how these writings—fragmentary, uneven, and often closer to notes and expositions than to treatises—nevertheless form an internally developing attempt to let a sense of being emerge in thinking and saying, and how the attempt itself shifts in tone, conceptuality, and direction over the sequence she tracks. The book’s value lies in its reconstruction of that inner movement while simultaneously thematizing the interpretive problem posed by such texts: how reading can remain responsive to their performative demands without dissolving into mere paraphrase or external commentary.
Vallega-Neu frames the object of her inquiry by refusing to treat these writings as simply an “unpublished supplement” to the public Heidegger. Their nonpublic character is not incidental metadata; it functions as a methodological operator governing how claims are to be read. Heidegger, she notes, held these manuscripts back and directed their publication only after the lecture courses, which already indicates an intended order of reception: what is most “inceptive” in the attempt at thinking being as historical event is to arrive only when a more familiar pedagogical and argumentative corpus is already in place. The consequence for Vallega-Neu’s exposition is decisive: the question is less “what doctrines do these texts contain?” than “what kind of thinking is being attempted here, under what constraints, and by what internal transitions does it reconfigure its own vocabulary and criteria of adequacy?”
Her guiding designation—poietic—is itself an interpretive claim with a restricted but strong scope. It is not a thesis that Heidegger becomes a poet, nor a loose metaphor for “creative writing.” It names, with deliberate etymological restraint, an orientation to ποίησις as “bringing forth,” and thus to a mode of philosophical saying whose success would consist in allowing historical being to come to word rather than describing it from the outside. The terminological economy is important: she explicitly seeks to minimize German technicalities, yet she retains a small set—Ereignis, Machenschaft, Erlebnis, Da-sein—only insofar as the English terms would otherwise conceal the specific conceptual work those words perform across shifting contexts. Even when she retains such terms, she treats them as transitional instruments whose meaning is repeatedly re-determined by later developments within the sequence of writings.
A first axial tension appears immediately: the attempt to “say” being in its truth is presented as intrinsically groundless, in the sense that it cannot be secured by prior objects, methods, or evidentiary criteria that would stand outside the eventuation it seeks to articulate. Vallega-Neu marks this groundlessness as more than a negative result; it is a positive constraint on how the writing must proceed. The sense of being sought is described as “without ground” and accessible only through a performative understanding—through undergoing the sense in the very act of thinking—rather than through explanatory representation. Hence the recurring insistence that the usual metaphysical dualities of activity/passivity and subject/object fail to capture what is being attempted. The “middle voice” becomes an orienting grammatical figure for this: an occurrence that is neither the act of a subject nor the impact upon a patient, but a happening in which the differentiation of agents and objects is derivative.
This grammatical motif is not allowed to remain merely grammatical. It is converted into a systematic demand: thinking must learn to experience itself as response—response to a call that is only recognized as call within the response—and thereby to locate its own origin outside the self-positing of subjectivity. Vallega-Neu repeatedly ties this to the peculiar force of the small word “of” in the title Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event): “of” is read as belonging-to rather than about-ness, so that thinking “comes to itself” out of what is assigned to it in belonging to historical being. The expository burden then becomes: how does the book show this belonging-to across the sequence, and how does it handle the pressure that such an account places upon both conceptual determination and interpretive method?
Vallega-Neu organizes her own book so that this pressure is not merely reported but reenacted in the architecture of exposition. She separates “expository/interpretative” chapters, intended to give the reader navigational “structures” and conceptual clarifications, from chapters of freer, more intimate, and more critical engagement that respond to the texts’ unorthodox character and to the limits of academic “ordering.” This is not a stylistic choice added from the outside; it is presented as demanded by the texts, especially where Heidegger explicitly enjoins the reader to avoid “ordering” contents and to let “the pure word that rests in itself” resonate, without presupposing a listener. The book’s form thus becomes an interpretive thesis: the poietic writings call for an oscillation between structural clarification and a responsiveness that resists the very impulse to stabilize structures.
