Philosophy and Poetry: Continental Perspectives 9780231547246

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Philosophy and Poetry

Philosophy and Poetry Continental Perspectives

Edited by Ranjan Ghosh

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2019 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ghosh, Ranjan, editor. Title: Philosophy and poetry : continental perspectives / edited by Ranjan Ghosh. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018048959 | ISBN 9780231187381 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231547246 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: European poetry—20th century—History and criticism. | Philosophy, European—20th century. Classification: LCC PN1271 .P48 2019 | DDC 821/.9209—dc 3 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018048959

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America

Cover design: Catherine Casalino

Contents

1. The Agonizing Agon: Meditations on a Conjugality Ranjan Ghosh

1

2. As the World Turns: Heidegger and the Origin of Poetry Georges Van Den Abbeele

23

3. Benjamin’s Baudelaire Lutz Koepnick

43

4. Georges Bataille and the Hatred of Poetry Roland Végső

56

5. Voicing Thought: Arendt, Poetry, and Philosophy Cecilia Sjöholm

69

6. Language and the Poetic Word in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics James Risser

84

7. “I Am a Poem, Not a Poet”: Jacques Lacan’s Philosophy of Poetry Jean-Michel Rabaté

97

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Con t en ts

8. Adorno: Poetry After Poetry Thomas H. Ford

113

9. Sartre and Poetry: Je t’aime, moi non plus (I Love You—Me Neither) Francois Noudelmann

131

10. Levinas and the Poetical Turn of Being Raoul Moati 143

11. The Intoxicated Conversation: Maurice Blanchot and the Poetics of Critical Masks Daniel Rosenberg Nutters and Daniel T. O’Hara

160

12. Merleau-Ponty, Ponge, and Valéry on Speaking Things: Phenomenology and Poetry Galen Johnson 175

13. Deleuze and Poetry Claire Colebrook

195

14. Irigaray’s Breath, or Poetry After Poetics Anne Emmanuelle Berger 209

15. On the Persistence of Hedgehogs Leslie Hill

235

16. What Are Philosophers For in the Age of the Poets? Badiou with and Against Heidegger Bruno Bosteels

248

17. Jean-Luc Nancy: Poetry, Philosophy, Technicity Ian James

271

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Con t en ts

18. Rancière on Poetry Jean-Philippe Deranty

283

19. Desire Against Discipline: Kristeva’s Theory of Poetry Carol Mastrangelo Bové 296

20. Agamben and Poetry Justin Clemens 311

List of Contributors 329 Index

333

1 The Agonizing Agon Meditations on a Conjugality Ranjan Ghosh

If we divorced poetry and philosophy altogether, we should bring a serious impeachment. —T. S. Eliot, “Dante”

Within philosophy resides the perennial temptation of the poetic, either to be made welcome or to be rejected. — George Steiner, The Poetry of Thought

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he quarrel begins . . . Jacques Maritain observes that “Henri Bergson liked to quote a sentence he found in the letters of a French philosopher; the sentence was as follows: ‘I have suffered from this friend enough to know him.’ When I know a friend to the core—not through having submitted him to a complete series of psychological tests, but because I have suffered from him and have got in myself the habit of his nature—then we may say in philosophical language that I know this man by connaturality.”1 Poetry and philosophy have eavesdropped on each other ever since Xenophanes; they have known each other connaturally since their earliest days of togetherness through a “lover’s quarrel”—a quarrel that builds on unusually intense moments, however sustained and interminable. Texts, whether poetic or philosophic, are apparently evasive of each other committing to a sort of clarity and rigor. But such effort to

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maintain a distinctness of self-analytic monologics can seldom conceal, on a deeper investigation, a multivoiced conversation, mutually inflective and infective. George Santayana raises two questions at the beginning of his short essay “Poetry and Philosophy”: “Are poets at heart in search of a philosophy? Or is philosophy in the end nothing but poetry?” 2 The integral dependence of poetry on philosophy owes to poetry being theoretically a worth and order of its own. Santayana sees a “life of theory” as “typically human” and “keenly emotional” so poetry being theoretical does not sunder it from life or forms of life. Philosophy in being a “more intense sort of experience than common life” is a different mode of experience, a separate vein of life. Philosophy is both intense and nuanced and like poetry builds its own aesthetic—a redoing of the crudeness of life. It enters into poetry because both converge on making a different sense of theory and life (θεωρία) that we thought we have long understood and lived, something that cannot be mere investigation and reasoning but insight, a contemplation that is imaginative.3 In fact, we can see both as events for a new kind of thinking, generating fresh ontological capacity. Santayana argues further that our mind is “not created for the sake of discovering the absolute truth” and it is a kind of weariness to think of philosophy ontologically and persistently committed to achieve this. Abstraction is as much a part of philosophical quest as investigations into our living realities, our finitudes, are. Our excursus must be directed to allowing the living spirit to prosper and poetic philosophy is a key to such accomplishment. Philosophy begins in perception and the profound features of reality can be located in our perceptual experiences. Perception combines conception that, again, cannot afford to be direct, narrow, or stodgy: articulation is competently achieved knowing the skills that express our perceptual knowings. Philosophy is “figuring forth,” manifestations brought about in relational understanding of being, self, substance, activity, time, values, and will. I would argue that philosophy’s inadequacies cannot be met through philosophy alone but in a poetic philosophy that enables greater possession of conceptual ways and firmer occupancy of analytic spaces of meaning. Poetry is key to philosophy’s ability to engage with the “truths of experience.” 4 The lover’s quarrel then, as it opens unto the twentieth century in this book, is certainly more complicated and productive than what Socrates meant in the Republic. Let us, however, begin with Plato, who inevitably is our first point of dialogue. His Apology arraigns the poet on the grounds of not “composing” out of sophia or philesis, which the philosophers possess. Creation effected merely out of the base nature (phusis) and enthousiasmos is not exactly the Socratic recipe— the Socratic dismissiveness of poetry5 as evident through Republic, books 2 and 3 (where morality and poetry come under suspicion), the Laws (where dramatic

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structure is the point of scrutiny), and Apology, Ion, Phaedrus, Protagoras, and Lysis is in dialogues where poetry is not allowed a decent establishment and the poet stands ascribed as mad or ignorant. The Socratic elenchus and focus on preventing the mutative progress of concepts make allowance for a strong counterposition against the rhapsodes, the poets, who, it is claimed (see Euthyphro and Ion), speak without knowing often what they are speaking—dianoia (thought) and episteme can get established only when nous (reason) has not deserted the creator (see Protagoras). The battle of wits involving Socrates and Protagoras is an interesting commentary on the language world of both, the notion of reality and moral thought, the challenge to elenchus, and the arche of instruction in poetry. Socrates in his characteristic loquacity scores over Protagoras by dismantling the merits of poetry, using poetry to dismiss poetry as a medium of moral instructions and pedagogy, developing a theoretical and philosophical intelligence. Simon Haines points out that “Plato wanted to show not just that philosophy does a better job of thinking than poetry does but that it does a better job of thinking about just what poetry is supposed to be better at thinking about: passions. He wanted to do this because he was a poet, deeply interested in the passions: but his interest was in ruling them, subordinating them, not using them, living with them.” 6 So the soul of the “city” has the guardians who would know what “excellence” (see Meno) is and the poets for whom epithumos would lead to eros and not philia or episteme. The diet of poetry needs to endorse its passional and recognitive validity through tests of excellence, intellective reason, and conceptual clarity. If poetry chose character and the human, then philosophy chose the abstract and the concept. Susan Levin’s observations are perceptive: While Plato rejects the view that poets are authorities in the sphere of pedagogy, denying thereby that poetry could be a techne even under ideal conditions, he admits the possibility that gifted practitioners, if themselves properly educated, may benefit the state by generating creations that will be suitable for the young. Although the pedagogical function of poetry is limited to children, poetic compositions will, in addition, play a civic role on a range of public occasions. Plato thus “wins” for philosophy the quarrel (diaphora) between it and poetry by arguing, against tradition, that philosophy should be the teacher of adults and hence supplant poetry in this way as the educator of Greece. He establishes philosophy’s dominance, in addition, by contending that its practitioners should be the ultimate arbiters of the content and form of acceptable poetic compositions. The interpretation developed here foregrounds the complexity of Plato’s attitude by stressing that although much is at stake for him in

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the conduct and outcome of the diaphora between philosophy and poetry, he is nevertheless unwilling to bar poetry from the ideal polis if this exclusion would deprive it of a potential benefactor.7

Both Aristotle and Plato lived and grew up in a culture deeply grounded in poetry. Plato’s ambivalence can be traced to the decline of Greek poetry after the fourth century bc when poetry lost its moral and aesthetic power to a kind of crass materialization. The Socratic dialectic and its discriminating fineness look into poetry as speaking about a world and philosophy as interrogation into the workings of the world—the reason, the judgments, and sources. If the poet speaks about a moral world, the philosopher generally starts on morality. It was Socrates who drew Plato away from his initial vocation as a poet into the pathways of philosophy. But was Plato really spurning poetry or reorienting poetry into the service of philosophy? “My dear Socrates,” Diotima says in the Symposium, “if a man’s life is ever worth living it is when he has attained this vision of the very soul of beauty. . . . It is only when he discerns beauty itself through what makes it visible that a man will be quickened with the true, and not the seeming, virtue—for it is virtue’s self that quickens them, not virtue’s semblance.” 8 Raymond Barfield explains that “the poet sees but does not retain reason. The unpoetic philosopher reasons but cannot move beyond the methods and truly see. Diotima tells us about a third option. When the eyes have been opened and the lover of wisdom gazes upon the transcendent, upon beauty or the good in true contemplation, such a vision remains one’s own forever. The beholder experiences a vision without becoming ecstatic or possessed by a god, without losing reason. Indeed, the vision is attained in part through reason properly used. This is the source of a new and better type of poetry, the sort of poetry Plato writes.”9 Plato has his own distinct mode of doing philosophy—in dialogues that have rigor, clarity, and insight, the fierceness of insight with some uncertainty over inferences justifying the necessity of a dialogic mode. But is Plato’s philosophy steeped in poetry, his style a mediatory point between prose and poetry? What made Aristotle imply that the “Socratic Conversations,” as much as the prosemimes of Sophron and Xenarchus, can be categorized as poetry? In this context, Hartland-Swans observations are worthwhile: The Dialogues are works of art; dramatic to a varying extent; compact of serious argument, scientific and mythical description, sustained pleading, high incantation; enlivened by humorous incidents, quotations from the poets, topical allusions, playful digressions—all these diverse elements combining to develop a series of philosophical themes. And conversely it is these philosophical themes

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which orient and control the variegated discussions in each Dialogue. The language itself fluctuates between extremes of fine-spun or even laboured prosaic argumentation, and colourful or metaphorical descriptions of high poetic quality. And it is, naturally enough, in the Myths, allegories and fables that this poetic quality is longest sustained, and that Plato’s imaginative genius most openly displays itself. Not only are we aware that “poetry” rather than “fine prose” is the more correct description, but we can feel the presence of emotional currents which seem, for the moment, to change the whole atmosphere of the Dialogue.10

In fact, the “poetic” Plato’s objection to “bad poetry” is legitimate. Poetry must come with perception for it is what connects and negotiates with philosophy. The poeticization of the dialogues comes about through the urgency of perception, the necessity to challenge the vulgarization of abstraction. In fact, even Aristotle wrote poetry much to the surprise of people who see him only as the foremost philosopher in the ancient world. He composed enough poetry “to fill two papyrus rolls in the ancient collections of his works, for it was not unusual that a well-educated gentleman of his day should be able to come up with a verse or song to grace special occasions. What is very surprising is the story told about one of his poems, for the sources that preserve the text also tell us that it came near to costing the philosopher his life.”11 Aristotle’s socioepistemic consternation about the poets is less intense than Plato’s, which, however, does not prevent him from putting forth the exhortations for the creation of epic and tragedy. Intertwining poetry with ethics—the overlaps between Politics and Poetics are hard to ignore—Aristotle sees poetry supervised by philosophy through judgment, choice, and values. For a man with a variety of interests in life-experiences and forms of reality, his philosophical aesthetics combined wonder and practicality, structure and good action. Not as suspecting of poetic mimesis as Plato was, Aristotle reserves the significance of emotional effects in the construction of virtuous habits befitting particular occasions (cf. Nicomachean Ethics, Poetics, and Politics). Expanding the scope and scale of mimesis meant an acknowledgment of poetry’s groundedness in human nature, its reach, and its cultivation of techne to produce a wide and wise connect between emotion and poetry. The circle of interest, the depth of analysis, and the politics of the universals bring the philosopher and the poet into an agonistic negotiation. Poetry and philosophy connect on the working out and dynamics of “wonder”—the wonder as allowing the poet sense-making outside the familiar trend of occurrences and also as making room for the philosopher to inspire a sense-experience, a beyondthe-event investigation into the foundations of occurrences. They intersect with conflicting levels of profit on the use and sense of words: the poet’s words can be

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the philosopher’s tool, codes, and modes of reflection and judgment, of contemplation and enunciation. If Keats says Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty, the philosopher for once forgets the poem and questions the validity and ramifications of such a beauty-truth juxtaposition or contraposition. The poet (p)resides an experience, the philosopher decides.

3 Carrying on with the undulation in reception and understanding of the lover’s quarrel, one encounters the acts of siding with poetry in Platonists like Maximus of Tyre, Andrea Alciati, Jérôme de Monteux (Opuscula Jevenilia), and Alessandro Sardi. In fact, Platonism has had a pervasive and organic influence during this period and apology of poetry was argued within such premises. Renaissance philosophical thinking reformulated its frontiers with the dismantling of the notion of a finite universe, propelled and imploded by the works of Copernicus, Paracelsus, Kepler, Boehme, Galileo, Bruno, and Campanella. This saw the emergence of a tribe of skeptics and stoics in Montaigne, Ramus, Charron, and Frances Sanchez. Thinking under scientific and theological reason and imagination was knotted in conflictual domains resulting in departments of knowledge struggling to maintain their forte. Robert Clements explains that “in the new atmosphere, when liter ae humaniores reached parity with liter ae diviniores, Humanism proved to be a catalyzer for poetry and philosophy.”12 The entanglement in scholasticism and analytics made philosophy lose its verve and nerve to “philosophes.” Philosophy and literature came to share a grudging cohabitative space where people like Bacon, Erasmus, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Thomas More, Rabelais, and others with their diversity of interests brushed shoulders, as Clements points out, with Bessarion, Campanella, Cusanus, Lefevre d’Etaples, Manetti, Pico, Plethon, Pomponazzi, Ramus, Telesio, Valla, and Vives. Systematic thought came under fire and with the interest in the royalty for poets (flourishing on the principles of taste, decorum, clarity, and authority) the quarrel simmered with new intensity. Plato, Plotinus, Lucretius, Pythagoras, and others became inevitable targets for the poets. Philosophers stood exploited at the hands of the poets. Clements notes that Ronsard tried to understand philosophy at its etymological value, equating “Philosophie” with “Vertu” and leading the emergence of a special Renaissance genre, the “philosophical poem.” So circumstances “brought Renaissance writers and philosophers together into a more easy and tolerant coexistence, one even sustained by theory[;] we should not suggest that every vestige disappeared of an ancient and ingrained mutual suspicion or misunderstanding. There were bound on both sides to be occasional eructations.”13

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More than eructations it was a different metaphysical venue in Kant that brought the pulls of reason and the urge to dream, the disciplinary modes of rational thinking and the lure of immateriality into an agonism that spoke more than it met the eye. Poetry comes as the highest of all arts but not without the conceptual prod to avoid irrational image-making: a commitment to speak through sensus communis. Reflective judgment forbids the making of a “delirious person,” as Kant argues in Anthropology, and avoids communis vulgaris. Unremitting inspiration (schwarmerei) limits the processes of communication and, consequently, the philosophical dialecticism of thinking and understanding is under stress. However, the entangled force field of the poet and the philosopher dealing with communicability, language, cognition, and reflective judgment can be instanced through the “dynamic sublime” where the poets, as Kevin McLaughlin notes, exemplify the “ability to communicate the feeling of the supersensible force of reason. Not only able to see the world in a way that goes beyond cognitive experience—as withdrawing from a capacity to possess it mentally in the form of something extended in space and time—the poets are also capable of communicating the feeling of seeing the world ‘merely’ (bloß) . . . in accordance with what its appearance shows.”14 Kant argues that “poetry fortifies the mind: for it lets the mind feel its ability—free, spontaneous, and independent of natural determinations—to contemplate and judge phenomenal nature as having aspects that nature does not on its own offer in experience either to sense or to the understanding, and hence poetry lets the mind feel its ability to use nature on behalf of and, as it were, as a schema of the supersensible.”15 This is where the pathway between the sensible and the supersensible is formed. However, the products of the poet stand up to judgment, which is why some training needs to come with the understanding that the ways of the genius cannot be taught. The footsteps of philosophical rigor and understanding stay close to the poet’s productive imaginative ways—not to forget eleutheronomy—to render a purposivenes to aesthetic enactments. The tension stays alive in understanding what exists and how one imagines transcending it without losing judgment and aesthetic taste. The quarrel finds an elegant hiding in beautiful cohabiting good. The creative tension finds an interesting home in Schopenhauer’s authentic engagement with art. He advocates a disinclination for a will-to-live, enabling a separate vein of contemplation, a higher appreciation of ideas, which is creative. Highest creation comes from a will-less subject of knowledge whose distance from the object is diminished to a point where the “entire consciousness is pervaded by a single image of perception.”16 This is a kind of knowledge that exists “independently of all relations,” a kind of purity that one ascribes to poetry. So

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art experience comes with a contemplation of ideas, through an objectivity that suspends all instrumentalist and functionalist ways toward a self-transformative version of understanding. Poetry reveals ideas and the poet “apprehends the Idea, the inner being of mankind outside all relation and all time”:17 It is not confined to a limited grade of will’s objectification as architecture or animal sculpture are. Plastic and pictorial arts may surpass poetry in the presentation of the lower grades of will’s objectification, that is, in inanimate matter or plant and animal life, because these subjects may reveal their inner being in their outer forms in a static moment. Man’s Being on the other hand, is a much more complex issue, which is captured by poetry in a network of human actions, thoughts and emotions, through a dynamic approach. Poetry is able to capture progress and movement of its objects in a manner that the plastic and pictorial arts cannot.18

This leads to Wohlgefallen (aesthetic delight). It is here that aesthetic consciousness overcomes egocentricity, submission to will and anxiety, to generate the transcendence to an idea. For me the perception of the genius in Schopenhauer, as much as in Kant with the endowments of surplus, builds a serious complicity in the dynamics of the quarrel that these pages try to enunciate. Kant’s habitations in the complex dynamicity of genius put a fresh portrait for review. As “innate mental disposition,” genius is nature, and since nature gives rule, the artist, unlike the scientist, cannot have much control over the product or provide a formal account of the process: “such a skill cannot be communicated, but is apportioned to each immediately from the hand of nature, and thus dies with him, until nature one day similarly endows another.”19 This suggests the excitation of the productive capacity of another person who does not imitate (nachahmung) but follows (nachfolge) in an “original” way. Originality, however, cannot be the absolute condition for fine art. In fact, Kant finds the spirit of an art as a systematic method that contains a comprehensive idea (zusammenhangende)20 involving imagination, percept, understanding, and judgment: “In the employment of the imagination for cognition, it submits to the constraints of the understanding and is subject to the limitation of being corformable to the concept of the latter. On the contrary, in an aesthetical point of view it is free to furnish unsought, over and above that agreement with a concept, abundance of undeveloped material for the understanding, to which the understanding paid no regard in its concept but which it applies, though not objectively for cognition, yet subjectively to qucken the congnitive powers and therefore also indirectly to cognitions.” 21 Genius, thus, properly consists in the happy relation

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between these faculties—reasoned conformability with aesthetic release. For Schopenhauer, genius does not involve the “vulgarity” in that it is the “pure subject of knowing” where knowing is not subordinated to willing. A genius is “monstrum per excessum” rather than “monstrum per defectum.” 22 So in the entangled incidence of poetry and philosophy, I am tempted to see the genius, the “elect” as Schopenhaeur calls it, as a poet-philosopher. Philosophy provides a “universal survey of life as a whole,” 23 rational articulation realized in abstract concepts, which stands in contrast to perceptual and intuitive knowledge tied to the Idea. It is interesting to observe that philosophy and poetry both make an apprehension of the world through intuitive perception. Schopenhaeur argues that “just as the chemist obtains solid precipitates by combining perfectly clear and transparent fluids, so does the poet know how to precipitate,” and this precipation is effected through “representation of perception” and the abstract, transparent universality of concepts.” 24 Sophia Vasalau points out that “in several places Schopenhauer draws poetry and philosophy into special connection.” She explains that, “as with poetry, the aesthetic character of philosophy turns out to be realised on two closely related levels: with regard to its origin, in taking its beginning (at least in part) from an objective apprehension, and with regard to its expressive form, in using imagery to place the reader in contact with its genetic fount.” 25 For philosophy to find its location in poetry we need not declare a collapse of the two into each other for the philosopher’s guiding question (“What is all this?”) has its meaningful contrast with the artist’s question (“How is it really constituted?”). For me it is in the notion of the idea that the conjoint investment of poetry and philosophy is pressed into play. Schopenhauer departs from Plato’s Idea through his understanding of idea as not mimetic but a kind of nominal object where the individual is perceived as Idea. Julian Young rightly ascribes this to Nietzsche’s “idealizing.” He points out that “quite apart from the fact that it turns his aesthetic theory into nonsense, another, decisive reason for rejecting the suggestion that what Schopenhauer imports into his philosophy are the Platonic Ideas conceived just as Plato conceived them, is that there is nowhere for them to go. According to Schopenhauer’s version of Kantian idealism the thing in itself is ‘one,’ beyond plurality, plurality being dependent of the forms of space and time, the principium individuationis. But the Ideas are many. So they cannot be located on the ‘in itself ’ side of the ‘in itself ’–‘mere representation’ dichotomy. Hence they must be located on the representation side.” 26 The restrictive binarism and sequestration usually associated with Plato are mostly overcome through the universality that Schopenhaeur suggests. Art and philosophy have their distinct ways of communicating the universal but world as representation

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cannot overcome their entangled points of connect. What philosophy is to art is what wine is to grapes. Poetry as revelation of Idea is another way of suggesting its inexhaustibility, which, again, is the articulation of surplus. The perception of poetry has its correspondence with the conceptual depth of philosophy— philosophy says, art shows.27 The quarrel for me is further complicated with Hegel putting Kant’s aesthetic notions, Winckelmann’s classicism, in opposition to Frederich Schlegel, and yet holding on to arts alongside philosophy and religion as his three-pronged way to explore consciousness and spirit on one canvas. If philosophy, for Hegel, is trusted to explore the relationship between transcendence and consciousness, poetry is connected with language. Interestingly, there is an onsite-analogy between them in that both are expressed through language. Poetry for Hegel expresses “directly for spirit’s apprehension the spirit itself with all its imaginative and artistic conceptions but without setting these out visibly and bodily for contemplation from the outside.” 28 Spiritualization of poetry is working with ideas much in the same way a sculptor engages with bronze as his constitutive matter. Poetry is stirringly accommodative where a diverse array of subjects and things—natural, spiritual, historical, subjective—finds home, is translatable, and owes to artistic imagination, which is finally responsible for making some material poetic and conceiving an “inherently independent and closed world.” 29 In trying to spiritualize its way out into the domain of the Absolute, poetry undergoes a diminution of identity in contrast to the achievement of speculative philosophy. More than the closure that poetry generates, it is with the types of imagination that Hegel has his own problems. So poetry, for Hegel, “is bordered on one side by the prose of finitude and commonplace thinking, out of which art struggles on its way to the truth, and on the other side by the higher spheres of religion and philosophy where there is a transition to that apprehension of the Absolute which is still further removed from the sensuous sphere.”30 The understanding then rests on how the “particular” and the “whole” address philosophy and poetry where speculative hermeneutics of the former—its logic and judgment—is contrasted with the implicitness of an achievable unity of the latter—imagination and intrintic life. The dynamics of a superiorization of philosophical spirit over poetry are complexified through philosophy’s commitment to adjust its alleged and yet justified abstraction, with imagination and feeling drawn from poetry’s spirtualization and inwardness—the productive dialectic coming from a wrestle with sense-certainty. Barfield appropriately notes that “poetry excludes neither the sublime ideas of speculative philosophy nor the existence of nature, but it is distinguished by the artistic presentation of these things, the completeness of the world it presents relying on artistic unity rather

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than unity arrived at by abstraction.”31 Though antiromantic in his attitude to art and weighed down by the “subordination thesis,” the consubstantiality, here, is conspicuous. Philosophy speaks, and, often, made to speak by and through poetry.

3 It is with Nietzsche that the dialectic, or, rather, the problematic of philosophy and poetry, becomes more productive and complex—a perfect run-up to the intricate topography of the twentieth century. The compelling point of contact is the fire and life beneath the myth and reality of experience and living—the difficult art of aesthetic Socratism. The dialogue inherent in art is never thrown apart from the dialogue informing philosophy and, in fact, as Nietzche observed, Plato “has given to all posterity the model of a new art form, the model of the novel—which may be described as an infinitely enhanced Aesopian fable in which poetry holds the same rank in relation to dialectical philosophy as this same philosophy held for many centuries in relation to theology: namely, the rank of ancilla.”32 Modes of investigation whether in philosophy or poetry are mechanisms of intelligence, and sense in that analysis often hits the limit to find the passion of tragedy in instinct and insight—the Dionysic as formulative of a redemption. The productive quarrel takes interest in the mythical, the symbolical, and the interpretive, which is not always analytical and intellectual. However, the real philosophers are “commanders and law-givers; they say: ‘Thus shall it be!’ They determine first the Whither and the Why of mankind, and thereby dispose of the previous work of all philosophical laborers, and all subjugators of the past—they grasp at the future with a creative hand, and all that is and was  becomes for them thereby a means, an instrument and a hammer. Their ‘knowing’ is creating, their creating is a law-giving.”33 The rigor in the task of a philosopher is heavily accented where his exacting functions involve enacting a poet, collector, traveler, riddle reader, moralist, seer, and free spirit, owing, importantly, to an understanding that does not believe in reconcilement or conjugation without antagonism. The philosopher’s revaluation of values feeds on his capacities to be discriminative and yet stay capacious, building a separate vein of energy across sites of interests and persuasions. The human is invested in the poet-philosopher who is a conscious artist with powers of judgment and invention, holding the mood, longing, and faith in favorable forms of manifestation. In fact, the connection that poetry has with philosophy and the inspiration that poetry lends philosophers to philosophize poetically are a way to dedisciplinise philosophy:34 not merely about making philosophy less technical and

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more accessible but making the institution of philosophy surely more interesting in its manifestation and potency. Poetry then for the philosopher is a way to intensify and clarify their understanding of life (radiant slumberings) and its circumambient issues and to dedepartmentalize our doing of poetry and philosophy. Poetry and philosophy thrive on a select domain of deserting départir, meaning to divide, a countermomentum to the conscious construction of segregating faculties of thinking and disciplinizing. In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche describes the dilemma facing philosophy at the end of the nineteenth century: The dangers for a philosopher’s development are indeed so manifold today that one may doubt whether this fruit can still ripen at all. The scope and the towerbuilding of the sciences has grown to be enormous, and with this the probability that the philosopher grows weary while still learning or allows himself to be detained somewhere to become a “specialist”:—so he never attains his proper level, the height for a comprehensive look, for looking around, for looking down. Or he attains it too late, when his best time and strength are spent—or impaired, coarsened, degenerated, so that his overall value judgment does not mean much anymore. It may be precisely the sensitivity of his intellectual conscience that leads him to delay somewhere along the way and to be late: he is afraid of the seduction to become a dilettante.35

Poetry and philosophy are held in an immoderate relationship—concepts and images, reflection and inferences, myths and logos, representation and imitation, language and imagination come into an “intellectual sympathy” (in the words of Henri Bergson)36—typical of the changes and unfetterings that we start to encounter with Heidegger down to Agamben. The distance between the lovingly quarrelsome couple builds the gaze and consciousness of both: the much needed distance that contributes to the passion in their relationship. The immoderateness is because of this passion, which again is the reason for their quarrel. The quarrel is also one of great fun, vibrant and nonserious at times, for philosophy and poetry need not take themselves very seriously within their frames and fiber always. The tendency to allow oneself to be lost in the other, to poke and ponder over the other, is what sets the tone and tenor of the twentiethcentury quarrel. Certain issues involved in the quarrel are not, in fact, very difficult to locate. But the mediation and meditation around their kinship are also a submission to presence and a “taking place,” something that defies easy categorization and enunciation. When Paul Valéry declares his discomfort inside philosophy we know he has touched the subject at the subtle nerve: “We agree it

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[philosophy] is unavoidable, and no word may be uttered without some tribute being rendered to it. How could that be prevented, since it is itself unable to vouch for what it is? It is all but meaningless to assert, as is often the case, that we all philosophize unconsciously, since the very person engaging in it could not precisely account for what he is doing.”37 Perhaps the quarrel takes on a new meaning through what he calls “the invisibility of true philosophy,” where philosophy is not always where it is supposed to be but in sites where it is least likely to exist. The imperceptibility of philosophy is the strength that poetry gets as much as doing poetry without being conscious of practicing philosophy makes the appearance of philosophy possible. We are, thus, within the power of visibility and invisibility of philosophy and its resultant complexity that informs the character of this conjugality. This, in a way, prepares us to encounter the intricacy that twentieth-century philosophy builds with the power and presence of poetry. How interestingly fraught was the “quarrel” that Heidegger had with poetry? Georges Abbeele is right to note that Heidegger’s “turn to poetry cannot be scripted as a mere move away from philosophy per se.” It is the language of poetry that has the powers of unconcealment, the Gelassenheit, allowing the self-withdrawal of things for the revelation of wonder. Poetic language—the “house of being”38—speaks for itself to feature the “unshieldedness.” Doing philosophy finds its disclosures in the dwelling in poetic thought and language. However, “disclosures” come with the uncovering of “truth,” which is not simply about taking sides. This uncovering or “unconcealment” is penetrative and insightful and not mere commitment to verificationism and assertion—the analogy of the “true cabinetmaker” pertinently illustrates the “disclosure.” It is on the note of dasein that the poetry and philosophy dialectic nuances up its own debate. The retrieval of dasein is possible through a language that is poetic— manifesting what is pure and most concealed and is confused and common (as he discusses in “Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry”). Do poetry and philosophy then invite “thinking” when “the role of thinking is not that of an opponent?”39 It is about how thinking builds when philosophy “dwells” poetically. However, Bruno Bosteels leads us to a different quarrel in Badiou when he perceptively notes that “the philosopher who forsakes his task in favor of the poets corresponds mainly to Heidegger; the poet who finally confesses his own insufficiency in continuing to make up for this abandonment corresponds to Celan; and the philosopher who interprets this last gesture as an invitation to declare the closure of the age of the poets by substituting the matheme for the poem is obviously none other than Badiou.” Badiou’s struggle over the “quarrel” involves poetry both as a “recognizable subset of literature” and as “a privileged

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stand-in for art in general.” For Badiou the quarrel finds articulation through suture, rivalry, and condition, and Bosteels provides us with a very interesting reading of Badiou’s “poetic.” Poets never chose to be philosophers; poetry offered itself. This quarrel is far more complicated and unstable than Heidegger could have imagined and chosen to argue—a “jealous rivalry that goes both ways.” The quarrel is less complicated in Gadamer though. James Risser explains how for Gadamer “language’s ‘saying power’ is effectively ‘being-as-saying’ such that being is not simply reflected in language as a kind of ‘second being.’ Exactly how the meaning of being becomes manifest in language has everything to do with the movement of realization that occurs in language.” This inheres in Gadamer’s notion of conversation (Gespräch), which is mostly about recovering the “original saying power of words that occurs in the dialogue with language.” Through inner ear (Sprachgebilde), eminent sense (Wunder), enactment (Vollzug), and assertion (Aussage), the philosopher gets to engage with poets like Hölderlin, Goethe, Stefan George, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Celan, and Hilde Domin; this is more in line with Heidegger’s critical conversation with poets. The quarrel as dialogue builds around the notion of the “poetic word.” It is predominantly through his engagement with Celan and the “poetic word” that the complicated matrices between philosophy and poetry are opened up—Celan for him being the “most inaccessible [of] poets of the world literature.” 40 Poetry “names language itself,” and in You and I, the poem and the poet, we encounter a sharing, a poetic speaking that is about both the intelligibility and the (im)possibility of communication—“a word only becomes a word when it breaks into communicative usage.” 41 For both Heidegger and Gadamer poetry becomes a “speculative event.” The quarrel becomes a “play” when Derrida works through his understanding of Gadamer and Celan. Derrida, as Leslie Hill argues, invests in a poem through the intriguing play on “signatures” and the “logic of íterability”. Indeed Gadamer’s interest in the performativity of the “poetic word” corresponds with Derrida’s interest in the poematic, the poetic. Language, as Derrida, points out “does not belong.” This makes poetry function with an “irreducible secrecy,” refusing to be, as Hill explains, “policed, contained, or delimited by any of the customary binary oppositions—between inside and outside, self and other, the figurative and the literal, the personal and the impersonal, the private and the public, the transparent and the cryptic—that so often programme their reception, but which, Derrida shows, the law of iterability repeatedly contests, displaces, and reinscribes.” So the philosophy of knowing a poem through his engagement with Jabès, Artaud, Mallarmé, Valéry, Ponge, and Baudelaire is événement. It is much in the same way that, by quoting poets like Shakespeare,

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Racine, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Valéry, and Jules Romains, among others, Levinas tries to show the philosophical saying through the verbing of the poetic. Raoul Mouti points to the recently discovered poetry that Levinas had written throughout his life and demonstrates the enigmatic relationship that he shared with poetry. He shows us how poetry plays a “transitional role in Levinas’s effort in redefining Heidegger’s ontological difference,” the profound meditations around being and essence, and how poetry without being reduced to any ornamental activity commits “to ontology insofar as ‘essence’ (Being qua Being) resonates only in Poetry.” Poetic resonances in language come from “excrescence of the verb” (l’excroissance du verbe) and the nondesignative dimension of words. Poetry becomes an aesthetic activity and the “revelatory of Being as a Verb”: revealing things “in the night,” penetrating beyond positive naming and forms of daily existents. On this note of the “poetic,” interpreted as the deeply invested quarrel, even Deleuze’s philosophical approach to literature, as Claire Colebrook argues, “is both anti-Oedipal and poetic because there is not a single order of signs to which we are subjected, as though there were a transcendent paternal law that we must read but never master, while the work of art bears its own laws and consistency.” The poesis inheres in singularity and aberrant relations akin to the “bumblebee that constitutes the communication between flowers and loses its proper animal value becomes in relation to the latter merely a marginalized fragment, a disparate element in an apparatus of vegetal reproduction.” The poetic for Deleuze is a force of thinking, undying in its desire to avoid being immured by frameworks of signifiers: it defines creativity as more on the side of “inward reflection,” in trans-forming more relations. The poetic determines and shapes the conditions and emergence. Striking the note of secret verbality, following on Celan, and influenced by Hegel and Heidegger, Blanchot turns his “philosophical criticism and poetic theory into a new mode of fiction or poetry, and his fiction or recits (narratives) into a new mode of philosophy.” Emphasizing the quarrel, Nutters and O’Hara argue that Blanchot models his work on the “potentially infinite conversation, creating out of the unvowable, what he calls (along with Foucault) the outside, the authentic space of literature where it is that one may discover the community to come.” Blanchot’s antitheory of literature sees in poetry a “solitude,” a separateness; he writes, “in poetry we are no longer referred back to the world, neither to the world as shelter nor to the world as goals. In this language the world recedes and goals cease; the world falls silent; beings with their preoccupations, their projects, their activity are no longer ultimately what speaks.” The language becomes important to the point where it “becomes essential.” Language speaks as essential, which is “why the word entrusted to the poet can

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be called the essential word.” 42 It is in the negativity and the “resurrection of language” that the quarrel rests. How much of a “wounding,” then, does Nancy see in such an entanglement? Working in line with Heidegger, it is Nancy who emphasizes the “intimate, complex, conflictual, seductive and manipulative” relationship that poetry has with philosophy. In his chapter on Nancy, Ian James explains it well: “Philosophy in this context affirms, in turn, its own intimate, complex, and necessary relation with poetry as a means by which it accounts for its own privileged access to truth or being. So this schematically drawn opposition between Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Russell, on the one hand, and Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Nancy, on the other, reflects not so much the two sides of a “quarrel” between philosophy and poetry, but rather a quarrel within philosophy itself as to the nature of its own language, style, or technique and the manner by which philosophical access to truth can best be secured.” The quarrel-ground prepares itself to welcome the problematic of language again. Poetry needs to be subsumed within the “assumptive unity” of arts, and, hence, philosophical discourse, Nancy insists, cannot be adequate to poetry: it “lags” behind generating deficit and excess. Poetry exceeds poetry, disabling the desire of philosophy to overpower through a deterministic definition. It is here that poetry, as Nancy argues, connects with “sense” and the “heterogeneity of sensing.” Poetry occurs when access to excess happens. So poetry, James argues, “may occur in individual poems, but then again it may not. Poetry may also occur in other forms that are not poems at all.” Without the “federative function,” the technicity of poetry—the technique of being poetic—finds its articulation through language. And both philosophy and poetry build their conflatory reputation of uncovering the truth, staying exposed to sensing. Giorgio Agamben’s arguing for “creative criticism” brings the quarrel into a meaningful dialogue, working on the limits and incapacities of the individual disciplines—a negotiation on “potentiality” and the working out of a language. He observes that “only a language in which the pure prose of philosophy would intervene at a certain point to break apart the verse of the poetic word, and in which the verse of poetry would intervene to bend the prose of philosophy into a ring, would be the true human language.” 43 It is this persuasive settlement in creative criticism that brings into prominence the pregnant affinities between potentiality and art. What “experimentum linguae” (the “taking place of language”) can do is create the powers to refashion the meaning of our relationship with the world—humans as potential poetic beings. Potentiality operates through Agamben’s specialized readings of certain prosodic paradigms like stanza, caesura, and enjambment, where the semiotic is privileged over the

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semantic enabling of the presentative dimensions of poetry. Agamben argues that “poetry lives only in the tension and difference (and hence also the virtual interference) between sound and sense,” 44 where philosophy (sense) and poetry (sound) are always caught in a productive tension. Justin Clemens, with ease and elegance, shows how Agamben begins “with a truth-event, exemplified by a poetic innovation,” and then suggests “how the innovation is itself a reflexive rearticulation of received differences at the level of both material and meaning.” Clemens argues that Agamben “starts to link his hypothesis, identified in a singular situation, to other, more general issues in the field, enabling him to sketch out poetry as an event of a double torsion, which simultaneously joins and disjoins material and meaning, sound and sense; from there, he moves to a consideration of its exemplary nature for thought in general; finally, Agamben returns to the poem itself in order to designate the parahuman or inhuman body it has constructed, the profane and paradoxical re-membering of a figure of what he calls in Stanzas ‘joy without end.’ ” So when Lacan complains of not being poet enough he is arguing in favor of poetry, claiming that it is poetry that makes meaning possible, makes interpretation possible. Jean-Michel Rabaté points out that Lacan’s vexed engagements with the words pouasie, poète, and poésie, the link between unconscious and creativity, and his sonnet “Hiatus Irrationalis” delineate his lifelong fascination with poetry, which is not without its element of quarrel and anxiety. Through his reflections on poetic utterances and the unconscious, Lacan came to formulate that the unconscious was “structured like a language,” and this would find a confirmation in countless readings of famous poems, most often by Victor Hugo, Paul Valéry, and Paul Claudel (not to forget his fascination with Eliot’s “The Waste Land”). Rabaté notes that “poetry discloses the essence of language in such a way that there is no need to keep the distinction between prose and poetry. Both prose and poetry are formations created by a general rhetoric of the unconscious. It is thanks to these mechanisms that one can fathom better the vital and mysterious connection between subjects as beings and ‘Being.’ ” Not that all psychoanalysts need poetry; but Lacan needed it nourishing his practice of hermeneutic equivocation, his dialogism with the active recesses of the unconscious, the nonknowledge, and the inherent tryst with a failure (“unsuccess” as a poet) that made his signifier ever so productive. How would philosophy-poetry entanglement work when the critical needle stops on the “inner voice”? Through her profound engagement with Arendt, who drew on Husserl, Heidegger, and Karl Jaspers and classical Greek and Roman philosophy, tragedy, and poetry, Cecilia Sjöholm argues that “when philosophy listens to poetry, it might get a sense of the inner voice. When it listens,

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instead of theorizing, something is breaking through. Here we deal with a kind of sensorial encroachment. Poetry speaks to a sense of listening that is irreducible to hearing as a mere sense faculty. The experience of mood as a kind of tonality is not a question of translating emotions. It is not about something; it merely is, the presence of presence. Poetic language, as is stressed by Arendt, is speaking with.” It is this “with”—phainómenon—that poetry, literature, art, and philosophy sustain under the threat of totalitarianism. It is the mode of engaging with the world that determines the way in which philosophy listens to poetry—it is more “with imagination than reason, the mode of ‘as-if ’ emerging through the intonation of the voice.” 45 This is a quarrel that builds around a “thought-event.” The complicated negotiation between poetry and philosophy centering on Rancière’s antagonism to “any presupposed inequalities of intelligence,” any privileged position usurped by philosophy in its various attempts to speak for others” 46—the idea of police order, the distribution of the perceptible, the flesh of words—brings a different dimension to the quarrel. The politics of literature, as Rancière argues, is in the intervention of literature to carve up “space and time, the visible and invisible, speech and noise”; it also “intervenes in the relationship between practices and forms of visibility and modes of saying that carves up one of more common worlds.” 47 Interestingly, working through content of thought, signs, language, his engagements with Rimbaud and Mallarme, and “lessons of the poets,” Rancière’s aesthetic regime builds its own peculiar poeticity. Staying on with poeticity, we find Merleau-Ponty evincing his fair share of settlement in the quarrel with a proposal for “a-philosophy.” A strong believer in the generous intercourse between literature and philosophy, he saw the emergence of phenomenology as very much an effort of modern thought— with phenomenology drawing on Balzac, Proust, Valéry, Stendhal, Paul Claudel, Claude Simon, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Breton, Mallarmé, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Francis Ponge, and others. Galen Johnson argues that Merleau-Ponty writes like a poet “himself regarding the whistle of a locomotive in the night, the silence of a country house, the odors of its shrubbery and the sounds of the birds, and of an old jacket lying on a chair,” and that the “ontology of his later philosophy introduces concepts such as chiasm, reversibility, écart (gap, difference), flesh, and element, concepts that themselves read like poetic metaphors.” The “complex” relationship between him and Ponge speaks of an epistemological density that reaffirmed the productive variant of the connaturality of disciplines and intersecting persuasions. The quarrel assumes interesting proportions when Francois Noudelmann asks the question “Did Sartre ever understand poetry?” He never wrote poetry

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but could not avoid writing on poets like Baudelaire, Mallarmé (an intensive and yet incomplete and unpublished engagement), Ponge (primarily for antipoetic poetry), and Genet. Noudelmann shows Sartre’s changing attitude to poetic language, his growing ability to assess contradictory elements: in his foreword to Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française Sartre moves out of his instrumentalist view of language to appreciate the opacity and the intransitivity of poetry. His exposition on “committed literature,” his investments in “words as things,” and the contemporary political situation influenced the way he saw his negotiations with poetry. To aggravate the quarrel further Carol Bove critiques the way Kristeva combines the philosophy-poetry problematic in Stabat Mater, where the semiotic, the symbolic, the process philosophy, and the analysis of love come into a heady manifestation. Kristeva is argued to have theorized the “the poetic as instrumental in arousing desire and in provoking the creative thinking necessary for improved psychic and social well-being.” And the quarrel hits a different register—a thinking in reverse—when we find through Végső’s exposition that Bataille did not see any traditional dialogue or simplistic opposition between philosophy and poetry; rather, it points to the refiguration of the “limit” where poetry comes to hate poetry and philosophy does not succeed through a conventional discourse. Thinking outside the poetry-philosophy ensemble is also about thinking back differently into a seeming disequilibrium. Getting disturbed by the winds blowing from the Platonic continent about the superiority and eclecticism of philosophy over poetry cannot do us any good. The good, rather, embeds in seeing the complex and vexatious disturbance that lies between the two, as twentieth-century philosophers working on language, words, images, music, and sense help us to experience. The inferiorization of poetry cannot occur because of its disability to dialectize, argue, or analyze like philosophy. The lover’s quarrel deserves our attention because a “great deal of what is commonly called philosophy is metaphysical in character” (in the words of A. J. Ayer) and the metaphysician is a “misplaced poet.” Philosophy is not mere analysis and not simply about strict logicalization of thinking, not about defining thought only and establishing an analytic architecture of thinking and procedures of thinking. Philosophy, as Heidegger argued, is an engagement in seeing, hearing, hoping, and dreaming extraordinary things. It explores the being of things, tries to touch the very nature of things and events as they are revealed before us and make us a part of their manifested existence. To think of life, existence, we think philosophically: philosophy happens as much as it is inevitable and indispensable. Are we indeed talking of poetry too? Christopher Perricone is right when he notes that “humans do not create philosophy (or poetry), as Plato

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and his followers would claim. Philosophy is like the breath that we do not create, but that passes through and fills us. Philosophy speaks through humans, originally Greek men, as muses originally spoke poetry through men. To think of philosophy in this way is to go back before Plato and Aristotle to Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, to go back to when philosophers were also poets, and what was philosophical and what was poetical in their works were indistinguishable from each other.” 48 Both philosophers and poets are world-listeners. It is not about a poet trying to be a philosopher and a philosopher posing as a poet. The argument is much more subtle than that. The trajectorial undulations of the quarrel go to demonstrate that any attempt to keep the purity of philosophy by excommunicating feeling and emotion from philosophical discourses is predominantly about keeping the irrational out of the consubstantiality of the negotiation. Philosophers cannot afford to ignore that their “emotional and felt attachments” are “already present in their worlds of experience.” In fact, twentieth-century continental philosophers are somewhat united in their disinclination to stay immured in a philosophical purity, for doing philosophy is learning the art of staying inflexible in ways that are deeply perceptive and encompassive. Philosophy in its intricate and mixed reinvestments in poetry is not losing out on its character and specialism but declaring a “doing of philosophy” that does not speak of institutional liquidation and life-threatening contamination. Philosophy, as we find today, through Heidegger, Benjamin, Derrida, Rancière, Badiou, Agamben, and others has found its “illegitimacy of doing.” The illegitimacy is the agonizing conjugality under the common sky. The quarrel begins . . .

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Jacques Maritain, “Poetic Experience,” Review of Politics 6, no. 4 (October 1944): 387. Norman Henfrey, ed., Selected Critical Writings of George Santayana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 149. Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1910), see www.gutenberg.net. Martin Coleman, ed., The Essential Santayana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 49. See Nicholas Pappas, “Socrates’ Charitable Treatment of Poetry,” Philosophy and Literature 13 (1989): 248. Simon Haines, Poetry and Philosophy from Homer to Rousseau (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 40.

T h e Ag on i zi n g Ago n 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

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Susan  B. Levin, The Ancient Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry Revisited (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 130. See Symposium, 211d–212a. Raymond Barfield, The Ancient Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 29. John Hartland-Swann, “Plato as Poet: A Critical Interpretation,” Philosophy 26, no. 96 (January 1951): 9. Andrew Ford, Aristotle as Poet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Robert J. Clements, “Poetry and Philosophy in the Renaissance,” Comparative Literature Studies 8, no. 1 (March 1971): 5–6. Clements, 20. McLaughlin, Poetic Force: Poetry After Kant (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), xiii. Kant, Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951), 326. R. Raj Singh, Schopenhauer: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Continuum, 2010), 57. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1966), 245. Singh, Schopenhauer, 68–69. See Laura Penny, “The Highest of All Arts: Kant and Poetry,” Philosophy and Literature 32, no. 2 (2008): 378. Rudolf A. Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: The Hermeneutical Import of the Critique of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 97. Kant, Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, 160. Julian Young, Schopenhaeur (London: Routledge, 2005), 126. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 1:85. Schopenhauer, 1:243. Sophia Vasalou, Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint: Philosophy as a Practice of the Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 66. Young, Schopenhauer, 132. Young, 140. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vols. 1 and 2, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 961. Hegel, 965. Hegel, 968. Barfield, The Ancient Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry, 174. See Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy (New York: Vintage, 1967), 91. See Philip Blair Rice, “The Philosopher’s Commitment,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 26 (1952–53): 26. See also G. Watts Cunningham, “Nietzsche on the Philosopher,” Philosophical Review 54, no.  2 (March 1945): 155–72. Robert Frodeman, “Philosophy Dedisciplined,” Synthese (2013): 190. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (New York: Vintage, 1966), 124.

22 36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

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David Swanger, “The Metaphysics of Poetry: Subverting the ‘Ancient Quarrel’ and Recasting the Problem,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 31, no.  3 (Autumn 1997): 55–64. Jacques Bouveresse, “Philosophy from an Antiphilosopher: Paul Valéry,” trans. Christian Fournier and Sandra Laugier, Critical Inquiry 21, no. 2 (Winter 1995): 357. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Perennial, 1971), 25. David Farrell Krell, Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993), 378. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Writing and the Living Voice,” in Hans-Georg Gadamer on Education, Poetry, and History: Applied Hermeneutics, ed. Dieter Misgeld and Graeme Nicholson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 70. Gadamer, “Language and Understanding,” in The Gadamer Reader: A Bouquet of the Later Writings (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 105. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 41. Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, trans. Karen Pinkus with Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 78. Agamben, The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 109. Patrick Hayden, ed., Hannah Arendt, Key Concepts (London: Routledge, 2014), 174. Jacques Rancière, Gabriel Rockhill, and Slavoj Žižek, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London: Continuum, 2006), 2. Jacques Rancière and Julie Rose, “Hypotheses,” in Politics of Literature (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 4. Christopher Perricone, “Poetic Philosophy: The Heidegger-Williams,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 12, no. 1, new series (1998): 51.

2 As the World Turns Heidegger and the Origin of Poetry Georges Van Den Abbeele

T

he work of Martin Heidegger would seem to be the place where philosophy turns back to and becomes fully reconciled with poetry after the long separation inaugurated by Plato’s expulsion of the poets from the Republic. Of course, we know and realize that philosophy has often, if not inevitably, during this long divorce, assumed poetic form to advance philosophic thought. But the question of the relation between poets and philosophers, between poetry and philosophy, cannot be reduced to the mere acknowledgment of the myriad (poetic) forms philosophy has adopted in one case or another—the long poem, the dream narrative, the fable, or the fictional dialogue, most famously in Plato himself—that is, to a mere expression of the difference between form and content, or between appearance and being. Such formulations, of course, are readily subsumable under the very principle of metaphysics that, since Platonism, has posited the essence of truth or meaning as what lies beyond or behind the mere phenomena of appearance. Likewise, the presentational or representational forms in which philosophy is written should not divert us from critical discussion of the concepts proposed. The Heideggerian appreciation of poetry should not be understood, however, as a mere “reversal” of this representational paradigm, a reversal that would maintain the fundamental structure of metaphysics and that he associates with the “nihilism” of Nietzsche, who not only writes philosophy in a variety of modes and genres but also postulates a practice of dissembling in a world where there is nothing but dissemblance, a Dionysian embrace of the will to power as such. In Heidegger’s case, the question of poetry is inextricably bound with the related question of his “turn” (die Kehre) from the earlier “fundamental ontology”

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of Being and Time as the elaboration of the meaning of Being through the hermeneutical description of the everyday experiences of Dasein, a project Heidegger later denounces in the “Letter on Humanism” as both “subjective” and “caught in the language of metaphysics,”1 to the later work characterized by a more adventurous manner of “thinking” that strives to overcome the metaphysical forgetting of Being by opening onto the event of its disclosure or aletheia. It is all too tempting to contrast the philosophical approach of the former with the more “poetic” demeanor of the latter, the theoretical, even anthropological tenor of the early work with the increasing tendency to follow a train of thought that is guided even in its very conceptual development by the prolonged reading of particular texts, not only classic philosophic texts (Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche) but also overtly poetic ones (Rilke, Trakl, Novalis, and most especially Hölderlin). Of course, the specific reasons for and modalities of the famous “turn” in Heidegger’s thought remain extremely fraught and contested. The turn to poetry cannot be scripted as a mere move away from philosophy per se. Among other complications is the fact that the “turn” is also exactly contemporaneous with Heidegger’s apparent withdrawal from the politics that all too calamitously led to the official embrace of Nazism in his tenure as Rektor at the University of Freiburg. If the turn is a move away from the philosophy of classical metaphysics and toward a more rigorous practice of thinking, or Denken, as the anamnesis of Being, as the “Letter on Humanism” would proclaim, then why should this occur in synchrony with the retreat from politics? On the other hand, is the abandonment of the (overtly and officially) political for the poetical as clear-cut as it is portrayed. As Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has convincingly argued, might not the apparently contrarian embrace of the poetical belie the pursuit of the political “by other means,” one that would reveal less a rejection of National Socialism than the scandal of its further development?2 However one attempts to answer these questions, the poetic turn is decisive in how one understands Heidegger’s thought and, most especially, in how one continues to ask the question, such as it has been raised and continues to be raised, of the relation not only between poetry and politics, but also between poetry and philosophy. To help answer the question, it might be helpful to step back and consider some of the features of Heidegger’s thought that would seem to frame his discussion of poetry in ways that may also help explicate what the Kehre is really all about. First of all, it is important to recognize that, right from the beginning of his philosophical work in Being and Time, there is an explicit rejection of classical aesthetics as a subregion of philosophy. Even this early phenomenological method of fundamental ontology means asking the question of Being through the description of everyday existence as what appears, as what manifests itself in

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the aisthesis of phenomena. But to the extent that a phenomenological approach to ontology inevitably continues to presuppose an intelligibility behind the sensual appearance, it remains precisely caught within the “language of metaphysics” decried by the “Letter on Humanism” and thus, within his own project, crucially evades the question of Being. Only within an ontic sense can “aesthetics” take its place within philosophy as a kind of science of phenomena, just as the ideology of aesthetics ultimately lies in making the nonsensuous sensuous, in making appear what cannot appear, a concept most systematically theorized by Paul de Man and then by Andrzej Warminski.3 Such an “aesthetic ideology” is the very definition of metaphysics, whose deconstruction is announced but not achieved in Being and Time, a work that seeks to begin philosophy anew by inquiring into the conditions of that being that asks the question of Being, the “being there” Heidegger famously calls Dasein. But if aesthetics disappears from fundamental ontology, is it not also because the aisthesis or phenomenon is as much everywhere as it is in fact nowhere? Although aesthetics is nowhere since it cannot be isolated as a discrete field of inquiry without relapsing into metaphysics, it appears to be everywhere, however, as the worldliness within which the being of Being can be thought and its essence unconcealed as the truth of aletheia. Such a dilemma, however, in turn requires a way of thinking that is determined by Being itself, that is ontologically and not simply ontically determined, a way of thinking that inaugurates a new beginning for philosophy, one that recalls but does not merely repeat the so-called Greek origins of thought. Such a thinking is what, post-Kehre, Heidegger ostensibly tries to find a way to do, which we can also describe as the pursuit of constant twists and turns to uncover the truth of Being, an endless set of turns dating back even well before the so-called Kehre, and on account of which we might think the Kehre itself less as marking a chronological moment in Heidegger’s philosophy than as the very sign of his thought, as an ever-renewed questioning of thought itself, a turning way of thinking. It is tempting to link this way to the peculiarities of Heidegger’s hermeneutic style, which moves between a well-honed suspicion of common sense (such as in his frequent gesture of daring to “question what is unquestionable”) and at the same time a certain assumption of or reliance on a kind of popular, even at times creepily völkisch, common sense in his familiar “descriptions” of the everyday, or of what is close or ready to hand, as the basis for thinking through philosophical problems. This shifting, turning mode of hermeneutic reasoning is found massively on display in the key text for our inquiry, “The Origin of the Work of Art,”

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originally delivered as a lecture in November 1935 but only published in the collection from 1950, Holzwege (a book whose title allegorizes the task of thinking as following the twisting and turning woodland pathways Heidegger could find right outside his famous Schwarzwald “hut”). Given the span of time that marks its long gestation, “The Origin of the Work of Art” also positions us right in the midst of Heidegger’s claimed “turn” of thought, which could be said to occur somewhere between the early works and career culminating in his resignation from the Rektorat in 1934 and the postwar publications starting in the 1950s. (That this turn coincides with the very ascendency of Nazism and the horrors of the Second World War only raises more questions, as raised by many but perhaps most trenchantly by Jean-François Lyotard, and more recently, by Jean-Luc Nancy.)4 At the same time, the subject matter of the essay on the “origin of the work of art” is also significant in the light of the simultaneous rejection of classical aesthetics and the ubiquity of the aistheton, namely, that despite the double move, one still needs to account for the very being and existence of something like art as such. But if the question of Being could be approached as it was in Being and Time by inquiring into the being that asks the question of Being (aka Dasein), the question of art as addressed in “The Origin of the Work of Art” confronts an initial dilemma: How can we derive a general concept of art from the “comparative examination of actual art works” unless we already “know beforehand what art is”?5 And, on the other hand, how can we define the principle of what art is without being able in advance to determine and identify actual works of art as art? The dilemma, such as it is, stems from the classical metaphysical distinction between the universal and the particular and the alternative modes of deriving the one from the other: idealism and realism, or, as Kant more precisely delineates it, the determining versus the reflective power of judgment.6 Given the implicit circularity between the universal and the particular, each of which presupposes the other, Heidegger denounces any procedures that would derive the one from the other as “self-deception” (18). Instead, Heidegger embraces the very circularity of thinking, its turning about, despite the objection that “ordinary understanding demands that this circle be avoided because it violates logic”: “Thus, we are compelled to follow the circle. This is neither a makeshift nor a defect. To enter upon this path is the strength of thought, to continue on it is the feast of thought, assuming that thinking is a craft. Not only is the main step from work to art a circle like the step from art to work, but every separate step  that we attempt circles in this circle.” Rather than heed the logical injunction (or “self-deception”) to extract oneself from the illogical and unfamiliar path of circular reasoning, Heidegger insists upon following what we are

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nonetheless “compelled to follow,” a conscious accession to necessity that he views not as a weakness but as the very “strength” or “feast” of thought, no doubt through the very consciousness of that accession. The subsequent approach will then be to “go to the actual work and ask the work what and how it is.” And here, in the very midst of the defamiliarizing questioning of what unquestionably passes for “ordinary understanding,” the familiar returns as the very ground for the propitious pursuit of thinking in its strong form as “craft”: “Works of art are familiar to everyone. Architectural and sculptural works can be seen installed in public places, in churches, and in dwellings. Art works of the most diverse periods and peoples are housed in collections and exhibitions. If we consider the works in their untouched actuality and do not deceive ourselves, the result is that the works are as naturally present as are things” (19). This conclusion that artworks are like things, if not in fact a kind of thing, seems at first singularly unpromising if by “thing” we are to understand the most generically expandable word: What can we not indicate by the word thing? What is subsumed by the signifier whose signified can signify any thing? And yet, the word thing cannot aspire to the magical or majestic play of the floating signifier, be it Lévi-Straussian mana or the Lacanian phallus. Rather, it is precisely through the lowliness of the “thing” that Heidegger can proceed along the path of thinking what art is, how it is indeed “thingly” and yet “something other than the mere thing itself ” (19). Indeed, the very ubiquity of the thing (“The stone in the road is a thing, as is the clod in the field” [20]) also belies its amazing conceptual intransigence. For in circling back prior to the question of what a work is, much less a work of art, and to the very being of the thing in its thingness, Heidegger swiftly and effectively rejects an entire set of various metaphysical interpretations or representations of the thing that by defining it through prevailing “thing-concepts,” for example, as a bearer of traits, as the unity of a manifold of sensations, or as formed matter, in point of fact “obstruct the way toward the thingly character of the thing” (31). As Heidegger’s lightning survey shows, the history of Western metaphysics in its construction of these various obtrusive thing-concepts proves itself unequal to and undone by the lowly thing whose thingness it can never reveal: This exertion of thought seems to meet with its greatest resistance in defining the thingness of the thing: for where else could the cause lie of the failure of the efforts mentioned? The unpretentious thing evades thought most stubbornly. Or can it be that this self-refusal of the mere thing, this self-contained independence, particularly difficult to express and only seldom expressible is infallibly documented by the history of its interpretation indicated above. This history

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coincides with the destiny in accordance with which Western thought has hitherto thought the Being of beings. (32)

Interestingly enough, Heidegger’s demolition job on Western philosophy’s failure even to think what a thing is has an important if unstated corollary in the course of an analysis of the origin of the work of art, namely, the discounting of the major Western theories of art, which define the work of art in representational terms, with exactly the same paradigmatic concepts used to define things, namely, as the bearer of traits, as the unity of a manifold of sensations, or as formed matter. Thus, the very same “thing-concepts” that “obstruct the way toward the thingly character of the thing” also block the path “toward the equipmental character of equipment, and all the more toward the workly character of the work” (31). Heidegger latches on to “equipment” as something “intermediate” between thing and work, as something “particularly familiar to human thinking” to the extent that it comes into being through human making. But how to understand what the equipmental quality of equipment is without falling into the same kinds of metaphysical explanations previously discounted in the analysis of things? Heidegger’s response: “We are most easily insured against this if we simply describe some equipment without any philosophical theory” (32). The statement raises more questions than it answers. Is there such a thing as a “simple description”? And what would that “simple description” look like? Are we talking once again about the appeal to the familiar and the close-to-hand as the ground to renew philosophy, or is this a concealed recall of the classic phenomenological method? Is this really a way to do “without any philosophical theory” or “simply” a way to do philosophy differently? And, finally how about the choice of “equipment” to be described, simply, and without any philosophical theory? We first get an answer to the last question, which Heidegger answers in the first-person plural, less the royal we (as the pluralized ego of authority) than the conversational or familiar we of presumed collective agreement (we = I + you): “We choose as example a common sort of equipment—a pair of peasant shoes” (32). The claimed commonness and familiarity of this item, at least for Heidegger, then in fact allows him—still in the conversational “we”—to do without the actual description, simple or not, that was announced (and thus without in fact having to channel or evade “any” philosophical theory): We do not even need to exhibit actual pieces of this sort of useful article in order to describe them. Everyone is acquainted with them. But since it is a

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matter here of direct description, it may be well to facilitate the visual realization of them. For this purpose a pictorial representation suffices. We shall choose a well-known painting by Van Gogh, who painted such shoes several times. But what is there to see here? Everyone knows what shoes consist of. . . . Such gear serves to clothe the feet. (33)

A simple description turns out not to be necessary since “everyone” already knows what shoes are, namely, a useful piece of equipment that “serve[s] to clothe the feet” and thus to enable a certain activity, such as the peasant woman walking in the field. But the being of equipment, such as shoes, paradoxically lies in their occlusion. Equipment is only useful or reliable to the extent we are unaware of it: “The peasant woman wears her shoes in the field. Only here are they what they are. They are all the more genuinely so, the less the peasant woman thinks about the shoes while she is at work, or looks at them at all, or is even aware of them” (33). But if the being of equipment in its functional disappearance, or by dint of its use, “wastes away into mere stuff” (35), then what does this have to do with the work of art, and with the reference to a specific work of art by Van Gogh in lieu of the promised “simple description”? For Heidegger, the equipmental quality of equipment, which hides itself the more it really works as equipment, is instead revealed or dis-covered, de-concealed, in the work of art, where “we” are “suddenly somewhere else than we usually tend to be” (35).7 The disclosure of equipmental being through art happens precisely “not by a description and explanation of a pair of shoes actually present; not by a report about the process of making shoes; and also not by the observation of the actual use of shoes occurring here and there” (35), i.e., not by the conventional or “simple” modes of (phenomenological) description, but rather because something other, art, which cannot be reduced to mere representation, “lets us know what shoes are in truth” (35),8 because as Heidegger exclaims in an obscure nod toward the decisive role language (and especially poetic language) will later play in the origin of the work of art: “This painting spoke [Dieses hat gesprochen]” (35, emphasis added). Art thus appears as a key form of aletheia, literally an unforgetting (or anamnesia), which Heidegger describes as disclosure or the event whereby an entity emerges into the unconcealedness of its being: “If there occurs in the work a disclosure of a particular being, disclosing what and how it is, then there is here an occurring, a happening of truth at work” (36). Art as a-letheia is thus also Ereignis, the event or happening that is the coming into view of the truth of being: “Art is the setting into work of truth [das ins-Werk-Setzen der Wahrheit],”

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an ambiguous turn of phrase Heidegger then repeats throughout the rest of the essay.9 But what does this setting into work of truth mean? While representation is not excluded per se, art more broadly realizes the conditions for the unconcealedness of beings to come into view. These conditions are realized by what Heidegger calls the clearing, or Lichtung (the light from a clearing in the woods), or just the Open: “That which is can only be, as a being, if it stands within and stands out within what is lighted in this clearing. Only this clearing grants and guarantees to us humans a passage to those beings that we ourselves are not, and access to the being that we ourselves are. Thanks to this clearing, beings are unconcealed in certain changing degrees” (53). Interestingly, as the language becomes more poetic, the examples shift from painting to architecture, with the Greek temple replacing Van Gogh, ostensibly to indicate the nonrepresentational basis of art: “Who could maintain the impossible view that the Idea of Temple is represented in the building? And yet, truth is set to work in such a work. . . . A building, a Greek temple, portrays nothing” (37, 41). Rather than sensuously re-presenting something nonsensual, the temple exemplifies art as the setting into work of truth. This setting into work of truth through art happens as the installation of what Heidegger calls a “world” wherein or whereby being is unveiled, a clearing where it emerges in its truth, as such. In the case of the Greek temple, world gets defined thus: “It is the temple-work that first fits together and at the same time gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of destiny for human being. The all-governing expanse of this open relational context is the world of this historical people” (42). World is the context opened up or set up by art, an “open” set of relations or “paths” but it is also the particularity of history, of a people, of a certain “destiny.” As such, world appears as paradoxically both utopic and determining, as the “open” unveiling of the truth of being and as the closure and closedness of national or even regional essentializing. World takes place or stands out against what Heidegger alternatively calls “earth”: Standing there, the building holds its ground against the storm raging above it and so first makes the storm itself manifest in its violence. . . . The temple’s firm towering makes visible the invisible space of air. The steadfastness of the work contrasts with the surge of the surf, and its own repose brings out the raging of the sea. Tree and grass, eagle and bull, snake and cricket first enter into their distinctive shapes and thus come to appear as what they are. The Greeks early called this emerging and rising in itself and in all things phusis, It clears and

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illuminates, also, that on which and in which man bases his dwelling. We call this ground the earth. (42)

Earth and world are both contrastive and mutually assertive. World emerges as what is set up or installed (aufstellen) while earth is what is consequently set forth (herstellen), what world brings to light by emerging over and against it. Earth and world are coposited within a complex structure the older Heidegger will later recalibrate and refer to as the fourfold, which then redefines “world” as the fourway interface of earth, sky, human, and divine.10 If earth, on the one hand, corresponds to Greek phusis, it is also what paradoxically conceals itself in its unveiling, what refuses or resists its ready comprehension, exactly like the thing. And indeed, Heidegger shortly makes that very connection: “But what looks like the thingly element, in the sense of our usual thing-concepts, in the work taken as object, is, seen from the perspective of the work, its earthly character. . . . Anticipating a meaningful and weighty interpretation of the thingly character of things, we must aim at the thing’s belonging to the earth [whose nature is] in its free and unhurried bearing and self-closure” (69). But if earth qua phusis veils as it unveils itself, remains perpetually inscrutable to the (human) gaze that would reveal it, what is “world” if not another kind of metaphusis, what comes after or about the phusis, a true metaphysics exemplified by the work of the work of art as the worlding of a world that unveils the ever selfveiling earth, the ever-resistant truth of the being of things? Indeed, the metaphysics of world is said not only to reveal the physics of earth, but world itself appears, as Heidegger very precisely stipulates, as the “destiny of an historical people” (48). On the one hand, this makes sense since worlding occurs within or as the particularity of historical moment, geographic location, or cultural context, even as what makes those very specificities possible (as well, it should be said, as the correlative sense of the beyond or before of context evoked by earth and thing). It is not just a building or temple but the Greek temple built by ancient Greek people to house a specific god or gods within this specific valley at this specific historical time. As such, world would seem to be as ephemeral as the stubbornness of things appears eternal: The Aegina sculptures in the Munich collection, Sophocles’s Antigone in their best critical edition, are, as the works they are, torn out of their own native sphere. However high their quality and power of impression, however good their state of preservation, however certain their interpretation, placing them in a collection has withdrawn them from their own world. But even when we

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make an effort to cancel or avoid such displacement of works—when, for instance, we visit the temple in Paestum at its own site or the Bamberg cathedral on its own square—the world of the work that stands there has perished. World-withdrawal and world-decay can never be undone. (40–41)

The risk for the work of art would then be its swiftly becoming irrelevant, becoming no longer a work but a mere “object” in the “realm of tradition and conservation”: “But does the work still remain a work if its stands outside all relations? Is it not essential for the work to stand in relations?” (41). The questions make utter sense if world is defined, as we saw earlier, precisely as an “open relational context.” No surprise that Heidegger then answers his questions on this point with an exhortation to raise the question: “Yes, of course—except that it remains to ask in what relations it stands.” Later, Heidegger will propose an answer in terms of the “preservers” whose role in “letting the work be a work” is as crucial as that of its creators: Just as a work cannot be without being created but is essentially in need of creators, so what is created cannot itself come into being without those who preserve it. However, if a work does not find preservers, does not at once find them such as respond to the truth happening in the work, this does not at all mean that the work may also be a work without preservers. Being a work, it always remains tied to preservers, even and particularly when it is still only waiting for preservers and only pleads and waits for them to enter into its truth. (66–67)

Do preservers of a work belong to the same world as its creators? Heidegger neither asks nor answers this question directly, yet implies that it is less a question of belonging or not to some reportedly same world than a kind of “letting the work be” to the extent that it works to “transport us out of the ordinary” and “to transform our accustomed ties to world and earth”: “Preserving the work, as knowing, is a sober standing-within the extraordinary awesomeness of the truth that is happening in the work;. . . it is standing within the conflict that the work has fitted into the rift [between world and earth]” (66–68). The “open relational context” of world thus raises more questions than it answers and it implicitly urges us to reconsider the specific world of a specific “historical people” within an ever wider, more open set of relations and “contexts,” an unbounded network of ever-changeable worlds of historically multiple

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and mutating peoples. But instead of embracing this implied radical openness, Heidegger’s world as revealed in his practice as a kind of “preserver” all too distressingly evokes a narrowing context of German blood and soil. The very first appearance of the “world/earth” dichotomy occurs well before its explicit theorization with the example of the Greek temple. It occurs precisely with Heidegger’s bizarre fantasy of the peasant woman trodding her fields, which stands for or as an interpretation of Van Gogh’s painting of a supposed pair of old shoes: In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining anxiety as to the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having once more withstood want, the trembling before the impending childbed and shivering at the surrounding menace of death. This equipment belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. (34, first emphasis mine)

What could be closer to Heidegger than this “world of the peasant woman,” lurking no doubt just around the corner from the philosopher’s “hut” in rural Todtnauberg, her very “tenacity” an implicit paean to the self-assertion of German national spirit, to the call of the German people to its historic destiny. It may indeed be a world, but perhaps less a metaphysics in the etymological sense of what comes after the phusis of the earth than a mere ideology and of the worst kind, wherein the supremacy of this historical people legitimates itself above all others. Another glimpse of this world of Heidegger’s comes even earlier in the essay, when he evokes the “diversity” as well as the familiarity of works of art: Art works of the most diverse periods and people are housed in collections and exhibitions. If we consider the works in their untouched actuality and do not deceive ourselves, the result is that the works are as naturally present as are things. The picture hangs on the wall like a rifle or a hat. A painting, e.g., the one by Van Gogh that represents a pair of peasant shoes, travels from one exhibition to another. Works of art are shipped like coal from the Ruhr and logs from the Black Forest. During the First World War Hölderlin’s hymns were

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packed in the soldier’s knapsack together with cleaning gear. Beethoven’s quartets lie in the storerooms of the publishing house like potatoes in a cellar. (19)

That these examples of “the most diverse periods and peoples” are all northern European or downright German tells us much, alas, about Heidegger’s world; and this is not to make a simple charge of ethnocentrism or even to discount the choice of examples as what would simply have been what was near and ready to hand for the thinker. Rather, it is the narrowing of perspective to the familiar that seems utterly at odds with the daringness of the questions the essay asks, including the gesture of questioning the unquestionable. Just as in the course of the essay all art will be fundamentally reduced to poetry (“All art, as the letting happen of the advent of truth of what is, is, as such, essentially poetry” [72]), so it would appear that all art, and indeed, all poetry, can be reduced to German poetry and, ultimately, to the sole poet, Friedrich Hölderlin. Despite the variety of art forms evoked by Heidegger in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” the essay and many other writings make abundantly clear the absolute priority of poetry above all other genres, and indeed its virtually exclusive appeal as the art of language. Language, Heidegger is fond of saying, is “the house of being,” and as such, poetry as the highest form of language would seem akin to a temple for being, an architectonics of worlding where the fourfold is at its strongest. But why the privileging of Hölderlin in particular? Heidegger writes in his essay on “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” published in 1937, contemporaneous to the first lecture version of “The Origin of the Work of Art”: “I choose Hölderlin, and him alone. . . . I did not choose Hölderlin because his work, as one among many, realizes the universal essence of poetry, but rather because Hölderlin’s poetry is sustained by his whole poetic mission: to make poems solely about the essence of poetry. Hölderlin is for us in a preeminent sense the poet’s poet.11 Heidegger’s position is dramatic and sustained throughout his career. With his seminars on Hölderlin’s hymns, “Germania” (1934), “The Rhine” (1935), and most notably “The Ister” (1942), Heidegger’s Denkheit seems insolubly linked to that specific poet’s Dichtung, as if what passes for philosophy has now morphed into a form of textual explication. I say “form” since the rigor of Heidegger’s interpretations has been a subject of considerable debate and outright skepticism, but the point may lie less in the “fidelity” of Heidegger’s reading than in its status as a mode of poetico-philosophical reflection with its own peculiar aims and practices. As such, they lead readily to the later essays “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” (1954), “What Are Poets Good For?” (1950), and especially

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“ ‘Poetically Man Dwells’ . . .” (1951), all of which spin a philosophical reflection out of small bits or even single lines of poetry, as if verse were indeed the key to the house of being.12 And while, in these later essays, Heidegger does on occasion cite or discuss other key German poets (Rilke, Trakl, Novalis, Stefan George), there appears a significant inability to transcend those national boundaries, even when prodded, for example, by René Clair’s failed attempt to engage the philosopher on the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, or by the even less satisfactory encounter between Heidegger and the Germanophone but not ethnically German, Paul Celan, whose cryptic poem “Todtnauberg” names the philosopher’s homely hut in an apparent testament of their meeting there, whose details nonetheless remain obscure.13 It is Hölderlin, however, “the poet’s poet,” whose poetry remains the ground for philosophy. One need look no further than the conclusion of the essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” which ends with a quotation from one of those hymns by the mad poet of Tübingen, which were supposedly packed into every German soldier’s knapsack: “Reluctantly / that which dwells near its origin departs.”14 The citation coincides with the essay’s final reversal of the meaning of the “origin of the work of art” from objective to subjective genitive, with the conclusion that “art is by nature an origin: a distinctive way in which truth comes into being, that is, becomes historical” (78). And it is as poetry that “art happens” (77), that is, “the saying of world and earth, the saying of the arena of their conflict, . . . the saying of the unconcealedness of what is” (74). Poetry, continues Heidegger, is “projective saying” or a “saying, which in preparing the sayable, simultaneously brings the unsayable as such into a world”: “In such saying, the concepts of an historical people’s nature, i.e., of its belonging to world history, are formed for that folk, before it” (74). This is what makes art itself an “origin,” a “distinctive way in which truth comes into being, that is, becomes historical,” but only to the extent that it defines the nature of a historical people. In other words, history is to be understood not simply in terms of a “sequence in time of events” but rather as the “transporting of a people into its appointed task as entrance into that people’s endowment” (77). Art, as a version of the projective saying that is poetry, calls as an appeal to a historical people’s destiny. It invokes a beginning that is the project of a people, but again everything happens as if the German people in particular constitute a special volk, if not the exemplary people itself, the one “destined” to hear the call of the truth of Being. The Hölderlin quotation is interesting in this regard, since the “reluctance” to leave one’s origin, stated by Heidegger as a kind of “test” for the German people, presumably to stiffen its resolve to embrace or follow the call of its origin, is in fact what Hölderlin specifically rejects in this hymn, significantly called “The

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Journey.” The reluctance to leave one’s origins is ridiculed just as are the towns along the Neckar where the people “affirm that / No dwelling place could be better.” Instead, the poet boldly rejects that complacency, or narrowness of world: “But I am bound for the Caucasus! / For only today / I heard it said in the breezes / that free as the swallows the poets are.”15 The rest of the poem in fact evokes a fantasy that the “German people” once left their home along the Danube (their Ursprung) for the Black Sea, where they encountered other peoples with whom they mixed and from whom “there sprang a people more beautiful / than all who before or since / Have called themselves human.” But where, bemoans the poet, have these people gone, these long lost “kin,” who are also utter strangers in a distant East? If there is a world here in Hölderlin’s poetry, it is not one that evokes the heimisch pastoral of the Schwarzwald but of freedom of flight elsewhere, of the distant seashores far down the river from its Ursprung, and beyond. If there is a call to the historical destiny of the German people, it is the call of radical miscegenation with other peoples, of dispersed dissemination into a “more beautiful” humanity. A similar divergence of reading occurs in Heidegger’s seminar in 1942 on “The Ister,” that other Hölderlin hymn, where the free flight of the poet—“we sing from the Indus”—is again evoked (“Not without wings may one / Reach for that which is nearest”) when the river Danube is imagined to “travel backwards” and “must come / from the East.” Heidegger is at pains trying to distinguish this “poetic knowledge” from modern, fact-based “cognitive knowledge,” arguing for a kind of truth poetry would reveal despite the absurdity of such a claim against the “unquestionableness” of the “calculable and ordered relationality” or spatiotemporal rationality that factually asserts that of course the river flows from West to East.16 Poetic “truth” might be readily invoked here by recourse to the Western myth of translatio imperii, whereby the center of civilization moves inexorably westward from Greece to Rome to Paris to London to New York to . . .17 Unfortunately, the currency of this myth inconveniently sidesteps Germany and in particular “the upper Donau valley between Beuron and Gutenstein” that Heidegger in an oddly “factual” moment identifies as the landscape of this section of Hölderlin’s hymn. Rather, Heidegger proposes that “we think the Ister hymn so as to grasp the essence of the Ister as a river in its poetic truth” (42). What then is a river? The river determines the being at home of human beings as historical in their coming to be at home. The river is the locality of the locale of the home. The river at the same time determines the becoming of human beings as historical in their being at home. The river is the journeying of that journey in which the

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becoming of being at home has its essence. The river is not simply one of these (locality) and then the other (journeying) in addition. The river is both, and is so in an originary [ursprüngliche] unity. Human beings, as historical, are grounded in relation to this essence of the river. Perhaps it is in this essence of the river in general that something of the historicality of human beings as historical is first unveiled. (42–43, emphasis added)

So far so good. The river would appear as another version of the world and earth relation, wherein place and movement function again, like the work of art, as origin, and specifically as origin for human historicality. Further elaborations will occur in later essays such as Heidegger’s long gloss on Hölderlin’s turn of phrase “poetically man dwells” in the essay by that same title.18 But, in continuing his commentary on the river as a world of poetic dwelling, Heidegger can’t help but clarify that “when we speak of ‘human beings’ here and throughout these remarks, we always mean the essence of the historical human beings of that history to which we ourselves belong: the essence of Western humankind” (43). A few pages later, this delimitation on the essence of humanity appears further reduced, perhaps unsurprisingly, to Heidegger’s own nationality. If Hölderlin’s hymn is “the telling of a coming into one’s own,” then “what is one’s own in this case is whatever belongs to the fatherland of the Germans” (49). But it is not simply that poetry or art or worldliness, to the extent that it determines or originates human historical being, must instantiate itself in terms of a certain singularity—although the very aggregate concept of nation or race, however defined, implied in the notion of a “historical people” necessarily refuses the concept of singularity just as Heidegger’s definition of “human beings” as globally “Western” also accompanies his rejection of that term meaning “mere ‘individual’ human beings” (43). Rather, singularity remains a problem within a framework that inevitably, as Lacoue-Labarthe has argued, leads back to a poetized politics of “national aestheticism.”19 Heidegger himself evokes the problem only to conjure it away in trying to read Hölderlin: “we must think definite and singular relations whose singularity is expressed clearly by way of the proper names that are named in the poem ‘The Ister.’” The poem in question itself bears a proper name as its title, though perhaps it is not the proper proper name for that river more commonly called the Danube. Heidegger’s perplexity mounts as the river’s poetic motion charts an “enigmatic” or, shall we say, poetic path from East to West: The name “Indus” is named. “Hercules,” one of the Greek heroes, is named, the “Isthmus of Corinth” and the river “Alpheus.” Heracles appears in a very obscure

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relation to the Donau. Greece and the homeland of the upper Donau valley stand in a relation that is clearly named and yet presents an enigma. The Ister has “invited” Hercules from the Isthmus “as a guest.” The locales and the journey, the back-and-forth between the foreign and the homely (das Heimisch), are poetized in the poem. Yet these relations are alien for us. And we are scarcely offered any immediate foothold we could latch onto in order to illuminate them. (43)

The puzzlement before the foreignness, not only of the foreign names whose westward flow raises further questions about origins, including those of a certain historical people, but also of the foreignness of the relations that remain “alien for us” between these singular names and places, leads Heidegger into a long meditation on the relations between the foreign and the homely, concluding that “coming to be at home is a passage through the foreign,” a passage poetically realized by the poet Hölderlin insofar as he “had the privilege of possessing the intrinsic ability to be influenced by Pindar and Sophocles,” which in turn means the ability “to listen in an originary and obedient manner to whatever is originary in the foreign from out of his own origin” (50). But if this Auseinandersetzung between the foreign and the homely is, as Heidegger claims, “the fundamental truth of history” (49), how are we to understand that relation except as another origin or originariness, like the work of art and in particular the poetry of the poet, the only real originary because “able to be influenced” poet, Hölderlin, or the river’s originary unity of place and travel? But there seems also to be at least two different pathways at work here: one that is home directed (“to be at home is a passage through the foreign”); and one that is foreign directed (heeding “whatever is originary in the foreign” from out of one’s own). The former might be characterized as imperialist or colonial, “securing a suitable ‘living space’ ” for human beings, aka for a particular “historical people” (48), a formulation that all too uncomfortably echoes, most especially in 1942, the overt Nazi policy of conquest, annexation, and genocide to meet the German people’s quest for Lebensraum. The latter direction, though, would be more avowedly exilic, other-oriented, and open to the originary in the foreign, if not the foreign itself as origin, a formulation that then wreaks interminable havoc with any discourse of national or racial destiny, even the very identity of an “historical” people. This remains the enigma for Heidegger in reading Hölderlin’s “poetizing.” And going beyond Heidegger’s familiar and comfortable trope of Greek originariness, which also figures as his call to begin philosophy anew, what do we do with the Indus? Heidegger says no more than that its name “is named,” but this is, after all, stated in

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the poem as the explicit location of the poetic voice: “we sing from the Indus.” Beyond the “enigma” of Heracles’s “very obscure relation” with the Ister, who invites him up into its upper watershed, there is this other mighty river, beyond Greece and the Alfeios and, leaving Heidegger’s apparent Greco-German world picture behind, beyond Egypt and the Nile River, beyond the Persian empire and the Tigris and Euphrates, all the way out to the farthest limit of the AlexandrianGreek empire, the Indus River Valley, home to its own ancient civilization, the Harappan or Indus Valley Civilization, essentially contemporary with its counterparts in Egypt and Mesopotamia and at least as massive and influential, but far less understood. Controversy remains, for example, as to whether various scripts found in Indus Valley sites can be said to constitute a language or not; we would seem to be then not merely at the edge of the European world but at the very threshold of the house of being that is language. The point here is not to indict Heidegger over a point of factual archeology he could not possibly have known but rather to question the broad comfort of the myth of Grecian origin, on the one hand, and, on the other, to consider to what extent a poem by that poet’s poet, Hölderlin, might offer something very different than a call to the historic German people to reassert their destiny as origin, as the ur-sprung from which to spring up in a founding leap that brings its truth into being, presumably by dominating various peoples to the East. Rather, we who sing from the Indus (whose other name is the Sind) sing out to this other river called the Ister, whose course seems to travel backward, as though it came from the East, along with that enigmatic visitor, Hercules. If the world Heidegger evokes is always the ordinariness of the near at hand (which often, to his credit, turns out to be unexpectedly extraordinary),20 if we steadfastly remain with him within a heimliche and heimische Heimat (which remains ever more so as we wander back to it via the unheimisch, which may or may not be as the unheimliche Freud discloses in a very different register),21 then what are we to do with a poet, the poet’s poet, the only real poet, the poet of the “essence” of poetry, when he sings of the journey elsewhere with no return home or sings of the home from an unacknowledged origin that is utterly and perhaps inconceivably remote? If poetry, like art, sets up a world that is origin, “both to creators and preservers, which is to say of a people’s historical existence,” to the extent that art is “a distinctive way in which truth comes into being, that is, becomes historical,” 22 does it follow that the named terms all remain selfsame, all in the interest of home being or being home as the ultimate metaphysics of presence? Does it follow necessarily that creators and preservers, or writers and critics, belong to the same historical people? That origin is not necessarily destiny? That home is not always already foreign? That the river can be traveled (differently, of course) both

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upstream and downstream? That historical destiny can also be unpredictable contingency? That the poein of poetry is not only a way to dwell by building in the house of being but also what—as the world turns and as the philosopher’s thought “turns” upon itself—casts us into the uncharted Open where language might also portend a certain homelessness of being? It may be that poetry’s potential to “transport us out of the ordinary” or “to transform our accustomed ties to world and earth” explains Heidegger’s attempts in the essay on “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry” from 1937 to gloss the poet’s poet’s contradictory assertions both that poetry is the “most innocent of all occupations” and that language is the “most dangerous of goods.” 23 But what is “innocent” and what is “dangerous” may not be something that can readily be decided within a world where home and homeliness come fundamentally to be at stake, a world not just where we are compelled to follow the twists and turns of circular reasoning, or even those wild woodland paths that may lead us back, or perhaps not, to one’s hut of a home, but where home increasingly becomes what one has forcibly had to leave forever behind with no hope of return, that exilic world the poet’s poet himself poetizes as well as countless others from Ovid to Baudelaire to Celan.24

Notes 1. 2. 3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, ed. and trans. David Farrell Krell (1946; New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 216–66, 207–8. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger and the Politics of Theory, trans. Jeff Fort (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007). Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Andrzej Warminski, Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013); and Warminski, Material Inscriptions: Rhetorical Reading in Practice and Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and “the Jews,” trans. Andreas Michel and Mark  S. Roberts (1987; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), and more recently, by Jean-Luc Nancy, The Banality of Heidegger, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (1950; New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 15–86, 18. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (1790; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 66–67. The analysis of equipment echoes, of course, the discussions of Zuhandenheit in Heidgger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (1927; Albany: State University

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9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

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of New York Press, 1996), 68–71ff., 330–32, and passim). There, the handiness of the hammer repeatedly serves as the privileged example of the withdrawal of being in the usefulness of the tool, an example that also hearkens back to Kant’s example of the tool missing its handle to illustrate the “purposiveness without a purpose” that defines the object of the aesthetic judgment. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 120. The withdrawal of the object from the at-hand world of equipment and purpose (a withdrawal itself inscribed with the wider withdrawal of Being) thus appears to the condition for its coming into cognition as such, if not into the specificity of aesthetic cognition, of art. Missing handles, broken hammers, discarded shoes, et al. all raise the general question of understanding art beyond the confines of classic representation and utility (“to please and instruct”) and a fortiori of art itself as another, perhaps more experimental but just as rigorous a kind of cognition as scientific or philosophical knowledge. I will not rehearse here Derrida’s brilliant unraveling of equipmental being in the startling realization that the shoes depicted in the Van Gogh painting Heidegger references do not even constitute a proper “pair” of shoes and are not walkable or usable as the equipment Heidegger alleges them to be, and thus the painting itself challenges even this remnant of a representational theory of art that motivates Heidegger’s blood and soil fantasy of the German peasant woman trudging in her fields. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (1978; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Heidegger notes at several junctures the “intentionally ambiguous” phrasing of this definitional expression, “art is the setting-into-work of truth,” which works both objectively and subjectively (70–71). In his addendum added in 1956, Heidegger then comments again at length on the “essential ambiguity” in this definition of art, where “truth is ‘subject’ on the one hand and ‘object’ on the other,” only to conclude that “Both descriptions are ‘unsuitable’ ” (86–87). For a recent and uniquely comprehensive treatment of this aspect of Heidegger’s thought, see Andrew Mitchell, The Fourfold: Reading the Late Heidegger (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015). Heidegger, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller (1937; Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2000), 52. Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 141– 60; Heidegger, “What Are Poets Good For?,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 87– 140; Heidegger, “ ‘. . . Poetically Man Dwells . . . ,’ ” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 209–54. On this encounter between the former Nazi philosopher and the Jewish Romanian poet, see, most recently, James  K. Lyon, Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: An Unresolved Conversation, 1951–1970 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). Friedrich Hölderlin, “The Journey,” in Selected Poems and Fragments, ed. Jeremy Adler, trans. Michael Hamburger (1826; London: Penguin, 1998), v. 18–19. Hölderlin, 185. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” trans. William McNeil and Julia Davis (1984; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 37.

