The paper studies Heidegger's reading of the poet Stefan George (1868-1933), particularly of his poem "Das Wort" (1928), in the context of Heidegger's narrative of the history of metaphysics. Heidegger reads George's poem as expressing certain experiences with language. First, it voices an experience of the constitutive role of language, of naming and discursive determination, in granting things stable identities. Second, it expresses an encounter with the unnameable and indeterminable character of language itself as a meaning-constituting process, and a subsequent insight into the human being's dependency on language and her incapacity to master it subjectively. Heidegger characterizes these experiences as "transitional" (übergänglich). It is shown that in Heidegger's historical narrative, this places George's poem within the framework of the ongoing transition (Übergang) from the Hegelian and Nietzschean end of metaphysics to a forthcoming "other beginning" of thinking.

This paper agrees with Thomas Sheehan that Heidegger inquires into the source of meaning in finite human existence. The paper argues, however, that Sheehan’s paradigm for interpreting Heidegger should be expanded: Heidegger is also concerned with “excess” (encounters with what eludes meaning or is other than meaning) and “event” (the founding of the “there” within which meaning is possible). Excess and event are crucial to being and history, as Heidegger understands them.