The introduction supplies the internal genealogy that motivates the turn to the event without reducing it to a biographical narrative. Vallega-Neu reads the “impasses” of Being and Time as conceptual impasses that arise when the transcendental-horizonal language still invites the thought that a subject transcends into a horizon, thereby risking objectification of the very horizon that was meant to be the nonobjective condition of disclosure. The marginal note she quotes—“overcoming of the horizon… return into the source… presencing out of this source”—functions as a hinge: it authorizes the later regress to the source while also indicating that the later writings are meant to radicalize, rather than abandon, the original project of thinking being from time. Yet, as Vallega-Neu emphasizes, the “source” is not a stable origin that could be captured; it is a withdrawing source, increasingly thought as withdrawal itself. The movement she traces is therefore doubly regressive: it regresses toward an inception that is only fully manifest at the end, and it regresses toward a withdrawal that resists representational capture.
The handling of truth is central to this regress. Vallega-Neu reconstructs how unconcealment is thought as inseparable from concealment, and how the later focus increasingly shifts from presencing to self-withdrawal as the more originary trait of being’s occurrence. This shift is tension-laden, because it risks making the event appear as a kind of negative theology of absence, while the texts simultaneously insist on the need for concrete “sites” in which truth is sheltered in beings—words, deeds, works—so that the event is not a pure beyond but a happening that requires endurance and sustaining. The interpretive problem thus becomes: how can withdrawal be articulated without turning it into a represented “thing,” and how can sheltering in beings be affirmed without collapsing the event back into an ontic inventory?
At this point the book’s distinctive sensitivity to attunement begins to govern the exposition. Fundamental attunements are treated neither as subjective feelings nor as mere rhetorical coloration, but as disclosive dispositions through which the openness of a historical time-space is experienced and sustained. The early framing already emphasizes that the sense of being sought includes, particularly up to the late 1930s, a sense of loss marked by shock or horror, so that the “truth of beyng” harbors an abyssal dimension experienced as revelatory of fuller possibilities. This is not presented as psychological reportage. It is a way of showing that, for Heidegger in this period, attunement functions as a primary medium of disclosure, and therefore as a primary operator of conceptual invention: shifts in attunement are simultaneously shifts in what can be said, what counts as a relevant distinction, and what kind of movement thinking must enact.
This is why Vallega-Neu can present “tonality” as a rigorous category. She claims that between the first and last published volumes of the poietic writings “striking shifts” occur: from a more Nietzschean pathos seeking an empowerment of being to a more “mystical” responsiveness to the “silent call of being,” accompanied by a progressive displacement of the primacy of the human and a deepening attempt to find the origin of language in historical being itself. The point is not to label Heidegger with external typologies (“Nietzschean,” “mystical”) as a classificatory exercise, but to show how the texts themselves re-determine the posture of thinking: earlier emphasis on resistance and decision gives way, in later writings, to letting-go, following, poverty, and a proximity to silence that threatens the very possibility of discursive stabilization.
The book’s reconstruction of machination and lived experience is exemplary of its method of internal derivation. Vallega-Neu presents machination (Machenschaft) as naming a mode in which being occurs historically, characterized by makeability and calculability, with roots traced through a history in which τέχνη increasingly overpowers φύσις, later reinforced by a creation-framework, and finally intensified in modernity under subjectivity and rationality. She treats this genealogy as Heidegger’s own, and she draws out its internal stakes: machination is not moralized as a mere human fault, but interpreted as a necessary consequence of how being initially took place in Western history. This internal necessity is crucial for understanding the later shift in posture: if machination belongs to the epochal deployment of being, then resistance may itself remain caught within the same metaphysical will-structure it seeks to oppose.
Lived experience (Erlebnis) is then shown to reinforce machination while veiling it, by relocating beings into the sphere of the subject as “relational center,” so that what counts as being is what can be an object of lived experience and what can be brought before oneself. Here Vallega-Neu’s exposition tightens: she does not merely say “Heidegger criticizes subjectivity.” She tracks how machination and lived experience conspire to close off the experience of plight—the abandonment of beings by being—because lived experience produces a feeling of proximity to life that removes the felt necessity of deeper questioning and prevents the shock that might unsettle thinking into the openness of concealment. The internal responsibility of this account is evident: the path toward another beginning is said to require that the plight be experienced and acknowledged, in order that thinking might be displaced into the “untimely” situation of being-there as the openness of a time-space of decision.