42 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

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The finest critical analysis of the trope of translatio imperii remains Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, Translations of Power: Narcissism and the Unconscious in Epic History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). Heidegger, “What Are Poets Good For?” Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger and the Politics of Theory, 86. “At bottom, the ordinary is not ordinary; it is extra-ordinary,” Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 54. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition Of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), 17:218–54. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 78. Heidegger, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” 53–55. A remarkable gloss on this apparent contradiction can be found in Warminski, Readings in Interpretation: Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 45– 71. See also Warminski, “Monstrous History: Heidegger Reading Hölderlin,” in Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics, 159–72, which unravels the consequences of Heidegger’s (mis)translation of Hölderlin’s ungeheuer as unheimlich or even unheimisch. I cannot help but cite here the final sentence of Lyotard’s Heidegger and “the Jews,” which Nancy also cites as the final sentence of The Banality of Heidegger (73): “ ‘Celan’ is neither the beginning nor the end of Heidegger; he is his lack: what is missing in him, what he misses, and whose lack he is lacking” (95).

3 Benjamin’s Baudelaire Lutz Koepnick

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o author, poet or not, was of greater importance to Walter Benjamin than Charles Baudelaire. Neither the writings of Kant nor those of Marx energized Benjamin’s thought as much as Baudelaire’s poetry of the mid-nineteenth century. Neither Goethe nor Breton galvanized Benjamin’s efforts to establish himself as a leading literary critic outside of the academic system as strongly as Baudelaire’s thoughts on what it means to be modern. And yet, Benjamin’s relation to Baudelaire is far from stable. It is historical, meaning that it took different turns at different junctures of Benjamin’s career and in the process resulted in various and often competing images of Baudelaire. The following pages are to shed some light on the shifting presence of Baudelaire’s work in Benjamin’s thought. They trace intellectual affinities without wanting to posit causal effects or narrate a philological story of direct influence. They are about how one author reads another across fundamental divides and precisely thus allows today’s reader to see both authors involved in a reciprocal historical dynamic, a malleable constellation of perspectives charged with profound insights about the promises and failures of modern culture.

3 Having translated Baudelaire’s poetry ever since the mid-1910s, in 1923 Benjamin embraced the publication of a large sample of this work as an opportunity to draft his seminal essay “The Task of the Translator” and present it as an introduction—an intellectual portal—to the collection. In his essay, Benjamin famously conceived of translation as an art form whose primary goal is not to

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communicate the original’s meaning but to restore the idea of an originary language, one that preceded the Babylonian dispersal of linguistic forms. “A real translation is transparent,” Benjamin prefaced his translation of Baudelaire, “it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully.”1 Language, Benjamin continued to argue, is neither defined nor exhausted by human communication, and poetry is never primarily meant for the reader, be it the reader’s temporary delight, his moral education, or her edification and aesthetic transformation. In its most primal form, language instead is all about itself: it may name objects, it may in fact create and shape things through the very act of naming, but it exceeds the templates of human intentionality and it transcends the violence we administer to words when using them as mere vessels to exchange meanings and messages. Language at heart is poetic. And due to Baudelaire’s principal refusal to use language as a medium to disseminate moral messages and entertain his society’s expectations of decency, Baudelaire’s poetry—Benjamin implied—approximated the idea of pure language as closely as one can if not actively reconstructing the transhistorical relationships of all languages through the work of translation. As much as Benjamin as a young scholar aspired to assimilate Baudelaire’s poetry to his speculative theory of language, his more mature work of the 1930s showed no significant effort to use the French poet’s work in order to develop a unique philosophy of language, let alone reflect on the lyrical as a philosophical mode of thought. The conceptual labors of “The Task of the Translator” notwithstanding, throughout the 1930s Baudelaire will serve Benjamin primarily as a seismograph charting the tremors modern technology, traffic, and commodity exchange inflict upon the structures of human perception. Baudelaire, Benjamin will come to argue, wrote poetry in, for, and about a modern age categorically inhospitable to poetry. The poet, heroically as it were, experienced what resisted experience under the sign of modern industrial culture. His poetry indexed the vanishing of what in premodern times enabled the very possibility of both poetry and philosophy: contemplative distance and detachment. Unlike Heidegger’s Celan or Adorno’s Eichendorff, Benjamin’s Baudelaire thus not only raises profound questions about the sustainability of lyrical poetry in the face of modern urbanization, industrialization, and technological reproducibility. He in fact challenges the privileged role of philosophical thought in unfolding the meaning of lyrical poetry in the first place. But if Baudelaire inspires Benjamin during the 1930s to tie philosophy’s afterlife to poetry’s afterlife, the French poet at the same time provides powerful evidence that the waning of the contemplative need not result in stunned silence or melancholic withdrawal.

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Baudelaire’s work contests the role of philosophy as a primary medium for thinking through what may constitute truth, how we should act, and what we may sense. Yet instead of asking the critic to abstain from further commentary and cease possible reflection, this work urges twentieth-century thought to turn to the history and theory of modern media to think through the contingencies of perception, memory, value, belonging, and existence in modern life.

3 A fragment written in 1921 or 1922 foreshadows the extent to which Baudelaire in Benjamin’s work of the 1930s will occupy a central role in theorizing how modern media restructure human perception, but also how industrial modernity and new technologies define the human body as the most primary of all mediums. “Let us compare time to a photographer—earthly time to a photographer who photographs the essence of things,” Benjamin writes. “But because of the nature of earthly time and its apparatus, the photographer manages only to register the negative of the essence on his photographic plates. No one can read these plates; no one can deduce from the negative, on which time records the objects, the true essence of things as they really are.” Except Baudelaire, Benjamin continues, thanks to his unique sensitivity and intelligence. “He alone is able to extract from the negatives of essence a presentiment of its real picture. And from this presentiment speaks the negative of essence in all his poems.” 2 Benjamin’s thought experiment, presenting Baudelaire’s poetry as an exercise of reading the frozen time of photographic images, is no doubt curious. It is well known that Baudelaire, though he entertained a long friendship with the photographic pioneer Nicephore Nièpce, harbored strong reservations about photography, not least of all about how it tended to define artistic realism as a mere mirroring of the visible world. Photographic images, in Baudelaire’s view, were useful in assisting human memory, but they had little artistic potential precisely because aesthetic truth resided in the world of the imagination, the dreamlike, the fantastic, a world inaccessible to the merely reproductive arts. “If photography,” Baudelaire polemicized in 1859, “is allowed to deputize for art in some of art’s activities, it will not be long before it has supplanted or corrupted art altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the masses, its natural alley. Photography must, therefore, return to its true duty, which is that of handmaid of the arts and sciences, but their very humble handmaid, like painting and shorthand, which have neither created nor supplemented literature.”3 An index of the material world, photography could serve naturalists, travelers, and astronomers to document their observations. But in Baudelaire’s scathing perspective, it was

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principally unfit to produce anything of aesthetic value simply because its indexical qualities quelled what art was all about: unbridled explorations of the imaginary. Given Baudelaire’s reservations about photography, Benjamin’s choice of image is—to say the least—puzzling at first. If Baudelaire himself considered the reproductive aspects of photography, contrary to what Benjamin himself would argue in the 1930s, as fundamentally hostile to aesthetic experience, why use this technological metaphor to describe the uniqueness of Baudelaire’s poetic process? If photography betrays the productivity of the imagination, why use the photographic negative as a model to encode how Baudelaire was able to produce aesthetic truth? What further complicates Benjamin’s metaphor is the fact that it at first seems to misrepresent the exigencies of the photographic process itself. After all, since photographic negatives present nothing less than inverted images of the developed final print, it is not intuitive why “reading” a negative should require special skills and aesthetic sensibilities. One might in fact, and in contradistinction to Benjamin’s praise of Baudelaire, argue that reading a negative plate is no different from reading a positive print, and that both activities have little in common with “reading” in the first place. Benjamin’s metaphor, then, as it wants to illuminate how Baudelaire through a unique process of inversion captures the essence of things, not only violates Baudelaire’s own mistrust in photography as an art form; it seems to ignore some of the key features that define photography as a modern tool of technological reproducibility to begin with. Benjamin, one might want to conclude, gets it doubly wrong, and unlike what we know from mathematics, a doubling of the negative here cannot but fail to produce a positive. Let’s take a second look, though, before relegating Benjamin’s fragment to the dustbins of literary criticism and media history. Note, first, that Benjamin at no point in his fragment really talks about photography as a process producing physical imprints of real objects and hence providing what Baudelaire loathed most: indexical representations of reality that could either substitute for or even provide models for forms of art that shunned the transformative power of the imagination. True to his later writings on photography,4 Benjamin’s interest here is mostly in how photography engages with and slices through the passing of time, how it, rather than simply indexing objects and visible realities in front of the camera lens, is able to unlock some kind of truth about the essence of things in time, how any act of perception and understanding bears a temporal index. In Benjamin’s work of the 1930s, photography will repeatedly serve as

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a  potent metaphor for and analog of the work of critical historiography and materialist criticism. Understanding modernity as a series of ongoing disasters and catastrophes, Benjamin in the late 1930s will conceive of history “in the language of photography, as though he wishes to offer us a series of snapshots of his latest reflections on history,”5 and he will consider the temporal logic of photographic capture as a model for reading history against the grain and expressing solidarity with a past threatened by forgetting. Benjamin’s early fragment on Baudelaire anticipates this interest. The focus is not on photography as a medium reproducing the real, but on how photographic images capture and communicate with times past—how they interrupt the fleeting passage of time in the name of unknown futures and invite these futures to recognize what has been forgotten, been repressed, or never been seen at all. Note, second, that Benjamin’s fragment commences, not as one might presume with comparing Baudelaire’s method of poetic production to that of a camera, but with initially associating the work of time itself, of earthly time, with the operations of photography. According to the logic of the image, what Benjamin calls and Baudelaire exposes as essences is deeply historical. The nature of things does not reside outside of time, in the form of Platonic ideas, but is a product of historical time. It may only become visible to observers whose acts anticipate flux and instability. Time here, in other words, is envisioned as a process that—like a camera—exposes essences onto photographic plates to whose meaning Baudelaire’s poetry owns privileged access. Unlike the work of his contemporaries, Baudelaire is able to transcend the transient, the ephemeral, and the merely phenomenal, precisely because he positions himself unconditionally as contemporaneous to his own time. He extracts essences—the timeless— from the whirl of time, from the photographic writing of history, only because he hurls himself into the unrest of the present and uses poetry to read the photographic records of time against their grain—uses to read the writing of time deeper and more carefully than anyone else. What is remarkable, then, about the logic of the metaphor is the fact that Benjamin sees Baudelaire as a poet for whom nothing, including our access to the most essential facts of life, precedes mediation, technique, and technology. As much as there is nothing timeless without it being deeply embedded in time, there is no essence without a medium, including the nature of human perception. Baudelaire’s uniqueness among the poets of the nineteenth century results from his ability, at the level of intuition and the nonintentional, to reveal the essential mediatedness of all things and to consider the human body and its sensory access to the world as the most primary of all media. Poetry, in the hands

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of Baudelaire, takes stock of the ineluctability of mediation. It pictures the modern as an age in which we for the first time come to realize that we need media, not simply to extend the human sensorium, but to interpret our own senses, our being in time, the hold of time on our being. Poetry doubles the writing of history to reveal that media are essential to aesthetic experience and the creative work of the imagination. Benjamin’s fragment of the early 1920s, as it presents Baudelaire as a poet whose artistic process involves canny practices of remediation and who, by implication, understands his own sensory systems as media of aesthetic experience, largely prefigures the crucial role of Baudelaire in Benjamin’s work of the 1930s. In Benjamin’s later work, media define modernity’s destiny. They, as Benjamin learns from Baudelaire, are key not only to what makes modernity modern and artistic production modernist, but to how cultural criticism and theory must reflect on their own affairs. Like poetry, modern thought no longer can assume detached standpoints of contemplation. It finds itself in ongoing flux and motion, eager to decipher the photographs of history while at the same time knowing all too well that the future will revise and remediate the certainties of presents past; and it is held to reflect on how different logics of mediation—the impact of media such as film and photography, the ubiquity of industrial machinery, the speed of vehicular transport—structure our very seeing of seeing, the way in which thought tries to illuminate the contingencies of modern existence. In his seminal essay on art in the age of technological reproducibility, Benjamin will famously write: “Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception. The way in which human perception is organized—the medium in which it occurs—is conditioned not only by nature but by history.” 6 This passage helps Benjamin to introduce his most discussed conceptual intervention of the 1930s: the notion of aura. Its call for a historicization of human perception explicitly refers to the work of nineteenth-century art historians Alois Riegl and Franz Wickhoff while echoing Marx’s declaration in 1844 that the “forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present.” 7 As importantly, however, Benjamin’s insistence on historical malleability of our sensory access to the world, coupled with his call that thought itself must reflect on its own temporal index, at once reflects and focalizes his reading of Baudelaire’s poetry. Baudelaire’s stress on the contingency of perception marks the crucial point of departure for Benjamin’s entire late work, his Arcades Project. It energizes how Benjamin redefines thought as a practice on the move, as a method confronting the inhospitality of an ever-accelerating now and as an

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ongoing struggle to interrupt the mere flow of time so as to withstand myths of automatic progress.

3 “Spleen as a bulwark against pessimism,” Benjamin writes in one of the aphorisms gathered in “Central Park,” written between 1938 and 1939, yet never published during Benjamin’s lifetime. “Baudelaire is no pessimist. This is because, with Baudelaire a taboo is placed on the future. That is what distinguishes his heroism most clearly from Nietzsche’s.” 8 Baudelaire’s bad temper, his contempt for the institutions of bourgeois life, reflected a feeling that modern history had entered a state of permanent catastrophe, of catastrophe in permanence, leaving little room for hope and considerable doubt that future change would really produce anything different than a mere repetition of the always same. And yet, instead of possibly turning his back to the atrophy of the present, Baudelaire was eager to gaze straight at the modern now in all its transitoriness, in the mode of a contemporary. To live modernity rather than to escape it, to immerse oneself into the present instead of longing for distant elsewheres and elsewhens, was Baudelaire’s most potent motto. In his poem “Le Soleil,” Baudelaire pictured himself as a bellicose fencer encoding what it takes to write poetry in times and for audiences no longer inclined to tolerate poetry: Through decrepit neighborhoods on the outskirts of towns, where Slatted shutters hang at the windows of hovels that shelter secret lusts; At a time when the cruel sun beats down with redoubled force On city and countryside, on rooftops and cornfields I go out alone to practice my fantastical fencing, Scenting opportunities for rhyme on every street corner, Stumbling over words as though they were cobblestones, Sometimes knocking up against verses dreamed long ago.9

According to Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire, aesthetic experience under the condition of modernity cannot but learn a lesson or two from the martial arts. It requires utmost perceptual attention to parry and transform the shocks that assault the modern subject at each possible moment. In his essay on Constantin Guys, Baudelaire in fact did not hesitate to compare the very act of drawing, of art making itself, to how fencers wield their weapons. Guys, Benjamin says (quoting Baudelaire), “bent over his table, scrutinizing the sheet of paper just as intently as he does the objects around him by day; how he uses his pencil,

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his pen, his brush like a rapier, spurts water from his glass to the ceiling and tries his pen on his shirt; how he pursues his work swiftly and intensely, as though afraid that his images might escape him. Thus he is combative, even when alone, and parries his own blows.”10 Modern creativity is war with other means. It encounters the fundamental disintegration of the durational, the violent contingencies and interruptions of the everyday, as mediums of inspiration. Baudelaire’s poetry, rather than representing an author’s moral confusion and deviation, thrives on the art of reversing and recoding dominant structures of perception from within. It situates modern art as a site heroically claiming from modern life what modernity increasingly denies: experience.11 Benjamin’s thought of the 1930s at heart pursues nothing other than to translate Baudelaire’s poetic practice into a belligerently modernist epistemological, ethical, aesthetic, and political perspectives. Like Baudelaire, the exile Benjamin heroically appoints the modern in order to challenge its most devastating catastrophes, and he denies any utopian visions of reconciliation so as to fight complacency and build bulwarks against disabling forms of pessimism. Similar to Baudelaire’s fencer, Benjamin’s late philosophy of history encounters head-on the modern disintegration of durational experience. It incorporates the shocks and ongoing states of emergency of the modern to define possible standpoints within its very flux from which one may be able to beat the catastrophic logic of modern time at its own game. “Articulating the past historically,” Benjamin writes in his final text, “On the Concept of History” (1940), “does not mean recognizing it ‘the way it really was.’ ” And he continues, as if trying to seize Baudelaire’s figure of the fencer as a trademark of historical materialism: It means appropriating a memory that flashes up in a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to hold fast that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to the historical subject in a moment of danger. The danger threatens both the content of the tradition and those who inherit it. For both, it is one and the same thing: the danger of becoming a tool of the ruling class. Every age must strive anew to wrest tradition away from the conformism that is working to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer; he comes as the victor over the Antichrist. The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious. And this enemy has never ceased to be victorious.12

Benjamin’s late rediscovery of Jewish mysticism has often been seen as a critical tributary to this unique philosophy of history, and so has his rather

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idiosyncratic reading of Marx, on the one hand, and, on the other, his somewhat puzzling engagement with the decisionist writing of the Nazi legal scholar Carl Schmitt. Yet the most powerful engine driving Benjamin’s account of danger and emergency as sites to seize flashes of the past, battle against the burdens of tradition, and rescue the dead from the arrogance of the present is none other than Baudelaire. Like Baudelaire, Benjamin as a historical materialist understands his own present as a catastrophe in permanence, one whose disintegration of temporal continuity requires the critic to meet his age in the mode of martial arts experts. The task of historical materialism is to parry the shocks of a permanent state of emergency while inhabiting this present as a site to actively recode memories of the past and read history against the grain. Though Benjamin, in his late work, will repeatedly invoke the figure of the Messiah to speculate about a future of redemption, he at the same time—similar to Baudelaire (and unlike Nietzsche)—places a taboo on the future for the sake of containing the lure of political pessimism. Benjamin’s Messiah does not promise the coming of a different and better time, a utopian era replacing the negativity of catastrophic modernity with experiences of plenitude, meaning, and hospitality. Instead, Benjamin’s Messiah operates as a cipher for a radical interruption of modern time altogether. He will permit a jump, not simply into a different regime of historical time, but beyond catastrophic history and temporality tout court. Constantly on edge about the possibility that passing images and memory flashes might disappear forever, Benjamin’s chronicler of time therefore combats the present’s conformism in the name of a future he cannot but refuse to describe. The only way for him to think redemption is to envision it as something that will arrive in the mode that defines the very maladies of the twentieth century: abruptness. Whatever moves history beyond its ongoing catastrophes cannot but result from some radical contingency itself, an unpredictable and discontinuous interruption in the very fabric of time. Which is just another way of saying that Benjamin’s state of redemption is nothing anyone really needs to talk about all, that we—like Baudelaire—may remain silent about the future to keep us on our toes and protect us from incapacitating pessimism.

3 A vast gathering of textual fragments, Benjamin’s Arcades Project aspired to mirror the catastrophes of the twentieth century—the rise of fascism, the devaluation of experience and community under the pressure of capital—in the shards of mid-nineteenth-century culture, in particular in how industrial capitalism dressed the production, display, and dissemination of commodities in a cloak of

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spectacular attractions and in how it drew on the power of widespread phantasmagorias to cast the bourgeois subject into a historical dream sleep. Baudelaire not only served Benjamin as a key witness in this endeavor. His poetic practice in fact provided crucial methodological models for how to fan sparks of hope in the past and read fleeting historical images in and against the maelstrom of utmost danger. Praising Baudelaire’s ability to encounter his present like a detective, a wide-eyed reader of seemingly opaque surfaces, traces, and clues, Benjamin’s own effort to reframe the nineteenth century zoomed in on its alluring displays and forgotten marks in order to reveal what could help explain the twentieth century’s political disasters. Baudelaire’s role as a poetic ragpicker—a subject uniquely able to gather what others considered the refuse of the French capital; a cataloger of waste, the lost, and the long forgotten; a collector of the abject doing his business while ordinary citizens are at sleep—offered a blueprint for Benjamin’s own historiographical principles, namely, to turn one’s eyes to the debris of history while the storms of historical time would blow the observer inevitably into the future. And Baudelaire’s unforgiving look at the logic of nineteenth-century commodification, including the extent to which capitalism asked its subjects to sell their bodies, ideas, and artistic sensitivities as marketable products, in Benjamin’s own writing will turn into a compelling strategy to read nineteenth-century commodities as allegories of both social disintegration and deceptive reenchantment—as fetishistic objects whose appeal prepared the ground for how aesthetic politics during the twentieth century manipulated minds and massaged emotions.13 And yet, no single aspect of Baudelaire’s life and poetry is of greater important for Benjamin’s own philosophy and practice of history during the late 1930s than the poet’s infamous status as a flâneur, navigating the streets of Paris to wrest lasting images from the fleeting and shock-like impressions of urban modernity. Making a virtue of necessity, Baudelaire’s greatest ambition as a  flâneur was to give shape to modernity: to resist the possibility of being overwhelmed by the sensory distractions of the modern and interrupt what interrupts the possibility of durational experience, to aesthetically recode the antiaesthetic logic of abruptness that marked the new conditions of urban life. Baudelaire’s flânerie smuggled residues of drift and the nonintentional into the midst of the modern landscapes of goal-oriented action and hyperattentive self-preservation, and precisely thus was able to warrant the possibility of aesthetic experience in times fundamentally hostile to durational experience in the first place. As much a devotee to experiments with substances of intoxication as Benjamin himself, Baudelaire engaged flânerie as a bodily medium to shower the senses and pierce the hardened boundaries of bourgeois subjectivity.

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True to the penetrating force of capitalist circulation, however, he wandered the streets of Paris not simply to absorb unexpected impressions, but to sell himself—as a poet as well as an object-to-be-looked-at. Nowhere does the complex temporal logic of Baudelaire’s flânerie, and its echoes in Benjamin’s own thought about what it might mean to be a modern, become clearer than in Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire’s “A une passante,” a sonnet staging a brief encounter between a veiled female passerby and the roaming poet amid the moving crowds of the street. “What this sonnet conveys,” Benjamin explains, “is simply this: far from experiencing the crowd as an opposing, antagonistic element, the city dweller discovers in the crowd what fascinates him. The delight of the urban poet is love—not at first, but at last sight. It is an eternal farewell, which coincides in the poem with the moment of enchantment. Thus the sonnet deploys the figure of shock, indeed of catastrophe.”14 Baudelaire’s heroism expresses itself in no less than his ceaseless ambition to turn the contingency of modern temporality into an engine of aesthetic productivity. Rather than flee the ephemerality and abruptness of the modern, he flees into it and recalibrates what might possibly shock into a source of transitory enchantment. Throughout the last decade of his life, Benjamin’s thought and writing follow Baudelaire’s poetic practice to the letter. It deploys modern figures of shock, the ruptures and contingencies that mark modern time, to construct alternative histories and find unexpected sources of fascination. Modernity, as seen through Benjamin’s Baudelarian eyes, may result in a progressive disintegration of experience, but what constitutes modern thought as modern is the ability to encounter opposing forces in the mode of a contemporary and learn how to think and write at all times as if we—like the roaming poet— thought and wrote at last sight.

3 Contemporariness, Giorgio Agamben argued recently, “is that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an anachronism. Those who coincide too well with the epoch, those who are perfectly tied to it in every respect, are not contemporaries, precisely because they do not manage to see it; they are not able to firmly hold their gaze on it.”15 No present, Agamben continued, is ever transparent to itself; it instead is steeped in obscurity and an inevitable degree of unreadability. To be a contemporary is to face this obscurity head-on, to perceive and expose oneself to the darkness of the moment, yet also to recognize the light that may help illuminate the present from either the past or the future.

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Benjamin’s Baudelaire, as he perfected the arts of writing poetry on the move and of holding his gaze on the fleetingness of modern existence, was more than just a contemporary in this sense: he advocated contemporariness as modernity’s most essential feature. And what Benjamin extracted from Baudelaire for his own position as an intellectual in the 1930s was nothing less than the insight that critical thought in the face of the catastrophes of the twentieth century had no alternative but to pursue radical contemporaneity as well—that thought’s most important mission was to relate to its own present through disjunction and anachronism, and to recognize its own tenuousness and passing as a source of critical illumination.

Notes 1.

2.

3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913– 1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael  W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 260. Walter Benjamin, “Baudelaire,” in The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 27. Charles Baudelaire, “The Modern Public and Photography,” in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (Chicago: Leete’s Island, 1980), 88. Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in Selected Writings, vol.  2, 1927–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 507–30. Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 4. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in Selected Writings, vol. 3, 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 104. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. M. Milligan (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1987), 109. Benjamin, “Central Park,” in The Writer of Modern Life, 135. Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” in The Writer of Modern Life, 98. Benjamin, 97. For more on the concept of experience as a central category of Benjamin’s work, see Miriam Bratu Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Sieg fried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938– 1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael  W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 391.

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14. 15.

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For more on how Benjamin’s critique of fascism as an aestheticization of politics is conceptually tied to his work on nineteenth-century Paris, see, among many others, in particular Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); and Lutz Koepnick, Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999). Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Selected Writings, 4:324. Giorgio Agamben, “What Is the Contemporary?,” in What Is an Apparatus?, and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 41.

4 Georges Bataille and the Hatred of Poetry Roland Végső

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s readers of Georges Bataille know all too well, it is not necessarily easy to define the exact nature of the tension between philosophy and poetry in his writings for the simple reason that Bataille rejects traditional definitions of philosophy and poetry. For a number of different reasons that range from mistrustful modesty to outright defiance, in his writings Bataille repeatedly distances himself from both of these domains. In fact, the difficult point is to grasp that for Bataille both philosophy and poetry necessarily turn against themselves: a philosophical text or a poem becomes an authentic representative of what it was destined to be only if it reaches the absolute internal limit of its own discourse where it turns into its own opposite. To rely on a quintessential Bataillean category, we could say that this kind of self-transgression is constitutive of both of these discourses. Accordingly, then, philosophy, as the love of wisdom, has to become nonsense (or the negation of knowledge), while poetry, as the sacrifice of words, must become the hatred of poetry (or the sacrifice of poetry itself).1 As a result of this double critique, there is no immediately obvious hierarchical relation between poetry and philosophy in Bataille’s “system.” The parallel critique of poetry and philosophy leads to a suspension of these discourses in his texts in such a way that none of them can be set up without further qualifications as a master discourse organizing his thought. Of course, it is true that Bataille produced more along the lines of philosophy than poetry. Even if his philosophical writings are not easy to categorize as traditional philosophy, it is undeniable that Bataille’s poetic output is quite meager in comparison with his productivity in other genres. In this sense, Bataille would be more of a

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philosopher than a poet. But as we all know, Bataille is often recognized as a literary rather than a properly philosophical author due to the notoriety of his often scandalous (or at least designedly scandalizing) fiction and not the memorable force of his actual poetry. In other words, there appears to be a split between prose and poetry in his literary activities as well. In fact, his prose fiction appears to be the intermediary domain in which his philosophy moves toward poetry and his poetic imagination approaches philosophy. The situation is made only more obscure by the fact that, even if Bataille is not much of a poet himself, the outlines of a philosophy of poetry are clearly legible in his works. Thus, while it might be true that he is more of a philosopher than a poet, he nevertheless does aspire to be a philosopher of poetry. In fact, what should be of special interest to us is precisely a tension between the generalized literary pathos of Bataille’s philosophical texts and the concrete philosophy of poetry that these texts expound.2 These and similar considerations seem to have convinced many that the best way to approach his writings is through the dominance of their literary (if not specifically their poetic) quality. In fact, for many this is the basic reason why Bataille could be canonized as a precursor of poststructuralist philosophy.3 But, even if there is a recognizable “literary” quality to his philosophy, poetry as such does not enjoy priority in Bataille’s thought. It might appear to some that Bataille simply rejects philosophy (the rational discourse of systematic philosophy) in favor of poetry. But one can easily cite passages from Bataille’s oeuvre that either condemn or celebrate poetry in often quite uncertain terms. This is why it is very important to emphasize that in spite of Bataille’s critique of philosophical discourse and his ambiguous exultation of poetry, his thought cannot be described in terms of this simplistic opposition. For Bataille, both poetry and philosophy remain limited in their scopes. While the logical discourse of philosophy can take us only to the limits of knowledge but cannot help us make the ultimate leap into the unknown, poetry is inherently limited in that it must rely on language and, therefore, it cannot avoid domesticating the impossible that it tries to capture in words. In other words, in Bataille’s thought the primacy goes to larger ontological or even cosmological questions with regard to which both philosophy and poetry fulfill only limited roles. Needless to say, however, it is barely more than a theoretical sleight of hand to artificially isolate poetry and philosophy here as if they were autonomous domains within Bataille’s texts. The truth is that they both need to be positioned in relation to a whole set of other discourses among which sociology, politics, religion, and economics stand out as the most obvious examples. This proliferation of discourses no doubt accounts for some of the difficulties we

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encounter while trying to make sense of some of Bataille’s texts. While it is true that Bataille’s fundamental method is to perpetually play off these discourses against each other to prevent the emergence of one single master discourse, by the end of his life it appears that Bataille’s writing did find an organizing principle in a specific discourse: philosophical anthropology. The more systematic nature (and therefore more conventional style) of these later writings devoted to the formulation of this anthropology suggests that Bataille wanted to anchor his previously freely floating ideas in a concrete discourse. But this discourse is definitely not that of poetry: in fact, we can observe without any trepidation that these final texts are the least poetic of his writings. Yet the conflict of philosophy and poetry seems to have created a vacuum in Bataille’s writings that his readers are eager to fill in with whatever discourse suits their tastes the best. Ever since Sartre’s famous dismissal of Bataille as a mystic,4 it has been a common interpretive gesture to suggest that the simultaneous rejection of poetry and philosophy is in fact a theological move. To put it differently, it is religion that supposedly takes the place of these two discourses as the guiding principle of his writings. No doubt, we are once again dealing with a nontraditional interpretation of religion (an atheology), but it is still a mystical discourse that supposedly defines the ultimate horizon of the selfovercoming of poetry and philosophy.5 Similarly, we could also argue that it is Bataille’s work on the “accursed share” that connects all of these discourses. Poetry and philosophy are both dissolved in a “general economy.” To put it differently, philosophy, poetry, religion, and economy all have to be turned against themselves: the antiphilosophical hatred of poetry finds its justification in an atheological experience of the sacred that dissolves all of these restricted economies in a general economy. This is what Bataille calls, in the end, the “impossible.”

THE HATRED OF POETRY

Traditionally, general accounts of Bataille’s oeuvre did not put a lot of emphasis on the role of poetry in his works. They often contented themselves with a discussion of Bataille’s strained relationship with André Breton and Surrealism or with a discussion of Bataille’s novels. In an attempt to reverse this tendency, Sylvain Santi, for example, speaks of the “persistent marginalization” of poetry in the critical literature devoted to Bataille.6 Of course, while there are very good

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reasons to combat this marginalization, we have to be careful not to overemphasize the significance of poetry for Bataille either. We should, however, consider here at least one circumstance that could in fact justify this renewed focus on poetry. As Marie-Christine Lala argues, “Understanding the meaning of the hatred of poetry entails considering the role played by the impossible in the circuit of communication. For it is in the hatred of poetry that Georges Bataille discovers that ‘part maudite’—that doomed part—of exchange, whose use value he generalizes through the concept of the impossible not only in terms of textual poetics but in terms of logic, economics and religion.”7 To put it differently, we should in fact be wary of underestimating the significance of the hatred of poetry for Bataille, since it represents an early attempt to formulate some of his quintessential later ideas. In fact, we could go even further: here poetry (or the hatred of poetry) becomes something like the hidden paradigm of Bataille’s philosophy. The expression “the hatred of poetry” first appeared in Bataille’s writings as the title of his book Haine de la poésie, published in 1947.8 Significantly, however, close to the end of his life, in 1962 Bataille republished the book under a new title: The Impossible. Beyond the change of the title, this new edition also contained some other revisions, the most significant being the reordering of the sequence of its three sections. In this final version, the book opens with the two fragmentary narratives “A Story of Rats” and “Dianus” and concludes with “The Oresteia” (a collection of poems that leads up to a theoretical reflection on poetry). In Lala’s interpretation, this new sequence stages a move from the death of narrative to the subversion of poetry: “When the narrative finishes, exhausted, it becomes possible to recompose the coherence of the text in terms of poetry, for non-sense can arise as the product of the dice-throw of the signifier falling onto the page.”9 This reading appears to give a teleological structure to the otherwise incoherent, fragmentary text as it announces the ambiguous triumph of poetry in its own self-subversion over prose. The final section of the book, titled “To Be Orestes,” provides the clearest definition of the hatred of poetry. The argument is based on Bataille’s ontology of chance: being is purely contingent (it is a throw of dice) and excessive (it is an infinite immensity).10 The subject finds itself thrown into this infinite immensity as if being were a game. But in this “blind fall,” the subject itself is an excess: it simultaneously exceeds what is given (nature) and exceeds itself (in other words, it is in excess of its own will as what is given in the subject). The subject as true excess is, therefore, best understood as an excess over the excess of being itself: “Within an immensity, I am a more exceeding that immensity.”11 The

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contingent excess of being can be truly excessive only if it overflows itself in its immensity: being is what is given in its contingency, but its own excess must go beyond the merely given. This is precisely the position of the subject: the subject is the excess produced by the self-overcoming of the excess of substance. Poetry, then, appears in this world as the subject’s attempt to relate to nature: “A poet doesn’t justify—he doesn’t accept—nature completely. True poetry is outside laws. But poetry ultimately accepts poetry.”12 Poetry appears first to be a rebellion against nature in the name of the excess of the subject over the merely given. But, as Bataille insists, poetry eventually turns into its own opposite: rebellion becomes the acceptance of nature. We must insist here that Bataille’s language is easy to misunderstand. It is important to emphasize that this passage does not oppose “true poetry” (which remains a rebellion against nature) to failed poetry (as the acceptance of nature). The crucial point for us to see, if we want to understand Bataille’s hatred of poetry, is that in spite of the fact that “true poetry” is outside every law, it still disintegrates into mere acceptance. As we can see, poetry is its own limit since there will come a moment in its delirious rebellion when poetry will have to at least accept poetry itself. To the degree that the rebellion against the given reaches a limit where the rebellion of true poetry is no longer questionable, poetry ends up accepting something in nature that it no longer wishes to rebel against: poetry itself. We could even say that it is precisely the idea of a “true poetry” that becomes the ultimate limit for poetry. This is why Bataille opposes mere poetic delirium to “clear consciousness”: “Poetic delirium has its place in nature. It justifies nature, consents to embellish it. The refusal belongs to clear consciousness, evaluating whatever occurs to it.”13 Since poetry is inherently limited by poetry, it finds its place in nature. It is not the most authentic expression of the subject’s freedom. It merely abandons us in the penumbra of perpetual uncertainty: “Poetry removes one from the night and the day at the same time. It can neither bring into question nor bring into action this world that binds me.”14 This exaltation of clear consciousness over poetry might come as a surprise to casual readers of Bataille, since his writings are not exactly exemplars of clarity. Nevertheless, Bataille’s point is clear: “Clear discrimination of the various possibles, the gift for going to the end of the most distant one, are the province of clear attention. The irrevocable venturing of oneself, the one-way voyage beyond every given require not only that infinite laughter, but also that slow mediation (senseless but through excess).”15 What is this, we are tempted to ask, if not an indirect elevation of philosophy over poetry? Of course, we are not talking about philosophy as an academic institution, but philosophy as clear consciousness at the limits of the possible: “senseless but through excess.”16

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But Bataille immediately hastens to add that it would be a mistake to assume that philosophy triumphs over poetry. Of course, most of Bataille’s attention is devoted to trying to delimit the scope of poetry. It is in this context that Bataille opposes poetry to experience. First of all, poetry is not the experience of the impossible but only its evocation: “Poetry is not a knowledge of oneself, and even less the experience of a remote possible (of that which, before, was not) but rather the simple evocation through words of inaccessible possibilities.”17 Thus, while the evocation of the impossible does have its own seductive splendor, in the end it falls short of its actual goals: “Evocation has the advantage over experience of richness and an endless facility but it distances one from experience (which is essentially paralyzed).”18 In its isolation from experience, then, poetry ceases to be an effective force in the world: “Poetry opens the night to desire’s excess. In me the night abandoned by the ravages of poetry is the measure of a refusal—of my mad will to exceed the world.—Poetry also exceeded this world, but it could not change me.”19 While poetry is successful in giving expression to its own excess over the given, it fails in truly liberating the subject. The limited effectivity of poetry, thus, reduces it to the status of a mere “detour” or a “middle term.” It is not the means of escaping the world. It is the means of escaping the world of logic and, subsequently, philosophy: “Poetry was simply a detour: through it I escaped the world of discourse, which had become the natural world for me; with poetry I entered a kind of grave where the infinity of the possible was born from the death of the logical world.” 20 In this sense, it is a necessary tool, as it corrects the excesses of philosophy as well. It allows the subject to anticipate the impossible beyond discourse. But as a mere detour in our journey from the possible to the impossible, from sense to nonsense, from knowledge to nonknowledge, it does not allow us to complete the journey. In the end, it forces us to run around in circles. Inexorably, it leads us back to our starting point: “Poetry reveals a power of the unknown. But the unknown is only an insignificant void if it is not the object of desire. Poetry is a middle term, it conceals the known within the unknown: it is the unknown painted in blinding colors, in the image of a sun.” 21

THE IMPOSSIBLE

So why was the change of title from The Hatred of Poetry to The Impossible necessary? What does this change tell us about Bataille’s understanding of poetry and philosophy? As the introduction to the revised version of the book explains,

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Bataille found the change of title important because the original expression gave rise to misunderstandings: “I first published this book fifteen years ago, giving it an obscure title: The Hatred of Poetry. It seemed to me that true poetry was reached only by hatred. Poetry had no powerful meaning except in the violence of revolt. But poetry attains this violence only by evoking the impossible. Almost no one understood the meaning of the first title, which is why I prefer finally to speak of The Impossible.” 22 Not without some characteristic irony, Bataille then immediately adds: “It’s true that this second title is far from being clearer.” Be that as it may, the shift of titles suggests some kind of an equivalence between the two expressions, “the hatred of poetry” and the “impossible.” But we have to be careful not to assume actual identity here: the hatred of poetry is the mere evocation of the impossible. A crucial unbridgeable gap separates the two from each other. The first title is the mere preparation for or the mere approximation of the object that the second one tries to name directly. In fact, in an extreme case, we might even be able to argue that they are opposites of each other (in that the hatred of poetry might be mistaken for what it is not). What did these misunderstandings of the hatred of poetry consist of? I would like to propose here four different possible interpretations of the hatred of poetry. One assumption might be that the expression simply designates an unconditional and, one might even say, naïve rejection of poetry. According to this interpretation, Bataille simply did not like poetry. Given the fact that we are dealing with an author whose work is often described as autobiographical in nature, we could treat this attitude toward poetry as a biographical fact confirmed by his intellectual biography. Michel Surya, for example, discusses Bataille’s poetic activities from 1942 in the following terms: “Bataille had never had recourse to poetry (except as a teenager, none of which was published): of all the genres he took stock of, poetry remained the one he neglected. Not only did he neglect it, he violently opposed it.” 23 Even for Surya, however, this interpretation is not sufficient in itself to account for Bataille’s paradoxical relation to poetry.24 This first approach reaches its philosophical peak when it assumes that Bataille’s rejection of poetry is similar to the classic Platonic gesture that bans the poets from the ideal city. The significant difference between Plato and Bataille, however, remains that for Bataille there is no philosopher king to rule the city, since philosophy itself is necessarily subjugated to the same kind of criticism. A more convincing approach to the problem holds that Bataille’s hatred of poetry is not a rejection of poetry as such. In fact, this attitude implies that the hatred of poetry is actually an attempt to save the true essence of poetry by elevating the poetic principle to a new level. In this interpretation, poetry is guided

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by a principle of self-transcendence (and, therefore, we could call this approach a Romantic or Modernist appropriation of Bataille).25 “True poetry” is never mere literature. True poetry coincides with its own essence only when it transcends itself. According to this interpretation, then, Bataille does not hate poetry in general, only bad poetry (which is, in the end, not really poetry at all). So the hatred of poetry is really not the hatred of poetry, but the hatred of the simulacrum of poetry. To put it even more emphatically, the hatred of poetry becomes the love of true poetry. We have already seen that Bataille himself relies on the expression “true poetry,” and his critics have followed suit.26 But a hasty separation of true poetry from mere “embellishment” 27 risks missing a quintessential element of Bataille’s philosophy: his unconditional rejection of all forms of idealism.28 In order to be consistent with Bataille’s argument, this identification of “true poetry” cannot take place in the name of transcendence. Bataille is allergic to anything that claims to represent elevation and height as inherently valuable. So it might be possible to argue that there is room for true poetry in Bataille’s philosophy, but this true poetry cannot be an ideal poetry of transcendence. It has to be a poetry of “base materialism”: not an elevation of poetry to new heights but its lowering to absolute baseness. In this sense, true poetry is mere excrement. The hatred of poetry reveals here its darkest depths. It is nothing more or nothing less than the love of excrement. Bataille’s preoccupation with the excremental (or, in more general terms, with the abject) also explains his admiration for Marquis de Sade.29 But, in Bataille’s work, de Sade is only one possible paradigm for the celebration of poetry. Another, maybe even more compelling example comes from Rimbaud: silence and the abandonment of poetry. In Inner Experience, Bataille writes: “Even simple minds felt obscurely that Rimbaud had extended the ‘possible’ of poetry by abandoning it, by making sacrifice complete, without ambiguity, without reserve.” This gesture of the complete sacrifice of poetry, however, is easily misunderstood: “But those minds could not follow Rimbaud: they could only admire him, Rimbaud having by his flight, extended the ‘possible’ for himself, at the same time that he suppressed this ‘possible’ for others.”30 Once Rimbaud abandoned poetry (out of either modesty or horror), this act was interpreted as the sacrifice of poetry in the name of poetry itself. Once again, as an act of the hatred of poetry, Rimbaud’s sacrifice was reintegrated into what it tried to abandon. This is why what needs to be emphasized is that “true poetry” (even if it is excremental or manifests itself in the form of the sacrifice of poetry itself) is still a failure. Thus, what we need is not a naïve rejection of poetry, or an attempt to

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save the true essence of poetry on another level (be that elevated or completely debased), or the abandonment of poetry in the name of poetry itself. What we need is yet another option that sufficiently accounts for the impossible. We should, therefore, remind ourselves that it is not poetry but the hatred of poetry that can take us to the limits of the possible. But this is all poetry or philosophy can do: take us to the limits without crossing them. They cannot effectively capture the impossible. Or if they do, the very act of capture already functions as the reduction of the impossible to the possible. The impossible functions in Bataille’s thought as a fundamental ontological principle that represents simultaneously an enabling condition and an ultimate limit.31 It is that undifferentiated level of being that haunts every experience in the form of its impotentiality. While it is in being, it exists only in the form of its withdrawal from all direct experience. The constant struggle that motivates and complicates Bataille’s writings is precisely a result of the attempt to write consistently about the impossible. The paradox is clear: according to the logic of Bataille’s writings, it should be impossible to write about the impossible. While it is possible to evoke the impossible, there is no definitive articulation that could capture it once and for all. The most memorable metaphor offered by Bataille for the only imaginable way of reconciling this paradox is that of a self-effacing writing: “The only way to atone for the sin of writing is to annihilate what is written. But that can be done only by the author; destruction leaves that which is essential intact. I can, however, tie negation so closely to affirmation that my pen gradually effaces what it has written.”32 The fluidity of this predicament provides us with an explanation for why it was necessary to change the title of the book. The original title brought poetry into focus and seemed to suggest that a true poetry could eventually succeed in capturing the impossible. It opened up the way for a misleading fetishization of poetry itself that is completely alien to the Bataillean hatred of poetry. The shift from the hatred of poetry to the impossible, however, clearly designates that the central category here is the impossible itself. It makes it clear that poetry is not in a privileged position in relation to the impossible as it is only one possible way of evoking the impossible. In other words, we would have to conclude that the underlying logic of the series of discourses employed by Bataille (poetry, philosophy, politics, religion, and economics) is the impossible itself. The furthest we could go here is to suggest that in this series, at one particular point in Bataille’s career, the hatred of poetry played a crucial role in that it was simultaneously one element of the series and the element that also first named the logic of the entire series itself.

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BATAILLE, OUR CONTEMPORARY?

In what sense is this idea of the “hatred of poetry” still relevant today? As long as we use it to reintegrate the abandonment of poetry into poetry itself, it is quite useless, if not anachronistically irrelevant. It appears that the ultimate limit of the Bataillean definition of the hatred of poetry is precisely this compulsive reinscription of the overcoming of poetry into the heart of poetry itself.33 The question, therefore, that we inherit from Bataille is the following: Is the hatred of poetry nothing but a paradoxical return to and return of poetry at the peak of its self-negation? Or does it perhaps announce the actual overcoming of poetry without the possibility (or necessity) of its return? Could the hatred of poetry be the means of a definitive disjunction of philosophy and poetry? The tension between the general “literary pathos” of Bataille’s writings and the concrete “hatred of poetry” put forth in these texts seems to have convinced most of Bataille’s readers that he must be read as an exemplary representative of the first option. But what I would like to suggest here as a conclusion is that the contemporaneity of Bataille’s thought lies in the opposite direction. Bataille has the potential to become our contemporary not because he is a poststructuralist avant la lettre, but because he is also a useful resource for moving beyond the poststructuralist heritage. A renewed focus on the theme of the hatred poetry could allow us to see in a new light the juxtaposition of Martin Heidegger’s and Bataille’s works as two basic paradigms of mid-century thought: if we see more in Bataille’s hatred of poetry than a paradoxical return to poetry, we could interpret it as a direct rejection of Heidegger’s ontological sacralization of poetry. In this regard, as Lübecker also noted, Bataille should be read not so much as a forerunner of the poststructuralist fetishization of literature but as a potential resource for the overcoming of this literary-philosophical hegemony.34 Bataille, then, could be seen as an unlikely ally in Alain Badiou’s philosophical struggle against the Heideggerian suture of philosophy to poetry.35 As Badiou’s work itself proves, however, the liberation of philosophy from the spell of the poem does not mean an absolute ban on poetry. Poetry does not have to be discarded and forgotten. Rather, it has to be seen as one possible condition of philosophy whose relation to the other conditions is best described by the term compossibility. So the liberation of philosophy from the poem is also potentially a liberation of the poem itself. Inasmuch as the poem itself is relieved of the burden of the speculative imperative imposed on it by this particular form of philosophy, it might break out of the vicious circle that defines its ultimate horizon today: it no longer has to define itself exclusively in terms of its own

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self-negation and its subsequent return to itself in this negation. Freed from the burden of this philosophy, poetry would be free to explore its own destiny as a form of thinking.

Notes 1.

2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

For an exploration of the parallel critiques of philosophy and poetry in Bataille, see Nikolaj Lübecker “Le han du non savoir et le sacrifice de la poésie: Philosophie et poésie chez Georges Bataille,” Revue Romane 37, no. 2 (2002): 271–91. For a discussion of the role poetry and sacrifice in Bataille, see Patrick Ffrench, “Donner á Voir: Sacrifice and Poetry in the Work of Georges Bataille,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 42, no. 2 (2006): 126–38. I borrow the term pathos as it applies to Bataille’s writings Geoffrey Bennington, who argues that Bataille tends to “personalize and anthropologize” strictly logical problems in his writings and, therefore, there is an “existential pathos infusing [his] work in general, leading him to derive what is ultimately an ethics from what is immediately a logic.” See Geoffrey Bennington, “Introduction to Economics I: Because the World Is Round,” in Bataille: Writing the Sacred, ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill (London: Routledge, 1995), 46. We should, however, heed Noys’s assessment that Bataille cannot be so easily identified with poststructuralism. See Benjamin Noys, Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto, 2000), 16–17. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Un nouveau mystique,” in Situations I (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 174–229. For an attempt to tie Bataille’s notion of poetry to his “atheological” definition of the sacred, see Elisabeth Arnould, “La poésie comme non-savoir,” MLN 119, no. 4 (September 2004): 792–94. Sylvain Santi, Georges Bataille, à l’extrémité fuyante de la poésie (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 7. The cause of poetry had been taken up by other critics as well. See the following works: Jacques Cels, L’exigence poétique de Georges Bataille (Brussels: de Boeck, 1989); Jacqueline Rissel, “Haine de la poésie,” in Georges Bataille après tout, ed. Denis Hollier (Paris: Belin, 1995), 147–60; Marie-Christine Lala, “The Hatred of Poetry,” in Gill, Bataille, 105–16; Marie-Christine Lala, Georges Bataille, Poète du réel (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010). In this regard, it is a telling example that in Benjamin Noys’s otherwise excellent Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction, the word poetry does not even appear until the conclusion of the book (where it is still reduced to a minor example). See Noys, Georges Bataille, 139. Lala, “The Hatred of Poetry,” 105. The book from 1947 was of course not the first time Bataille engaged the problem of poetry in his works. For a discussion of the role of poetry in Inner Experience (1943), see Lübecker, “Le han du non savoir,” 279–82. For a systematic chronological overview of Bataille’s developing views of poetry, see Santi, Georges Bataille.

Georges Bataille an d t he H at red of Poet ry 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

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Lala, “The Hatred of Poetry,” 107. Georges Bataille, The Impossible, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights, 1991), 157. Bataille, 157. Bataille, 158. Bataille, 158. Bataille, 158–59. Bataille, 158. For a discussion of the relationship of clear consciousness and poetry, see Lübecker, “Le han du non savoir,” 278. Lübecker argues that we should treat the relation of the two not as an opposition but rather as complementarity: only poetry can express the intimacy of being but it does so at the price of obscuring consciousness; consciousness, on the other hand, can take us to the extreme limits of knowledge but tames poetry. Bataille, The Impossible, 162. Bataille, 162. Bataille, 162. Bataille, 163. Bataille, 164. Bataille, 10. Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (New York: Verso, 2010), 322. Surya, 324. For a discussion of the Romantic and post-Romantic modernist heritage in relation to Bataille, see Arnould, “La poésie comme non-savoir.” For example, Lala speaks of “authentic poetry” and Lübecker of “revolutionary poetry.” See Lala, “The Hatred of Poetry,” 108; Lübecker, “Le han du non savoir,” 279. Bataille, The Impossible, 161. See, for example, his essay “The ‘Old Mole’ and the Prefix Sur in the Words Surhomme [Superman] and Surrealist” and “Base Materialism and Gnosticism,” both in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and Donald  M. Leslie  Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 32–44, 45–52. For Bataille’s critique of Hegel and German Idealism, see Rodolphe Gasché, Georges Bataille: Phenomenology and Phantasmatology, trans. Roland Végső (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012). See his essay “The Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade” in Visions of Excess, 91–102. Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 148. In his famous essay on Bataille, “A Preface to Transgression,” Michel Foucault defined the impossible in similar terms: “But such an experience, for which the death of God is an explosive reality, discloses as its own secret and clarification, its intrinsic finitude, the limitless reign of the Limit, and the emptiness of those excesses in which it spends itself and where it is found wanting. In this sense, the inner experience is throughout an experience of the impossible (the impossible

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being both that which we experience and that which constitutes the experience).” Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” in Language, Counter-Memory Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 32. Bataille, L’abbé C., trans. P.  A. Facey (London: Marion Boyars, 1988), 128. For a discussion of the same passage, see Noys, Georges Bataille, 93. For a detailed analysis of the way this logic plays itself out in Bataille’s relation to modern poetry, see Arnould, “La poésie comme non-savoir.” Lübecker, “Le han du non savoir,” 281. Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 69–77. See also Badiou, The Age of the Poets, and Other Writings on Twentieth-Century Poetry and Prose, trans. Bruno Bosteels (New York: Verso, 2014).

5 Voicing Thought Arendt, Poetry, and Philosophy Cecilia Sjöholm

THE VOICE WITHIN

Toward the end of Richard III, Shakespeare’s drama, the king is seized by the ghosts of his victims. In a state of dream, but close to wakefulness, Richard sees the bodies of assassinated friends and children. It is a moment of reflection, where the voices of the dead are transposed into thoughts attacking Richard as he is lying half asleep, unable to steer off the sounding of conscience: My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, And every tongue brings in a several tale, And every tale condemns me for a villain.

In this moment of the drama, Shakespeare describes the ghosts appearing: Edward, Henry VI, Clarence, Rivers, Grey, Vaughn, Hastings, the little princes, Buckingham, Lady Anne. But what is central to the scene is not how they appear to the eye, but rather how their voices assail Richard in his own mind. As he wakes up, he sees that he is alone. The ghosts have vanished. What is left is the tonality of their voices. Now Richard begins speaking to himself. What does he fear? It must be himself, since no one else is there. He cannot flee from himself. There is no creature loves me; And if I die, no soul shall pity me: Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself Find in myself no pity to myself?

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Moments such as these, monologues that make the inner voice appear, catch what Hegel calls the inner reflection of conscience.1 It is often used by Shakespeare, and to modern philosophy it evokes a modern, Christian form of selfconsciousness that is to be contrasted to the dramatization of the ancients. Modern philosophy’s engagement with Shakespeare gives witness to the preoccupation with interiority.2 Shakespeare has also been important in the move from interiority to other conceptions of the subject, by Brecht and Adorno, for instance. 3 Hannah Arendt discusses the inner monologues of Richard III in Life in the Mind. They are not just any example of poetic language, strewn across the pages of a philosophical argument. They can be read as a pendant to Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, where she argues that Eichmann cut off the possibility of thought. This is one of her most famous, and most debated, propositions. It is not by chance that Shakespeare is engaged in the inquiries into what it means to think in Life of the Mind. To Arendt, poetic language is not just books with names of authors. It is “thought.” But it is thought with a special kind of characteristic, different from philosophy in many respects. And yet philosophy and poetry hold a feature in common: the inner voice. Where does it speak from and what does it say? On this, poetry and philosophy differ. But the attention to the sounding of language and the resonation of internal dialogue within the self is the same. When philosophy listens to poetry, it might get a sense of the inner voice. When it listens, instead of theorizing, something is breaking through. Here we deal with a kind of sensorial encroachment. Poetry speaks to a sense of listening that is irreducible to hearing as a mere sense faculty. The experience of mood as a kind of tonality is not a question of translating emotions. It is not about something; it merely is, the presence of presence. Poetic language, as is stressed by Arendt, is speaking with. It engages with an interlocutor that is interiorized. When the poetic sounding evaporates it becomes a language that is, instead, about something. Poetry, in its original mode, is not talking and it is not speaking. It is a sounding: “out of my mouth came a sound, which assailed me unconditionally,” writes Rilke, quoted by Arendt.4 Poetic language does not have a message. It is its own sensuality. What is particular of poetry, to Arendt, is not its meaning. It does not have a meaning in the linguistic sense. Poetry is like love—whoever speaks lovingly has incorporated the other as a part of him- or herself. Rilke’s poetic language speaks of its liminal predicament: it carries a risk of losing itself, of losing the world. Poetry is the integration of the voice; sounding is the incorporation of embodiment, worldliness, affectivity, and love.

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Here, perhaps a metaphysics based on the Greek tradition of philosophy is of less help than the Hebrew. In the Hebrew tradition, Arendt remarks, the power of the voice is embraced. We cannot distance or protect ourselves from a sounding deity. When we listen instead of looking, the intimation is that the deity is breaking through some form of passive resistance. A relationship between voice and submission is suggested by the German language: the verb hö-ren (to hear) also carries echoes of gehorchen, hörich, gehören, words that, in English, translate as to obey, be in bondage, to belong.5 In gehören (to belong), the “hearing” implies not just a sense but also a relationship of power. A hearer is a receptor, exposed to a sound he cannot avoid. Sounding, however, is not a state in which one can remain, like the elation of love. Sooner or later, the sound of language shifts and transposes into meaning. It becomes a Mit-teilung, a message that also has an addressee.6 At this point the alterity is no longer an aspect of myself, but externalized.

RICHARD III, EICHMANN, AND THE CALL OF CONSCIENCE

The relation to poetic language for philosophy is never that of simple illustration. Arendt departs from the example. Exemplarity makes of all literature a form of thought.7 Richard III is not any example of the inner voice. It is the example of how thought works; how it may integrate, or deny, the sounding of the world internalized. This offers a way of understanding conscience. By default, moreover, it offers a way of understanding what it means not to think. The latter touches on the infamous doctrine on Eichmann and the banality of evil. Through the example of Richard III, this doctrine acquires a dimension that has not been fully elucidated in the debate. What Eichmann does when he is not thinking is not accepting the sounding of thought: the voices of his conscience, the shadows of those he has killed. Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann is multifaceted, and points to the many aspects of abhorrence on the one hand and willingness on the other that produced his part in genocide. This included an adherence to bureaucratic language, which helped produce the foreclosure of thought: “The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think,” which meant the inability to imagine other standpoints. Eichmann was unable to perceive “the words and the presence of others” and had construed, in his adherence to the totalitarian state, an immunity “against reality as such.” 8 Remarks such as these have been the subject of a

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mass of criticism, not only from those with whom Arendt was trying to communicate and later appease, the Jewish community in Israel and her friend Gershom Scholem.9 Her stance on Eichmann has been generally interpreted as if she meant that he was merely following orders. However, what she argues is that Eichmann was a person all too willing to submit, an individual who enthusiastically embraced the mechanisms of totalitarianism.10 Eichmann’s loss of a sense of the real was not a pathological feature. It was the result of a perversion of the call of conscience. Eichmann did not deny the call of conscience—he was in fact obsessed with it. But he failed to recognize its rootedness in the fundamental prohibition against killing the other—a prohibition that cannot be compromised. In her postscript to the second edition of Report on the Banality of Evil, she attempts to ward off the ostracizing criticism directed at her from Israel, trying to illuminate her contested proposition that Eichmann does not think. Here, Richard III is only briefly mentioned, and not in the profound sense in which the play is then expanded upon in Life of the Mind years later (the Eichmann book came out 1964, Life of the Mind in 1978 after the death of Arendt). That Eichmann is not Richard III and does not strive for power is the first reading of Arendt.11 In the postscript, this is shown to be of importance because he cannot be tried in accordance with existing laws in the country of his crimes. In ordinary trials, we presume a coherence between conscience and the law to be in place. In the case of Eichmann, however, no such framework exists. Therefore, the resort to judgment, to thought, and to a conscience rooted in certain fundamental conditions of the law and not in the fantasmatic calls of superiors becomes the only available tool: no matter how small one’s place might be as a cog in the wheel of bureaucracy, what is at stake in the end is the capacity of the individual to use judgment.12 In Life of the Mind, although there is no sustained discussion of the Eichmann case, Arendt makes clear that thought has a political poignancy.13 She returns to Richard III in order to testify further to what is at stake: conscience is, as one can hear by the etymology of the word, related to consciousness. Thought is a process in which an inner dialogue proceeds in solitude although we are still immersed in the world. We are with ourselves, but not lonely. The two-in-one of the thought process, to Arendt, is dramatically different from being in the world of appearances, where “the outside world intrudes upon the thinker and cuts short the thinking process.”14 Richard the murderer speaks to himself and thinks to himself. As many literary historians have noted, the monologues in Shakespeare’s dramas may be looked at as a development of his sonnets: they communicate an inner voice. In

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private, Richard sees the ghosts. In public, he rejects them. The poetic is relegated to the cellar of nonconsciousness. Thought proper, to Arendt, strives after a certain congruence with itself; it strives to accommodate the other in such a way that discord is replaced with differentiation: I become the two-in-one, I accommodate the internal friend “at home.”15 Richard, like Eichmann, forecloses this process, a process that can only be brought in poetic form. Something happens in the monologues of Shakespeare that goes beyond a mere theatrical representation of self-consciousness: thought comes across in the form of voices, bringing us beyond the idea of a self that is self-contained and self-reflective. The inner voice is a trace inscribed in consciousness that appears to give witness to another consciousness. But that consciousness is never fully represented; it appears as a trace of something or somebody. The monologue evokes, through its very absence, the voice that resounds with “the standpoint of somebody else,” and it evokes, through its absence, the internal voice that may guide our sense of the real, an internalized presence of alterity that “assures us of the reality of the world and of ourselves.”16 It is this sense of the real that has been cast off in the testimony of Eichmann, offering us, instead, a dead language of bureaucracy.

THINKING THE NONTHOUGHT

To “think” requires not empathy but rather the ability to use imagination.17 For this, literature offers examples in many shapes. Examples are needed for reflective judgements, as argued by Kant in the Critique of Judgment. They refer, as Arendt notes, through the process of imagination, to concepts or general rules.18 By default, the inability to move from an example to a general rule demonstrates a lack of imagination. Not to be able to think means not to be able to deal with particulars from a standpoint of reflection. Particulars can be translated as stories, persons, and events in the form of narrative. It can also be transposed into moods and tonalities. The inability to think in a way that is congruent with our general sense of the real, and of notions such as good and bad, therefore, has nothing to do with emotions such as empathy; it has to do with imagination, the capacity of transposing and drawing conclusions. Literature thinks.19 Richard III offers the example of nonthought from the point of view of evil; the incongruence of Richard’s internal voices has something to do with the internal silence of Eichmann. But literature, also, may point to the excess of the good, as in the case of Billy Budd, a figure of sacrifice in the novel of Herman

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Melville. Billy Budd is a figure whose tragedy lies in his predicament of “absolute goodness; an impossible predicament which leads to the ensuing violence around him and against himself.” Arendt uses Budd to prove that absolute goodness also is the result of a lack of world.20 The excess of goodness makes of Billy Budd a figure as abstract and eerie as Richard III, but at the other end.21 Again, we encounter the fallacy of the inner voice, though the inability to hear, listen, and receive. Billy stutters—which Arendt notes—and is unable to communicate; his assailants fail to recognize it as his voice. The voice of Billy Budd is not recognized as such and therefore not brought into the horizon of conscience.22 Arendt’s collection of essays on literature, Men in Dark Times, shows that literature becomes political through the example. The example is never just abstract—it is poeticized. This is demonstrated in her analysis of Franz Kafka, Hermann Broch, Isak Dinesen, and others. Art in general is described by Arendt as a thought-thing, an appearance taken out of context and made to appear as “not just themselves but for themselves.” Art is a sensory thing that thinking has taken “possession” of.23 Works of art, and poetry, appear in a state in between, as if thought is touching itself through its externalization into sensual qualities. Literature is characterized by Arendt in Between the Past and the Future as a “thought-event.” 24 This does not simply mean that it is giving coherence and meaning to things that happen. It means that literature works in the same register between sensory experience and derealization as philosophy; it is a thoughtevent, thus integrating all those aspects of itself that applies to thinking. This holds the power of its exemplarity. Kafka, one of Arendt’s model examples, works with a literary style that is like a “blueprint,” which, although “it is rooted in reality, owes its discovery to a thought process more than to sensory experience.” 25 But there is no contradiction between thought, although it is not a sensory form of experience, and the sense of the real. On the contrary, what is argued persistently in Life of the Mind is that thinking—in the form of philosophy, but also in the form of art, poetry, and literature—is always rooted in a plurality of appearances, at an ontological level. We cannot flee the multifaceted aspects of the sensory world even as we engage in “interior” activities such as thought—“we are of the world and not merely in it.” 26 Such a predicament calls for an engagement in the world in which thought is a direct production of an ontological predisposition. Thought, like poetic language, is the metaphorical transposition of a many-faceted world from “intuition” back into the world.27 In her lectures on Kant, Arendt proceeds to argue that plurality structures our sense of realness. The experience of realness measures the way in which our perceptions “fit” into the world.28 In the end, this means that thought-things

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and thought-events, such as literature and poetry, sustain our sense of the real although individual works may be perceived as abstract and uncanny. The sense of realness has nothing to do with realism. It has to do with the same state as that of philosophy; it is produced in the world of solitude and yet it engages in the world. The experience of reality, to Arendt, is guided not simply by the common, but by the common as produced by “differences of position and the resulting variety of perspectives.” 29 If literature and poetry, then, is a “thought-event,” it is because it illuminates the manifoldness of perspectives and positions while engaging a call for the common. In contrast, “real” objects disappear with the foreclosure of plurality in totalitarian states. Here arises the “curious contradiction between the totalitarian movements’ avowed cynical ‘realism’ and their conspicuous disdain of the whole texture of reality.”30 Whereas literature, poetry, and art sustain the public sphere of appearances, and thereby also our sense of the real, totalitarianism closes these spaces. What may follow is a flight into the intimate space of interiority, in thought and in poetic language. But, as Arendt clearly demonstrates in Men in Dark Times, this can only go on for so long. When Brecht saw the incongruence between the world he envisioned and the one he experienced, he fell silent.31

TONALIT Y, METAPHOR , AND THE TRANSPOSITION OF INTUITION

Immanuel Kant comments famously, as noted by Arendt, that thinking is speaking with oneself: it is “speech in the belly.”32 With Arendt, the inner voice takes us beyond a mere psychological experience, and beyond the question of philosophical method. The coming together of the self with “the one at home,” as Arendt puts it in her reading of Richard III, erupts with the negativity opened by the very tonality of thought. Quoting Plato’s Gorgias, Arendt discusses the Socratic proposition: “It would be better for me that my lyre or a chorus I directed should be out of tune and loud with discord, and that multitudes of men should disagree with me rather than I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself and contradict me.”33 As Arendt notes, this is a paradoxical suggestion; in order for harmony to resound, we would need at least two tones, and therefore the I is not one, but is marked by differentiation or plurality from the very outset, in relation to itself.

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The Kantian suggestion of an “inner voice” in thought is taken by Arendt to bring us to the world of plurality. This is in stark contrast to Hegel’s notion of the schöne Seele, or “beautiful soul.” This means figuring an inner life of the soul that lies hidden under other delusions, a discovery that involves giving up on the world and withdrawing into melancholy.34 Poetry carries a tonality that is also an integral aspect of its permanence; oral poetry was carried out in public. Still when literature became an aspect of privacy through the bourgeois novel, tonality remained in language.35 But to Arendt, what is important is that thinking has a tone. Melancholy has a tone, remembrance has another.36 Uproar and revolution have other kinds of moods, other kinds of tonalities.37 In Arendt’s model of the two-in-one there is a sentient form of being, an aesthetic mode present in the I of apperception, which feels itself and at the same time exceeds itself. Metaphor, also, which is closely connected to tone, is a primary tool for this carrying over of language between inner and outer—it transposes language over “the abyss between inward and invisible mental activities and the world of appearances.”38 But metaphor, unlike the conclusion one might be able to draw, is not the translation of thought. It is thought. The intertwinement between philosophical thought and poetic thought becomes clear. Metaphor transposes all our intuitions into workable language, and in this transposition the tonality of thought may remain. The very sensibility of tone, mood, and metaphor in philosophy and poetry may resist assaults from other compromised forms of discourse, such as dead bureaucratic language. The integrated voice becomes the other side of a reflecting I that is the condition of possibility of experience, accommodating the other into an interior life. To Kant, this is not simply abstract. His formula for it, which is what intrigues Arendt, is the following: to use reason is “to think for oneself (in communication with human beings) into the place of every other person.”39 This venture, however, may transform into a humanist metaphysics when I appear to myself, Arendt writes, “as if I am not a human being, but the human being.” 40 This was the mistake of Heidegger, Hegel, Marx, and others. They were unable to affirm thought through the manifestation of plurality.41 Where inner speech appears, to Heidegger, it does so through zwiesprach, “double talk,” between a self and shadow beset by a luring publicness that verdunkeltalles, “makes everything dark.” 42 But to Arendt, the plurality of publicness does not hide or darken. It is what makes the inner voices of poetry and philosophy come to the fore. The voices through which we think, the moods that accompany literary experiences transcend the divisions between private and public, intimate and

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collective. The inner voice pushes the limits of the I of apperception. Thought points to the primacy of alterity since “the self is put in place of the friend, not the other way around.” 43 The inner voice may push us in directions that we are not familiar with. Thought, like literature and art, is engaged in the world through its very retreat. This encroaching upon does not entail that we are beset by others in the sense of empirical beings. We are rather beset by an alterity that we cannot seize—like the ghosts in Shakespeare’s dramas. Through the world of literature, we are given access to what we might call the “as-if.” Poetry, in evoking tonalities of voices through its multifaceted arrangements of dialogues, monologues, and polylogues, serves thought processes in which we are engaged in the world. We test out, learn, and evaluate new modes of reflection. We train our imagination through new forms of sounding. To Arendt, when we think with an enlarged mentality, we “go visiting.” 44 Poetry becomes the testimony of and the means through which we learn that the inner voice is engaged in the world, rather than running parallel with it, as Maurice MerleauPonty has shown in Phenomenology of Perception. Language, says Merleau-Ponty in a formulation close to Arendt, arranges the way in which we are able to “think according to others.” 45 This enables it also to produce new thoughts.46 If consciousness may sometimes be experienced through the inner voice, it is because thought is a phenomena of expression among others; it is not privileged over music or art although it may appear silent and reclusive.47 Literature does this not merely through the presentation of points of view, opinions, and other forms of consciousness. When philosophy listens to poetry, a mode of engaging with the world emerges that has more to do with imagination than reason, the mode of “as-if ” emerging through the intonation the voice. When philosophy listens to poetry, it becomes immersed in the tonality of a voice that is interiorized. It opens itself to a position of contingency, and needs to give up on the full demands of comprehension. As we listen, the sounding of the inner voice will impinge upon us, rather than appeal to us with specific demands. Narrative, Arendt explains in The Human Condition, expresses particularity as an answer to the question of the “who.” With the internal voice of the two-inone, what emerges is the raw engagement with the world. The voice testifies to the plurality in which we are always engaged. Rather than distinct appearances, poetry makes a world appear. If philosophy needs to listen to poetry, it is in order to approach connections, lineages, and sensory phenomena through tones and silences. It is this challenge that philosophy needs to work with, gathering voices in order to listen, rather

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than returning to a given concept of “meaning” and thus straying further and further away from the web of voices. It is this challenge, also, that we need to face as we look for new models for critical thought. We need to find ways to act, think, or feel “in concert” and yet maintain a legacy of critical reflection and freedom. The phenomenology of the thought process gives witness to the presence of the voice in an ontology of plurality, through the mood of inner language and the experience of the “two-in-one.” The originary alterity of the “one that thinks” is linked to imagination, metaphor, and tonality: we see this original alterity in the work of Rilke, W. H. Auden, and others. Voice is the means of engaging in the in between. The inner voice is not only a thought; it engages my being, my imagination, my corporeal situatedness. This is also why poetry broadens our horizon: it speaks where “it speaks.” It may speak in a space of the eerie, dematerialized, and detached. But it still gives witness to a world of the many, in which I can never fully recede onto myself.

CARAZAN’S DREAM AND THE GHOSTS OF THOUGHT

The tonality of thought appears from a state of the in between, not through the introjection of another consciousness but rather from a mode of being both in the world and outside of it. Hannah Arendt, in her diary, writes on Descartes’s Meditations: “Die Ent-zweiungist der Zweifel (‘dubitare’—zwischen zwei Seiten hin- und herschwanken).”48 “The chasm is the doubt, to doubt means to go back and forth between two sides, with no given direction.” What interests Arendt in this is not the methodical foundation of the metaphysical subject, but rather the quality of the process of thought that Descartes gives witness to. “The doubt of reality is the outstanding experience of thinking,” she writes. The experience of thought has itself the power of bringing with it the doubt of reality: as I am in my solitary mode of thought, I am in another sphere than when I am appearing to others. This may easily lead me to lose my sense of the real, and bring with it the kind of experience through which I dream and doubt. And this is also the experience I have as I experience the thought-event of literature, as in Kafka’s dreamlike tales. As indicated in Arendt’s reading of Shakespeare, the inner voice is not presenting a consciousness to another consciousness. The inner voice appears through ghosts, through beings that are the afterlife, the traces of another consciousness.

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The ghostlike character of the inner voice is an important feature of its way of sounding. Shakespeare’s monologues point to inner voices encroaching on our minds, accompanied not by the appearances of other people but by shadows and ghosts. Arendt perceives this state in her reflections on Rilke, Descartes, Shakespeare, and Kafka: solitude has the power of bestowing the inner voices with an eeriness that comes forth as we withdraw from the presence of others. If the encroachment of others appear as eeriness, it is absence blown open. As we read, moving into the world of literature, or as we see a theater play on stage, we are quite ready to conceive of authored voices as the shadow, the fragment of another possible consciousness, without demanding the full rise of absolute alterity. In this suspense we are dealing with aspects of plurality that, as Arendt describes it, present us with what it means to think “in the place of another.” These voices do not overtake our world, they do not present us with the full universe of another subjectivity, and they do not confront us with the full-blown dialectics of reason. What these voices do, rather, is poke at the gate of imagination: opening for the possibilities of other beings, other lives, other stories, and other modes of consciousness. In her reading of Richard III, Arendt describes the inner voice as a function of thought that may lead to a certain peace with oneself. But one can stress, also, the closing of Shakespeare’s play, which stages conscience with haunting ghosts. The eeriness of this ending lies less in the presentation to Richard of his guilt, than in his panicky realization: I am alone, and still not alone, they speak to me, but they are me. Literature may evoke our imagination and our capacity of internal travel. But poetic language, also, can evoke the eerie silence that meets us as the space of alterity is empty. Sometimes we may hear ourselves thinking. We may hear our own voice, as in an echo. Sometimes, thoughts appear, as voices in a cave. They strike us, as from the outside. We hear them, as if they are aspects of what Chion calls acousmètre, the invisible point that we can only hear but not see, and yet it is structuring our perception and our apprehension of space.49 When we hear our own thoughts, we experience ourselves somehow as naturally double, as beings capable of reflecting in the world internally and silently, in our own minds. When the voices appear as foreign, as the voices of angels or devils, or simply as belonging to other people, this is a sign of psychosis, or, as in Descartes’s doubt, is as if we are in a dream. This is what occurs, also, in Carazans’ Dream, told by Kant in Essays on the Beautiful and the Sublime and recounted by Arendt in her lectures on Kant. It is a tale about the greedy Carazan, whose wealth was growing exponentially at the same rate as the diminishing of love for other humans. In the end he is brought before the voice of God by the angel of death,

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and the voice speaks to him: “Carazan, your service of God is rejected. You have closed your heart to the love of man, and have clutched your treasures with an iron grip. You have lived only for yourself, and therefore you shall also live the future in eternity alone and removed from all communion with the whole of Creation.”50 Here Carazan approaches the end of nature, the abyss of a boundless void, “A fearful kingdom of eternal silence, loneliness and darkness!”51 The unspeakable void that swallows Carazan is of course the void in himself. Whereas Richard III meets the ghosts of his past, and is pursued by his own conscience, Carazan’s rejection implies the absolute loss of everything. In Arendt’s reading, the tale speaks not so much of Kant’s reflections on ontology as about his understanding of the social nature of man: man thinks and judges in the company of others. That is why the voice of poetic language, although it may be evoked in solitude, has the power of presence.

Notes 1. 2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

Cf. Jennifer Ann Bates: Hegel and Shakespeare on Moral Imagination (New York: SUNY Press; 2010) 240. Richard II, sometimes referred to as the poet king, is pursuing throughout this tragedy forms of interior speech that may be, as James A. Knapp has argued, performative masks rather than expressions of modern forms of subjectivity: Knapp, “Richard II’s Silent, Tortured Soul,” in Shakespeare and Continental Philosophy, ed. Jennifer Ann Bates and Richard Wilson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 94–121. On Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941), an allegory on National Socialism, Brecht writes in his journal: “Shakespeare’s grand motif, the fallibility of instinct (indistinctness of the inner voice) cannot be renewed.” This meant that the representation of interiority on stage was given up by Brecht for other theatrical means that involved less “inner” and more emphasis on concrete dialogue and props. To Adorno, in this new metaphysics, we are led to believe that the subject has a content, and exists as an individual with a consciousness with unknown depth and variety. Theodor  W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert HullotKentor (New York: Continuum, 2002), 213. Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, vols. 1 and 2, ed. Ursula Ludz and Ingeborg Nordmann (Munich: Piper, 2002), 215. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vols. 1 and 2 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1978), 112. Arendt, Denktagebuch, 1:215. Already in 1999, Liliane Weissberg pointed to the fact that the role of literary examples in Arendt’s work had not been given proper attention. Weissberg points to their political poignancy. Weissberg, “In Search of the Mother Tongue: Hannah

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8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

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Arendt’s German-Jewish Literature,” in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, ed. Steven E. Aschheim (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), 149. I would like to argue that their political poignancy lies in their being a form of thought. Another way of approaching the relation between exemplarity, philosophy, and poetry is to use the concept of autonomy. This has been shown by Lydia Goehr, The Quest for Voice: Music, Politics and the Limits of Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), chap. 3. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 2nd ed. (London: Penguin, 1964), 49. “ ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’: An Exchange of Letters Between Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt,” Encounter 22 (January 1964): 51–56. See, for instance, Roger Berkowittz’s argument in this contested area à propos von Trotta’s film Hannah Arendt. Eichmann subordinates himself to “the fictional truth of the movement”: https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/mis reading-hannah-arendts-eichmann-in-jerusalem/?mcubz=1. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 287. Arendt, 280–89. Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 1:212. Arendt, 1:185. Arendt, 1:190–91. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 50. In the postscript to the second edition on the Eichmann report, Arendt argues that it was his lack of imagination that made him complain that he had not been promoted when questioned by a German-Jewish police officer after the war—rather than experience, regret, remorse, or any kind of open anxiety. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 287. Cf. Deborah Nelson’s article on Arendt’s rebuttal of the use of empathy: Nelson, “The Virtues of Heartlessness: Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, and the Anesthetics of Empathy,” American Literary History 18, no.  1 (2006): 86–101. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 84. Arendt, 84. As pointed out in the discussion by Shiraz Dossa and many others: Dossa, The Public Realm and the Public Self: The Political Theory of Hannah Arendt (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1989), 116–117. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin, 1963), 82–83. See the analysis of Richard J. Bernstein: Arendt’s negation of “absolutes” does not make the engagement with evil less relevant since it proposes an engagment with resposibility. See Bernstein, “Are Arendt’s Reflections on Evil Still Relevant?,” in Politics in Dark Times: Encounters with Hannah Arendt, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 293–305. As expressed by Jonathan Neufeld, it does not fit within the existing structure of authority and political justification: Neufeld, “Billy Budd’s Song: Authority and Music in the Public Sphere,” Opera Quarterly 28, nos. 3–4 (December 1, 2012), 172–91, at 72. As Seyla Benhabib has pointed out, Billy Budd is used to point to the distinction

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26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

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between universal human rights and “the right to have rights,” the latter a notion that does not require any preconception of what is to count as “human.” Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 107. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:184–85. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Viking, 1968), 10–11. Hannah Arendt, Reflections on Literature and Culture, ed. Susannah Young-Ah Gottlieb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 104. As Liliane Weissberg has noted, Kafka was among those who held a position in Arendt’s work because they were German-Jewish and shared a mother tongue: Weissberg, “In Search of the Mother Tongue.” Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:22. As Susannah Young-Ah Gottlieb has shown, in this transformation of the given lies a Messianic moment in Arendt’s notion of art: Gottlieb, Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in Hannah Arendt and W. H. Auden (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 147. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 76. Arendt, The Human Condition, 57–58. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harvest, 1973), viii. Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harvest, 1968) 207–51. As I argue in Doing Aesthetics with Arendt: How to See Things (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 95–96, Brecht’s silence can be interpreted as the insight that he unraveled a reality that he did not want to see; in this, his work became a political act. Patchen Markell, in turn, has argued that Brecht to Arendt offered a case of “disruptive faithfulness to factual reality.” Markell, “Politics and the Case of Poetry: Arendt on Brecht,” Modern Intellectual History (November, 22, 2016): 1–31. Immanuel Kant: Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Robert Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), §§39, 86. Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 1:181. Kant, Anthropology, §§24, 53–54. In this sense, Arendt’s notion of poetry follows a certain story of the disintegration of the public sphere, through which the tonality of poetry becomes less a tool of public and political impact, and more a tool of decoration. Mel A. Topf, “Hannah Arendt: Literature and the Public Realm,” College English 40, no.  4 (December 1978), 353–63. Arendt, Denktagebuch, 2:690. Writings—Notes and excerpts—n.d. (7 of 8 folders) (Series: Addition III, 1945, n.d.) 033020 033019. The Hannah Arendt papers at the Library of Congress. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:205. Kant, Anthropology, 124. Arendt, Denktagebuch, 2:723. Arendt, 2:695. Arendt, 2:815. This passage is concerned with Heidegger’s Being and Time, §27, “zwischen Man-selbst und Selbst,” between the self of das Mann and the self. This is argued both in Life of the Mind and The Promise of Politics: humans are both subject and object, which means that they are “plural also within themselves.”

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44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

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Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2005), 22. This in turn means that “I can experience a friend as another self.” Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 43. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), 208. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, 209. Merleau-Ponty, 221. Arendt, Denktagebuch, 2:761. Chion defines acousmètre as the presence of a voice that has not been visualized through a face; instead “we get a special being, a kind of walking and acting shadow.” Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 21. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 11. Arendt, 11.

6 Language and the Poetic Word in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics James Risser

HERMENEUTICS, LANGUAGE, AND POETRY

Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) is perhaps the most preeminent continental philosopher associated with the name hermeneutics. While hermeneutics has a long association with the art of interpretation and understanding of texts, Gadamer develops his hermeneutics more broadly to encompass any experience in which there is something to understand, including the experience of art in general. For Gadamer this broadening of the scope of hermeneutics goes hand in hand with his insistence that interpretation can no longer be confined to a methodological procedure and the task of discovering right principles for interpretation. As he makes clear in his major work, Truth and Method, there are experiences of truth—notably in history, art, and philosophy—that cannot be captured by any methodical procedure. He thus identifies his own work as a philosophical, rather than methodological, hermeneutics with the aim of bringing to light the conditions for understanding as it occurs everywhere in our human experiencing of the world. When Gadamer broadens the scope of hermeneutics in this way he is at the same time making a claim for the universality of hermeneutics. This claim indicates not simply the break from method, and along with it the restriction of understanding to one mode of knowing alongside others, but also the extent to which understanding is actually basic to our very being in the world. The ability to understand, Gadamer insists, is nothing less than a fundamental endowment of man. At a philosophical level this idea is first made clear by Heidegger, whose work Gadamer closely follows. When Heidegger formulates the idea of a hermeneutics of facticity in the 1920s as a way of describing how human existence is first

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situated in the world, he transforms the very concept of understanding into an existential category of human existence. Existential understanding constitutes a basic comportment of our being-in-the world, which subtends any comportment toward definite objects of knowledge. Likewise for Gadamer, in all experiencing and “knowing” of the world a moment of understanding is to be worked out. Most decisive in this regard is Gadamer’s further claim that language constitutes the medium of hermeneutic experience, determining both the hermeneutic object and the hermeneutic act. Thus for Gadamer the human experience of the world is fundamentally linguistic, and only through the experience of coming to word do humans actually have a view of the world. Meanings are not first present in experience and then subsequently put into words, but emerge within the dynamics of hermeneutic experience itself. Both the relation of poetry to philosophy and the significance of poetry for hermeneutic experience are determined by the nature of language put forth in this further claim. For Gadamer the nature of language lies fundamentally in its “saying power,” where “saying” pertains foremost to appearing and making manifest in the manner of showing. But this is not to say that he regards language in terms of the “statement,” and above all it is not to regard language in terms of the sign. As a system of signs, language functions by pointing away from itself (to the signified), and as such the nature of language takes on an instrumental character. Language functions as a mere tool, a means by which a consciousness orders and communicates with the world. The nature of language, so understood, amounts to a second-order phenomenon of representation. To regard language otherwise, as Gadamer does, is to claim that the word, rather than being a sign, is more like an image that bears a deeper connection to the appearance of what is named in the word. For Gadamer language neither represents a reality nor projects an intelligibility onto an unintelligible reality, but is that in which the intelligibility of the real makes itself manifest. In effect Gadamer is claiming that language is not a bridge between a wordless world on the one side and a worldless word on the other. Rather, our words are worlded from the start and the reality of language is that a world is presented in it. Gadamer famously writes, “being that can be understood is language.” This means simply that the ontological constitution of what is understood is determined in a universal sense as language.1 Language’s “saying power” is effectively “being-as-saying” such that being is not simply reflected in language as a kind of “second being.” Exactly how the meaning of being becomes manifest in language has everything to do with the movement of realization that occurs in language. Gadamer argues that language is capable of movement by virtue of the living character of language. It is the living act of speaking that constitutes for

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Gadamer the very essence of language. Since speaking takes the form of address and response, of speaking to each other and listening to each other, this movement is the movement of dialogue or conversation (Gespräch), which, in regard to the experience of understanding, takes place within the dynamics of question and answer. For Gadamer a conversation, because it is an engagement with the speaking of language through the participants, occurs even when a real dialogical partner is not present as in the case of the interpretation of texts. In reading a text, poetical or otherwise, one does not understand by imposing a meaning on the text, but in responding, as if in a dialogue, to what the language of the text is trying to say. In this sense it is no exaggeration to say that the task of understanding amounts to a recovery of the original saying power of words that occurs in the dialogue with language. Dialogue functions then not merely to facilitate exchange, but in a middle-voiced way as a movement for the self-presentation of meaning. The issue of poetry in this context is simply the question of how language becomes art. It is a question that Gadamer devotes considerable attention to in his numerous writings on art, along with his specific treatments of the poets Hölderlin, Goethe, Stefan George, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Celan, and Hilde Domin.2 The writings that take up the question of how language becomes art— the issue of poetry—are more than an attempt to establish a close proximity between philosophy and poetry, as one finds in Heidegger. Rather, they are more concerned with the heightened experience with language that is peculiar to poetry. While both philosophy and poetry are capable of bringing the experience of the world to light in a language event where the movement of language enables meaning to assert itself, the language of poetry, unlike philosophy, does not sublate itself. The hermeneutic task, he writes, “is to learn how to determine the special place of poetry in the constraining context of language.”3 This constraining context is the fact that poetic language cannot escape a conceptual element in which “concepts enter into a relationship with each other,” and yet it is not philosophy—at least not the dialectical concept in which the word “fades into the unsayable.” For Gadamer, the experience of poetry is an experience with language in which the word “comes to a stand”; it is an experience with language in an eminent sense, and for this reason he assigns to poetry a special place.

POETRY AS LANGUAGE IN AN EMINENT SENSE

What exactly Gadamer means when he says that poetry is language in an eminent sense has everything to do with the autonomy of language in poetic

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experience, an autonomy that he also attributes to philosophy insofar as both are “set off from the exchange of language as it takes place in practical activity and in science.” 4 In the everyday exchange of language our speaking acquires its meaningfulness “from a living context that is concretely realized in a situation in which we are addressed.”5 As such the words spoken simply do not stand for themselves but pass over into the meaningfulness of what is said. But in poetry especially, the words are intended to stand for themselves in the sense that they have their own autonomy and are not intended to pass over into a meaningfulness outside of the poem. In “Text and Interpretation,” an important essay first published in 1984, Gadamer explains this autonomy of the poetic text: But then there is literature! That is to say, texts that do not disappear in our act of understanding them but stand there confronting our understanding with normative claims and which continually stand before every new way the text can speak. What is it that distinguishes these texts from others? . . . My thesis is this: These texts are only authentically there when they come back to themselves. Then they are texts in the original and authentic sense.6

A literary text, as text, does not just render spoken language into fixed form. If such were the case, one could attempt to read poetry in search of motivations and intentions behind the text. But as text in the special sense in which it claims for itself an autonomy, the poetic text does not refer back to an already spoken word, as if it were only a vehicle for conveying an original expression such as an author’s intention. The poem intends only itself such that in reading a poem we are “wholly directed toward the word as it stands” and not toward a word that someone employs to tell us something.7 The poetic word, Gadamer claims, is a word detached from all such intending, and speaks in nobody’s name; it speaks for itself in the sense that its normative function seems to originate in itself. “The poem is not judged against a world outside it, but, on the contrary, a world is constructed from within the poem itself.” 8 For a text to come back to itself means that it fulfills the meaning of the text out of itself where it “prescribes all repetitions and acts of speaking.” The autonomy is thus that of a special case of a text that lets something be said from itself, and as such it is hermeneutically possible to say that it is the text that speaks to the reader. In his essay “On the Contribution of Poetry to the Search for Truth” Gadamer describes the special autonomy of the poetic text in relation to two other forms of autonomous text: the religious text and the legal text. Together, these three forms of autonomous text all have the nature of a declaration or  statement (Aussage). A text that is an Aussage is associated with a form of

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authority such that it is intended to be binding on the one to whom the statement is addressed. The religious text that “stands written”—an expression Gadamer takes from Luther—is a kind of statement that has the specific character of a pledge (Zusage), and has to be understood as a promise, which becomes so only if it is accepted, and becomes binding in this way. The legal text is a kind of statement that has the character of a proclamation or announcement (Ansage), and is binding by virtue of its being written down and promulgated. Such statements declare what is valid insofar as it “stands written.” In contrast to these two forms of statement, the poetic text is an Aussage in the eminent sense of the word, for it is literally a saying-forth (Aus-sage) and the most “saying” word.9 “It is a saying that says so completely what it is that we do not need to add anything beyond what is said in order to accept it in its reality as language.”10 For Gadamer the poetic word stands out as the highest fulfillment of the revealing, which is the achievement of all speech. This does not mean that the content of a poem completely expresses itself in every reading. In the autonomy of its self-standing character, the poetic text continually comes back to itself. Its writtenness (Sprachlichkeit) is in this unique way ahead of language, inaccessibly ahead.11 The poetic text truly has its “saying” in nobody’s name, “neither in the name of a god or a law, but from itself.”12 It makes itself believable from itself and becomes binding in the reader’s readiness to allow something to be said.

POETRY AND TRUTH

In designating the poetic word as Aussage Gadamer wants to claim that poetry not only is language in its authentic sense where its saying power is most heightened, but also issues in a claim to truth. He insists, though, that in order to understand the relation of poetry to truth we must put aside the weakened idea of truth associated with the general character of art as mere imitation. In his essay “Poetry and Mimesis” Gadamer points out that when Plato criticized the poets for being imitators he wanted to emphasize the ontological distance between the original and the image, but the idea of mimesis cannot be reduced to this portrayal of it. What is essential to the idea of mimesis—at least as Aristotle uses this word—is the element of recognition. For Aristotle the special kind of making that is art is not to know something for a second time, as if its function is only to produce a copy, an imitation of an original, but to raise something up to the universal, which is to be recognized in the production.13 For

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Gadamer recognition is simply coming to know something more authentically than one is able to do in a first encounter with it, and in relation to art the production finds its genuine fulfillment in the recognition of what is “there.” “Mimesis then does not imply a reference to an original as something other than itself, but means that something is there as itself.”14 The question of truth in poetry is thus for Gadamer a question of how the poetic word is able to speak such that one sees or hears precisely what is “there.” How does the word actually come forth in poetry such that there can be something like a truth of the word? Gadamer’s answer to this question can only be understood in relation to how he conceives the general experience of meaning in language as an event of self-presentation of what is “there.” In the case of poetry—and all art for that matter—this self-presentation is not just a matter of the content to which the word refers. Such is made evident in painting with modern nonobjective art that does not have depictive content yet is still able to have something to say to the viewer. Poetry too, as in the pure poetry of Mallarmé, demands that the reader cannot look simply to the communicative content that would unfold from the ordinary rules that govern our forms of communication. The very forming of poetic language is not a rule-governed application of words. At the same time the self-presentation of what is “there” is not just anything. Poetry, which has the ability to establish meaning on its own, is certainly aided in this regard—and, Gadamer would insist, essentially—by the way in which language is bound back to its own resounding and resonation. This resonation is not contained in the mere structure of the sound of the word. In “Text and Interpretation” Gadamer writes: Not only does the [poetic] word make what is said present; it also makes itself present in its radiant actuality as sound. Just as style constitutes a very effective factor in a good text and yet such a text does not put itself forward as a piece of stylistic decoration, so too is the actuality of words and of discourse as sound always indissolubly bound up with the transmission of meaning. . . . With a literary text the self-manifestation of each and every word has a meaning in its sonority, and the melody of the sound is also used by the discourse to augment what is said through the words.15

Poetry is not simply a written text, but a text that can overcome the abstractness of being written by the repetition of the words in “the original saying power of their sound.” The presenting of meaning in poetry is inseparable from this quality of sonority, which is in play as a second movement along with the

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movement of language. The movement of sound—what Hölderlin called the tone—balances with the movement of meaning, giving the text its “volume” and its own manner of being true. The nuances of meaning are bound up with the “radiant actuality of sound” in such a way that unity of the whole of the poetic text, which arises from the stream of speech, becomes determined through it. Because of this unique way in which the saying of language comes to appearance in poetry, Gadamer says that the poetic text must not only be read, but also be listened to with what he calls the “inner ear.” “Only in the inner ear are semantic reference and tonal construct entirely one.”16 The inner ear hears what has been formed in language (Sprachgebilde), which is something more than the mere sound of the word. When Gadamer then turns explicitly to the issue of truth in poetry he offers little by way of an actual definition of truth. While one might assume that he simply follows Heidegger in this regard and adopts the notion of truth as unconcealment, such an assumption would overlook the distinctness of Gadamer’s rendition of the claim to truth in poetry. For Gadamer truth is the “there” of being, which resides in what he calls the wonder or miracle (Wunder) of language. This description of language is apt precisely because he does not regard language as a constructed instrument, but as that which has, in its movement, the power from itself to generate meaning.17 Accordingly, while, indeed, the truth claim of poetry has the characteristic of unconcealment, for Gadamer this truth claim resides more specifically in the character of its self-evidence and selfvalidating nature. Within this “miracle” that is language Gadamer captures the notion of a selfvalidating truth with the expression So ist es! (That’s right! That is the way it is.) If this experience of truth involves the wonder of language that is because the determination of exactly how it comes forth and validates itself cannot itself be put into words. In his essay “The Artwork in Word and Image” Gadamer explains this experience with truth by linking it to the Greek concept of energeia, where, as he says, “we are no longer moving in the realm of sentence truth.”18 With this concept, Gadamer claims, Aristotle was able to think a motion that was without path or goal, something like life itself. Energeia is translated into English as “actuality,” but it has the simultaneous sense of “activity” and “actuality.” Bearing this sense in mind, the expression “So it is!/That’s right!,” which is to capture the truth of the poetic word, signals the appearance of an accomplishing actuality. In poetic truth something comes forth, speaking from the poetic work itself and always allowing for a further speaking. But again, what comes forth does so from itself and not in relation to what one might say about it. The phrase “So it is!/That’s right!” indicates that it is not the standpoint of the reader

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that determines the truth of the poem. Moreover, in this determination of an accomplishing actuality, of being-at-work, the poetic work is not a finished work, not a completed production (ergon), and thus not a “work” in the traditional sense. So Gadamer claims that poetry, and all art for that matter, has its being in its enactment (Vollzug).19 Because of the intimate link that Gadamer establishes between being and language (Being that can be understood is language) the enactment of meaning in language will necessarily extend into the world. For Gadamer the truth of poetry has a special significance in this regard. At the end of his essay “On the Contribution of Poetry to the Search for Truth,” Gadamer remarks that the truth of poetry consists in creating a “hold upon nearness.” 20 Gadamer reminds us that as beings subject to time, all things threaten to escape our grasp. All the events of our lives become entangled in the deeper dimension of forgetting and distancing that characterizes the human experience of life. Against this, Gadamer thinks that the poetic word has, in a certain way, the ability to counteract this existential reality. Language, especially poetic language, “always furnishes the fundamental articulations that guide our understanding of the world” such that, through the poetic word, the world is brought closer to us.21 Accordingly, the hold upon nearness, which can be experienced in a genuine poem, amounts to a “growing familiarity with the world.” This is not a romantic theory for Gadamer, but simply the recognition that language gives us our access to a world and that through the poetic word we are able to bear witness to our own being. In his essay “The Verse and the Whole” Gadamer describes the hold upon nearness as the experience of “living in poetry.” This experience, he tells us, “is more than a kind of exercise in relaxation occurring within the helter-skelter and pressures of our performance-oriented life. Living in poetry is rather one of the ways through which we experience being moved within ourselves.” 22 The hold upon nearness as a making ourselves at home in the world is then simply a description for the dynamic in which we gain access to the world and to ourselves as well.

READING POETRY HERMENEUTICALLY

If indeed gaining access to the world is an accomplishment of poetry, this accomplishment is greatly dependent, hermeneutically, on the distinctive act of reproduction that occurs in the recitation or reading of poetry. Gadamer acknowledges that the poem’s assertion (Aussage) is not easy to grasp correctly.

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Reading poetry is an interpretive experience that is much more than a simple reproduction. A simple reproduction would be one that only verbalizes the text, and thus misses the interplay between meaning and sound as well as the binding character of the poem’s assertion (Aussage) that imposes its own temporality on the reader. Reading poetry depends upon and demands being read in the right way. In several places Gadamer describes this process of reading as Weilen/ Verweilen (tarrying, lingering). As Gadamer employs this word, tarrying has little to do with relaxation and leisure over something; rather, it pertains to the experience of “taking time,” which is not actually to lose time. The time that one can lose is empty time; it is the time that needs to be filled and is measurable, and can be boring (langweilig) or entertaining (kurzweilig). In contrast to this there is filled time that “does not last long, nor does it pass away.” 23 The fact that the filled time of tarrying does not last long does not mean that nothing is happening there, for it retains a temporal structure in which there is movement. Gadamer ties this movement to the basic character of living language as dialogue: “Being in the mode of tarrying is like an intensive back-andforth conversation that is not cut off but lasts until it is ended. The whole of it is a conversation in which for a time one is completely ‘absorbed in conversation,’ and this means one is ‘completely there in it.’ ” 24 More than this, the dialectic of question and answer, which forms the basic structure of conversation (and thus the hermeneutic process of interpretation), undergoes a special modification in reading poetry. The modification has to do with the fact that the mediating discourse of the interpreter is not actually taken over into the interpreting of the poetic text. The poetic text is not interrupted by the intermediary speaking of the interpreter, but “is simply accompanied by the interpreter’s constant cospeaking.” 25 It is this modification that allows the normal temporality that belongs to all discourse to be annulled. Undoubtedly, Gadamer thinks that reading poetry requires great hermeneutic sensitivity, a sensitivity that is equally expressed by the poet Paul Celan, whose work Gadamer greatly admired. In language that could have been written by Gadamer himself, Celan writes in his Meridian speech: “A poem, being a form of appearing [Erscheinungsform] of language, hence essentially dialogue, may be a letter in a bottle thrown out to sea with the . . . hope that it may somehow wash up somewhere. . . . In this way, too, poems are en route: they are headed toward. Toward what? Toward something open, inhabitable, an approachable you, perhaps, an approachable reality.” 26 For Celan the  poem becomes conversation and only the space of this conversation can establish what is addressed in the poem. But as Gadamer fully recognizes, this space of conversation—certainly in the hermetic poetry of Celan, for which the

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virtue of hermeneutic listening is a necessity—is inseparable from a profound experience with an interruption in language from which words are then summoned. Commenting on Celan’s poem cycle Atemkristall (Breath Crystal) in his book Who Am I and Who Are You?, Gadamer notes the significance of the related word that Celan gives to the title of the volume of poems, Atemwende (breath turn). Atemwende is the spacing between breath, the silent moment between inhaling and exhaling where the breath turns, and where language turns and the poetic word originates.27 It is for Celan the silent, whisper-like transition that is never a spectacular occurrence but consists of a thousand silent imperceptibilities “whereby the ‘breath-crystal’ of the poem emerges in pure form like a single snowflake.”28 In this movement through silence, which separates for Celan “the strange from the strange,” the word of the poem comes forth. The interpretive difficulty that one must confront in reading Celan’s hermetic poetry does nothing to undermine the universality of hermeneutics for Gadamer, but it does serve to make more prominent the fact that reading poetry, as in any attempt at understanding, may not always be successful. There is not just the possibility of not understanding; it is also possible to misunderstand a poem, which Gadamer acknowledges in his own reading of Celan’s poetry.29 Even more so, Gadamer is willing to cede the fact that a poem may be, in yet a stronger sense of nonunderstanding, untranslatable, which, when understood properly, helps us grasp the greater complexity that Gadamer attributes to the Aussage that is a poetic text. In language that approximates that of Heidegger, Gadamer notes that in the autonomous saying power of the word there is the in-dwelling of being in language, which is inseparable from a sheltering concealment. The limit of translatability, Gadamer says, “shows us exactly how far the protection in the word stretches.” The poetic word in “holding on to itself ” also “holds itself back,” which ironically gives it its highest possibility.30 Being at home in language means precisely being able to experience this sheltering in which the word stands. The hold upon nearness occurring in the experience with poetry is also the holding within itself this nearness of language. When Gadamer says, “being that can be understood is language,” we should take this to mean “that which is can never be completely understood.”31 At best, then, one remains attentive to the encounter with the language of the poem with no guarantee that the poem will “speak”—a posture that Gadamer makes the most of. He writes: “I do not want to deny that Celan does not only associate this moment of turning breath, this instant when the breath returns, with calm self-restraint, but that he also allows the subdued hope bound up with every return [Umkehr] to resonate.”32 This hope that is tied to the motif of turning around and of the destiny of a poem that reaches out to the other in

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the movement of departure and return is a recurrent theme in Gadamer’s reading of certain poets. This hope is the hope not just for the communicative event of language, but for the understanding commensurate with it that enables us to see the world in a new way. Interestingly, Gadamer sees this hope and newness as being set against a fundamental and unremovable experience of strangeness. In a small occasional piece celebrating the poetry of his friend Hilde Domin, Gadamer identifies the poet as one who is always making a return to language (Rückkehr zur Sprache) in which the return is something like a double departure.33 The one who turns back after a long being away must now let go of something else. In the doubled departure one must part from the place where one has arrived after the initial leave-taking; and by virtue of this doubled departure, there is no simple going back. The return is thus no mere reuniting—a being again there, as would be the case in a simple return. The return is an ambiguous gift. It is not getting back what one has lost, but always a new loss. The doubled departure will make all return in effect uncanny—a strangeness of the home from where one begins. Gadamer identifies the work of language in the experience with poetry as this venture into the foreign in which the return as a form of arrival is at once a farewell to what was once familiar. Such is the character of all real insight, according to Gadamer. What the poet experiences in the return to language is for us all a return to language: a farewell and an insight both at once. This departing and return in and through language are of course necessary because “words are never simply self-same and the poet in particular is the one who is exiled from this familiarity.”34 In reading poetry we accompany the poet in her farewells and insights. Being at home in the language of poetry then is not at all the experience of a constant familiarity, but a return in language that is still to come. In his essay “Heimat und Sprache” Gadamer describes this way of being at home in language as being akin to an original intimacy (Urvertrautheit) to which we hope to return. “There is a breath of strangeness, Gadamer tells us, in everything where one returns.”35 Such is the work of poetry for Gadamer. Perhaps this is why he considers it so important for the present age where the discomfort of our social life in an anonymous mass society is felt from all sides. If there is a need to hear the word of the poet in our age, he insists that the word of the poet must be a different kind of word from our ordinary speaking. In his essay “Are the Poets Falling Silent?” he tells us, borrowing from the poet Rilke, that such a word is a word of “discretion”—a quiet word that requires a different tempo. “It is the quiet word that confirms the communality and therefore the humanity, which you and I find in the word.”36 Through it “we are able to suddenly meet and welcome . . . the powerful foreignness of the modern world as something familiar.”37

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Notes 1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1989), 474–75. Gadamer devotes two volumes of his Gesammelte Werke to writings on poetry and art. See Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, vols. 8 and 9, Äesthetik und Poetik I and II (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1993). Gadamer, “Reflections on My Philosophical Journey,” in The Philosophy of HansGeorg Gadamer, ed. Lewis Hahn (Chicago: Open Court, 1977), 39. Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, and Other Essays, ed. Robert Bernasconi, trans. Nicholas Walker (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 133. Gadamer, 132. Gadamer, “Text and Interpretation,” in Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter, ed. Diane Michelfelder and Richard Palmer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 41. Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, 106. Gadamer, 110. The importance of this word for Gadamer’s reflections on poetic discourse and art in general is evidenced by its use in the full title of volume  8 of his Gesammelte Werke: Ästhetik und Poetik I: Kunst als Aussage. Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, 110. Gadamer, “Philosophy and Literature,” trans. Anthony Steinbock, Man and World 18 (1985): 248. Gadamer, “The Truth of the Word,” in A Gadamer Reader, ed. Richard Palmer (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 145. The notion of the universal in poetry has a qualified sense for Aristotle, as one sees from his often quoted remark from the Poetics that poetry is more philosophical than history because poetry tends to express the universal while history expresses the particular. Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, 121. Gadamer, “Text and Interpretation,” 43. Gadamer, “The Eminent Text and Its Truth,” trans. Geoffrey Waite, Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association 13 (Spring 1980): 7. In Truth and Method Gadamer writes: “Every word causes the whole of language to which it belongs to resonate and the whole world-view that underlies it to appear. Thus every word, as the event of a moment, carries with it the unsaid, to which it is related by responding and summoning.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 458. Gadamer, “The Artwork in Word and Image,” in Palmer, A Gadamer Reader, 213. “The Artwork in Word and Image,” in Palmer, A Gadamer Reader, 215. Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, 113. Gadamer, 114. Gadamer, Hans-Georg Gadamer on Education, Poetry, and History: Applied Hermeneutics, ed. Dieter Misgeld and Graeme Nicholson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 91. Gadamer, “The Artwork in Word and Image,” 217.

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24. 25. 26.

Gadamer, 211. Gadamer, “Text and Interpretation,” 46. Paul Celan, Collected Prose, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop (Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY: Sheep Meadow, 1986), 34–35. This idea grows more complicated later in his speech: “The poem becomes . . . the poem of the one who—yet still—perceives, one who is turned toward what appears, questioning and addressing, what thus appears. The poem becomes conversation—often desperate conversation. Only in the space of this conversation does that which is addressed constitute itself, gather itself around the naming and addressing I. But this addressed, also become a “you” through naming, brings its being-other into this present.” Celan, Collected Prose, 50. Gadamer, Gadamer on Celan: “Who Am I and Who Are You?,” and Other Essays, trans. Richard Heinemann and Bruce Krajewski (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 73. Gadamer, 162. See Gadamer, 186. Gadamer, “The Truth of the Word,” 154. Gadamer, “Text and Interpretation,” 25. Gadamer, Gadamer on Celan, 73. Gadamer, “Hilde Domin, Dichterin der Rückkehr,” in Ästhetik und Poetik II, Gesammelte Werke 9 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1993), 324. Gadamer, 326–27. Gadamer, 327. Gadamer, “Are the Poets Falling Silent?,” in Hans-Georg Gadamer on Education, Poetry, and History, trans. Lawrence Schmidt and Monica Reuss (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 81. Gadamer, 81.

27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

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7 “I Am a Poem, Not a Poet” Jacques Lacan’s Philosophy of Poetry Jean- Michel Rabaté

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y title derives from a rather enigmatic assertion made by Lacan in the preface to the English translation of Seminar XI, the first of his seminars to be published, and one of the most influential. In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan develops the idea that there is no certificate or rubber stamp that can provide credentials for a psychoanalyst. Psychoanalysts must authorize themselves to practice for their true legitimacy will only come from them. However, a different principle obtains if one looks at a birth certificate: “A certificate tells me that I was born. I repudiate this certificate: I am not a poet, but a poem. A poem that is being written, even if it looks like a subject.”1 Thus, if agency is required of psychoanalysts who should not rely on official papers given by schools, institutes, or any institution, the reverse is true for human subjects when they are born: their very births, inscribed in archives by a birth certificate, will confirm that symbolic markers like family names and first names, along with all other administrative details, are all set down before any agency is possible. Hence, I am always a being that is “being written.” My unconscious functions as a living text, even if it remains undecipherable—hence, I cannot claim to be the author of my fate. This preface is dated from May 17, 1976. Exactly one year later, to the day, Lacan returned to the same idea, but in a different key, for this time, he applied the formula to himself. It was the last session of the seminar titled L’ insu que sait de l’une-bévue s’aile à mourre (Seminar XXIV), a title in which one recognizes the influence of Joyce’s punning method; the words can be rearranged as L’ insuccès de l’Unbewusst c’est l’amour, meaning that the failure of the Freudian unconscious is Love; they also say something like “the unknown that knows of the one-error takes wings to die.” Close to the end of the seminar, Lacan explains

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that poetry is necessary because only poetry can replenish language with meaning. It is poetry that helps a psychoanalyst interpret the slips of the tongue and other unconscious or symptomatic productions presented by patients: “Man’s cunning has been to fill all this with poetry, poetry that is an effect of meaning, but also creates the effect of a hole. Only poetry, I have told you, makes interpretation possible, and this is why in my clinical practice, I am not able to make it cohere any longer. I am not enough of a “poet,” I am not “Poetassé.” (“Je ne suis pas assez poète. Je ne suis pas poâte-assez.”)2 Different transcripts of the seminar provide alternative spellings for “Poetassé.”3 Commentators have noted that Lacan was quoting a well-known quatrain by the French poet Léon-Paul Fargue. Fargue had published in 1923 a collection of short humorous poems titled Ludions (Little Imps). The following year, they were set to music by his friend Erik Satie. The shortest of these poems, titled “Air du poète” (“The Poet’s Tune”), is very short; it consists of four lines: Au pays de Papouasie J’ai caressé la Pouasie La grâce que je vous souhaite C’est de n’être pas Papouète

We realize that the punning practice was not introduced by Lacan: it was already in the original poem. Léon-Paul Fargue, a friend of James Joyce, shared with the Irish writer a predilection for bad puns, for invented words, and for playful poetic riddles. Lacan was familiar with these verses and with Satie’s little song, and he would allude to these lines several times in talks and seminars. In Je parle aux murs, a talk given in January 1972, Lacan commented on a poem by Antoine Tudal that he had quoted earlier in his essay-manifesto “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis.” Lacan said this: “Il s’agit de voir ce qu’il va y avoir maintenant, comment on peut l’écrire, ce qu’il va y avoir entre l’homme, c’est à dire lui, le pouète, le pouète de Pouasie, comme disait le cher Léon-Paul Fargue, qu’est-ce qu’il y a entre lui et l’amour.” (What matters now is to see what there is, how one can write this, what there is between man, that is him, the poet, the Poet of Papouasia, as my dear Léon-Paul Fargue would say, and love.)4 Fargue’s witty quatrain puns on the French name for Papua, Papouasie. It plays on the quasi-homophony of pouasie and poésie to make fun of “poetry,” because it suggests poux (lice) in pouasie, and distorts the pronunciation of poète. His Papouète is both a “not-poet” (pas-poète) and an exotic Papuan, while the French distortion on “poet,” often pronounced poâte or pouet,

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calls up bad and conceited writers. Indeed, the very word of poète was often spelled with a tréma (Mallarmé always spelled it “Poëte”), which makes it sounds funnily grandiose. It was often distorted as Pouet! Pouet! to evoke either the sound of farting or an old bicycle horn. However, whereas the preface to the translation of Seminar XI from 1976 establishes a general principle stating that all human subjects are not “poets” but “poems,” one year later Lacan confided that he himself was not a poet. Was this a way of deploring a weakening of his inspiration, of admitting a crisis in his practice, or even of confessing to a loss of creativity? Can these two statements taken together help us understand Lacan’s philosophy of poetry? To try to answer these questions, I will follow a chronological progression and study Lacan the evolution of his lifelong fascination for poetry. Lacan took his point of departure from a Surrealist credo, the idea that poetry can and should be written by all. Poetry, for Breton and his friends, was written by all people but more especially by the hysterics, the deviant, the insane, all those who had been excluded by the social norms and who therefore were closer to the unconscious. Similarly, Lacan saw in poetry a verbal proof of the link between creativity and the Freudian unconscious. However Lacan, even though he was close enough to Eluard, Breton, Aragon, Crevel, and Dali, was not a proto-Surrealist. He could be rather called a philosopher of psychoanalysis who attempted to produce a synthesis bridging the gap between the natural sciences and the humanities.

3 Quite early in his career, Lacan penned one poem, a sonnet titled “Hiatus Irrationalis.” This testifies to his literary ambition, at least to a wish to be taken as a “poet” and not simply a poem (yet). This interesting poem was published in the last issue of the short-lived Surrealist journal Le Phare de Neuilly.5 The journal, which had only three issues from 1931 to 1933, was edited by Lise Deharme, who figures as “The Lady of the Glove” in André Breton’s memoir Nadja. Lacan’s poem, dated from August 1929, is as follows:

Hiatus Irrationalis Choses, que coule en vous la sueur ou la sève, Formes, que vous naissiez de la forge ou du sang, Votre torrent n’est pas plus dense que mon rêve; Et, si je ne vous bats d’un désir incessant,

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Je traverse votre eau, je tombe vers la grève Où m’attire le poids de mon démon pensant Seul, il heurte au sol dur sur quoi l’être s’élève, Au mal aveugle et sourd, au dieu privé de sens, Mais sitôt que tout verbe a péri dans ma gorge, Choses, que vous naissiez du sang ou de la forge, Nature,—je me perds au flux d’un élément: Celui qui couve en moi, le même vous soulève, Formes, que coule en vous la sueur ou la sève, C’est le feu qui me fait votre immortel amant. H.-P., août 1929. Jacques Lacan

Formally, we find here a traditional Petrarchan sonnet written in alexandrines, and it exhibits little of the wild metaphors and free verse of most Surrealist productions. Its classical rhyme scheme in ABAB, ABAB, CCB, DDB adds an interesting constraint: the B rhyme echoes with the author’s name. Since it is placed after the last line, it looks as if “Lacan” provided an extra rhyme to “amant.” The sonnet’s inspiration is philosophical. Its main source is a book by Alexandre Koyré about Boehme’s philosophy published in 1929. Koyré’s La philosophie de Jacob Boehme (The Philosophy of Jacob Boehme) commented on Boehme’s famous sentence “In Ja und Nein bestehen alle Dinge” (In Yes and No are all things constituted). For the German mystic, nature was a dynamic synthesis of affirmation and negation, both implying each other dialectically. This monistic theory of Nature aimed at reconciling affirmation and negation via the agency of a universal Fire.6 Lacan’s first title for his sonnet in its earliest version from 1929 was “Panta Rhei,” quoting Heraclitus’s most famous saying: “All things flow.” I will return to Heraclitus via Heidegger a little later. We can note that the final version from 1933 had changed a Greek title to a Latin title. One of the implications of this change might be that, for Lacan, Heraclitus led to Boehme’s philosophy. The meaning of the abstract, allegorical, and philosophical “Hiatus Irrationalis,” in which one discerns clear influences of Paul Valéry’s style, is not easy to fathom.7 Here would be a literal translation: Things, whether sweat or sap flow in you, Forms, whether begotten from forge of flood, Your stream is not denser than my dream; And if I do not beat you with unceasing desire, I cross your water and fall to the shore

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Pulled by the weight of my thinking demon Left alone to fall on hard ground from which being rises, On evil blind and deaf, on god meaningless, But, no sooner have words perished in my throat, Things, whether begotten from blood or forge, Nature—than I lose myself in elemental flux: Fire smoldering in me, the same fire lifts you Forms, whether sweat or sap flow in you, It’s the fire that makes me your eternal lover.

Echoing Arthur Rimbaud’s “It is the fire that rises again with its damned soul” from Season in Hell,8 Lacan posits desire as a universal principle that runs through nature. Desire is figured both as an endless Heraclitean stream and as Boehme’s universal fire. However, in order to attain the Mysterium Magnum, the subject must pass though a moment of subjective disappearance: the first tercet evokes a moment of speechlessness. Boehme’s mystical vision, it seems, foreshadows an absolute Other whose silence lets nature disclose its secrets. “Hiatus Irrationalis” combines Heraclitus’s “panta rhei” with Boehme’s philosophy of fire; it is less to posit universal mutability than all-consuming desire. If Boehme’s monism leaves room for an Other, Lacan’s recurrent starting point in Spinoza’s Ethics, with two echoes of Descartes’s malin génie in the poem, would generate the idea of a Natura naturans underpinned by a desire passing through all things and subjects. Lacan may have found the phrase “hiatus irrationalis” in Georg Lukacs’s History and Class Consciousness, a book published in German in 1923, whose French translation dates from 1960. Lacan was fluent in German and a voracious reader, and he felt strong affinities with Marxism in the 1930s. The phrase appears in a chapter in which Lukacs examines the peasants’ rebellions in Germany, especially the revolt led by Thomas Münzer, who was executed in 1525. Lukacs links the doctrine of a hidden god (deus absconditus) with the religious utopia launched by thinkers who had an impact on Jakob Boehme (born fifty years after the death of Münzer). Lukacs remains critical and notes that Münzer’s actions reveal the same “dark and empty chasm,” the “same ‘hiatus irrationalis’ between theory and practice” that defines “a subjective and hence undialectical utopia.”9 Lukacs himself had found the expression in the works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, for whom it referred to an irreducible gap between thinking and reality, the yawning interval between theory and praxis. Lacan would have appreciated how a visionary mysticism disclosing the truth about desire came as a substitute and a displacement of a doomed precommunist utopia.

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Lacan’s sonnet was contemporary with his first attempts at letting the “insane” or the “psychotic” speak. Having frequented the Surrealists, Lacan discovered that everyday language is structured as poetry through the “inspired speech” of raving patients. In 1931, Lacan coauthored with Lévy-Valensi and Migault an essay titled “Inspired Writings” so as to analyze the psychotic ramblings of a young female teacher who had been hospitalized at Sainte-Anne. She would write in a psychotic style, which meant that she had elaborated a partly invented language with regular freewheeling verses in which one could discern a regulated system of echoes and puns. As the three psychiatrists observed, the function of rhythm was dominant. There were numerous echoes from popular sayings, famous poetic quotations, automatic expressions, proverbial idioms slightly distorted. Such a stereotypic echolalia was self-consciously presented as “poetry” by the psychotic patient. In this joint paper, the groundbreaking stylistic analysis of the grammar of mad utterances acknowledges the pioneering work done by the Surrealists just a few years before. The authors quote Breton’s first Manifesto of Surrealism, but also look for models of interpretation in Breton’s and Eluard’s imitations of different types of delirium, the five psychotic “imitations” from The Immaculate Conception (1930), a text that they quote in a footnote.10 In the wonderful section titled “Possessions,” Breton and Eluard reproduce types of psychotic styles, “Mental debility,” “Acute mania,” “General paralysis,” “Interpretive delirium,” and “Dementia Praecox.”11 In a dazzling introduction to “Possessions,” Breton and Eluard reject the idea that they are indulging in facile pastiches of clinical texts, even though they insist that they have looked at authentic archives of “alienated” or insane patients. Their aim is rather to show that the poetic faculties of normal subjects allow them to reproduce the most bizarre, paradoxical, and eccentric verbal productions of those who are deemed to be “insane.” Breton and Eluard conclude by disclosing a veritable poetic program, and do not hesitate to provoke literary critics—the ravings of the insane will offer new criteria and new poetic forms capable of replacing traditional genres: “Finally, we declare that this new exercise of our thought had brought pleasure to us. We became aware of new, up to then unsuspected, resources in us. Without anticipating the conquests of the supreme freedom that this practice can introduce, we take it, from the point of view of modern poetics, as a remarkable standard of value. Which means that we would gladly suggest the generalization of this exercise, and that for us the ‘attempt at simulation’ of the diseases of those who are locked up in asylums could advantageously replace the ballad, the sonnet, the epic, the improvised poem and other obsolete genres.”12

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This poetic point of departure was shared by Lacan, which led him to formulate the thesis that the unconscious was “structured like a language,” which became a motto that he repeated in all his seminars and essay. Such a thesis would find a confirmation in countless readings of famous poems, most often by Victor Hugo, Paul Valéry, and Paul Claudel.13 The theory of poetic metaphors had already been discovered in the “involuntary Surrealism,” as Paul Eluard had said when praising Lacan for a dissertation in which he reproduced the crazy writings of his main patient, whom he called “Aimée.” Poetry discloses the essence of language in such a way that there is no need to keep the distinction between prose and poetry. Both prose and poetry are formations created by a general rhetoric of the unconscious. It is thanks to these mechanisms that one can fathom better the vital and mysterious connection between subjects as beings and “Being.”

3 The couple of concepts Being/being (Sein/seiendes, or Sein/Dasein) derives, of course, from Martin Heidegger, in whom Lacan was interested for a long time. This fascination led him to translate Heidegger’s essay “Logos,” and the practice of translation in this case shows that Lacan and Heidegger shared a similar theory of a poetic “Saying.” The poet’s Sage discloses human subjects’ relation to Being and thus to Truth, even if Truth appears as elusive as a goddess like Diana. The quester who wants to reach Truth is often destroyed in the process. In “The Freudian Thing,” subtitled “Or Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis,” Lacan gave a highly rhetorical speech in Vienna in 1955 in which he heralded his “return to Freud” against all deviations of Freudian doctrine, especially the drift to ego-psychology that prevailed in the United States then. When the lecture was published in 1956, not only did it include a three-page-long prosopopeia of Truth, in which Truth speaks in the first person, saying, “I, the Truth, I speak,” but also a highly wrought conclusion. It ends with a paragraph that conceals a submerged quatrain. Here is once more a set of rhyming alexandrines, but this time hidden amid an opaque prose: Actéon trop coupable à courre la déesse, proie où se prend, veneur, l’ombre que tu deviens, laisse la meute aller sans que ton pas se presse, Diane à ce qu’ils vaudront reconnaîtra les chiens.14

Bruce Fink translates this passage as “Actaeon, too guilty to hunt the goddess, prey in which is caught, O huntsman, the shadow that you become, let the pack

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go without hastening your step, Diana will recognize the hounds for what they are worth.”15 Is this really a poem? Anyway, it is easy to recognize here a similar invocation of universal desire but linked with a principle of flight and capture, all of which are reminiscent of “Hiatus Irrationalis.” However, as soon as one reads it more closely, a weird humor erupts to undermine a more “serious” invocation of Greek myths. One finds a joke in “reconnaîtra les chiens,” in which one unmistakably hears “reconnaîtra les siens” (will tell her own from the pack); the obscure expression of “trop coupable à courre la déesse” contains, among other echoes, “chasse à courre” (fox hunting) plus “coureur de femmes” (a womanizer). Along with his militant program, here pointedly addressed to the Viennese Psychoanalytic Society, Lacan appeared as poet-philosopher of psychoanalysis, a post-Heideggerian thinker progressing by opaque epigrams, a psychoanalyst wishing to revolutionize a whole field of knowledge. This shift had to do with Lacan’s lasting conversion to Heidegger’s philosophy, which, as we saw, culminated with his idiosyncratic version of Heidegger’s “Logos,” published in the first issue of La Psychanalyse in 1956. In this case, the philosopher Jean Beaufret had been a mediator: he was Lacan’s analysand. Beaufret, who soon after became one of the best commentators of Heidegger in French, knew Heidegger personally. Whenever he wanted to pique Lacan’s curiosity, he blurted out from the couch that Heidegger had mentioned Lacan’s name. In Easter 1955, Lacan, accompanied by Beaufret, visited Heidegger in Freiburg, and asked for permission to translate “Logos” for his journal, La Psychanalyse. Heidegger accepted, and a few months later spent a weekend in Lacan’s country house.16 The thought of Heidegger exerted a strong influence on Lacan, which is visible in “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” a long essay published in the same issue of La Psychanalyse and in Écrits. This was a manifesto for Lacan’s new version of psychoanalysis. In his translation, Lacan distorted Heidegger’s literal meaning. “Logos” became in Lacan’s version “legs” (legacy). The translation is as punning as the original, and Mallarmé’s style provides a good medium for Lacan’s reappropriation. Heidegger had played on the proximity in German between the verbs legen (“to read” in German) and legein (Greek, from Logos). Lacan adapted this to the French language by playing on the similarity of léguer (to bequeath), legs (legacy), and lais (poetic lays). Lacan’s decision to translate “logos” as “legs” (legacy) was the result, as he explains, of a pun. Heidegger deplored the inability of Heraclitus, deemed to be the most perceptive of the pre-Socratic philosophers, to understand that logos was not just

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reason but the essence of language. For Heidegger, logos could be rendered as the German term of Lege, a “laying that gathers.”17 At the end of his essay, Heidegger developed the analysis of Heraclitus’s philosophical blindness by offering a metaphor: he compared this process with a flash of lightning that lets, for an instant, Being appear: “But the lightning [Blitz] abruptly vanished. . . . We see this lightning only when we station ourselves in the storm of Being (Gewitter des Seins).”18 The image would be adapted by Lacan to evoke poetically the moments when Truth can be glimpsed, when the unconscious discloses something for an instant before it vanishes or becomes obscure again. For Lacan as for Heidegger, Truth was produced when a terrifying storm of Being raged and disclosed its essence as Language. Lacan’s translation is “Mallarmean,” but this tendency may be due to the problems of rendering Heidegger’s impenetrable prose into French, more than to partisan choices of a French culture against a German ideology. Here is an example of Heidegger’s text followed by what Lacan makes of it: So west der Δogo∫ als das reine versammelnde lesende Legen. Der Δogo∫ ist die ursrprüngliche Versammlung der anfängliche Lese aus der anfänglichen Lege. O Δogo∫ ist: die lessened Lege und nur dieses.19 Tel est essentiellement le Logos comme le pur lit de ce qui se lit dans ce qu’il recueille. Le Logos est la recollection primordiale du choix fait au commencement dans le lais original. O Δogo∫ est: le lais où se lit ce qui s’élit, et ce n’est que cela.20

We see how Lacan’s rendering enriches the homophonic “versammelnde lesende Legen” (literally, a “a laying down that is both a gathering and a reading”) by rendering it as “le pur lit de ce qui se lit dans ce qui se recueille,” literally “the pure bed of what can be read in what is gathered.” A footnote explained earlier that lais would render Lege adequately, but then it is developed by legs. It is thus unlikely that Lacan’s omission of three pages constituted an aggressive appropriation or even more a strategically calculated nationalization of the text. The general idea of language as speaking though subjects is true to Heidegger and constitutionally Lacanian. Lacan was indeed Freud’s heir, provided we remember that, as Roudinesco has often stated, his “enlightenment” was also a “dark enlightenment,” turned to the abysses of the self. For Lacan, a key was provided when Freud’s teachings could be spliced with Heidegger’s later meditation on the philosophical dignity of poetic language. Lacan’s French translation calls up the style of Stéphane Mallarmé, which was probably the best way of finding equivalents for Heidegger’s tortuous prose.

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If Lacan assumes that lais, meaning “poetic song,” renders adequately the German Lege without any conceptual forcing, he then develops the associations of lais, which inheres in aletheia, the forgetting (a-letheia) that is also a remembering of truth (aletheia). Heidegger had pointed to a conflation of lie and truth, also providing an original model for the inscription of Dasein’s subjectivity in time and historicity. One can say that Heidegger’s philosophy underpins Lacan’s vision of a Freudian unconscious capable of revealing the truth poetically. Heidegger, as we have seen, reads Heraclitus’s logos as the Greek word that betrays a near miss, the almost perceived intimate link between being and language. Then in its later uses, logos will end up confining Being to mere reason. Historically, if logos replaced myth (as we read in the usual genealogies of philosophy), it retroactively constitutes a new myth that can be opposed to reason. Myth would thus be on the side of poetry whereas logos, having lost this earlier mooring in poetic language, errs on the side of abstract reasoning. Heidegger’s essay “Logos” is thus also an essay on poetic translation, not so much a translation of Greek into German, but of Greek into Greek, and then of German into German. Such an operation is essential for the modus operandi of logos as language-legacy, which is exactly the meaning given by Lacan’s innovative operation that translates lais into the French legs (meaning legacy). By accepting to continue the process of inner poetic and philosophic translation contained in Heidegger’s essay, Lacan wanted his readers to be aware of poetic language as a condition for the birth of subjectivity; this principle would guide Lacan’s interpretation of Freud via the detour of Heidegger. Logos should be understood as a “Being-of-Language”: here is the foundation for Heidegger’s interpretation of truth as aletheia. This interpretation of truth supposes a constant conflict between hiding or withdrawing, and the brief poetic moment of an unconcealment of Being. Heidegger’s aletheia does not lead to a revelation of objects of knowledge brought into the light or reason, but a movement that withdraws itself from representation.21 Heidegger’s insistence on reading the history of metaphysics in terms of an unthought-thought cannot be, in the end, the equivalent of the Freudian wish to exhibit a repressed content hidden because of cultural demands, which would correspond more or less to a general history of humanity as sketched in Civilization and Its Discontents. For Heidegger, there would have been almost since the beginning of philosophy, i.e., already with the pre-Socratics, thus even Heraclitus, a wish to retreat from the slippery openness of language and a preference for a logical positioning of meaning. These remarks have been triggered by the superb but highly critical book by Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe The Title of the Letter, a book whose main drift is to denounce the impossibility of combining a Heideggerian

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theory of aletheia with the new linguistic theory borrowed from de Saussure, then forcibly grafted on to Freud. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy offer a systematic reading—one might say a debunking—of Lacan’s “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis.” They point out that it is far from simple to keep in peaceful theoretical coexistence the post-Saussurean linguistics of the signifier and Heidegger’s poetic ontology. This is why, in the end, their sharp critique turns into paradoxical praise: when they present Lacan as torn between the urge to flaunt scientific credentials and his embrace of a logos as aletheia and language legs, this very hiatus irrationalis, this dynamic disjunction, this systemic openness, preserves Lacanian doctrine from a premature closure predicated on scientific positivism. By denying Lacan’s claims to science but acknowledging Lacan’s poetic creativity, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe see a saving grace in Lacan’s inconsistencies, equivocations, and contradictions. These equivocations subvert the metaphysical wish to reduce rationality to a concept of equivalence, or the ancient urge to reduce truth to an adequation of things with the intellect. Thus Lacan would have been obliged to follow the dialectical movement of concealment and unconcealment that underpins Heidegger’s thought as he attempted to think it though Freud. Such a dialectical opposition sustained Lacan’s clinical effort at dismantling the relation between signifier and signified. Lacan keeps insisting on an excessive slippage of the signifier. Such a slippage is sufficient to subvert the stable Cartesian cogito by letting the unconscious speak in its place. Modifying Descartes’s formula, Lacan would repeat: “I think (poetically) where I am not.”

3 However, if Heidegger is hugely present in “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” another poetic voice is perhaps as important: it is that of T. S. Eliot, invoked in combination with famous poets like Robert Browning, Johann Goethe, and Paul Valéry. Lacan quotes Eliot in the original and without attribution: We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!22

What is more, Lacan’s essay ends with a long quotation from the Upanishads about the “voice of the thunder,” the celebrated gloss on “Da” interpreted

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successively as Damyata (to master oneself), Datta (to give), and Dayadhvam (to be merciful).23 Even if French readers may not have read The Waste Land, this reference is quite obvious for any English-speaking reader. One knows that, during World War II, Lacan had begun to translate the famous poem into French. In a talk given in 1960, Lacan connects Eliot’s vision of a drab and desolate “Waste Land” following the catastrophe of World War I with Freud’s main insights: “God is dead, nothing is permitted any more. . . . This is what Freud brings us, meeting in the thousand threads of his network a very ancient myth of something wounded, lost, castrated in a mysterious king, that causes the wasting of the entire land.” 24 It was not absurd for Lacan to splice Eliot and Heidegger. Eliot’s “hollow men” do call up the world of empty verbiage, the Gerede of inauthentic Dasein denounced in Being and Time, while the poem of the Upanishad adapted in the magnificent ending of The Waste Land provides a perfect demonstration that the main gift of the gods to humanity is not fire, as with Prometheus, but the gift of speech, once the thunder and the fire have died out. In case we had missed the reference, we find on page 239 of Écrits a quotation of the epigraph culled from Petronius’s Latin novel Satyricon that Eliot had chosen for The Waste Land. Once more, Lacan provides the Greek and Latin text without any attribution. The wish uttered by Petronius’s Sybil (“I want to die”) will then play off against the voice of another Sybil, that of Paul Valéry, quoted two pages earlier: . . . cette voix Qui se connaît quand elle sonne N’être plus la voix de personne Tant que des ondes et des bois!25

(This voice / which when it sounds knows itself to be / The voice of no one / But that of the waters and the woods.) Valéry’s poem “La Pythie” stages a different female prophetess. A long section stages the feverish monologue of the Pythia, the priestess through whose voice Apollo’s oracle was conveyed in the temple at Delphi. She sat on a bronze tripod in the inner chamber of Apollo’s temple and would go into a trance induced by hallucinogenic vapors coming from below. She had to be young and a virgin, and the poem explores her repressed sexuality, her rant culminating in a quasi-orgasm. However, after her ecstatic finale, the final section takes distance, and the Pythia is presented as embodying the power of language as such. This is the section from Valéry’s poem that Lacan quotes.26 I translate it:

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“Honor of men, sacred LANGUAGE, / Ornamented and prophetic speech, / Beautiful chains into which is caught / The god gone astray in flesh / Illumination, largesse! / Here speaks a wisdom / And resounds the august Voice / Which when it sounds knows itself to be / The voice of no one / But that of the waters and the woods!” In Lacan’s essay, Heidegger, Valéry, and Eliot meet when they agree on a praise of the prophetic powers of language. Poetry is not merely decorative; for psychoanalysis, poetic language has a precise function. Language as such being the only medium of psychoanalysis, Lacan wants to grant it its full power by inscribing it in its mythical dimension, which he does mostly via poetry. One paragraph condenses this process well: “Hieroglyphics of hysteria, blazons of phobia, and labyrinths of Zwangsneurose; charms of impotence, enigmas of inhibition, and oracles of anxiety; talking arms of character, seals of selfpunishment, and disguises of perversion: these are the hermetic elements that our exegesis resolves, the equivocations that our invocation dissolves, and the artifices that our dialectic absolves, by delivering the imprisoned meaning in ways that run the gamut from revealing the palimpsest to providing the solution of the mystery and to pardoning speech.” 27 We verify that if the spectrum is quite broad, the analyst’s task remains on the side of interpretation, like deciphering a coded and overdetermined riddle. Such a process follows laws that are revealed by poetry. In a famous passage of “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,” Lacan uses another poem by Paul Valéry from the same collection, Charmes, “Au Platane,” to explain how a single signifier like “tree” can take on infinite meanings: Circulatory tree, arbor vitae of the cerebellum, lead tree or silver amalgam [arbre de Diane], crystals precipitated into a tree that conducts lightning, it is your countenance that traces our destiny for us in the fire-scorched tortoiseshell, or your flash that brings forth from an infinite night that slow change in being in the Ev ∏avta of language: No! says the Tree, it says No! in the scintillating Of its superb head Verses that I consider to be as legitimately heard in the harmonies of the tree as their reverse: Which the storm treats universally As it does a blade of grass.

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For this modern verse is organized according to the same laws of the parallelism of the signifier, whose concert governs both primitive Slavic epic poetry and the most refined Chinese poetry.28

One more: Lacan has gathered Valéry’s poetry and Heidegger’s translation of Heraclitus’s “Ev ∏avta”: “Ev ∏avta, One: All, All: One” in one single vision.29 In the same manner, Victor Hugo’s beautiful image of the moon presented as a golden scythe thrown among the stars in the climax of “Booz Asleep,” a poem from his Légende des siècles, offers a perfect synthesis of the concept of the metaphor. These poems disclose how they follow the two regulating principles of the metaphor or the metonymy. Poetry functions along lines defined by Freud about the logic of dreams. Such a theory of poetic metaphors brings us back to what Lacan had discovered in the “involuntary Surrealism,” as Paul Eluard said, of his patients. Like the mad poetic prose of psychotics, poetry can discloses the essence of language. In order to conclude, we are in a better position to understand Lacan’s regret that he had not been “enough of a poet.” This uncharacteristic admission of humility contrasts with Lacan’s usual bombast. A similar idea is to be found in Freud: he keeps praising poets for their brilliant discoveries (all at once, armed with their fervor and a sort of beginner’s luck, they chance upon the hidden mechanisms painstakingly described by psychoanalysis) but also berates them for their shortcomings: “In the past, we have left it to the poets to depict for us the ‘conditions of love.’ . . . Poets have certain qualities that enable them to solve such a task, in particular a great sensitivity in the perception of hidden mental impulses in others, and the courage to make their own unconscious speak. . . . They cannot represent the stuff of reality unadulterated, but are obliged to isolate fragments of it, dissolve obstructive connections, soften the whole and fill any gaps.”30 Lacan would agree, no doubt, for he was never one to “soften the whole” or “fill any gap.” Heidegger repeated that man “dwells” poetically in language. What Lacan teaches us goes further. He tells us that we are born not only in language, but thanks to language, which is well expressed in relation to Heidegger in Mon Enseignement.31 Such a birth does not constitute a final event, but it continues throughout our lives. It continues thanks to the hieroglyphics, the coats of arms, and the runes that are being written in our psyches, all those unknown and obscure signs inscribed in us thanks to the harsh contact with reality. A psychoanalyst must know how to read these signs, and hence must be conversant with all types of poetry. It does not follow from this that she or he will automatically know how to write.

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Above all, poetry is indispensable for the practice of active interpretation, and more pointedly for the Lacanian practice of hermeneutic equivocation, an actively dialogic game-playing with the signifiers presented by analysands. This does not entail that all psychoanalysts must turn into poets. Lacan knew too much about the inner workings of the unconscious to let himself go and play the game of poetry as a naïve creator. Too close to the insu que sait of the unconscious, his “nonknowledge that knows,” led to his “unsuccess” as a poet. Here was the price he had to pay in order to be a good psychoanalyst, and also, perhaps, an “eternal lover.” However, the last word must be left to a poet whom Lacan quoted once in a while, Max Jacob, who once wrote: “Truth is always new.”32

Notes 1.

2. 3.

4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), viii. The French original is to be found in Lacan, Autres Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 572. See Seminar XXIV, session of May 17, 1977, on the website of Gaogoa, gaogoa.free .fr/Seminaire.htm. Dany Nobus has given a wonderful analysis of these coinings in “Once They Were Poets: The Function and Field of Sonority and Meaning in Psychoanalysis,” a paper presented at the APW Study Weekend on Lacan’s Seminar XXIV at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, on October 9, 2011. I am in debt to his insights. Jacques Lacan, Je parle aux murs: Entretiens de la Chapelle Sainte-Anne (Paris: Seuil, 2011), 101. Here, I rely on the extensive analysis in Marie-Claire Barnet, “To Lise Deharme’s Lighthouse: Le Phare de Neuilly, a Forgotten Surrealist Review,” French Studies 57, no. 3 (July 2003): 323–34. Alexandre Koyré, Jacob Boehme (Paris: Vrin, 1929), 393–94. This has been discussed in great detail by Annick Allaigre-Duny, “A propos du sonnet de Lacan,” L’unebévue 17 (Spring 2001): 27–48. Rimbaud, Collected Poems, trans. Oliver Bernard (London: Penguin, 1986), 317, translation modified. Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin, 1967), http://literaturepdf2.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/georg-lukacs -writing. Jacques Lacan, De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité, suivi de premiers écrits sur la paranoïa (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 379–80. André Breton and Paul Eluard, The Immaculate Conception, trans. Jon Graham (London: Atlas, 1990), 51–78. André Breton, Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 1:849.

112 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

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I have discussed some of these readings of literature in general in Jean-Michel Rabaté, Jacques Lacan: Psychoanalysis and the Subject of Literature (Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2001). Jacques Lacan, Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 436. I reproduce the text as poetry; it is laid out as prose in the original French text. Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 362–63. See Elizabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 226. Martin Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984), 77. Heidegger, 78. Martin Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2000), 221. Jacques Lacan, La psychanalyse (Paris, 1956), 68. See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Title of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan, trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 142. Lacan, Écrits, 234. Lacan, 265. Jacques Lacan, Mon Enseignement (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 36. Lacan, Écrits, 237. Paul Valéry, Oeuvres, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), 136. Lacan, Écrits, 232. Lacan, 420. See Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, 69. Signmund Freud, The Psychology of Love, trans. Shaun Whiteside (London: Penguin, 2006), 241. Lacan, Mon Enseignement, 39. Max Jacob had written “Le vrai est toujours neuf ” in a startling account of an accident he had on Place Pigalle. (See “Nuits d’hôpital,” in Ce n’est encore que l’aube.) This could be taken as a motto for psychoanalysis. Quoted in Lacan, Mon Enseignement, 27.

8 Adorno Poetry After Poetry Thomas H. Ford

AFTER AUSCHWITZ

Poetry’s philosophical significance lay for Theodor W. Adorno in its promise to redeem the mute truth of nature, and so to reconcile the human spirit with its material world. This is a recognizably Romantic claim, one grounded in the unprecedented philosophical primacy that early German idealism awarded to art by identifying in it what it called “intellectual intuition” or “the absolute”: the transcendence, in other words, of the epistemological and ontological divisions of thought from feeling, subject from object, and mind from nature.1 But it is a claim darkened and subdued in Adorno’s late version of it: qualified by G. W. F. Hegel’s understanding of art as an inescapably historical and so impermanent presentation of truth, by Georg Lukács’s argument in History and Class Consciousness that these metaphysical oppositions are generated by the social contradictions of the commodity-form, and by Walter Benjamin’s attempt to resolve those oppositions by reformulating them within an expanded concept of language as an inscriptive legibility belonging to things as well as to humans. It was a claim, moreover, that for Adorno had to be rethought not only in light of the crisis of intelligibility enacted in artistic modernism, but also, and even more urgently, from the perspective of the historically unparalleled brutality and misery of his generation—violence so total it degraded even the capacity to call it by name. “The violence that expelled me,” Adorno wrote of this historical experience, “thereby denied me full knowledge of it.” 2 Against the aesthetic promise of absolute reconciliation, Adorno set the barbarism of writing poetry after Auschwitz—a barbarism that certainly also extends to the act of reading it.3 This taboo on poetry after Auschwitz is

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unquestionably Adorno’s best-known philosophical imperative. When read in its immediate context, though, or when interpreted with regard to his wider philosophical project and positions, it is that in it he was not just singling out poetry in particular, but that poetry was also standing in for the pleasures and promise of aesthetic experience much more generally. As Derrida noted, in Adorno’s taboo on poetry the term Auschwitz served as “both the irreplaceable proper name and a metonymy.” 4 And the term poetry could likewise be said to have this twofold linguistic function, acting at once as something like a proper name and also as a metonymy. It is clear, too, that the barbarism attributed by Adorno to poetry here was not proposed as sufficient reason to stop reading or writing it. Poetry’s barbarism was rather something that needed to be seen henceforward as qualifying and even negating whatever truths were to be located in enlightenment and late enlightenment European cultural life— indeed, in all cultural life, even that from long-distant historical periods, inasmuch as Auschwitz retroactively staged an unsurpassable condition of its present-day reception. But this invalidation of the promise of the aesthetic served only to raise its necessity, and its stakes, all the higher. Given the remarkable theoretical afterlife of his remarks on poetry and Auschwitz, and given too the centrality of language in his philosophical project, poetry was in fact a surprisingly minor interest for Adorno. It was music that instead was the primary field for Adorno’s engagement with the arts. Of the twenty volumes of Adorno’s Gesammelte Schriften, no fewer than eight concern music, against a single volume dedicated to literature, the title of which—Notes to Literature—indicates the metaphoric extension even there of a musicological framework. And within that volume, only a handful of essays address narrowly poetological themes—the most important being “On Lyric Poetry and Society” and a series of papers on a restricted canon of almost exclusively German poets. Poetry is vitally at issue in many of Adorno’s other writings—in his reading of the Odyssey in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, for instance, and in his discussion of aura and Paul Celan in Aesthetic Theory. But there poetry often tends to be considered only within or alongside much more general terms. It was art in general, rather than poetry in particular, that for Adorno promised to reconcile human spirit with its world. That promise was for Adorno one now assessable only in negative terms: it could be considered true solely in its inescapable ideological falsity, as a promise whose contemporary disappearance brought about its fulfillment in the most bleakly ironic sense. Poetry is then important in Adorno’s philosophy in two main ways. First, via metonymy, poetry presents a particular instance of this much more general paradox of the dialectic of enlightenment, whereby cultural

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progress turns into its opposite, as if compelled by a fairy-tale logic in which wishes for happiness are realized in the form of a curse. In service of liberating humanity from natural compulsion, capitalist rationality instead reestablished within social relations the inescapably compulsive violence of mute nature. The absolute goals of bourgeois philosophy, goals it had frequently entrusted to poetry and to art more generally (those, for instance, of intellectual intuition, or of the identity of knowing subject and known object), had then in fact been realized for Adorno, but only through the unreflected collapse of concept into intuition, and of subject into object, so as to generate a subject with the rigid imperviousness of the object-world, and an objective condition as imperial and capriciously cruel as subjective interiority itself. Second, and more specifically— considered, indeed, almost as a proper name—poetry matters to philosophy in terms of a transformation in the nature of language that takes place through this general dialectic—a historical transformation that changed the relationship between poetry and the other art forms, along with the relationship between the languages of art and that of philosophy.

POETRY IN THE CULTURE INDUSTRY

Read now after a lapse of some seventy years, the examples Adorno and Max Horkheimer give of the culture industry in their coauthored Dialectic of Enlightenment summon an evocative atmosphere of wartime life in the American 1940s: Benny Goodman and the Budapest String Quartet; jazzed-up Mozart and Orson Welles; Greta Garbo, Mickey Rooney, Betty Boop, and the image on a packet of pudding mix; Toscaninni on the radio; Donald Duck and Guy Lombardo; the Hays Office; Ernest Hemingway and the Lone Ranger; everything, indeed, from the B-movie “screen world” to Mortimer Adler’s neo-Aristotelian philosophy of film.5 Much rarer are examples of what might lie outside the reach of culture’s total integration: one poet is named (Karl Kraus, better known for his journalistic writings), and one composer (Schoenberg); circuses, peep shows, and brothels are also mentioned.6 The culture industry was not yet fully identical with all of cultural practice considered in its entirety. Elements of both popular entertainment and high art still potentially remained exterior. Yet the culture industry was insidiously dynamic, with porous and mobile borders. In the right set of commercial circumstances, everything that Adorno and Horkheimer located outside the culture industry could plausibly be relocated within it, for they saw the culture industry to be encroaching at all points,

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causing “meaninglessness to disappear at the lowest level of art just as radically as meaning is disappearing at the highest.”7 In extending capitalist logics of commodification and reification, the culture industry attributed organizational purposes to once purposeless aesthetic practices from lyric poetry to acrobatics, and subordinated ever further spheres of human life into its realm of general equivalence, exchange, and qualitative indifference. Whatever the specific location of any text at any given moment, for Adorno all poetry, both historical and contemporary, would then need to negotiate in some way these dynamics imposed on communicative form by the social totality. There is in this sense no outside to the culture industry, even as that total integration should be understood as a speculative rather than empirical claim—not least because empiricism is itself a powerful instance of this universal logic of integration at work. The point of Adorno and Horkheimer’s ascription of the disappearance of meaning to high culture, and the disappearance of meaninglessness to low culture, was not that elite meaning on the one hand and vulgar meaninglessness on the other once neatly lined up with the two sides of the fundamental class division, and that those two poles were now collapsing into each other in a general state of middle-brow cultural indistinction. That reading, of Adorno as a pessimistic and even antidemocratic anticipator of dynamics subsequently celebrated by cultural studies and in postmodern art, while influential at the height of theoretical interest in those intellectual and artistic movements, has since been strongly contested, particularly through renewed attention to the complexities of Adorno’s historico-philosophical understanding of the artwork. In Anglophone reception, this shift can be roughly dated to the decade following the publication in 1984 of the English translation of Adorno’s posthumous and uncompleted Aesthetic Theory. Reading backward from the Aesthetic Theory has helped bring into focus just how many of the important conceptual elements of Adorno’s later theory of art were already in place, if often only partially articulated, in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Indeed, Aesthetic Theory represented the culmination of a turn to art and to the philosophy of art in Adorno’s publications after the war, a turn that was motivated by the critical problem he had first described and confronted in collaboration with Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment. There, Adorno brought a philosophical history of language together with a sociophilosophical critique of the present to position philosophy as the reflective interpretation of the language of its own time. It was through the resulting account of the fate of language in the present that the historical ontology of the artwork, understood in specifically linguistic terms, took on a new and critical salience for his subsequent philosophy, allowing the poem to stand, in his words, “as the philosophical sundial telling the time of history.” 8

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Even in the age of the culture industry, any cultural expression for Adorno still involved a dialectic of meaning and meaninglessness. The defense of aesthetic autonomy first sketched in Dialectic of Enlightenment, and later expanded in Aesthetic Theory, reworked in more sociological and historical terms the philosophical link Kant had drawn in the Critique of Judgment between aesthetic experience and nonconceptuality. For Adorno as for Kant, the artwork conveyed dimensions of experience that lay beyond the threshold of conceptualizability, at least in terms of existing language—in particular, those dimensions involving sensuous, intuitive, and expressive materiality. And from Kant, Adorno likewise took the idea that the meaning of art is thereby keyed to the exteriority of nature to human structures of meaning, and even to the system of the categories that underlies all experience, whether these be understood as a priori, with Kant, or as historical and social, with Adorno. Art’s meaning was then always constituted in part through elements of meaninglessness and incomprehensibility for Adorno, a position articulated both in his writings on the theory of art and in the readings he gave of individual artworks. If meaning is disappearing from autonomous art—from “the highest level of art,” as Adorno and Horkheimer claimed in Dialectic of Enlightenment—then a particular reflective presentation of meaninglessness in virtue of which that meaning was first possible must necessarily be disappearing as well. What disappears then is a specific configuration of meaning and meaninglessness: of a singular type of meaning, of its determinately negated type of meaninglessness, and of their distinctive dialectical intermeshings. Meaning and meaninglessness change together, they disappear together—something that was identifiable for Adorno not least in the loss of art’s once constitutive erasure of social purposes (that is, of Kantian purposiveness without purpose), and in the concomitant discursive and institutional functionalizations of art. So the point of the collapse of polarities described in Dialectic of Enlightenment was not that high and low culture were becoming indistinguishable, but rather that meaning and meaninglessness were becoming indistinguishable. It was this polarity that once potentially gave cultural expression critical purchase at both high and low ends, lyric poems as much as circus tricks. And for Adorno, it was the dialectical force of that opposition that generated—and even perhaps still generates—art’s capacity to express otherwise inarticulable truths: its promise, that is, of nonconceptual knowledge, and of a free but unelected affinity between the collective terms of language and the material world that exceeds them. The collapse that mattered to Adorno then ultimately concerned culture because it concerned this historical shift in the relationship between meaning

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and meaninglessness, the dialectic of enlightenment playing out in terms of intentional expressivity. As meaninglessness was increasingly overturned by rational thought and enlightened critique—enlightenment being the progressive growth of knowledge—increasingly, those new gains added only to a vast accumulation of commodified and formally identical facts, the predominant mode of knowledge within bourgeois societies. Enlightenment thus redefines the meaning of meaning, and with it the meaning of meaninglessness. That matters for the specific correspondences poetry establishes between meaning and nonmeaning. It matters, equally, for any critical philosophy, not least because it makes it harder for philosophy to call into question what is held to be meaningful and valuable in contemporary life. The dialectic of enlightenment then frames the continuing possibilities of both poetry and philosophy as unavoidable intellectual questions for the present. The culture industry renders aesthetic autonomy radically uncertain—as uncertain, indeed, as the existence of any form of critical thinking able to bring this situation to philosophical reflection. The analyses Adorno gave of these problems concerning the contemporary possibilities of poetry and philosophy (to be found in most detail in Aesthetic Theory and Negative Dialectics, respectively) were by no means identical. But the imperiled and unsecurable status of philosophical self-reflection in the present was always tied for him, via the dialectic of enlightenment, to the fortunes of poetry’s survival after Auschwitz. While these were then two problems addressed by Adorno in distinct constellations—the constellation being Adorno’s figure, derived from Benjamin, for his own characteristic mode of thinking—they were nonetheless ones that not only shared common elements, but also were each partly definable in terms of the other, so that neither was properly comprehensible in isolation.

SMELLY MIMESIS

In Adorno’s account, the dialectic of enlightenment reconfigures social rationality in ways that severely limit human capacities for thoughtful perception and critical reflection, and so ultimately for collective historical self-transformation. This takes place very significantly, although not only, through changes to the internal structure of language that strip it of terms able to resist prevailing intellectual and social trends. How can there be any truly critical thinking, to give a current-day example, now that critical thinking has become a marketing slogan in the knowledge economy? Due to such speculatively totalized suspicion of its

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terms, philosophy enters into a double bind. On the one hand, the urgency of the philosophical understanding of the present must be asserted. But on the other, there is available no noncomplicit language in which such an understanding could be formulated, and any appeal to such a language must be stringently resisted as ideological. For Jürgen Habermas, by insisting on these twin imperatives, Adorno succumbed to a performative contradiction. Due to his entanglement in these “paradoxes of a self-negating philosophy,” he was forced back into locating only the weakest of residual utopian impulses in advanced avant-garde art: “one presses on in the illuminating exercise of negative philosophy, to the insight with which one is forced to endure that, if a spark of reason is left, then it is to be found in esoteric art.”9 In other words, Adorno’s aesthetic turn after Dialectic of Enlightenment was impelled by his sacrifice of rationality to a hyperbolic vision of baleful and total social integration. Adorno’s critique of philosophy then logically resulted in the dissolution of philosophy into poetry, enlisting him in what Habermas saw to be a much more general postmodern turn toward poetic modes of expression and away from enlightenment values of critical reason and truth—the “great levelling,” in Habermas’s words, “of the genre distinction between philosophy and literature.”10 But such accusations struggle to account for Adorno’s repeated insistence, throughout his writings, on the critical differences between the discursive strategies available to philosophy and poetry in response to the contemporary impossibility that they share. The opening sentence of his first published book, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, reads: “All attempts to comprehend the writings of philosophers as poetry have missed their truth content.”11 Interpreting philosophy as poetry aestheticizes it, “tearing” it “away from the standard of the real.”12 “As a critique of philosophy,” Horkheimer and Adorno commented of their Dialectic of Enlightenment in the preface, “it does not seek to abandon philosophy itself.”13 “Philosophy,” Adorno stated in Negative Dialectics, “is neither science nor thought-poetry, to which positivism, with an inane oxymoron, wants to degrade it, but is rather a form as mediated as it is sublated by what it differs from”—that is to say, in this context, by science on the one hand and poetry on the other.14 Precisely because philosophy is dialectically intertwined with its others, poetry not least, it cannot be identical with them. By collapsing Adorno’s account of the aporetic condition of philosophy into sheer poetics, Habermas could reject Adorno’s utopian reconciliation with nature in favor of his own regulative ideal of intersubjective communication. Language, in being recuperated for critical rationality in the present, was then remodeled by Habermas as a medium of recognition between human subjects, rather than one potentially expressive of a nonviolent intermerging

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of subject with object. But for Adorno, poetry’s difference from philosophy, and philosophy’s distance from aesthetic experience, could only be properly understood when these two sides were seen as distinct historical reconfigurations of the dispersed elements posited in an expanded sense of language: of language understood, that is, as a medium capable, at least in the unfulfilled terms of its immanent promise, of expressing and so realizing the nonpropositional truths of nonhuman nature. “The animal’s lack of reason holds it eternally captive in its form,” Horkheimer and Adorno stated, “unless man, who is one with it through his past, can find the redeeming formula and through it soften the stony heart of infinity at the end of time.”15 Such a redemptive linguistic formula would be neither purely poetic nor strictly philosophical, for it could only arise from language in which the historical split between those two discourses had itself been mediated away into a softened infinity. In their speculative history of enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno linked the differentiation of poetry from philosophy to a process through which language’s internal dimensions were disarticulated from one another, so that the linguistic medium frayed into an array of diverse and quasi-autonomous semiotic and mimetically expressive means: With the clean separation between science and poetry the division of labour which science had helped to establish was extended to language. For science the word is first of all a sign; it is then distributed among the various arts as sound, image, or word proper, but its unity can never be restored by the addition of these arts, by synaesthesia or total art. As sign, language must resign itself to being calculation and, to know nature, must renounce the claim to resemble it. As image it must resign itself to being a likeness and, to be entirely nature, must renounce the claim to know it.16

Enlightenment disenchants the word, dissociating sign from image, splitting semiotics from materiality, and severing signifying from mimetic aspects of language. Playing out at the level of the social division of labor, these dissociations of language participate in the administrative logic of disciplinary specialization that divorced the sciences from the arts and knowledge from expression. Adorno’s historico-philosophical account of language then introduced the speculative proposition of a paradoxical language that is both conceptual and nonconceptual, intentional and expressive, semiotic and mimetic: a language in which representation becomes presentation, cognition takes the form of resemblance, and the being of nature is expressed as self-knowledge. This paradoxical sense of a language beyond or outside of language as it historically exists is the hinge on

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which Adorno’s rethinking of the relationship between philosophy and poetry would subsequently pivot. Although language’s mimetic and material dimensions are alienated from its signifying structure through the dialectic of enlightenment, mimesis is nonetheless ineliminable from language, for it underlies all cognition whatsoever, right down to the basic structures of perception. All human reason, even highly abstract conceptual thought, remains nourished by mimesis: “Without mimesis,” Adorno stated, “the break between subject and object would be absolute, and cognition impossible.”17 Mimesis involves the constructive presentation of an affinity between word and thing, rather than a semiotic relation of signification. Mimetic rationality then appears as the utopian goal immanent to language. It is only to be achieved at the softened end of time, perhaps; yet it is still traceable in the present in language’s residual and dispersed expressive, sensuous, and material dimensions. In Minima Moralia, Adorno linked mimesis to the formation of human subjectivity, for “a human being only becomes human at all by imitation of other human beings.”18 Because all content and all form come to the self from outside, from its “relation to the object,” the human subject “grows richer the more freely it develops and reflects this relation, while it is limited, impoverished, and reduced by the separation and hardening that it lays claim to as an origin.”19 Mimetically conceived, even perception is a constructive, active process—a practice of becoming, and of the dialectical transformation of the self through its reflective mediation of what it perceives as exceeding it out there in the world. But through the decay of language, mimesis, as the affective attitude underlying all rationality, also decays into an antagonistic polarity. For Adorno, here adapting Freud’s sublimation thesis, enlightenment involves the violent repression of mimetic behavior: “Social and individual education reinforces the objectifying behaviour required by work and prevents people from submerging themselves once more in the ebb and flow of surrounding nature. All distraction, indeed, all devotion has an element of mimicry. The ego has been forged by hardening itself against such behaviour. The transition from reflective mimesis to controlled reflection completes its formation.” 20 Mimesis then remains available only residually: in art, for instance, which presents “a refuge for mimetic comportment.” 21 It lingers too “in the contagious gestures of an immediacy suppressed by civilization: gestures of touching, nestling, soothing, coaxing.” 22 And it is active, more regressively, in “the chaotically regular flight reactions of the lower animals, the patterns of swarming crowds, the convulsive gestures of the tortured—all these express what wretched life can never quite control: the mimetic impulse.” 23

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These “tabooed mimetic traits” of touching, fleeing, writhing, and so on have an uncanny and communicative affective quality, experienced powerfully as shame, repulsion, and disgust—affects that then feed back into enlightenment’s radiant calamity when they are mobilized politically, as in anti-Semitism, for example. “There is no anti-Semite who does not feel an instinctive urge to ape what he takes to be Jewishness,” Horkheimer and Adorno stated.24 The elements of anti-Semitic caricature they discussed sketch out a destructive second-order imitation of mimesis, one that aggressively disavows the erotic and metamorphic erosions of the boundaries between subject and object that characterized mimesis of a first order. In the analysis they offered of the image of the “Jewish” nose, for instance, Horkheimer and Adorno linked mimesis to the specific perceptual characteristics of smell, in which the object is sensed only by being drawn within the body of the subject: In the ambiguous partialities of the sense of smell the old nostalgia for what is lower lingers on, the longing for immediate union with surrounding nature, with earth and slime. Of all the senses the act of smelling, which is attracted without objectifying, reveals most sensuously the urge to lose oneself in identification with the Other. That is why smell, as both the perception and the perceived— which are one in the act of olfaction—is more expressive than other senses. When we see we remain who we are, when we smell we are absorbed entirely.25

You are what you smell, and this reciprocity lies at the heart of all mimetic language, which as it were sniffs out a world that it thereby comes to resemble. But whatever promise may be presented here of an unforced identity of perception with what is perceived, it is one that has nonetheless been mediated by the enlightened history through which language’s sensory modalities have been disaggregated into abstract isolation from one another. Smell in this passage is elegiac, pervaded by a sense of loss. Nowhere mentioned in Horkheimer and Adorno’s discussion of smell, but everywhere present as an elusive odor of citation, is the link Benjamin drew in his late work between smell and involuntary memory in Proust. Through literary mimesis of smell, Proust reconvened the dispersed fragments of traditional storytelling that had been split from one another through the modern atrophy of experience. But as Benjamin demonstrated, this came at the cost of indelibly marking the mutual exclusion of voluntary and involuntary memory, thereby forfeiting the possibility of mastering through narrative our relationship to the past. History instead remained locked up in the evanescent fragrance of some unknown material object, the encounter with which was purely contingent and indeed may never come to pass.

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Mimesis then interrelates a heterogeneous field of nonsemiotic communicative capacities. It names a flexible affinity between an object and the thought of that object. It is a chameleonic mode of perception that folds the knower into what is known. Despite being linguistic through and through, mimesis offers nonetheless a nonconceptual and even nonverbal form of communication, constituting a language beneath the language of human beings—desubjectified, animalistic, even thingly. Mimesis is abstracted, deformed, fragmented, and turned against itself through the historical disintegration of language, of which the functionally differentiated linguistic spheres of poetry and philosophy, culture and knowledge, must now appear as symptoms. The “separation of sign and image is inescapable,” Adorno asserted.26 But granting this separation a foundational status—hypostatizing it, in Adorno’s term—would be to affirm this history, and to accept its results as unchallengeable. For philosophy, Adorno argued, takes not only its origin but also its essential orientation from this disintegration of the word: “Philosophy has perceived the chasm opened by this separation as the relationship between intuition and concept and repeatedly but vainly has attempted to close it; indeed, philosophy is defined by that attempt.” 27 So poetry and philosophy are both opposed to this disintegration of language even as each can only be defined in its terms. This is what makes poetry and philosophy impossible in modernity, positing them both as practices that can survive only through particular reflective mediations of their own impossibility. Each emerges here as a discursive mode involving disjunctive constellations of the dispersed fragments of atrophied language, presenting historically specific configurations of linguistic nonidentity. It is only in this negative sense, for example, that the modern lyric poem can make its absence of song audible as unheard melodies. But while each practice is thereby dialectically entangled with the other, the strategies each follows in positing a utopian overcoming of this split are opposed. Philosophy seeks dialectically to outfox the concept by means of the concept. Poetry instead attempts the mimetic expression of the destruction of mimesis.