“Decision” thus appears as a key operator in the early configuration. Vallega-Neu indicates that, especially in the “Prospect” of Contributions, the preparation of a site for decision over the other beginning is treated as a fundamental task, with the time-space of Da-sein as the locus in which such decision can be sustained. Yet the concept of decision is itself subjected to pressure as the sequence advances, because later writings tend to redescribe what earlier appeared as resolute preparation in terms of departure, letting-go, and a following of what calls in silence. The book’s interpretive labor lies precisely in showing how such a reconfiguration retroactively changes the sense of earlier emphases: what counted as “grounding” or “preparing” begins to appear, from the later perspective, as still too structural, too oriented by distinctions (such as guiding/basic question) that may still belong to metaphysical representationality.
This retroactive transformation is nowhere more evident than in Vallega-Neu’s handling of Da-sein. She carefully marks that Da-sein shifts from Being and Time to Contributions, and then undergoes a further displacement in the later writings. In Contributions, the hyphenation and play between “da” and “sein” allow Heidegger to think the “there” as opening site of truth and the “being” as the sustaining of that opening, requiring humans who endure and hold open the openness through word, gesture, deed. Still, later Heidegger will criticize Contributions for thinking Da-sein too one-sidedly with reference to the human, and will articulate Da-sein more radically out of the essential occurrence of truth itself—so radically that Da-sein is said to name “beyng” thought out of its truth. Vallega-Neu does not treat this as a mere terminological change; she reads it as a shift in the site of origin for language and thinking, a shift that increases the danger of “dehumanization” while also claiming to return the human to a more originary belonging.
Here an important methodological tension becomes explicit. If later poietic writings demand that “ordering contents” be avoided and that no listener be presupposed, how can scholarly reading proceed without betraying the text’s own injunctions? Vallega-Neu does not resolve this by choosing one side. Instead she makes the tension productive: her expository chapters supply conditional structures—structures offered as aids for navigation rather than as claims to exhaust what is happening—while her critical chapters explore what happens when one attends to the intimate, solitary, and attunement-driven character of the writing. This division is itself an interpretation of the poietic writings’ internal demand: the texts appear to require a reader who can both grasp conceptual differentiations and undergo a displacement in which the differentiations lose their primacy.
The book’s engagement with historical context is governed by the same principle of subordination: external context is introduced only insofar as the poietic writings’ own situation and overlaps require it. Vallega-Neu explicitly argues that engagement with these writings “requires, at least to some extent,” engagement with the Black Notebooks, because although the poietic writings are distinguished as more strictly oriented to uncovering hidden aspects of historical being, there are overlaps, and the notebooks contain disturbing anti-Semitic remarks that have shaped reception. Her critical chapters therefore include inquiry into nationalism and anti-Semitism as interpretive constraints on how claims about “history,” “destiny,” and attunement are to be read. Notably, she frames this as a problem of attunement and provenance: she suggests that Heidegger tended to attribute the attunements determining his thinking too unilaterally to historical being, thereby becoming blind to more “ontic” dispositions rooted in unexamined lineages, a blindness that appears more evidently in the notebooks where conceptual discipline is looser. The philosophical implication, drawn with explicit caution, is that a poietic claim to be speaking from the silent voice of being risks errancy when it incorporates dispositions whose provenance cannot plausibly be attributed to that “silent voice.”