ANTIPOETRY IS NOT ANTIPHILOSOPHY

While for Adorno poetry and philosophy both attempt to say the unsayable, they say it differently, approaching the unsayable from opposite sides, so to speak. For Horkheimer, critical theory was a program of interdisciplinary materialism that could dispel the traditional problems of metaphysics by conjoining a

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Marxist theory of society to a Freudian theory of the subject. By contrast, Adorno always retained a commitment to philosophy as a specific and quasiindependent domain of truth, despite him sharing Horkheimer’s sense that philosophy had entered into irresolvable contradiction in modernity—a position ultimately derived from Lukacs’s argument that the commodity-form structures even the metaphysical division of subject from object. Adorno characteristically formulated this contradiction as philosophy’s refusal to acknowledge the inadequacy of thought to being, a position that motivated his experiments throughout his career in “nonidentitarian” thinking. “Whoever chooses philosophy as a profession today,” he stated in an early lecture from 1931, “must first reject the illusion that earlier philosophical enterprises began with: that the power of thought is sufficient to grasp the totality of the real.” 28 Advancing this argument through a programmatic survey of the existing philosophical field—including neo-Kantianism, Simmel’s Lebensphilosophie, phenomenology, Heideggerean ontology, and logical positivism—Adorno asserted that all these schools of thought either sacrificed, as forms of idealism, the concreteness of historical reality or conversely overlooked the philosophical assumptions built into their claims that traditional metaphysical problems were unanswerable and that metaphysics should in consequence be abandoned. The “actuality” of philosophy—both its possibility in and its adequacy to the present—then presented an urgent philosophical problem because philosophy was confronted with contradictory twin demands, in an early version of the double bind that entangled philosophy in the dialectic of enlightenment. Philosophy’s claim to the rational comprehension of totality was no longer tenable, “prohibited by the fragmentation in being itself.” 29 And yet the philosophical interpretation of reality could not be abandoned, for attempts to do so, as with logical positivism, for example, rested on a specific interpretation of reality that was disavowed and so rendered uncontestable. In these circumstances, philosophy could proceed only dialectically, as an open-ended series of “essays” in the interpretation of the world considered as an “incomplete, contradictory and fragmentary text,” and as a practice of riddle-solving that, rather than discovering the meaning of the riddle of the existing order, sought to abolish it by answering it.30 The concepts of the essay and of the riddle introduced here by Adorno were to prove critical in his later account of the divergent negative paths taken by philosophy and poetry. For Adorno in the early 1930s, the goal of abolishing the existing order linked philosophy to revolutionary praxis: “the interpretation of a given reality and its abolition are connected to each other, not, of course, in the sense that reality is negated in the concept, but that out of the construction of a configuration of

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reality the demand for its real change always follows promptly.”31 Dialectic of Enlightenment broke with this earlier conviction that “the annihilation of the [philosophical] question compels praxis.”32 Instead, that immediate link between philosophy and praxis was revealed as yet another manifestation of the forced identity of thought and being: the compulsion linking the two was in fact a form of violence against each side. But Adorno’s retreat from praxis should be understood as a radicalization of his earlier diagnosis of the contradictory status of philosophical thinking in the present. In his later work, rational enlightenment was presented as self-defeating, and the knowledge of this dialectic did not in itself indicate any way out of that grand paradox. The full dimensions of the problem of philosophy’s “actuality” were thereby revealed, for it was now understood to place not just philosophy in an unbreakable deadlock, but also historical reality itself. In his later metaphilosophical writings, Adorno elaborated the means through which philosophy could address its contemporary impossibility: not by abandoning thought for praxis, or through some presumptively unmediated access to reality, but rather through paradoxical practices of determinate selfnegation. “Philosophy,” Adorno stated in the first sentence of Negative Dialectics, “which once seemed superseded, lives on because the moment of its realization was missed.”33 Only by internalizing its own nonactuality would philosophy be able to continue as a discursive practice capable of truth. Philosophy, in other words, would have to be reconfigured as a speculative dialectic of philosophy and antiphilosophy. It would need to become, as Adorno wrote of Walter Benjamin, “a philosophy directed against philosophy” in order to “escape the trancelike captivity of bourgeois immanence,” and thus “to avoid the danger of estrangement and reification which sought to transform all observation of capitalism as a system itself into a system.”34 But whereas Benjamin’s micrological method remained, in Adorno’s judgement, “impermissibly ‘poetic’ ”—so engrossed in the contingent particularities of its objects that it was unable to conceptualize them—Adorno instead placed his faith in the unremitting negativity of conceptuality: “the effort implicit in the concept of thought itself, its opposition to passive intuition, is already negative, a revolt against the unreasonable demand of all immediacy that thought should bow down to it.”35 Philosophy could then be distinguished from poetry by its conceptual medium, and by its commitment to the negativity of this medium, even while it shared with poetry the broken language of which concepts formed merely a fragment. Adorno asserted, against Heidegger, that “what is true and possible as poetry cannot be so, literally and unrefractedly, as philosophy.”36 While art  negates reality aesthetically—through appearance, semblance, fictionality, autonomy, and so on—philosophy does so via the historical distance between

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concept and intuition from which it takes its origin. Its negations operate reflectively in the space thereby opened between concepts and the language in which they are concretized, its task being “to get beyond the concept by means of the concept.”37 Adorno’s notoriously rebarbative written style followed from this model of a philosophy that works against its traditional materials, concepts, without abandoning them for the nonconceptuality that is nonetheless their ground and goal. His philosophy sought to proceed immanently through a dialectic “that discloses each image as script,” and thereby “teaches us to read from its features the admission of falseness which cancels its power and hands it over to truth.”38 Restricting philosophical thought to the concept meant that what resisted conceptualization, as thought collided with its own boundary, could emerge within thought itself as contradiction, thus recovering a dialectical yield of truth even from conceptuality’s inescapable falsehood. Adorno’s characteristically hyperbolic claims, which overshoot the mark so as to fracture the seamless consistency of reality; his jarring juxtapositions of high abstraction with vulgarly sociological images; his essayistic forms, fragmentary, unfinished, and avowedly supplementary; the shifting ambiguities and multivalence of his key terms, which signify differently as they are differently constellated; the densely spiraling character of his writing, in which individual words seem almost to shimmer in an interwoven mesh of impulses, allusions, suggestions, and crossreferences: these can all be understood as mechanisms for outwitting the concept through conceptual means, and so for regenerating philosophy by extending its reflective relations to its own, determinate antiphilosophical others. “Philosophy as a whole,” Adorno stated in his Hegel: Three Studies, “is allied with art in wanting to rescue, in the medium of the concept, the mimesis that the concept represses.”39 But while philosophy approaches this repression via the conceptual contradictions it generates, art approaches it from the side of mimesis. Like philosophy, art “seeks refuge in its own negation, hoping to survive through its own death.” 40 But given the specific historical formation of art, this negation follows another logic and generates other forms to those of philosophy. Through its disengagement from religious ritual practice, which is the historical precondition for its autonomy, art for Adorno “participates in the dialectic of enlightenment.” 41 Art too, in other words, is inextricably bound to the culture industry, which also annihilates it. It is enrolled in social processes of demythologization and rationalization that, for Adorno, “lead finally to an abolition of language and its replacement by the pure sign.” 42 But art, Adorno wrote, “has confronted this dialectic with the aesthetic conception of anti-art; indeed, without this element art is no longer thinkable. This implies nothing less than that art must go beyond its own concept in order to remain faithful to that concept.” 43 Modern art then

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negotiates the aporia of enlightenment through its own dialectic of autonomy and antiart, in which art resecures its aesthetic autonomy by transgressing its existing forms. The resulting shifting, positional logic of modernism’s negations of aesthetic pleasure, public communicability, and mimetic representation installs historicity as the artwork’s mode of immanent reflection of the conditions that render it impossible. In “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” Adorno claimed the very category of lyric poetry to be a result of this modern dialectic of art and antiart. Here he described language as double or split: On the one hand, it is the medium of pure subjectivity, the expression of the most private inward impulses of the self. But on the other hand, it always remains the medium of conceptual predication, and so is oriented toward the universal communicability of objective social knowledge. Through the general social process of reification, the gap between language’s expressive and predicative dimensions becomes unbridgeable, even as poetry remains the “aesthetic test” of their continued dialectical interrelation (a condition Adorno registered historically with Baudelaire): “As the contradiction between poetic and communicative language reached an extreme, lyric poetry became a game in which one goes for broke.” 44 Poetry embarked on this all-or-nothing gamble not by seeking refuge in pure subjectivity, but by training its mimetic comportment onto this unbridgeable chasm itself. For it is important to note that this doubleness of language, its split between private and subjective on the one hand and social and objective on the other, is not identical with that I described earlier, between signifying language and mimetic language. Rather than simply aligning, the two distinctions potentially intersect, and in cutting across each other work to free mimesis from its entrancement in the world of objectively existing things, and even allow it to express the conditions that have rendered those objects mute. Lyric poetry is then always also antilyric, which is why for Adorno it was an essentially modern category: “Art is modern art,” he stated in Aesthetic Theory, “through mimesis of the hardened and alienated; only thereby, and not by refusal of a mute reality, does art become eloquent.” 45 In its mimetic rehearsals of commodification’s relentless disintegration of language, modern art no longer imitated nature but instead became an imitation of its own impossible existence in the present. Instead of imitating what existed, art imitated what could not exist, namely, itself. As antipoetry that has turned mimesis against itself, poetry thereby allowed for “the survival of mimesis, the nonconceptual affinity of the subjectively produced with its unposited other.”46 And in mimetically destroying its language in this way, poetry paradoxically rescued language from its social destruction, thereby underwriting the continued promise of rational thinking, discursive knowledge, and philosophy. This was how, in Adorno’s words, “art itself thinks.” 47

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As antiphilosophy, philosophy becomes incomplete, supplementary, and nonactual: it becomes, in other words, an essay. As antipoetry, the poem becomes the riddle that essay takes as its subject matter. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno returned to the notion of the riddle he had first developed in his early essay “The Actuality of Philosophy,” where he had defined the task of philosophy in the present as interpretation: “the function of riddle-solving,” he had written there, “is to light up the riddle-Gestalt like lightning and to negate it.”48 For early Adorno, the philosophical solution to the riddle destroyed the riddle, which disappeared into its answer and, by disappearing, staged the transition to revolutionary praxis. But when Adorno revisited this concept of the riddle at the end of his career to identify it with modern art’s internal dialectic of mimesis and reification, which he saw then to be the locus of its immanent historicity, and so to locate in the “riddle-character” of the artwork its specific mode of rationality, philosophical interpretation was also revised so that it no longer culminated in the disappearance of the riddle, but issued rather in a demand for infinite understanding. Understanding “in the highest sense” was now defined as “the solution of the riddle-character that at the same time maintains it,” so that “the better an artwork is understood, the more it is unriddled on one level but the less its constitutive riddling is cleared up and enlightened.”49 Poetry and philosophy could then only converge because antipoetry was not antiphilosophy. “They each remain faithful to their proper contents through opposition,” Adorno wrote in Negative Dialectics: “art, by withdrawing from its own meanings; philosophy, by not clinging to immediacy.”50 “Even the felicitously interpreted [art]work,” Adorno stated in Aesthetic Theory, “asks for further understanding, as if waiting for the redemptive word that would dissolve its constitutive darkening.”51 But that word cannot be pronounced by philosophy, no matter how antiphilosophical, nor yet by poetry, no matter how antipoetic, for it would amount to the achieved identity of concept and intuition, philosophy and poetry, the human spirit and nonhuman nature. Although such a word is unrealizable, and its anticipatory simulation the very acme of enlightenment’s ideological untruth, it nonetheless presents the utopian horizon within which alone the construction of critical knowledge is possible after Auschwitz. In that infinitely softened perspective, literary criticism is truth.

Notes 1.

Klaus Peter, “Friedrich Schlegel und Adorno: Die Dialektik der Aufklärung in der Romantik und heute,” in Die Aktualität der Frühromantik, ed. Ernst Behler and Jochen Hörisch (Paderborn: F. Schöningh, 1987), 219–35.

Adorno 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

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Theodor  W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (London: New Left Books, 1974), 8. Theodor  W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 34. Jacques Derrida, “Fichus: Frankfurt Address,” in Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 178n. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 100–15. Horkheimer and Adorno, 114. Horkheimer and Adorno, 114. Theodor W. Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 46. Peter Dews, ed., Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews with Jürgen Habermas (London: Verso, 1992), 99. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 185. Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 3. Adorno, 3. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, xii. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, vol. 6 of Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), 115. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 206. Horkheimer and Adorno, 12–13. Theodor W. Adorno, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), 143n. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 154. Adorno, 154. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 148. Theodor  W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 53. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 149. Horkheimer and Adorno, 150–51. Horkheimer and Adorno, 151. Horkheimer and Adorno, 151. Horkheimer and Adorno, 13. Horkheimer and Adorno, 13. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Actuality of Philosophy,” Telos 31 (1977): 120–33, 120. Adorno, 126. Adorno, 126. Adorno, 129. Adorno, 129. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, 15. Adorno, Prisms, 233–34. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, 29, 30.

130 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

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Theodor W. Adorno, “Parataxis,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 114. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, 27. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 18. Theodor W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 123. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 338. Adorno, 29. Theodor  W. Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie: Zur Einleitung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973), 68. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 29. Adorno, “Lyric Poetry,” 44. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 21. Adorno, 54. Adorno, 99. Adorno, “Actuality,” 127. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 122, 121, translations altered. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, 26–27. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 122.

9 Sartre and Poetry Je t’aime, moi non plus (I Love You—Me Neither) Francois Noudelmann

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id Sartre ever understand poetry? The answer is no, if one considers his comments in Qu’est-ce que la littérature? In this manifesto, the existentialist philosopher traced a border between prose and poetry and dismissed poetic language because of its opacity. Unfortunately for Sartre’s legacy, this caricatured opposition remains famous and it still underscores his inability to approach poetry. However, this call for “committed literature” does not sum up Sartre’s thought and one could quote many other texts of his that support different, even contradictory conceptions of poetic language. We should keep in mind that this voluntarist text was written in 1948, i.e., just after World War II, and that in it Sartre wanted to go beyond the nihilist spirit of his prewar existentialist novels, like La nausée. In a certain sense, he did not pretend to define the essence of literature but he did propose setting new goals for it, subjective realism and political commitment being the aim of literary writing at the time. If one look at Sartre’s work as a whole, from the very beginning of his early narratives to his final monumental study L’ idiot de la famille, it becomes obvious that he dealt with poetic matters as well as those of language; he became more and more involved in the distinction between the signifier and the signified. Certainly, Sartre did not feel comfortable with writing poetry, the only genre that he never published in. He wrote novels, collections of short stories, diaries, plays, movie scripts, philosophical essays, biographies, and art criticism, but never poems. There are, however, several attempts at poetic writing in Sartre’s archives, as if he would have regretted not having any skill at writing poems. Sartre’s interest in poetic language is further confirmed through his

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books about poets such as Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Ponge, and Genet. Therefore, one must reexamine this idea in order to understand the complex relationships of Sartre with poetry.

AGAINST POETRY

Sartre’s aggressiveness regarding poetry was directed toward both poems and poets. In Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (1947), the separation between prose and poetry allows him to establish a series of dichotomies: action vs. contemplation, activity vs. passivity, transparency vs. opacity, signification vs. nonsense, and so on. As usual, in this work, Sartre reenacts dualisms and multiplies concepts, figures, and metaphors that refer to his position on consciousness through a discussion about poetry. The emphasis given to free consciousness implies taking responsibility for choices, and this argument is transferred to the place of consciousness in language: choosing the right words, projecting meaning onto them, taking responsibility for the effects of language. All of these mental acts deal with prose as the right vehicle for the expression of consciousness. Conversely, the use of language as a topic in itself leads to what Sartre calls “bad faith” in L’Être et le Néant. This means that pretending to let language resonate with unintended meanings is a kind of nonchoice. In Sartrean terms, this is a decision not to choose, i.e., a way to escape from the responsibility of language. By using words as things instead of signs, poetry resembles painting, sculpture, or music.1 It obscures what it refers to, unlike prose, which reveals it. In this philosophical essay, Sartre claims that naming is an act of appropriation: to give a name to a reality is to create a world of significations. Thus, using language is more than simply designating things; it reenacts the freedom of consciousness that shapes and transforms reality. For this reason, writing is always a commitment, and by promoting “committed literature,” Sartre calls for the writers to be self-aware. Poetry, like prose, is a committed form of language, but without the collective and political nature of writing; rather, it promotes the solitude of writers and the illusion of secret meanings. These caricatured judgments about poetry must therefore be contextualized in Sartrean philosophy and in the political situation of the postwar period. Poets and all that is imagined about poetic writings were the real target. Sartre fought against a Romantic conception of literature from the nineteenth century. This is why he wrote, at quite the same time, an essay on Baudelaire. He began to write it in 1944, a very particular moment of his life. Sartre felt that the war

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would end and he was well aware of his lack of commitment to the Resistance. Even if he consistently supported the idea of resisting, he continued living a rather ordinary existence, as did the majority of French intellectuals. Analyzing Baudelaire was therefore a kind of self-analysis and self-criticism. By pointing out the false prestige of the rejected poet as a solitary man, Sartre refers indirectly to himself and to his attitude before the war. He had already criticized this behavior in his trilogy Les chemins de la liberté by denouncing the concept of the independent self, incarnated through his main character, Mathieu, as his double. So Sartre wrote his biographical essay on Baudelaire during the liberation of France, a period of political reversal for him. This study is more devoted to the poet’s existential choices than to his poetic works. Sartre stresses Baudelaire’s dandyism as an existential strategy against the bourgeoisie, and argues that his anticonformism remains dependant on the gaze of the Other. Baudelaire, therefore, does not incarnate the “accursed poet” according to this nineteenth-century myth but deliberately chose to live as a kind of misfit or scapegoat. Poetry is thus a part of this alienated behavior and it shapes a certain conception of literature as a destiny of failure. By writing his Baudelaire, Sartre wanted to break several clichés about literature, such as inspiration, elitism, and mysticism. He also supported prose as profane literature, involved in ordinary social issues.

PHILOSOPHICAL READINGS OF POETRY

Beyond this critique of the myths of poetry, Sartre was nonetheless involved in reading poems in a philosophical way. At the same time as he was writing his essay on Baudelaire, he focused his interest on a contemporary poet, Francis Ponge. Today it could seem strange that Sartre chose to comment on this poet, who became an important reference for poststructuralist and deconstructionist thinkers far from existentialism, like Sollers and Derrida. In fact, Sartre had already commented on Ponge twenty years earlier. As Deleuze attested in an intelligent homage,2 Sartre had imported, for the young postwar generation, everything that was new at the time, such as phenomenology, film theory, the American novel, and he introduced little-known writers like Sarraute, Genet, or Ponge. In the review Poésie 44, Sartre wrote an article on Le partipris des choses in which he analyzed Ponge’s poems from a phenomenological perspective. This text became a part of the first volume of Sartre’s Situations, under the title of “L’homme et les choses.” It thus belongs to philosophical studies about literature. Sartre pointed

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out the way Ponge emphasizes things in themselves as a Husserlian reduction (epoché), a tactic to get rid of human significations given to reality. Being inside things and seeing ordinary life from this perspective destabilize the mental representations people have of the world and is thus a kind of revolution thanks to this new point of view. Sartre praises Ponge’s poetry because of its contemplation that also implies acting on reality. Instead of devaluing language, as Surrealist poets do, Ponge deals with the relationships between words and things. Even if he plays with the multiple connotations of words, he never forgets the necessity of naming and articulating reality. This unstable balance between things and the consciousness of things reenacts the dialectics of the “in itself” and the “for itself” that defines the movement of consciousness in L’Être et le Néant. By studying and discussing Ponge’s materialism, Sartre faces the question of language, paying special attention to the linguistic stakes of poetry. Indeed, he avoids reducing Ponge’s poetry to a philosophical thesis and makes interesting remarks on poetic forms. His choice of Ponge, then, comes not only from his theoretical interest but also from his poetic style. In a certain sense, Ponge proposes antipoetic poetry. Far from the prestige of a hermetic language, he writes close to ordinary things, avoiding metaphors and human representations. Ponge’s poetry is antilyrical and antiexpressionist. All his work could be read as an effort coming from things getting to be named and signified, even if this effort never succeeds. Although this failure of language does not fit with the committed literature that Sartre would support, it confronts human consciousness with things and reality, and it questions the world of significations. Regarding Sartre’s involvement in poetic language, one of the most surprising poets he wrote on is Mallarmé. It seems indeed strange that he chose a poet with such a hermetic style to write about, especially in 1947, after he had just promoted his manifesto on the political commitment of literature. However, this long study was never published: Sartre first wrote around five hundred pages and subsequently gave up. Later, in 1952, he returned to Mallarmé, writing some 130 pages more, but finally abandoned his project. Based on what has been published, it seems that Sartre planned to write a huge biography, according to the principles of “existential psychoanalysis,” which he explains in L’Être et le Néant, but also under the recent influence of Marxism. Sartre wanted to give a collective dimension to his concept of free consciousness and read Marx in order to conciliate individuality and history. This intellectual evolution led him to a philosophical essay, Critique de la raison dialectique, in 1960, and to a three-volume biography of Flaubert, L’ idiot de la famille, in 1972. His study on Mallarmé could then be considered as a first attempt to conceive of, based on Mallarmé’s case, a synthesis of existentialism and Marxism.

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Sartre tried to understand the relationship between social conditions and individual choices. On the one hand, he studied the historical context in which Mallarmé aimed to become a creator by reinventing language. The generation that came after the French revolution of 1848 had to deal with the end of God and of religious ideals. Mallarmé’s poetry expresses the disorientation of nineteenth-century writers who both hoped in salvation thanks to absolute language and faced the impossibility of the existence of any ideal. He was obsessed with the project of creating “le Grand Œuvre,” the ultimate book that would synthesize all arts. As he never reached this aim, he was confronted with the inefficiency of language and the anguish of the blank page. On the other hand, Sartre wanted to give credit to the agency of the individual and he stressed the singularity of Mallarmé. His psychoanalytic point of view led him to the poet’s relationship with his mother’s death and the issue of absence. As usual, Sartre wants to go beyond Marxist reductionism by insisting on singularity: Mallarmé is an expression of his time, but why is it that no one else became Mallarmé? So the idea of individual consciousness must not be neglected. In any case, this new existentialist study remains unfinished, perhaps because of the complexity of Mallarmé’s poems. Even if Sartre truly appreciated these hermetic texts, he did not succeed in linking them to his new anthropological and political perspective.

THE FINAL ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF THE SIGNIFIER

Sartre’s interest in the poems themselves, in spite of a lack of formal analysis in his biographical studies on poets, suggests that he was more aware of the signifier than one would think from Qu’est-ce que la littérature? By reading Sartre’s text carefully in the context of his works, one understands that his instrumentalist conception of language had changed. More astonishing is the fact that he could assess contradictory arguments on poetry at the same time. In 1948, just after publishing his manifesto about committed literature, Sartre wrote an important foreword to Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française, “Orphée noir” (Black Orpheus). In this text, destined to support francophone literature, Sartre adopted a totally different attitude regarding poetic language. Contrary to his recent call for transparency and objectivity of prose, he supported the opacity and the intransitivity of poetry. “Orphée noir” is based on the idea that African poetry has to deal with both colonialism and an alienated language. Writing in French, for colonized people, is already an alienating practice because language in itself carries many

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values, representations, and hierarchies that condemn the colonized to inferiority. The opposition between black and white in several sentences and metaphors, for example, implies colonial racism. Thus poetry, Sartre acknowledged, could provide this, blurring the transparency of direct language and moving into the world of significations. Even though he deals with the materiality of language, Sartre certainly keeps in mind the revolutionary aim of literature; his perspective on African poetry remains political. However, he also gives credit to the same opacity and ambiguity that he condemned in his existentialist manifesto. Referring to the notion of “negritude” used by Senghor and Césaire, Sartre considers poetry as a way of destroying the colonizers’ language. He applies, therefore, a dialectic method to understand poetic political subversion, underscoring negativity and positivity: the negation of white language leads to the affirmation of black soul and culture. African poetry is “orphic” because it implies both a return to roots and a descent into hell. Like Orpheus, once poetry returns to its origins, it can then lead, through a new language, to the future of a liberated Africa. But even if Sartre sees this new horizon of freedom, he analyzed the present language of African poetry. Surprisingly, he supported the idea of a black essence, which is in direct opposition to his existentialist philosophy. When he finally pays attention to the literary forms of poetry, he becomes essentialist and develops myths about a supposed primitive androgyny of blackness or about a native synthesis of vegetation and sexuality. In La nausée, he already essentialized blackness, through the jazz music and the invented character of a black composer that composed the song “Some of This Days.” In “Ophée Noir,” he writes literary commentaries on the symbols used in African poems, linking them to the suffering of black people living their existence as a Passion play. No doubt Sartre, at that point of his life, felt an empathy with the black cause. This text is the beginning of his political commitment to fighting colonialism. Three years before this text, he traveled the United States, as a reporter for two French newspapers, Combat and Le Figaro, and became involved in the struggle against racial discrimination there. He wrote a play, La putain respecteuse, in 1946, about the hunting and lynching of a black man in a southern state, the beginning of a strong commitment against racism and, subsequently, against colonialism. Shifting his interest from African Americans to Caribbean populations to African populations, Sartre wanted to support “black culture” and literature. Because of his political convictions, he remains, in “Orphée noir,” close to the idea of a black essence or a black soul, in spite of the apparent contradiction with his existentialist philosophy. It is therefore through a theoretical disjunction that Sartre was led to the power of poetic significations and, especially, to the autonomous functions of the signifier.

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Sartre’s focus on the signifier allows him not only to understand poetics but also to be aware of the linguistic imagination at play in prose. Thanks to this path through poetry, Sartre goes far beyond the simplistic thesis of Qu’est-ce que la littérature? He thus acknowledges that prose itself uses implicit significations, hidden connotations, and eloquent silences. In his book devoted to Jean Genet, in 1952, he discussed this ambivalence inside prose. His analysis is certainly based on the famous existential psychoanalytic perspective because he wanted to give an overview of Genet’s existence and especially his decision to become a writer. In Saint Genet, comédien et martyr, a text initially intended to be a foreword to Genet’s works and that became a book of nine hundred pages, Sartre indicates that literature is a way out of a desperate life. Genet was a thief, and a misfit, but his personal rebellion found its way into language, especially through his introducing poetic tricks in prose. Perverting transitive language, i.e., the language of the symbolic order, was a corrosive strategy that Genet used to fight social and moral hierarchies. At that moment of his thought about language, Sartre accepted the idea that communication is not the only aim of literature and that poetic means, without a transitive intention, could nonetheless have a powerful effect on social representations. This slow recognition of the importance of poetry in itself evolves in distinct steps in Sartre’s thought and it seems that he cannot completely give credit to poetic language if it is not helped by prose. In an important interview on language, “L’écrivain et sa langue,” in 1965, Sartre kept criticizing poetry for the narcissism that it is supposed to imply. He condemned the ambiguous meanings in the connotations of words, which he called “resonances,”3 as if they were sound effects of language, beyond human control. He, at least, acknowledges the complementary relationship between prose and poetry.4 But poetry should always be kept on a tight leash by prose. Sartre admits that prose could include poetic moments, silences, and resonances, only in a dialectical process of communication and solitude, of expansion and contraction. According to Sartre, prose always brings poetry toward signification and communication, which is the main goal of literature. Regarding his philosophical positions on language, Sartre followed an instrumentalist approach, while he regularly accepted the quasi-autonomy of words in his essays on writers. He even progressively gave more and more importance to the signifier, from his book on Baudelaire to his studies on Ponge, Genet, Mallarmé, and his final essay on Flaubert. This acknowledgment is not openly declared but it is readily visible through local analysis of language. In L’idiot de la famille, for example, Sartre even quoted an improbable source, Jacques Lacan, although Lacan’s theory about the functions of the signifier in the unconsciousness has nothing in common with the philosophy of the free consciousness. In any case,

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Sartre reformulated his conception of the imagination, during the 1970s, proposing the notion of “imaginarization” and incorporating linguistic matters. His idea, at this point, concerns the way Flaubert builds an imaginary world for himself, one that un-realizes (“déréalise”) not only the ordinary world but also the self. Flaubert constantly doubles reality by modifying his perception, considering that everything already belongs to an imagined life. According to Sartre, Flaubert “imaginarizes,” i.e., sees as images, the graphemes of common language. They are no longer signs designating referents but images associated and blending with other images. For instance, “Amboise,” the French castle, could be seen as a “framboise” (a raspberry),5 because of the association of graphemes and rhymes. Sartre goes beyond such poetic associations of rhymes and emphasizes the way the signified is also involved in the displacement of imaginary: thanks to the “framboise,” one could actually imagine the castle in the shape and color of a raspberry. Through the power of the signifier, reality could become an imagined world, subject to poetic metamorphoses. Sartre finally adopts the uncontrolled significations of language that he had previously rejected in poetic practices.

THE DREAM OF A POETIC LIFE

Sartre’s attitude regarding poetry seems therefore contradictory: On the one hand, he remains a philosopher using language as a means that he wants to keep under his control; the aim of writing is to communicate and even literature implies commitment to political issues. Language provides access to reality because it is transitive and its significations are part and parcel of human action and responsibility. On the other hand, Sartre is fascinated by the power of words. In his autobiography, Les mots, he explains his linguistic neurosis coming from his early relationship to literature when he was a child. At a basic level, he mixed up words and things and he was connected to reality only through novels. This is why he felt very close to Flaubert’s character Emma Bovary; he even spent his life resisting this temptation of living as a dreamer. Sartre’s declarations on language, especially in Qu’est-ce que la littérature?, could be considered as an antidote to his pervasive neurosis. His commentaries about writers like Baudelaire or Flaubert are, in a way, addressed to himself. Contemplation, imagination, and dreams are part of this behavior that he condemned although he began playing with them when he discovered the magic of literature. Poetry is the quintessence of the imaginary tendency of language and Sartre always felt obliged to keep his poetic attraction secret or to dismiss

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the illusion of the autonomy of language. His relationship with poetry is similar to the one he adopted with music: Sartre loved to play Romantic composers like Chopin but he nonetheless wrote spiteful comments on Chopin’s listeners in his works. More generally, he managed a double life with music, both enjoying and criticizing it, while at the same time he was fully committed in political action.6 He dreamt of himself as an opera singer, as a jazz musician, or as a Romantic composer, which seems incredible regarding his public image and legacy. Poetry is symbolically connected to the world of insignificance, passivity, opacity, and unrestricted life. It defies the powerful control of philosophical rationality, and therefore remains a consistently denied temptation in Sartre’s discourses. The schizophrenic attitude of Sartre in his relationship with poetry becomes obvious if one examines certain scattered poems he wrote. Critics usually neglect these texts but even if these poems are not Sartre’s greatest literary successes, at least they testify to his poetic temptation. When he was twenty-one, Sartre certainly wrote a few poems, as many students do. He was studying literature and philosophy, and it comes as no surprise that he could enjoy writing some poems as an exercise. One of them, called “Ho hé Ho (je suis un petit garçon et je ne veux pas grandir),”7 comprises eighty-five lines of free verses and Sartre sometimes refers to it as “Peter Pan.” Its content and style are obviously playful, and quite childish. Sartre wrote it for his friends and he particularly addressed it to Raymond Aron, already a very serious young man, studying philosophy and incarnating the “age of reason.” Sartre’s poem is a kind of apology for freedom and joyful behavior, a fight against the “esprit de sérieux” that Sartre would later criticize, especially at the end of L’Être et le Néant. One cannot therefore consider this text as Sartre’s poetic involvement in poetry because it focuses only on the message rather than on language. However, another poetic attempt of Sartre’s is much more interesting: in 1940, when he was prisoner in Germany, he recorded his thoughts and feelings daily in several notebooks, and composed a poem of twenty-three verses. The way he introduces this poem reveals his attitude toward poetry. First of all, Sartre explains that he had received a young unknown writer’s poems and that they made him feel ignorant about poetry. He was quiet upset, but surprisingly, instead of getting rid of these poems he decided to write one himself. His explanation of this is extremely significant: “parce que je traîne tous ces jours-ci un état déplaisant mais poétique, j’ai essayé de faire un poème. Je le donne ici pour ce qu’il vaut, par mortification” (because these days I am in an unpleasant and poetic mood; here it is, for what it’s worth, by mortification).8 Here Sartre refers to a “poetic mood” and this is a kind of cliché for him, to feel like a poet facing the world. He confuses this mood with writing poetry, as if the choice of writing

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poetry would necessarily come from an existential position leading one to think of oneself as a “poet.” Sartre, then, plays the part of a poet because he had an uncomfortable feeling that he could not control, a mixture of sadness and passivity. He finally added this poem to his notes, which were finally published posthumously, but he immediately dismissed the idea, referring to it as an act of self-denigration. Sartre felt ashamed of publishing a poem; however, he did it anyway, expressing repressed fulfillment through shame. Sartre’s poem comprises four unequal stanzas of free verse. Internal repetitions and rhymes produced sound effects, producing a kind of complaint. Sartre echoes the style of an ode in a paradoxical manner: it is a lyric poem addressed to the beginning of spring but asking for its end, expecting that summer would soon erase all of its manifestations. Even if one could find some of Sartre’s wellknown fantasies, especially his disgust with the process of growth in nature, it is more interesting to analyze the poetic style he refers to. This poem is indeed lyrical and expresses a lonely wish for wind and fire. Sartre reproduces Romantic images and feelings, pointing out the synthesis of natural elements (wind, water, fire, and earth), emphasizing correspondences between sensations (seeing, touching, smelling, hearing) thanks to many metaphors. “Printemps qui commence en mon coeur” (Spring which begins in my heart) resonates from SaintSaën’s opera and from nineteenth-century poetry, even if Sartre tries to break this Romantic inspiration with some Mallarmean hermeticism or some realistic effects like “Mon coeur sent le poisson” (My heart smells like fish). A bit further, in his notebook, Sartre returns to this poem and severely critiques it: only five lines are worth keeping. However, Sartre goes beyond stylistic self-criticism, and confesses that he feels guilty simply because he wrote a poem, “c’est-à-dire, pour moi, une obscénité” (that is, for me, it is an obscenity).9 So poetry is not an obscenity in itself, but for Sartre, his writing a poem is. This strange qualification reveals that through poetry writing, Sartre feels naked, exhibiting hidden and repressed tendencies like melancholy, passivity, dreaming, as well as love for the resonance of words. Being a poet is therefore an unbearable attitude for Sartre, who seems both attracted to and frightened by this. Thus, poetry, or writing poems, means, for him, being “poetic,” i.e., living in an imaginary relationship to the world through a magic language. Certainly, Sartre’s poetic experience was disappointing, especially when he tried to imitate Romantic lyricism. However, one should include, in his attempts at poetry, all that he considered “poetic,” for instance, the lyrics he composed for singers—also a kind of poetry. During the golden age of Saint-Germaindes-Près, just after World War II, he met the singer Juliette Gréco and gave her his text “La rue des blancs-manteaux,” which became a great success, thanks to

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Joseph Kosma’s music. He also wrote “À quoi rêve la demoiselle” for her in 1966 and he greatly enjoyed this kind of artistic collaboration. These texts are a far cry from the Romantic inspiration of his first attempts at poetry, but they reveal another side of Sartre, one looking for lightness, playing with words in a foolish manner, and expressing intimate feelings. Thus, in spite of his dismissive arguments about poetry in Qu’est-ce que la littérature?, Sartre was in fact attracted to poems and poets. He would even have been happy to develop the skill of writing poetic texts himself. He confessed: J’enrage de ne pas être poète, d’être si lourdement rivé à la prose. . . . Mais il y a en moi quelque chose de noué, une secrete pudeur, un cynisme trop longtemps appris, et puis de la disgrâce aussi; mes sentiments n’ont pas trouvé leur langage, je les sens, j’avance un doigt timide et, dès que je les touche, je les change en prose.10 I am furious not to be a poet, to be so heavily riveted to prose. . . . But there is in me something knotted, a secrete modesty, a cynicism too long learnt, and disgrace as well; my feelings have not found their language, I feel them, I put forth a shy finger and, as soon as I touch them, I change them into prose.

This is a repressed temptation for poetry in Sartre’s life, made up of parody, of disappointment, and of fancy flights. However, the significance of poetry, in Sartre’s mind, is a form of behavior rather than a way of writing. Although considering poetry a special mood remains a cliché, the way Sartre labeled some of his existential attitudes “poetic” expresses an intense commitment. Living in a poetic manner and feeling like a poet were both condemned and experienced by Sartre, who acknowledged a dimension of his psyche by living poetically, fleeing from the real world. Poetry is therefore associated with music or with cinema, which Sartre defined as “the poetry of modern life.” It opens, inside language, the opportunity of transforming oneself as an imaginary subject, moving through words that lighten the weight of reality: poetry, for Sartre, is a revolving door between being and nothingness, play and melancholia, delusion and freedom.

Notes 1.

“Le poète s’est retiré d’un seul coup du langage-instrument; il a choisi une fois pour toutes l’attitude poétique qui considère les mots comme des choses et non comme des signes.” Jean-Paul Sartre, Qu’est-ce que la littérature?, in Situations III, ed. Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre (Paris: Gallimard, 2013), 20.

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5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

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Gilles Deleuze, “Il a été mon maître,” in L’ île déserte et autres textes (Paris: Minuit, 2002), 109. Jean-Paul Sartre, “L’écrivain et sa langue,” in Situations IX (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 58. “Le salut de la poésie, c’est qu’il y a de la prose à côté; c’est leur complémentarité. En ce sens, la prose a toujours à se reconquérir contre la poésie: la poésie, c’est ce qui se trouve dépassé, dominé dans la prose, la vraie prose, c’est-à-dire cette structure intérieure des mots qui nous renvoie à nous, à l’Histoire, au narcissisme et en même temps à ce pratico-inerte qui se charge de choses qu’on n’a pas voulu y mettre; à ce titre la prose est le dépassement de la poésie.” Sartre, 59. Jean-Paul Sartre, L’ idiot de la famille, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 932. I analyzed Sartre’s schizophrenia regarding his musical practice in Francois Noudelmann, The Philosopher’s Touch: Sartre, Nietzsche and Barthes at the Piano (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). In Jean-Paul Sartre, Écrits de jeunesse (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 407. There is also a poem written by Sartre and his friend Paul Nizan, “Complainte de deux khâgneux qui travaillaient fort,” a kind of joke referring to students’ frustrations. Jean-Paul Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 489. Sartre, 490. Sartre, 564.

10 Levinas and the Poetical Turn of Being Raoul Moati

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t may seem inevitable that, in any attempt to shed light on Levinas’s relationship to poetry, we find ourselves confronted with a seeming paradox, one first emphasized by Derrida in Violence and Metaphysics: Levinas recommends the good usage of prose which breaks with Dionysiac charm or violence, and forbids poetic rapture, but to no avail: in Totality and Infinity the use of the metaphor, remaining admirable and most often—if not always—beyond rhetorical abuse, shelters within its pathos the most decisive movements of the discourse. . . . Because of all these challenges to the commentator and the critic, Totality and Infinity is a work of art and not a treatise.1

Derrida rightly emphasizes Levinas’s particularly poetic and metaphorical style, which seems to contradict the claim explicitly formulated in Totality and Infinity: To poetic activity—where influences arise unbeknown to us out of this nonetheless conscious activity, to envelop it and beguile it as rhythm, and where action is borne along by the very work it has given rise to, where in a dionysiac mode the artist (according to Nietzsche’s expression) becomes a work of art—is opposed the language that at each instant dispels the charm of rhythm and prevents the initiative to become a role. Discourse is rupture and commencement, breaking of rhythm which enraptures and transports the interlocutors—prose. 2

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The apparent paradox that Derrida emphasizes, between a defense of prose against poetry and a very metaphoric and poetic way of writing philosophy, appears to be reinforced by the recent discovery and publication of unpublished poetry Levinas had written throughout his life. In these previously unseen writings, we see a Levinas who was deeply committed to poetry, and that his own poetic output was both personal and deeply linked to the most fundamental themes within his philosophy.3 Taken together, these preliminary elements seem to betray an ambiguity in Levinas’s position toward poetry. It would of course be quite simple, contra Derrida, to invoke Nietzsche, for whom “the great masters of prose have almost always been poets, too—if not publicly then at least secretly, in the ‘closet.’ ” 4 But in the case of Levinas, things are actually much more complicated, and even Nietzsche’s claim here is insufficient. Reflections on poetry play a fundamental role in the Levinasian process of deducing anew the ontological difference that originates with Heidegger. Indeed, it is within the horizon of a critique of Heidegger that Levinas’s reflections on poetry must be resituated, in order to clarify their methodological importance for the intelligibility of the philosophical passage from Being to Otherness in Levinas’s own account.

FROM ONE DIFFERENCE TO ANOTHER

Reflections on poetry play a transitional role in Levinas’s effort to redefine Heidegger’s ontological difference. Heidegger’s discovery of the ontological difference between Sein and Seiendes constitutes what Levinas considers one of the most important philosophical discoveries of the twentieth century.5 Indeed, this distinction opened the path to what Levinas calls “the verbal dimension” of the notion of Being, which had been repressed by traditional metaphysics: “Heidegger accustomed us to this verbal sonority. This reeducation of our ear is unforgettable.” 6 It should then come as no surprise that Levinas refers constantly to Heidegger’s distinction, in works ranging from De l’existence à l’existant to Autrement qu’ être. But at the same time, we must not forget that Levinas thinks that such a horizon “beyond Being” cannot be obtained without a prior clarification of the verbal dimension of the notion of Being discovered by Heidegger: “contemporary ontology has made possible the renewal of the philosophical problematic.” 7

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Levinas reminds us that the essential discovery of Heidegger’s philosophy lies in the discovery of the verbality of being qua being. For Levinas, following Heidegger, it must be understood that Being qua Being is not something that can, in any way, be named. It is not an entity or a substantive, but instead coincides with what Levinas calls variously “the process of being,” 8 “the very work of being,”9 “the fact of existing,”10 “the existing” (l’exister), “existence” (existence), or “the there is” (l’ il y a). In this way, the Heideggerian discovery would lie within the distinction between substantives (positive entities) and Being as irreducible to any positive entity: that is, Being as a verb that refers, as Levinas specifies at the very beginning of Otherwise Than Being, to “being as different from beings, the German Sein distinguished from Seiendes, the latin esse distinguished from the Scholastic ens.”11 Such a being, understood as the very “process of being” as such, is what Levinas calls “essence” (l’essence) in Otherwise Than Being. In this picture, Being in its verbal dimension cannot be identified with any kind of entity—“ideal or real.”12 “Being is a verb” means that Being cannot be named because Being in its truth cannot be identified with any positive entity, with any substantive, with any kind of Ousia or Ens—the various names for Being in the metaphysical tradition. In other words, Being in its verbal dimension, as the very “process of being,” is indeed anything that can be named or objectified without immediately loosing it in its very verbal truth: “the process captured by the designation, even if it is a movement, shows itself, but is immobilized and fixed in the said.”13 Levinas distinguishes between “Existents”—entities that are named— and the “Existing” as such, which has nothing to do with an entity because it cannot be named or objectified. The “process of being” coincides then with Being as a verb, not as a Name (something named). Here however, a problem necessarily emerges, which Levinas identifies: it seems that we can never say anything about the verb existing, precisely because just as it is said, it is objectified, and thus lost in its verbality. This is why Levinas claims that being as a verb can be distinguished from names only if language—names and verbs—is able to transcend its designative function, to which it is usually reduced. If language were only designative, it would be at least poorly verbal, since verbs would be reduced to the function of naming actions and events. Against such a reductive vision of language, Levinas claims that “the verb comes into its verbality by ceasing to name actions and events, ceasing to name.”14 If language were merely designative, then Being qua Being would be revealed as an entity and not as a verb. But—and this is Levinas’s

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major claim—because the poetical use of language is no longer designative, when language becomes fully poetic, it also consists in what Levinas calls the “excrescence of the verb.”15 The resonances, sounds, and musicality of words revealed by poetry coincides with a process of the “excrescence of the verb,” or, put differently, with what Levinas calls the manifestation of “the verbality of the verb or essence.” Poetic resonances and sounds are produced by words no longer taken to be signs (names)—because names name entities—but rather coincide with words in their nondesignative dimension, words (names and verbs) revealed in their verbality—which means in their nondesignative dimension. Levinas says that when the designative function of words is suspended, “essence resounds, is exposed.”16 Nevertheless, for Levinas, ultimately, contra Heidegger, the essence of language as discourse cannot be poetical. Such a critical position toward poetry becomes clearer only if we keep in mind that Levinas’s position toward poetry must be resituated as a preliminary step in the process of the deduction of the ontological difference that originates with Heidegger.

THE DEDUCTION OF ENTITIES

Let’s start with the definition of the deductive method given by Levinas in the preface to Totality and Infinity: “The break-up of the formal structure of thought (the noema of a noesis) into events which this structure dissimulates, but which sustains it and restore its concrete significance, constitutes a deduction.”17 For Levinas, deduction consists in allowing the main events that are covered up by the phenomenological intuition to appear. In other words, to allow the appearance of the main event(s) that are hidden to the phenomenological approach because the instant is restrictively given to the phenomenological intuition as an unbreakable state within the phenomenological framework: “the difficulty of separating Being from beings and the tendency to envisage the one in the other are not accidental. They are due to the habit of situating the instant, the atom of time, outside any event.”18 When Levinas uses the concept of “deduction” to describe his own philosophical approach, it is always in a nonphenomenological sense, which means in a non-Heideggerian sense.19 As a matter of fact, if Heidegger discovered the ontological difference, Levinas reminds us that “in Heidegger, there is a distinction not a separation.” 20 For Levinas, phenomenology as a philosophical method can only reach the instant as an unbreakable state: “the

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instant, which phenomenological analysis takes as something that cannot be decomposed.” 21 For that reason, the phenomenological approach to the instant misses the very articulation of the instant as such: “An instant is not one lump; it is articulated. This articulation is what distinguishes it from the eternal, which is simple and foreign to events.” 22 The notion of deduction, in the Levinassian sense, intervenes as a way to get beyond the phenomenological intuition and restriction of the instant as an unbreakable state. Levinas speaks about “a method” thanks to which “thought is invited to go beyond intuition.” 23 What is at stake in the deductive method is nothing other than the description of the instant as a no longer unbreakable state—as it is in the phenomenological framework—but as an “event,” “the very event through which, in the pure act, the pure verb, of Being, in Being in general, a being is posited, a substantive which masters that Being.” 24 To “deduce” in the Levinassian sense means to break the phenomenological “play of light” 25 in which the instant is given as an unbreakable state, in order to reach existing and existent in their very articulation seized as an “event”: the birth of an existent in existence. This “event of birth”—described as the very passage from pure existence to existence as the existence of an existent—coincides with what Levinas calls “hypostasis.” For Levinas, Heidegger’s phenomenological approach to the instant misses this genetic approach to the ontological difference from which existence is presented in the instant as becoming the existence of an existent, and thanks to which an existent is then deduced in its ontological meaning. If the deductive method is required against the phenomenological one, it is because phenomenologists, and Heidegger first and foremost, start directly with “Mineness” (Jeimeinigkeit)26 as an existential. “Mineness” as an existential means that existence is conceived as being always already the existence of an existent: “In Heidegger there is a distinction, not a separation. Existing is always grasped in the existent, and for the existent that is a human being the Heideggerian term Jemeinigkeit precisely expresses the fact that existing is always possessed by someone. I do not think Heidegger can admit an existing without existents, which to him would seem absurd.” 27 By decomposing what remains unbreakable to the phenomenological glance, Levinas proposes to think the constitution of existents from the fact of existence prior to any existent: that is, from being in its pure verbality or “work of being,” or being prior to the subject/object distinction.28 Once being in general “in its impersonality” is considered as the point of departure of the ontological inquiry, it in turn becomes possible to take into account the act of hypostasis and to explain the way in which an existent arises

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as itself emerging from hypostasis, as an act of the mutation of the verb to be. The thematization of the arising of existents in existence from the ontological mutation of the verb to be coincides, for Levinas, with the deduction of the ontological meaning of an entity: “On the ground of the ‘there is,’ a being arises. The ontological significance of an entity in the general economy of being, which Heidegger simply posits alongside of Being by a distinction, will thus be deduced.” 29 Once the phenomenological intuition is broken, it becomes possible to describe the passage from one state of being to another—to describe the “instant” as an event—that remains hidden to the phenomenological intuition of phenomena. Such a description, beyond the phenomenological approach, coincides with the description of the passage from one state of being (anonymous existence) to the other (existence as possessed by an existent), instead of thinking Being and beings simultaneously (phenomenologically). This means that Levinas’s description coincides with the deduction of the ontological meaning of an existent “in the general economy of being.” By this method, which is no longer phenomenological, an existent can no longer be understood alongside existence, but as what became “the subject of the verb to be.”30 According to Levinas, by remaining faithful to the phenomenological method, Heidegger “posits being alongside entity,” instead of thinking the constitution of the latter from the ontological mutation of the former. Levinas claims that because Heidegger started with the ontological relation as an unbreakable state, the latter missed being in its verbal dimension, prior to any existent: “Fundamental ontology itself, which denounces the confusion between Being and entities, speaks of Being as an identified entity.”31 We can see how deeply such a claim complicates the traditional way of drawing the opposition between Levinas and Heidegger. In opposition to Heidegger, Levinas poses the idea that the verbality of being remains unthinkable in the framework of Mineness, since being is not dissociated from the existent. This is why Being in its verbal dimension is also described by Levinas, after Heidegger, as “there is,” il y a.

THE DEDUCTIVE FUNCTION OF POETRY

The establishment of a relation to being prior to the world (of entities) reveals a notion of being that is ontologically independent from existents. This does not means that such a state of being is generally experienced, but that it remains definitional of being as such insofar as existence does not require any existent to be: “of itself Being refuses the personal form.”32 Indeed, Levinas claims that

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“impersonal existence cannot be named, for it is a pure verb.”33 And for that reason, once Levinas’s deductive methodology is accepted, a crucial question becomes seemingly unavoidable. As a matter of fact, “if of itself Being refuses the personal form, how then are we to approach it?”34 Contra Heidegger, Levinas thinks that the very articulation between the existent and its existence remains undetermined if we lose a prior relation to existence that remains irreducible to our relation to existents. This is why Levinas claims that the very goal of his work is “to approach the idea of Being in general in its impersonality so as to then be able to analyze the notion of the present and of position, in which, a being, a subject, an existent, arises in impersonal Being, through a hypostasis.”35 But since impersonal being remains “unnameable,” for Levinas, only art will be able to reveal such a prior “relation” to impersonal existence, as what he calls the “fact of the there is.” Levinas’s approach consists in the deduction of existents from existence (1). Such a deduction requires the isolation of existence from existents (2). Art reveals existence freed from existents (3). For Levinas, poetry is not only the name of one aesthetic activity among others; it also names the artistic gesture as such, as revelatory of existence deprived of existents (impersonal and anonymous existence). As Levinas claims it explicitly, Being qua Being remains fundamentally “unnameable and can only appear in poetry.”36 Poetry thus constitutes the answer to the preliminary question raised in Existence and Existents: “if of itself Being refuses the personal form, how then are we to approach it?” It is for this reason that the full deduction of the ontological signification will necessarily imply a prior reflection on poetry as a privileged way to approach the notion of the “there is.”

POETRY AND BEING

Levinas claims that “A verb is not simply a name for an action like a noun is a name for a thing. The function of a verb does not consist in naming, but in producing language, that is, in bringing forth the seeds of poetry which overwhelm ‘existents’ in their position and their very positivity.”37 A claim of this kind should first remind us that we cannot reduce a verb to what is performed by a name: that is, naming something. In other words, it is not possible to reduce any verb of our language to the pure designative function of naming an action: “to eat” as designating the action of eating, “to walk” as designating the action of walking, and so on. Indeed, as says Levinas, “a verb is not simply a name for an action,” and as he says further, the verb does not find its true function in the act

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of naming: “the function of a verb does not consist in naming, but in producing language.” This second moment of the sentence gives then an important indication: language would not be a language without verbs, precisely insofar as verbs do not merely name. As we have already seen, for Levinas a language that would only name things (objects and actions) would no longer be a language. It is a language precisely because (1) verbs do not only name actions, and (2) names themselves do not only name objects, and for that reason must be recognized as having their own verbality. In our ordinary language, only the first aspect is satisfied insofar as verbs do not only name actions; names, on the other hand, are simply given as designators of things. This means that our ordinary language is a language only because it contains verbs. Indeed, it is thanks to verbs that the language does not only name actions and things, and can be thereby constituted as a bona fide language. Levinas thus speaks of “the seeds of poetry” that are given thanks to the irreducibility of verbs to the function of naming. This means that our ordinary language is already poetical, and that any language, insofar as it is a language, is poetical in essence—though languages are not poetical to the same degree. As a matter of fact, a set of words within which verbs do not only name, but where names do name, is a language (our ordinary language); and for that reason, our language is poetical, but it is poorly poetical insofar as only one aspect of it (verbs) remains irreducible to nomination. Thus, thanks to our verbs, some “seeds of poetry” dwell in our ordinary language. When language becomes fully poetical, it does not reveal existents, the positive entities of the world, by naming them; rather, it coincides with what Levinas calls “excrescence of the verb.” When poetry reveals “existents,” it does so—strictly speaking—without naming them. Levinas claims that instead of naming existents, and revealing them as positive substantives, poetry overwhelms them in their “position and their very positivity” as objects. Poets do not merely disclose things as positive objects, revealed by the daylight—insofar as the particular way in which they use words allows them to reveal things in ways more fundamental than their “daily” revelation as positive objects (naming). As Levinas says, they “penetrate behind the form which light reveals.”38 And for Levinas, objective forms, as they are given in the light of knowledge, obscure what he calls the “materiality of the there is”: “behind the luminosity of forms, by which beings already relate to our ‘inside,’ matter is the very fact of the there is.”39 Thus the poetical way of showing things without their positivity, their positive forms, entails the revelation of things through their anonymous materiality—hidden behind their

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objective forms. Poetical revelation entails, then, a way of rediscovering the objects of the world without “their position and their very positivity.” How, then, can language lead to the revelation of the “there is,” wherein objects no longer appear as positive realities? And how could the revelation of the “there is” be possible if the “there is” remains “perfectly un-nameable,” as Levinas says? In order to answer these two fundamental questions, Levinas reminds us, on the one hand, that “a word cannot be separated from meaning” 40 and that a “word harbors a meaning and names an object.” 41 But on the other hand, meaning must not be understood as the exclusive dimension of words: “there is first the materiality of the sound that fills it, by which it can be reduced to sensation and musicality.” 42 In this way, the movement of poetical “nomination” no longer leads to an object, but detaches the sensible qualities of words from their “object reference.” 43 This detachment occurs when words become “capable of having rhythm, rhyme, meter, alliteration, etc.” 44—in other words, when words become poetic. Indeed, poetry no longer engages worldly objects through names; it no longer reveals positive objects, but rather the secret verbality—the nondesignative dimension, the musicality—of names themselves. Poetry reveals the hidden verbality of words, concealed by language in its ordinary designative function of naming. It coincides with the phenomenalization of “l’essence” as “there is,” the hidden and anonymous materiality of things from which a world of positive entities occur. Positive entities come from the act of hypostasis as the very act of suspending existence in its originary impersonality. Poetry reveals the musicality of words through the association of meanings based on relations between sonorities of words. This musicality, revealed in poetry, coincides with the manifestation of being as a verb: “Poetry is productive of songs, of resonance and sonority, which are the verbality of the verb or essence.” 45 The return to the musicality of language coincides then with the revelation of that which is concealed by names and entities: “being different from beings,” 46 being as “the very work of being,” anonymous existence as impersonal materiality. The experience of sensible qualities, prior to the introduction of the category of object—in other words, the experience of sensible qualities deprived of their designative/intentional “object reference”—coincides with the revelation of “essence.” It is not a substantive, but the very process of being of entities: in the painting and the poem we no longer experience “the red” but instead the verb “to redden” (le rougeoyer).47 This is the result of the detachment entailed by the suspension of the naming function of words. The becoming verb “to redden,” of the nominalized adjective, “the red,” performed by art, no longer names the red

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(as a substantive or a nominalized adjective) but coincides with the phenomenalization of “the being-red of the red (l’ être-rouge du rouge).” 48

FROM SUBSTANTIVES TO THE “THERE IS”: COUNTER- HYPOSTASIS

Levinas presents forms as that which “conceals” things in their materiality. Poetry is able to open the path to what stands “behind the luminosity of forms”: things in their “nudity” and “materiality” beyond their forms and worldly positivity. As he says, “Behind the luminosity of forms, by which beings already relate to our ‘inside,’ matter is the very fact of the there is.” 49 Levinas speaks about “the “fantastic,” “hallucinatory”50 reality in poets like Rimbaud, even when they name the most familiar things and the most accustomed beings. Objects, once deprived of their forms, no longer appear as positive entities, as they typically appear to us. They appear instead through the poetical gesture as unreal and fantastic things. In order to describe the effect produced by the poetical way of revealing, of detaching things from their daily forms, Levinas uses the image of the city discovered after a long and exhaustive trip. The fatigue that results entails an inability to discern and to detach forms from their ground. Forms appear but without being detached from their ground, and this simultaneity produces a kind of derealization of the things perceived: “Like the unreal, inverted city we find after an exhausting trip, things and beings strike us as though they no longer composed a world, and were swimming in the chaos of their existence.”51 If we take into account that the “there is” “constitutes the dark background of existence,” and that poets reveal such a ground, then we have to conceive the poetic gesture as a kind of “counter-hypostasis.” Levinas insists that in order for this hypostasis to occur, for the ontological mutation of anonymous existence (the pure verb) into the existence of existents (“beings capable of bearing names”),52 a substitution is required: “in the world for the vicissitudes of the activity of being (the verb being) substantives bearing adjectives, being endowed with values offered to our intentions, are substituted.”53 Through the act of hypostasis, the anonymous ground of existence disappears in favor of forms—such a substitution is constitutive of the arising of a world of positive entities. Forms that emerge from hypostasis, in “concealing” the anonymous ground of being, give a positive and worldly determination to things. Through them, the anonymous verb mutates into participles (positive existents).

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On the contrary, in poetical nomination, because it is no longer designative, such a mutation does not occur. As the “dark background of existence” arises, it leads to the dissolution of worldly forms and positive entities (participles), in favor of the manifestation of the verb (existence without existents) as such. The more the ground of existence disappears, the more we are dealing with positive objects. On the contrary, the more the ground of existence appears, the more things appear as deprived of their positivity—as “unreal,” “fantastic,” and “hallucinatory.” Prose names real things, existents, because hypostasis coincides with the arising of names. Poetical nomination, however, because it is no longer designative, instead unrealizes things. As says Levinas says, through poetry, existents are “overwhelmed” in their position and their positivity. No positive existent, strictly speaking, arises from the undetermined and anonymous materiality of being that poetry reveals. To reveal something, not in its daily and usual form, but instead through its nocturnal materiality, means to loose it as a positive object, as a positive existent. Understood in this way, counter-hypostasis would constitute the truth of Rimbaud’s poetical gesture. Levinas reminds us just how poetical musicality—that is, the verbality of being—can appear. It is not so much a matter of pure sonority, but rather of musicality: “In music sounds resound; in poems vocables, material of the said, no longer yield before what they evoke, but sing with their evocative powers.”54 In poetry, language does not “refer.” Instead, through “rhythm, rhyme, meter, alliteration, etc.,”55 language sings, and its musicality coincides with the manifestation of verbality because of its very gratuity—by the fact that it does not serve the function of naming. By preventing any blunt access to objects, poetry coincides with a long and interminable stay in the thickness of vocables, insofar as they mean and sing at the same time. On that point, Levinas remains faithful to Paul Valéry, whom he references in Otherwise Than Being: “Poetry is a hesitation between sound and meaning.”56 Poetry consists then not in pure sounds, but in the very “hesitation between sound and meaning.” Such poetical hesitation comes from the mysterious ability—the proper genius—of the poet to associate words that have nothing in common between them, with the way that they are objectively associated in our daily experience of the world. And so, if Rimbaud’s reality is “fantastic” and hallucinatory, it is because his poems do not, for example, simply reveal a boat as a positive entity, but rather a “drunken boat” (un bateau ivre). Here we see the way in which the poetic association of words produces lasting ambiguities. In Rimbaud’s poem, it is no longer a “positive boat” that appears to us. Instead, and thanks to the way of associating meanings proper to Rimbaud’s poetical gesture, which reveals the

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musicality of words, that which appears to us when the poet names a boat now becomes a “drunken boat.” Levinas explains that through the poetical gesture, positive entities “collapse into their “materiality.”57 This way of associating words and meanings in a nonobjective order is the very means by which poets do not reveal substantives, but rather things deprived of their substantiality: fantastic and unreal boats, roads, schools, fabrics, and all other realities of our world, which the poem deprives of their familiar ways of appearing. Thus the Rimbaldian poem no longer leads us to the world, but to the exotic and hallucinatory reality of existence without existents that the positive world of existents conceals. In the hallucinatory way of perceiving things entailed by the poem, things appear deprived of their world and their worldly (positive) status. In naming, the poet causes what Levinas calls a “worldless reality, arising from a shattered world,” to appear. Such a poetical way of perceiving the realities of the world without their worldly determination is what Rimbaud calls “hallucination.” Once the verbality of our words is brought to the forefront, the poetical dimension of words no longer leads to the world, but to realities of our world deprived of their worldly truth and coherence (of what Levinas calls their “position and positivity”). For that reason, realities, even familiar ones, become, under the poetical nomination, fully hallucinatory: I grew accustomed to pure hallucination: I saw quite frankly a mosque in place of a factory, a school of drummers made up of angels, carriages on roads in the sky, a parlor at the bottom of the lake, monsters, mysteries. The title of a vaudeville conjured up horrors before me. Then I explained my magic sophisms with the hallucination of words!58

To make appear things “in a night,” as Levinas says, means to make realities appear deprived of their forms—constitutive of the arising of the world as a world of positive entities: the lake, monsters, the parlor, and the like are fantastic realities because they are full of “night.” That is, they are full of indetermination, in the sense of lacking the ontological determination given by their daily forms. This kind of experience, an experience of realities deprived of their world and of their day—thrown by the poet into the fantastic, anonymous, and horrifying element of the night—no longer coincides with the experience of positive existents, but with the experience of “existence without existents.” In order to realize the deductive task that he sets out for himself, Levinas has to overcome standard philosophical ways of naming that always deal with existents, rather than the impersonal existence revealed in poetry. That is also why Levinas constantly quotes poets—Shakespeare, Racine, Baudelaire, Rimbaud,

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Valéry, and Jules Romains, among others—and invents poetical formulas in order to bring to light that which remains hidden to philosophical developments based on names. Of his style of description, Levinas says, “here description would make use of terms while striving to go beyond their consistency.”59 Overcoming the consistency of terms seems to imply poetical intrusions into the very core of philosophical developments. Poetical intrusions into philosophical discourse have a philosophical meaning, since Levinas’s very goal is to describe the arising of existents from anonymous existence through the description of what he calls “hypostasis” in Existence and Existents. It is in this way that we can explain the seeming paradox that is raised by Derrida, and with which we began: If Levinas remains faithful to poetical discourse in spite of his critique of poetry, it is because only poetry is able to accomplish the gesture of overcoming terms described in their consistency and positivity, in order to allow pure existence hidden behind positive existents to appear. As a matter of fact, without such a background in mind, the passage from hypostasis to “Time”—as ethical relation to the Other—would remain completely unintelligible.

BEYOND ANONYMIT Y

For these reasons, however, Levinas’s method is, strictly speaking, no longer phenomenological. This is because, as we have already seen, it must use the poetical resources of language in order to “overcome the consistency of terms used for the description”: “The affirmation of an anonymous vigilance goes beyond the phenomena, which already presupposes an ego, and thus eludes descriptive phenomenology. Here description would make use of terms while striving to go beyond their consistency, it stages personages, while the there is is the dissipation of personages. A method is called for such that thought is invited to go beyond intuition.” 60 Since being is understood as anonymous by Levinas, contra Heidegger, and since existents must be understood to arise from an act of the suspension of the anonymity of being, it is thanks to the prior renewal of Heidegger’s ontological difference that the specific relation to the Other can be fully elucidated in its original dimension. It is indeed because being has been isolated in its anonymity that it becomes possible, as Levinas says, that “in the hypostasis of an instant . . . we can discern the return of the there is.” 61 It is because being in its anonymity is not fully overcome in ipseity, in the solitude of Dasein as being-in-the-world, that the relation to the Other as Other can be presented as providing what the hypostasis of

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the existent in the world is unable to provide: that is, the definitive suspension of the anonymity of being, a definitive liberation of the existent from the anonymity of the verb. In the Heideggerian picture, then, since (1) being is missed in its originary anonymity, (2) the ontological meaning of the existent remains nondeduced (as what results from the suspension of the anonymous kernel of being performed in the “instant”), and finally (3) the relation to the Other cannot be fully discovered in its proper (supra)ontological meaning. That is, it cannot be discovered as something that accomplishes a relation in which the ordeal implied by the verbality of being— its horrifying anonymity—would find its absolute and definitive overcoming. According to Levinas, because Heidegger overlooks anonymity as a radical point of departure of the ontological inquiry, he also misses the relation to the Other in its original supraontological meaning—as the only way to suspend the “there is.”

3 I have attempted to elucidate the seeming paradox of Levinas’s style of writing, as initially identified by Derrida. If Levinas defends prose against poetry it is because discourse, as prose with the Other, is the ultimate way to depart from the anonymity of being. Nevertheless, the escape from anonymity, by discourse as prose, would be unintelligible without poetry. This is because poetry is the exclusive means by which anonymous existence—freed from existents—can be revealed. Insofar as the relation to the Other remains unintelligible without the prior elucidation of the “instant,” such an elucidation requires an approach to the “there is”—which comprises the two central aspects of Levinas’s philosophy: 1. First, a continuous reflection on poetry as the fundamental locus of revelation of the verb to be; “in other words a philosophy of poetry.” 2. Second, a poetization of philosophy, by the poetization of his philosophical writing. In Levinas, this takes either the form of references to poetic works or the more direct form of a lyric and metaphorical way of writing philosophy, proper to Levinas in order to allow for the appearance of the verbality of being—the “there is”—beyond “personnages.” This prior ontological disposal is required in order to open the path to ethics as the ultimate step in the process of the subjectivation of the subject, insofar as ethics coincides with an interpersonal discursive relationship, where the face of the Other reveals the Other in its absolute Otherness, in a univocal way through the suspension of the proliferation of equivocities produced by the verbality of

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words—where no personal face, no positive Infinite, can present itself: “Society with the Other marks the end of the absurd rumbling of the there is.” 62 In this sense, the Other can present herself as Other only in discourse by virtue of the fact that the discourse breaks with anonymity, which means, necessarily, with the verbality of words. In other words, she can do so only if language is able to break with verbality as the poetical kernel of language. If language remains overdetermined by both its verbality and its poetical ambiguities, prose breaks with the dissimulation of interlocutors entailed by the equivocities produced by verbality. Here, because personal initiative is replaced by artificial roles, personal existence and subjectivity are dissolved into an anonymous—third-person—drama.63 Nevertheless, this last point raises a fundamental and unavoidable question: if Levinas claims that language per se is verbal, constitutively verbal, and then necessarily poetical, and that it is through verbs that it opens the path to anonymous being (precisely by disrupting existents in their positivity), then we can ask whether or not it is possible to easily base the ethical relationship, as an interpersonal relationship, on language. In other words, how could language both lead the il y a and allow for the pure univocal expressive presence of the Other, without any further difficulties? Language is able to reveal and to open the path to a personal existent, the Other, only if prose is able to entirely suspend the verbality of language—and this is ultimately Levinas’s claim. Is an absolute suspension of the verbality of language possible, without loosing it as language—and therefore as ethical?

Notes 1. 2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

For Laurent Villevieille Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Writing and Difference (London: Routledge, 2001), 312n7. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Duquesne Studies Philosophical Series (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 203. Emmanuel Levinas, Œuvres Complètes, vol.  3, Eros, Littérature et Philosophie (Paris: Imec-Grasset, 2013). Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 2010), 145. Note that the first occurrence of the expression “ontological difference” occurs not in Being and Time but in the course The Fundamental Problems of Phenomenology, given in 1927. Emmanuel Levinas and Philippe Nemo, Ethics and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 38.

158 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

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Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001), 3. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, or, Beyond Essence (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 23. Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, and Additional Essays, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 48. Levinas, 47. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, xli. Levinas, 23. Levinas, 23. Levinas, 34, translation modified. Levinas, 35. Levinas, 42. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 28, emphasis added. Levinas, Existence and Existents, 1. Keeping in mind Heidegger’s claim that “only as phenomenology, is ontology possible.” Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), §7, p. 60. Levinas, Time and the Other, 24. Levinas, Existence and Existents, 2. Levinas, 2. Levinas, 63. Levinas, 2. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 27. Cf. Heidegger, Being and Time, §9. Levinas, Time and the Other, 45. Levinas, Existence and Existents, 52. Levinas, 83. Levinas, 83. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 43. Levinas, Existence and Existents, 3. Levinas, 82, translation modified. Levinas, 3. Levinas, 3. Levinas, 51. Levinas, 82. Levinas, 54. Levinas, 51. Levinas, 47. Levinas, 47. Levinas, 47. Levinas, 47. Levinas, 48. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 40. Levinas, xli.

Lev i na s a n d t h e P o et i c a l T u r n   o f   B ei n g 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

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Levinas, 39. Levinas, 40. Levinas, 40. Levinas, Existence and Existents, 54. Levinas, 54. Levinas, 103. Levinas, 27. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 40. Levinas, Existence and Existents, 48. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 189. Levinas, Existence and Existents, 54. Arthur Rimbaud, “ ‘Delirium,’ in ‘A Season in Hell’ (Une saison en enfer [1873]),” in Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters: A Bilingual Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 289. Levinas, Existence and Existents, 63. Levinas, 63, translation modified. Levinas, 121. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 261. Levinas, 202.

11 The Intoxicated Conversation Maurice Blanchot and the Poetics of Critical Masks Daniel Rosenberg Nutters and Daniel T. O’Hara

We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art. —Henry James, “The Middle Years”

T

he title of Maurice Blanchot’s collection The Infinite Conversation, published in 1969, brings to mind a famous moment from another mid-century literary theorist and critic, Kenneth Burke, whose understanding of language’s construction of reality as an “ ‘unending conversation’ that is going on . . . in history” oddly enough complements and clarifies the work of the avant-garde Frenchman.1 Burke describes this conversation as follows: Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your

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ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.2

How might imagining Maurice Blanchot as Burke’s interlocutor reshape this eloquent analogy? (And note that my use of the nominal “Maurice Blanchot” refers to the body of writing that appears under that name.) More importantly, how might putting into play this hypothetical conversation clarify not only Blanchot’s thought, but also particular assumptions innate to the practice of literary criticism? As peculiar as the juxtaposition of these two thinkers might be, the underlying premise of this essay is that picturing Blanchot and Burke as both allies and opponents in this imaginative scene can illuminate the political potential, creative vitality, and ethical importance of teaching and writing about literature. In a historical moment where criticism as a genre narrows, ever more becoming a form of pseudoscientific research, where academic jeremiads foster this divide by questioning the importance of the humanities and literature in their effort to ground new methodologies, scholarly techniques, and professional trends, linking such outlandishly different critics as Blanchot and Burke presents the opportunity to return criticism to the artistic playfulness in which it originally emerged. Just as Blanchot puts Orpheus, James, and many others into play in his essays (as does Burke), we turn to both critics to describe via the poetics of masks what the futures of our and more importantly the human imagination just may be at this time. Let us return then to Burke’s metaphor and propose the following: if Blanchot enters Burke’s conversation then he surely arrives to the party quite late and drunk. Burke’s scene of history, if it includes such a writerly writer as Maurice Blanchot, becomes an infinite inebriated conversation. Why is this so? Though we will return to Burke in due course, the epigraph to this essay from Henry James invites us to explore Blanchot’s understanding of the creative process as it pertains to madness and drunkenness as topoi of our modern condition. “The Middle Years” tells the story of Dencombe, a novelist who, fearful for the end of his life, arrives at a seaside resort and receives a copy of his latest work, also titled The Middle Years. When he receives this book, “his ‘latest,’ perhaps his last,” Dencombe glances at its cover, smells its pages, “but for the moment he went no further—he had become conscious of a strange alienation. He had forgotten what his book was about. Had the assault of his old ailment, which he had so fallaciously come to Bournemouth to ward off, interposed utter blankness as to what had preceded it?”3 For any reader of Blanchot, and James for that matter, it is clear that the “utter blankness” of memory that

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Dencombe experiences when looking at his new book and reflecting on its composition is not an “assault of his old ailment.” The “strange alienation” that comes over this sickly novelist is the “alien reality” that a piece of writing assumes as it comes into being, its “public” existence.4 “The book, the written thing,” Blanchot tells us, “enters the world and carries out its work of transformation and negation” (LRD 314) and in the case of Dencombe, like all writerly writers, it is the authorial self that the text negates. James expresses this feeling of negation in terms remarkably reminiscent of Blanchot: His [Dencombe’s] subject had already gone from him, leaving scarcely a superstition behind. He uttered a low moan as he breathed the chill of this dark void so desperately it seemed to represent the completion of a sinister process. The tears filled his mild eyes; something precious had passed away. This was the pang that had been sharpest during the last few years—the sense of ebbing time, of shrinking opportunity; and now he felt not so much that his last chance was going as that it was gone indeed. He had done all that he should ever do, and yet he had not done what he wanted. This was the laceration—that practically his career was over: it was as violent as a rough hand at his throat. He rose from his seat nervously, like a creature hunted by a dread; then he fell back in his weakness and nervously opened his book. (MY 213)

The unrecoverable loss that Dencombe feels, a feeling of total expenditure, is not simply the sense of an impending death, old age, or the absolute limits of mortality. Rather the mere appearance of the closed book suggests the image of a deformed self that, standing before its destructor as the ghost of the former, reminds the latter of its unfulfilled desire: echoes of Spencer Brydon’s mutilated ghost in “The Jolly Corner” to be sure. “The writer who writes a work,” suggests Blanchot, “eliminates himself as he writes that work and at the same time affirms himself in it” (LRD 340). What the book affirms, for Dencombe, is the totality of his authorial vision in its full, alienated majesty. But just as a glance at the finished form of the book is a glance at his own disembodied self, it is also a realization that the act of writing, the act of self-becoming, is complete. This is the “laceration” that his glance opens up; it is the wound inflicted by language as  it seeks to name an identity; it is the death experienced as consciousness emerges into self-consciousness via Hegelian negation. We witness Dencombe breathe “the chill of this dark void so desperately it seemed to represent the completion of a sinister process. The tears filled his mild eyes; something precious

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had passed away.” And when this happens, Blanchot’s understanding of the act of writing tells us how we must interpret those lines: “As one realizes the void, one creates a work, and the work born of fidelity to death, is in the end no longer capable of dying; and all it brings to the person who was trying to prepare an unstoried death for himself is the mockery of immorality” (LRD 340). The “sinister process” might as well be the sinister laugh of death, emanating from the void the book occupies, as it glances back on its author to declare, in a mocking gesture, that its unworldly existence will eradicate any sublime aspirations. But when Dencombe begins to read he becomes “pacified and reassured. Everything came back to him . . . with a wonder . . . with a high and magnificent beauty. He read his own prose . . . and had, as he sat there with the spring of sunshine on the page, an emotion peculiar and intense. His career was over, no doubt, but it was over, after all, with that” (MY 213). The opening of the wound, the “laceration,” animates or bestows life upon the “dark void.” For Blanchot, reading is the act of coming into contact with the work’s origin, its creative generative moment, which thus transforms the reader into a maker himself. However, although “the reader . . . become[s] an author in reverse . . . the true reader does not rewrite the book.”5 This does not seem to be the case for Dencombe. “In his surprised enjoyment of this ability” to recognize himself in his own work of art, Dencombe believes that he has gained “a glimpse of a possible reprieve” (MY 213). In a seeming departure from Blanchot, James writes: The result produced in his little book was somehow a result beyond his conscious intention: it was as if he had planted his genius, had trusted his method, and they had grown up and flowered with this sweetness. If the achievement had been real, however, the process had been manful enough. What he saw so intensely to-day, what he felt as a nail driven in, was that only now, at the very last, had he come into possession. His development had been abnormally slow, almost grotesquely gradual. He had been hindered and retarded by experience, and for long periods had only groped his way. It had taken too much of his life to produce too little art. The art had come, but it had come after everything else. At such a rate a first existence was too short—long enough only to collect material; so that to fructify, to use the material, one must have a second age, an extension. This extension was what poor Dencombe sighed for. As he turned the last leaves of the volume he murmured “Ah for another go!—ah for a better chance!” (MY 214)

At first, the “reprieve” that Dencombe seems to find in his book, in marked contrast to Blanchot, is its revelation of “his genius” all “grown up and flowered

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with sweetness.” Yet as this “achievement” becomes illusory, the resulting doubts emerge not from Dencombe’s art itself, the “dark void” of the text, but because he believes he failed to sacrifice enough. His entire life, in other words, was spent “collect[ing] material” and not making use of that material. What mocks him, this passage would lead us to believe, is not the text itself, but his knowledge that artistic perfection is impossible in a life so short. “The Middle Years” would seem to espouse a clichéd existential theme familiar not just to James, but too much of the post-Romantic tradition’s emphasis on belatedness, where the artist, suffering from his own mortality, yearns for an extension or a redo. Of course, after Dencombe loses consciousness and awakens in the infirmary, his friend and admirer Doctor Hugh discovers: “ ‘I see you’ve been altering the text!’ Dencombe was a passionate corrector, a fingerer of style; the last thing he ever arrived at was a form final for himself. His ideal would have been to publish secretly, and then, on the published text, treat himself to the terrified revise” (MY 219). In irony characteristic of much of James’s writing, the entire revelation of Dencombe’s pacifying reading occurred under the auspices of his textual revisions. If, as we saw, Dencombe’s self-consciousness emerges from his gaze into the internal void represented in his own creative work, the glance at the book being akin to the glance of death, then reading is not salutary, it exacerbates that original “pang.” In other words, the act of reading brings the reader into close proximity with the work’s origin, but it is an agonistic experience. As Blanchot puts it, “it is as if this divisive void which, in the course of the genesis, is now the abyss where the work subsides, now the soaring energy by which it comes to light, now that empty violence where everything repeats eternally but then again the search from which everything begins” (SL 203). The emergence of the “void” is an eternally recurring phenomenon whose only respite is the act of writing. Although Dencombe is the author of the book, his process of reading does not cure the laceration inflicted by the work after it reveals to him his alienated self. “The incessant experience of the origin,” which occurs when we read, “is the condition of its being, and also that the antagonistic violence due to which it was, in the course of its genesis, the opposition of its contrary moments, is not just a feature of this genesis, but belongs to the character of agonistic struggle which is the character of the work’s very being” (SL 204). Dencombe does not retrieve his alienated self in the act of reading, in the act of coming into contact with the origin of the work; rather, he reexperiences the very violence that annihilated his authority over the work and authorial self in the first place. He comes into contact with the otherness of the literary text that, even though he once wrote its words, interrupts his subjectivity in a similar fashion to his act of writing. As Donald Marshall explains: “The author cannot

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reread his work as author, for this would mean re-opening the space of writing, revising, adding to, or subtracting from the work (as Blanchot himself did with the second version of Thomas l’Obscur).” 6 If Dencombe is a virtual gestalt for Henry James, and the fictional novel’s title, replicating both the short story’s title as well as the final installment of James’s memoir, would suggest as much, then such an uncanny “play of representational values,” a hallmark of James’s criticism, makes him a peculiar precursor to Blanchot.7 When Doctor Hugh tells Dencombe that he is a great success the author responds with the famous lines that mark this essay’s epigraph: “We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.” Here we have the essence—if we can say as much—of Blanchot’s thought. The writer caught in a paradox. He must write himself into existence even though that very act is an act of self-annihilation. He can read in an effort to recuperate that “incessant experience of the origin,” but such an effort only repeats the cycle as the origin appears as what is forever lost. This is the darkness of the night in which Dencombe, Blanchot, and all of us “work.” Blanchot’s novella Thomas the Obscure eloquently synopsizes such an existential predicament: I discover my being in the vertiginous abyss where it is not, an absence where it sets itself like a god. I am not and I endure. An inexorable future stretches forth infinitely for this suppressed being. Hope turns in fear against time which drags it forward. All feelings gush out of themselves and come together, destroyed, abolished, in this feeling which molds me, makes me and unmakes me, causes me to feel, hideously, in a total absence of feeling, my reality in shape of nothingness. A feeling which has to be given a name and which I call anguish. Here is the night. The darkness hides nothing.8

What we experience here in Blanchot is the madness of art.9 Reading this text, we discover ourselves in the darkness that exacerbates doubt as our hope becomes fear. However, as the purposeful and necessary repetitive nature of Blanchot’s writing suggests, this doubt, fear, and “feeling” of “a total absence of feeling” become the passion, a writerly mission, and an art that is the only tonic we have on that toxic journey into “an inexorable future.” According to Geoffrey Hartman, “the myth [that] Blanchot chooses to relate most directly [to this] passion of the artist is that of Orpheus and Eurydice.”10 By turning to this myth, Blanchot allegorizes how the writer “discover[s] my being in the vertiginous abyss where it is not” or, in terms of James’s story, the burden Dencombe assumes as he peers into his newly published book. Eurydice,

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as Blanchot reimagines the myth, is the object that Orpheus, the poet or writer, desires but loses prematurely. His pursuit of her into the Underworld complements the understanding that the act of writing is an act of discovering the truth of the self only in the land of death. But because Orpheus is only able to reunite with his lover by refusing to look at her, such self-discovery can only be tentatively affirmed or, if attained at all, attained indirectly. The lost object of desire might be pursued but it requires the quester to submit to his own death and then, even after that, the object can never be fully present, directly faced. “But,” as Blanchot explains, “that forbidden movement,” or looking at Eurydice, “is precisely what Orpheus must accomplish in order to carry the work beyond what assures it. It is what he cannot accomplish except by forgetting the work, seduced by a desire that comes to him from the night, and that is linked to night as to its origin. In his gaze, the work is lost. This look is the only moment in which the work is absolutely lost” (SL 174). Orpheus, in other words, desires full presence, full self-realization, or absolute immediacy, but he knows that he must transgress via a “forbidden movement” to fulfill his desires. Yet in his uncanny rereading of the myth, Blanchot suggests that in order to accomplish this goal, Orpheus must actually “forget the work” and allow himself to be “seduced,” not by his object of desire, but “by a desire that comes to him from the night and that is linked to the night as to its origin.” The dream of full self-realization is thus “the nostalgic return to the uncertainty of the origin” (SL 174) whereby the work—presence, truth, identity—must be sacrificed. In a bitter irony, for Orpheus to attain the work he must annihilate it in the process of giving. The result of his gaze is that “something more important than the work, more bereft of importance than the work, announces and affirms itself. The work is everything to Orpheus except that desired look where it is lost. Thus it is only in that look that the work can surpass itself, be united with its origin and consecrated in impossibility” (SL 174). The truth of writing matters insofar as it enables us to access the empty void, the “origin,” that lies behind it. In the failure of “that desired look” Orpheus can “be united with its origin” in the darkness of the night. This ironic scenario is, for Blanchot, the space of literature, what he will also call the neuter or the limit experience. Orpheus is able to step beyond, go outside, or transgress the limits of intelligibility only through language and literature’s singular experience. His gaze is “the extreme moment of liberty, the moment when [Orpheus] frees himself from himself and, still more important, frees the work from his concern” (175). In this regard, the space of literature enables the writer to gain an autonomous subjectivity only in the act of annihilating it. Because such a paradox is the raison d’etre for the act of writing, it is why we write, why we must continue to write and, “still more important,” dwell

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in this space or abyss where communication with absolute otherness might become possible. In what would seem like an uncanny anticipation of Blanchot, Kenneth Burke tells us: The story of Orpheus and his voyage to Hades has much to tell us about the ways of poetry. But a still more basic myth . . . is that of Perseus and the Medusa—Perseus who could not face the serpent-headed monster without being turned to stone, but was immune to this danger if he observed it by reflection in a mirror. The poet’s style, his form[,] . . . is this mirror, enabling him to confront the risk, but by the protection of an indirect reflection.11

In contrast to Blanchot’s conception of language as utter loss, Burke posits language in terms of indirect reflection and both, despite their difference, would seem to encompass two of the canonical understandings of language in twentieth-century literary scholarship (the third being a rote notion of clear and present meaning). More than mere theory, however, Blanchot’s use of Orpheus emphasizes the experiential dimension of language while Burke’s focus on rhetoric draws our attention to language as a shaping force in the world, what he calls symbolic action or language’s dramatistic attitude. But when Burke brings the myth of Perseus into the equation, he further sheds light on Blanchot’s thinking. The Perseus that we see here is not the same figure famously described by Geoffrey Hartman. That Perseus, the modern poet, wants to look directly at Medusa but is aware that his glance will turn him to stone. Unlike Blanchot’s Orpheus, Hartman’s Perseus fears and seeks to avoid death and thereby enlists the help of his mirror-shield. The modern poet, from Wordsworth through Rilke, might desire, like Perseus and Orpheus, to gain unrestricted access to the face of a betrothed (Eurydice) or an enemy (Medusa) but he instead repeatedly encounters language’s mediating effects.12 Blanchot would have us think that only in the experience of mediation can the poet gain access to the space of literature and it is for this reason that Hartman sees him as a kind of continuation, or rather fulfillment, of the Romantic tradition of anti-self-consciousness theories.13 Blanchot’s view of language seems to resemble what Burke calls a “ ‘scientistic’ approach [which] begins with questions of naming, or definition.”14 That is, the attempt to gain immediacy or identity is akin to the act of naming the self or using language to define the world. We can recall, in this manner, that Blanchot repeatedly comes back to language’s negation of the very object it seeks to represent: “to name a cat is, if you like, to make it a non-cat, a cat that has ceased to

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exist, has ceased to be a living cat” (LRD 325). Burke, on the other hand, focuses on “language as act” that performs representational work in the world, beyond its epistemological shortcomings.15 The Perseus myth, thus as he reads, is appropriate in this endeavor as this hero does not truly want to see Medusa as a scientistic use of language would have it, one where Perseus wants to name the Gorgon via his direct glance. Rather Perseus is concerned with survival, slaying the master, and acting to fulfill his historical (as opposed to existential and figurative) task. The mirror-shield is not a vehicle of self-discovery (as in Hartman) or an ontological quest for certainty (as in Blanchot), but a literal weapon that can help him overcome his specific challenge. Perseus, for Burke, is not quite a poet feeling the exigent demand of writing, but something like a bureaucrat who engages in “language, as a value of practical exchange, [some]one [who] . . . tend[s] toward action.”16 Whether or not Kenneth Burke allows for Blanchot’s understanding of language as negation is not our concern here.17 Rather, putting these two thinkers into a dialogue illuminates how Blanchot is able to accommodate, and put into play, both a scientistic and dramatistic theory of language. We see this in his often-repeated use of the Lazarus myth: “The language of literature is a search for this moment which precedes literature. Literature usually calls it existence; it wants the cat as it exists. . . . [It wants] Lazarus in the tomb and not Lazarus brought back into the daylight, the one who smells bad, who is Evil, Lazarus lost and not Lazarus saved and brought back to life” (LRD 327). The “search for this [originating] moment” is the scientistic use of language that seeks, in the act of naming the cat, to access its “existence.” But as language names, to turn to Blanchot’s final example, it brings to life, resurrects, or animates—prosopopeia—neither the actual cat nor Lazarus. The Lazarus sought remains “in the tomb” and always, forever, “lost.” But this does not mean that nothing is “brought back to life.” The act of writing contains within it a dramatistic use of language. Not getting the Lazarus desired, we summon his ghost, trace, or spectral form: But what does this Lazarus saved and raised from the dead that you hold to me have to do with what is lying there and makes you draw back, the anonymous corruption of the tomb, the lost Lazarus who already smells bad and not the one restored to life by a force that is no doubt admirable, but that is precisely a force that comes in this decision from death itself? But which death? That death comprehended, deprived of itself, become pure privative essence, pure negation; the death that, in the appropriated refusal that it constitutes itself, affirms itself as a power of being, and as through which everything is

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determined, everything unfolds as possibility. And perhaps this is indeed the true death; death become the movement of truth. But how can one not sense that in this veritable death, the death without truth has slipped away: what death is irreducible to the true, to all disclosure, what never reveals itself, hides or appears? And, certainly, when I speak, I recognize very well that there is speech only because what “is” has disappeared in what names it, struck with death so as to become the reality of the name; the life of this death—this is indeed what the most ordinary speech is admirably, as is the speech of the concept at a higher level. But the fact remains—and this is what it would be blindness to forget and weakness to accept—that what “is” has in effect disappeared: something was there that is there no longer. How can I find it again, how can I, in my speech, recapture this prior presence that I must exclude in order to speak, in order to speak it? And here we will evoke the eternal torment of our language when its longing turns back toward what it always misses, through the necessity under which it labors of being the lack of what it would say.18

The questions posed toward the end of this passage, a passage that encapsulates Blanchot’s thinking, are the essential questions that arise from literature. Something emerges from language because “literature is divided into two slopes” (LRD 332). On the one hand, “Lazarus saved and raised from the dead” is the “first slope” or what we call “meaningful prose” or the language that “everyone speaks” (LRD 332). On the other hand, as speech attempts to convey meaning, “art feels it is madness to think that in each word something is completely present through the absence that determines it, and so art sets off in a quest of language that can recapture this absence itself and represent the endless movement of comprehension” (LRD 332–33). The Lazarus we get, the Lazarus we name, is not the Lazarus we want, the Lazarus that is. This is the “quest of language” and its “eternal torment.” As the imagery in the lengthy passage quoted suggests, Blanchot would arrive at Burke’s party, if we take the metaphor literally, drunk. In making this claim we do not mean to trivialize the ethical stakes of Blanchot’s thinking, which take shape throughout The Infinite Conversation’s highly experimental, fragmentary, conversational writings and dialogues. But if the limit experience “is a movement of contestation that traverses all of history” (IC 204) and takes place within Burke’s “unending conversation” of history reimagined as Blanchot’s infinite conversation with an unapproachable other, then it seems accurate to say that our use of language as the representational tool that constructs our reality and our knowledge of history is one that overwhelms us as it continually refuses to satisfy our desires. Recalling the avant-garde artist’s cultivation of

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customs, norms, practices, and behaviors that stand in opposition to the traditional society—Coleridge or de Quincy’s love of opium, for example, or the relationship between the poetic vision and psychedelic experience—Blanchot’s understanding of language imagines us always in this state of bewilderedness, reaching out in the night and trying to grasp something that disappears as we turn our glance its way. We could go as far as to say that the conversation of history is a conversation that always occurs in the dark, where language takes on an agency of its own exceeding our capacity to contain and use it with purpose. Blanchot would argue that the space that this intoxication engenders provides an ironic ground for ethical activity, a space where the anonymity of our language enables us to experience a particular relation to otherness. However, this singular experience cannot account for the literal effects, or attitudes, that our language produces in the world. In other words, if the space of literature presages an ethical community, each time we put in our “oar” to the infinite conversation we are liable to do more harm than good. Putting Blanchot into such a limited conversation with Burke allows us to emphasize the second slope of language, or the Lazarus that we resurrect. Blanchot focuses on the space of literature in terms of our recognition of the discrepancy between the Lazarus brought back to life and the rotting body in the tomb. But what happens to that Lazarus brought into the world? In what way does he haunt our every action? Is he, as we are suggesting through the metaphor of drunkenness, a poltergeist that shapes history and our world through random occurrences and destructive acts? One way to answer this question is think about the legacy of Blanchot in the academy. While the work of Derrida clearly, and most visibly, carries on this tradition of thinking, Barbara Johnson reminds us that “as soon as any radically innovative thought becomes an ism, its specific groundbreaking force diminishes, its historical notoriety increases, and its disciples tend to become more simplistic, more dogmatic, and ultimately more conservative, at which time its power becomes institutional rather than analytical.”19 The fact that Johnson refers primarily to the work of Derrida and de Man and not Blanchot suggests how deconstruction, as an “ism,” is the appropriation of a kind of thinking and living that prohibit systematization. The extent to which Derrida’s writings continue the work of Blanchot is a matter for debate, but how many other academic henchmen see their acts of writing in similar terms? In fact, does one’s very existence in a university assume a position of power and authority (if tenured) that requires self-promotion and glorification (for institutional prestige) and preclude Blanchot’s thought and espousal of anonymity? Does being faithful to Blanchot require us to live a life like Baudelaire? When Blanchot puts in his

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“oar” and drunkenly steps into the parlor of history, does he find himself in the morning on the professional lecture circuit? Another way to think about the worldly affects of language is to recall the Perseus imagined by Burke (the bureaucrat or man of action) and by Hartman (the modern poet or visionary quester). Might they be joined, say, through the literalization of Shelley’s image of the legislating poet? If one of the goals of this essay is to juxtapose divergent figure—Blanchot, Burke, and James—then an additional writer, Geoffrey Hartman, provides the ground for such comparisons. His refutation of the Arnoldian thesis in Criticism and the Wilderness, where he argues that criticism is an extension of art rather than its savior, allows us to see a novelist like James as a philosopher-poet or Blanchot and Burke as theorizing their own critical poetics.20 In addition, emphasizing style as the central attribute of criticism’s artistic value enables Hartman to respond throughout his career to the following question: “Can art give a law to politics?” 21 The “New Perseus” of The Unmediated Vision is the modern poet who seeks to evade linguistic mediation and achieve “Pure Representation.” The social relevance of the poet’s desires becomes ostensible in “The Voice in the Shuttle,” where Hartman theorizes language’s capacity to convey truth, as well as in his later work on trauma studies, psychoaesthetics, and the Philomela project.22 Similarly, Hartman’s thought takes on a historical dimension when he turns to Wallace Stevens and asks: “Can history-writing . . . become a new medium—a supreme fiction which does not reduce being but defines a thing sharply in the ‘difficulty of what it is to be?’ ” 23 Yet what interrupts Hartman’s bid (following his New Perseus) to discover an adequate fiction, a supreme poetics of healing, is the reproduction of an incurable linguistic wound that inevitably emerges from the effort to achieve pure representation or transcend the temporal irony of historical existence. It is the intransigence of language that forces critics, like Hartman, Blanchot, or James and his Dencombe, to return incessantly to the space of literature and begin their quests anew. Hartman describes this revisionary scenario in terms of the catastrophe theory of creation: the hallmark of Romantic poetics in the visionary tradition that includes, among others, the Kantian sublime, Wordsworth’s abyss of imagination, Freudian sublimation, Yeats’s terrible beauty, Conrad’s destructive element, and Badiou’s theory of the truth-event. Whether the writer aspires toward transcendence (i.e., the Apollonian dream of harmony or the idealist aesthetic education latent in many Romantic poets) only to recognize his historical finitude and belatedness, or yearns for a form of transgression (i.e., the deidealizing Dionysian dimension of modernism that begins with Flaubert and Baudelaire and moves through Bataille, Blanchot, and Beckett) even though he remains

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unable to produce the ultimate sacrifice, the need for revision always emerges in relation to an insurmountable limit. The inability to transcend or transgress fully necessitates revision and, in turn, yields art’s worldly affects. For example, Burke’s thought, like that of Blanchot, shatters idols. His dramatistic criticism is a self-revising grammar and rhetoric of motives that parody efforts at systematization; symbolic action, writes Hartman, is “a repetition that makes us aware of a common, even vulgar, hence comic, rage for order.” 24 It is in this context, we believe, that he might be read alongside Blanchot, a critic who, like the other writers discussed and alluded to throughout this essay, produces “great art [that] is radical . . . [because it] slanders an established order, good or bad, by not conforming. Its very existence is often a resistance.” 25 While there is no escape from hierarchy—what Blanchot calls “the world . . . [of] subordination to ends, to measured proportion, to seriousness, to order . . . [via] science, technology, the state . . . [and] significance, stable values, the idea of the Good and the True” (SL 216)—it would seem that we must deal with this world every time we put our pen down, seize it to write, and leave the space of literature. It is because the exigency of writing cannot be sustained forever that we must pay careful attention, following Burke, to the ghost of Lazarus that we resurrect. But this does not preclude complementing that knowledge with an ethical stance embodied in the world of “Art[,] . . . [a] world turned upside down [via] insubordination, disproportion, frivolity, ignorance, evil, non-sense” (SL 216). “All this,” Blanchot continues, “belongs to art: a wide domain, and one to which art lays claim. What entitles it to do so? It has no title, nor can it have any, nor does nothing authorize it. It speaks of the heart, of irreducible existence” (SL 216–17). If our experience of language makes us insubordinate, disproportionate, frivolous, ignorant, evil, nonsensical, or drunk, we should still take care, while attending Burke’s party, to be drunk on our best behavior, lest we forget whether we are Orpheus, Eurydice, Perseus, or, worse yet, Medusa and succumb to the “madness of art.”