This critique is sharpened through Vallega-Neu’s recurring attention to the body. She observes that Heidegger scarcely thematizes the body in the poietic writings, often mentioning it only to criticize biologism, a restraint connected to the attempt to think nonrepresentationally and to overcome subjectivity. Yet she insists that the lived body is profoundly implicated via attunement: attunements reveal the ecstatic, relational, temporal constitution of the lived body, and bodies bear sedimentations and histories that escape awareness, so that the “style and character of a thinker or text” can be understood as bodily dispositions. This becomes a significant tension within her reconstruction of Heidegger: the more the writing seeks to let the event speak and to dehumanize the account of the event, the more the text nevertheless carries a polyphonous voice that lets the bodily thinker resonate, attuning readers whose own bodies become sites of beings in reading. The hermeneutic consequence is stringent: if thinking is an event that happens in the text, then reading is not an external act of decoding but a participation that must include vigilance toward the histories embodied in the reader’s dispositions.
The later trajectory, as Vallega-Neu narrates it, intensifies these tensions rather than resolving them. In the concluding synthesis she states her narrative directly: the shift from Nietzschean empowerment and resistance to a more “mystical” attunement emphasizing letting-go, following, and poverty, in which machination is no longer resisted but left to its demise; alongside this, the deemphasis of the human and the increasingly disclosure-centered sense of Da-sein. The sequence is said to culminate around 1941–1942 in a movement of “bending back” into the inceptual abyss, where Heidegger’s thinking becomes most solitary and farthest from the openness of a world and the coming-to-presence of beings. Vallega-Neu treats this culmination as both a peak and a limit: a peak of regression into inception and departure, and a limit where the “soundless voice of being” threatens to become a discourse of non-sense at the edge of sense, bringing into play death, dis-propriation, and the “beingless,” while the text itself insists that what calls is “neither speaking nor keeping silent” and is “prior” to language even as it is named “voice” because it attunes.
Her handling of this brink is again tension-sensitive: she does not simply endorse the later meditative procedure, nor dismiss it as obscurantism. She tracks the internal wager: thinking must reply to attuning so that attuning resonates and finds sense in responsive words; the event is thought as a coming-in-between in which dis-propriation is inseparable from appropriation; yet in The Event Heidegger tends to think the coming-into-being of beings in terms of egress marking the first beginning, while the other beginning is marked by departure and downgoing—already announced, she says, in the first foreword to The Event. The inferential pressure is clear: if the other beginning is departure rather than egress, then the possibility of a world of things may require that the abyssal movement be undergone without prematurely converting it into a new positive order.
Vallega-Neu’s book indicates, within its own resources, how Heidegger’s later path after this period can be read as an emergence from the imageless and soundless abyss toward a renewed thinking of things and world—through dialogues and the development of the fourfold of gods/humans/earth/sky—while carefully noting that such later developments exceed the poietic writings’ temporal bracket and therefore appear only as contextual orientation. Even here, her restraint is methodological: she uses the later path to illuminate the specific character of the 1941–1942 culmination, namely its distance from any concrete exemplification of beings released into their essence, and the way in which the poietic writings can appear as holding open a “to come” rather than describing an achieved world.
In the end, the unity Vallega-Neu attributes to the book she has written is explicitly layered rather than architectonic. She acknowledges that any narrative fails to do justice to nuances and particularities that escape a general storyline, and she therefore treats unity as the achieved coherence of a traced set of shifts—conceptual, tonal, methodological—organized around recurrent clusters: language and the limits of hermeneutic interpretation; the relation between attunement, language, and conceptual determination; the relation between attunement, history, and the body; and the delimiting “gathering power” of Heidegger’s thought of the history of being, which can organize and simultaneously constrain engagement with concrete events.
The poietic writings, as reconstructed from within, thus attain a form of philosophical unity that resembles controlled stratification: recurrences with altered valence, transitions that change what counts as evidence, and reformulations that convert earlier premises into later results. Yet that unity remains burdened by unresolved tensions that the book refuses to smooth away—above all, the tension between an abyssal, withdrawing source and the demand for sheltering in beings; between the aspiration to let the event speak and the ineliminable embodiment and historical provenance of attunements; between a single “history of being” and the plurality of histories that bodies carry; and between the methodological injunction against ordering and the scholarly responsibility to render the inner movement conceptually trackable.
Simon Gros 
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