Notes 1. 2. 3.

Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1941), 110. Burke, 110–11. Henry James, “The Middle Years,” in Tales of Henry James, ed. Christof Wegelin and Henry B. Wonham (New York: Norton, 2004), 212–13. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as MY.

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5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

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Maurice Blanchot, “Literature and the Right to Death,” in The Work of Fire, trans. Lydia Davis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 306. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as LRD. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 203. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as SL. Donald G. Marshall, “History, Theory, and Influence: Yale Critics as Readers of Maurice Blanchot,” in The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America, ed. Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich, and Wallace Martin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 148. Henry James, The Art of the Novel, ed. R. P. Blackmur (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 349. For a more extended discussion of James and Blanchot, see Daniel Rosenberg Nutters, “The Madness of the Master: Henry James and Maurice Blanchot at the Limit,” Henry James Review 37, no. 4 (2016): 261–73. Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure, trans. Robert Lamberton (New York: Station Hill, 1973), 104. Blanchot directly references the phrase “the madness of art” in a short essay that studies James’s creative practice by examining the germ for The Turn of the Screw. See Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). Geoffrey Hartman, “The Fulness of Nothingness of Literature,” Yale French Studies 16 (1955): 70. Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 63. See Geoffrey Hartman, The Unmediated Vision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954). In addition to Hartman’s and Marshall’s essays already cited, see Geoffrey Hartman, “Maurice Blanchot: Philosopher-Novelist,” in Beyond Formalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 93–110. Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 44. Burke, 44. Maurice Blanchot, “Poetry and Language,” in Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 137. We should note that Burke does not seem to repudiate the kind of thought we see in Blanchot but simply has other interests. See the essay “Poetics in Particular, Language in General” and note Burke’s use of Edgar Allan Poe, surely a precursor to Blanchot, in Language as Symbolic Action. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 35–36. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as IC. Barbara Johnson, The World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 11. See Geoffrey Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980). Geoffrey Hartman, Scars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against Inauthenticity (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 219.

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23. 24. 25.

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See Geoffrey Hartman, “The Voice in the Shuttle,” in Beyond Formalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 337–55. On the Philomela project, see Geoffrey Hartman, Minor Prophecies: The Literary Essay in the Culture Wars (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). Geoffrey Hartman, The Fate of Reading (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 105. Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness, 94. Hartman, 98.

12 Merleau-Ponty, Ponge, and Valéry on Speaking Things Phenomenology and Poetry Galen Johnson

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acing execution at his trial on capital charges in ancient Athens, Socrates disputed the wisdom of artists and poets. “I went to the poets,” he recounts, “the writers of tragedies and dithyrambs.” He took up with them their very best poems and asked them what they meant. “I  am ashamed to tell you the truth, gentlemen, but I must. Almost all the bystanders might have explained the poems better to me than their authors could.” He concludes that the poets composed from inspiration, like seers and prophets, without any understanding or knowledge. So Socrates withdrew from the poets thinking he had an “advantage” over them.1 Of this account, in his essay “My Creative Methods,” the French poet Francis Ponge wrote: What emerges from the foregoing, if not (my apologies) considerable silliness on Socrates’ part? What an idea to ask a poet what he meant! And is it not obvious that if he is the only one unable to explain it, it is because he can only say what he said the way he said it (otherwise he would probably have said it differently)? From this I also gain the certainty of Socrates’ inferiority to the poets and artists, not his superiority.2

Thus, is joined in modern times—with the word silliness (une certaine sottise)— the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy. Later in the same essay, Ponge elaborates less dismissively: “Poems, not to be explained (Socrates). . . . Superiority so long as they [poets] do not think themselves superior in anything but their poetry. . . . If I define a butterfly as a twice-spawned petal (pétale superfétatoire), what could be truer?” (VT 103/M 37).3

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Merleau-Ponty read and cited Ponge throughout his writings. Thus is also joined the dispute between the majority (Socratic) tradition of philosophy and Merleau-Ponty’s “minority philosophy” or even “a-philosophy,” as he once called it,4 in which the tasks of philosophy are linked in a partnership with the poets and artists. Near the beginning of Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre, the preface to Phenomenology of Perception (1945) ends by joining philosophy precisely with both modern literature and modern painting: “Phenomenology is as painstaking as the works of Balzac, Proust, Valéry, or Cézanne—through the same kind of attention and wonder, the same demand for awareness, the same will to grasp the sense of the world or of history in its nascent state. As such phenomenology merges with the effort of modern thought.”5 Merleau-Ponty blended not only Balzac, Proust, and Valéry with phenomenology but many more: Stendhal, Paul Claudel, Claude Simon, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Breton, Mallarmé, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Francis Ponge, to give an incomplete list. In “Metaphysics and the Novel,” Merleau-Ponty emphasized: “From now on the tasks of literature and philosophy can no longer be separated.” 6 This means that, rather than a merely analogous but independent development occurring in modern poetry and philosophy, more strongly, Merleau-Ponty turns to and depends upon Ponge and other poets, especially Valéry, to develop his philosophical thought. In this essay, I will look in more depth into Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation and deployment of the poetry and poetics of Francis Ponge in his philosophy. We will also be able to say a few words about Merleau-Ponty and Paul Valéry along the way and especially in the conclusion.

MERLEAU- PONT Y AND PONGE POETRY: SPEAKING THINGS

Like Ponge’s critique of the Socratic demand for explanation from the poets, Merleau-Ponty argues that the task of philosophy is not explaining the world, not creating a system of causes and ends or giving reasons why things are as they are; rather, a phenomenological philosophy formulates an experience of the world, evokes our contact with the world too often overlooked, passed by, or forgotten. Philosophy “points at” the world and “points out” things and philosophical expression has the same ambiguities as literary expression (SNS 28/49). “Pointing at” things has the meaning of pointing with one’s finger (montré du doigt) and has the sense of showing or monstration, demonstration.7 MerleauPonty writes like a poet himself regarding the whistle of a locomotive in the night, the silence of a country house, the odors of its shrubbery and the sounds

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of the birds, and an old jacket lying on a chair (SNS 28–29/50). The ontology of his later philosophy introduces concepts such as chiasm, reversibility, écart (gap, difference), flesh, and element, concepts that themselves read like poetic metaphors, all the while Merleau-Ponty urges us to take them literally (à la lettre). To speak of a “flesh of things,” Merleau-Ponty writes, “is no analogy or vague comparison and must be taken literally [doit être pris à la lettre]” (VI 133/175). Merleau-Ponty speaks of Ponge in his Sorbonne lectures on child pedagogy and psychology and his radiophonique addresses of 1948, subsequently published as The World of Perception (Causeries), and he writes of Ponge in his essay “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” (1951–52) and “Man and Adversity” (1951), both published in Signs. These sources are all concentrated in the middle period of his philosophy in between Phenomenology of Perception (1945) and The Visible and the Invisible (1961, 1964). The key concepts Merleau-Ponty develops on the basis of the poetry and poetics of Ponge are “semantic thickness (density),” the thing as “complex,” and the thing as element. The semantic thickness or density of things (l’ épaisseur des choses) means not “to speak about” a thing but “to speak a thing,” that is, to allow the thing to have a voice. Ponge wishes for things to speak for themselves and to reveal their essences uncontaminated by human intervention. For now, we will go past the philosophical problems about language such an attempt entails to return to it in our final section on the “paradox of expression.” Ponge’s early now classic Le parti pris des choses is the work that brought him to the attention of the public and may be rendered in English in different ways, one of the most common and literal being “taking the side of things,” but also “the voice of things” and “the nature of things.” 8 Merleau-Ponty writes that words have the “power to designate in excess of their accepted definition, through the muffled life they have led and continue to lead in us, what Ponge appropriately called their ‘semantic thickness.’ ”9 One of the sources in Ponge in which Merleau-Ponty would have found this concept is the proème (prose poem) titled “Introduction au galet” (Introduction to the pebble). Ponge writes: “O infinite resources of the density of things [l’ épaisseur des choses], rendered [rendues] by the infinite resources of the density (l’ épaisseur sémantique des mots) of words” (T 200).10 This symmetrical sentence pairs the density and richness of things with the density and richness of words. This word rendered brings to mind the tradition of “poetry as painting” (ut pictura poesis) and the words of Paul Klee: “art does not reproduce the visible but makes (renders) visible,” which means to render the invisible visible.11 The long poem “The Pebble” (Le galet) is the final poem of Le parti pris des choses and begins from the point of view of classification: “A pebble is not an easy thing to define. If one is satisfied with a simple description, one can start

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out by saying it is a form or state of stone between rock and gravel. But this remark already implies a notion of stone that has to be justified” (VT 69/T 104). By the middle of the poem Ponge turns from geology and history to the pebble’s common universe with the human body: “If I now wish to examine a specific type of stone with greater attention, its perfection of form and the fact that I can hold it, roll it around in my hand, makes me choose the pebble” (VT 74/T 111). Combining geology, history, and phenomenology in this way brings us to Ponge and the complex. In fact, Merleau-Ponty turns to the pebble as held by childhood memories in his lectures on child psychology to introduce Ponge’s idea of the “complex.” In the lectures of 1949–50 titled “Structure and Conflicts in Child Consciousness,” in the context of his discussion of synaesthesia in a painter like Cézanne, who wanted to paint odors and tastes as well as forms and colors, Merleau-Ponty turns to Ponge on “complexes.” In a writer like Francis Ponge, for whom each object is a complex, “each object is a mode of existence with a most intimate relation to our life. These complexes furnish the ground of our consciousness and surface in the form of dreams concerning vegetables or minerals symbolizing these profound realities.”12 The thing as complex means it draws together into a unity the earth and sky within which it abides and the experiences and memories it evokes in each of us. Everyday usage imposes the noun upon the thing too quickly without breaking apart the complex perceptual aspects of which the thing is composed. The complex that is the thing is complex (complicated). In “My Creative Method,” Ponge indicates a way of approaching the thing in which the poet’s task is to consider it “unnamed, unnameable, and describe it ex nihilo, but so well it can be recognized—however, only at the end; its name, as it were, the last word of the text and not appearing until then. . . . The name must not be indispensable. Replace the name” (VT 102/T 35). Merleau-Ponty’s mention of dreams in relation to the complex suggests a relation with psychoanalytic complexes, but it seems the complex in Ponge’s poetry extends to individual memory and the archaic memory of myth and legends without engagement with unconscious complexes such as Freud’s Oedipal complex. A resonance of Ponge with Freud derives from a harmony regarding pleasure or “the pleasure principle,” which Ponge attributes to the purpose of writing and hearing poetry; Ponge even uses words such as joy and jubilation (“Entretien avec Breton et Reverdy,” M 294) and begins “The Notebook of the Pine Woods” with “the pleasure of the pine woods.” Similarly, in his work on Ponge titled Signsponge, Derrida has emphasized the duty or demand of things toward their expression combined with this joy and jubilation: “I owe to the thing an absolute respect which no general law would mediate: the law of the

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thing is singularity and difference as well. An infinite debt ties me to it, a duty without funds or foundation. I shall never acquit myself of it. . . . Now the thing is an insatiable thou must only to the extent that it remains beyond exchange and priceless . . . it jubilates and joys.”13 Merleau-Ponty comes back to Ponge and complexes in the subsequent lectures of 1951–52, “Method in Child Psychology”: In the writings of Francis Ponge, we find analyses of the shrimp, the orange, and so forth, and in particular, of a pebble. The wind and the sea are, as it were, already referred to by the pebble, and the pebble itself is a complex which must be illuminated. Ponge observes things in the impact they have on him and not as exterior to him. The pebble that he analyzes is the pebble of the child (we ourselves are obliged to return to our childhood impressions of the pebble in order to recover the poetry of it). Therefore, the symbolization in the pebble is of a whole series of behaviors, as well as the evident relation between certain persons and the pebble. We thus understand that the spectator’s conception of perception would not permit us to truly comprehend things. (CPP 421)

Thus, a “thing” as “complex” crystallizes all the qualities of its natural environment, geology, and biology as well as its phenomenology, psychology, psychoanalysis, legend, and mythology. All are essential parts of the poetic meaning of the thing. Of the pebble, Ponge requests that he “not be reproached for going even further back than the Flood” (VT 69/T 104). Thus, for Ponge as for Merleau-Ponty, the “thing” is no mere object of the spectator’s detached observation. To best speak of the “thing,” we need a word not like object of the subject-object binary, but rather something like the ancient word element, in the philosophical vocabulary of Merleau-Ponty. We find the word element in Merleau-Ponty’s longest text on the poetry of Ponge from his radio lectures of 1948 in the third lecture, titled “Exploration of the World as Perceived: Sensible Things,”14 and it includes Merleau-Ponty’s commentary on Ponge’s poem “Water,” also found in Le parti pris des choses. MerleauPonty’s selection of this particular poem of the many in the collection is significant for it highlights his own use of “element” in the Greek pre-Socratic sense of earth, air, fire, and water to characterize “the flesh of the world.” In fact, MerleauPonty’s sentence immediately prefacing his citation from Ponge’s poem speaks of water precisely as an element: “And indeed, the essence of water, for example, and all the elements lies less in their observable properties than in what they say to us” (WP 64/C 29). Here permit a rather long citation of Merleau-Ponty’s excerpts

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from Ponge’s poem “Water,” as found in the third chapter of The World of Perception: Water is colorless and glistening, formless and cool, passive and determined in its single vice: gravity. With exceptional means at its disposal to gratify the vice: circumvention, perforation, infiltration, erosion. The vice plays an inner role as well: water endlessly ravels in upon itself, constantly refuses to assume any form, tends only to self-humiliation, prostrating itself, all but a corpse, like the monks of some orders. . . . You might almost say that water is insane, given this obsession, this fixation, the hysterical need to obey its gravity alone. . . . By definition, LIQUID is what seeks to obey gravity rather than maintain its form, forgoes all form to obey its gravity. And loses all bearing because of this fixation, these unhealthy qualms. . . . Water’s anxiety: sensitive to the slightest change of incline. Leaping downstairs two steps at a time. Playful, childishly obedient, returning the moment we call it back by tilting the slope this way. (WP 64–65/C 30)

Merleau-Ponty likes these phenomenological-psychoanalytic definitions and descriptions: LIQUID, vice, perforation, insanity, obsession, fixation, anxiety, playfulness, childishness. He immediately extends his analysis toward Gaston Bachelard’s series of works on air, water, earth, and fire.15 Each of these elements, Merleau-Ponty states, is home to the imaginary of particular individual persons and orients life, dominates dreams, and becomes “the sacrament of nature which gives them strength and happiness” (WP 65/C 31). The philosopher then moves from Bachelard directly to André Breton’s Surrealist experiments thirty years prior to Bachelard and Ponge in which Breton found in things “ ‘catalysts of desire’: the place where human desire manifests itself, or ‘crystallizes’ ” (WP 65– 66/C 31). From Ponge to Bachelard to Breton: these may appear surprising linkages; nevertheless, in “Man and Adversity” they persisted in linking Ponge with Breton—as well as Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and Valéry, as unlikely as such pairings may appear—for grasping what he calls “this pathos of language common to writers who may mutually detest one another,” yet respect the “caprices and graces of language” and understand that expression is never more than approximate (S 233/295–96). In “Notes Toward a Shell” (“Notes pour un coquillage”) in Le parti pris des choses, Ponge tells us he most admires “a few restrained [mesuré] writers and musicians—Bach, Rameau, Malherbe, Horace, Mallarmé”—who, like the

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mollusk, created monuments “made of the genuine human secretion common to the human mollusk, the thing most proportioned and suited to his body, yet as utterly different from his form as can be imagined: I mean WORDS (la parole)” (VT 60–61/T 86). With this phrase “the human mollusk,” the poet has invoked a very diverse biological phylum with an evolutionary history stretching backward for several hundred million years, which, in addition to exotic species, also includes the quotidian clam, mussel, oyster, and scallop. All secrete the chemical compounds that form the shell as a kind of house within which the organism moves and reproduces. When Ponge links humans and mollusks, any hint of the human as “higher organism” disappears. He has written: “It is necessary to return humanity to its place in nature: that is honorable enough. It is necessary to replace humanity at its proper rank in nature: that is high enough” (T 240). Ponge writes that he admires the “the Louvre of the written word” above the monuments of Rome or Nîmes (of his native Languedoc region in the south of France) or the Egyptian pyramids of the Pharaoh, for the written word can be inhabited by other dwellers later on, much like the crustacean hermit crab moves into the shell-house left behind by the mollusk (VT 61/T 86).

MERLEAU- PONT Y AND PONGE POETICS

Ponge links definition and description in his poetics: “What I shall attempt then is in the nature of a definition-description-literary work of art” (VT 85/M 14). He imagines a brand new kind of writing, a new rhetoric placed in between definition and description, taking from definition its precision and brevity, he even says “infallibility and indubitability,” and from description its respect for the sensory aspect of things (VT 83/M 11). Therefore, dictionaries and etymologies in multiple languages informed Ponge’s method. This is demonstrated by the publication of his poetic process of notes, jottings, scribblings, starts, and stops in The Making of the Pré (La fabrique du pré) for what resulted in his beautiful prose poem “The Pré” (multiple meanings too numerous to translate, approximation of “meadow”—“prairie”—“prayer”—“sacred place”): Contraction of paratus, according to the Latin etymologies, Près, pressed close to the rock and the rill, Prêt, ready for mowing or grazing, Préparé, prepared for us by nature, preadorned, Pré, paré, pré, près, prêt,

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The pré, here lying as the preeminent French past participle Revered also as our prefix of prefixes, Prefix, already, in prefix, present indeed in present. No escaping our original onomatopoeias. Therefore we must penetrate them.16

Ponge’s tools were the Larousse or the Encyclopédie Larousse and Littré (VT 89/M 19) and he comments in “My Creative Method” that his proèmes are built up from and “replace” the encyclopedic dictionary, etymological dictionary, analogical dictionary (which he says does not exist), the dictionary of rhymes, the dictionary of synonyms, and all lyric poetry inspired by nature (VT 106–7/M 41). In spite of what this may seem to imply regarding a possible formalism, nothing could be further from comprehending Ponge’s aims. Above all, Ponge attempted to capture the solidity, monumentality, and density of things in such a way as to awaken our own sensory contacts with the world of things. His poetry is processual, for he understands nature and things in terms of processes, movement, and development. “What is being?” Ponge asks. “It is only ways of being, in succession. It is as much so of objects. Or of opening and closing ones’s eyes.”17 No wonder Merleau-Ponty would be attracted to Ponge in just the same way he was attracted to Cézanne, in whom Merleau-Ponty found the “phenomenological painter” who had moved through Impressionism to seek beneath the momentary sensations the solidity and monumentality of Mt. St. Victoire “becoming mountain before our eyes” (EM 128/OE 29). As Merleau-Ponty wrote: “His Mont. Saint-Victoire is made and remade from one end of the world to the other in a way different from but no less energetic than in the hard rock above Aix” (EM 130/ OE 35). In fact, The Making of the Pré by Ponge includes a magnificent Cézanne painting as illustration alongside Ponge’s remark: “Ah, what beautiful things one could say about the pré” (MP 62–63).18 Of Ponge, one commentator has written: “A kind of mystic of the material world, Ponge wants us to look afresh at all that surrounds us, to respect and love it, so that there can be established the proper and harmonious relationship between the human and the nonhuman.”19 Here we are drawing Ponge close to the phenomenological tradition and he was aware of the association of his poetics with the phenomenological epoché. In an interview with Serge Gavronsky, Ponge remarked that Sartre had made him “the magus of phenomenology” and Ponge expressed his delight, connecting this immediately with Husserl’s imperative “back to the things themselves.” 20 MerleauPonty found in artists and poets a rigorous practice of the phenomenological epoché, this suspension or bracketing of the natural attitude in favor of the world’s “appearing.” Merleau-Ponty was at pains to state the “true sense” of the reduction

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as a “step back” from the world, not the loss of the world in a transcendental idealism. “It steps back in order to see transcendences spring forth and it loosens the intentional threads that connect us to the world in order to make them appear” (PP lxxvii/viii). We rupture our familiarity with the world to allow “the unmotivated springing forth of the world” (PP lxxvii/viii). In articulating this “true sense” of the “suspension of the world,” Merleau-Ponty turns to Husserl’s assistant Eugen Fink, who spoke of “wonder before the world [étonnement devant le monde]” (PP lxxvii/viii). Speaking with Ponge, the nuances of language are illuminating. The English wonder denotes “marvel, awe, astonishment, amazement.” The French étonnement means “surprise,” even “stupefaction,” and has for synonyms the nouns stupeur, meaning “mute” and “paralysed,” and saisissement, the “emotion of strong, sudden surprise.” The German is Erstaunen, “astonishment” or “amazement,” and the Greek is the noun tóthaumatos, meaning “a wonder or marvel to behold,” spoken in Homer of a beautiful woman and equally Hercules, and subsequent to Homer spoken in the plural of puppet shows, toy theaters, juggler’s booths, and menageries.21 In The Visible and the Invisible’s third chapter, “Interrogation and Intuition,” Merleau-Ponty describes philosophy as a form of questioning that does not “provide answers” or “fill in the blanks,” but rather one that takes up “a past of experience and of knowledge that one day ends up as this open wondering [cette béance]” (VI 105/142).

MERLEAU- PONT Y AND PONGE VS. SARTRE

Philosophically, the name of Ponge is inevitably linked with that of Sartre, who wrote a commentary on Le parti pris des choses in 1944, which was eventually published in 1947 as part of Situations I, titled “Man and Things” (“L’homme et les choses”). Ponge references Sartre in his own “This Is Why I Have Lived” (1961) for Sartre’s account of Ponge’s way of “fixing, immobilizing, and petrifying” things for eternity (VT 187). Ponge dedicated his poem “The Wasp” (La guêpe), which opens La rage de l’expression, to both Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and it contains this marvelous definition-description: “the wasp can be called the musical form of honey.” 22 Nevertheless, the interpretation of Le parti pris des choses Sartre offers seems to overly reflect Sartre’s own ontology and existential psychoanalysis; at least it marks out a sharp difference from the interpretation of Merleau-Ponty. The tension or torsion in Sartre’s rendering of Ponge stands out in the essay’s final sentence: “For Ponge the thinker is a

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materialist and Ponge the poet—if we leave aside the regrettable intrusions of science—has laid the foundations of a Phenomenology of Nature.” 23 Sartre wants to demarcate Ponge’s thought or philosophy from his poetry, for Sartre reads Ponge not only as a materialist but as an advocate of a mechanistic materialism of nature as machine. From the point of view of Merleau-Ponty, the singular mistake of Sartre’s reading is the failure to distinguish between objects and things, and in his radio lectures from 1948 Merleau-Ponty stressed: “The things of the world are not simply neutral objects which stand before us for our contemplation” (WP 63/C 28). Sartre’s confusion of things with mere objects resulted from Sartre’s own dualistic ontological template of for-itself being over against in-itself being, which is to say, the radical freedom of subjects over against the total determinism of objects. In this way, Sartre refers to the “materialism” of Ponge, as well as mechanism, and attributes to him the “ontological desire” of becoming object, that is, the desire for death. When Ponge names the human the “mollusk-human,” how mechanical, how passive, does this render the human’s “secretion” of language? Let us bear in mind that Ponge’s poet as “mollusk-human” renders the nature-human continuum in terms of Life, not inert, inorganic matter. The poem “Snails” gives us the snail as a maker of works of art: “this shell, a part of their being, is at the same time a work of art, a monument. It lasts far longer than they” (VT 45/T 61). The method of the snail is not pure passivity, but rather an interpenetration of activity and passivity: “It [earth] goes through them. They go through it. An interpenetration in the best of taste, tone on tone so to speak—with a passive and an active element, the passive one simultaneously bathing and nourishing the active one, which displaces itself while it feeds” (VT 42/57). Here Ponge’s thought reminds us of one of Merleau-Ponty’s most beautiful passages: “Philosophy has never spoken—I do not say of passivity: we are not effects—but I would say of the passivity of our activity, as Valéry spoke of a body of the spirit: new as our initiatives may be, they come to birth at the heart of being. . . . It is not I who makes myself think any more than it is I who makes my heart beat” (VI 221/274). This delicate interpenetration of the active and passive is bifurcated in Sartre’s ontology of objects and the psychoanalysis of death that he imposes upon Ponge. Permit a brief selection from Sartre’s text on Ponge. Sartre writes: “What gives the things in Ponge’s lapidary their ambiguous originality is the very fact that they are not animate. They retain their inertia, their fragmentation, their ‘stupefaction,’ that perpetual tendency to collapse that Leibniz called their stupidity” (MAT 441/283). Following on from the inanimate stupidity of things, Sartre pursues the argument by explicitly invoking his own ontology and existential psychoanalysis. He writes:

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It seems he [Ponge] has opted for a quick path to symbolically fulfilling our shared desire to exist after the manner of the ‘ in-itself.’ . . . I have observed elsewhere that the desire of all of us is to exist with complete consciousness in the mode of being of things; to be entirely a consciousness and, at the same time, entirely a stone. Materialism provides a theoretical satisfaction of this dream since it tells human beings they are merely mechanisms. (MAT 449/288)

It is true there are times in which Ponge divides humans from the world of nonhuman things and overvalues the nonhuman while devaluing the human. Examples appear in Les parti pris des choses: “The Gymnast” is portrayed first as a goat, subsequently less agile than a monkey, finally as a caterpillar, all in all “the adulated paragon of human stupidity” (VT 52/T 72); “R.  C. Seine No” shows no mercy to the “petty, ill-mannered, derby-hatted, briefcase-clutching little clerks” (VT 53/T 74); and, the subsequent “Lemeunier’s Restaurant Rue de La Chaussée D’Antin” is similarly harsh with its critique of “the horde of clerks and salesgirls who lunch there” in a world of mindless “tastelessness and twaddle [O monde des fadeurs et des fadaises]” (VT 55, 56/ T 78,79). The judgment against the gymnast is softened somewhat if one bears in mind that the Ponge poem “The Goat” attests to the tenderness this animal arouses in us because it is both “deplorable and admirable: it may be no more than a pathetic and pitiable animal, yet still a prodigious organism, a being, and it works” (VT 137).24 Nevertheless, all in all, to me this only means that Ponge has no patience for that vapid kind of humanism that would accord preciousness to all human activities no matter how self-centered and absurd. Camus attempted to recruit Ponge into his own absurdist philosophy in a letter on Le parti pris des choses, writing to Ponge that he discovered there “one of the goals of absurd reflection,” namely, “indifference and total renunciation—that of the stone.” 25 However, Ponge replied in Proèmes (“Réflexions en lisant ‘L’essai sur l’absurde’ ”) that qualities in “the metaphysics of the stone” such as “indifference and total renunciation” are “qualities-among-others, . . . a number immensely varied, an infinite variety of qualities” (T, “Pages bis,” VII, 225). Ponge maintains that “failure is never absolute [l’echec n’est jamais absolu]” (T 206). Merleau-Ponty reacted immediately to Sartre’s “Man and Things,” which we recall was published in 1947, and made his defense of Ponge and reply to Sartre during the summer of 1948 in an unpublished lecture titled “L’homme et les objets.” 26 His reply is indirect without naming Sartre out loud as his opponent, for the rupture in their friendship and collaboration as editors of Les Temps Modernes was still in the future (1951/1952). The occasion was a cycle of lectures,

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“The Object and Poetry” (“L’objet et la poésie”), given by Boris Vian, Jacques Lacan, and Jean Cocteau, for which Merleau-Ponty’s lecture gave the introduction to the general theme. Merleau-Ponty begins by demarcating the classical world from the modern world, where the modern has the characteristics of ambiguity and openness rather than the classical fixed and finished, closed point of view. In this light, Merleau-Ponty invokes the name of Ponge alongside those of Cézanne, Breton, Bachelard, and Kafka—Sartre and Malraux as well (and here I presume Merleau-Ponty means to include Sartre as literary writer rather than existentialist philosopher). In addition to the “complex” and “element,” this address also stresses the way in which things are values: the thing is “at the same time an ethical category and the beginning of myth.” Merleau-Ponty concludes his address saying that the artist and writer of today want to “go further” (cherche plus loin). “They believe neither in finality nor pre-established harmony but are particularly sensitive to this vibration that gives birth to form in taking possession of matter.” 27 In Emmanuel de Saint Aubert’s definitive study of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical development from 1945 to 1951, we find his chapter on Ponge and Sartre, “Le mollusque et la pierre” (“The Mollusk and the Stone”). Saint Aubert sums up the conclusion toward which our argument leads: The preferences of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre diverge radically. . . . One easily imagines the reaction of Merleau-Ponty to Sartre’s “Man and Things,” the Merleau-Ponty who rightly already in 1936 defined the Cartesian look as “a specular attitude” that strips off from the object its human aspect [dépouillait l’objet de son aspect humain]. . . . Thus, Ponge is rediscovered solidly within the framework of Bachelard, Breton, and even Claudel, the interpretation of Sartre purely and simply passed over in silence, to the benefit of the emphases of these authors [ces lignes] regarding passion and desire.28

MERLEAU- PONT Y, PONGE, AND THE PARADOX OF EXPRESSION

The poetics of Ponge and Merleau-Ponty share the terms equivalence and vibration, both of which express the delicate, paradoxical relation of words and things. Ponge sometimes writes as if the things speak for themselves in their own voice in his poetry. For example, in “My Creative Method” he wrote of things “annihilating him, causing him to disappear” (VT 83/M 14); “TAKING THE

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SIDE OF THINGS equals TAKING ACCOUNT OF WORDS [PARTI PRIS DES CHOSES égale COMPTE TENU DES MOTS]” (VT 89/M 19). Yet Ponge is also keenly aware that there are differences between the thing and its expression. In a note found at the end of “The Notebook of the Pine Woods,” Ponge clearly formulates the philosophical problem: “I should remark in passing a problem to be mulled over when I have the leisure for it: that of the difference between the sense and the expression (relation and difference). It’s a big problem, I see at once. Briefly, what I mean is: the difference between the expression of the concrete and visible, and the sense, or expression of the idea, of the exact differential quality compared with the subject.” 29 In “Reasons to Live Happily” (“Raisons de vivre heureux”), Ponge is equally clear in a very important passage: “There is always a relationship with mankind. . . . It is not things which speak among themselves but men who speak among themselves about things, and one cannot in any way get away from mankind” (T 189). “The Object is the Poetics” (“L’objet, c’est la poétique”) opens with an acknowledgment of the relation of mankind to things: “The relation of man to object is by no means only one of possession or usage. No, that would be too simple. It’s much worse. . . . Our feeling is transitive. It needs an object, which affects it, as its direct complement, at once. It is a question of the gravest relation (not at all of having, but of being). The artist, more than anyone else, bears the brunt of it, acknowledges the blow” (NR 94/145). When Ponge speaks in this way of transitivity, we recognize the phenomenological property of intentionality, the relation of “being-with” between acts and their objects, in Husserl’s terms between noeisis and noema. Phenomenology of Perception had already rejected the theory of poetry as sheer onomatopoeia as “naïve” for positing a purely natural sign in spite of the conventional variations in mother tongues (PP 193/218). In the fourth and final chapter of The Visible and the Invisible, titled “The Intertwining—the Chiasm,” Merleau-Ponty is explicit about a paradox in expression: “in the patient and silent labor of desire, begin the paradox of expression.”30 For the theory of expression, there is a chiasm (crossing over) but also an écart (difference, gap) between the thing and its sign or expression, which means there must be heterogeneity all the while maintaining contact with the givens of the world (les données). The expressive word or work must speak or show differently or divergently yet simultaneously reveal the thing expressed. If the word or work were an imitation or exact replica, it would be a bare repetition that disclosed nothing; the word or work would be sheer redundancy. Merleau-Ponty’s theory of expression has recently come to the forefront of scholars, each of whom formulates the meaning of expression in a singular, somewhat different way: mise en forme, excess, exscription.31 In a sense, the theory of

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expression is the unthought-of element in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy in a similar way to how Merleau-Ponty spoke of an unthought-of element in the writings of Husserl in “The Philosopher and His Shadow,”32 namely, the thought of a “barbaric principle” within phenomenology expressed in the element “earth” and an untamed “baroque world” (S 181/228). These notions of excess, mise en forme, or exscription, each in its own way, points toward the paradox, “miracle,” or “mystery” of expression that seeks to maintain contact with the thing all the while creating new form, which is to say, authentic expression is “thing-word” or “thingimage” and makes of expression an event, a happening of the new within the given. To my mind, Merleau-Ponty’s clearest statements on the paradoxical element in art and expression are found in his middle-period essay “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence.” There he speaks of the equivalence that is yet heterogeneous between thing and expression as a “coherent deformation,” and the phrase is an adaptation from Malraux.33 In the central passage to which I wish to draw attention, Merleau-Ponty is speaking explicitly about painting and he begins by saying that the picture of a woman is not in the woman seen, because that would mean the painting was already completed, yet the painter’s expression must be “at least called for by her [du moins appelés par elle]” (S 54/68). “Called for” in the sense of appelés connotes the way in which we are named, what we are called in introducing ourselves, for example, je m’appelle. The “call” expressed in the painting bears the same relationship and same kind of necessity as between the individual and her name. Thus, Meleau-Ponty immediately writes: “There is signification when we submit the data of the world [the givens, les données] to a ‘coherent deformation’ ” (S 54/68). He continues in saying that such a coherent deformation comprises the meaning of “style.” Style is not a subjective nuance of feeling, or certain techniques of handling brushes and paint, or even the name or signature of the painter. Rather style is this unique relationship of both coherence and creativity (deformation) between an expression and the thing expressed, as called for by the thing. Merleau-Ponty puts it succinctly: “For each painter, style is the system of equivalences that he makes for himself for the work which manifests the world he sees. It is the universal index of the ‘coherent deformation’ by which he concentrates the still scattered meaning of his perception and makes it exist expressly” (S 54–55/68). Here is Merleau-Ponty’s sense of “equivalence.” His introduction to Signs stated: “Thus things are said and are thought by a Speech and by a Thought which we do not have but which has us” (S 19/27). Merleau-Ponty’s essay brings expression back to poetry explicitly in terms of style as an “acquired voice . . . which announces itself in lightning signs as a spoken word or an arabesque” (S 52/65). He asks: Why should expression of the world be limited to the prose of the senses or the concept? “It must be poetry;

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that is, it must completely awaken and recall our sheer power of expressing beyond things already said or seen” (S 52/65). The image of lightning suits Ponge’s desire for the “power and purity of language.” If lightning is a recurrent Merleau-Pontean metaphor for newness, miracle, mystery, and event, the very emblem of creative power, the arabesque is conversely rare in Merleau-Ponty’s writings. While the arabesque may figure as the curved space in drawing, painting, and sculpture, it also is a figure of the body’s flexible equilibrium in dance, a posture of the body bent forward supported on one leg with the other leg extended horizontally backward, one arm extended forward, the other backward. Merleau-Ponty asks us to consider the poetic line as similarly arabesque, a flowing, intricate, complex poise of balance stretching back and reaching forward. Poetic language is a “going beyond” and a “going further.” In Eye and Mind, Merleau-Ponty asks: What is “that dimension that lets Van Gogh say he must go ‘still further’ [veut aller ‘plus loin’]” (EM 123/15)? Thus, when both Ponge and Merleau-Ponty use the word equivalence to express the relationship between word and thing, this is not a pure, mathematical equal sign. That would return us to the notion of mere repetition or redundancy. This “equivalence” is about giving weight to the side of things, to wait in silence for the resonance or vibration of things and world. In “Notes premières de ‘l’homme’ ” (“First Notes on Mankind”), Ponge has written: “A certain vibration of nature is called mankind” (T 245). The poet—as well as the philosopher— seeks in language, rhythm, meter, and song a resonance with the world, that taut string of the lyre, or precise tuning of the piano to A-440, as close to perfect pitch to which one can draw near. Ponge plays upon the resonance/reason (réson/ raison) pairing to express that most appropriate, most necessary, language. He contends that such a resonance even has little in common with calligrams, such as those of Apollinaire in which the shape of words pictures its object, in which, for example, the letters, words, and phrases are placed on the page to create a picture of the Eiffel Tower. Resonance, adequation, equivalence are more subtle, Ponge says, and have “to do with a much more hidden form. . . . The way in which a word is caught, held, then let go. No rules for that, precisely because they change (according to each subject)” (VT 102–3/M 36–37). Therefore, we could say that poetic words are the twinning of things, but the words are nonidentical twins that reveal the things in previously unseen and unthought-of ways. The Visible and the Invisible speaks of a “vibration” between our bodies and things: “This bursting forth of the mass of the body toward things, which makes a vibration of my skin become the sleek and the rough, makes me follow with my eyes the movements and the contours of the things themselves, this magical

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relation, this pact between them and me according to which I lend them my body in order that they inscribe upon it and give me their resemblance” (VI 146/192). In Signs, Merleau-Ponty uses the same word, vibration, for the relation between words and things. The passage begins by saying: “Language is much more like a sort of being than a means, and that is why it can present something to us so well.” Then we come to its “vibration”: “At the very moment language fills our mind up to the top without leaving the smallest place for thought not taken into its vibration, and exactly to the extent that we abandon ourselves to it, it passes beyond the ‘sign’ toward their meaning” (S 43/54). Thus, Merleau-Ponty argues, we must rid ourselves of the idea of language and expression as imitation or the “translation” of an “original text”; then we understand that “the idea of complete expression is nonsensical, and that all language is indirect or allusive—that it is, if you wish, silence” (S 43/54). Expression is not only what is said, but what is not said, left unsaid, expressing meanings not in the words themselves but “between them in the hollows of space, time, and signification they mark out” (S 76/95). Returning to “painting as poetry,” a novel or poem “expresses tacitly like a painting” (S 76/95). One of the most philosophically electrifying texts Ponge ever wrote is titled “The Silent World Is Our Only Homeland” (“Le monde muet est notre seule patrie”). Ponge tells us of the function of poetry as nourishing the spirit of mankind by turning us away from dominating nature toward participating in it. “Hope therefore lies in a poetry through which the world so invades the spirit of man that he becomes almost speechless, and later reinvents a language” (VT 109/198). The love of things is  the essential element for “they are the ambassadors of the silent world. As such, they stammer, they murmur, they sink into the darkness of logos—until at last they reach the level of ROOTS, where things and formulations are one” (VT 110/198). Ponge concludes: “The silent world is our only homeland. We make use of its possibilities according to the needs of the times” (VT 111/M 199). In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty wrote of language as the power of rendering visible the invisibilities that he called the “lining and depth” of the visible (VI 149/195): such invisibilities as hidden things, things not noticed but passed over, things elsewhere, and even more deeply, self and spiritual forms as well. The French word translated as “lining” is la doublure, literally the interior or lining of a garment, expressing the intimacy between outside and inside, between visible and invisible. Rendering such invisibilities visible through the word, rhythm, and song is the power and promise of poetic language, which for Merleau-Ponty means philosophical language as well. He wrote of language as life: “Language is a life, is our life and the life of things, . . . not a mask over Being but—if one knows how to grasp it with all its roots and all its foliation—the

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most valuable witness to Being” (VI 127/167). The next-to-last sentences of The Visible and the Invisible express this longing for a language of “wild meaning” (un sens sauvage) and “wild being” (l’ être sauvage). The sentences begin from Husserl then move to a poem by Paul Valéry, “The Pythoness” (“La Pythie”), from the collection Charmes: “In a sense the whole of philosophy, as Husserl says, consists in restoring a power to signify, a birth of meaning, or a wild meaning, an expression of experience by experience, which in particular clarifies the special domain of language. And in a sense, as Valéry said, language is everything, since it is the voice of no one, since it is the very voice of the things, the waves, and the forests” (VI 155/203–4). The voice of the things, the waves, and the forests is drawn from the final stanza of “La pythie,” spoken not in the voice of the pythoness, but in a “new voice,” likely the Voice of the Poet himself: Honor of mankind, sacred LANGUAGE, Ordered and prophetic speech, Chains of beauty that enwind The god bewildered in the flesh, Illumination, and largess! Now a Wisdom makes utterance, And rings out in that sovereign voice Which knows itself when it is raised No longer the voice of any man, But of the woods and the waves!34

In spite of the stylistic differences between the expressionistic prose poems of Ponge and the more formed poetry of Valéry,35 and because of this, and in spite of Ponge’s evident distaste for the poetry of Valéry, these two great poets, both of whose lives span almost the entirety of the twentieth century, seek the same thing: to find words and reinvent forms to speak things themselves.

Notes 1. 2.

Plato, Apology, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1975), p. 26, 22bc. Francis Ponge, “My Creative Method,” in The Voice of Things, ed. and trans. Beth Archer (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), 97. Hereafter, this work will be cited parenthetically in the text as VT. French original: “My Creative Method,” in Méthodes, vol. 2 of Le Grand Recueil (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), 29. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as M.

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7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

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“Twice-spawned petal” (pétale superfétatoire) is found in the last line of Ponge’s poem “The Butterfly” (“Le papillon”) (VT 46). French original: Francis Ponge, Le  parti pris des choses, in Tome Premier (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 62. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as T. Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel,” in Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Merleau-Ponty, ed. and trans. Hugh J. Silverman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 12. French original: Notes de cours, 1959–1961 (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 278. Cf. Mauro Carbone, “Preface,” in The Thinking of the Sensible: Merleau-Ponty’s A-Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004), xiii. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald  A. Landes (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 2012), lxxxv. French original: Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), xvi. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as PP. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 28. French original: Sens et Non-Sens, 5th  ed. (1948; Paris: Nagel, 1966), 48–49. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as SNS. Cf. Vincent Colapietro, “Pointing Things Out: Exploring the Indexical Dimensions of Literary Texts,” in Redefining Literary Semiotics, ed. Harri Veivo, Christina Ljungburg, and Jørgen Dines Johansen (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2002, 2009), 109–31. The author discusses Ponge on 113, 115, and especially 128. Francis Ponge, Le parti pris des choses, in T. This work was originally published separately by Gallimard in 1942. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 75. Also cf. 234. French original: Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), xxx. Also cf. 297. Hereafter cited in the text as S. English translation by Martin Sorrell, Francis Ponge (Boston: Twayne, 1981), 50. Paul Klee, “Creative Credo,” in Notebooks, vol. 1, Paul Klee: The Thinking Eye (New York: George Wittenborn, 1961), 76. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures, 1949–1952, trans. Talia Welsh (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 172. French original: Merleau-Ponty à la Sorbonne: Résumé de ses cours établi par des étudiants et approuvé par lui-même, Bulletin de psychologie 236, no.  18 (November 1964). Hereafter cited in the texts as CPP. Jacques Derrida, Signsponge, trans. Richard Rand (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 14–16. Merleau-Ponty gave seven radio lectures in 1948 on the channel Programme national de la Radiodiffusion française (RDF), later transcribed and published as The World of Perception (Causeries, 1948). Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, trans. Oliver Davis (London: Routledge, 2004). French original: Causeries, 1948 (Paris: Seuil, 2002). Hereafter cited in the text as WP/C. The English translator of Causeries has mistranslated the title of the third chapter as “The World of Perception: Sensory Objects.” Merleau-Ponty’s chapter is at pains to distinguish between a mere “object” and the “thing.”

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Cf. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos, trans. Daniel Russell (Boston: Beacon, 1969); and Bachelard, Psychoanalysis of Fire, trans. Alan Ross (London: Routledge, 1964). Francis Ponge, The Making of the Pré, trans. Lee Fahnestock (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1979), 227. French original: La fabrique du pré (Geneva, Switzerland: Éditions d’Art Albert Skira, 1971), unnumbered, approximately 191. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as MP. Francis Ponge, “The Object Is the Poetics,” in Things: Francis Ponge, ed. and trans. Cid Corman (New York City: Grossman, 1971), 94. French original: Ponge, “L’objet, c’est la poétique,” in Nouveau Recueil (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), 145–46. Ponge notes that the expression “l’objet, c’est la poétique” is from Braque. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as NR. Ponge, The Making of the Pré, 62–63/110–11. The Cézanne painting is not credited. It resembles Large Trees at the Jas de Bouffan (1885–87). Sorrell, Francis Ponge, 12. Francis Ponge and Serge Gavronsky, “From an Interview with Francis Ponge,” Books Abroad 48, no. 4 (Autumn 1974): 680. Cf. also Serge Gavronsky, The Power of Language: Texts and Translations/Francis Ponge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). Cf. H. G. Lidell and R. Scott, Greek-English Lexicon, with a Revised Supplement (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 785. Ponge, “The Wasp,” in Things: Francis Ponge, 97–102. French original: T, 261–70. Cf. 101/ T 270, for the wasp as the “musical form of honey.” Nevertheless, has the author here confused the wasp (la guêpe) and the honeybee (l’abeille)? This would be so unlike Ponge. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Man and Things,” in Critical Essays (Situations I): Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Seagull, 2010), 457. French original: Situations I (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 293. Hereafter cited in the text as MAT. Ponge, “La Chèvre,” in Pièces, vol. 3 of Le Grand Recueil, 211. Albert Camus, “Lettre au sujet du Parti pris,” in Articles, prefaces, conférences (1938– 1944), Oeuvres Completes, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), 885. Cited in Gerard Farasse, “Ponge et Camus: un dialogue désaccordé,” in Dolorès Lyotard, Albert Camus contemporain (Paris: Presses universitaires Septentrion, 2009), 116. We have only a written summary of Merleau-Ponty’s lecture published as “L’homme et l’objet” (“Man and Object”), an unpublished lecture given by Merleau-Ponty at the Pavillon du Marsan, in introduction to a cycle on “L’objet et poésie” (“The Object and Poetry”), resumé by J.  L. Dumas, “Les Conférences,” in La Nef, 5th année, no. 45, (August 1948): 150–51. “Les artistes d’aujourd’hui ne croient ni à la finalité ni à l’harmonie préétablie, mais ils sont particulièrement sensibles à cette vibration que suscite la forme en prenant possession de la matière” (151). Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, Du lien des êtres aux éléments de l’ être: MerleauPonty au tournant des années 1945–1951 (Paris: Librairie  J. Vrin, 2004), 279, 284–85, 286. Ponge, “The Notebook of the Pine Woods,” in Things: Francis Ponge, 68.

194 30. 31.

32.

33.

34. 35.

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Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 144/189. Cf. Bernard Waldenfels, “The Paradox of Expression,” in Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, ed. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000); Veronique Fóti, Tracing Expression in Merleau-Ponty: Aesthetics, Philosophy of Biology, and Ontology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013), 106, 112; Leonard Lawlor, “Nascency and Memory: Reflections on Véronique Fóti’s Tracing Expression in Merleau-Ponty,” Chiasmi International: Trilingual Studies Concerning Merleau-Ponty’s Thought 16, New Series (2014): 294; Leonard Lawlor, Thinking Through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 91; Donald A. Landes, Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 8–9, 18; Lawrence Hass, MerleauPonty’s Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 155. Merleau-Ponty writes: “At the end of Husserl’s life there is an unthought-of element in his works which is wholly his and yet opens out onto something else . . . not objects of thought, since (like shadow and reflection) they would be destroyed by being subjected to analytic observation or taken out of context, and since we can be faithful to and find them only by thinking again.” Merleau-Ponty, “The Philosopher and His Shadow” (S 160/202). Cf. André Malraux, The Voices of Silence, trans. Gilbert Stuart, Bollingen Series 24 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 324. French original: Les voix du silence (Paris: Pléiade, 1951), 324. The Pléiade edition collects together Malraux’s three-volume history of art titled Psychologie de l’art, published in Switzerland by Albert Skira. The volumes were respectively subtitled: Le musée imaginaire (1947), La création esthétique (1948), and La monnai de l’absolu (1949). Merleau-Ponty’s citation from Malraux on “coherent deformation” is from volume 2 on the aesthetic creation. Though Malraux stresses the coherence of an artist’s style, the phrase “coherent deformation” is Merleau-Ponty’s own, a creative deformation of Malraux’s text, one might say. Paul Valéry, “The Pythoness” (“La Pythie”), in Poems, trans. James R. Lawler, Bollingen Series 45, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 176, 177. For a side-by-side analysis of the poetry of Ponge and Valéry, cf. Robert L. Mitchell, “Valéry and Ponge: Rheuminations,” in From Dante to García Marquez: Studies in Romance Literatures and Linguistics, ed. Gene H. Bell-Villada, George Pistorius, and Antonio Giménez (Williamstown, MA: Williams College, 1987), 313–22. Mitchell compares Ponge’s “Pluie” (“Rain”) and Valéry’s “Neige” (“Snow”).

13 Deleuze and Poetry Claire Colebrook

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hen Gilles Deleuze has written about literature he has, more often than not, focused on prose writers and novelists. His most significant contributions to the study of literature include his monograph on Proust1 and, coauthored with Felix Guattari, a booklength study of Kafka.2 His most significantly philosophical works such as the early The Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition feature literary works in a manner that is crucial to the formation of Deleuze’s philosophy.3 Deleuze does not, as philosophers often do, use literature to provide examples or case studies; he does not see the content of literature as providing material for philosophical reflection. In this respect his work differs from traditional philosophical approaches, such as Martha Nussbaum’s claim that literary plots and characters offer us ways of thinking about other lives and are exercises in sympathy. In contemporary European philosophy some literary scenes have provided ways of explaining fundamental philosophical motifs. Franz Kafka’s The Trial contains a parable “Before the Law,” which Deleuze’s contemporary Jacques Derrida read as a way of thinking about the relation to textuality: just as the man stands before a door awaiting a law that never discloses itself, so the reader’s relation to what a text means is necessarily deferred, and yet always before us demanding to be read.4 One might hazard a broad description of Deleuze’s contemporaries: either one could follow the Anglo-American analytic tradition and use the content of literature for philosophical reflection, or one could follow the alternative path of Deleuze’s contemporaries for whom literature itself is about inscription, reading, text, and interpretation. In addition to his essay on Kafka, Derrida also responded to Jacques Lacan’s use of Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Purloined Letter.”5 For Lacan, the tale of a royal intrigue regarding a hidden and

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illicit love letter provides a way of thinking about desire: it is not the object itself but how one views another’s desire for the object, and—in turn—how subjects view each other’s reading of their own desire.6 In short, for Lacan, the literary text provided a way of thinking about the reading of desire. Derrida’s response to Lacan’s essay pointed out that Lacan had approached the story as a way of explaining desire and reading, but had not taken account of inscription or the level of text: How was Lacan’s own position as “purveyor of truth” possible? For Derrida, Lacan’s reading position was itself the effect of inscription and traces. For Lacan, the story was about desire and “the letter” or the way one imagines that one might grasp some final meaning behind signification; for Derrida the story itself comprised letters or signifiers, and Lacan had simply failed to take account of his own relationship of reading or the “scene of writing.” It is this aspect—the materiality of inscription—that became the focus of a whole series of essays and debates regarding both Poe’s short story and Kafka’s “Before the Law.”7 The concept of the signifier or the letter, or the material aspect of the text, was the dominant focus for the generation of French thinkers influenced by structuralism or the notion that it is the inscribed system of differences (the letters and sounds of a language and then the terms of each different language) that generates the possibility of meaning. On such a theory it would be the signifier, inscription, the letter, or the differences of textuality that would enable and generate meaning, and would allow subjects to be distinguished from objects. In the beginning would be the letter, and so one might say—following Derrida— that there is nothing outside the text. Or, following Lacan, that the “A signifier represents the subject for another signifier.” It is by way of reading or imagining that the text stands for something other than itself that meaning is generated. If one accepts this conception of “the signifier” then it follows that one would not look to literature for content that might then be reflected upon philosophically. Rather, there would be something literary, inscriptive, or textual at the very origin of thinking. One would then—as Derrida proceeded to do— transform philosophy by thinking of its literary potentiality: philosophical terms such as justice, democracy, or truth could not simply be regarded as meanings that a philosopher might determine once and for all. Because such terms are textual or capable of being reinscribed and circulated well beyond any present intention, they have a force that cannot be contained or delimited by any present context. For this reason Derrida claims that literature is the right to say anything, given that its inscriptive power cannot reduce the text to an author’s intentionality.8 This also ties literature to democracy or the open circulation of what can be said. Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, Kristeva: all—in different

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ways—celebrated the materiality of inscription or “the signifier” in proclaiming the revolutionary power of literature. If one attends to the ways in which differences are marked out by the sounds and signs of a language, then one is also attentive to the system or law through which communication takes place; to disturb that system of inscribed differences would be to rethink the relations through which the world and meaning are given. Now it is just this conception of the primacy of the signifier or inscription that Deleuze’s philosophy challenges. With Guattari, Deleuze refers to the “despotism of the signifier,” and ties this conception of language, desire, and the subject to modern capitalism.9 How, they ask, did inscription come to be understood as a system of signs that imposes difference from above? If we think of the world as a chaotic and undifferentiated reality that is given meaning and order only by way of a constituted system, then it follows that one could not think about prelinguistic reality other than as a negated or lacking plenitude, and it would follow that language would have a commanding or despotic force. It would also follow that literary texts that drew attention to signs would be revolutionary insofar as they drew attention to inscription. In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari contest all these premises. First, inscription occurs before language in the narrow sense, and precedes what we think of as human history. The social order of individuals, families, and exchange (of language and money) emerges from inscription, or the way different elements are marked out from one another. Instead of difference being imposed from above, difference is generated positively from relations among sounds, marks, and bodies. The capitalist notion that individuals enter into relation by way of law and language is negative and Oedipal, and assumes that there are no differential forces that precede the imposition of a single overarching despotic system. In this sense the essential thing seemed to us to be, not exchange and circulation, which closely depend on the requirements of inscription, but inscription itself, with its imprint of fire, its alphabet inscribed in bodies, and its blocks of debts. The soft structure would never function, would never cause a circulation, without the hard machinic element that presides over inscriptions. Savage formations are oral, are vocal, but not because they lack a graphic system: a dance on the earth, a drawing on a wall, a mark on the body are a graphic system, a geo-graphism, a geography. These formations are oral precisely because they possess a graphic system that is independent of the voice, a system that is not aligned on the voice and not subordinate to it, but connected to it, co-ordinated “in an organization that is radiating, as it were,” and multidimensional. (And it must be said that this graphic system is linear writing’s

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contrary: civilizations cease being oral only through losing the independence and the particular dimensions of the graphic system; by aligning itself on the voice, graphism supplants the voice and induces a fictitious voice.)10

Second, in their much later work What Is Philosophy? they describe quite different powers of science, philosophy, and art. Here, as in their description of a positive inscription or marking out of differences in Anti-Oedipus, they describe the formation of distinct sensations that is prehuman and prelinguistic: Every morning the Sceno-poetesdentirostris, a bird of the Australian rain forests, cuts leaves, makes them fall to the ground, and turns them over so that the paler, internal side contrasts with the earth. In this way it constructs a stage for itself like a ready-made; and directly above, on a creeper or a branch, while fluffing out the feathers beneath its beak to reveal their yellow roots, it sings a complex song made up from its own notes and, at intervals, those of other birds that it imitates: it is a complete artist. This is not synesthesia in the flesh but blocs of sensations in the territory—colors, postures, and sounds that sketch out a total work of art. These sonorous blocs are refrains; but there are also refrains of posture and color, and postures and colors are always being introduced into refrains: bowing low, straightening up, dancing in a circle and lines of colors. The whole of the refrain is the being of sensation. Monuments are refrains. In this respect art is continually haunted by the animal.11

Before moving specifically to the implications this has for approaching poetry, one might begin to think about their phrase “art is continually haunted by the animal.” Unlike other philosophers of their generation, Deleuze and Guattari do not locate art, or even literature, as akin to a system of differences or signs that have an order that is radically detached from the matter of the earth. Theirs is a philosophy of immanence—with the world itself comprising signs, inscriptions, and perceptions at a prehuman level. Signs are not restricted to language or humans. In A Thousand Plateaus they tie becoming-animal to writing. One way of thinking about literature, then, is to regard signs and inscriptions as having a force that goes beyond communication, the social order and the distinct identity of bodies. If the stage-maker bird becomes the being that it is by way of assembling sensations into a territory, then we might see the identity of each body as a composition. To say that art is haunted by the animal, and to see the task of thinking and writing as “becoming-animal” is to think about the positive force of differences—the power to make difference—well beyond language and signs in the narrow sense. Rather than think of “man,” or the social

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individual subjected to signs and order, “becoming-animal” is a way of thinking about compositions of sensations (colors, sounds, marks). Here we might now turn to the way Deleuze theorizes signs and literature in his book on Proust. The first thing to recognize is that even though Deleuze and Guattari do make general claims about art—that art is the creation of affects and percepts, and therefore differs from philosophy’s concepts—when Deleuze reads literature he generates a singular mode of thinking in each case. Thinking, in turn, is not restricted to concepts but refers more to a distribution or how a writer, such as Proust, creates relations among forces to open problems that might then be thought philosophically. Part of the significance of Proust and Signs is the way in which Deleuze theorizes signs well beyond the narrowly linguistic conception of “the signifier.” In this highly complex work, Deleuze reads Proust’s In Search of Lost Time as a passage from one type of sign to another. Most significantly from a mode in which one reads signs as a path toward an ultimate and underlying truth that would make sense of the whole—a sense in which one is subjected to a system of signs, beyond which there must be the single meaning that is truth as such—Deleuze finds a truth beyond humans and animals that he refers to as vegetal and innocent, as though one might perceive everything in the world as bearing its own complexity, force, distinction, and capacity to open a world. Just as a lover might relate to an other not as a thing but as a being for whom there is an entirely different and distinct composition of time and perception, so might one experience (through literature) perceptions that diverge from the notion of a unified, organized, and universally human world. Literature is tied to desire and becoming-animal not because a text holds a meaning that we seek but that must remain forever deferred, but because “sex” for Deleuze is beyond the human. Sex is perhaps best thought of as the way in which elements enter into relation to create constant transformations and differences. Against the notion of logocentrism or that one necessarily assumes a truth that subtends a system of signs and difference, with signs being necessarily distant from a signified, Deleuze argues for a proliferation of signs where nonhuman elements create relations and distance (where plants are signs or attractors for insects). Deleuze’s philosophical approach to literature is both anti-Oedipal and poetic because there is not a single order of signs to which we are subjected, as though there were a transcendent paternal law that we must read but never master, while the work of art bears its own laws and consistency. The work of art, once created, is a world unto itself generating its relations of truth and composition; this is the meaning of poiesis for Deleuze—where all the world’s compositions make up a cosmos of their own:

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The logos is a huge Animal whose parts unite in a whole and are unified under a principle or a leading idea; but the pathos is a vegetal realm consisting of cellular elements that communicate only indirectly, only marginally, so that no totalization, no unification, can unite this world of ultimate fragments. It is a schizoid universe of closed vessels, of cellular regions, where contiguity itself is a distance: the world of sex. . . . As individuals possessing both sexes, though “separated by a partition,” we must cause the intervention of a galactic structure of eight elements, in which the male part or the female part of a man or woman can enter into relation with the female part or the male part of another woman or man (ten combinations for the eight elements: an elementary combination will be defined by the encounter of one individual’s male or female part with the male or female part of another individual. This produces: male part of a man and female part of a woman, but also male part of a woman and female part of a man, male part of a man and female part of another man, male part of a man and male part of another man . . . etc.) Aberrant relations between closed vessels; the bumblebee that constitutes the communication between flowers and loses its proper animal value becomes in relation to the latter merely a marginalized fragment, a disparate element in an apparatus of vegetal reproduction.12

Even though Deleuze’s sustained discussions of literature tend to refer to novelists—Proust, Kafka, Lawrence, Woolf, Miller, James—his conception of literature (and art more generally) is poetic. That is, rather than see novels as expressions of a social milieu, as articulations, masks, or resolutions of ideology, or as explorations of social wholes or individual lives, literary works are compositions that take on a certain autonomy or standalone quality. When Deleuze and Guattari write about desire it appears as if they might be endorsing an “everything is connected” thesis, and that one could see literary works as expressions of a cosmos in which every aspect is yet one more articulation of a complex whole. This is close to the truth, but not true enough. Deleuze’s philosophy is expressivist, such that rather than see some layers of reality such as language or mind representing reality, every aspect of life is a distinct and singular expression of the whole. An insect, an equation, a cloud, a refrain, a poem, and a building—all of these are articulations of matter and none has a privileged power to explain or account for any other. Every literary work, like every grain of sand or every human body, has its singular “perception” of all of matter, and opens to the infinite in its own way. Whereas one could unfold a universe from a grain of sand— explain everything that exists in terms of earth, minerals, geography, and geology—one could also explain the whole by way of writing, or the ways in which molecules read, respond, inscribe, and copy. There are a thousand (at

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least) plateaus. To look at the world poetically is to grant singularity and autonomy to the smallest and seemingly least connected of aspects. If, for example, I were to cut a sentence from a novel and examine it on its own terms—with all the possible novels, poems, worlds, authors, perceptions, and desires it might unfold—it would be more productive than (say) reducing a sentence to the specific communicative intent of the speaker. Literature, then, intensifies the deterritorializing power of language. You and I can have a conversation only because the signs we express are not tied to the singularity of our bodies but have formed a system of linguistic markers that allows them to be used and repeated. Literature is a “higher” deterritorialization in that it takes the signs we use for day-today communication and tears them from context and actual speakers. In this respect Deleuze’s approach to literature is consistently oriented to asking how texts work and what they do, rather than what they mean or any message they might import. Deleuze does have an affinity for practical philosophy (in terms of looking at what texts, concepts and terms do) but this does not mean that writing is “practical” in the sense of being located within human intentions, desires, and projects. “Practical” has the sense of “praxis,” or an action oriented to the unfolding of a desire toward what is not yet present. Praxis is not the opposite of poiesis but its complement: from the strivings, desires, and forces of the world, unpredictable and deterritorialized creations emerge. If I were to write a poem in order to achieve some end—becoming a famous and well-paid author, attending to marketable themes and fashionable styles—then the poetic object would answer to an already given set of requirements, and would maintain the present in its current form. One might term such modes of writing “practical” if one understands praxis as that which allows a body to maintain its current state. When Deleuze refers to “practical” philosophy, he has quite a different sense of the practical that concerns what might be brought into being that is not already given. Practical philosophy, then, is not (as we often find today) a set of philosophical guidelines that might help us negotiate business ethics or day-to-day calculations. Practical philosophy concerns what concepts might be created that would, in turn, expand what bodies can do. (And for Deleuze bodies are not necessarily organic bodies, but could also be bodies of work such as a tradition of texts, social bodies, institutional bodies, and any other assemblages.) One might say that when Descartes created the concept of the subject he transformed the force of what philosophy could do, but perhaps also opened a new style of thinking that would contribute to later practices of the subject, including private reading, identity politics, therapy, and a mode of truth and reason that relied on inward reflection. Poetry, too, is practical in this creative sense: creative not because

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“creative writing” expresses who I am, but because it creates new relations, and allows for new forces, potentials, and bodies. When Deleuze and Guattari say that art is the creation of affects and percepts they grant art a certain poetic or standalone quality. Rather than art expressing, criticizing, or reflecting a social whole, art brings something into being that is quite distinct from its conditions of emergence. On the one hand, then, art for Deleuze and Guattari has a certain eternal quality that cannot be reduced to the context of its emergence, its authorship, its broader conditions of consumption and production, or certainly its meaning if meaning refers to how its components operate in ongoing communication. On the other hand, artworks are singular insofar as art’s powers of composition create new ways of apprehension with each work. In the case of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time—despite appearing as the journey of a single character—the novel is ultimately about time, which is ultimately the fundamental concern of all of Deleuze’s philosophy. The eternal flux of time is quite distinct from the discrete units of everyday chronological or clock time. If it is possible for us to think of distinct things—including the identities of selves—this is because a grander whole of becoming has composed differentiated bodies. We perceive this whole of time only after it has expressed itself in the becomings that make up the world; indeed, time just is this ongoing open whole of becoming. In Proust and Signs Deleuze describes the narrator’s journey from worldly signs, where one simply “reads” the world in terms of a basic course of action, to the signs of love, where the beloved perceives a world that is other than one’s own and comprises different fluxes and flows of existence: It is a revelation to see again those who were familiar to us, for their faces, no longer a habit, bear in a pure state the signs and effects of time, which has modified this feature, elongated, blurred, or crushed that one. Time, in order to become visible, “seeks bodies and everywhere encounters them, seizes them to cast its magic lantern upon them.” . . . A whole gallery of heads appears at the end of the Search, in the salons Of the Guermantes. But if we had had the necessary apprenticeship, we would have realized from the start that worldly signs, by virtue of their vacuity, either betrayed something precarious or else have frozen already, immobilized in order to conceal their alteration. For worldliness, at each moment, is alteration, change.13

To arrive at the signs of art is to recognize that one’s own world of time is but one aspect of an eternal and always open whole of becoming, where fixed

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identities such as the self are expressions of a more complex creative temporality. Rather than beings who change through time, time is a complex becoming from which relatively distinct bodies may take on a relative stability. If “man” has been the figure for some unchanging essence or substrate that subtends reality and becoming, then the art of grasping “time in its pure state” is necessarily inhuman and poetic. It is inhuman or related to “becoming-animal” because rather than begin with subjects who go through change, art aims to grasp the pure predicates, essences, or affects and percepts that enter into relation to compose subjects: “But once the signs of art have given us the revelation of essence in their own regard, we recognize its effect in the other realms. We can recognize the marks of its attenuated, loosened splendor. Then we are in a position to render essence its due, and to recover all the truths of time, and all the kinds of signs in order to make them integral parts of the work of art itself.”14 Such traits or qualities are neither human nor animal, but might be thought of as “becoming-animal” or a way of thinking how a body becomes organized from intense differences. As Deleuze and Guattari argue in A Thousand Plateaus, there can be no “becomingman” because “man” has always stood for a basic unchanging substrate that underlies difference. Their task—by way of art, philosophy, and science, but in distinct ways—is to think about the differences that compose differentiated qualities. Art and literature, then, may take on a narrative or continuous form, but their journey is toward decomposition, toward intensive differences. Extensive differences, such as the difference between two qualities, are the outcome of intensive difference, or the power to make a difference. Broadly, one might say that Deleuze’s entire philosophy is inhuman and poetic insofar as it breaks with the figure of “man” who would be some subject that subtends thinking, perception, and becoming, and insofar as the task of all thinking is to take composed, organized, and connected forms and intuit their distinct differences. In his books on cinema, which (along with his book on the painter Francis Bacon)15 are his most profound and sustained meditations on art, Deleuze describes the ways in which modern cinema takes the flow of time and breaks it down into irrational cuts that free the series of images from the “sensory motor apparatus” of the human body. This might appear to be at odds with his claim in his book on Bacon that the aim of art is an analogue language: “Analogical language would be a language of relations, which consists of expressive movements, paralinguistic signs, breaths and screams, and so on.”16 On the one hand he hails cinema for its cuts and decomposition of the experienced flow of time: There is becoming, change, passage. But the form of what changes does not itself change, does not pass on. This is time, time itself, “a little time in its pure

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state”: a direct time-image, which gives what changes the unchanging form in which the change is produced. The night that changes into day, or the reverse, recalls a still life on which light falls, either fading or getting stronger. . . . The still life is time, for everything that changes is in time, but time does not itself change, it could itself change only in another time, indefinitely. At the point where the cinematographic image most directly confronts the photo, it also becomes most radically distinct from it.17

On the other hand he valorizes art’s power to release thinking from discontinuous units (or digits). Yet these two demands are perfectly compatible with what we might refer to as a poetic philosophy: it is only by cutting into and decomposing the everyday world of communication and coherence that one might intuit the force that generates difference rather than already differentiated forces. In his book on Bacon he compares Proust with the painter, with both bodies of work somehow finding a way to think a temporality that is not that of the willing and identified subject: This is perhaps because Bacon, when he refuses the double way of a figurative painting and an abstract painting, is put in a situation analogous to that of Proust in literature. Proust did not want an abstract literature that was too voluntary (philosophy), any more than he wanted a figurative, illustrative, or narrative literature that merely told a story. What he was striving for, what he wanted to bring to light, was a kind of Figure, torn away from figuration and stripped of every figurative function: a Figure-in-itself, for example, the Figurein-itself of Combray. He himself spoke of “truths written with the help of figures.” And if, in many cases, he resorted to involuntary memory, it was because it succeeded in making this pure Figure appear, as opposed to voluntary memory, which was content to illustrate or narrate the past.18

If Bacon’s visual art and Proust’s novels are both events of figuration, where a fragment of the world is detached and set apart in order to reveal an impersonal, nonchronological becoming, one might think of Deleuze’s philosophy as reaching its fulfillment in a mode of poetics that passes from being to becoming, from extensive to intensive difference, and from perception located in an “I” to a disclosure of the world as a composition of perceptions, each aspect of the world unfolding to infinity. Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Windhover” is ostensibly a theological poem, singing God’s grandeur by way of intuiting the brilliance of the world’s intensity. In Christian versions of expressivism—a tradition of philosophy upon which Deleuze draws heavily—every aspect of the world is a

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revelation of one convergent, harmonious whole of which only God has full perception. In Deleuze’s articulation of expressivism the world is made up of perceptions—a grade of grass “perceiving” water and light, a bee perceiving pollen— but some of those perceptions open divergent and incompossible worlds. In Hopkins’s poem there is an initial sense of expressive harmony but ultimately a divergence and contrapuntal world unfolds. Even though the poem begins with a highly active “I caught,” the “catching” has a sense of being taken hold (in the way one catches a virus). The object, the falcon, is not the perceiver’s but “this morning’s morning minion.” The poem passes to the falcon’s sense of air, to the point that perception is chastened, “My heart in hiding”: I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing! Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier! No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion19

Deleuze and Guattari argue that art is the creation of affects and percepts (which are not the same as affections and perceptions). If I am hunting and see a bird and shoot it, this is because I have a perception, and may then feel triumph (an affection). In Hopkins’s poem what is seen takes on a power of its own; the poem captures what is there to be perceived, a percept. The poem concludes with visual intensities that have now become distinct from the bird, and—in their becoming-distinct—these intensities become the subjects of a final action of falling, galling, and gashing: “blue-bleak embers . . . / Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.” As in most of Hopkins’s poetry, the very force of the visual destroys syntax and propulsive poetic meter, arriving at monosyllables that break with any form of conversational flow: “act, oh, air, pride, plume,

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here.” The subjects of the poem shift from the opening “I” to the falcon’s mastery, and then progressively the qualities and affects perceived in the falcon are the subjects of the verbs: “the fire that breaks from thee then.” And yet the falcon’s mastery is one of intensive encounter. It is as though the “I” of the poem becomes an “eye” that can feel the resistance of the falcon’s flight, “As a skateheel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend.” In the end the poem gives over not to any living being, but to rhythm itself: “sheer plod makes plow down sillion,” and then effaces the affect of the perceiver, “No wonder of it.” Of course one possible reading of this poem is that even the smallest powers affirm the mighty wonder of God, but reading the poem practically (in Deleuze’s sense of what it does) is to see its journey from the opening “I,” to a dazzled “eye,” to the rhythm and brilliance that catch the eye. To “gall” and “gash” is to decompose the intensities that entered into relation to generate the beings that are then capable of perceiving and being perceived. To read poetry in the spirit of Deleuze is not to situate the work back in its context (be that Hopkins’s life or the milieu of Victorian faith and doubt). Rather than seeking what the work represents or denotes, one reads for sense. If there can be an “I” or “eye” that in catching a falcon is itself caught, then the elements of the poem become forces that create what Deleuze elsewhere refers to as a “line of flight”: But in the end, why should all this be peculiar to painting? Can we speak of a hysterical essence of painting, under the rubric of a purely aesthetic clinic, independent of any psychiatry and psychoanalysis? Why could not music also extricate pure presences, but through an ear that has become the polyvalent organ for sonorous bodies? And why not poetry or theater, when it is those of Artaud or Beckett? This problem concerning the essence of each art, and possibly their clinical essence, is less difficult than it seems to be. Certainly music traverses our bodies in profound ways, putting an ear in the stomach, in the lungs, and so on. It knows all about waves and nervousness. But it involves our body, and bodies in general, in another element. It strips bodies of their inertia, of the materiality of their presence: it disembodies bodies. We can thus speak with exactitude of a sonorous body, and even of a bodily combat in music—for example, in a motif—but as Proust said, it is an immaterial and disembodied combat “in which there subsists not one scrap of inert matter refractory to the mind.” In a sense, music begins where painting ends, and this is what is meant when one speaks of the superiority of music. It is lodged on lines of flight that pass through bodies, but which find their consistency elsewhere, whereas painting is lodged farther up, where the body escapes from itself.20

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The day-to-day experience, perception, and language of subjects and objects, along with their desires and intentions, are possible because of the contraction or organization of intensities. In different ways art, science, and philosophy take hold of the tendencies that have formed bodies and experience and create new compositions. One can think of poetry in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of art as the creation of affects and percepts: in “The Windhover” the poem allows the power of visual brilliance to stand alone, as though the eye can feel the bird’s own sensation of resisting the air.

Notes 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). The Logic of Sense draws heavily on Lewis Carroll and features an appendix on Michel Tournier, while Difference and Repetition refers to Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin  V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Athlone, 1994). Jacques Derrida, “Before the Law,” in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 181–220. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: from Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 2006). John P. Muller and William J. Richardson, eds., The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida and Psychoanalytic Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); Kevin Attell, Giorgio Agamben: Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). Jonathan Culler, “The Most Interesting Thing in the World,” diacritics 38, nos. 1–2 (2008): 7–16. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 74. Deleuze and Guattari, 184. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 184. Deleuze, Proust and Signs, 175. Deleuze, 18. Deleuze, 89.

20 8 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

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Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London: Continuum, 2003). Deleuze, Logic of Sensation, 111. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Caleta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 17. Deleuze, Logic of Sensation, 67. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Windhover,” in Poems and Prose, ed. W. Gardner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2008), 30. Deleuze, Logic of Sensation, 54.

14 Irigaray’s Breath, or Poetry After Poetics Anne Emmanuelle Berger

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ost commentators of Luce Irigaray’s work draw a line, often a sharp one, between her first essays and her later books. Indeed, many late-twentieth-century readers, mostly feminist critics of some persuasion who showed a keen interest in Irigaray’s early work, do not know what to make of Irigaray’s “second” and longest period by far. The first period comprises mainly two books, published in the course of five years: the much-acclaimed Speculum of the Other Woman (1974 for the French edition) and This Sex Which Is Not One (1979).1 This is deemed to be Irigaray’s poststructuralist and quasi-deconstructionist moment. The second period spans over thirty-five years and has been said to confirm the “essentialist” tendencies already pointed at by some of Irigaray’s early critical readers. “Essentialism” is a widespread and derogatory term within the confines of late-twentieth-century feminist thought designed to incriminate both naturalizing and foundationalist (to use Judith Butler’s preferred idiom) tendencies in the consideration of sexual difference. In the course of its borrowing from the philosophical field of ontology, the feminist notion of “essence” has actually undergone a significant shift of meaning and value, leading sometimes to confusions and misunderstandings between philosophers (feminist or not) and feminist theorists coming from different fields. Whether Irigaray’s “essentialism,” that is, her undeniable embrace of a certain kind of ontology, corresponds to the contemporary feminist understanding of “essence,” to a particular philosophical ontology, or to both thus deserves some careful examination. For the time being, let us note that Irigaray’s “turn” away from poststructuralism and toward some form of “essentialism” from the late 1970s onward has not only been a philosophical or possibly ideological move but also a topical,

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rhetorical, and stylistic one. In particular, it has taken the form of a more and more pronounced emphasis on poetry. Such emphasis can be traced both at the thematic level, through the feminist philosopher’s explicit construing of her quest for a different “being-with-the-other-in-the world” as an effort to (re)poeticize the world, and at the performative level, with her attempts to write “poetically,” as in Elemental Passions (published in French in 1982),2 and eventually to craft plain poetry, as in Prières quotidiennes/Everyday Prayers (2004).3 What are, then, the stakes of Irigaray’s poetical turn (if it is a “turn”) in the second and most important part of her work? What is the connection between her probing (and ethics) of sexual difference and her choice of poetry as the strongest venue for a certain direction of thinking? What is poetry for, and what is it about, for Irigaray?

MALLARMÉ OR THE LINGUISTIC MOMENT

Un regard déjà s’y perd. —“Plato’s Hystera,” in Speculum of the Other Woman, 2514

Irigaray’s interest in poetry actually preceded any other intellectual commitment on her part. Like Julia Kristeva, Irigaray entered the intellectual world through the door of linguistics, which, in the 1960s, was still the queen of the human and social sciences. Anthropology and psychoanalysis relied on its insights, and so did philosophy. More precisely, Irigaray was trained in the kind of structural linguistics developed by Roman Jakobson. Jakobson used the metalanguage of rhetorics to describe the structure and functioning of language along “metaphoric” and “metonymic” axes of selection and combination. In other words, he looked at linguistics through the lenses of what he himself came to call “poetics.” The resulting dominance of poetics within (or upon) linguistics in the 1960s helps us understand the paramount importance taken by the literary text, and especially poetry, at that moment. Indeed, the first two papers ever published by Irigaray when she was training as a linguist in Belgium in the early 1960s dealt with poetry. The first one, “Inconscient freudien et structures formelles de la poésie” (1963),5 compared the linguistic structure and function of the poem with that of the dream and the joke. The second one, “Un modèle d’analyse structurale de la poésie” (1964), applied Jakobsonian linguistics to the study of Paul Valéry’s “La jeune Parque.” 6

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In his essays, Jacobson had already stressed the relation between the language of the dream and poetic language, hence between poetry and the workings of the unconscious. While also relying on Lacan’s own linguistic reinflection of Freud, Irigaray clearly follows the linguist’s lead in her first paper. Contrary to Jakobson, though, who, especially in his Questions de poétique,7 provided close readings of the literary texts he was concerned with, Irigaray offers mainly a conceptual parallelism between Freud’s analysis of dream language, his understanding of the linguistic fabric of jokes, and the practice of poetry. She mentions Valéry and Mallarmé and she quotes excerpts of Maurice Scève, Joaquim du Bellay, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé, but she doesn’t delve into detailed analyses of their work. This feature will remain constant in her writings. Unlike Kristeva, who became a professor of literature and who, at least in her first major books, dealt at length with the linguistic features of actual poetical works, Irigaray has written a lot about poetry and “poeticizing” but has studied or even mentioned strikingly few works by specific poets. In other words, her approach to—and understanding of—poetry doesn’t take the form of “readings,” at least in the conventional literary sense of the term. Indeed, she returns to—or continues with—Mallarmé in indirect or hidden ways in her first opus of feminist philosophy, Speculum of the Other Woman. Speculum marks Irigaray’s irruption in the field of what was not yet called “feminist thought,” at roughly the same time as Hélène Cixous, another prominent representative of what I have called elsewhere “linguistic feminism” and a participant, like Irigaray, in the then young and thriving Women’s Liberation Movement.8 Speculum also signals Irigaray’s newly acquired credentials in philosophy, as she switched from linguistics to philosophy in her academic pursuits. In the collection of essays featured in her book, Irigaray devises a forceful and original “theory” of the specular construction of men and women’s hierarchical relations within the Western philosophical tradition. This time, she provides very close readings of Freud’s conference on “femininity”9 and of Plato’s cave myth in The Republic. But “Plato’s Hystera” doesn’t only read like a playful and subversive reiteration-rendition of Plato’s mythological apologue, of the kind that has both puzzled and enchanted many early feminist readers of Irigaray, especially in the Anglophone world. “Plato’s Hystera” doesn’t only resort to the kind of textual mimicry or critical mimesis whose sly rhetoric, heuristic function, and political import have been extolled by her commentators. In fact, “Plato’s Hystera” is also a rewriting, never avowed and yet thinly disguised, of Jacques Derrida’s “La double séance.”10 Just as in “La double séance,” which deals with the question of “mimesis” and representation through a reading of both Mallarmé’s “Mimics” and an excerpt of Plato’s Philebe, in “Plato’s Hystera”

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“everything is acted out between rehearsal and performance, repetition and representation, or reproduction” (Speculum 247). Like Derrida in “La double séance,” Irigaray plays on the homophony and lexical familiarity between antre (the cave) and entre (the [in] between, the interval, the passage). She offers a reading of the cave as a forgotten uterine inner space, which takes her and us back into the vicinity of Derrida’s “hymen” (351). And what about Mallarmé? Well, Mallarmé is everywhere (not) to be seen, in at least two guises: in Irigaray’s turns of phrase, which recall “Un coup de dés” and Mallarmé’s characteristic syntax, as well as in her attack on logocentrism, which, like Derrida’s, pitches syntax against “metaphor” and “writing” against truthful speech.11 Commentators have hailed Irigaray’s “poetical style” in Speculum. Take a paragraph like this one: Forgotten Vagina. Missing passage, left on the shelf, between the outside and the inside, between the plus and the minus. With the result that all divergencies will finally be proportions, functions, relations that can be referred back to sameness. Inscribed, postulated in/by one, same unit(y), synthesis or syntax. Dictating silently, invisibly, all the filial resemblances or differences. Even if it seems possible to name what articulates them, or see it represented: sun for example, or truth. Or good. Or father. Or phallus? For examples. (Speculum 247, translation modified)

The sentences are deliberately fragmented, “de-hierarchized,” dissociated. The grammatical subjects that are supposed to govern the verbs and perform the “actions” described are omitted in favor of an overuse of the passive verbal form. Nominal elliptical phrases abound, as well as anaphoric devices. In short, traditional discursivity under the lead of an apparently sovereign “I” or “We” is dismantled. With such an “illocutory disappearance” of the subject, no wonder that, on several occasions, sentences appear that look like replicas of Mallarmé’s precious syntactic convolutions or famous “coup de dés.” See page 311 of the French original: “Le magicien, dont la situation derrière et/ou antérieure, vaut déjà qu’on analyse le re-cul, se susbstitue les instruments de son pouvoir, leurrant en la soidisant adéquation de leur facture. Un regard déjà s’y perd” (my emphasis).12 And again, page 341–42: “La deuxième naissance, origine secondaire, renaissance ou réminiscence, en vérité jamais ne diffèrera, simplement, le tropisme hystérique. Le discours de la raison, métaphoricité solaire, paternelle, jamais ne déplacera, sans retour, la phantasmatique de la caverne” (my emphasis).13 Irigaray’s clever mime, her haunted syntax, never will abolish Mallarmé’s spectral signature. But why Mallarmé? Because, at his boldest and as the boldest, the French selfreflexive poet and sophisticated analyst of the epochal “crisis of verse” that

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marked the true onset of “(post)modernity” epitomizes the poetic revolution of language hailed by all the proponents and representatives of what has been called retrospectively the “linguistic turn.” The 1970s were truly Mallarmé’s decade. Irigaray’s sometimes Mallarmean prose in Speculum thus signals her full participation in the intellectual project of her time. Derrida enrolled Mallarmé in his effort to deconstruct the workings and underpinnings of logocentrism. In “Plato’s Hystera,” Irigaray follows course. Her indictment of “the discourse of reason,” her analysis of the “solar metaphoricity” that governs Plato’s cave myth, her debunking of the analogical link between reason, the sun, and the father echo Derrida’s analysis of Western metaphysic’s heliocentrism. In “White Mythology,” Derrida showed how the dominant philosophical understanding of metaphor, from Aristotle up to Hegel and his followers, tends to turn this trope, and fiction in general as a tropology, into a servant of truth:14 since metaphor is traditionally construed as a conduit of analogy, the turn away from the “proper” (meaning) serves to better return to it, and the other (in and as language) becomes a figure of the same. Jean-Joseph Goux analyzed in similar fashion the logocentric production of what he calls general equivalence.15 “Plato’s Hystera” partakes in a kindred critique of metaphor’s arraignment by the discourse of truth: “A whole conception of language here halts—or runs up against—the illusion of a system of metaphor, a meta-metaphor, postulated by the preexistence of the truth that decides in advance how conversation, interventions, will develop,” writes Irigaray about Socratic dialogs (Speculum 261–62). Even more pointedly, and relying again on Jakobson’s oppositional distinction between metaphor and metonymy, that is, between selection (based on equivalence) and contiguity, she faults what she calls “the dominant economy of metaphor” for preventing the blind men in the cave and their Western heirs from finding the path to the ψστερα προτερα (hystera protera). Only a language able to foster connections without canceling differences could lead back to it. In other words, only a metonymic approach, based on contiguity rather than (structural) analogy, on (syntactic) closeness rather than (semantic) sameness, could enable such a move: “Thus the orbit of the cave organized into cinematography everything that had been left outside its enclosure: the hystera protera. Other excess to language. But these two ‘terms’ to the logic of discourse cannot/can no longer be related. A whole system of kinship— that is, in this case, of analogy—makes contact between them impracticable. The economy of metaphor that is in control keeps them apart” (346). The critique of metaphor as the preferred trope and operation of Western metaphysics will remain a hallmark of Irigaray’s thinking about language in general and poetic language in particular. But it will take a different path and take on a new meaning with the feminist philosopher’s breaking away from, or breaking up with, deconstruction. The signs of such a breakup could not be

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more blatant than in the piece called “Belief Itself,” which Irigaray read at the first Cerisy “decade” devoted to Derrida’s work in 1980.16

PULLING THE VEIL ON DERRIDA

Even before the hymen, the angel makes the annunciation —“Belief Itself,” in Sexes and Genealogies, 38

“Belief Itself” is construed as a response to one of Derrida’s pieces on Freud published in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond.17 In that piece, titled “Speculations—on Freud,” Derrida provides a reading of Freud’s analysis of the Fort-Da game. In her own response, Irigaray ostensibly treats Derrida’s speculation on Freud as a pretext as she proceeds with deliberate care to bypass her alleged subject (i.e., Derrida’s work). In the first pages, she establishes the legitimacy of her own reading position of the Freudian text as a practicing psychoanalyst. She begins by quoting a female patient of hers, who described herself as excluded from the spiritual communion between father and son. Such a communion is explicitly construed by both the female patient and Irigaray as a reiteration of the Catholic ritual of the Eucharist. At this point, Irigaray interprets the latter not as a reenactment of the sacrifice of Christ, but as a sacrificial albeit symbolic consumption of the absent woman. Even though Irigaray never even hints at such a possibility, one cannot help but wonder whether this fantasized scene of communion between father and son at the expense of a suffering woman might not stand in for another scene, namely, the spiritual encounter between Freud (the father) and Derrida (the son), seen from the point of view of Irigaray as the excluded female third. Whatever the case, Irigaray certainly manages to turn the tables on both Freud and Derrida in the course of her presentation. She goes on to quote a long excerpt from Freud followed by a rather short paragraph by Derrida, only to dismiss both Freud’s interpretation of the spool game and Derrida’s reading of it. Freud, she says, may well have been wrong in thinking that the boy is playing with the appearance and disappearance of his mother and even more wrong in thinking that the spool game aimed at conquering a threatening situation. What is being replayed here, according to Irigaray, is the little boy’s relation to his own birth. And since neither life nor death can ever be mastered by any living being, even if it is a human subject, what is at stake is not so much the male child’s wishful mastery as his delusional belief in the possibility of mastery. As for Derrida, again according to

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Irigaray, he has missed the point twice: in hinting that the bed mentioned by Freud in his account of the scene might be worth thinking about, and in repeating Freud’s mistaken interest in the spool. In Irigaray’s view, the decisive element, the one on which she places her interpretive bets and bases her own reading of the game, is instead the “veil” or curtain, which surrounds the bed across which the child throws the spool.18 Once Irigaray has performed this double dismissal, there will be no further word about Derrida, or in his direction. Seizing the veil that neither Freud nor Derrida had paid attention to, she turns it into a placenta-like envelopment. In the course of her subsequent meditation on bodily envelopments and light veils, she brings in a figure that will become a familiar visitor of Irigaray’s texts: an angel, who symbolizes the mediation between earth and heaven, the mother and god, the body and the divine. But what, might one ask at this point, does this have to do with Irigaray’s stance on poetry? Lo and behold! On the wings of Irigaray’s angel flies Rilke, a well-known host of angels, who will become from then on, along with Hölderlin, Irigaray’s main poetical reference. Hölderlin and Rilke are also the two poets most frequently quoted and reflected upon by Heidegger. Indeed, the visitation of the angel signals Irigaray’s “poetical turn” and her moving away from what I have called her deconstructionist and Mallarmean moment in favor of an understanding of poetry heavily inflected by Heidegger’s. The second and longest part of “Belief Itself ” is entirely devoted to a meditation on angels under Rilke’s aegis. It continues with a poetical musing on flowers, whose opening, writes Irigaray, is “sans projet,” without an aim.19 The piece ends with a shameless paraphrase of Heidegger’s famous essay “What Are Poets For?,” a plain borrowing of Heidegger’s thought and words on the matter, halfadmitted by Irigaray herself in a footnote.20

POETRY BEYOND METAPHOR BEYOND METAPHYSICS

The poetic writing that I try to practice seeks to preserve and promote a phuein, a becoming, which does not divide itself from nature. —Prières quotidiennes/Everyday Prayers, 30

Heidegger’s philosophical influence loomed over Irigaray from the very beginning of her career as a thinker. Her first piece, in which she follows a path opened

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by both Jakobson and Lacan, actually starts with an epigraph drawn from Heidegger’s “Man Dwells as a Poet.” 21 Indeed, on closer scrutiny, the ostensibly Jakobsonian comparison between poetry and dream language reveals another current of thought. “Inconscient freudien et structures formelles de la poésie” is also an essay on the use and role of the present tense in poetry and, through it, on the language of “Being.” Starting from Freud’s reflection on the peculiar “actuality” of the dream, which renders the wish “present,” as it were, by performing it, she attempts to define the nature and function of the present tense in poetic language. Following Freud, she emphasizes the ability of the present tense to “represent what is wished for as if it was accomplished” (“Inconscient freudien” 445). This hallucinatory power of the present tense, which manages to render present for the addressee the scene the speaker is talking about whatever the actual time of the event’s occurrence, is well known by the literary practitioners of hypotyposis. Irigaray thus extols a certain actualizing force of the present tense rather than its ability to convey abstract ideas through gnomic statements. Parting from Freud and dream language though, she goes on to define the utmost wish of the poet—a wish only a certain understanding and use of the present tense can help make come true—as one “not so much of arresting time, but of creating another time, without direction, without actuality, a mythical time from before history, where [the] instant and eternity can coincide” (445, my translation). Later on in her essay, Irigaray defines the now deemed “inactual” yet deeply lived through “time” of the poem as one of a “fabulous present,22 beyond all and any duration” (461). In the preface to her Prières quotidiennes/Everyday Prayers written fifty years after this first essay, one finds again an almost identical formulation, this time applied to her own poetical endeavor: “Why [is] present tense used so much [by Irigaray herself] to say the real? . . . The present here suggests duration more than current events, it says an eternity born from the instant” (44). Even though Irigaray’s formulations regarding poetical time or the present of poetry in her first essay are still tentative, even somewhat confused, her first attempt at thinking the poem as the linguistic experience and instantiation of a “mythical” present foreshadows her (re)turn to Heidegger. More precisely, it conjures up the Heidegger of “What Are Poets For?” and the commentator of Hölderlin’s hymn “The Ister,” in other words, the Heidegger who tried to think and hail “Being” as the presentation (or donation) of a certain presence, through and thanks to poetical speech: “The whole sphere of presence is present in saying,” writes Heidegger in “What Are Poets For?” (132). By this he means, following Hölderlin, that only poetic saying can convey Being as presence. In his

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commentary on “The Ister,” the philosopher accounts for Hölderlin’s recourse to mythology in ways that shed light on Irigaray’s own relentless pursuit of Greek gods, goddesses, and heroic mortals. “Mythology,” Heidegger writes, “is that historical ‘process’ in which being itself comes to appear poetically.” 23 Once again, Irigaray comes close to such an understanding of myth and mythological reference when she interprets poetry from the start as the fulfillment of the wish to “create another time, . . . a mythical time from before history” (“Inconscient freudien” 445). Remaining on Hölderlin’s tracks, both Heidegger and Irigaray conceive of myth as a poetical expression of “time,” that is, the time of Being. Irigaray’s shift from syntax to song, from “differance” to presence, from Mallarmé to Rilke as of the early 1980s thus marks her apparent (re)turn to Heidegger. From then on, she too will hail poetry as the shortest and most powerful cut to Being. One could read Irigaray’s turn or return to a Heideggerian view of language as a kind of neo-Romantic reaction against the at once textualist and formalist approach to literature typical of the structuralism and soon after poststructuralism of the 1960s and early 1970s. Few thinkers and writers, after all, have remained faithful to the radical outlook of the deconstructionist moment. With the Romantics and Hegel in particular, as well as with Heidegger, Irigaray shares the idea that poetry, and more specifically lyric poetry, is the highest form of “saying,” the speech art form closest to something like the “divine.” Yet, again like Heidegger, she parts ways with Hegel on the question of metaphor, which she continues to excoriate as the exemplary trope of the Western metaphysical tradition. In Speculum, as we have seen, Irigaray had already indicted a certain notion and use of metaphor, which she linked to the prevalence of a metaphysical understanding of language. While abandoning the Derridean line on Western metaphysics as the philosophical matrix of logocentrism, she will try to take her criticism of metaphysical metaphorics one step further, a step that will bring her even closer to Heidegger, up to a certain point at least. In his commentary of “The Ister,” Heidegger criticizes the Western metaphysical conception of art in general and poetry in particular. From Plato up to Hegel, poetry, he says, has been merely treated as a sensuous and pleasing metaphoric representation—Irigaray might call it a “veil”—of truth, more exactly of the “idea” of and as truth: The distinction between the sensuous [aestheton] and the nonsensuous [noeton] is the fundamental configuration of what has long since been called metaphysics. . . . Since Plato, all Western conceptions and interpretations of the world have been

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“metaphysical.” In all metaphysics, the work of art counts as something sensuous that does not exist just for itself. . . . It exists for the nonsensuous and suprasensuous, for that which is also named the spiritual or the spirit. With respect to the metaphysical essence of art, we can say that all art has to do with symbolic images. (17)

Poetry, in this sense, would only serve as a repertory of “symbolic images” in service of a higher meaning. Against the metaphysical tradition, Heidegger contends that a (true) poet is not a painter of the shadows projected by the light of truth. Rather, he or she is “an experienced traveler in the land of the saying of Being” (98). Hence, “the rivers in Hölderlin’s poetry” are “in no way symbolic images” (18). Rather, they point to the strange locality of Being. According to Heidegger, then, Hölderlin’s poetry “[stands] entirely outside of metaphysics, and thus outside the realm of Western art “ as the latter is understood through the category of aesthetics (18). In a similar vein, that is, thinking of herself as one of those poetic travelers treaded after by Heidegger, Irigaray aspires or claims to be “concerned to hit the right note without claiming to speak the truth,” as she writes in Elemental Passions.24 In her preface to her Prières quotidiennes/Everyday Prayers, she comes close to defining her own poetical work as an attempt to “say Being”: “Creation, here,” she says of her “prayers,” “is no longer a work of fiction but a disclosure of what is the most real in the real, a real that we do not yet know because our culture has been busy with something other than our Being and the relation between us” (33). Attempting to devise what we might call a poetics of ontology while describing her own creative practice, she adds: “The infinitive comes in frequently as a way to say Being, to express it in its becoming. . . . If everyday discourse generally entrusts the permanent to the substantive and the transitory to the verb, here discourse unfolds in another way. The use of the verb reaches the eternal and the use of the substantive reaches current life in its particularity, in its concreteness.” This passage ends with the remarks on the necessary use of the present tense to “say the real” I have quoted earlier. To attain Being, or rather to stay as close as possible to it, one has to give up the metaphorical pull or drift of metaphysical poetics: “The simplest words are the best medium to succeed in this. Those that work or transform little but that let be. . . . Words that are the least metaphorical, the closest to the real” (43, my emphasis). All this culminates with the following assertion, at the closing of Irigaray’s preface to her Prayers: “there are no metaphors, in the strict sense, in the feminine poems presented in this book” (48).

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But do Heidegger and Irigaray really mean the same thing when they speak about Being? Assessing Heidegger’s thinking on Being is of course too immense a task for me to even begin to tackle here. Let me just indicate briefly what I see as strong convergences but also possible points of separation between Heidegger’s and Irigaray’s poetic ontologies. Like Heidegger, Irigaray attempts to free ontology from the Western metaphysical closure. This will lead her to look for Being eastward in much of her recent work. The feminist philosopher is also indebted to Heidegger’s interpretation of phusis, an interpretation once again prompted by the latter’s close reading of his favorite poets. At the start of this paper, I mentioned the understanding of essentialism, a term that purports to decry the appeal to or reliance on “essence” (from the late Latin verb essere, “to be”), which has come to prevail within the precincts of feminist thought. According to this understanding, “being” is equated with “nature,” and “nature” itself is conflated with some form of fixed biologism by essentialist thinkers. Yet, for his part, and again with the help of both Rilke and Hölderlin, Heidegger developed a discourse on the nature of “nature,” that is, on what the use of the word nature might index, completely at odds with the dominant feminist interpretation today. “What Rilke calls Nature,” he notes in “What Are Poets For?,” “is not contrasted with history.” “Above all,” he continues, “it is not intended as the subject matter of natural science. Nor is Nature opposed to art. It is the ground for history and art and nature in the narrower sense. In the word Nature as used here, there echoes still the earlier word phusis, equated also with zoe, which we translate ‘life.’ In early thought, however, the nature of life is not conceived in biological terms, but as the phusis, that which arises” (101). Phusis, as “that which arises,” is not opposed to history, art, and technics. Quite the contrary, it names the condition of possibility if not the very occurrence of historical processes. It designates not the fixed or factual nature of “what is,” but the eventful motion of “what gives” (es Gibt).25 It is therefore not to be confused with “the subject matter of natural science” (or perhaps with what we nonbiologists think naïvely biology is about), no more, for that matter, than bios ought to be. “The law of history places historical mankind into a specific essence,” states Heidegger, this time with regard to Hölderlin’s hymn (Hölderlin’s Hymn 143). Clearly, this historically inflected, or historically bound, essence of humankind is not to be confused with the “merely organic.” “The relation to one’s own” developed through the experience of wandering away from home—a relation that poetry alone is able to capture because “language is the house of Being” and poetry as the art of “saying” is what makes Being “arise”

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in language—“is never a mere self-assured affirmation of the so-called ‘natural’ or ‘organic,’ ” insists Heidegger (143). When Irigaray claims that “the poetic writing that [she tries] to practice seeks to preserve and promote a phuein, a becoming, which does not divide itself from nature,” when she defines poetry as “language” set again in motion, literally up-set and un-settling,26 when she advocates again and again the practice of art, as she does in “Flesh Colors” (in Sexes and Genealogies) or in In the Beginning She Was as a way of cultivating (our) “nature,” 27 she does not only speak ancient, that is, pre-Socratic, Greek: she speaks Heideggerian Greek. Yet, there are, I think, several important differences between Heidegger’s and Irigaray’s views on the poetry (qua “saying”) of “nature” and the nature of poetry. If Heidegger does characterize poetry as “singing” in “What Are Poets For?,” if, listening intently to Rilke’s words, he senses the immense power of the almost imperceptible “poetic breath,” his approach to song, sound, and breath is much less literal, or let’s say, much less willfully embodied than Irigaray’s. For all her half-Spinozist, half-Heideggerian, and lately neo-Buddhist call on (and to) the divine— a “divine” that, to paraphrase Heidegger again, is nonetheless presumed to belong to this side of life (Hölderlin’s Hymn 31)—Irigaray has exhibited from the start a strong materialist bent. And through all her apparent discursive shifts, she has continued to uphold and deepen what can qualify in my opinion as a materialist stance. As I said, Speculum, and especially “Plato’s Hystera,” is couched in Derridean language. Yet, at closer look, the argument made by Irigaray against metaphysical phallologocentrism is perhaps less a deconstructionist one than a “foundationalist” one of sorts: one that takes material and especially corporeal reality both as its rational and as its epistemological ground, full and firm. Irigaray doesn’t fault the theo-heliocentric truth discourse that commands the allegory of the cave for failing to acknowledge its own metaphoricity; she doesn’t really deconstruct the hierarchical opposition between proper and figural meaning by showing that the alleged proper meaning of Reason is always already metaphorical. Rather, she attacks logocentric metaphoricity on the grounds that it obscures the (maternal) materiality of the cave, thus causing the men in the cave and the readers of the apologue to forget (this is one of Irigaray’s preferred expression) the bodily reality of their origin. Take a paragraph like this one, which describes the hiding, burying, obscuring, and forgetting of the maternal origin achieved by the logocentric “discursive parades” of men: The logos, in order to preserve the purity of its conception, so veils [the matter/ mother/other] in the truth of his word that it is no longer clear what she is

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hiding in her store, and all the desires and delirium of potency denied by measured Reason can be projected on to her. Thus is she manifest and exalted, even as she is masked and lost, in discursive parades that set her outside herself; ideally offered to the oratorial disputes between men. As for the rest, it lies buried under the earth, deep down in dark caves where all is shadow and oblivion. And to which we will need to return one day. But by what path? (Speculum 344)

Following what we could call a traditional materialist logic, Irigaray characterizes the metaphoric “figuration of origin” provided by the cave myth as an idealistic “reversal,” one that substitutes the figural for the proper, the abstract for the concrete, the veil of discourse for the flesh of the maternal envelopment. “This cave is a mere reversal, a project of figuration [of the origin, the hystera],” she writes earlier in the same vein (249). The figuration, or “metaphorization,” of the origin through the cave myth amounts to “veiling” the hystera (ψστερα), a process that Irigaray abundantly denounces as a “writing trick with duplicative effects” (296), a game of “images, reflections, reduplications” (262). In the end, Irigaray leaves in place the opposition between the proper and the figural. In her charge against metaphor as veil, she even repeats the metaphysical secondarization and indictment of metaphor she had seemed to want to put in question in the wake of Derrida and Heidegger. The notable difference between her stance and the traditional line of metaphysics, of course, is that she doesn’t decry metaphor in the name of abstract truth, but in the name of the body.28 Heidegger was no metaphysical idealist, but no materialist in this sense either. “Being,” for him, that is, the specific being-in-the-world of humankind, is primarily “grounded” in (the groundlessness of) language. The body, its life, and its attributes are hardly part of Heidegger’s philosophical vocabulary, nor are they as such the object of his attention. In contrast, Irigaray’s neo-Heideggerian antimetaphysical ontology remains heavily inflected by what I have called her early materialist stance. And her materialist stance, her claim that bodies matter, her insistence that we do not obscure the fleshy stuff we are made of owe a lot to the terms of her initial philosophical and political engagement with the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s in the Western world. Before running too quickly to the conclusion that, if Heidegger’s ontology may well largely escape the feminist definition of “essentialism,” Irigaray’s certainly doesn’t, let’s at least put Irigaray’s emphasis on the materiality and life of the body, above all, the female body, in perspective. There is no question that, in contrast with earlier feminist struggles and formulations, the Western feminism

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of the 1970s brought the “body question” to the fore. Born in the wake of the socalled sexual revolution, reacting against the bourgeois pathologization of the hysterical body, emboldened by contraception, fueled by the battle for abortion rights and, beyond that, for the rights of women to own their bodies, the Women’s Liberation Movement celebrated its newly acquired sexual freedom. Many women taking part in the “movement” explored their newly “discovered” bodies. This new emphasis on “the body,” the attending discourse on enjoyment beyond the limitations of “patriarchy” or the dictations of bourgeois and religious prescriptions, and, finally, the recasting in sexual or sexualized terms of the struggle for symbolic as well as social equality didn’t stem from, or result in, a belief in an eternal feminine; it didn’t necessarily express or condone a narrowly “biologistic” outlook on sexual difference. Rather, it reflected a particular historical and intellectual juncture, one that saw “sexuality” and the gendered experience of the body enter the political discourse as such, and transform the philosophical landscape. If Foucault questioned the “monarchy” of sex, he too, for that matter, extolled the political and epistemological potential of “bodies and pleasures.” 29 Speculum of the Other Woman, with its wishful excavating of the repressed (maternal) “body” of Western philosophy, fully belongs to that moment.

IRIGARAY ’S FEMININE ELEMENT(S)

An interweaving of souls / Arms at the service of breath / A sort of wings / Present in our embraces, / Holding the flesh of the air / In us —Everyday Prayers, December 8, 1997

Despite the changes in Irigaray’s language and philosophical affiliations I have delineated so far, one could say that, with regard to the body matter, Irigaray has remained faithful to the initial impetus of Speculum. Like Heidegger, she insists that phusis, far from being identical to itself through time, is or rather names “becoming.” But if everything she says about the necessity to cultivate life also points to a nonfixist ontology that makes room for historical and transformative processes, she does tend to present the kind of poetry she wishes for as a practice of reconnection, inextricably physical and spiritual, with bodily processes, through the conscious exercise and transcription of “breath.”

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Already, in “Belief Itself,” she had managed to add more body to Heidegger’s line on what poets are for. At an unexpected turn of (para)phrase, she describes poets as those speaking beings who “[trust] beyond measure that which gives flesh to speech: air, breath, song” (52, my emphasis). In Everyday Prayers, she explains that the “singing” body is “animated through and through by breath, has become body-soul, and not the burial place of an immortal soul, which only death could liberate from its prison” (49). This vitalist, almost animist (in the literal sense) conception of poetic practice as an art of breathing leads her to seek and praise the benefits of “air.” “Air” is the very element that living beings breathe and live by; it connects inside and outside (one has to breathe in air in order to breathe it out), thus manifesting the body’s dependency on its natural environment. “Air” is the physical milieu, the basic condition of any and every encounter between living organisms, whatever species they belong to. With “air”—which Irigaray claims Heidegger, for all his powerful indictment of metaphysics, has forgotten—and thanks to it, poetry as an art of breathing is thus connected to physical life and its cosmic rhythms. And because the poet literally needs air to transmute her or his breath into poetic words (or aerial speech), because the poet’s task, in this sense, is to spell out the haleines (another word for “breath[s”) of living things, Irigaray ends up taking refuge, in both thought and reality, in a properly “natural” environment, in a much more literal sense than the one intended by Hölderlin, Rilke, or Heidegger. Only in such a conducive environment can she breathe the pure essence of poetry. One might be tempted once again to interpret Irigaray’s wishful poetic retreat into a “nature” recast as an unscathed physical environment, as a neoRomantic gesture, a flight away from the disappointing arena of history. Or one might stress the new political potential of this perhaps more antipolitical than political disavowal of the polis, with its at once atmospheric and spiritual pollution. The literalization of the poetic motif of “breath” brings attention to the fact that, contrary to what the Romantic myth of self-expression in nature might cause us to forget, breathing is as much if not more a question of inhaling than of exhaling. The poetic subject, therefore, as well as the quality and meaning of the poetry she or he is able to create, cannot be thought independently from the quality of the air she or he breathes. Irigaray’s mythophysics ends up being inseparable from a commitment to ecological transformation, which aims at bringing about the conditions of a proper cultivation of humankind’s nature. But what marks the poetic or poeticizing body, which breathes and sings according to the rhythms of nature, as feminine? Obviously, lungs are not sexual

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organs. The ascription of the adjective “feminine” to the “breath art” Irigaray is celebrating can thus only be a matter of gender, not sex.30 It is at the moment when she asserts most directly that “there are no metaphors” in her poems that Irigaray characterizes the latter as “feminine” in Everyday Prayers.31 The “femininity” of her poems is thus linked to their allegedly nonmetaphoric texture. In “Plato’s Hystera,” as we have seen, an antimetaphoric “animus” already pervaded Irigaray’s reading of the cave apologue. Such a reading was driven by the feminist philosopher’s stated desire to unearth not all and any body matters that have been buried under the tropological operations of phallogocentrism, but more specifically the material body of the mother. Irigaray maintains this line of thought when she felicitously invites us to rephrase Heidegger’s famous pronouncement “language is the house of Being” in “What Are Poets For?,” as “la poésie est l’enceinte de l’être.” Both the cave-hystera and poetry qualify as enceintes in Irigaray’s view. The word enceinte in French doesn’t only designate any kind of enclosure or precinct; it also evokes most vividly the figure of the pregnant woman, as in la femme enceinte, thus lending at once a body and a gender—is that not a metaphoric operation of sorts?—to poetic saying. In Everyday Prayers though, the “feminine” body seems to take on a less sexually defined shape and therefore a potentially more general meaning: “Matter is transformed,” Irigaray continues on the same page, “into a spiritual corresponding to it while still remaining matter” (48). Clearly, then, while the qualifier “feminine” is attached to the presumed ability of poetic language to let “the body”—that is, matter qua matter—speak through, this ability is not predicated primarily on considerations of physiological sexual differences. Rather, its qualification as “feminine” stems from a certain interpretation of the historical unfolding, or deployment, of “sexual difference,” which places matters of the body and women on the same side of the cultural divide. Isn’t it because women have been assigned the tasks and side of bodily matters by Western metaphysical culture that the experience of the body has become a gendered experience beyond the realm of sexuality proper? In other words, nonmetaphoric poetry might not be “feminine” because, as the language of matter, it is the language of women proper. Rather, it is “feminine” because body matters have been traditionally gendered feminine. In keeping with her materialist stance, Irigaray doesn’t aim at freeing women from the contingency and needs of bodily life. On the contrary, she wants to resist the abstracting pull of Western metaphysics, and draw men and women alike back toward (that) life, in order for humankind to learn to “cultivate” the natural (re)sources of its becoming.

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VERSE OR VERSUS

My angels are the servants of life, of love: tender, almost carnal. Those of Rilke are terrible, frightening in the encounter he maintains or fails to maintain with them. —“Preface,” Everyday Prayers, 31

One would think that Irigaray’s attack on the metaphysical opposition between body and spirit, or matter and form, which she claims “it is the advantage of poetic writing” to overcome, would result in a refusal, or at least a skirting of the dualistic structure of metaphysical discourse. Yet, just as with the opposition between figural and literal meaning, the poet-philosopher ends up reinscribing and reanimating a great number of the oppositions she purports to contest. With the exception of the “feminine” prayer poems, whose aerial lightness and haiku-like brevity prevent arguments from forming, her parapoetic, metapoetic, and quasi-poetic texts remain mostly argumentative and are, perhaps even more than others, loaded with oppositional statements. Take her treatment of the distinction between “dwelling” and “building,” once again inherited from Heidegger. Heidegger, as we know, is preoccupied with the difficulty of locating Being—meaning at once retracing the path to its abode and finding a proper locale for it—in the destitute times opened by GrecoChristian metaphysics. The Da of Sein is fort. What draws mankind ever further away from Being’s locality or “dwelling,” what prevents it from dwelling in and as “Being,” is the technocratic impulse or direction of Western metaphysics: “All this working and achieving, this building and cultivating, is merely cultura, culture,” writes Heidegger in his course notes on “The Ister Hymn” (137). “Culture,” he adds, “is always already only the consequence of a ‘dwelling,’ of a ‘being at home’ of spirit. Such dwelling, however, being properly homely, is ‘poetic’ ” (137). Shortly after this statement, Heidegger will complicate the notion of “homeliness” by pointing to the estranged or necessarily strange nature of the dwelling or “being at home” of spirit. “Whatever is one’s own is most remote and the path to one’s own most is the longest and the most difficult” (143), he warns in ways that resonate unwittingly with Freud’s famous pronouncement: “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden.” One can only “wander” home then, and that is what poets such as Hölderlin endeavor to do. For our present purpose, let’s retain that Heidegger situates “dwelling” and “poetry” on the same side as home finding. Poetry has to do with dwelling, that is, with seeking the “properly homely,” as opposed to

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trying to “achieve” and succeed through “building.” Conversely, one can only dwell “poetically” or, perhaps even, in poetry, the sole spiritual home. In “When Life Still Was,” one of the essays collected and published only in English in In the Beginning She Was, Irigaray echoes Heidegger’s questioning of a certain “will to construct”: “Man,” she writes, “constructs a new dwelling with language. But who will inhabit it? Have the flesh, the soul not disappeared in the construction: used in order to build, and then, forgotten in this new mode of existing? From which heart and breath withdraw. And, more generally, what lives and grows” (45). Here, she mourns the disaffection and disembodiment, the loss of heart and breath, that characterize “man’s” current linguistic constructions. In another piece of that same volume, “Between Myth and History: The Tragedy of Antigone,” she offers a rereading of Sophocles’s Antigone and reinterprets the concern expressed by the chorus for Antigone in the following way: “The chorus describes how man has lost the possibility of dwelling because he only dominates and overlooks his place on earth without living in it” (121, my emphasis). If “man has lost the possibility of dwelling,” Antigone, Irigaray tells us, “struggles to preserve living beings and their dwelling” (124). The tension between linguistic construction and the living body qua primary dwelling, hence between techné and phusis, on the one hand, and between “man,” who “has lost the possibility of dwelling” in his bid to dominate the earth, and Antigone, who struggles to preserve the dwelling of living beings, on the other, is subtly recast as a gender(ed) opposition. The generic term man may well be used in French or English to encompass all humankind, but Irigaray is intent on deneutralizing its use and exposing its gendered, hence partial, dimension. In other words, the Heideggerian distinction between dwelling and building is reinterpreted by her as an opposition between woman and man. It is “woman” who “dwells” and “man” who “builds.” If “dwelling” is a woman’s task or striving according to her “nature” (phusis as historical becoming), and if poetry, as the only way of living (that is, keeping life alive) in language, is an art of dwelling, then indeed poetry might be deemed essentially “feminine.” The singing or rather would-be singing “I” of Elemental Passions certainly suggests (by way of celebrating it) the intimate connection between the poetic act and the feminine act of hospitality, that is, between singing and sheltering both the self and the other in the sonorous, amorous, and maternal dwelling of poetic language: “And I shall sing all the day long. I shall fill the air with the joy of you in me, of me in you. Guarding you and guarding me in this incantation. Sonorous home in which I shelter you. Which protects me from the violence of the day. Childhood’s cradle, where any rapture is given free play. An attentive hymn. Which does not falter

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and is not interrupted. And whose tender fragility is never breached by fixed duration” (104, my emphasis). The nostalgic (or, rather, in the case of Irigaray “nostophiliac”) thinking about “home,” “homeliness,” or “Heimlichkeit” stirred by the concern with dwelling might take us in unwanted political directions if we greeted it with uncritical attention. Yet, Irigaray’s meditation on “dwelling” or the possibility of “offering shelter” today in and thanks to language, as well as her attempt to lay the ground for a feminist ecology, should not be dismissed, no more than Heidegger’s thinking about poetry and the (historical) essence of mankind. Precisely because the world seems to be headed in a completely different direction today, we need to try to think about what we are “forgetting” or assume we have left behind. And perhaps the feminist philosopher is right to bring to the surface the gendered underpinnings of Heidegger’s discourse on Being. Still, the dualistic, oftentimes even agonistic, rhetoric she deploys when she reinterprets inherited oppositions as gendered ones runs the risk of simplifying the picture, as when she pits “her” angels of life against Rilke’s angels of death,32 or when she emphasizes her own celebration of life through poetry over and against the “texts of the masculine authors [in which she] has above all found death” (Everyday Prayers 31). Nowhere is the tension between a dualistic, almost agonistic staging of sexual difference and her stated desire to transform the terms of the heterosexed encounter through a different discursive approach—one that poetry in particular would epitomize—greater than in Elemental Passions. Published in French in 1982, shortly after An Ethics of Sexual Difference, the piece reads like a long prose poem, divided in stanzas that are one to three pages long and are laid out in short verse-like paragraphs. It stages a female or feminine “I” addressing most of the time a clearly masculine “You.” Sometimes, the verselike paragraphs start with “I,” but more often, they start with “You” or the secondperson possessive article (“Your”), thus calling attention to both the addressee and the gesture of address. The first stanza of the prose poem features a symbolic exchange of gifts between “You” and “I”: “You” gives “I” a blank mouth (“You give me a blank white mouth,” 7, my emphasis), and “I” states her intention of singing for “you” (“A song, for you,” 7, my emphasis). “I” and “You” thus seem to seal what we could call a lyrical pact with each other. For reasons that I will expand on later, one expects this prose poem to be a love poem. Yet, on closer inspection, Elemental Passions turns out to be a reversed or counter–Song of Songs, one that pits repeatedly the feminine “I” against the masculine “You” in a long string of harsh reproaches,33 until the wishful transformative epiphany of the last stanza quoted earlier. True, Irigaray doesn’t endorse this agonistic stance.

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Rather, she accuses Western culture of having fostered gender antagonism. In this sense, Elemental Passions may well be construed as a discourse of impeached love. But one cannot but be struck by the force of this polemical, deeply confrontational antipoem. Such an oppositional discursive stance toward “man” (or, more precisely, a/the masculine lover) is at odds with Irigaray’s stated goal of fostering a new ethics of sexual difference, based on new discursive practices or what she calls a new “style” in “The Three Genders”: “Two procedures are important for setting up different norms of life: the analysis of the formal structures of discourse on the one hand and the creation of a new style on the other. Thus, . . . what is said in [my] books moves through a double style: a style of loving relationships, a style of thought, of exegesis, of writing. The two are consciously or unconsciously linked” (Sexes and Genealogies 177). One page later in the same piece, she adds: “A style cannot be reduced to bipolar alternatives: positive/negative, better/worse etc. . . . Style escapes all of these because it creates without resolving or dissolving into dichotomies” (178). What would it take, then, to change the rhetorical terms of the encounter between “I” and “You,” in other words, “woman” and “man” (and conversely)?

I SING TO YOU?

You have opened the heavens to me: How could I lose you? —Prayer, September 8, 1997

Irigaray, as her readers know, is not simply a thinker of the necessary embrace of “otherness,” namely, of sexual difference conceived as the paradigmatic instantiation of one’s relation to an other; she is more precisely a thinker of the “You,” that is, of the addressed other. Books’ titles such as Je, Tu, Nous: Toward a Culture of Difference (1993) or I Love to You (1996) spell out the case clearly.34 The pronoun You conjures up not others or otherness in general, but rather a unique other, singled out, elected in and by (my) language, through the gesture of address. In the last piece of In the Beginning She Was, which advocates and performs in the same thrust a certain (re)turn home, on renewed terms, of the paramount wandering man (Ulysses), Irigaray makes explicit the stakes and meaning of this singling out of one other through linguistic address: “In the early stages of Greek

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culture,” she writes, “the word ετεοσ first of all expresses a relation between two, two that are different and cannot merge into one, as is the case in the relation with the mother, and also with God. While the word αλλοσ signifies the other in a group or series, the word ετεροσ means the other of two; for example, the other hand, the other eye and also the other sex or gender” (146). Contrary to French or English, the Greek language offers the possibility of naming and conceiving two different kinds of otherness, entailing two very distinct ways of posing “the question of the other.” Clearly, the otherness that compels Irigaray is not the one conveyed by the word αλλοσ (allos), but indeed the one indexed by the word ετεροσ (heteros), the other of two. As the feminist philosopher understands it, the heterogeneity of the heteros does not so much mark out difference in general or even sexual difference in particular; rather, it inscribes from the start the figure of the pair, the couple, made of two bound together in or by language. Indeed, for Irigaray, thinking of sexual difference always means thinking of a/the relation between two, assessing the terms of their bond, in other words, thinking of love or what might prevent it. In this sense, the question of love might be said to precede and usher in the question of sexual difference for Irigaray. In the wake of another major linguist of the text, Émile Benveniste, Irigaray stresses the difference between, on the one hand, the pronouns of interlocution I-You, which imply each other and are thus bound together, and, on the other hand, the third-person pronoun, which, Benveniste teaches us, performs a radically different function. If “I” and “You” stand for persons on speaking terms, the third person (“she” or “he”) is strictly speaking a nonperson, one that is not speaking or spoken to but spoken about, and who therefore does not belong to the scene of interlocution: the third person is by definition the object of my speech and cannot stand in for a subject. Between I-You and I-he/she, the difference is not only grammatical, but almost axiological. When the feminine “I” asks her masculine “you” partner in Elemental Passions, “When you say I, you, he or she, if she says: I, where and what becomes of you?” (17), she folds several questions into one: she asks what happens when the traditional division of gender roles in the scene of interlocution, whereby man speaks and woman listens, is upset or reversed. When “she” says “I,” and the masculine “I” becomes a “you,” what happens to him and how do the terms of the address, whereby a masculine “you” is generated, as it were, by a linguistic matrix gendered feminine, transform him? But this question also presupposes a more general question: What happens, that is, what could happen, when the heterogendered “I” and “You” come into play and start addressing each other?

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I suggested earlier that the question of love might well precede that of sexual difference for Irigaray. One could say that, for her, there is no love as such, that is, no attested love, before love is declared. And the declaration of love starts, not with the verb to love, but with the pronoun you. To say “you,” more exactly to address myself to “you,” means to acknowledge and salute “you.” Without such an address, there may be sexual drive, which has neither subject nor aim, or even desire, which may involve an “I” yet no properly acknowledged “you,” but no love. Love, in this sense, is always already “ethical,” heading a call in the/an other’s direction. Yet, Irigaray is wary of conventional expressions of love. As she has shown in Speculum, in traditional gender relations that are caught up in a phallocentric specular logic, the (masculine) “I love you” runs the risk of meaning “I love myself in you,” as long as “you” is treated as a fantasized object rather than as another subject. Hence her invention of a new formula for love in ethical times: “I love to you.” The “to” stresses the directionality of my love, the gesture of address to a (unique) other, while functioning, in Irigaray’s words, “as a barrier against alienating the other’s freedom in my subjectivity, my world, my language” (I Love To You 110). “I love to you thus means: I do not take you for a direct object” (110). “The to,” she elaborates further, “is an attempt to avoid falling back into the horizon of the reduction of the subject to the object, to an item of property” (111). One could say, then, that what the “after you” is for Levinas, the “to you” is for Irigaray. But what, might one inquire again at this point, does this have to do with poetry? Irigaray seeks to promote discursive strategies that emphasize the I-You enunciative structure. And poetry, as she conceives and strives to practice it, that is, lyric poetry, is perhaps the highest, most ancient, and most codified form of addressed speech. I can’t address at length within the framework of this essay the intricacies of the history of lyricism and its shifting definitions. Let me just say that, if a certain reading of nineteenth-century lyricism has led the historians of literature to stress the centrality of the effusive “I” in Romantic poetry, the ma informs of lyric poetry, its overarching thematics, and its preferred rhetorical figures mark it clearly as a “you-oriented” type of speech or song. From prayers and hymns, which presuppose by definition a transcendental, explicit or implied, “You,” to the great European tradition of love sonnets and up to Paul Celan’s poetry, “the poem,” to quote Celan, “intends an other, needs this other, needs an opposite. It goes toward it, bespeaks it. . . . The poem becomes conversation—often desperate conversation.”35 Hence the

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prevalence of the syntactic figure of apostrophe in lyric poetry. Hence also the insistent thematization of the call for love, or the appeal to a/loved one. Hence, finally, the well-known metapoetic motif of the gift of the poem, which assumes a relation between a donor and a receiver, a (word) sender and an addressee. Thus, for Irigaray, lyric poetry provides the ideal template for the relational discourse “between two” she advocates and seeks to foster. In this sense too, she conceives of poetry not only as a discourse on sexual difference, but as sexual difference’s most accomplished and harmonious utterance.

Notes 1.

2. 3.

4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

Luce Irigaray, Speculum de l’autre femme (Paris: Minuit, 1974); English translation: Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); hereafter the English translation is cited parenthetically in the text as Speculum; Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). Luce Irigaray, Elemental Passions, trans. Joanne Collie and Judith Still (New York: Routledge, 1992). Luce Irigaray, Prières quotidiennes/Everyday Prayers, trans. Luce Irigaray with Timothy Mathews (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2004); hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Everyday Prayers. Luce Irigaray, “Plato’s Hystera,” in Speculum of the Other Woman, 251. The English translation of this sentence, “Already, a man’s gaze is lost in them,” doesn’t do justice to its strange elliptical syntax, which conjures up the specter of Mallarmé for native French readers. See Stéphane Mallarmé, Igitur, Un coup de dés, ed. Bertrand Marchal, preface by Yves Bonnefoy (Paris: NRF, 2003). Cf. Luce Baudoux [Irigaray], “Inconscient freudien et structures formelles de la poésie,” Revue philosophique de Louvain 61, no. 71 (1963): 435–66; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as “Inconscient freudien.” Cf. Luce Irigaray-Baudoux, “Un modèle d’analyse structurale de la poésie: A propos d’un ouvrage de Levin,” Logique et Analyse 27 (October 1964): 168–78. Roman Jakobson, Questions de poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1973). On this topic, see Anne Emmanuelle Berger, “And Yet She Speaks! ‘Italian Feminism’ and Language,” in Another Mother, ed. Cesare Casarino and Andrea Righi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018). Cf. Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol.  22 (London: Hogarth, 1964). Cf. Jacques Derrida, La dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972). In contrast with what she does in “Plato’s Hystera,” Irigaray identifies Derrida’s “La double séance” as her main theoretical source (and rhetorical model) in “Le sexe fait comme signe,” a

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14. 15.

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17. 18.

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piece published in 1970 in a special issue of the journal Langages devoted to “enunciation”: Luce Irigaray, Langages 17, no. 5 (1970): 42–55. “The logos, in order to preserve the purity of its conception, so veils [the matter, or mother, or even ‘other’] in the truth of his word that it is no longer clear what she is hiding in her store, and all the desires and delirium of potency denied by measured Reason can be projected onto her” (Speculum 344). The English translation misses out the elliptical syntax and lexical preciosity of the sentences, in its effort to make the meaning of the sentences and the relation of their respective parts as clear as possible to the reader: “The magician, whose position behind and/or in front already cries out to be analyzed in terms of doublingback, substitutes for himself the instruments of his power, which are deceptive because they claim to be such perfect copies. Already a man’s gaze is lost in them” (Speculum 251). “The second birth, secondary origin, renaissance, or reminiscence of truth never will, simply, defer the hysterical tropism. The discourse of reason, solar and paternal metaphor, never will oust the fantasy structure of the cave completely” (Speculum 274, translation modified). Cf. Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). Cf. Jean-Joseph Goux, “Numismatics: An Essay in Theoretical Numismatics,” in Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtis Gage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 9–63. Cf. Luce Irigaray, “Belief Itself,” in Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian  C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 23–53; Sexes and Genealogies hereafter cited thus parenthetically in the text. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). On Irigaray’s obsession with veils, see Anne Emmanuelle Berger, “Textiles That Matter: Irigaray and Veils,” in Re-Writing Difference: Irigaray and the Greeks, ed. Athena Athanasiou and Elena Tzelepis (New York: State University of New York Press, 2010), 63–78. Irigaray’s statement echoes the famous pronouncement of the mystic theologian Angelus Silesius: “The rose is without a reason” (“la rose est sans pourquoi”). The reference is lost in the English translation, which reads: “The heart of the rose opens without the need of a blueprint” (“Belief Itself,” 48). Perhaps Irigaray’s insistence that the rose is not only without telos but more specifically without a “project” is also aimed indirectly at Sartrean and Beauvoirian existentialism. Indeed, the notion of “project,” indicating the directionality of the human will, is part and parcel of the definition of existentialist humanism. Sometimes, this section echoes the essay “Why Poets?,” in Heidegger’s Poetry, Language, Thought (in Sexes and Genealogies, 50n8). Cf. “What Are Poets For?,” in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971); hereafter cited parenthetically as “What Are Poets For?”

Ir igar ay ’s Breat h , or Poet ry A ft er  P o et ics 21.

22. 23.

24.

25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

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31. 32.

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“L’homme se comporte comme s’il était le créateur et le maître du langage, alors que c’est celui-ci qui est et demeure son souverain.” Martin Heidegger, “L’homme habite en poète,” quoted in “Inconscient freudien,” 435. Remember that the French language uses one and the same word, temps, for both time and grammatical tense. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 111; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Hölderlin’s Hymn. Cf. Luce Irigaray, Elemental Passions, trans. Joanne Collie and Judith Still (New York: Routledge, 1992), 85; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Elemental Passions. Heidegger, as his readers know, strives to distinguish the (self) donation of the Dasein (the ontological level) from the mere facticity or “reality” of the ontic level. “Language seems to have paralyzed us, frozen even our words. Though adults, we have no mobility. Once childhood is over, we can move only along the paths of poetry, art, prayer.” Irigaray, “The Three Genders,” in Sexes and Genealogies, 181. “Art is a necessary condition for the establishment of a culture of affective relationships. . . . Without art, sexuality falls into a natural immediacy that is bound up with reproduction.” Irigaray, “Flesh Colors,” in Sexes and Genealogies, 165. “Only a general practice of art can maintain and cultivate the between us. . . . Art ought to be a basic daily undertaking carried out by everyone for passing from nature to culture.” Luce Irigaray, In the Beginning She Was (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 22; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as In the Beginning. On metaphor and/as veil, see Berger, “Textiles That Matter.” “It is the agency of sex that we must break away from, if we aim—through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality—to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance. The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures.” Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Randon House, 157). Irigaray does make the claim that “the whole of my body is sexuate” in an interview with Alice Jardine and Anne Menke, but I suppose she means that, whatever gender I identify with, this identification affects my perception of my body (and the other’s body) as a whole, for, as she explains, “my sexuality is not restricted to my sex and to the sexual act.” Luce Irigaray, “Writing as a Woman,” in Je, Tu, Nous: Toward a Culture of Difference, trans. Alison Martin (New York: Routledge, 2007), 47. “There are no metaphors, in the strict sense, in the feminine poems presented in this book” (Irigaray, Everyday Prayers 48). “My angels are the servants of life, of love: tender, almost carnal. Those of Rilke are terrible, frightening in the encounter he maintains or fails to maintain with them” (Irigaray, Everyday Prayers 31). In the first stanza, the female “I” claims that the masculine “You” has cut her tongue, a statement euphemized by the English translation: “You have stopped my

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tongue” (7). And she goes on: “You do not hear. So many words divide us” (7). In the third stanza, she accuses: “How enclosed you are, how unattainable to others. You strike, knock, cut, wound, rub raw this living body to rediscover the source of life” (18). In stanza 14, she deplores: “Your order freezes the mobility of relations between. It produces discontinuity. Peaks, pikes, fissures. Energy no longer circulates. Is hoarded in forms that create closure” (90). And so on, and so forth. The violence of the reproach constantly matches the violence of the injury. Cf. Luce Irigaray, I Love to You, trans. Alison Martin (New York: Routledge, 2007); I Love to You hereafter cited thus parenthetically in the text. Paul Celan, The Meridian, in Collected Prose, trans. Rosemarie Waldrop (Manchester: Carcanet, 1986), 49.

15 On the Persistence of Hedgehogs Leslie Hill

I

“Che cos’è la poesia?” What is poetry? This was the ceremonial question, provocative yet ironic, that in the wake of several other invitees (artists and thinkers as varied as Ignacio Matte-Blanco, Tadeusz Kantor, Jean-Marie Straub, Giacomo Manzoni, Camillo de Piaz, Luigi Baldacci, Gabriella Drudi, and Bernhard Minetti) was put to Jacques Derrida by the Italian journal Poesia in November 1988. The implications were many: If poetry is a thing, what kind of thing is it? Is it a special kind of thing, or can it be anything? Is it even a thing at all? And if not, is it still possible to give it the status of a discrete, autonomous entity, and speak of it—speak to it—as though its essential being and diverse attributes were determinable as such and everywhere verifiably present? Extending over five and a half pages, and as though in silent tribute to the poems of the recently deceased Francis Ponge (the subject of a long essay by Derrida reissued earlier that year), Derrida’s response proposed a series of philosophico-poetical variations on the vulnerable but spiky figure of istrice, the hystrix or porcupine, a familiar, if increasingly endangered, inhabitant of Southern Italy and North Africa (Derrida’s French text, exploiting the phonetic resonance between the two—the echo of ˈistr- in -ʀis—calls it un hérisson, or “hedgehog”).1 Some fifteen months further on, in the course of a more explicitly philosophical exchange with Maurizio Ferraris, Derrida returned to the same intrepid nocturnal traveler, the memory of whom perhaps reached far back into his Algerian childhood, under the refreshed title, “Istrice 2. Ick bünn all hier,” prolonging the original Italian or French with the help of the distinctive Plattdeutsch of the Brothers Grimm, as invoked by Heidegger in 1957, and recited by Derrida in his turn.2

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Derrida’s response to Poesia’s question was in two parts. The first was in the form of an injunction allied with a pointed refusal: “Most of all,” he advised his readers, “do not let the hedgehog [le hérisson] get drawn back into the circle or merry-go-round of poiesis: no making (poiein), no ‘pure poetry,’ no pure rhetoric, no reine Sprache, no ‘putting-to-work-of-truth.’ ” No mimetic teleology, no postsymbolist self-referentiality, no literal-figurative duopoly, no theological materialism, no alethic disclosure: neither Aristotle, nor Valéry, nor structuralism, nor Benjamin, nor Heidegger. Instead, Derrida went on, now in more affirmative vein: “only a contamination, as occurs [telle], at a given crossing [tel carrefour], and accidentally here and now [cet accident-ci].”3 On the one hand, then, unlike the overwhelming majority of modern literary critics, theorists, or philosophers, Derrida firmly set aside any explicit or implicit appeal to an ontology of the artwork and any reliance on the metaphysical category of the aesthetic or the supposed autonomy of poetic language. There was, however, nothing dogmatic or nihilistic about such choices. For in refusing each of these influential yet largely unquestioned philosophical assumptions regarding art’s defining characteristics, Derrida’s more modest yet more radical purpose was to reconsider the minimal conditions of possibility of what in the Western tradition has come to be known as literature. These, he argued, were anything but specifically literary. They rather had to do with a crucial property of all language(s), verbal and nonverbal, which he called “iterability”: that paradoxical doubling that binds repetition to alterity, the general to the singular, and structure to difference in such a way that what is first is always, retroactively, what comes second, what appears identical with itself does so only insofar as it is different from itself, and what is posited or affirmed, in order to be what it is, is necessarily and unavoidably always already subject to interference, division, and displacement— without which it would not, however, be graspable as itself at all. And if there was—perhaps—something distinctive about literature in general, he added, it derived not from some prior or posterior essence, grounded in form, function, perception, or theme, but from the remarkable diligence with which a literary work, radicalizing a feature inherent in all inscription as such, could always point to itself, among others, as a so-called literary text. The implications of iterability were nothing if not far-reaching. When Derrida first had occasion to explore them in specific detail, which he did in a conference presentation in 1971 that subsequently provoked a lengthy exchange or, better, nonexchange with the speech-act theorist John Searle, he concentrated attention on the example—plainly both more and less than an example—of signatures: formal or informal, explicit or implicit.4 Soon after, in his double treatment of Genet and Hegel in 1974 and in his paper from 1975 on Ponge,5 he went

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on to demonstrate the relevance of the paradoxical logic of signatures for an understanding of literary and other texts. On the one hand, he argued, in that they attest to a signatory’s presence and supposed self-presence in a particular place and at a particular time, signatures are by definition bound to context, and as such both incontrovertible and irreplaceable. Nobody, in other words, can properly sign in my place. At the same time, however, Derrida went on, “to function at all, that is, in order for it to be read as such, any signature must have a repeatable, iterable, and imitable form; it must be detachable from the singular, present intention embodied in its production.” 6 In order to authenticate the present moment of its inscription and the self-presence of its signatory, then, any signature must necessarily outlive, exceed, and interrupt that so-called original context. But as soon as a signature is separable from that given origin, it is necessarily exposed to any number of inherent risks, each of which has the effect of compromising the alleged purity, reliability, and authenticity of the signature, while also being essential to this so-called normal functioning of that very same signature. My signature, in other words, in order to signify my intent, must continue to do so in my absence or after my death. It is necessarily subject to a law of repetition. But as the world’s banking system is only too well aware, the necessary repeatability of my signature is as much an opportunity for fraudulent cloning as it is for enhanced security. Signatures, then, are often not what they seem. Crucially, however, Derrida argues, all such seemingly parasitical effects are inseparable from the structure of signatures in general. Without their sometimes aberrant possibility, signatures would not work at all. As the poet and performer Antonin Artaud was only too keenly aware, the dividing line between true selfhood and identity theft is vanishingly thin and susceptible to many misunderstandings as unavoidable as they are distressing. Success or failure proceeds from the selfsame causes, with neither the one nor the other being ever wholly free of the ghostly presence or simulacrum of its rival, just as a promise can never be reliably distinguished from a threat, or a threat from a promise. By dint of the logic of iterability, signatures, then, are necessarily divided: irreducibly singular yet infinitely repeatable; infinitely repeatable yet irreducibly singular—or, better, as Derrida has it, irreducibly singular because infinitely repeatable, and infinitely repeatable because irreducibly singular. Conditions of possibility, in other words, are simultaneously conditions of impossibility, and the only law that holds a law of impurity, duplicity, and adulteration: what Derrida in 1988, as seen earlier, calls contamination. Signatures come in many forms, and poems themselves, suggests Derrida, are already signatures of a sort. They too are unique, irreplaceable, solitary, and all

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but untranslatable, as any reader of “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “The Waste Land,” or “Canto I” can testify. They, too, then, are singular events before they are statements pertaining to the world, and radically escape each and every criterion of truthfulness or the true, no matter whether truth is understood as traditional correspondence or as Heideggerian unconcealment. But, like signatures, poems too are governed by the logic of iterability, without which they in turn would not even be writeable or readable either. And however much they may be thought to belong to a specific time or place, mood, occasion, or moment, it is only insofar as they can—and must—always be detached from that originating context in order to be read and reread, performed, cited, or learnt by heart by some always unidentifiable future reader. Poems too, then, like all texts, are subject to a law of what Derrida, apropos of Genet, Ponge, and others, calls ex-appropriation, according to which every effort on the part of writer, speaker, poet, novelist, or thinker to lay claim to the language that they come to use, discerning within it or imprinting upon it their own distinctive way of speaking, only ever succeeds insofar as it necessarily fails. All writing is an attempt to appropriate for oneself an idiom, but to do so is always already to be expropriated by one’s own words, which are of course never one’s own at all, but always already those of others. Once again, this reversal of the singular into the general and of the general into the singular is no deleterious external accident, but one that follows necessarily from the structure of iterability. “Language,” Derrida told Évelyne Grossman, “does not belong.” “Even when one has only the one mother tongue,” he explained, “and deep roots in the place of one’s birth and one’s language, even then, language does not belong. That language does not allow itself to be appropriated is part of language’s very essence. It is precisely that which does not allow itself to be possessed but that, for that very reason, prompts all sorts of attempts at appropriation. Because it can be desired but not appropriated, it sets in motion all kinds of gestures of ownership and appropriation.” The implications, Derrida pointed out, were as much political as philosophical or poetic. “My suggestion,” he continued, “is that, paradoxically, what is most idiomatic, i.e., most proper to a language, cannot itself be appropriated.” “There is therefore good reason,” he added, “however paradoxical it may seem, to dissociate what is idiomatic [l’ idiome] from what is proper [la propriété]. Idiom is what resists translation, and therefore what attaches itself, it would seem, to the singularity of the signifying body of language or even simply the body itself, but which by dint of that singularity eludes all possession, all claims of belonging.” 7 If then to write is to affirm the authority of experience, it is only insofar as what results is lacerating exposure; and if it is to address the radical uncertainty and unpredictability of

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an encounter with the other, it is only insofar as irreducible secrecy is necessarily always already encrypted in the poem. Just as the multiplicity of languages provides at once for both the possibility and the impossibility of translation, so poetic communication is itself traversed, i.e., both enabled and disabled, by that which defies and resists communication. No more than any other literary text, such as those of Joyce, Kafka, Blanchot, or Cixous, poems for Derrida cannot be policed, contained, or delimited by any of the customary binary oppositions— between inside and outside, self and other, the figurative and the literal, the personal and the impersonal, the private and the public, the transparent and the cryptic—that so often program their reception, but that, Derrida shows, the law of iterability repeatedly contests, displaces, and reinscribes. That iterability, in Derrida’s thinking, was not confined to works of literature, but marked a fundamental property of all language in general, whether verbal or nonverbal, is an important point to stress. For what it implies is that the boundaries of what goes under the name of poetry or literature are necessarily unstable. So long as it can point to itself as such—and it is axiomatic, Derrida argues, by the logic of iterability, that any trace, in order to be a trace, must simultaneously refer both to another trace and to itself—any trace, that is, any word, statement, sound, or inscription, even a silence or an absence of language, might therefore feature as part or as the whole of a literary text, in an irresistible movement that Derrida sometimes describes as “the possibility of the becomingliterature [devenir-littérature] of any text.” 8 But if “literature,” as a result, as Derrida once put it, “annuls itself in its illimitation,” i.e., has borders so capacious that it forfeits any specificity at all, and if it therefore follows, he argued, that “there is no essence of literature, no truth of literature, and no literarity [êtrelittéraire] of literature,” this was no reason, he went on—on the contrary—“not to work at finding out what came to be represented and determined under the head of literature, and why.”9 The fact was, literature or poetry was always at least double. On the one hand, as literary critics have long been aware, it was an institution, governed by a vast number of generalized or local conventions deeply embedded in cultural, social, political, or legal history, and bent on repeating themselves through time. On the other hand, by the logic of iterability itself, all such repetition only ever served to interrupt the self-identity of the institution and expose it to an alterity that was essential to it and that it could not control. Literature as institution, in other words, is simultaneously made possible and impossible by what Derrida, in an interview by Derek Attridge, calls the counter- or anti-institution of literature,10 synonymous with a troubling or troublesome capacity to challenge all established authority, hierarchy, and order, the effects of which were necessarily unpredictable. Which in turn meant that

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to read a literary text was not only to take account of various institutionalized codes, protocols, or rules of interpretation, but always to have to attend to the singularity of the poem not as a construct dominated by calculable possibility, but, more radically, as an event traversed throughout by the undecidable, unforeseeable, and untranslatable, in a word, borrowed from Blanchot or Bataille, by what Derrida calls the impossible. What, then, is poetry? Derrida’s answer—hystrix or istrice—was necessarily circumspect, informed by a disarming—and disarmed—gesture of learned ignorance (the knowledge that whoever is supposed to know something in fact knows nothing). It bristled too with suspicion, shuffled cautiously through a dense undergrowth of inherited concepts, and under cover of dusk blazed a secret trail of its own. Istrice and hérisson, repeating the -ʀi- of their sponsor’s name (Derrida) in their joint appeal to -ʀi- (istrice, hérisson), were of course themselves both already improbable signatures. (I may add that the computer on which I am writing this chapter, I genuinely assure you, is also called Hedgehog; its cousin, part of the same network, is for its part called Porcupine.) Derrida’s tutelary animal was moreover preceded by at least two prestigious but very different forebears, as he conceded to Maurizio Ferraris over a year later, not having realized it at the time, he claimed, at least not consciously. The first was that cited by Schlegel’s famous Athenäum fragment on the fragment (“entirely separate from the surrounding world, like a miniature artwork, and complete in itself like a hedgehog [ein Igel]”), while the second, drawn from the Grimms’ story of the hare and the hedgehog (“Der Hase und der Igel”), was that adduced by Heidegger in support of the claim that, just as the Grimms’ twin hedgehogs, the male standing at the start and the female at the finish (each supposedly indistinguishable from its partner, as Derrida, with perceptible skepticism, duly emphasizes), can pretend to have already reached their destination in advance of their rival the hare (who, after seventy-five failed attempts at running ever faster, finally drops dead from exhaustion!), so too the ontico-ontological difference, like the two would-be identical hedgehogs, had always already found its origin and reached its goal before the race had even begun.11 Derrida’s hystrix, however, wanted nothing of Schlegel’s totalizing fragment or Heideggerian destinal teleology. In both cases, there was a crucial difference, which had to do with the fact that Derrida’s hystrix was neither simile, nor allegory, nor metaphor—but a catachresis,12 that figure without figure used (or abused) as a name for the unnamable or the nameless, which defied the standard, usually indispensable rhetorical distinction between the literal and the figurative by voiding or ignoring it, and substituted for the thing called poetry the improper specter of the poetic, or better, Derrida suggests, now following

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Benjamin or Heidegger, the poematic (das Gedichtete).13 Not poetry, nor the poetic, in other words, but the experience preceding and exceeding those words, indeed all words, not however in the sense of a retreat into the interiority of self, but, drawing inspiration from the Latin verb experiri, much rather a burrowing or a journeying forth, an exposure to danger and an encounter with the outside, in which were indissolubly joined an economy of memory, as Derrida calls it, an elliptical treasure trove of inherited meanings, allusions, and knowledge, and the singularity of a body, able to respond to the poematic only by assuming it, endorsing it, and performing it—or learning it by heart. So why, then, hystrix? In his response to Poesia, Derrida dramatizes the fate of his favored peripatetic animal in at least two ways. From the outset, he noted, hystrix, or the poematic, was a fragile and vulnerable creature, always susceptible to being run over when crossing the road, particularly the road called translation, irrespective of whether its name was hedgehog, porcupine, or hystrix. And if its response to danger was to roll itself into a ball, this resulted not in self-protection, as Schlegel had once imagined, but merely in the prospect of further harm, wounding, even death. But this exposure to the outside did not mean that, spines and quills to the fore, it could not in return make a violent or wounding mark of its own or save itself from contact with the other. On the contrary, its passion, in all senses, was its passion, and desire its secret—to which it might allude, but never divulge or betray. “The poem,” writes Derrida, “this certain passion of the singular mark,” “can curl itself up into a ball, but again only to turn its pointed signs [ses signes aigus] outwards. It can no doubt reflect language or speak poetry yet it never brings everything back to itself [ne se rapporte jamais à lui-même], and never moves of itself unlike those murderous contraptions on the road. Its occurring [événement, event] always interrupts or derails the autotelic self-proximity of being [l’être auprès de soi dans l’autotélie] called absolute knowledge. This ‘demon of the heart’ never gathers itself up [jamais ne se rassemble, another nod of disagreement in the direction of Heidegger], more often loses its way or its head [s’égare plutôt] (hallucination or mania), exposes itself to chance, and would sooner let itself be torn apart by whatever is coming towards it [par ce qui vient sur lui].”14

II

Among the many authors usually classified as poets whose writings Derrida explored in his published work (including, among others, Jabès, Artaud, Mallarmé, Valéry, Ponge, and Baudelaire), one to whom he returned repeatedly

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from the mid-1980s onward was his erstwhile colleague at the École normale supérieure Paul Celan, whose poems were the subject, occasion, or addressee of three important essays by Derrida, notably Schibboleth: Pour Paul Celan (1986), Poétique et politique du témoignage (2000), and Béliers: Le dialogue ininterrompu: Entre deux infinis, le poème (2003), not to mention at least two significant interviews and other seminar material.15 Admittedly, in foregrounding Celan’s poems, Derrida was not alone. Already the third of his published essays was itself in the form of a posthumous tribute to Hans-Georg Gadamer, who in 1973 had published a painstaking commentary on Celan’s poem sequence Atemkristall. And for numerous other contemporary thinkers in France, Germany, and elsewhere, Celan’s poems lay at the heart of a fraught, often interrupted dialogue between philosophy and poetry, as testified to by such diverse commentaries on aspects of the writer’s work as those offered (among others) by Adorno, Blanchot, Lacoue-Labarthe, Hamacher, Szondi, even Badiou. Moreover, on Celan’s side, too, as a famous poem by that title bore witness, there was the memory of a notorious failed encounter with Heidegger in Todtnauberg in 1966. In other respects also, his writing was more exposed and vulnerable than most, crossed as it was by languages and states, histories and geographies, politics and poetics. For after his early years in Northern Bukovina, at the time part of Romania, and having lost his immediate family to the Shoah, Celan next found himself in Vienna, before then migrating to France and to Paris, where, in 1955, he took up French nationality. And having begun writing in Romanian, he soon after reverted to the German of his childhood, without having ever been German either by birth or by adoption, and, by the time of his presumed suicide in 1970, he had established himself both within that language and at its margins not only as the author of a body of poetry of startling inventiveness that tested translation to the limit, but also as a remarkable translator in his own right from French, English, Russian, Romanian, Italian, Portuguese, and Hebrew. Derrida’s starting point in addressing Celan’s work or, as he more modestly described it, in considering certain traits displayed by certain poems by Celan was not to attempt to interpret this or that poem or sequence of poems to their fullest extent, assuming such an enterprise achievable at all, but rather to test out the conditions under which reading might or might not occur. This did not, however, mean imposing any prescriptive interpretative grid, underpinned by some transcendental philosophical framework or abiding set of literary conventions. Instead it was to question the hold that formalism and hermeneutics, alone or in tandem, might aim to exert over Celan’s poems, and in so doing to expose himself in his turn, as a reader, to the event of a poem, i.e., this poem,

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here and now, in its intractable nudity. But “the certainty of an assured reading,” he cautioned in 2003 in response to Celan’s poem “Grosse, glühende Wölbung,” “would be the greatest idiocy or gravest act of betrayal.” “This poem,” he added, “remains for me the place of a singular experience [une expérience unique], in which the calculable and the incalculable are joined together not only in the language of another but in the foreign language of another, who gives me the chance and responsibility [me donne] (what a fearsome present tense that is) of countersigning the future as much as the past: the unreadable is no longer opposed to the readable. Remaining unreadable, it secretes and secretes away [secrète et met au secret], within the same body, endless possibilities of reading.”16 Two decades earlier, in Schibboleth, Derrida had both begun and ended speaking to Celan’s poems, in knowingly circular manner, by evoking the onceonly, ritualized event of circumcision, that signature inscription that, as Derrida’s own experience told him, for whoever undergoes it, is simultaneously a wounding and a consecration, and proof once again, as it were, of a violent coming together of memory and the heart, writing and body, inheritance and flesh.17 As with circumcision, so too with the many dates, explicit and implicit, countersigned in Celan’s poems, each of which marked an irreplaceable point in time and space, but only insofar as it always already belonged to a repetitive series, cycle, or circle, and each of which also had the status of a traumatic encounter (“who signs,” Derrida once remarked, “is always the other”; “the signature of a poem,” he also wrote, “as with any text, is a wound”). What followed Derrida’s calculated exordium was itself likewise dated and signed, and, as it pondered at length the months and years recurring in Celan’s poems, proceeded for its part, in secret solidarity, in seven distinct sessions. Seven scansions, then, the number of the covenant, each detailing the singular thinking of certain of Celan’s poems: their obstinate fidelity to that which, occurring only once, resists thought, and is irreducible to “all forms of philosophical questioning, all objectivisation, all theoretico-hermeneutic thematisation,”18 even as it necessarily returns, binding itself to the other, giving way to a possibility of translation and memory; their conviction that every date, in this sense, was always already a signature, contingent on circumstances that, being as essential as they were inessential, thereby encrypted an inaccessible secret, maintaining it, so to speak, while also withdrawing it and bearing witness to what survived as a spectral remainder: an absence, a nothing, mere ash; the proof that, while any poem implies a possibility of translation, it by that very token endlessly defers or withholds that possibility, not least by citing (as it always can) words of diverse origin and from more than one language, as does

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Celan’s poem “In Eins,”19 for instance, which incorporates, alongside German, phrases from Spanish and from French, thus rendering itself untranslatable into anything other than itself, an arbitrary shibboleth, therefore, both slogan and password, testifying to a double-edged poetics that is already an incisive politics; which was also to say that the poem remained, witnessing, as it were, its own afterlife, simultaneously readable and unreadable, private and public, secret and transparent: an infinite, finite, abyssal trace; and in that sense, too, irreducible to the distinction between a performative and a constative, disabling any final decision as to its truthfulness or not, its fictivity or not; an experience, in other words, of the spectral return of words, of “all words,” suggests Derrida, insofar as “what one calls poetry or literature, even art,” he wrote, this “certain experience of language, of the mark, of the trait as such,” “is perhaps only an intense familiarity with the inescapable originarity of the spectre”;20 in other words, then, a circumcision, both signature and wound, as attested by the supernumerary presence of the prophet Elijah—guaranteeing, so to speak, the possibility or, better, impossibility of a future yet to come. When Derrida returned to Celan nearly two decades later, it was again with memory and heart uppermost in his thoughts. The memory in question was of an unsatisfactory, failed exchange with Gadamer in 1981, at which Derrida had contented himself, in elliptical, improvised fashion, with reiterating his longstanding objections to phenomenology’s logocentric privileging of “the original communicative situation [die ursprüngliche Mitteilungssituation],” as Gadamer called it.21 This unhappy meeting with Gadamer was, however, less a refusal of dialogue on the part of either participant, and more a dialogue deferred, in Gadamer’s eyes, or, more accurately, according to Derrida, a dialogue interrupted, which for that reason, he argued, in that no dialogue could occur at all without disrupting the so-called presence of any originating context, still bore within it an unfulfilled promise pointing toward the future. And when in 2003 Derrida took up the invitation to speak in Gadamer’s honor, he did so, with the help of Celan’s poem “Grosse, glühende Wölbung,” in memory of that earlier disabling-enabling fracture of continuity. But though Derrida continued to insist how far Gadamerian hermeneutics and what he called the “disseminal reading-writing” of deconstruction were radically incompatible (though far from mutually exclusive, in that the first, in spite of itself, was ultimately reliant on the “irreducible remainder [reste] or excess [excédent]” delimited and affirmed by the second),22 his tone was very different: melancholy, effusive, and heartfelt.

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There were reasons for this: February 5, 2003, the date of Derrida’s address, singular but recursive, was close to the first anniversary of Gadamer’s death at the remarkable age of 102 (“I cannot believe in Gadamer’s death,” Derrida wrote in an obituary piece for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung three weeks later: “I cannot bring myself to believe it”),23 and it was also near to the thirty-third anniversary of Celan’s drowning in the Seine, and likewise only months before the diagnosis of a life-threatening condition that would result in Derrida’s own death the following year. So many specters, ghosts, and revenants, then, like so many fragmentary signatures, haunted Derrida’s words. What survived, however, was a poem, to which in February 2003 he returned time and again, in particular to its enigmatic closing line, itself in the form of an address, spoken perhaps by the one to the other, or the other to the one, perhaps even by the poem itself to those who might be its future readers: “Die Welt ist fort, ich muss dich tragen,” “The world is gone, I shall have to carry you.” Celan’s poem, in other words, and Derrida’s reading, in the absence or interruption of world, and by dint of that very caesura, nevertheless testified, in secret, to remarkable persistence: radical exposure, boundless affirmation, infinite responsibility.

Notes 1.

2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

Jacques Derrida, Points de suspension: Entretiens, ed. Elisabeth Weber (Paris: Galilée, 1992), 303–8; Derrida, Points . . .: Interviews, 1974–1994, trans. Peggy Kamuf and others (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 288–99. Derrida’s Signéponge, first delivered as a conference paper at Cerisy in 1975, reappeared in French in January 1988. Ponge died on August 6 that year, less than three months before publication of Derrida’s response to Poesia. Derrida, Points de suspension, 309–36; Points . . . , 300–26. Derrida, Points de suspension, 307; Points . . . , 297, translation modified. For an excellent analysis of Derrida’s text, see Timothy Clark, The Theory of Inspiration (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 259–81. Jacques Derrida, Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), 367–93; Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 309–30. See Jacques Derrida, Glas (Paris: Galilée, 1974); Derrida, Glas, trans. John  P. Leavey Jr. and Richand Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986); and Derrida, Signéponge (Paris: Seuil, 1988); Derrida, Signéponge/Signsponge, trans. Richard Rand (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). Derrida, Marges, 392; Margins, 328, translation modified.

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8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

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Derrida, “La langue n’appartient pas,” interview by Évelyne Grossman (June  29, 2000), Europe 79, nos. 861–62 (January-February 2001): 81–91, 85–86; Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, trans. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 101–2, translation modified. Jacques Derrida, Parages, rev. ed. (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 244; Derrida, Parages, ed. John  P. Leavey, trans. Tom Conley, James Hulbert, John  P. Leavey, and Avital Ronell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 228, translation modified. Jacques Derrida, La dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 252–53; Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 223, translation modified. Jacques Derrida, “Cette étrange institution qu’on appelle la littérature,” in Derrida d’ ici, Derrida de là, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Philippe Romanski (Paris: Galilée, 2009), 276; Derrida, “This Strange Institution Called Literature,” trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 58. For this prehistory of hedgehogs named in vain, see Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Schriften und Fragmente, ed. Ernst Behler and Hans Eichner, 6 vols. (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1988), 2:123; Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, trans. Ernst Behler and Roman Struc (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968), 143, translation modified; and Martin Heidegger, Identität und Differenz (Stuttgart: Neske, 1996), 54, Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 63. For the original punch line quoted by Heidegger (“Ha ha, got there before you!”), see Grimms Märchen, ed. Heinz Rölleke (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker, 2007), 722. In a subsequent footnote, Derrida adds another hedgehog (Igel) from Nietzsche’s Ecce homo (“Warum ich so klug bin,” §8). Derrida, Points de suspension, 307; Points . . . , 297. On the expression “das Gedichtete” and its meanings, see Philippe LacoueLabarthe, Heidegger, la politique du poème (Paris: Galilée, 2002), 87; LacoueLabarthe, Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry, trans. Jeff Fort (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 42. Derrida, Points de suspension, 307; Points . . . , 299, translation modified. In addition to texts already mentioned, see Jacques Derrida, Schibboleth: Pour Paul Celan (Paris: Galilée, 1986); Derrida, Béliers: Le dialogue ininterrompu: Entre deux infinis, le poème (Paris: Galilée, 2003); Derrida, Poétique et politique du témoignage (Paris: L’Herne, 2005); Derrida, “La Vérité blessante,” Europe (May 2004): 8–27; and Derrida, Séminaire la bête et le souverain, 2001–2002, 2 vols. (Paris: Galilée, 2008–10), 1:289–313, 338–66. All these texts are reproduced in English in Sovereignties in Question. Derrida, Béliers, 45–46; Derrida, Sovereignties in Question, 148, translation modified. For the poem itself, see Paul Celan, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Beda Allemann and Stefan Reichert in collaboration with Rudolf Bücher, 7 vols. (1983; Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2000), 2:97.

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18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

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On Derrida’s own circumcision, see Jacques Derrida, “Circonfession,” in Jacques Derrida, by Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida (Paris: Seuil, 1991); Derrida, Jacques Derrida, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Derrida, Schibboleth, 17; Sovereignties in Question, 5, translation modified. See Celan, Gesammelte Werke, 1:270. Derrida, Schibboleth, 96; Sovereignties in Question, 53, translation modified. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, 10 vols. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1993–95), 2:346; Gadamer, Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter, ed. Diane P. Michelfelder and Richard E. Palmer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989). This latter volume contains significant additional interpretation and commentary regarding the Paris debate of 1981. Derrida, Béliers, 47; Sovereignties in Question, 149. Derrida, “Wie recht er hatte! Mein Cicerone Hans-Georg Gadamer,” trans. Michael Bischoff, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 23, 2003.

16 What Are Philosophers For in the Age of the Poets? Badiou with and Against Heidegger Bruno Bosteels

Who today would presume to claim that he is at home with the nature of poetry as well as with the nature of thinking and, in addition, strong enough to bring the nature of the two into the most extreme discord and so to establish their concord? —Martin Heidegger, “What Are Poets For?”

So let us do battle, divided, torn, unreconciled. Let us do battle for the conflicted respite, we philosophers, forever torn between the norm of literal transparency of mathematics and the norm of singularity and presence of the poem. —Alain Badiou, “What Does the Poem Think?”

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ost readers of Alain Badiou’s work will have come across the expression “age of the poets” for the first time in a chapter of that same title in his Manifesto for Philosophy, the slender introductory volume published in 1989 as a way of accompanying the presentation in 1988 of the first great synthesis of his philosophy in Being and Event.1 The French philosopher subsequently would go on to develop his hypothesis with regard to a proposed closure of the age of the poets, most notably as part of a seminar organized by Jacques Rancière in the spring of 1989 at the Collège

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International de Philosophie in Paris, published in 1992 under the title La politique des poètes: Pourquoi des poètes en temps de détresse?2 The subtitle of this seminar, in turn, is an obvious allusion to the line from Friedrich Hölderlin’s elegy “Bread and Wine,” famously commented upon by Martin Heidegger right after the end of the Second World War: “so what are poets for in a destitute time?”3 In fact, Heidegger not only is the one who popularized Hölderlin’s phrase; his own musings on the role of the poets in a time of destitution or distress also come close to using the very same expression that Badiou would pick up forty years later as the main jumping-off point to elaborate his polemic with Heidegger: “The word ‘time’ here means the era to which we ourselves still belong,” the German thinker says. “The age for which the ground fails to come, hangs in the abyss.” 4 “Age of the poets,” in this sense, could be said to be a coinage due almost as much to Heidegger himself as to Badiou, forcing one precisely to think together poetry and the experience of one’s own time or age. Before turning to Rainer Maria Rilke as a poet who, though of a different order of rank, would still belong to the same orientation, the author of the unfinished Being and Time paraphrases Hölderlin’s elegy to suggest that poetry is a privileged way of thinking one’s time, or the age one lives in. Indeed, if poetry is a form of thought, bringing together a “thinking poetry” such as Hölderlin’s or Rilke’s and a “poeticizing thinking” such as Heidegger’s own, this can only mean that the task of thought is to think time. Philosophy and poetry, for Heidegger, share a common mission in this unique task of thinking time, understood both ontologically and historically.5 This means, on the one hand, to think the transcendental horizon of time in general, insofar as time opens up the essential movement of being itself, its epochal coming into being, and, on the other, to think its time as the specific epoch we live in today, which for Heidegger means the destitute time of the fugitive gods over which the poets in our nihilistic age are among the few mortals, if not the only ones, to stand guard in preparation for a divine return: “To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods.” 6 The poet’s capacity to attend with his singing or saying to the destitute nature of our time, however, does not mean even for Heidegger that the function of poetry comes to be subordinated to an extraneous—historicist or aestheticist— task. What happens in this poetry belongs to the poems alone. And yet, the very nature of poetry, too, becomes clarified in the same process. In other words, this thinking poetry never ceases to think itself. This explains the commonly held view that the poets in question are “self-reflective” poets, writing about the very nature of poetry. Or at least this is how these poets appear to be, once they are given over to a highly philosophizing interpretation in the hands of “we others,” that is, poeticizing thinkers such as Heidegger. In a strange loop Hölderlin, for

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example, appears to speak with the voice of a “poet’s poet,” but only if and when there are philosophers prepared for listening in: It is a necessary part of the poet’s nature that, before he can be truly a poet in such an age, the time’s destitution must have made the whole being and vocation of the poet a poetic question for him. Hence “poets in a destitute time” must especially gather in poetry the nature of poetry. Where that happens we may assume poets to exist who are on the way to the destiny of the world’s age. We others must learn to listen to what these poets say—assuming  that, in regard to the time that conceals Being because it shelters it, we do not deceive ourselves through reckoning time merely in terms of that which is by dissecting that which is.7

Leaving aside for a moment the question whether it is really as modest as it appears to be for the philosopher thus to assign the task of thinking to the poets, the fundamental lesson should be clear enough. Over and above that which merely is, philosophers must learn to listen to what poets have to say in terms of the essential link between time and being. For Heidegger, this is not just a theme or a subject matter for a calculative reckoning but involves nothing less than the destiny of an age of the world in which a privileged mission is assigned to the poets. To call these poets and their poetry self-reflective, though, is a serious misnomer since part of the mission or vocation of the poets also consists in withdrawing from the dominant view in which language’s goal is to reach an objective reflection or adequate representation of the world on the part of a thinking subject. As Lacan would later say: there is no metalanguage, or, closer to Heidegger’s words, no objectifying reflection on the subject of poetic language: “By contrast, there is a saying that really engages in saying, yet without reflecting upon language, which would make even language into one more object. To be involved in saying is the mark of a saying that follows something to be said, solely in order to say it.” 8 Thus, taking a step back from the representational view of language based on the adequacy or inadequacy between a subject and an object, which is a metaphysical view that according to Heidegger has only ever aggravated the extreme degree of oblivion and dereliction reached in the modern age of technology, the poets of this destitute time that supposedly is still ours let themselves be drawn into the more primordial movement of the concealment and unconcealment of being itself.

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In his Manifesto for Philosophy, it is this whole Heideggerian framework for thinking our time through a select few of its poets that Badiou proposes to close so as to move on to an entirely different articulation of poetry and philosophy, albeit one in which several premises from Heidegger’s setup can be retained just as many lessons from the age of the poets remain to be learned. The chapter in Manifesto for Philosophy, however, is neither the first nor the last occasion for Badiou to present his hypothesis according to which now is the time to declare the end or closure of the age of the poets and draw all the necessary consequences from this declared end. Before this chapter, the publication of his seminar for the year 1986–87, Heidegger: La figure du retrait, allows us further to refine our understanding of the role that the notion of the age of the poets plays in the larger project summed up in Being and Time. Indeed, while it actually appears to be in this seminar that Badiou first begins to use the expression in a systematic way (“with and against Heidegger,” he points out in his presentation of the seminar, but “at the farthest remove from deconstruction”),9 on this early occasion he also works through a number of different formulations about the dynamics of the phenomenon that are more tentative and for this reason perhaps more inviting than the systematic if also peremptory conclusions reached in the chapter “The Age of the Poets” in Manifesto for Philosophy or in Rancière’s seminar La Politique des poètes. For example, the seminar on Heidegger oscillates between different interpretations of who is responsible for the historical phenomenon of the age of the poets, assuming there is such a thing: the philosophers who abdicate the task of thinking our time to the fullest extent of their own capacities, or the poets who seem ready and eager to fill in the void created by this abdication? When reread in light of the earlier interrogations in the seminar of 1986–87 on Heidegger, moreover, the arguments in the two texts called “The Age of the Poets,” one published in 1989 and the other in 1992, begin to reveal minor but significant shifts in emphasis, which might be the result of a desire to take into account various criticisms that Badiou in the meantime had received from Rancière and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, among others, about the way the hypothesis of the closure of the age of the poets was mobilized at the time of Being and Event. Finally, among the many materials on the topic that have come out after Manifesto for Philosophy, in addition to the set of shorter essays now available in English in the first half of the collection The Age of the Poets, and Other Writings on Twentieth-Century Poetry and Prose, Badiou revisits the problematic links between philosophy and poetry, most notably in his seminar of 1992–93 on Friedrich Nietzsche, which has also just been published and is the first of a series

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of seminars between 1992 and 1996 devoted to the major “antiphilosophers” of our time: Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Lacan, and then, to conclude, their early precursor Saint Paul.10 What this last discussion highlights is not just the question whether Heidegger, too, should be considered an antiphilosopher—something that, according to Badiou, he most certainly is not, given the fact that Heidegger, on the one hand, still upholds a notion of truth (which for antiphilosophers is little more than the effect of certain rhetorical or discursive operations) and, on the other, under the preferred name of postmetaphysical “thinking,” continues to believe in the lofty mission of philosophy (which for antiphilosophers is the object of scorn and ridicule). Furthermore, a comparison between the recently published seminars on Heidegger and Nietzsche, especially with regard to their take on poetry and art, reveals the extent to which Badiou’s struggle in this area plays itself out simultaneously on two fronts. In other words, the age-old quarrel over the relation between philosophy and poetry—a quarrel that was already ancient in the eyes of Plato—involves a double combat on the part of Badiou: 1. Against the gesture of resigned abdication with which postmetaphysical “thinkers” allow philosophy to become sutured onto art, literature, and, more specifically in the case of Heidegger, poetry. 2. Against the gesture of unbridled ambition with which modern “antiphilosophers,” in their attempt to cure humanity of the illness of philosophy, seek to rival the powers of politics, art, and science, as can be seen in the cases of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Lacan. Incidentally, the distinction between “antiphilosopher” and “thinker” in the technical sense also means that, contrary to the joint fate commonly bestowed on Nietzsche and Heidegger in the so-called philosophies of difference, whether in post-1968 France or Italy, Badiou does not see these two figures as operating along the same lines. Nor do Nietzsche and Heidegger, according to him, have the same fundamental approach to the question of art and poetry, even considering how in both cases, as we will see, this question is inevitably mediated through politics more so than what Badiou sometimes states explicitly. But before we turn to Badiou’s answer, which will consist in articulating the relation of art and poetry to philosophy as a relation of a condition to the conditioned, let us take a closer look at the concepts of suture and rivalry that help him develop a diagnosis of the treatment of art and poetry in the exemplary cases of Heidegger and Nietzsche.

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As far as the terminology of this diagnostic is concerned, whenever Badiou speaks of poetry or the poem, we should keep in mind that these terms may be understood both in a strict sense and in a broad sense: on the one hand, poetry as a recognizable subset of literature, e.g., the poetry of Hölderlin, Rilke, or Georg Trakl in Heidegger’s case, to whom Badiou—aside from generally omitting Rilke—likes to add his own slightly less Germano-centric but still all-male list, including Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Osip Mandelstam, Fernando Pessoa, and Paul Celan; and, on the other hand, poetry as a privileged stand-in for art in general, in which case the age of the poets becomes a much broader category that also includes phenomena such as Nietzsche’s grand hopes for and subsequent disillusionments with Wagner’s total work of art, Gilles Deleuze’s two books on cinema, and Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard’s work on painting—to give only a few examples of a wider trend that Badiou still sees as being part and parcel of the age of the poets. Not just formally but chronologically, too, therefore, this last notion greatly exceeds the polemic with Heidegger’s views and refers to a much longer historical period in the eyes of Badiou: perhaps starting as early as Hegel (if not already with Kant’s third Critique), with Hölderlin still standing before us as its unsurpassed precursor (as Heidegger claims in “What Are Poets For?”), reaching its high point after the Paris Commune (which is why Badiou feels justified to add the central names of Rimbaud and Mallarmé), and ending with Paul Celan’s fateful encounter with the silence of the master when he travels to Todtnauberg to seek answers from Heidegger. “This event is also the end of the injunction to the philosopher to submit himself to the poem, a positive end, because it is first poetically proffered,” Badiou explains in February 1988 during a philosophical evening devoted to Being and Event, which had just been published. “We can translate it as follows: to be done with Heidegger, because what has given force to this thought in the final instance was its intimate accord with the age of the poets, which from Hölderlin to Celan, by way of Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Trakl, Pessoa, and Mandelstam, has delegated the sense of its destiny to the poem.”11 Regarding the same issue of terminology, already in his conferences of 1935– 36 on “The Origin of the Work of Art,” the German language had allowed Heidegger to distinguish between Poesie and Dichtung so as to separate poetry or poesy in the narrow sense from a much broader understanding of language or diction as an originary setting-into-work of truth that also includes nonverbal works of art. “Poetry is thought of here in so broad a sense and at the same time in such intimate unity of being with language and word, that we must leave open whether art, in all its modes from architecture to poesy, exhausts the nature of poetry,” Heidegger comments. “Language itself is poetry in the essential

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sense. But since language is the happening in which for man beings first disclose themselves to him each time as beings, poesy—or poetry in the narrower sense—is the most original form of poetry in the essential sense.”12 In addition to this double use of the notion of the poem in Heidegger’s thought, which is likewise at play in Badiou’s philosophy, for the purposes of conceptual symmetry it is not a negligible advantage that in French poème rhymes with mathème more clearly than their equivalents, say, in English. This then allows Badiou to set up a neat parallelism in which poetry is to art what mathematics is to science, that is, the privileged kernel of these two conditions of philosophy, so that mathematics can be to Badiou what the poem is to Heidegger. “Just as the ontologies of Presence cite and comment upon the great poems of Hölderlin, Trakl and Celan, and no-one finds matter for contestation in the poetic text being thus spread out and dissected, here one must allow me, without tipping the enterprise over into epistemology (no more than that of Heidegger’s enterprise into a simple aesthetics), the right to cite and dissect the mathematical text,” the author asks in his introduction to Being and Event. Finally, as we will see, the particular way in which Badiou uses mathematics also means that truth no longer has to be approached indefinitely as the presencing of being in the poetic saying alone but instead can be formalized as a subtractive excess over being itself, a supplement produced by an event, which can happen in any of the four procedures of truth that are the generic conditions of philosophy: “For what one expects from such an operation is less a knowledge of mathematics than a determination of the point at which the saying of being occurs, in a temporal excess over itself, as a truth—always artistic, scientific, political or amorous.”13

3 For Badiou, suture, rivalry, and condition name three essential ways in which poetry and philosophy have been or can still be articulated. Suture, on the one hand, is a term that would have been familiar to readers of the Lacanian psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller, whose paper from 1966 titled “Suture: Elements of the Logic of the Signifier,” published in the first issue of the Lacano-Althusserian journal Cahiers pour l’analyse, in which Badiou would also come to participate, became pivotally important in the late 1970s and early 1980s both in the area of film studies, around the British journal Screen, and in the area of political theory, thanks to the efforts of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics.14 In all these cases, the metaphor carries mostly pejorative connotations. The suturing of the spectator’s gaze into the cinematic field, or the impossible attempt to suture society

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into a transparent totality, for example, could be said to serve as contemporary definitions of what constitutes ideology, now seen as typically involving elements of misrecognition, fantasy, and the imaginary closure or filling-in of what is in fact a constitutive gap, lack, or absence in a given structure. In Badiou’s work from the time of Being and Event and Manifesto for Philosophy, on the other hand, not only does suture receive two very different connotations, one positive and the other negative, but paradoxically the first is used to counter and undo the damage wrought by the second: 1. Especially in Being and Event, the term is used quite positively to describe how any given situation is sutured through the void onto the being of this situation. From within the situation, which only ever presents a consistent multiplicity, being as pure inconsistent multiplicity cannot appear except as empty or void, but conversely this means that the void is the point through which a situation is articulated onto being qua being. Mathematically, we can think of this in connection to the idea that set theory presumes the existence of only one set—namely, the empty or null set, having no elements of its own but being universally included in every other set. Thus, if ontology as the discourse of being qua being can be derived from the void, we also no longer have to pursue a mysterious presence of being as an origin at once veiled and unveiled: “I will say that being not only does not in any manner let itself be approached, but solely allows itself to be sutured in its void to the brutality of a deductive consistency without aura. Being does not diffuse itself in rhythm and image, it does not reign over metaphor, it is the null sovereign of inference.”15 While still relying on the power of poetic nomination, this positive use of the metaphor of suture already puts us on a mathematical track toward ontology that is radically different from the hermeneutic path followed by Heidegger when he sutures philosophy onto poetry. But then to describe this path the metaphor carries a decidedly pejorative connotation for Badiou. 2. In Manifesto for Philosophy, in particular, this second, negative use of the notion of suture describes the operation whereby philosophy abdicates the task of thinking through the full range of its own time and delegates this task exclusively to one of the generic conditions of truth, instead of thinking together the joint compossibility of all four. After Hegel, Badiou thus sees the nineteenth century as dominated by a double suturing of philosophy: first, onto science (in the guise of positivism) and, second, onto politics (in the guise of revolutionary Marxism, which furthermore presents itself as a combination of the two sutures, in the name of a “science of History”). Badiou’s principal argument about the age of the poets, then, holds that especially in the wake of the Paris Commune

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and throughout much of the twentieth century, in response to the two world wars and the short-lived promise of the October Revolution, philosophy has allowed itself to become sutured onto art and poetry. Today, according to Badiou, we can and must declare the end of the age of the poets. This is not just a theoretical decision or a personal whim but a programmatic conclusion drawn from actual events happening around us, as discussed in the chapter “Events” in Manifesto for Philosophy. In terms of signs of the exhaustion of the age of sutures, for example, Badiou cites Celan’s quasi-mythical encounter and disillusionment with Heidegger, while in terms of hints of a new beginning, he mentions the possibility of thinking the pure generic multiplicity of being qua being in terms of axiomatic set theory, thanks to the mathematical inventions of mathematicians from Georg Cantor to Paul Cohen, as well as the possibility of rethinking the theory of the subject in light of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Though still relatively obscure, especially in the realm of emancipatory politics, for which Badiou briefly refers to the aftermath of May ’68, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Iranian revolution, and the experience of Solidarity in  Poland as a working-class movement that tries to extricate itself from the Marxist suture, all these events support the possibility of desuturing philosophy from the almost sacred privilege that poetic and artistic experience enjoyed from Nietzsche to Heidegger, or, in terms of their favorite models, from Wagner all the way back to Hölderlin. “For this reason,” Badiou concludes in Manifesto for Philosophy, “the fundamental criticism of Heidegger can only be the following one: the age of the poets is completed, it is also necessary to de-suture philosophy from its poetic condition.”16

3 Before we study all the implications of the proposed desuturing of philosophy, let us dwell for a moment longer on the exact nature of the suture marked by the so-called age of the poets. For the dynamic behind this situation is far more complex than the notions of abdication and delegation might suggest. Clearly, by suturing itself onto poetry the Heideggerian orientation of philosophy crosses a line that should not have been crossed, according to Badiou. Where the free play of a subtle equilibrium would be needed, the balance has been tipped over in the configuration both among the four conditions of philosophy and between these conditions and the conditioned field of philosophy itself. However, as the hesitation in the lists of proper names suggests, it is not equally clear whether this is the exclusive fault of the philosophers. Do the poets themselves

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play no role in this whole process? Why, then, would the age of the poets be defined by a list of names that goes from Hölderlin to Celan rather than, say, from Nietzsche to Heidegger? Are the poets merely the victims of a violent appropriation on the part of a philosopher who never stops putting words in their mouth in the name of an essential reserve before the enigma of being? Or is there also a secret philosophical ambition involved on the part of poets who seem eager enough to proffer the poetic thoughts of the day? And would this mean that the appropriation actually amounts to a form of extortion, based on the cunning exploitation of certain wants and needs of the poets themselves? Badiou’s response to such questions varies over time and from one occasion to the next, in dialogue with the responses he received from his interlocutors. In Being and Event, it would appear to be the philosophers, in the person of Heidegger and his numerous followers in France, who are the main culprits responsible for the ontology that Badiou, as a result of the suture, proposes to call poetic. “Heidegger still remains enslaved, even in the doctrine of the withdrawal and the un-veiling, to what I consider, for my part, to be the essence of metaphysics; that is, the figure of being as endowment and gift, and the figure of ontology as the offering of a trajectory of proximity,” Badiou comments. “I will call poetic this type of ontology, haunted by the dissipation of Presence and the loss of the origin. We know what role the poets play, from Parmenides to René Char, passing by Hölderlin and Trakl, in the Heideggerian exegesis.”17 Thus, too, according to certain statements in Manifesto for Philosophy, the poets themselves seem to have little or no say—other than providing the raw materials—in the ontological orientation of this exegesis in which unbeknown to themselves they were catapulted onto the stage of the history of being. “These poets did not decide to take the place of philosophers; they did not write with the clarified awareness of having assumed these functions,” Badiou observes. “Instead one must imagine that they were submitted to a kind of intellectual pressure, induced by the absence of free play in philosophy, by the need to constitute, from within their art, that general space of reception for thought and the generic procedures that philosophy, sutured as it was, could no longer establish.”18 All agency, clarity of vision, and capacity for decision-making in these formulations appear to be rather one-sidedly located on the side of the philosophers in their quest to give the ontological discourse of being a uniquely poetic orientation. Finally, in the version of “The Age of the Poets” that was first presented in 1989 and published in 1992 as part of Rancière’s seminar La Politique des poètes, Badiou concludes that, contrary to what the combination of “age” and “poets” might suggest, this category is neither historicist nor literary-aesthetic, but strictly philosophical. And, in a personal letter sent to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe

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after the latter in June 1993 had given the talk “The Poet’s Courage,” in which he revisited some of the same criticisms first raised in a response to Badiou titled “Poetry, Philosophy, Politics” as part of the same seminar organized by Rancière, Badiou similarly places the blame for the poetic suturing of philosophy squarely on the shoulders of the philosopher from Todtnauberg. Lacoue-Labarthe quotes a long passage from Badiou’s letter in a postscript to the version of “The Courage of Poetry” that is included in his book Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry: If it turns out that the immanent operation of the poem, already—or even especially—for Hölderlin, is in no way the establishment of the sovereignty of myth (or of sacred names), but on the contrary their erasure, and therefore a becoming prose; then the mytheme is not an intrinsic given properly located in the poem, but, already, a speculative appropriation that does violence to the poem. In that case, are you not calling “mytheme” the very thing that I am calling “suture”? For I have always conceived the suture as an operation carried out by philosophy, in some way grafted onto certain aspects that have been unilaterally detached and isolated from the post-Romantic poem.19

Under two different names, suture and myth, both Badiou and Lacoue-Labarthe would be talking about a speculative operation that is not intrinsic to the postRomantic poem itself but the result of a violent philosophical appropriation on the part of Heidegger and some of the French Heideggerians. And yet, just as René Char in the eyes of Badiou appears as someone who consciously strikes the pose of the Heideggerian thinker-poet, so too on other occasions Badiou suggests that the poets themselves are not for nothing behind the historical sequence marked by philosophy’s suturing onto poetry. “If poetry was singularly designated for this labor,” he continues in Manifesto for Philosophy, “it is because, on the one hand, at least till Nietzsche and Heidegger, it was not among the conditions to which philosophy was sutured in a privileged way; on the other, since a distant vocation of poetry, which is the art of binding Word and experience, is to have at its chimerical horizon the ideal of Presence such that a word can found it.” 20 Here, on top of the external pressure on the poets exerted by philosophers who are still reeling from the struggle to overcome the twin legacy of scientific positivism and revolutionary politics, we are told about certain internal motivations for philosophy’s suture onto poetry. Thus, what otherwise appears to be the violent hack job of a self-serving philosophical exegesis would actually go back to a distant vocation present in poetry itself. In fact, already in his seminar on Heidegger from 1986–87, Badiou had spent considerable time discussing the intrinsic reasons that might help account for

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poetry’s availability to become absorbed into the suturing of philosophy in the first place. These reasons include not just the personal motivations, desires, and needs that might have driven this or that poet to seek an answer, or give in to the pressure, from the philosopher, but also certain philosophical decisions and orientations that are somehow preinscribed within the poem. Thus, Badiou begins his seminar by establishing a point-for-point comparison between the poem and what he calls the matheme in terms of their inherent tendency to orient the thoughtpractice that they otherwise both are: either in the direction of sensible presence, rhythm and sound, the loss and return of the origin, the privilege of the national language, and the nostalgia for an almost childlike innocence; or in the direction of conceptual subtraction, the axiomatic consequences of inferential fidelity to the void, the privilege of artificial language, and the mature courage to work through an impasse in the structure. It is not surprising, therefore, that when Heidegger after his supposed retreat from politics seeks support in poetry in order to approach the enigmatic saying of being, the result is a hermeneutic ontology of the withdrawal and return of origins. For Badiou, this result is not just an imposition from the outside; it is also inherently preinscribed in the original vocation of poetry. Similarly, when toward the end of his seminar on Heidegger a member in the audience asks him about the position of the poets with regard to their own activity, Badiou’s answer is palpably different from the notion that the creation of an age of the poets would be simply the fault of the philosopher’s speculative misprision: “We must observe how the suture, whenever it occurs, is always in part a joint suture: it is the doing of the philosophers, but it is also the result of the consent given to the suture of the generic practice in question,” and this holds true for politics as much as for poetry. Badiou continues: “There certainly have been politicians who consented to or have been practitioners of the suture of the political condition to philosophy. For a long period there have after all been Heideggerian poets, so to speak, I mean poets who maintained from within the space of poetry a statement of the kind: ‘Only poetry is of the same order as philosophy and philosophical thinking.’ ” 21 A strange mixture of desire and ambition, power and consent, is also at play on the side of the poets. In the end, perhaps the best way to think of the age of the poets is in terms of an unstable combination of forces pulling and pushing for different reasons in both directions between the philosophers and the poets, complete with their false modesty and their secret arrogance, their jealous rivalry and their passive aggressiveness. In his first response to Being and Event and Manifesto for Philosophy, part of another event in 1989 at the Collège International de Philosophie, Rancière suggested something similar by talking about a strange chassé-croisé, or “criss-crossing,” between the poet and the philosopher: “The poet takes at the

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same time the negative figure of the one who leads the philosopher into temptation and the supplementary figure of the one who, fulfilling the task abandoned by the philosopher, confesses to his insufficiency and requests to be relieved by the philosopher newly armed with the matheme.” 22 To which we should add that obviously these figures are not always combined in one and the same person. What Rancière has in mind when he mentions the negative figure of the poet who leads the philosopher into temptation corresponds to all the great representatives of the age of the poets beginning with Hölderlin; the philosopher who forsakes his task in favor of the poets corresponds mainly to Heidegger; the poet who finally confesses his own insufficiency in continuing to make up for this abandonment corresponds to Celan; and the philosopher who interprets this last gesture as an invitation to declare the closure of the age of the poets by substituting the matheme for the poem is obviously none other than Badiou. Whereas Rancière based on the chapter in Manifesto for Philosophy speaks of a chassé-croisé between poet and philosopher, Badiou himself in the later version of “The Age of the Poets” prepared for Rancière’s seminar on La Politique des poètes uses the metaphor of a breaching that is also an overlapping: ébrèchement and recouvrement in French. Again, without attributing a conscious decision to the poets, Badiou admits that because of its originary capacity for thinking its own time, poetry also has the power to encroach upon the terrain of philosophy: “The poem then finds itself unwillingly—I mean without this position stemming from a calculation or a rivalry—in a kind of breach, which is also an overlap, with philosophy, whose originary vocation is precisely to think the time of thought, or to think the epoch as site of compossibility of the different generic procedures (poem, matheme, politics and love).” 23 If indeed such an encroachment exists, the vocations of poetry and philosophy are bound to clash in a jealous rivalry that goes both ways. As Badiou concludes in “What Does the Poem Think?,” another of his later texts taken up in The Age of the Poets: It could well be, therefore, that the poem disconcerts philosophy insofar as the poem’s operations rival those of philosophy. It could well be that the philosopher has always been a jealous rival of the poet. Or, to put it differently: the poem is a thought in its very act, which therefore has no need to be also the thought of thought. Now, philosophy establishes itself in the desire to think thought. But it is always uncertain whether the thought in action, the sensible thought, is not more real than the thought of thought.24

Here we furthermore see how the suturing of philosophy onto poetry can also become intensified to the point of giving way to an antiphilosophical rivalry in

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which philosophy itself wants to become the sensible thought that is poetry, the radical breaking in two of history that is the political revolution, or the integral transmissibility of the knowledge of the real that is science. “Me, the truth, I speak,” Lacan would go on to say, in ways that for Badiou are reminiscent of the final moments of Nietzsche’s madness, when he proclaims himself to be dynamite, not a man but a destiny: “We have just entered into great politics, even the very greatest… I am preparing an event which in all likelihood will break history into two halves, even to the point that we will need a new calendar in which 1888 will be the Year 1.” 25 Thus, with Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, or Lacan, philosophy no longer just delegates the task of thinking its own time to one of the four conditions but becomes rabidly antiphilosophical by proclaiming itself capable of producing a great event or act that will have been more powerful than anything found in art, politics, or science, even while mimicking the latter’s radical form. For Badiou, then, the difficulty of his own endeavor will lie precisely in having to find an answer to the age of the poets that must at the same time serve as a manifesto for the renewed possibility of philosophy and stay clear of an antiphilosophical heightening of the rivalries in which the conditioned becomes not just sutured but fused with one of its conditions. Except perhaps during his brief period in 1933–34 as rector of the University of Freiburg in Nazi Germany, when the suture was still more political than poetic, Heidegger never goes this far in fusing the condition with the conditioned. Rather, at least after the so-called turn, or Kehre, he maintains an insuperable distance between philosophical thinking and poetic saying. In spite of the endless etymological comings and goings between them, these are two reciprocal but separate ways of thanking the pure gift of being: “Only poetry is of the same order as philosophical thinking, although thinking and poetry are not identical.”26 Badiou, for his part, always runs the risk of seeming to want to restore a peaceful coexistence between all four of the truth conditions and the philosophy they condition. But then, to avoid the calm and uneventful prudence of such an approach, which could seem the work of an insipid Aristotelian rather than of a boastful Platonist, Badiou himself may not always be able to stave off the opposite temptation of seeking the thought in action that is the point of the real for antiphilosophy, pushing him straight into the arms of a Nietzsche or a Wittgenstein. I believe that this is why, beginning in 1992–93 with the seminar on Nietzsche, Badiou meets the challenge head on and initiates a new series of polemical engagements with the main antiphilosophers of our time, after having spent almost half a decade seeking to extricate philosophy from the temptations of its Heideggerian suture onto poetry.

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As for the implications of the proposed desuturing of philosophy in the wake of the closure of the age of the poets, we can address these on three different but closely related levels: 1. At the theoretical or metaphilosophical level, the implications concern the need to restore a space of compatibility for the four procedures for producing truths that function as the conditions of philosophy. 2. At the methodological or metaontological level, the implications concern the need to choose between two fundamental orientations of philosophy. 3. At the genealogical or metahistorical level, the implications concern the way we understand the beginnings of philosophy in connection with the site of ancient Greece. Conditions, orientations, and inceptions: under each of these three headings, let us now examine in some more detail the conclusions we can draw from Badiou’s debate with and against Heidegger.

3 To declare the end of the age of the poets, first of all, does not mean—as it was sometimes understood by Badiou’s earliest critics such as Lacoue-Labarthe—to repeat the Platonic gesture of expulsion, which itself in any case is only the symptom of an exaggerated and undigested rivalry. Instead, it means to liberate the poetic condition of philosophy from its suture and to restore the free play among all four conditions. This is a task that Badiou in Manifesto for Philosophy defines in terms of the classical Leibnizian concept of compossibility: “Philosophical concepts weave a general space in which thought accedes to time, to its time, so long as the truth procedures of this time find shelter for their compossibility within it. The appropriate metaphor is thus not of the register of addition, not even of systematic reflection. It is rather of the liberty of movement, of a moving-itself of thought within the articulated element of a state of its conditions.” 27 But we could also say that to avoid the age of sutures the four generic procedures of truth must find a space in which they can function according to a principle of equiprimordiality, this time stealing an expression from Heidegger’s own lexicon. Poetry itself, therefore, is not banned from the republic but restored to its power: “ ‘End of the age of the poets’ means: end of a philosophical operation of suture onto the poem, but not at all end of the poetic condition of philosophy,” Badiou clarifies in response to his critics in the discussion of Being and Event at

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the Collège International de Philosophie. “After Heidegger, this condition will rather have been liberated. We will see in particular that any evental nomination, in its declaratory sequence, when it is necessary to declare that a fidelity begins, implies a poetic incision in language (where nomination is opposed to signification).” 28 To be precise, we could say that poetry in the wake of the closure of the age of the poets comes to play a triple role in Badiou’s philosophy: 1. Poetry, as a condition of truth, presents the hard core of art as one of the four generic procedures, alongside science, politics, and love, capable of producing a truth. 2. Poetry, as a power of nomination, operates both within each domain for the production of truth (for example, whenever an event’s singular name must be drawn “from the edges of the void”) and in philosophy’s attempts to define a space of compossibility for the truths of its time (whenever the effects of an event in any one of the four conditions are registered in terms of ontology, for example, as the metaphorical “suturing” of a situation onto its being by way of the void). 3. Poetry, as an orientation of thought in its own right, preinscribes certain decisions as well as the trajectories that follow from choosing one or the other (for example, the choice between the paths of affirmation or subtraction, plenitude or lack, midday or midnight, sheltering proximity or primordial exile). One might still object that the power of poetry here receives a decidedly conceptual and philosophical slant, as though poetry could not be freed up in its timeliness without the eternal help of the philosopher. But the suspicion of hierarchy behind this objection could also be turned upside down. Far from having to be placed on a pedestal, philosophy here declares itself incapable of producing any truths of its own and submits itself to the power of poetry, without turning this show of modesty or humility into the leverage for a pose of secretly self-aggrandizing abdication, as Badiou claims happens in the case of Heidegger and some of the French Heideggerians. Second, to undo the poetic suture of philosophy also means to break with the dominant hermeneutic orientation of thought today. For Badiou, this means to choose the other orientation in the fundamental alternative between hermeneutics and mathematics, with their respective methods or modes of interpretive approximation and deductive transmission. Now, already for its founder, Friedrich Schleiermacher, the function and place of hermeneutics had become generalized as a framework for interpreting not just the Bible or secular texts but also, through the inevitable mediation of language, the very question of being

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qua being. Thus was constituted what Hans-Georg Gadamer, at the end of a century-long trajectory that culminates in Heidegger’s thought, called a hermeneutic ontology whose basic principle can be summed up in the phrase “Being that can be understood is language,” especially when we recall with some of Gadamer’s postmodern disciples that a more literal translation would have to retain the commas of the German original: “Being, which can be understood, is language.” 29 Heidegger’s own turn to language via the poetry of Hölderlin, furthermore, is not just a response to his failure to finish the project of Being and Time, due to the well-known limits of metaphysical language. Rather, from a secondary or technical issue of expressive means, the problem of language gradually comes to be seen as the only possible site where the ontological question of being qua being can be retrieved, by staying in close proximity to the primordial saying of the poets. Therein lies the whole essence of Heidegger’s turn, or Kehre: “The problem of language and the problem about language (exit from the language of metaphysics properly speaking through a renewed meditation on language itself in its essence) thus become the very substance of the Kehre. The only way to repeat the existential analytic ontologically is then the meditation on language, which thus also reveals itself as the only possible form of ontology.”30 This ontological disclosure of language as the house, shelter, or precinct of being is exactly the place where Badiou seeks to introduce the wedge of a polemical intervention, leaving behind the poetic charm of the hermeneutic path, in favor of the axiomatic rigor of the mathematical method. “Now, to the seduction of poetic proximity—I fall prey to it as soon as I name it—I will oppose the radically subtractive dimension of being, foreclosed not only from representation but from all presentation,” Badiou proposes in the introduction to Being and Event, insofar as these notions of presence and subtraction would be the two orientations that command the entire destiny of thought in the West. Between them the choice could not be clearer: “For poetic ontology, which— like History—finds itself in an impasse of an excess of presence, one in which being conceals itself, it is necessary to substitute mathematical ontology, in which dis-qualification and unpresentation are realized through writing,” Badiou continues. “Whatever the subjective price may be, philosophy must designate, insofar as it is a matter of being qua being, the genealogy of the discourse on being—and the reflection on its possible essence—in Cantor, Gödel, and Cohen rather than in Hölderlin, Trakl and Celan.”31 These two orientations of thought, the poetico-hermeneutic and the formalmathematical, do not simply offer different inroads to gain access to one and the same ontological domain. Rather, the effects of the methodological orientations also rub off, so to speak, on the thing itself that they seek to approach. Whether

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one chooses the first or the second path, in other words, also has direct consequences for the very nature that the ensuing ontology will ascribe to being qua being. In Badiou’s view there is thus an essential link: 1. between the poetico-hermeneutic ontology and the disclosure of being as presencing, on the one hand; and 2. between the mathematico-deductive ontology and the formalization of being in terms of lack, void, and nonbeing, on the other.

In fact, the preferred choice of terms such as path or orientation (in the sense of Heidegger’s “elucidations” of Hölderlin as Erörterungen that lead us back to an originary “site,” or Ort) as opposed to “method” or “formalization” (in the sense of Lacan’s dictum that “the real is the impasse of formalization” so that, as Badiou is fond of inferring, “formalization is the pass of the real”), aside from involving a decidedly poetic process of nomination, is itself overdetermined by the alternative between hermeneutics and mathematics. Truth and Method, the title of Gadamer’s principal work, is after all meant as a statement about the radical choice between the truth of hermeneutic interpretation and the method of scientific explanation, whereas all truths—whether scientific, artistic, political, or even amorous—require the disciplined fidelity of a systematic method in the eyes of Badiou: “This is another way of saying that philosophy is only desutured if it is, on its own, systematic. If a contrario, philosophy declares the impossibility of the system, it is because it is sutured, and hands thought over to only one of its conditions.”32 In particular, if contemporary philosophy declares the impossibility of a systematic method, it is because it continues to be sutured onto the poem and sees the task of thinking as an endless play of interpretations. Finally, the proposal to substitute a mathematical ontology (based on deductive fidelity to whatever can be inferred from the void) for a hermeneutic one (rooted in poetic proximity to whatever discloses itself in the coming to presence of being) also throws new light on the historical question of the origins or beginnings of philosophy. If we accept the hypothesis that the site of this beginning can be found in ancient Greece, Badiou’s debate with and against Heidegger also implies a complete overthrow of the way we view the nature of this break. Here, too, the contrast could not be more radical, as Badiou makes clear in the meditation titled “Nature: Poem or Matheme,” which constitutes a veritable turning point in the overarching structure of Being and Event. For Heidegger, the Platonic Idea, to which mathematics gives a privileged access, stands before us as the beginning of a willful forgetting of the originary experience of being, which lays unveiled in the poetic fragments of the Pre-Socratics. Heidegger’s elucidations of

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modern poetry, then, are attempts to retrieve some hint of this primordial sameness of being and saying, of phusis and logos, as if Hölderlin or Trakl were meant to be our latter-day Parmenides or Heraclitus. For Badiou, on the contrary, philosophy can be said to begin with Plato’s willingness, in the name of mathematics, to break with the poems of the Pre-Socratics. “There is well and truly a Greek historicity to the birth of philosophy, and, without doubt, that historicity can be assigned to the question of being. However, it is not in the enigma and the poetic fragment that the origin may be interpreted,” Badiou states in the same pivotal meditation from Being and Event. He continues: If philosophy—which is the disposition for designating exactly where the joint questions of being and of what-happens are at stake—was born in Greece, it is because it is there that ontology established, with the first deductive mathematics, the necessary form of its discourse. It is the philosophico-mathematical nexus—legible even in Parmenides’ poem in its usage of apagogic reasoning— which makes Greece the original site of philosophy, and which defines, until Kant, the “classic” domain of its objects.33

The effects of this redefinition of the inception of philosophy are not limited to our views of ancient Greece. The role of modern poets, too, is inverted thereby. If for Heidegger Hölderlin or Trakl offers oblique pathways that might lead us back to the Pre-Socratic origins forgotten under the aegis of the Platonic Idea, for Badiou in stark contrast the post-Romantic poets are our modern-day version of Parmenides, from whom he proposes to break free in the name of a strange new Platonism—that is, a Platonism of the multiple without One. In this way, Badiou can indeed claim to be thinking both with and against Heidegger: 1. with Heidegger, insofar as Badiou’s counterintuitive Platonism accepts the need to take up the task of ontology through a patient deconstruction of the One. 2. against Heidegger, insofar as this strange Platonism of the multiple nevertheless breaks with the privileging of poetry as an essential saying of being qua presencing.

Thus, whereas Heidegger seeks to take a step back, via modern poetry, so as to leap into another beginning, Badiou proposes that modern philosophy take one more step, without any return or rebeginning other than to repeat Plato’s break with the Parmenidean poem. This break, not the lost presence of being sheltered

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in the poem, marks the inception of philosophy in ancient Greece according to Badiou. “The particular invention of the Greeks is that being is expressible once a decision of thought subtracts it from any instance of presence,” he concludes in Being and Event. “The Greeks did not invent the poem. Rather, they interrupted the poem with the matheme. In doing so, in the exercise of deduction, which is fidelity to being as named by the void, the Greeks opened up the infinite possibility of an ontological text.”34 The nostalgia for presence, in fact, is only the retrospective illusion produced by the mathematical break. In this context, should it come as a surprise that in Badiou’s seminar on Heidegger such a crucial place is reserved for Plato’s Parmenides? This is merely another way of occupying the terrain of the adversary and stealing his weapons, by showing how even the poem of the Pre-Socratics, instead of the natural unveiling of a primordial presence, can be pushed in the direction of a mathematical formalization caught in the deductive fidelity to the impasses of the One and the multiple. And, in fact, the same Machiavellian stratagem of stealing the language of the adversary can be applied to the poets of the age of the poets, at least if the canonical list is expanded to include the likes of Rimbaud, Mallarmé, or Pessoa. They, too, after all embrace the cold rigor of method and, at the furthest remove from any nostalgia for “existence beyond number,” to use Rilke’s expression of which all Heidegger’s musings in a sense are but the violent and prolonged paraphrase, propose poetry as one way among others of “being by numbers.”35

Notes 1. 2.

3.

Alain Badiou, “The Age of the Poets,” in Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 69–77. Alain Badiou, “L’âge des poètes,” in La Politique des poètes: Pourquoi des poètes en temps de détresse?, ed. Jacques Rancière (Paris: Albin Michel, 1992), 21–38. This is the piece I selected as the title essay in the collection The Age of the Poets, and Other Writings on Twentieth-Century Poetry and Prose, ed. and trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Verso, 2014), 3–22. During the conference in 1989 at the Collège International de Philosophie, Badiou’s presentation was followed by a critical rejoinder from Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe: Lacoue-Labarthe, “Poésie, philosophie, politique,” in Rancière, La politique des poètes, 39–63. This response has since then been included in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger: La Politique du poème (Paris: Galilée, 2002), 43–77; translated in Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry, trans. Jeff Port (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 17–37. See Martin Heidegger, “What Are Poets For?,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 89–142.

26 8 4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

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Heidegger, 92–93. Badiou sees this as a quintessentially Hegelian definition of philosophy. “With Hegel what takes the stage is this explicit conviction that philosophy has our time as its stake,” he suggests in his seminar on Heidegger. “Time, Hegel teaches us, is the veritable being-there of the world. The precise formula is: ‘Die Zeit ist der Begriff da,’ time is the being-there of the concept.” See Alain Badiou, Le Séminaire, l’ être, vol. 3, Heidegger: La figure du retrait (Paris: Fayard, 2015), 108 and 112. According to Michel Foucault, it already belongs to Emmanuel Kant, in his answer to the question “What Is Enlightenment?,” to have defined the task of philosophy in relation to the actuality of the present. See Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 32–50. Heidegger, “What Are Poets For?,” 94. Heidegger, 94. Compare with Badiou: “The poems of the age of the poets are those in which the poetic saying not only constitutes a form of thought and instructs a truth, but also finds itself constrained to think this thought.” Badiou, “The Age of the Poets,” 5. Heidegger, “What Are Poets For?,” 137. Again, Badiou echoes these words: “However, to think the thought of the poem cannot be a reflection, since the poem offers itself only in its act.” Badiou, “The Age of the Poets,” 5. Badiou, Heidegger: La figure du retrait, 4 and 11. Badiou nevertheless will go on repeatedly to describe his study of the dialectic of being and nonbeing in Plato’s Parmenides as a deconstruction of the One. See Alain Badiou, Le Séminaire, L’antiphilosophie, vol. 1, Nietzsche (Paris: Fayard, 2015). Alain Badiou, Une soirée philosophique (Paris: Seuil/Potemkine, 1988), 23. Badiou’s brief intervention during this philosophical evening, where he is accompanied by Christian Jambet, Jean-Claude Milner, François Regnault, François Wahl, and Antoine Vitez, anticipates the arguments that make up Manifesto for Philosophy, published the following year. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 75. Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), 18. Jacques-Alain Miller, “Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signifier),” Screen 18 (1977–78): 24–34; and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985). Badiou, Being and Event, 10. Badiou, “The Age of the Poets,” 74. Badiou, Being and Event, 9–10, translation modified. Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 69. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, postscript to “The Courage of Poetry,” in Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry, 81. Lacoue-Labarthe’s talk “Le courage de la poésie” was first presented in June 1993 as part of the cycle Conférences du Perroquet organized by Badiou and was subsequently published as a small booklet. It was announced with a precirculated note in which the question of responsibility for the age of the poets is central: “When philosophy addresses itself to poetry, it takes on a responsibility— and, moreover, it claims this responsibility as its own: It responds, it says, to the

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20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

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responsibility with which poetry itself believes itself to be authorized.” LacoueLabarthe, Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry, 104. Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 69–70. Badiou, Heidegger: La figure du retrait, 227–28. Jacques Rancière, untitled intervention to the dossier “Autour de L’Être et l’événement,” Le Cahier du Collège international de philosophie 8 (October 1989): 214. Also contributing to this same dossier are Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and JeanFrançois Lyotard. Rancière’s and Lacoue-Labarthe’s interventions, in particular, appear to have been decisive for Badiou’s subsequent elaborations of the notion of the age of the poets. I would argue that Badiou’s fundamental thesis in this regard remains unchanged but the tactical and strategic means deployed to support this thesis clearly undergo significant changes between 1986, when he first uses the expression in his seminar on Heidegger, and 1992, when the polemic with Heidegger gives way to an Auseinandersetzung with the antiphilosophers Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Lacan. Badiou, “The Age of the Poets,” 5. Badiou, “What Does the Poem Think?,” in The Age of the Poets, 34. Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Briefe: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: DTV/de Gruyter, 1986), 8:500. For a more detailed discussion of Badiou’s treatment of antiphilosophy in the cases of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Lacan, see Bruno Bosteels, “Radical Antiphilosophy,” Filozofski Vestnik 2 (2008): 155–87; Bosteels, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, by Alain Badiou, ed. and trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Verso, 2011), 1–66; and Bosteels, “Nietzsche, Badiou, and Grand Politics: An Antiphilosophical Reading,” Nietzsche and Political Thought, ed. Keith AnsellPearson (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 219–39. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 28. Badiou discusses this passage at some length in Heidegger: La figure du retrait, 215–38. Compare also with Badiou’s own statement: “It is not because poetry momentarily has assumed the tasks of philosophy that it becomes philosophy” (174). Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 38. Badiou, “Dix-neuf réponses à beaucoup plus d’objections,” in Le Cahier du Collège international de philosophie, 248. For a discussion of the construction of a general—not just technical but ontological—hermeneutics in Friedrich Schleiermacher, see Gianni Vattimo, Schleiermacher filosofo dell’ interpretazione (Milan: Mursia, 1986). Hans-Georg Gadamer’s phrase appears in Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 474. Vattimo frequently returns to this phrase as the key to a postmodern interpretation of hermeneutic ontology, most notably in his talk at the conference honoring Gadamer’s one-hundredth anniversary, in February  2000. See Gianni Vattimo, “Sein, das verstanden werden kann, ist Sprache,” Hommage an Hans-Georg Gadamer (Frankfurt: Surhkamp, 2001), 50–60. Gianni Vattimo, Essere, storia e linguaggio in Heidegger (Genoa: Marietti, 1989), 141. Badiou, Being and Event, 10.

270 32. 33. 34. 35.

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Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 66. Badiou, Being and Event, 10. Badiou, 126. Heidegger comments on Rilke’s expression “existence beyond number” in “What Are Poets For?” whereas “Being by Numbers” is the title of one of the best interviews with Alain Badiou, Artforum International 33 (October  1994): 84–88 and 123–24.

17 Jean-Luc Nancy Poetry, Philosophy, Technicity Ian James

Poetry surely cannot dispense with its relationship with philosophy which is intimate, complex, conflictual, seductive and manipulative all at the same time—on both sides and in both directions at once. —Jean-Luc Nancy, “Taking Account of Poetry,” Multiple Arts

J

ean-Luc Nancy’s affirmation of the intimate, indispensable, and mutually reciprocal relationship of poetry with philosophy is not, of course, shared by all philosophers. Most obviously Plato’s polemic in book 10 of The Republic, where he states that “poetry has no claim to be valued as an apprehension of truth,”1 not only continues what was even then “a long-standing quarrel between poetry and philosophy” (10.606) but arguably seeks to sever all relation between the two. Poetry, and by extension all mimetic or representational art, is, for Plato, “a long way from reality” (10.598), and would therefore only have the most tenuous, degraded, and derivative relation to that realm of Truth with which philosophy concerns itself. In the early modern period Descartes in the Meditations on First Philosophy placed philosophy’s most intimate, necessary, and privileged relation not with poetry, but with mathematics.2 Later in the eighteenth century Kant argued in the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason that the presentational style and form of philosophical writing should resemble that of “the secure course of science . . . through the regular ascertainment of principles, the clear determination of concepts, the attempt at strictness in proofs.”3 Later

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still such an alignment of philosophy with science and mathematics was given one of its most explicit expressions in the twentieth century by Bertrand Russell when he affirmed in The Problems of Philosophy that “there is no special source of wisdom which is open to philosophy but not to science, and the results obtained by philosophy are not radically different from those obtained by science.” 4 So Nancy’s insistence that poetry must “surely” have an indispensable relationship with philosophy and vice versa places him at odds with those philosophers and traditions of philosophy that seek to align their practice with that of science or mathematics. In general Nancy’s thinking in relation to art always draws on, and remains in a close proximity to, the great modern philosophical discourses on art that run from Hegel, through Nietzsche, to Heidegger. What is common to these three thinkers with whom Nancy aligns himself is a privileging, albeit in very different ways, of art’s (and above all poetry’s) access to something like truth or being. Philosophy in this context affirms, in turn, its own intimate, complex, and necessary relation with poetry as a means by which it accounts for its own privileged access to truth or being. So this schematically drawn opposition between Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Russell, on the one hand, and Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Nancy, on the other, reflects not so much the two sides of a “quarrel” between philosophy and poetry, but rather a quarrel within philosophy itself as to the nature of its own language, style, or technique and the manner by which philosophical access to truth can best be secured. Here the relation or nonrelation of philosophy to poetry, its alignment or nonalignment with scientific determination and mathematical proof, might arguably be said to draw a key fault line within the practice of philosophy itself. For Nancy the key to this problematic is “a matter of what, in respect of the relationship with language, . . . is common to philosophy and poetry—that is, common to both and shared by them.”5 The commonality of philosophy and poetry lies therefore in a specific shared relation with language. To this extent Nancy views the ambition of philosophers such as Descartes and Kant to transcend the contingency of language by aligning philosophy with mathematics or science as an attempt to disavow or repress such contingency and its disruptive effects.6 The commonality of this relation to language means that when Nancy talks about poetry, when he describes its operations or its privileged relation to something like truth or being, he is also always describing a potentiality of his own philosophical discourse, of his own thought in, and as, a certain practice of language.

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NANCY ON POETRY

Nancy appears to be acutely aware that when he talks or thinks about poetry he is always doing so as a philosopher and through the prism of philosophical discourse. Yet he does not appear to ascribe to philosophy its traditional privilege of circumscribing and legitimating the identity and value of those other nonphilosophical discourses about which it may come to speak. So when it comes to talking about poetry he suggests that “nothing is more risky and there is perhaps nothing less possible” and that “No discourse will be adequate to that task, and philosophical thought knows in advance that it lags behind.”7 The inadequacy of philosophical discourse in relation to poetry suggests that poetry itself is not something that may have a distinct and selfsame identity that the work of concepts or generic taxonomy can determine. The question of the identity of poetry is closely bound up with that of the identity of art and of the arts in general. On this point Nancy is very clear and consistently argues that there is no overarching unity of something like “Art” that would subsume the plurality of different art forms into an overarching category or shared identity. As he puts it in his essay on the French poet Michel Deguy: “Among the arts, there is no assumptive unity. . . . There is no such thing as art as such; there is always art as the plurality of the arts. And poetry is never like painting or like music except insofar as it is neither one nor the other: but poetry as poetry.” 8 So poetry cannot be defined by reference to the wider unity of art that philosophy itself would determine. What Nancy consistently appears to affirm across his writing on art in works such as The Sense of the World, The Muses, and Multiple Arts is the irreducible plurality of the arts and the impossibility of subsuming this plurality into any kind of overarching concept or category. This means that, for Nancy, “art would thus be in default or in excess of its own concept.”9 It is this irreducible plurality and excess over any given concept that would no doubt explain Nancy’s insistence that “philosophical discourse” cannot be adequate to poetry and that it will always “lag behind.” Poetry itself would also be a profusion of multiplicity, always placing it one step ahead, and in excess of its definitions as poetry. So not only are the arts irreducibly plural but, by implication, any given art such as poetry also obeys a logic of multiplicity that escapes determinate or generic identity. Indeed Nancy says about poetry as poetry much the same as he does about art in general: “Poetry is in essence something more and something other than poetry itself. . . . Poetry does not coincide with itself: perhaps this non-coincidence, this essential improperness or impropriety, is properly what

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makes poetry what it is.”10 So both poetry and “art” in general exceed any determinate definition that philosophy may wish to give for them “in general,” and if there is any essence to them at all it is the nonessence or irreducible plurality of this very excess. Were Nancy to develop this position no further his discourse on poetry (and on art) would simply amount to an affirmation of the singularity of the individual poem or artwork. Each poem would be an aesthetic experience that cannot be exchanged with any other on the basis of an equivalence or shared property. One might wonder in such circumstances how the value of poetry as poetry, or therefore of any given poem, might be discerned or evaluated. Yet Nancy moves beyond a simple affirmation of multiplicity and singularity here. What is key to his understanding of the plurality of the arts, and of each artistic form’s internal plurality or non-self-identity, is the way in which their constitutive excess and irreducible singularity are always bound up with his very specific usage of the term sense (sens in French). His understanding of this term is elaborated in key works such as A Finite Thinking and The Sense of the World but permeates much of his thought from the 1990s onward. Nancy exploits the multiple meanings of the French word sens, which designates meaning or meaningfulness, and sense perception (as in the five senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch), as well as direction (the French for one-way being sens unique). In this context the term sense takes on an ontological weight or force, in that sense is understood in terms of the being of things and the world in general. So by sense here Nancy means “the sense of existence; the sense of existence which is or makes sense, . . . the sense which exists, or which produces out of existing, without which there would be no sense.”11 The adjective ontological here relates to ontology understood as that branch of philosophy that concerns itself with the “being” of things. An ontological discourse will speak of what constitutes fundamental “being” in the absence of contingent qualities or predicates. So if one strips any one instance of being or existence of all its contingent attributes (color, weight, texture, and so on) in order to reduce it to its bare being as such, then, Nancy would argue, what remains of and as this being is its sense, understood as its sensible-intelligible and therefore material meaningfulness for a sensing body. For Nancy, sense is what any instance of world always already is, insofar as it is meaningful and sensed by the sense perception or touch of a bodily directedness toward that instance of world. He is careful here to differentiate sense from anything like signification or determinate meaning within concept, language, or discourse. Sense is that lived embodied and sensed meaningfulness which is always in excess of determinate meaning, which arises or emerges as the temporal presencing of (a) world and as each singular instance of a body’s, or of bodies’, directedness toward, or contact with, that world. As such,

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sense, as existence or being, always only arises or emerges as the temporalizingspatializing passage or sharing of sense between bodies and as a singular, nonexchangeable relation with the mass or plurality of bodies. And, as such, the being of sense is always an excess over any determinable or signifiable entity or phenomenon; it is, as Nancy argues, that which “exceeds the phenomenon within the phenomenon itself.”12 This means that sense, for Nancy, is only a quasiontological category insofar as it necessarily exceeds any and all discourse of ontology; fundamental ontology cannot master or gather the excessive multiplicity of sense, which is the very stuff of our being-in-the-world. It is here that the privilege of art, and specifically of poetry, is affirmed in Nancy’s philosophy. For the very fragmentation of art and poetry, their resistance to assumptive or conceptual unity or determination, is inseparable from the relation to sense, understood in Nancy’s specific usage of the term, which they articulate. Nancy argues that each artwork articulates an (itself irreducibly singular) relation to the fragmentary and excessive dimension of sense understood as the very “stuff” of being or existence. The logic at work here is one of exposure at the limit. If “sense” is always withdrawn from presence as an excess over phenomenal appearance, linguistic signification, or concept, then it can never be held in reserve or gathered in any act of (re)presentation. It can only be approached through an exposure of a given artistic form to, and at, the limit of what it presents. It is in this light that Nancy’s insistence on the arts having no assumptive unity must be understood: they remain, as it were, alongside one another, distinct in their relative specificities, yet all exposed at their limits to the excess of sense. It is also in this context that Nancy in the end does nevertheless make some general or axiomatic comments about the functioning of the artwork as a privileged relation to the being of the world understood as “sense.” So, for instance, in The Muses he asks, “What does art do if not finally touch upon and touch by means of the principal heterogeneity of sensing?” He goes on to argue that art’s touching of the heterogeneity of sensing means that it “deals with being-in-the-world in its very springing forth.”13 So, to summarize, the only commonality the arts have among themselves, for Nancy, is this logic of the exposure of and to sense at the limit (of signification, presentation, or representation). They are irreducibly plural in their specificities and distinctness from one another yet this very difference is assured by the fact that they all articulate this singular relation or exposure to sense and to the presencing of being-in-the world. Strangely then, poetry, for Nancy, is necessarily distinct from all the other arts yet at the same time it also does what they do, namely, “touch” on sense via an exposure at the limit of signification. Yet the question arises here, however, as to whether in some sense poetry, or the poetic,

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is a privileged form among the arts in relation to the excess of sense. As Nancy puts it in the essay “Making Poetry”: ‘Sense is a surplus, an excess, the excess of being in relation to being itself. The question is how to accede to this excess, to yield or cede to it.”14 And at the very beginning of the same essay he notes: “If we understand or, in one way or another, accede to a dawning of sense, we do so poetically.”15 What seems clear here is that, for Nancy, poetry, or the poetic, occurs in and as an “access” to the excess of sense: “poetry occurs only when such access occurs.”16 Yet this would mean that this takes place not only in the writing of poetry but, if other art forms also “touch” on or at sense, that it takes place also in all artworks in one way or another. On this point Nancy is explicit, pointing out that the word poetry can refer “indiscriminately to a type of language, a particular artistic genre, and a quality that may be present elsewhere, and indeed may be absent from works of this type of genre altogether.”17 So poetry, according to Nancy, may occur in individual poems, but then again it may not. Poetry may also occur in other forms that are not poems at all. In light of this it may appear that Nancy the philosopher, while refusing the assimilation of poetry into something like a unified concept of “Art,” is engaging in a reverse move whereby all the arts, insofar as they “touch” on sense, also “accede” to sense and are therefore all poetic, albeit in different ways. One might worry here that the specificity of poetry as poetry may somehow be lost in all this despite Nancy’s insistence on the distinctness and difference of all the art forms from one another. Yet at the same time he is probably not wrong to suggest that the “poetic” is regularly understood as something that exceeds the limits of the genre of poetry as such and is used to describe a certain quality of experience that can be found in other art forms or indeed in other nonartistic forms. When the word poetic is used in this more general way it often has a rather vague and nondefined meaning. Arguably Nancy’s understanding of the poetic in terms of his quasi-ontology of sense and in terms of the possibility of “access” to sense is rigorous and exact in the way it articulates an experience that, in and of itself, is never easy to account for. When we experience the “poetic,” in poetry or elsewhere, it is as a certain intensity, at once affective and diffusely meaningful, but also sensible (i.e., perceived by the senses). Yet the poetic is perhaps never immediately or at all reducible to the fixity of determinate meaning, somehow impressing itself upon us as an experience in a manner that is not captured by such fixity. Everything hangs then on the nature of this poetic “access” to sense and in the essay “Making Poetry” Nancy gives a number of very precise descriptions of such access. The access to sense granted by poetry is “absolute and exclusive, immediately present, concrete and as such, in exchangeable.”18 However difficult or

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abstract Nancy’s formulations may appear to be he is trying to work his way toward something immediate and concrete, yet necessarily opaque and refractory. If our being as such can be situated in the material, diffusely intelligible sensing of our bodies and the passage or surging of sense that is exposed between bodies who share an experience of world, then such being is nothing if not concrete and always, singularly from body to body, concretely bringing into presence. And yet if this concrete experience of being cannot be gathered into the work of signification or conceptual determination, that is, of representation, then perhaps we can touch upon it, feel it, or otherwise affectively encounter the truth of this being in the experience of the “poetic.” So the “poetic” in poetry or other art forms is not what is conveyed by way of their meaning, or their representational power. It is not conveyed in the signifying codes that can be exchanged with or made equivalent to other signifying forms in the work of interpretation. In poetry “access occurs each and every time only once, and it has always to be done again, not because it may be said to be imperfect, but on the contrary because, when it is (when it yields), it is each time perfect.”19 Despite the difficulty of his formulations Nancy is trying to talk about the intensity of poetic experience, the way in which it can both physically and emotionally move us by putting us  into contact with something that exceeds the limits of what is represented and that feels profoundly true, yet that is also at the same time evanescent and ungraspable.

POETRY AS TECHNIQUE

Nancy’s emphasis on the excessive character of sense, on its ungraspability and opacity, might make one think that, for all his talk of concreteness and embodiment, his account of poetry relies on an appeal to a vague and otherwise nebulous or abstract experience of the ineffable. Yet one of the key aspects that ground his accounts of both poetry and other art forms in a concrete dimension is his insistence on the material production of the poem or artwork itself. In this context he uses the language of technique or of technical production. In an essay on the Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara, Nancy alludes to the ancient Greek term techne poietike, or “productive technique.” The Greek poiēsis, meaning a making or production, points to the origin of the word poetry in the procedures and operations of skilled artifice or manufacture. Again Nancy appears to equate the poetic with other arts insofar as “poetic production” is a quality of all artworks as well as of poetry as such:

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Techne poietike: productive technique. This technique, this art, this calculated operation, this procedure, this artifice, produces something not with a view to something else or to a use, but with a view to its production alone, its exposition. The pro-duction of the thing brings it forth, presents and exposes it. . . . Poetry sets in position. Art is a setting in position. It sets the position of the thing according to the dictates of presence. It is technique productive of presence.20

So rather than a nebulous or abstract “ineffable,” the poetic “access to sense” about which Nancy speaks should be seen as the result of the specificity of artistic material and technical production. If “sense” is the very stuff of existence, being, or presence, then access to sense, however excessive or ungraspable, is not access to some abstract or other dimension beyond experience; it is access to the concrete being or truth of that experience. If poetry “sets in position” and is “productive of presence” it is not as a representation or copy of the world as we reflect it through abstract concepts and categories but a presentation of the immediate presencing of the world itself: “Poetic technique is geared towards presenting this present, toward ‘re-presenting’ it. Not, however, in the sense of a copying or a recopying, since there is nothing here that could be copied, but in the sense of a bringing forth, a putting forward.” 21 So it is always in the material technicity, artifice, and skilled production of the poem or the artwork that access to sense occurs in and as the presentation of the presencing of the sense of a world. In light of this emphasis on technique and on techne poietike as the material production of all art forms, including poetry, some general comments about Nancy’s account of the poetic can now be made. First it might appear that Nancy is making some contradictory assertions. On the one hand poetry as poetry is distinct from other art forms and none of them can be assimilated into a greater unity or concept of art in general. Yet on the other hand poetry is not restricted to the specific genre called poetry. The poetic “access to sense” is something that happens in all arts and perhaps even in any experience we might truly live as “poetic.” So Nancy appears to be affirming the specificity and distinctness of poetry as an art form and yet at the same time generalizing the “poetic” (understood as techne poietike and access to sense) to all art forms and beyond. The key to squaring this apparent contradiction perhaps lies in the way in which, for Nancy, the productive technique of poetry is a specific articulation of language. There are moments when Nancy argues that language is not just one form of technique but is rather “technicity itself as such.” 22 This is because language is a “symbolic technicity” and, arguably, it is only through our

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ability to act and behave symbolically, and inscribe that symbolic activity in language, that we can have anything like technical activity or production of any kind. So when we approach poetry as “technical” and as a productive technique of language, “it is entirely possible that poetry finds itself acting out on its own behalf the whole scene of the differences between the arts.” 23 There is a clear indication in Nancy’s writing on poetry that it enjoys a privileged status among all the arts. It is at once singular and different from all other art forms yet at the same time enacts the logic of difference, singularity, and access to sense in an exemplary fashion. Nancy puts this in the following terms: Poetry could be said to give in language an account of what, as art and the difference between the arts, acts as the margin and the cut of language. It follows that poetry cannot but be in a privileged position, as an art of language and as the poetic dimension of all arts. . . . But it also follows that this major position does not give rise to any “federative” function or one that is “expressive” of the totality of art.24

So the productive technique of poetry as language, and as a specific access to sense via language, articulates the poetic dimension of all the arts while at the same time articulating that dimension as an exposure at the limit of symbolization, which in turn fragments all the arts and resists any possibility of something like a unity of art. What poetry does in language (as the fundamental technicity of symbolization and signification) all the arts do in their poetic access to sense but this “all” is only ever a plurality of each time different and singular instances of access to sense that never add up to a totality. So the seeming contradiction of Nancy’s discourse on poetry, whereby it is held to be different from all other arts yet at the very same time exemplary of them, is really a function of its status as a technical production of language, and of the status of language itself as the fundamental technicity of human symbolic activity. And it is here that the question of the relation of philosophy to poetry in Nancy’s thinking once again comes to the fore. This discussion began by highlighting Nancy’s affirmation of an intimate indispensable and reciprocal relationship between philosophy and poetry. It also highlighted his questioning of “what, in respect of the relationship with language, . . . is common to both philosophy and poetry.” 25 This commonality can now be thrown into sharper light. For what does Nancy’s philosophy do if not speak of the “sense” of being, of sense as being, and, in so doing, does it not clearly have some kind of philosophical ambition to gain “access” to the sense of being? That access, of course, can only be gained by a specific technique or production of philosophical

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language. If Nancy’s discourse is to be in any way adequate to the sense of being or existence about which it speaks, it cannot conceptualize it as such. It cannot represent “sense” or circumscribe it within philosophical categories. If Nancy is to be consistent his own philosophical writing needs to treat “sense” as an excess of its own signifying discourse and is required, if what he says about poetry holds, to “access” sense in a poetic way. As a linguistic production Nancy’s philosophy is constantly operating on a figural and verbally creative level. If, in the end, it is always speaking about something in excess of its own philosophical discourse, and always trying to access the truth of that sense without gathering it into a unity of conceptual determination, then Nancy’s writing too is aligning itself with poetry. Indeed he is very explicit on this point, suggesting that “a philosopher can hardly avoid being affected, one could even say riven, by a kind of need for poetry, which arises from the most urgent part of his or her practice, free of any exaltation or any ‘poeticizing’ temptation.” 26 The intimacy of philosophy and poetry is indispensable, for Nancy, because philosophy, like poetry, albeit in a different manner, concerns itself with being, with accessing the truth of being as “the most urgent part” of the philosopher’s practice. If Nancy is right about the privileging of poetry as the productive technique that “presents the present” and thereby gives access to the “sense” of being-inthe-world in the moment of its arising, then philosophy cannot but align itself with poetry and the poetic disclosure of truth. Yet, as was clear from the beginning of this discussion, which identified a range of philosophers who aligned philosophy with science and mathematics, the alignment of poetry with “truth” is subject to dispute within philosophy itself. If one were to be critical of Nancy one might wonder whether he is in fact appropriating poetry as a genre, and the poetic as an experience, for his own philosophical purposes, casting it in the image that would allow his own writing to articulate itself as a philosophicalpoetic access to the excess of sense. Moreover, even if his writing on poetry does pinpoint very exactly the force, intensity, and value of poetic experience, one might also question whether he is right to give poetic technique such a uniquely privileged access to the truth of being. Could one not concede the power of  poetic technique as Nancy articulates it but also at the same time affirm that other modes of technical production also give us some kind of access to that which exceeds the given frames of determinate meanings or available concepts? So, for instance, could the instruments of scientific technicity that explore the edges of our knowledge and what we know of the physical and biological world also be thought of as productions of presence and of access to some kind of excess? Arguably a scientist looking upon the tracks appearing on a monitor

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screen tracing the movement of subatomic particles in a supercollider is engaged at the limit of what is knowable or signifiable and is exposed to an “excess” of being. Yet to align scientific experimental technicity with Nancy’s poetic technicity and Nancean “sense” with the traces, signals, or observations generated at the limits of scientific knowledge does not at first sight appear to fit within the strict bounds of his excessive ontology of sense and his account of poetry. Yet, since the poetic in Nancy far exceeds poetry itself and informs also the logic of all the arts and of philosophy, the question arises as to whether such logic might not also be extended to other technicities that are not immediately poetic in Nancy’s understanding of the term, but that nevertheless accede to that which lies in excess of what we are able to signify and conceive. There may be ways of thinking of scientific activity as somehow “poetic” in the very broad sense that Nancy has given to the term. If this were so, philosophy’s alignment with poetry need not restrict it to a certain poetic practice of language at the expense of a relation with science and mathematics. If the “poetic” access to the truth or sense of being could be thought in terms of a broader field of technicity, linguistic, and technical-scientific, then there may be ways to think beyond the polemical opposition of philosophy-as-science and philosophy-as-poetry. And then, ceasing to privilege poetry as exemplary, both for the arts and for philosophy, philosophical thought might better be able to let poetry be as poetry.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8.

Plato, The Republic, trans. F.  M. Cornford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941), 607. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 45. Emmanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Alan Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 119–20, B, xxx–vi. Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 87. Jean-Luc Nancy, Multiple Arts: The Muses II, ed. Simon Sparks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 13. See Jean-Luc Nancy, Ego Sum (Paris: Flammarion, 1979); Nancy, Logodeadalus: Le discours de la syncope (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1976); for commentaries on the texts see Ian James, The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 26–63. Nancy, Multiple Arts, 91. Nancy, 107.

282 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

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Jean-Luc Nancy, The Muses, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 4. Nancy, Multiple Arts, 3–4. Jean-Luc Nancy, A Finite Thinking, trans. Simon Sparks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 3. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 17. Nancy, The Muses, 18. Nancy, Multiple Arts, 7. Nancy, 3. Nancy, 4. Nancy, 4. Nancy, 5. Nancy, 6. Nancy, 191. Nancy, 199–200. Nancy, 18. Nancy, 19. Nancy, 20–21. Nancy, 13. Nancy, 1.

18 Rancière on Poetry Jean- Philippe Derant y

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wo key axes carry the parameters that define Rancière’s approach to poetry. The first axis is constituted by his well-known account of aesthetic modernity as a democratic “regime of the arts,” which breaks with the previous, “representative” one, by allowing all subjects and all genres to be appropriated in expressive gestures. These expressive gestures can no longer rely on the old representational rules and references and therefore require constantly reinvented creative forms. The second axis that emerges from the dismantlement of the old regime of representation is therefore a new mode of expressive creativity inherent in individual and collective action. The combination of these two principles creates the structural conditions and the contradictions of the modern aesthetic field, within which individual poets define their tasks and encounter new limits and difficulties. Viewed as a series of individual, situated attempts at linguistic creation within a field in which the structures of perception and diction are inherently up for grabs, poetry becomes a particularly significant exercise. The great poets provide exemplary models of what saying and doing can mean in the conditions of modernity as a regime of equality; and from their individual exemplarity, profound theoretical implicit lessons can be drawn. Rancière’s writings on poetry as a result always seek to accomplish two aims: provide substantive hermeneutic reconstructions of writing practices, taken as exemplary forms of modern “poiesis”; and critique alternative theoretical uses of poetry and, through these, alternative conceptions of modern practice and theory. To review these aspects of Rancière’s approach to poetry, I have adopted a genealogical approach, as it is the simplest way to give a sense of the richness of Rancière’s long engagement with the works of poets.

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MODERN PROLETARIAN STRUGGLES AND MODERN POETRY

Substantive reference to the work of modern poets started to appear in Rancière’s work with the publication of Proletarian Nights (1981), when Rancière formulated his mature interpretation of the archival research into the “proletarian dream” conducted in the previous decade. As he has himself recounted on many occasions, his initial project following the break with Althusser was to document the early phases of the workers’ movement, in order to retrace the steps through which the real discourses and practices of proletarian struggles were gradually obscured and silenced in the grand theories of emancipation, notably the Marxist one.1 In the course of this research, notably through the encounter with the figures of Louis-Gabriel Gauny and Désirée Veret, Rancière came to the conclusion that the most significant aspect of the early workers movement laid in renewed and disparate efforts to wrench proletarian struggles from all prescribed identifications. Proletarians in fact struggled to be recognized as beings capable of reasoned speech, equal to any other speaking being. From that perspective some of the most decisive actions of the movement were the attempts, most strikingly exemplified in the writings of Gauny, to appropriate the highest forms of thinking and writing as proletarians. The encounter between proletarian writing and established bourgeois poetry thereby became central. The exclusion of the former by the latter was exemplary of the symbolic ostracism at the heart of the social mechanisms of exclusion.2 However, the great Romantic poets also presented models to follow for the proletarian writers, since “poetic” excellence, that is, the demonstration of one’s highest capacity for speech, was the most important of all matters, both to challenge exclusion and more simply to achieve self-expression and autonomous thought. A profound structural kinship therefore appeared between emancipation and poetry, as the outcome of Rancière’s archival work. If emancipation consisted first and foremost in the rejection of stultifying identities and the demonstration of the capacity to speak, this corresponded in the realm of the social and the political to what poetic activity was effectuating in the realms of the symbolic, under the theme of the “erring letter.” This topos designates the obsolescence of the rules attaching speech to bodies that would rightly proffer meaning by virtue of their social or indeed their alleged “natural” essence. Meaningful speech in fact has no specific location and can be addressed to anyone. This fundamental principle of modern societies appeared simultaneously in the biographical accounts of the “children of the people” whose lives had been transfigured by the encounter with literature, and as a fundamental principle of

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Romantic and post-Romantic literature, in the idea of “mute speech,” the expressivity of all things. Rancière’s work in aesthetics in the following decades, culminating in Mute Speech in 1998, has been a comprehensive exploration of this trope, as a structure analogically shared by modern emancipation, conceived as the radical assertion of equality, and modern literature, as the emancipation of discourse from the strictures of the representative regime. In 1981 already, at the conclusion of his work on the archives of the proletarian, poetry provided the link between emancipation and literature. In a summary of the argument of Proletarian Nights, Rancière made the link explicit: the “mode of existence” he was “compelled to give those silhouettes and words cut loose from their social anchorage” was “similar to what a contemporary poet (Yves Bonnefoy) describes, speaking of Baudelaire and in particular of his famous poem ‘The Swan,’ defined as ‘the act and place of poetry.’ ”3 A profound homology appeared between the fate of the proletarian writers and the status and powers of poetry in the modern era. Both testified to an impossibility that also contained a promise and a necessity: the impossibility of attaching ways of speaking and doing to fixed identities; the loosening of discourse from any essential foundations; and as a result the promise and the necessity of creative rearticulation, in guises each time specific to particular places and indeed to particular individualities.

“LOOKING AFTER THE DEAD CHILD”: THE PROBLEM OF LYRICISM

In the texts of the next decade Rancière explored the poetic nature of proletarian detachment and the political dimension of the “erring letter” through the theme of the “voyage to the land of the people.” These voyages are mostly literal and metaphorical travels made by modern poets outside their countries and outside their social classes in times of political upheaval: Wordsworth traveling through revolutionary France; Georg Büchner at the border between revolutionary France and apathetic Germany; Byron on his way from Britain to Greece, the mythical birth place of European freedom; Mandelstam writing in the midst of the Russian revolution.4 The background problem raised by these “voyages” is the question of lyricism in the conditions of modernity: how a poetic “I” can be constituted so that a position of utterance becomes possible both in relation to experience and in relation to speech. The difficulty in both cases comes from the loosening of the ties between bodies and meaning that is characteristic of the modern situation. The lack of adjustment between words,

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things, and experience impacts, first of all, on the general, collective horizon, in which subjective experience takes place, as the grand programs of the modern revolutions (political, scientific, economic) fail to deliver the transformations they were promising, or end up in their opposites, in failure, in terror, in new forms of oppression, or in an emptying of meaning. The destruction of secure links between bodies and meaning impacts also on the possibility of expression, as previous symbolic regimes (the representative regime for the romantics, the Christian narrative, nineteenth-century symbolism for Mandelstam) become exhausted and fail to designate definitive modes of expression that would ensure the possibility of sense. However, neither the possibility of emancipation nor the possibility of expression can be abandoned. A new structure thus emerges, which makes modern lyricism the challenge par excellence of modernity, as well as the knot in which the contradictions of modernity are encapsulated. Within this problematic topology, a specific, recurring trope captures particularly well the contradictions and challenges of the new situation: namely, the figures of the dead and the abandoned child. The trope appeared for the first time in the writing of Gauny, the carpenter-philosopher, to designate the sense of existential abandon attached to the proletarian condition.5 A text dedicated to Wordsworth, first written in 1981, formulates the more general, expressive power of that trope in a way that applies to Rancière’s reading of other poets at the time: “the poet has to take charge of the dead child whom all politics abandons.” 6 The dead and abandoned children are figures of the inconsistency of the new regime, incarnating the death of a future-to-come that is inscribed at the very heart of the present. These images are directly related to the challenge of symbolization as they personify the dangers inherent in the modern, hubristic belief that logos could be the final word on things, in the form of total knowledge and control of society or nature or history. Against the fateful dreams of a logos that would wholly shape or perfectly express the world of things, indeed against the naïve Romantic dream, shared by the young Wordsworth, of a poetic logos that would perfectly echo the logos of the world, modern poets develop a counterlanguage that does justice to the inherent ambiguity of utterance in the new regime. Poets position themselves at that ambiguous point, make themselves the guardians of the century’s “dead children” (indeed often identify with that subjective position), where the promises of a new world can indeed be seen and the image of a full embodiment of logos remains visible, but the difficulty or impossibility of this embodiment is also faced frontally. The new figures the poets invent testify to the inherent fragility and ambiguity of language, which are also the ambiguity and fragility of modes of experience of the world itself, as something that has to be made sense of in inherently arbitrary ways.

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JACOTOT AND “THE LESSON OF THE POETS”

The theory of the “regimes of the arts,” which forms the first axis of Rancière’s philosophical aesthetics, enunciates in detail and in synoptic fashion the structural conditions under which art is produced and received after the modern revolutions. The second axis of his aesthetics, creative freedom as a necessary condition for the realization of equality, also owes much to poetry and the encounter with another historical figure, Joseph Jacotot. In Jacotot’s method of universal teaching, Rancière found a theory explaining how “the first virtue of intelligence” is “the poetic virtue,”7 in the creative and productive sense of “poiesis,” as production of meaningful, symbolic “artifacts,” expressive words, images, gestures. Jacotot’s view of the relationship between truth, knowledge, and language is one Rancière seems to endorse. There is no direct access to truth, no natural or absolutely prescribed way to use specific signs to represent a content. Language in the broad sense of a true expression is inherently arbitrary. This arbitrariness goes down all the way to the individual level. In order to make sense of any thought, emotion or affect, every human being has to use signs that borrow from a more general stock of grammatical and symbolic resources, but in idiosyncratic ways, in a way that makes sense to him or her. Any personal thought, involving a representation of content to oneself, is therefore already an expressive creation, a form of “translation,” of the thoughtcontent to oneself, via the medium of signs produced by the self. In turn, the communication of that thought-content to another, since it can only occur through arbitrary signs, involves a second translation on the part of the other who has to “translate” for himself or herself the idea communicated to them. Language-use, in other words, both as self-expression and as expression through communication, is inherently “poetic,” or rather “poietic”; it involves the production and exchange of the outputs of expressive poiesis: “in the act of speaking, the human being does not simply transmit his knowledge, he makes poetry (“il poétise”), he translates and invites others to do the same. He communicates as an artisan: as a person who handles words like tools.” 8 In other words, inasmuch as they are thinking beings, all human beings are expressive beings, and as expressive beings, all human beings are poets. The equality of intelligence is the capacity, and the right, of anyone to “work at” expressing themselves and understanding anyone else, to translate for themselves, in their own language, what their own experience and the other’s expressive gestures are about. Rancière can thus reformulate Jacotot’s view and state that equality and intelligence are synonymous: they both entail the inclusion without exception of every speaking being in the infinite circle of translation and countertranslation.

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This equality is equality in principle and by right. However, just as some craftsmen are more skilled or more experienced than others, some artisans of speech are particularly brilliant. Their individual ways of “translating,” their skill at the work of “poiesis,” at crafting symbolic artifacts, are exemplary. They are the people we specifically call “poets” among the poets we all are. The paradigm of the poet here is not the Romantic one, seeing the poet as a “child of nature,” but the classic conception, which thinks of his art in the manner of a craft, like Racine. Racine, the supreme master of classical French, was not ashamed to be a craftsman (a besogneux, “someone who toils”): in writing Phaedra “he learnt Euripides and Virgil by heart, like a parrot. He tried translating them, broke down their expressions, recomposed them in another way. He knew that being a poet means translating two times over: translating into French verse a mother’s sadness, a queen’s wrath, or a lover’s rage was also translating how Euripides or Virgil had translated them.”9 This crafty work of translation on the part of Racine relies upon our capacity to translate his expressive work into our own, and so implies the equality of intelligences. At the same time, however, it is also his exceptional brilliance at language use that forces us to engage in our own capacity of expressing and understanding. The example of Racine shows that poets, by proposing rigorous modes of poietic invention, also “design the models of a reasonable society,” since their exemplary models of poiesis are based on the assumption of everyone’s and anyone’s capacity to be included in it. This is what Rancière has in mind when he studies poetry from the perspective of “the politics of the poets.” Each time a poet invents a new way of using language, this relies on a particular understanding of the existing community and the view of how logos is organized in it, which explains why a new language is needed: all genuine poetry is inherently critical. And the new poiesis also projects a counterimage of the community as community of expression and communication, an alternative vision of logos. All poetry is inherently utopian.

RIMBAUD’S LOGICAL REVOLTS

Rancière, as we saw, set down the first stones of his multilevel conception of aesthetic modernity with Wordsworth. His study of English Romanticism was somehow concluded with a chapter of Le fil perdu published in 2014, which contrasts Keats to Wordsworth.10 It is with the study “Rimbaud: Voices and Bodies,” published in 1993, that Rancière began his exploration of nineteenth-century French Symbolism. The

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study of post-Romantic French poetry reached its climax in The Politics of the Siren, the book-length study dedicated to Mallarmé published in 1996. It also found a new extension in Le fil perdu, with the chapter on Baudelaire’s “republican” poetics. “Rimbaud: Voices and Bodies” is paradigmatic of the approach to poetry Rancière developed from the mid-1990s onward, that is, once the different tenets of his conception of aesthetic modernity began to come together. Rancière’s method for reading poetry does not exclude biographical elements; indeed it relies on comprehensive information about them. What Rancière objects to is the use of biographical elements as keys to decipher poetic writing when this amounts to overlooking the specific “poietic” dimension, that is, the concrete, artisan-like productivity involved in the creative use of symbolic material. Psychological explanations are often used by commentators in such a way that the concrete poetic wording becomes significant only for what it translates, for what lies beneath it. Rancière rejects this kind of interpretation. Nevertheless psychological, indeed psychoanalytical, interpretations have a place in Rancière’s readings. The notion that the poets can teach us “lessons,” through the unique ways in which they recompose language, entails an important existential element, in the technical sense of the term. In his readings Rancière usually takes into account the whole of a poet’s work. This contrasts with other philosophical readings, which often focus on a few representative pieces, for example, Badiou in the many texts he has dedicated to Mallarmé.11 Rancière’s interest in “the lessons of the poets” is based on the assumption that a poet’s creations reflect an engagement by the poet as a whole person, involving his or her entire existence, in the task of recomposing language for the task of “translation and countertranslation,” so that personal traumas and desires matter, as the psychological fuel for their “poiesis,” even if the latter is also collectively determined and indeed collectively significant. “Rimbaud’s lesson” thus has to take into account the biographically determined “body of utterance” that makes Rimbaud’s poems possible. This designates the idiosyncratic way in which Rimbaud was “lyrically” engaged in poetic work, the way in which his poetic “I” traveled through the world and the century on the basis of a specific existential, affectively determined posture, which found its translation in Rimbaud’s idiosyncratic tropes, his specific poetic voice, and a particular linguistic musicality. Drawing on Pierre Michon’s celebrated account of Rimbaud’s writing as a life-writing (bio-graphy) in Rimbaud the Son, and returning to the poet’s first Latin compositions from school, Rancière identifies the problematic subjective position allowing Rimbaud to find his poetic voice as “the dead child, writing in a dead language, in order to unite

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his lips to those of the mother.”12 As Rancière insists, this bio-graphical dimension is not sufficient to account for what makes Rimbaud’s poetry “a singular event of thought.” One also needs to show how he “ties this family novel and its childhood Latin to another legend and another music, namely the great music of the 19th century: science on the march and the new work on which dawn is breaking; superstition conquered, new love, the Woman who will reveal herself and the light in the East; the future city and its glorious bodies, the brotherly choirs of new work and new love.”13 However, just as full communication between the mother and the son, or between Nina the office girl and the poet, was experienced as impossible, in the same way the utopia of a “language of the century,” which would be “the language in advance” of “future harmonies,” is also experienced as internally fractured. The conjunction of these two fractures gives Rimbaud’s poetry its particular tonality, the music of “obscure misfortune.” On its optimistic side, Rimbaud’s poetic project involves the “alchemy of the verb,” as a “theory of voices and bodies, an anticipated and anticipatory practice of their concord to come.”14 But Rimbaud also makes the experience and documents the untenability of this program, the impossibility of his own linguistic utopia, and fuels this experience with personal and collective affects. At the political level, this is the intense disillusionment that followed the failure of the Commune. In the symbolic, this points to the gap left behind by the demise of Christianity as a founding narrative. The conflict-ridden position of utterance established by Rimbaud chimes in strongly with those of Baudelaire and Mallarmé. But his particular “voyage” through the century, his way of dealing with the contradictions of experience and literature arguably make him the favored poet among the French postRomantics. Unlike Baudelaire, Rimbaud no longer relies on the vision of a prelapsarian nature the poet could return to after witnessing all the expansion of the “flowers of evil” in “the modern.” Unlike Mallarmé, he does not believe he can make himself the herald of a community-to-come through the purification of language. On Rancière’s reading Rimbaud rather fully endorses the problematic position of his present, as a time that harks back to old symbols that no longer make sense, and a time that already experiences the failure of future utopias: he “stays inside the gap between the old history—the song of the people and the salvation of bodies—and the new one, that of the poetical and political avant-gardes. He insists on singing of the unredeemable part of the economies of salvation whose music endlessly sells the dream of the glorified body.”15 This paradoxical position between a dead past and a dead future both of whom one cannot renounce is one Rancière can easily identify with. Rancière also clearly endorses the specific way in which Rimbaud aimed to discursively,

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“poietically” inhabit this paradoxical personal and collective position, through the “logical revolts.” These are ambiguous revolts that at once target the old order of things and capture the dreams of a new apotheosis, but do so from the immanence of the language and culture of the time. The aim of poetry is no longer, as with Baudelaire, to retrieve a classical form of beauty (in perfectly balanced rhythms and beautifully sculpted rhymes), or in the Mallarmean language that works to “give a purer meaning to the language of the tribe.” Instead Rimbaud strives to show the ambiguity of the modern period (its inherent promises and irreducible contradictions) within the language and images of the time, mixing the most sublime, the remnants of the old symbolic order, with the crassest and the most idiotic. Rimbaud is for Rancière the singular poet “for whom there is no language or act that is proper to the poem. New poetry for him must identify itself with language as a whole. Its fate is linked to the utopia of the new language and of reconciled bodies. Rimbaud travels through this utopia and undoes it by accompanying it with another music: the speech of the uncounted, the idiotic romance of obscure misfortune. In mourning for the new language of glorious bodies he shapes an idiom: not a dialect, but the opposite of a dialect, . . . a paradoxical language, a “particular common” language, particularly common. . . . He invents the poem without any place other than the totality of language, traveled by the idiom of the encounter always missed, the particular timbre of obscure misfortune.”16 In emphasizing the “contradictions” at the heart of the aesthetic regime, Rancière had in view the same kind of contradictions he saw Rimbaud struggle with. Rimbaud’s attempt to be true to the promises of the new era, even as their failure was most deeply felt, in a language that would therefore have to be both sublime and eminently prosaic, this mode of realizing the difficult task of modern lyricism, is one Rancière arguably favors over the others.

SYMBOLISM IN THE AESTHETIC REGIME

The long study of Mallarmé in Politics of the Siren (1996) mobilizes many of the hermeneutic schemes that were at play already, if in more succinct format, in the text on Rimbaud and in previous texts. The book represents the final preparatory stage before Rancière presents the full conception of the “regimes of the arts” in the first two parts of Mute Speech. Henceforth, starting with Le partage du sensible in 2000, Rancière gradually extrapolated from poetry and literature to the other arts, on the basis of his now well-established vision of the elements of the

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“aesthetic regime.” As this chapter has shown, however, it is specifically poetry, the many “lessons of the poets,” that were the constant reference point for Rancière in helping him to build his complex, multilayered theory of aesthetic modernity. In this process of generalization and consolidation, one theoretical element has been added that is particularly notable. This element that The Politics of the Siren develops explicitly for the first time, that Mute Speech returns to two years later, and that has been furthered developed in Aisthesis, is the theory of symbolism. This attempt to develop a consistent account of the symbol in the aesthetic regime is intimately linked to Rancière’s turn to German Idealism and Jena Romanticism from the book on Mallarme onward. Rancière, as we have seen, approaches specific poetic works by studying the way in which a poet brings together, each time in a unique way, the structural dimensions of a subjective voice (grounded in a personal history), collective experience (both in critical and in utopian, counterfactual modes), symbolic expression (as collective logos and as individual poiesis), and the world and the things in it. In the time of the representative regime, strict rules of propriety and appropriateness, linked to a rigid system of genres tied to the type of objects represented, dictated the poetic links that can be made between words and things. In this regime, symbols are tropes among others, a particular mode of  figurative speech operating within the strict boundaries of the system of genres. The collapse of this regime and the rise of the aesthetic regime radically alter their status. Symbols now stand at the heart of the contradiction arising from the structural conditions of the new regime. In this new regime, meaning no longer arises from the fictionalization of worldly elements, but finds its sources in the world and the things themselves. The aesthetic regime is based on the idea that things, matter, nature, as well as the social and historical worlds taken as objective wholes, all have their own language, and that poeticity is more than just a quality of human speech, and is in fact an essential aspect of the objective world itself. This assumption is shared by all the European Romantic schools. It defines Wordsworth’s poetic project, but was also most eminently present in the works and theoretical reflections of the German Romantics, notably Novalis and the Schlegel brothers. The philosophical account of this innate symbolism of the world was already preempted in Kant’s third Critique, with his claim that Nature speaks to us symbolically through its beautiful forms. It was systematically developed by Schelling in his early theory of the work of art: “what we call Nature is a poem sealed in a wonderful cyphered writing.”17 This leads to the ideal, constantly repeated throughout the nineteenth century, of a language that would recapture and bring to a higher order of potency, through “poiesis,” a poeticity inherent in the world itself. Representation has

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given way to expression as the central category, with the idea that the poet’s expressive gestures have to capture the inherent expressivity of the things themselves, their “mute speech.” At the end of the century, Rimbaud’s program of an “alchemy of the verb” still functions on this Romantic principle, according to which the world is inherently symbolic. There is a structural contradiction at the heart of this ideal, however, a contradiction we have already encountered in Rancière’s earlier poetic studies that he is able to fully articulate once he confronts his intuitions with the writings of the German Romantics and the post-Kantian philosophers. It is one thing to posit the existence of an inherent symbolism of the world (the natural world, as in early Romanticism or in Baudelaire, or the social world, as, for instance, in Balzac and Zola but also in Rimbaud); but how can the poet be certain his poiesis is capturing this immediate poeticity? A number of considerations complicate the ideal of an overlap through poiesis of the world’s poeticity. As we saw, nineteenth-century historical experiences are experiences of failures when attempts were made to match the energies of the world (natural, economic, political) with corresponding logos. This limitation of language in fact is inscribed in the aesthetic regime as its structuring dimension: the demise of the system of the genres means that anything can in principle be expressed in any language, by anyone, to anyone. This introduces radical contingency into poetic action. It makes the letter an “erring” letter, and this directly contradicts the ideal of inherent poeticity, which assumes, on the contrary, that there is a necessary way of (re)expressing the world. Furthermore, the system of genres of discourse came apart because the aesthetic and political revolutions were both related to a revolution in the metaphysical underpinnings of (individual and collective) experience. The Christian narrative can no longer be taken for granted. This narrative provided a secure grounding for poetic language, not only by providing fictional content in terms of stories and characters, but more fundamentally because the very possibility of symbolism was ensured by the principle according to which all figures of speech are figurations of a metaphysical truth. When that truth disappears it robs symbolic operations of an absolute reference, introducing an irreducible contingency.18 Each effort at poietic expression now has to provide its own grounding, its own self-justification. Of course poets can rely on external discourses (philosophical scientific, political) to ground their symbolic practices. But the sheer multiplicity of possible groundings makes symbolism inherently insecure and problematic, and the task of symbolizing the world all the more difficult. As poetic expression becomes inherently individualized and can no longer rely on unquestionable groundings, the line separating genius from madness, meaning from rambling, becomes

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tenuous. Symbolism, in other words, as the fundamental principle of the new era represents as much a promise as a problem. The philosopher who provides the most thorough description of this ambiguous status of artistic expression in modernity, the one to which Rancière returns in every one of his aesthetic texts, is Hegel. Hegel’s deflationary theory of figurative language in modernity, as a language that by its very nature misses its own aim of full expression, is the necessary counterpart to the other principle of the modern era, the Romantic ideal of a poietic recapture of the inherent poeticity of things. Rancière’s studies of the last decade thus use hermeneutic principles that have been reframed in terms of the problem of symbolism as it arises from the historical perspective just outlined. In a chapter of Aisthesis, for instance, Rancière makes sense of Emerson’s and Whitman’s poetics as the attempts to create a symbolic circulation between words and things that would reveal the spiritual depth inherent in the New World, even in its most prosaic aspects.19 The paradigmatic example, however, is Mallarmé. Rancière interprets Mallarmé’s poetics as a direct response to the Hegelian challenge. On his reading, Mallarmé fully accepts that the early Romantic ideal of an unproblematic expressive reformulation of the things’ inner poeticity can no longer be pursued. Poetry instead must testify to the power of the human spirit to bring together “aspects” of the world through its own force. Against Hegel, however, Mallarmé believes poetry is the proper linguistic medium to achieve this, and not philosophy, because one needs to use the material resources of language (rhythm, rhyme, sound) in order to express ideas. In the fleeting instants in which aspects of the world come together under the gaze of the poet, a new “type,” that is, a meaningful form of the world, can be captured in words. This then testifies to the creative capacity of humanity, provides a sign of humanity’s ability to create its own abode, its own Ideas, now that any pregiven “heaven of ideas” has been abandoned. Mallarmé thus creates a new theory of the symbol, whereby “the symbol is not an image, nor the idea a form of the object or the metaphor a way to communicate feelings. Symbol and metaphor do not express the idea, they allow it to be. They are the act of its production, the institution of its ritual.” 20 And by demonstrating the power of human language to create its own ideas, the poet points to a posttraditional, postmetaphysical possibility for the community to come together beyond all gods and all authoritative figures to make up its own abode. In other words, beyond the elitist facade of Mallarmé’s difficult poetry, his theory of the symbol in fact contains a radically democratic program, performs in the realm of poetry the project that also inspired Marx.21

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Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

See for instance the preface to the English edition of Jacques Rancière, Proletarian Nights (London: Verso, 2012). Rancière. Jacques Rancière, Staging the People: The Proletarian and His Double (London: Verso, 2011), 31. Jacques Rancière, “From Wordsworth to Mandelstam: The Transports of Liberty,” in The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 1–40; and Rancière, “The Poet’s Voyage,” in Short Voyages to the Land of the People (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 9–24. Rancière, Proletarian Nights, 17. Rancière, Short Voyages, 23. Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 64. Rancière, 65. Rancière, 69. Jacques Rancière, The Lost Thread: The Democracy of Modern Fiction, trans. S. Corcoran (London: Bloomsbury Academics, 2016). See Jacques Rancière, “The Poet at the Philosopher’s: Mallarmé and Badiou,” Politics of Literature (Oxford: Polity, 2011), 183–204. Rancière, The Flesh of Words, 46. Rancière, 49. Rancière, 49. Rancière, 66. Rancière, 65. Quoted in Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of the Arts, trans. Z. Paul (London: Verso, 2013), 59. See also Jacques Rancière, Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory and Politics, trans. J. Swenson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 76. See, in particular, Jacques Rancière, “The Poetics of Mystery,” in Mallarmé: The Politics of the Siren (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 9–26; and Rancière, “The Body of the Letter,” in The Flesh of Words, 71–93. Rancière, Aisthesis, 64. Rancière, The Politic of the Siren, 16. See also Rancière, Aisthesis, 62–63.

19 Desire Against Discipline Kristeva’s Theory of Poetry Carol Mastrangelo Bové

The . . . contemplative researcher may be metamorphosed into a poet. —Julia Kristeva, The Old Man and the Wolves

POETRY AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory makes the case for using poetry’s linguistic resources to promote psychic and social health. In a context not unlike that of Freud in “Creative Writers and Daydreaming,” the literary text, according to Kristeva, employs the power of poetry to animate the psyche and the body politic by drawing on unconscious energy. Freud’s statement in his essay, “myths . . . are distorted vestiges of the wishful phantasies of whole nations,” speaks of creative writing—his term in this quotation is “myths”—as the product of a group possessing a psyche fundamentally similar to an individual’s.1 Furthermore, in Civilization and Its Discontents, he writes, “civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct. . . . If the loss is not compensated for economically, one can be certain that serious disorders will ensue.” 2 As I demonstrate in Kristeva’s Politics: Literature, Art, Therapy, she builds upon Freud’s discovery of the unconscious and its power to affect the health of individuals and groups, theorizing the poetic as instrumental in arousing desire and in provoking the creative thinking necessary for improved psychic and social well-being. I see this poetic function as ethical/political in the sense that her theory engages the moral question of human rights. Such rights

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include a demand for psychic and social health along with the equitable distribution of the resources and power that nurture it. Kristeva implicitly explains how the poet may practice an ethics capable of shaping a more stable world when she states in connection with Colette’s writing: “Freedom being, by definition, what is most at stake in politics, one could say . . . that the representation of the passions—what is called “the Imaginary”—is by no means a trivial background, but an integral part of politics.”3 My essay will examine Kristeva’s understanding of poetry in its classical meaning, literature or “the representation of the passions.” This is the most valuable form of writing, according to her theory, which elaborates its political and ethical purpose. I focus on major texts from the early and middle periods of the Bulgarian-French writer’s career, in which she uses poetry both in the narrower sense, taking her examples from the literary genre, and in the classical sense, as I most often use it in this essay. I consider a number of the difficult questions posed by Kristeva’s theory. How is it that literature is rational enough to communicate with others and shape sociopolitical structures, on the one hand, and poetic enough to break communication in a substantial way, in Kristeva’s words, to bring about “upheaval, dissolution, and transformation,” on the other?4 Considering that the principal focus of her theory is language, not individuals and groups, to what extent and in what manner is the ethics of literary practice meaningful and effective? In this context, one remembers W.  H. Auden’s ironic line of verse, affirming in my view the ethical force of the poetic in promoting psychic and social health by means of its power to endure: “For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives.”5 Finally, to what degree does Kristeva ground her thinking on poetry in historical and material conditions?

POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY AS GENDERED DISCIPLINES

“The Ethics of Linguistics” and Revolution in Poetic Language, both published in 1974, along with Tales of Love in1983, reveal the principal characteristics of poetry according to her, including its predominantly semiotic component and its ethical function. The argument that poetry is ethical in the sense that it has the force to shape the psychological formations underlying the individual and society in a positive way is evident in the trajectory of her cultural theory and fiction taken as a whole. Her most significant and explicit thinking on poetry as a literary genre appears primarily in the earlier stages of her work. In these years emerging from

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her engagement with the Tel Quel collective in Paris in the 1960s, she develops the concepts of the semiotic, which dominates in poetic language, and the symbolic, characteristic of philosophical language, at least in the West. I use theory and, later, nonfictional prose interchangeably in my essay to refer to texts in which such philosophic language dominates, that is, the study of fundamental questions of knowledge, truth, and the nature/meaning of life. The terms semiotic and symbolic have frequently proven useful since the 1960s in literary and film criticism and theory as well as in philosophy, as a brief perusal of reliable databases shows. Kristeva has elaborated semiotic and symbolic within a psychoanalytic approach that, while based in part on Sigmund Freud’s monumental discoveries, gives greater attention than he does to sexual difference. Kristeva sees the poet’s job as a creative interplay between orthodox and oppositional voices and as a practice that is artistic, ethical, and gendered. The much-admired examples she culls from many centuries of world literature lend clarity and conviction to a theory that otherwise may bewilder: the biblical Song of Songs; the French Symbolists Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Lautréamont; and the Russian Futurists Khlebnikov and Mayakovsky. Her work—and “Stabat Mater” is arguably the best-known and strongest instance—is especially influential among critics who recognize the limitations of Western philosophy and its development out of classical, Judeo-Christian, and Cartesian traditions. This Western heritage has tended to control poetry, understanding it correctly as primarily lyrical, the expression of emotions and of bodily experience and implicitly associated with “the feminine,” as one comprehends in Kristeva’s famous essay on motherhood from 1977 and in Wordsworth’s “emotions recollected in tranquility.” 6 It is true that critics such as Claude Richard and Paul Bové suggest that a less controlling approach to poetry has existed at least as a subtext in Aristotle and Epicurus. Such a subtext undermines the dominant language of chronological time, causality, and reason by means of an appreciation for the random moment, probability, and the power of metaphor.7 Nevertheless, Western philosophy has mostly defined itself in opposition to poetry, understood in the broad sense of the poetic, as long ago as the fourth century bc with Plato, who bases his critique on the unreliability of the senses in the mimetic art of literature. The weaknesses in Western philosophy manifest themselves more precisely and dominantly especially in the United States in analytical philosophy, psychology, and some feminist theory, which often ignore or misunderstand significant continental thinkers, especially Freud, and those who write in his wake like Kristeva. Her thought and, in particular, her rereading of Freud mark that of the PhiloSOPHIA Feminist Society and its journal, PhiloSOPHIA: A Journal of

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Continental Feminism, along with the association, the Kristeva Circle, all three of which understand her theory more accurately. These relatively recent groups of feminist thinkers examine psychoanalytic writers, including not only Kristeva but also Jacqueline Rose and Luce Irigaray, for example, to construct a more complete ethical vision for the twenty-first century. Along with Maria Margaroni, Kelly Oliver, Toril Moi, Gayatri Spivak, and Judith Butler, Rose is among the cultural theorists who, in different ways, raise many of the significant questions embedded in Kristeva’s work examined here. My hypothesis in this essay is that Kristeva’s thought, even as it demands a confrontation with problems persisting to this day such as stereotyping and their impact on her conception of the poetic, constitutes a contribution to the production of knowledge in philosophy and poetry. Her work enables a better understanding of the connections between the two forms of writing including their ethical stance and its effectiveness. For Jacqueline Rose, Kristeva’s sense of the poetic assumes the valuable but problematic idea of women as abject. According to Rose, such a conception enables Kristeva to avoid being utopian. Union with the mother, for instance, often takes the form of psychic pain and masochism, including violence and the death drive. It is in this sense that one may say that Kristeva’s theory enables her to embrace the material conditions of being a woman. Her theory of women as abject makes feminism a more complex, reflective body of thought, which contributes to our knowledge of subjectivity and the political. As I read Rose, the dark tone of Kristeva’s writing before 1983 may well attest to the realistic and historical character of her philosophical thought to the degree that she deals with love in a way that connects it to past and contemporary marginalization, especially of women and Jews.8 For this reason, critics such as Spivak (especially on Kristeva’s book About Chinese Women) and Butler (on the maternal body in Kristeva’s understanding of the semiotic and the poetic) who consider her theory not sufficiently grounded in material conditions are inaccurate.9 Kristeva’s separation from certain versions of feminism and her category of a mother figure that one needs to repudiate in order to function socially are, however, a cause for concern among many critics, including Butler and Rose. This is important since one of the traditions with which some identify Kristeva degrades pregnancy and heteronormativity in general. On this point, Rose is one of these critics for whom an understanding of feminism takes issue with an abject mother whom one needs to master or repress in order to exist. From my point of view, however, Kristeva’s theory is feminist despite her separating herself from some forms of feminism, to the extent that repudiating an abject

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mother is figurative and bound to a reunion with a mother figure incarnated in an androgynous father. Thus, Kristeva’s writing on poetry constitutes a complex understanding of gender and sexuality, which does not treat pregnancy and heteronormativity in a pejorative way. Rather, her theories go beyond the social constraints of patriarchal cultures and their devaluing of mothers/women to help transform such limitations. Her analysis of the psychological formations represented in the poetic helps both to confront sexism and to comprehend the substantive function of literature beyond genre distinctions. That is to say, there is a connection between Kristeva’s metaphorical usage of “women” and her figurative understanding of “the poetic,” the latter being associated as it is with the former. While sexual/ gender differences and the disciplinary distinctions connected with them exist and constrain, such differences do not determine one’s behavior and are not as significant as (1) certain aspects of humanity, which transcend biology, and (2) characteristics of language that go beyond disciplinary definitions. From her Neo-Freudian perspective, differences within literature among poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and theater may not be as significant as their similarities. For example, it is less important whether or not the writer structures language into verses, which to some extent follow particular rhythmic or rhyming patterns, than that the writer re-create emotion and sense experience in the form and content of words while also examining ideas. This re-creation will sometimes obey laws concerning genre and linguistics and sometimes not. While she reflects on poetry in the broader sense at greater length earlier, she concludes succinctly on the apparent boundaries between philosophy and poetry in her novel The Old Man and the Wolves, published in 1991, as indicated in my epigraph. Kristeva the author interrupts her third- and first-person narrators to make a radical, explicit statement on the fluidity of philosophy and fiction, the latter standing in for the poetic/literary here: “Then the novel opens out into philosophy, and the interfusion of one with the other abolishes the frontiers once drawn up between the different genres for the benefit of lazy schoolboys.”10 According to Kristeva, genres and disciplines sometimes turn into something else, take on the form of another, following its laws and disobeying its own. Such fields are open to change, something understood by well-informed readers, to be distinguished from “schoolboys” who are “lazy,” or, in a closer translation of the original French, who “hardly read at all.” “The Ethics of Linguistics”—to take an example in which her metaphors of  both disciplinary and sexual difference appear—focuses on the Russian

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Futurists’ poems. Here images interact with rhythm, for instance, to dramatize the speaking subject’s sensations and emotions, normally associated with “the feminine.” The sun is one such image, appearing in Mayakovsky, and in other major poets, in the depiction of the strife between the poet and a paternal force represented in this light-filled body.11 In these texts one can read the poetic as metaphor for the literary and the feminine. Building upon Roman Jakobson’s reading of the two Russian Futurists, Kristeva develops a theory of language enabling the speaking subject to re-create his or her existence in poetry. The poetic incorporates both the emotional and the sensual discourse of the body, especially unconscious emotions and sensations, on the one hand, and the rational language of the mind and of the social order, on the other. The ethical dimension of her theory resides in the subject’s freedom to liberate the body, a liberation revealing the same psychological formations underlying group psychology, which enables society to free those banished or exiled, as Paul Ricoeur and Jürgen Habermas have demonstrated.12 In Kristeva’s words: We must analyze those elements of the complex operation that I shall call poetic language (in which the dialectics of the subject is inscribed) that are screened out by ordinary language, i.e., social constraint. I shall then be talking about something other than language—a practice for which any particular language is the margin. . . . What is implied is that language, and thus sociability, are defined by boundaries admitting of upheaval, dissolution, and transformation. Situating our discourse near such boundaries might enable us to endow it with a current ethical impact. In short, the ethics of a linguistic discourse may be gauged in proportion to the poetry that it presupposes.13

In this passage, it is clear that linguistic discourse or language, for instance, Mayakovsky’s poems, is the site for making one’s ideas, but also one’s sensations and emotions, “rational” and public by obeying the social contract for communication. More important, Kristeva describes language as open to the unconscious with its drives, hopes, and fears—an opening that would enable a freer existence for the individual understood as a psyche with roots in the psychological formations common to the social order. Here one can read the poetic as metaphor for creative language, “a linguistic discourse” that may emerge in not only poetry but any genre or discipline, including philosophy. Furthermore, the interaction of the sun associated with the paternal and rhythm linked to the feminine in Mayakovsky’s poems becomes a figure for sexual difference free of biological determinism in Kristeva’s framework.

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THE SEMIOTIC AND SYMBOLIC IN DIALOGUE

In Revolution in Poetic Language, which uses Mallarmé and Lautréamont as her principal examples, Kristeva, in her seemingly contradictory fashion, states that biological processes are the foundation for not only the semiotic but also the symbolic, providing a vital life force and threatening the subject with death.14 On the one hand, the forms of semiotic discourse, for example, the “upheaval, dissolution, and transformation” mentioned earlier in which strong unconscious emotion or sensations may endanger communication (“sociability” is Kristeva’s more general term), can erupt in symbolic language. On the other hand, the symbolic may threaten the semiotic if affect and the physical are too much repressed. She further makes clear that Western cultures designate biological processes as “woman” and that the syntax characteristic of the symbolic makes the processes intelligible. In this context, the functioning of symbolic and semiotic often constitutes a violent act not to be confused with the violence of religion needed to establish the social order according to psychoanalytic thought. On the contrary, the violence of symbolic/semiotic discourse disrupts that order. Links to the working class and to laughter, connections she appears to have learned from Bakhtin’s reading of Rabelais, discussed in her “Word, Dialogue, and Novel,”15 characterize poetry, represented in this volume in the dense poems of Lautréamont and Mallarmé, probably better known for their aristocratic or upper-middle-class themes and serious tone. She is also clearly indebted to Baudelaire for his discovery that it is the artist—and the poet, the creative writer, is arguably the artist par excellence for both Baudelaire and Kristeva—who most often exemplifies the psychic doubling inherent in laughing. In fact, she compares poetry and Western philosophy here, pointing out that the philosopher only rarely displays the subject-in-process and his or her laughter, which is most often present in the poet.16 Philosophers writing in the wake of Kant often do not see the absence of this doubling as a weakness but rather as the desired mastery of confused thinking. For Kristeva, such lucidity constitutes a denial of the body and a mastery fraught with danger for thought processes given that emotion and sense experience not only are significant in themselves but also an integral part of thinking. Contradictory and problematic though it is, the idea that the semiotic is a fundamental component of the symbolic is at the crux of her theory and a valuable contribution to the understanding of poetry, as I interpret Kristeva’s writing. Throughout her analysis of the French Symbolists and the theory of poetry they embody, she is in dialogue with both Freud and Hegel. The sexual nature of the dialectic she describes in speaking of the symbolic and semiotic derives from

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Freud but her association of “woman” with the foundation of the symbolic is a component of this theory that is her own. This association in fact reveals her greater awareness of sexual difference compared to that of the founder of psychoanalysis and to that of Lacan, arguably Freud’s most influential interpreter. Kelly Oliver indicates that poetry (Oliver uses the broader term art) for Kristeva is the model for her deeper understanding of the symbolic when she states that Kristeva sees it as including the semiotic.17 Maria Margaroni develops this fuller category of the symbolic by referring to Kristeva’s use of the etymology of the word from the Greek meaning a joining or exchange, which is both “a contract” and “an exchange of hostility.”18 Freud also makes his presence felt in the poetic theory in Revolution in Kristeva’s notion of a form of masochism and autocastration, which she uncovers in Mallarmé’s dramatization of moments when poetic language loses its foundation in the drives. The Freudian discovery of the unconscious’s sexual yearning for the mother, along with the notion of a phallic maternal figure, appears respectively in Kristeva’s examination of Lautréamont’s images of a submissive, oceanic being and of the overly possessive lover of the hanged man. While her versions of Freudian theory appear problematic to the degree that they seem to reinforce gender stereotypes, from my perspective such gendered ideas are metaphorical and not essentialist, as I have demonstrated earlier in the discussion of the feminist component of her work. Kristeva’s principal debt to Hegel here is the use of the philosophical category of negativity operating especially in religion and art. As in the case of Freud, she builds upon the theories of others and in so doing goes beyond their limits, a procedure Roland Barthes recognized long ago in his remark, recalling appropriately enough the Oedipal complex, that “what she subverts is authority—that of . . . filiation.”19 Her commentary makes clear that unlike Hegel and forms of scientific discourse developed in his wake, she understands negativity in a way that does not give preference to the symbolic.20 That is to say, in Hegel and in much scientific language, a form of idealism sees art as repressing rather than giving a voice to the passions. In the discourses of science, there is also an absence of a subject-in-process, which a transcendental ego denies. Finally, Kristeva identifies a version of a rationalist Hegelian philosophy and its homosexual brotherhood in fundamental components of Mallarmé’s A Throw of the Dice, Igitur, and The Book. She finds Hegel in the “mastering” of the first two works and in the monastic, sacramental, and ritual call of the third. Margaroni’s analysis of Kristeva’s theory of the semiotic in Revolution concludes that she reads Hegel through Freud. Julia Kristeva: Live Theory understands this fundamental concept of her thinking on poetry as a variation of the

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fourth or excessive movement of the Hegelian dialectic. Margaroni further states that Kristeva’s conception of the dialectic of the semiotic and symbolic is antagonistic rather than oppositional or contradictory and more closely linked than in the terms that have often previously described it. Taking the lead from Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Margaroni describes the playing out of this antagonism as a give and take.21 In this context, on the one hand, the language of reason may gain control of that of the senses/emotions and, on the other hand, the latter, in the powerful development of the death drive with which it is associated, may well break through and overcome the former, connected to sociability and the life force. Poetry keeps the semiotic and symbolic in play in a balancing act enabling both communication and the satisfaction of desire, though always under threat of losing one of the two vital components of its language. Margaroni also analyzes some significant changes in Kristeva’s thinking between her writing in Revolution (1974) and in Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis (2002). From the perspective of Julia Kristeva: Live Theory, Kristeva has come to see avant-garde poetry and its “revolutionary” ethics as less important than fiction and an ethics of “revolt.” Such an ethics, according to Margaroni, is based more on the care of others, both individuals and groups, and less on oppositional or subversive breaks with earlier poets or political leaders.22 Nine years before Margaroni, Robert Young implicitly focused on the idea of antagonism rather than opposition or contradiction at the center of Kristeva’s theory of the semiotic, including its interaction with the symbolic and, most important, its foundational function in the poetic.23 Without explicitly using the term antagonism, he connects her category of the antagonistic relationship between these two poles of her theory to Bakhtin’s understanding of the dialogic, dating Kristeva’s discussion of the antagonistic to 1966 and her essay “Word, Dialogue, and Novel,” eight years before Revolution. In the context of Young’s analysis and despite her writing six novels between 1990 and 2015, I do not see Kristeva valuing fiction and “revolt” over avant-garde poetry and its “revolutionary” ethics at the turn of the twenty-first century, as Margaroni speculates. Instead, inspired by Bakhtin’s sense of the dialogic in his work on Rabelais’s fiction, Kristeva crystalizes her thinking on the dialogic as a kind of antagonistic structure different from a dialectic and writes the history of significant literary works, relatively unconcerned with genre distinctions among them. The issue of whether the symbolic and semiotic are antagonistic/dialogic or oppositional and the consequences of these different ways of describing the dialectic emerge in this context. If Margaroni and Young are right, Kristeva’s theory may be more able to accommodate the idea of the Other, particularly the

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female Other, and therefore be less vulnerable to Rose’s feminist argument, not to speak of more hostile, less perceptive ones. Given that the symbolic never fully masters or represses the semiotic and its necessary link to “the feminine/ women/maternal,” at least in Margaroni’s, Laclau’s, Mouffe’s, and Young’s formulations, Rose’s critique of Kristeva on this point no longer stands. That is to say, according to her theory, it is not strictly speaking necessary to repudiate “women” in order to obey the social contract that is language. Practicing symbolic language in the fullest sense means at the same time maintaining the link to the drives in an antagonistic relation—I prefer Bakhtin and Kristeva’s more positive term dialogic—dangerous though they may be. The sense of an opposition (a contradiction or alternation rather than a dialogic relation) may be more in keeping with human perception and the experience of language as primarily sequential. Understanding poetry’s structure in terms of an opposition, however, may ultimately mean that the psyche and the society with which it is linked are not only vulnerable to Rose’s feminist critique but also to some extent schizophrenic, chaotic, and not amenable to orderly thinking, health, and stability. The fact that language operates both synchronically and diachronically may better accommodate an interpretation of the interplay of symbolic and semiotic as a dialogic structure. Such a structure, able to include fundamentally different elements, is thus more conducive to psychic and social well-being.

KRISTEVA THE POET- PHILOSOPHER

Kristeva’s theory of poetry’s dialogic structure, as it appears in earlier works such as Revolution, underlies her writing as a whole, including her recent book Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila.24 This hybrid volume—novel, psychoanalytic cultural theory, case history, and play—focuses on Teresa of Avila as a creative writer producing texts out of her mysticism and very physical relations with Christ. The novel’s narrator, Sylvia Leclercq, based in part on Kristeva herself, listens to Teresa’s mysticism in an attempt to open her own writing to the saint’s theological psychology. According to Teresa, the body and affect are vital and nourish an ethics promoting collaborative, imaginative, and dialogical thinking, as I am arguing, which, according to Sylvia, is frequently lacking and much needed in the twenty-first century. Examples of writing that transcends distinctions between philosophy and literature occur in Teresa, My Love, for instance, in the conclusion to the first

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chapter. Kristeva writes a poetic prose in which her narrator Sylvia describes, analyzes, and transforms herself into Teresa of Avila. Here, Kristeva echoes both the Catholic prayer Hail Mary, “Hail Teresa, borderless woman,” and James Joyce’s Molly soliloquy from Ulysses: “metaphors mutating into metamorphoses, or perhaps the other way around, oh yes, Teresa, beside yourself in you, beside myself in me, yes, Teresa, my love, yes.” 25 The prose gives visceral shape to philosophical ideas, including, for instance, the fact that comparisons become transformations in Teresa’s mystical thought. Comparing herself and Christ leads to a transformative experience in which she and he exchange places in her imagination. Sylvia refers as well to Western philosophy’s efforts to purge emotion and sense data from language: “the philosophers don’t have a clue, they become scholars, they recoil from your sensations, the best are mathematicians, tamers of infinity” (27). “Stabat Mater” also combines philosophy and poetry in a manner that demonstrates the theory of the poetic, which anchors Kristeva’s work taken as a whole, including her recent Teresa, My Love. A kind of prose poem, “Stabat Mater” uses her personal experience and ruminations on childbirth and motherhood to reenact the process engaged in the expression and analysis of love. This activity is for her at the center of both poetry and philosophy—though not in most Western traditions of this discipline, as I have noted. Kristeva revises Western philosophy’s dismissive classification of poetry with madness and mysticism. She indirectly describes her work as “an attempt to articulate that impossible element which henceforth can only be designated by the Lacanian category of the real.” 26 Thus, in “Stabat Mater,” the “opening out” of nonfictional prose into poetic prose—the articulation of “that impossible element”—is a more radical form of the blurring of novel and philosophy that I described earlier in The Old Man and the Wolves.27 Early on in her essay, for example, she explains that mysticism, functioning as it does outside of mainstream philosophy in the West, establishes love of God in the idea of a mystic with feminine characteristics: “the most intense revelation of God, which occurs in mysticism, is given only to a person who assumes himself or herself as ‘maternal.’ ” Expressing the inexpressible linked to a maternal mystic, the poetry printed next to the nonfiction in “Stabat Mater” voices the experience of motherhood as both entrance into the social contract and indescribable physical change: “FLASH—instant of time or of dream without time; inordinately swollen atoms of a bond a vision a shiver, a yet formless, unnamable embryo, . . . What is loving for a woman, the same thing as writing.” Instead of having the literary text “open out” into philosophy as described in The Old Man and the Wolves, which describes an alternating rhythm of the literary and the philosophic, she juxtaposes them—here poetic and nonfictional

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prose—in a sustained way for about thirty pages. In her description both of an opening out or of a juxtaposition, it is clear that the distinction between disciplines is not as important as the need to shift among them, mirroring the movement between semiotic and symbolic languages, between “feminine” and “masculine.” “Stabat Mater,” with its shifting symbolic and semiotic language, is part of Kristeva’s monumental Tales of Love, which explores influential examples of Western writing and its idea of love as an impossible phenomenon embedded in a psychological formation. Such a formation demands that the lover separate from the body and his or her emotional life. Song of Songs is a foundational example, with the lover/woman struggling without success against her body and senses to embrace God as a spiritual husband, devoid of sensation and emotion. This notion of love would seem to run parallel to Plato’s sense of a republic, which finds it necessary to banish poetry and its connections to the immoral life of the body, its senses and emotions including unconscious ones. It is difficult to describe how poetry understood in the broad sense as literature is an ethical practice, as Kristeva’s work indicates, not to speak of the problem of assessing its efficacy as such. The history of literature and literary criticism since Plato attests to poetry’s power to shape social behaviors, or at least to the perception that it does. Literature’s claims, however, seem speculative despite Kristeva’s cogent arguments. This is probably because of the persistence of two cultures that often resist collaboration and synthetic thinking: rationalist thought including analytic philosophy and science, particularly in the United States, on the one hand, and literature and the arts, on the other. The seemingly inevitable chaos of world events dominated by war and poverty, along with the increasing sense that the second culture, the humanities, is a weaker endeavor than the first, argues against literature’s social impact. Yet, Kristeva’s work, especially her early writing on poetry, demonstrates that if any practice influences the functioning of groups, it is the literary. The reliable testimony of a significant scholar on this topic, Kelly Oliver, further documents Kristeva’s sense of the poetic as an ethical, political practice. Reading Kristeva states, “Poetry signals tolerance in a society. The openness to poetry is the openness to difference,” and “Kristeva suggests that if we can bring about multiple sublations of this other [for example, in poetry] that has been excluded, then we won’t need to kill it. If, through this outlaw ethics-in-process, we acknowledge the death drive, then there might be fewer deaths.” 28 Part of Oliver’s conclusion in Reading Kristeva is that poetry is such a practice and that it may be one of the most effective in fostering peace and a more prevalent prosperity.

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From a perspective different from Kristeva’s and Oliver’s, Edward Said gives witness to the political and antagonistic function of literature in his statement “it [the interpretation and reading of literary texts] is a politics against the reading of literature which would denude it and emasculate what in the literature is profoundly contested.” 29 While Said is not a psychoanalytic writer, it is noteworthy that he uses the word emasculate to criticize practices of reading literature that distort its fundamental gendered character, thereby mirroring Kristeva’s understanding of a kind of murder of the feminine in practices that do not acknowledge the semiotic foundation of the symbolic in the poetic. Said’s words, including the reference to the “masculine” as a mirror image of Kristeva’s “feminine,” and implying poetry’s antagonistic structure, are best understood in the context of his well-known Orientalism, in which he shows how imperialist thought embedded in contrapuntal literary texts inextricably shapes the behavior of empires, that is, reinforces their projects. “Stabat Mater,” Teresa, My Love, and her five other novels provide models for a theory of poetry’s dialogic structure corroborated by Said’s words on the contrapuntal nature of literature. Her focus on the unconscious forces driving the poetic leads to an understanding of their feminine connotations. These in turn become the basis for Kristeva’s discovery of the semiotic in its complex, antagonistic relations to the symbolic, with both poles functioning in the most vigorous forms of thinking. Today it is arguably the economic inequities produced by the values of the marketplace along with aggressive and violent behavior that often characterize individuals and groups, characteristics very different from those Kristeva promotes throughout her work. I conclude that the examination of her philosophical concepts and views on the poetic expression of emotion and the senses offers possibilities for strengthening the psychic and social fabric in the twenty-first century. This might occur via the enduring force of poetry, or of poetry and philosophy, when each is open to the other in a dialogic discourse.

Notes 1.

2.

Sigmund Freud, “Creative Writers and Daydreaming,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, trans. James Strachey, with Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson, vol. 9 (London: Hogarth, 1959), 152. Sigmund Freud, “Civilization and Its Discontents,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, trans. James

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3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

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Strachey, with Anna Freud, Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, vol. 21 (London: Hogarth, 1961), 97. Julia Kristeva, Le génie féminin: Colette, vol. 3 (Paris: Fayard, 2002), 474. Translation mine. Julia Kristeva, “The Ethics of Linguistics,” in Desire in Language, ed. Leon  S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon  S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press. 1980), 25. W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” in Another Time (New York: Random House, 1940), line 36, www.poets.org /poetsorg /poem/memory-w-b-yeats. Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” in Tales of Love, trans. L. S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 234–63; William Wordsworth, “Wordsworth’s Prefaces of 1800 and 1802,” in Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London: Methuen, 1971), 244–45. See my afterword in Claude Richard, American Letters, trans. Carol Mastrangelo Bové (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 164; Paul Bové, Poetry Against Torture: Criticism, History, and the Human (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008), 17. Carol Mastrangelo Bové, Language and Politics in Julia Kristeva: Literature, Art, Therapy (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006), 102. Gayatri Spivak, “French Feminism in an International Frame,” in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987), 137; Judith Butler, “The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva,” Hypatia 3, no. 3 (1989): 106. Julia Kristeva, The Old Man and the Wolves, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 65. Originally published in French in 1994. Kristeva, “The Ethics of Linguistics,” 29. Paul Ricoeur, “The Question of Proof in Freud’s Writings,” in Paul Ricoeur: An Anthology of His Works, ed. Charles E. Regan and David Stewart (Boston: Beacon, 1978), 197–98. Originally published in 1977. See also Freud, “Group Psychology,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, trans. James Strachey, with Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson, vol. 18 (London: Hogarth, 1955), 65–144. Kristeva, “The Ethics of Linguistics,” 25. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 169–70. Originally published in French in 1974. Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue, and Novel,” in Desire in Language, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon  S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 64–91. Originally published in French in 1966. Kristeva, Revolution, 223. Kelly Oliver, Reading Kristeva (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 9–10. John Lechte and Maria Margaroni, Julia Kristeva: Live Theory (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2005), 16. Julia Kristeva and Toril Moi, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 1. Kristeva, Revolution, 233–34.

3 10 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

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Lechte and Margaroni, Julia Kristeva, 16–32. Lechte and Margaroni, 31. Robert Young, Torn Halves: Political Conflict in Literary and Cultural Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 54–55. Julia Kristeva, Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila, trans. Lorna Scott Fox (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). Originally published in French in 2008. Kristeva, 26. Hereafter citations given parenthetically in the text. Kristeva and Moi, The Kristeva Reader, 217. Kristeva, The Old Man and the Wolves, 65. Oliver, Reading Kristeva, 182, 189. Edward Said, The Pen and the Sword: Conversations with David Barsamian (Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 1994), 78.

20 Agamben and Poetry Justin Clemens

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f we find in Giorgio Agamben’s work a breathtaking range of allusions to the entire history of thought in the West, it is poetry that proves determining for his orientation and arguments. The decisive character that poetry has for Agamben has recently been acknowledged by a number of commentators who, seeking to supplement the dominating interest in his theories of “the political,” have essayed to delineate the substance and consequences of his own often-professed declarations on the subject.1 As Agamben puts it in Infancy and History, contesting the commonplace view that presupposes poetry’s distance from, even irrelevance to, political concerns: “The question is not so much whether poetry has any bearing on politics, but whether politics remains equal to its original cohesion with poetry.” 2 The primacy of poetry in the order of thought and action could not be more clearly asserted. This essay will examine the foundations and implications of this declaration, focusing on five interlinked issues. The first concerns the originary relationship between philosophy and poetry that orients and organizes Agamben’s entire oeuvre. This entails a reconsideration of what “poetry” is, does, and might do, that is, its potential and its exemplary character. As he asserts in The Man Without Content: “Ποιησις, poetry, does not designate here one art among others, but is the very name of man’s doing, of that productive action of which artistic doing is only a privileged example.”3 The second concerns the relationship between truth and transmissibility, bearing on the problem of communicability as such, as well as upon poetry’s role in “anthropomorphization.” As Agamben writes in The End of the Poem: “Anthropological changes correspond, in language, to  poetological changes. These are all the more difficult to register in that they do not simply represent stylistic or rhetorical progressions, but rather call into question the very

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borders between languages.” 4 Examining this claim requires a reconstruction of “the question of the meaning of being” from a post-Heideggerean, not to mention anti-Heideggerean, standpoint. The third concerns the close readings of poems that punctuate Agamben’s text, and thus the “operations” that he extracts from these interpretations, e.g., the nonrelation to prose, the primacy of enjambment, and the experimental nature of poetry. The fourth concerns the links of poetry to fundamental affects, for example, to sin and shame. Agamben notes that, in Aristotle’s Poetics, “the center of both the tragic and the comic experience is expressed with a word that is none other than the one by which the New Testament indicates sin: hamartia.”5 Following a brief examination of the bonds between poetry and affect, the essay will, fifth, conclude with a demonstration that poetry remains at the very core of Agamben’s political thinking—above all regarding its bonds with messianic inoperativity. Yet it is also true that there has been a general development in Agamben’s work from “the literary” to “the political.” His early work takes the constitution of the “literary” as its matter; his later work, especially that falling under the rubric of the Homo Sacer series, focuses on what are universally acknowledged as “political” topics. If one wishes to mark such a break, it would be possible to see a first sequence, oriented by poetry, running between his first book, The Man Without Content (first published in 1970), through Stanzas (1977) and The Idea of Prose (1985), to The Coming Community (1990); and a second sequence, dominated by political and theological references, running from Homo Sacer (1995) to that series’ own recent self-professed “abandonment” with L’uso dei corpi (2014).6 But the crucial point is that Agamben couldn’t have gotten to the second without going through the first—and that the methods, topics, and discoveries of the first sequence continue to insist, if in transfigured forms, throughout the second. Hence if Agamben’s post–Homo Sacer work is primarily concerned with the history of political thought, religion, and law, we always find him still dealing directly with the import of poetry and art: for instance, in the short book of essays Il fuoco e il racconto (The Fire and the Tale), published as a collection in 2014.7 Poetry remains an insistent and orienting point of reference throughout. So the term development must also be taken advisedly in this context, as a kind of pedagogical fiction. We should also flag Agamben’s own literary proclivities as marked by his style, manner, and genre: he writes “beautifully” in a range of forms, encompassing traditional modes from aphorisms through lectures to grand treatises, yet often in various nonstandard or eccentric presentations. In sum, I will provide an account of the centrality and development of Agamben’s doctrines vis-à-vis poetry, especially in regard to its relations to philosophy

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and politics. I will try to show how Agamben’s famous accounts of “the state of exception” and “the economy” ultimately derive from these doctrines. I will also focus on some of the specific ways in which Agamben approaches poetry, in order to show that, when such a form of attention is extended beyond the micrological details that bear upon the structuring of particular poets and poems, we are also able to discern something essential about the events of thought and action that shift epochs.

THE RELATION BET WEEN AESTHETICS AND ART IN GENERAL AS A PRIVILEGED MODE OF ACCESS TO THE MODE OF BEING OF THE PRESENT

Part of the difficulty in identifying the poetic core of Agamben’s work undoubtedly derives from the vast range of genres, topics, themes, styles, disciplines, and names that populate his works. In addition to his close interpretations of poems and his fondness for certain poets, we find philosophy, theology, religion, law, politics, criticism, cinema, and so on appearing throughout his oeuvre, drawn from all epochs, and often of an erudite, even recondite cast. Indeed, the now-immense secondary scholarship on Agamben has clearly been at once confounded and energized by such an anomalous practice. It may be too harsh to suggest that much of this scholarship remains trapped in the crystal of its own disciplinary specializations, insofar as it consistently undervalues his poetical affiliations. Yet, despite this diversity, Agamben seems also always to have worn his masters on his sleeve, as it were. His (still unavailable) doctoral thesis was on Simone Weil.8 He was clearly taken with the filmmaker and poet Pier Paolo Pasolini (and, indeed, appears briefly as Philip in the director’s The Gospel According to St.  Matthew).9 His preface to The End of the Poem opens with an account of planning a “cultural” journal with Italo Calvino and Claudio Rugafiori.10 Agamben’s own professed two great “critical influences” (I shall return to this nomination shortly) are Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin, who both remain staples of humanities scholarship today—not least for what they were able to develop ontologically, politically, and culturally out of their own attention to poets such as Friedrich Hölderlin and Charles Baudelaire. Finally, we find throughout Agamben’s work a series of rereadings of favored writers, who are particularly propitious for his thinking, perhaps most notably the troubadours, Hölderlin, and Franz Kafka, all of whom are regularly mobilized as

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figures not only whose works are of historical significance, but whose thinking ought to continue to guide us today—possibly as Virgil did Dante. The first, simplest, and most immediate remark to make about Agamben’s milieu is that it is an exemplarily literary one, or, rather more precisely, one in which the relationship between poetry and thought is clearly paramount. Indeed, if we began to enumerate the classical, canonical literary references that we find throughout Agamben’s work, we would find, in the early tract Man Without Content alone, Antonin Artaud, Charles Baudelaire, Denis Diderot, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Friedrich Hölderlin, Franz Kafka, the Comte de Lautréamont, Thomas Mann, Molière, Robert Musil, Marcel Proust, Arthur Rimbaud, Romain Rolland, Rainer Maria Rilke, Sophocles, Stendhal, and Paul Valéry. (This is, moreover, not an exhaustive list.) Perhaps this is an illegitimate enumeration, however: the tract in question is precisely dedicated to the history of Western aesthetics, and it would therefore be a surprise if such authors—or such kinds of authors—had not been cited. It is also the case that many of the named are novelists, playwrights, or prose writers, rather than poets “proper.” One could, moreover, cite the “visual artists” examined in the same volume. Finally, the work is also explicitly in dialogue with the philosophies of Plato, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Heidegger. Is this, then, not rather a work of historico-philosophical aesthetics, which, rather than privileging poetry as such, seeks rather to outline the historical transformations in the West regarding its relation to the work of art in general? Such would indeed be a characteristically modern problematic, in which the aesthetic and political come to be linked in every great thinker from Kant onward around the phenomena of becoming, time, and history. But that would be part of the point: Agamben begins his career posing the question of art as though it were in regard to its problematic that questions of (apparently) broader social, cultural, and political import must be decided. Hence, in a passage already cited earlier, Agamben renders poeisis the proper name for human action in general, even if it is poetry more narrowly considered that constitutes the privileged instance and access to this doing. I would like immediately to underline a connection and this disjunction: if, for the young Agamben, poetry is the privileged instance of poeisis, at this point the priority and persuasiveness of this relation are themselves given in terms that are clearly derivative of the work of both Heidegger and Benjamin. “By transforming the principle of man’s delay before truth into a poetic process,” Agamben writes, “and renouncing the guarantees of truth for love of transmissibility, art succeeds once again in transforming man’s inability to exit his historical status, perennially suspended in the inter-world between old and new, past and future, into the

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very space in which he can take the original measure of his dwelling in the present and recover each time the meaning of his action.”11 We can already discern certain key themes that will find a different matter and expression in the coming decades, regarding the relation between history and action, law and life, nihilism and renewal. We see an attentiveness to poetry as an indissociable act of invention-and-revelation, interruption-and-transmission, negation-and-transformation. As such, poetry is a place that gathers and exposes the membra disjecta of the world in such a way as to bring something into being that was not previously there, a form of creation ex nihilo from already-existing materials that, in its very rupture with its own background conditions, also illuminates a hitherto-unexpected character of those conditions. In this context, moreover, Agamben is concerned to emphasize a particular aspect of the Aristotelian distinction between energeia (“being-at-work”) and dynamis (“availability-for”), which he will later complicate, perhaps even overturn, by way of an original reading of the latter as “potentiality.” But it is with an eye to action in and for our present situation that his work on the history of art attends. Even more decisively—insofar as it marks a commitment to a kind of politics of the present—Agamben makes an evaluative judgment regarding a division within contemporary art. For him, the contemporary post-readymade or post-pop artwork, aka the “open work,” which being “founded not on an energetic but on a dynamic status of the work of art, signifies precisely this extreme moment of the exile of the work of art from its essence, the moment in which— having become pure potentiality, mere being-available in itself and for itself—it consciously takes on its own inability to possess itself in its end.”12 As such, the open work only “negatively” points beyond aesthetics, whereas the readymade and pop art enact a double suspension, frustrating both aesthetic enjoyment and technical consumption—even if they thereby place us in another aporia. Yet these latter modes manage to “possess” their own end, if it is only in the extreme form of a potential-for-nothingness that calls for a reseizure of our originary dwelling on earth. Both the key term potentiality and the ends of a radical transfiguration of doing are manifestly at stake in this division made within the present itself. Thus Agamben’s project begins by investigating a deep conceptual history of art and aesthetics, which attends to decisive poetic switching-points, to the relation between the lived and the possible, and to the role played by exemplary figures and characters. The problem of the example is perhaps first and most rigorously formalized for modernity by Kant in his Critique of Judgment, where, concerning the modality of a judgment of taste, he remarks: “as a necessity that is thought in an aesthetic judgment, it can only be called exemplary, i.e., a necessity of the assent

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of all to a judgment that is regarded as an example of a universal rule that one cannot produce.”13 Precisely because a determinate concept cannot be given either for the creation of a work of art (indicatively, that of genius) or for a judgment of taste (the situation of the spectator), the paradoxes of exemplarity must arise for any account of the role of the work of art. Indeed, the obscure necessity of Kant’s division proves the hinge on which Agamben’s entire book turns. As he comments: “in order to reconcile the radical otherness of the two principles [of taste and genius, Kant] had to resort to the mystical idea of the supersensible stratum that founds both.”14 If Agamben in this early work himself relies on a not fully elaborated doctrine of exemplarity, he is absolutely cognizant of the problem. We will shortly see how he comes to radicalize, in order to resolve, this Kantian thinking of the example. It is thus the case that many if not most of Agamben’s fundamental categories, means, and methods are already at stake in this early book: for instance, in the discussions of the relations between poiesis and praxis, potentiality and energeia, rhythm and structure, truth and transmissibility. Yet it is also the case that these themes will be placed under ever-more intense scrutiny by Agamben in subsequent works.

THE SCENE OF CRITICISM

If The Man Without Content establishes many of the key themes that Agamben continues to explore to the present day, it nonetheless does so in an unclarified way. It is with Stanzas, his second book, that Agamben begins to reconceive the genealogy of the possibility of the emergence of his own project in a mode that clarifies, extends, and indeed departs from the Heideggero-Benjaminian fusions of The Man Without Content. This departure is not simply a repudiation but a transformation of its own intellectual conditions into a definitively suspenseful space of thought: indeed, it picks up almost precisely where its predecessor left off, with a meditation on “The Melancholy Angel” (the title of the tenth and final chapter of The Man Without Content). We should note the ambivalence of Heidegger and Benjamin as a double influence. Following Heidegger, Agamben considers the history of thought as a sequence of dispensations which at once extend and transform their own historical sites, and in which certain occluded and ambiguous traits operate in a modality of withdrawal and incompletion (nb the book is itself dedicated “In memoriam Martin Heidegger”). A kind of philo-logico-sophical archaeology is crucial

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here. Following Benjamin, Agamben relocates the origins of his project in German Romanticism, albeit a Romanticism that is itself self-consciously born in the breach of the Platonic dispensation. For both Benjamin and Heidegger, if in different ways—marked not least by their antithetical political commitments—the problem of a kind of “salvation” of the present is at stake, one that requires radical and nonstandard reconstructions of historical sendings according to previously marginal, unnoticed, or suppressed forms of evidence. In both, moreover—and whatever the radicality of their innovations in this regard—the work of art remains a privileged witness and entrance to such reconstruction. Through this double influence, then, German Romanticism becomes a crucial reference. The extraordinary introduction to Stanzas invokes the Jena group’s ambition of a “universal progressive poetry” that would “abolish the distinction between poetry and the critical-philological disciplines.”15 Noting that, from at least Plato, Western thought has essentially divided the two great modes of discourse that are poetry and philosophy according to, respectively, a thought that enjoys its object without knowing it and a thought that knows its object without enjoying it, Agamben comments that “criticism is born at the moment when the scission reaches its extreme point.”16 We could even propose a preposterous formalization: Poetry = E – K Philosophy = K – E Criticism = (E – K) ˆ (K – E)

An operation that will recur throughout Agamben’s work, sometimes in near-unrecognizable or variant forms, is broached. Confronted with an aporia, in which one can either enjoy or know the object but not both simultaneously, Agamben sets out not to reduce, resolve, or restitute the division, where the danger would be to believe that one could and should attain (E + K), but to redivide and transform it according to a work of criticism. As Agamben puts it, “the quest of criticism consists not in discovering its object but in assuring the conditions of its inaccessibility.”17 Here his critical operation of ironic self-negation orients itself by attending to two coupled-if-antithetical modes of life that themselves proffer the example of anti-praxes-directed-to-assuring-the-inaccessibilityof-their-object: melancholia and fetishism. Unlike the Hegelian master who negates the object in his enjoyment of it, or the slave who comes to know the object by transforming it in the extorted deferral of desire that is labor, the critic a-voids the object in the delineation of “a topology of the unreal”—just as do the melancholic and the fetishist in their very different ways.18 As I have pointed out

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elsewhere, this is a recurrent signature fold in Agamben’s practice, whereby his own studies double and redivide their objects, in order that a thought without object may emerge as a “third genre.”19 The book’s title is drawn from the name that “European poets of the thirteenth century called the essential nucleus of their poetry,” that is, stanza: a “capacious dwelling, receptacle.” 20 Accordingly, poets feature heavily throughout: their utterances serve as epigraphs to the four sections, as well as guides, exemplars, and supporting evidence. A quotation from Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia opens the book as a whole; Rilke and Hölderlin, part 1; Cavalcanti, Simon Magus, and Baudelaire, part 3; Dante’s Inferno, part 4. Even when the text itself is focusing on medieval scholastic medicine, Sigmund Freud, or Ferdinand de Saussure, the poets (and other writers) swarm about. Aside from those already mentioned, there are appearances from Robert Musil, Kafka, Arnaut Daniel, the love poets of the Duecento, poets of Elizabethan and Jacobean England (John Donne is named), Nerval, De Quincey, Coleridge, Huysmans, Edgar Allan Poe, Apollinaire, Rimbaud, Kleist, Lautréamont, Mallarmé, Gottfried Benn, Eugenio Montale, William Carlos Williams, and Paul Celan. Chapters and long scholia offer analyses of Baudelaire and Rilke. The entirety of part 3 constitutes an interpretation of the phantasm in the Roman de la Rose, Dante, and others. I list these names not just to show that Agamben “likes” poetry, but to mark something specific about his use of it. Poetry literally saturates his text: it is not just a matter of discussing, interpreting, or taking a position on this or that genre or kind of poetry, of erudite allusions, or evincing an elective affinity. Instead, poetry finds itself commingling with disquisitions on dandyism, toys, inhuman figures, diverse emblems, and ancient theories of the atrabilious temperament. This, in fact, mirrors the very “unworking” of the fetishist to which the text attends: “The entrance of an object into the sphere of the fetish is always the sign of a transgression of the rule that assigns an appropriate use to each thing.” 21 In the spirit of Benjamin’s famous remarks on citation, collection, and constellation, or indeed of Heidegger’s on the gathering and the fourfold, one discerns a related movement of in-appropriation in Agamben’s own writing. It is worth pausing a moment to recall certain general characteristics of German Romanticism that remain determining for Agamben. First, there is the priority of language as such for any account of thought and action. Second, there is a reopening of the question of the relation between poetry and prose. Third, there is the treatment of poetry as a privileged form of inventive negation. Fourth, there is the emergence of criticism as such, as an eccentrically philological enterprise. Fifth, there is a concomitant downgrading of scientific method. Once again, Benjamin and Heidegger hover as tutelary sprites over the whole affair. As

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Benjamin proposes: “The more clearly mathematics demonstrate that the total elimination of the problem of representation—which is boasted by every proper didactic system—is the sign of genuine knowledge, the more conclusively does it reveal its renunciation of that area of truth towards which language is directed.” 22 In other words, poetry—as an exemplary use of language, one that finds a new use for common things while it remains constitutionally open to new uses itself—is also thereby an exemplary place of truth, to be distinguished from the knowledge whose paradigm is mathematics. Such truth is delineated by a stanza of criticism, whereby the divisions of thought and action that beset us can be rearticulated by attending to the diversions of verse in relation to knowledge.

THE END IS COMING

I have exerted some effort to suggest how profoundly imbricated Agamben’s early work is with poetry. I have shown how many of his well-known categories not only are present from the start of his career, but emerge and develop precisely out of an inquiry into the significance of poetry, which is in certain ways guided by, as it extends, the work of Benjamin and Heidegger. I have, moreover, shown how, between his first and second books, Agamben at once maintains these categories and concerns, yet, in this very maintenance, starts to transform their matter and relations in unexpected ways. Although there is not the space here to show in the requisite detail how this process—which Agamben will himself later call “study” 23—continues to elaborate itself from work to work, it is hopefully already evident how such an involuting process might start to find itself entangled with hitherto-unexpected problems. These “problems” (I will give some examples of these shortly) then require a transformation of the categories and means themselves. Let me now give a single brief instance of Agamben’s interpretative practice with regard to poetry proper, drawn from the collection The End of the Poem. The essay “Corn: From Anatomy to Poetics” was first published in 1996, as a contribution to a Festschrift for Roger Dragonetti. The essay therefore comes at the closure of that period of Agamben’s work in which literary historical questions retain their evident primacy. The essay, moreover, not only is a detailed investigation of constituent elements of poetry, but orients itself with respect to aporias emerging in and through the history of the interpretations of these elements themselves. As Agamben writes of the collection more generally: “Each of the essays in this book thus seeks to define a general problem of poetics with

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respect to an exemplary case in the history of literature.” 24 A short-circuit of general and particular is thus, as always, at stake in this procedure. The title “Corn” comes from an enigmatic word found in a notorious poetic exchange between the troubadours Raimon de Dufort, Lord Turc Malec, and Arnaut Daniel in the late twelfth century. The troubadours of course mark an extraordinary episode in the history of Western poetry, and have hence proven an abiding source of interest for a very wide range of thinkers and scholars, including such luminaries as Friedrich Nietzsche, Erich Auerbach, Denis de Rougemont, and Jacques Lacan, among many others.25 Agamben’s essay itself comprises six sections: “Historia,” “Allegory,” “Tropology,” “Anagogy,” “Seu Sensus Mysticus,” and an epilogue.26 The first section sets out the technical problem-in-its-history, beginning with a citation found in two thirteenth-century manuscripts: “Raimon de Dufort and Lord Turc Malec were two knights from Quercy who composed the sirventes about the lady called Milday n’Aia, the one who said to the knight that she would not love him if he did not corn her in the arse.” 27 What does “corn” mean? Agamben points out that in the relevant poems themselves, cul (arse) is not the object of the cornar but corn itself. He proceeds to cite an entire suite of scholars who treat cornar as sodomy or to sound a horn or trumpet, and the corn as, diversely, bottom, horn, corner, angle, canal, pipe, anus, clitoris, and the like. Thus Agamben begins by locating a properly poetic instability in the use of an enigmatic word, before laying out the history of the struggles over its meaning. As I have already indicated, this is a recurrent aspect of his practice: he begins with a phenomenon that frustrates knowledge, that is, by pinpointing a minimal eclosion of “truth” (though these are not words he himself regularly uses), and confronts its insistence with the unsettled history of its scholarly transmission. The following section, Allegory, opens by shifting the disputes over the reference of the word from a speculative anatomical signification to a properly poetic one: the word Korn in the German troubadours (the Minnesänger) signifies a partially unrelated rhyme, which sonically links separated stanzas with one another; moreover, cors or corns has been identified as designating a particular kind of verse. It is thus the case that the poetic deployment of corn simultaneously functions homophonically, that is, by deliberately confusing two discrete semantic elements by means of their material similitude, and self-reflexively, that is, by indexing its own topical operations qua poetry. From there, Tropology shows how the paradoxical fracture designated by corn enables Daniel to place in the most extreme tension a set of received poetic traits: between body and word, rhyme and strophe, orality and writing, harmonic and melodic, text and song, and so on. This is accomplished in such a way that

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“If . . . one wanted to define Arnaut’s style in one single trait that has its final apex in the sestina, one could say that he is the poet who treats all verses as ‘corns’ and who, by thus rupturing the closed unity of the strophe, transforms the unrelated rhyme into the principle of a higher relation.” 28 A Benjaminian theme that Agamben will shortly thereafter start to explore more extensively in a political frame begins to concretize in a new way: the contemporaneity of a poem outside the linearity of history bespeaks its own messianism, however minimal, weak, or impoverished, as “the principle of a higher relation.” But Agamben does not conclude there. Rather, he takes this critical crux as a stepping-stone to open Daniel’s singularity to more general issues in poetics. Hence Anagogy places corn in the wider context of the problematic of enjambment. This is a justly famous demonstration on Agamben’s part.29 Enjambment, the possibility that the end of a line in poetry may not constitute the end of a sentence, becomes for Agamben the very kernel of verse, and the only “certain distinctive criterion for poetry as opposed to prose.”30 Enjambment enables the separation of an internal metrical limit from a syntactical one, the disposition of words from their signification. This means that poetry can always assert its identity against prose, aside from one critical moment: its ending. One end of the poem is prose—an end that might prove either a catastrophe or a fulfilment. From there, Agamben broadens the context still further, citing Dante with St. Thomas Aquinas in order to show how such poetic operations as the unrelated rhyme start to chime with the limits of philosophical thought itself. In the chiasmus of philosophy and poetry, comprehension and its materials, we find the exposition of the relation and nonrelation of language to itself in its pure paradoxical communicability. The final moment of Agamben’s essay, the epilogue, sees a return to the very matter of the troubadours’ poetic dispute: “Ayna” herself. Ania is the name of a muse in John Scotus Eriugena’s glosses on Martianus Capella, upon which Eriugena comments that Ania means intellect, where the prefix “A” here designates not a privation, but an intensification. As Agamben remarks, in accordance with the corporeal inversions directed by corn itself, Ayna is the inverse of Ania. Yet this inversion is also a revision, not a negation: “her oneiric body is the place offered by the poet to unrelated relation.”31 I would link this “oneiric body” to the very many other avatars of (the kind of) redemption we find in Agamben: the melancholic, the fetishist, Beau Brummell, Narcissus, and Pygmalion. But the production of such bodies is also linked to the production of affects that evade the capture of life by the guilt of law, however nominally “unpleasant” these affects present as: the apatheia of melancholia, the joi of the troubadours.

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We can now (rather crassly) formalize Agamben’s method as follows: he begins with a truth event, exemplified by a poetic innovation that introduces an enigma; he exposes the unstable trace of this event through a sequence of conflicts over its interpretation; he then presents his own hypothesis, which cuts across the scholarly conflicts, by suggesting how the innovation is itself a reflexive rearticulation of received differences at the level of both material and meaning; he then starts to link his hypothesis, identified in a singular situation, to other, more general issues in the field, enabling him to sketch out poetry as an event of a double torsion, which simultaneously joins and disjoins material and meaning, sound and sense; from there, he moves to a consideration of its exemplary nature for thought in general; finally, Agamben returns to the poem itself in order to designate the parahuman or inhuman body it has constructed, the profane and paradoxical re-membering of a figure of what he calls in Stanzas “joy without end.” Poetry as such is an experimental laboratory of thought, constitutionally in excess of law, directed toward the construction of a redemptive body.

THE END HAS COME

The 1990s demarcates a broad shift from poetry to politics in Agamben’s work, which takes place between The Coming Community (1990), in which we find as yet not fully resolved anticipations of a newly intensified attention to law and the sacred, and Homo Sacer (1995), in which Agamben first asserts his nowfamous theses regarding biopolitics as the original activity of sovereign power in the withdrawn reference of the exception. This shift toward explicitly political phenomena sees a concomitant shift away from focused intensive explications of poetry. Along with Benjamin and Heidegger, Michel Foucault starts to become an insistent theoretical guide. The range of reference now takes its direction from classical and contemporary themes in political philosophy and theology: life, law, sovereignty, biopolitics, the exception, and so on, which were essentially absent from the earlier work, come to the fore. Certain key concepts are ever more rigorously formalized through this confrontation, such as the sacred, the messianic, profanation, and inoperativity. To give two examples: first, in The Time That Remains, an investigation into St. Paul’s messianism, we find a transformation of the melancholic simulations of the “as if ” examined in Stanzas to the hos me, the “as not,” of the Pauline intervention;32 second, although “the sacred” had previously been investigated in its relationship

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to play in Infancy and History, there was as yet no formalization of the paradigmatic figure of the homo sacer that is developed throughout that eponymous series. Yet this renovation of political categories not only required the preliminary studies of poetics to clear the ground, both in the development of the conceptual requisites and in serving in the identification of the new topics and complex relations. The very mode and movement of attention that Agamben brought to poetry—which, as I have attempted to demonstrate, move from singular to general along the lines of his analysis of melancholia, corn, enjambment, and so on, before returning again to the singular with a transfigured concept—are also precisely what he has brought to such fundamental political terms as life, rights, and sovereignty. Into the bargain, throughout the nominally political tracts, there is never not a recurrent recourse to the poem—where such a recourse proves crucial for delimiting the sense of key political topoi and their operations. Three brief examples. In Remnants of Auschwitz, a treatise in which the analysis of the problem of the witness and testimony is generally held by commentators to have displaced the poem, we nonetheless find Agamben invoking poetry at a crucial moment. Citing John Keats’s famous letter in which the poet is defined as the most unpoetical of things, as well as Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms, Agamben uses these instances to exemplify the experience of desubjectification operative in every enunciation and, hence, to illuminate something about the fracture in passivity that divides, on the one hand, into the Muselmann stripped of language and, on the other, into the witness that testifies to such a fate.33 In The Time That Remains, Agamben returns to another poem of Daniel’s, “The Firm Will Which Enters My Heart.” Here, Agamben uses the sestina to outline “a miniature model of messianic time. . . . The time of the sestina [is] the metamorphosis that time undergoes insofar as it is the time of the end, the time that the poem takes to come to an end.”34 Here, the poem not only functions as a paradigm of messianic time, as well as an index of how Pauline messianism was taken up in Europe in and through poetry itself, but suggests to Agamben how “poetic” Paul’s original text already is, how it literally jangles with internal rhymes. In Opus Dei, when discussing the genealogy of the word office, Agamben suddenly breaks off his discussion of such great authorities as Cicero to speak of the obscene uses of the word in Ovid, Propertius, and Petronius, citing: “saepest experta puella officium tota nocte valere meum” (often a girl has felt my duty all night long).35 Here, the point is that obscenity by antiphrasis illuminates the normal usage from which the poem departs. Yet there is another, absolutely fundamental point to make in this context, to which all the preceding contribute: in Agamben’s shift from the poetical to the political, poetry remains the paradigm for political action itself. The key category

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here is what Agamben denominates “inoperativity,” which, if it is worked out through a range of references from St.  Paul through Spinoza to Alexandre Kojève, Georges Bataille, and Maurice Blanchot, is finally exemplified by poetry. As Agamben directly asserts toward the end of The Kingdom and the Glory (the italics are his): A model of this operation that consists in making all human and divine works inoperative is the poem. Because poetry is precisely that linguistic operation that renders language inoperative—or, in Spinoza’s terms, the point at which language, which has deactivated its communicative and informative functions, rests within itself, contemplates its power of saying [Potenza di dire] and in this way opens itself to a new possible use. . . . What the poem accomplishes for the power of saying, politics and philosophy must accomplish for the power of acting.36

If examples could be further multiplied, the conclusion should be clear: the poem is at the heart of Agamben’s thought from first to last, where it functions as a kind of orienting event. The poem is the origin of the question of the (non)relation between truth and transmissibility, potentiality and profanation, as well as being used for diverse topical functions, such as definition-through-divagation, before, finally, providing the very model of messianic fulfillment itself. Yet this is not to suggest that all is to be reduced to poetry. Agamben’s work is rather critical, in the particular sense I have outlined. This means that, rather than poetry “itself ” being the alpha and omega of his work, it is rather what poetry points to—its “end”—that is, in the end, most decisive. In acknowledging this, criticism must establish itself as a regulated movement between poetry and its other, prose, whose paradigm is philosophy. The question of the political itself emerges between the two: yet poetry-philosophy is not simply a pincer that picks up the political as if from the outside; rather, poetry is part of the field itself, emerging as a paradoxical torsion within it. This is also why Agamben is not really a philosopher, but a critic, in the full sense given earlier, moving between poetry and philosophy, to find their means or medium—that is, to unleash and affirm their messianic inoperativity.

Notes 1.

See, inter alia, G. Asselin and J.-F. Bourgeault, eds., La littérature en puissance: Autour de Giorgio Agamben (Montreal: VLB, 2006); D. Ben-Merre, “Falling Into Silence: Giorgio Agamben at the End of the Poem,” Mosaic 45, no. 1 (2012): 89–104;

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J. Clemens, “The Role of the Shifter and the Problem of Reference in Giorgio Agamben,” in The Work of Giorgio Agamben: Law, Literature, Life, ed. J. Clemens et al. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 43–65; J. Cohen, “ ‘A Different Insignificance’: The Poet and the Witness in Agamben,” Paragraph 25, no.  2 (2002): 36–51; C. Dickinson, “The Poetic Atheology of Giorgio Agamben: Defining the Scission Between Poetry and Philosophy,” Mosaic 45, no. 1 (2012): 203–17; J. Luzzi, “The Ends of Poetry: Sense and Sound in Giorgio Agamben and Ugo Foscolo,” Annali d’Italianistica 29 (2011): 291–99; N. Heron, “Idea of Poetry, Idea of Prose,” in J. Clemens et al., The Work of Giorgio Agamben, 97–113. See also the entries by W. Watkin, “Poetry/Poetic,” and R. Sinnerbrink, “Poiesis/Poesis,” in The Agamben Dictionary, ed. A. Murray and J. Whyte (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011). Erik M. Vogt has given an account of what he calls the “political aesthetics” of Agamben in Zugänge zur politischen Äesthetik (Vienna: Turia und Kant, 2003). Perhaps the earliest extended study in English that takes Agamben’s literary proclivities with some seriousness is T. C. Wall, Radical Passivity: Levinas, Blanchot, and Agamben (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999). L. de la Durantaye has also dedicated a few pages to the question in his Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). The most extensive and substantial study of Agamben’s relation to poetry to date remains W. Watkin, The Literary Agamben: Adventures in Logopoeisis (London: Continuum, 2010). C. McQuillan has also dedicated an article to the study of Agamben’s relation not to literature or poetry proper, but to “Agamben’s Fictions”: McQuillan, “Agamben’s Fictions,” Philosophy Compass 7, no. 6 (2012): 376–87. Despite this efflorescence of interest, I believe that the scholarship remains insufficient, indeed still studded with obscurities and lapsus. The current essay will attempt to indicate some of the most significant of these. I would like to thank Tom Ford, Nick Heron, and Joe Hughes for their criticisms of an earlier draft of this essay. G. Agamben, Infancy and History, trans. L. Heron (London: Verso, 1993), 148. G. Agamben, The Man Without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 59, translation slightly modified. G. Agamben, The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics, trans. D. Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 96. Agamben, 9. It may be helpful here to remind the reader of the sequence of Agamben’s major publications, although this is not an exhaustive list (the dates provided are for the first Italian editions): The Man Without Content (1970); Stanzas (1977); Infancy and History (1978); Language and Death (1982); Idea of Prose (1985); The Coming Community (1990); Homo Sacer (1995); The End of the Poem (1996); Means Without End (1996); Remnants of Auschwitz (1998); The Time That Remains (2000); The Open (2002); State of Exception (2003); Profanations (2005); The Kingdom and the Glory (2007); The Sacrament of Language (2008); Nudities (2009); Highest Poverty (2011); Opus Dei (2012); L’uso dei corpi (2014). Note that, although Agamben has released several collections of essays since Homo Sacer, most of the major texts since then have been explicitly conceived as contributing to that eponymous series.

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See G. Agamben, Il fuoco e il racconto (Rome: Nottetempo, 2014). Certainly, most of Agamben’s recent works, from the major tracts that comprise the Homo Sacer series, such as L’uso dei corpei (Neri Pozza, 2014) and The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, trans. L. Chiesa with M. Mandarini (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), as well as squibs such as Pilate and Jesus, trans. A. Kotsko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015) or Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm, trans. N. Heron (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), are almost entirely concerned with references drawn from religion, theology, and politics. Yet in The Kingdom and the Glory, for example, the section on acclamations cites Alföldi’s admission that these “betray the same formal constraints as do works of poetry or art” (187), and proceeds to note how Homer and Ovid presume the very dependence of the heroes and gods on poetry, before concluding with a face-off regarding the relation between hymn and elegy in the writings of Rilke, Hölderlin, and Mallarmé (235–39). Note, too, Agamben’s characteristic quiet dialogue with thinkers who may often go unnamed in his discussions: Although Heidegger is cited several times in The Kingdom and the Glory, he is not mentioned at all when Agamben takes up the question of the hymn in Hölderlin. And yet Heidegger opens one of his own most famous encounters with the poet on precisely this theme: “The term hymn, in German Hymne, is formed from the Greek word υμνος, meaning song of praise, ode, more specifically a song in praise of the gods, to the glory of heroes, and in honor of those victorious in contests. υμνειν: to sing, to praise, to glorify, to celebrate and consecrate, and so to prepare the festival. Thus it is that we find a turn of phrase in which noun and verb, υμνος and υμνειν, are immediately united.” Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” trans. W. McNeill and J. Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 1. There is now a small academic industry dedicated to the enigmatic relation between Agamben and Weil, undoubtedly exacerbated by the unavailability of the former’s doctoral thesis and his subsequent relative silence on the matter: e.g., de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 22–23; A. Ricciardi, “From Decreation to Bare Life: Weil, Agamben, and the Impolitical,” Diacritics 39, no. 2 (2009): 75–93; J. Whyte, Catastrophe and Redemption: The Political Thought of Giorgio Agamben (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013), 120–21; C. Colebrook and J. Maxwell, Agamben (Cambridge: Polity, 2015). In almost all of these cases, commentators have emphasized the possible influence of, say, “decreation” upon “potentiality”: that is, they have drawn direct links between putatively “onto-political” concepts in Weil’s and Agamben’s thought. Even if this were true—a claim that, for reasons I will discuss here, would require strenuous nuancing—what would still have to be underlined is that the relation between poetry and politics in Weil is of the utmost significance, and that the tendency to strip her concepts of their integral links to the poetic must themselves be read as a symptomatic mutilation and misrepresentation. The locus classicus for Weil in this regard would have to be Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” trans. M. McCarthy, Chicago Review 18, no. 2 (1965): 5–30. See B. Dillon, “A Face in the Crowd,” Frieze 68 (2002): n.p. Agamben, The End of the Poem, xi.

Ag a mben an d Poet ry 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

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27. 28. 29. 30.

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Agamben, Man Without Content, 114. Agamben, 66. I. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. P. Guyer, trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 121. Agamben, Man Without Content, 45. G. Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. R. L. Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xv. Agamben, xvii. Agamben, xvi. Agamben will continue this investigation in The Idea of Prose, of which A. G. Düttmann has dedicated an illuminating essay: Düttmann, “Integral Actuality: On Giorgio Agamben’s Idea of Prose,” in Clemens et  al., The Work of Giorgio Agamben, 28–42. Agamben, Stanzas, xviii. J. Clemens, Psychoanalysis Is an Antiphilosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 99. Agamben, Stanzas, xvi. Agamben, 56. W. Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, intro. G. Steiner, trans. J. Osborne (London: Verso, 1977), 27. See Agamben, The Idea of Prose, trans. M. Sullivan and S. Whitsitt (Buffalo: State University of New York Press, 1995), 61–65. Agamben, End of the Poem, xii. See  F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. J. Nauckhoff with A. Del Caro, ed. B.  Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); E. Auerbach, Dante: Poet of the Secular World, trans. R. Manheim (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969); D. de Rougemont, Love in the Western World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); J. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. D. Porter (London: Routledge, 1992). In this context, it is worth noting that Lacan’s seminar spends some time on the specific Daniel poem discussed by Agamben. It is also worth noting that Dragonetti was himself a preeminent scholar of courtly love: e.g., Dragonetti, La technique poétique des trouvères dans la chanson courtoise: Contribution à l’ étude de la rhétorique médiévale (Bruges: De Tempel, 1960). Agamben himself adverts frequently to the troubadours throughout his work, e.g., Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, trans. K. E. Pinkus with M. Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 68–69; Agamben, Infancy and History, 104; Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 182; Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. P. Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 78–87. Agamben, End of the Poem, 23. Agamben, 31. He also deals with enjambment at length in the essay “The End of the Poem,” as well as in The Idea of Prose, 39–41. Agamben, End of the Poem, 34.

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Agamben, 42. See Agamben, The Time That Remains. G. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. D. HellerRoazen (New York: Zone, 1999). Agamben, The Time That Remains, 82–83. G. Agamben, Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty, trans. A. Kotsko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 71. Agamben, The Kingdom and The Glory, 251–52.

Contributors

Anne Emmanuelle Berger is professor of French literature and gender studies at Paris 8 University and currently heads the newly founded research institute LEGS (Laboratoire d’études de genre et de sexualité, CNRS/Université Paris Lumières). Initially a specialist of nineteenth-century French poetry, Enlightenment literature, and twentieth-century French thought, she has been writing mainly for the past ten years on the epistemology and intellectual history of the field of gender and sexuality studies in the Western world, the politics of language(s), and the relations between literature, philosophy, and politics. Her latest book, The Queer Turn in Feminism: Identity, Sexuality, and the Theater of Gender (Fordham University Press, 2014), has appeared in French and Spanish. She is currently working on a historical and philosophical account of the treatment of the body in the field of gender studies. Bruno Bosteels is professor in Latin American and Iberian literatures and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. He is the author among other books of Badiou and Politics (Duke University Press) and Marx and Freud in Latin America (Verso). He is currently finishing a new book titled Philosophies of Defeat: The Jargon of Finitude (also for Verso). Carol Mastrangelo Bové is senior lecturer in English, University of Pittsburgh, and professor of French, Emerita, Westminster College, Pennsylvania. She has written and translated several books and articles on French psychoanalytic thought. These include Language and Politics in Julia Kristeva: Literature, Art, Therapy and American Letters, and a critical edition and translation of Claude Richard’s Lettres Américaines. Professor Bové is currently completing a critical edition and translation of Colette’s La Maison de Claudine for SUNY Press. She is also working on a book for Palgrave Press examining the impact of Kristeva’s writing on literature in the United States as well as an article on Kristeva’s philosophical thought and fiction for Bloomsbury Press’s series Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism. Justin Clemens is associate professor in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is most recently the coeditor of the scholarly collections What Is Education? (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), with A. J. Bartlett, and The Afterlives of Georges Perec (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), with Rowan Wilken. Previous monographs include Lacan Deleuze Badiou (Edinburgh University Press, 2014), cowritten with A. J. Bartlett and Jon Roffe, and Psychoanalysis Is an Antiphilosophy (Edinburgh University Press, 2013). His long mock-epic poem The Mundiad (Hunter,

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2013) was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize. With Helmut Munz and Adam Nash, he is currently translating Kostas Axelos’s Le jeu du monde for Edinburgh University Press, as well as, with A. J. Bartlett, a number of short pieces by Alain Badiou for Bloomsbury. He is also an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, undertaking the project “Australian Poetry Today.” Claire Colebrook is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English, Philosophy, and Women's and Gender Studies at Penn State University. She has written books and articles on contemporary European philosophy, literary history, gender studies, queer theory, visual culture, and feminist philosophy. Her most recent book is Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols (coauthored with Tom Cohen and J. Hillis Miller). Jean-Philippe Deranty is associate professor of philosophy at Macquarie University, Sydney. He has published widely on contemporary French and German philosophy. Recent publications with Columbia University Press include the coauthored volume The Return of Work in Critical Theory: Self, Society, Politics (2018), and an edition, with Katia Genel, of the debate between Axel Honneth and Jacques Rancière, Recognition or Disagreement: A Critical Encounter on the Politics of Freedom, Equality, and Identity (2016). Thomas  H. Ford is a lecturer in English at the University of Melbourne. His publications include Wordsworth and the Poetics of Air (Cambridge, 2018), A Cultural History of Climate Change (Routledge, 2016), and a translation of Boris Groys’s The Communist Postscript (Verso, 2010). He is currently writing a book on The Natural History of Poetry, which takes its lead from Adorno’s early essay on the idea of natural history. Ranjan Ghosh lives in Siliguri, a small town in West Bengal, India. He teaches, and teaches himself, at the University of North Bengal. A man of “secular” interests, he loves music, philosophy, poetry, sports, the sciences, and, most importantly, loves to read and think. He is currently making some effort to write two books on plastic. If anyone is ever curious to know about him, one may look up his website: www .ranjanghosh.com. Leslie Hill is emeritus professor of French studies at the University of Warwick and the author of several books, including The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Derrida; Radical Indecision: Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida, and the Future of Criticism; Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing: A Change of Epoch; and Nancy, Blanchot: A Serious Controversy. He is currently completing books on Blanchot’s politics, the film work of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie-Straub, and Pierre Klossowski’s relationship to Nietzsche and Christianity. Ian James completed his doctoral research on the fictional and theoretical writings of Pierre Klossowski at the University of Warwick in 1996. He is a fellow of Downing College and a reader in modern French literature and thought in the department of French at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Pierre Klossowski: The Persistence of a Name (Legenda, 2000), The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford University Press, 2006), Paul Virilio (Routledge, 2007), and The New French Philosophy (Polity, 2012). Galen Johnson is professor of philosophy at the University of Rhode Island. He has been general secretary (executive director) of the International Merleau-Ponty Circle (2005–15) and has been a recipient of recent fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and American Philosophical Society (APS). He is editor of The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting (1993, 1998) and author of The Retrieval of the Beautiful: Thinking Through Merleau-Ponty’s Aesthetics (2010). His coauthored book, Merleau-Ponty’s Poets and Poetic, is forthcoming from Fordham

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University Press. He is coeditor of Chiasmi International: Trilingual Studies Concerning the Thought of Merleau-Ponty. His current research interests include the art and writings of Paul Klee and a study of the sublime and the baroque in Merleau-Ponty’s late writings. Lutz Koepnick is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of German, Cinema, and Media Arts at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where he also chairs the department of German, Russian, and East European studies and serves as the director of the joint PhD program in comparative media analysis and practice (CMAP). Koepnick has published widely on film, media theory, visual culture, new media aesthetic, and intellectual history from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. He is the author of, most recently, Michael Bay: World Cinema in the Age of Populism (2018), The Long Take: Art Cinema and the Wondrous (2017), and On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of the Contemporary (2014). His current book projects include a book on the role of resonance in contemporary sound art. Raoul Moati is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago. He is the author among others publications of Derrida/Searle: Deconstruction and Ordinary Language (Columbia University Press, 2014), Levinas and the Night of Being (Fordham University Press, 2017) and Sartre et le mystère en pleine lumière (Cerf, “Passages,” 2019). Francois Noudelmann, professor at the University of Paris VIII, is a member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He teaches regularly at New York University. His main interest is the role in thought processes of fiction, sounds, and images. Among his most recent publications are Edouard Glissant, l’ identité généreuse (Flammarion, 2018), Le génie du mensonge (Pocket, 2017), Les airs de famille, une philosophie des affinités (Gallimard, 2012), and The Philosopher’s Touch: Sartre, Nietzsche, and Barthes at the Piano (Columbia University Press, 2012). Daniel Rosenberg Nutters recently earned his PhD in English from Temple University after defending his dissertation, “Henry James and Romantic Revisionism: The Quest for the Man of Imagination in the Late Work.” He has published essays on post-Romantic writers and critics in Symploke, Arizona Quarterly, Journal of Modern Literature, Henry James Review, and several edited volumes. He is currently completing a larger book project tentatively entitled The Humanist Critic: Lionel Trilling and Edward Said. Daniel T. O’Hara is emeritus professor of English, Temple University. He is the author of nine books, including most recently Virginia Woolf and the Modern Sublime (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). He is also the editor or coeditor of six other books, including (with Donald  E. Pease and Michelle Martin) A William V. Spanos Reader: Humanistic Criticism and the Secular Imperative (Northwestern University Press, 2015). In addition, Professor O’Hara is series coeditor (with Donald E. Pease) of The Global Literary Imagination (Palgrave Pivots) and (with Ranjan Ghosh) of Transforming Theory (Rowan and Litchfield). Finally, he is an editor of the Journal of Modern Literature; a contributing editor to American Book Review; an advisory editor for Symploke; and (from 1980 to 2014) review editor and an original member of the editorial collective of boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture (1980–2014). Currently, he is completing a new book on the unstable narrators in Thomas Mann’s fiction. Jean-Michel Rabaté, professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania, has taught in Dijon, Paris, Montreal, and Princeton. A managing editor of the Journal of Modern Literature, he chairs the Forum for Philosophy and Literature at the MLA. One of the founders of Slought Foundation, where he curates shows, lectures, and conversations, he has been since 2008 a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has authored forty books and collections of essays. Recent titles include The Pathos of Distance (Bloomsbury, 2016), Think, Pig! (Fordham University

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Press, 2016), Les guerres de Jacques Derrida (Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2016), Rust (Bloomsbury, 2018), After Derrida (Cambridge, 2018), and Kafka L.O.L. (Quodlibet, 2018). Forthcoming are The New Beckett (Cambridge), Understanding Derrida/Understanding Modernism (Bloomsbury), and Jouissance de la littérature (ERES). James Risser is currently professor of philosophy at Seattle University and is a senior research fellow at Western Sydney University. His published works include Hermeneutics and the Voice of the Other: ReReading Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics (1997) and The Life of Understanding: A Contemporary Hermeneutics (2012). He is the editor of Heidegger Toward the Turn: Essays on the Work of the 1930s, coeditor of American Continental Philosophy, and coeditor of the journal Research in Phenomenology. He has published essays on Kant’s aesthetics and is currently completing a project on exemplarity in relation to aesthetics and hermeneutics. Cecilia Sjöholm is professor of aesthetics at Södertörn University. Her research is particularly focused on the relation between art and politics in contemporary culture. She has published extensively on art, psychoanalysis, and critical theory. Her latest book, Doing Aesthetics with Arendt: How to See Things (Columbia University Press, 2015), looks at the way in which Hannah Arendt’s reflections on art and aesthetics invite us to rethink her political concepts. Georges Van Den Abbeele is dean of humanities at the University of California at Irvine, and previously served as founding dean of social sciences and humanities at Northeastern University and as dean of humanities at UC Santa Cruz, after having taught at UC Berkeley, UC Davis, Miami (Ohio), and Harvard. His books include Travel as Metaphor, Community at Loose Ends, A World of Fables, French Civilization and Its Discontents, and the forthcoming The Retreat of French Thought. He is also known for his translations into English of French philosopher and former University of California at Irvine professor of critical theory Jean-François Lyotard. Van Den Abbeele is a member of the European Academy of Sciences and 2008 recipient of its Blaise Pascal medal for outstanding contributions to the human and social sciences. Roland Végső is Susan  J. Rosowski Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, where he teaches literary and critical theory and twentieth-century literatures. His primary research interests are contemporary continental philosophy, modernism, and translation theory. He is the author of The Naked Communist: Cold War Modernism and the Politics of Popular Culture (Fordham University Press, 2013). In addition, he is also the translator of numerous philosophical essays as well as two books: Rodolphe Gasché’s Georges Bataille: Phenomenology and Phantasmatology (Stanford University Press, 2012) and Peter Szendy’s All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage (Fordham University Press, 2016). He is the coeditor of the book series Provocations published by University of Nebraska Press.

Index

Adorno, Theodor, 44, 242 Aesthetic Theory, 114, 116–18, 127–28 Agamben, Giorgio, 12, 16–17, 20 aisthesis, 25 aletheia, 29 Anaximander, 20 Anti-Oedipus, 198 antiphilosopher, 252 antiphilosophy, 128 antipoetry, 128 antitheory of literature, 15 Apology, 2, 3 Arcades Project, 48, 51 Arendt, Hannah, 17, 18 Aristotle, 4, 5, 20, 88, 90, 236, 298, 315 Artaud, Antonin, 14 Aron, Raymond, 139 Auden, W. H., 78, 297 Auerbach, Erich, 320 Bachelard, Gaston, 180, 186 Bacon, Francis, 203–4 Badiou, Alan, 14, 20, 65, 242, 255 Bakhtin, Michel, 302, 305 Balzac, Honoré de, 18 Barfield, Raymond, 4, 10 Barthes, Roland, 303 Bataille, Georges, 19, 240, 324

Baudelaire, Charles, 14–15, 18–19, 43, 127, 132–33, 137, 154, 170–71, 176, 241, 290–91, 293, 298, 302, 313–14, 318 Beauvoir, Simone de, 18, 176, 183 Being and Event, 253–55, 257–58, 262, 265 Being and Time, 264 Benjamin, Walter, 20, 113, 118, 125, 236, 241, 313, 317–19, 322 Benveniste, Émile, 229 Bergson, Henri, 1, 12 Between the Past and the Future, 74 Beyond Good and Evil, 12 Blanchot, Maurice, 15, 239, 240, 242, 324 Boehme, Jakob, 100–1 Brecht, Bertolt, 70 Breton, André, 18, 58, 99, 102, 180 Broch, Hermann, 74 Browning, Robert, 107 Büchner, Georg, 285 Burke, Kenneth, 160–61, 167–68, 171–72 Butler, Judith, 299 Byron, 285 Camus, Albert, 185 Cantor, Georg, 256 Celan, Paul, 14–15, 35, 44, 86, 92–93, 114, 242–45, 253, 254, 256–57, 260, 264, 318 Césaire, Aimé, 136 Cézanne, Paul, 178, 182, 186

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Charmes, 109 Civilization and Its Discontents, 106, 296 Cixous, Hélène, 211, 239 Claudel, Paul, 17–18, 103, 230 Clements, Robert, 6 Cocteau, Jean, 186 Cohen, Paul, 256, 264 Coleridge, Samuel, 170 Coming Community, The, 312, 322 connaturality, 1, 18 Conrad, Joseph, 171 consubstantiality, 11, 20 creative criticism, 16 Critique of Judgement, 117, 315 Critique of Pure Reason, 271 dasein, 13 Deguy, Michel, 273 Deleuze, Gilles, 15, 133 De Man, Paul, 170 Derrida, Jacques, 14, 20, 114, 133, 143–44, 156, 170, 178, 195–96, 211–15, 220–21 Descartes, René, 78, 79, 201, 271, 272 Dialectic of Enlightenment, 115–17, 125 Diderot, Denis, 314 Dinesen, Isak, 74 Domin, Hilde, 86, 94 dwelling, 13 dynamic sublime, 7 Elemental Passions, 210, 218, 226–29 Eliot, T. S., 17, 107–9 Eluard, Paul, 103 End of the Poem, The, 311, 313, 319 entanglement, 16 equipment, 28–29 Essays on the Beautiful and the Sublime, 79 Essentialism, 209, 219, 221 Euthyphro, 3 event, 147 Everyday Prayers, 223–24 Fargue, Léon-Paul, 98 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 101 Flaubert, Gustave, 137–38, 171 Foucault, Michel, 15, 196, 222, 322

Freud, Sigmund, 97, 105–6, 107–8, 110, 178, 214–16, 296, 298, 303 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 14, 241, 244–45, 264–65, Gauny, Louis-Gabriel, 284 Genet, Jean, 19, 132–33, 137, 238 genius, 7–9 Goethe, Johann, 107 Gogh, Vincent van, 29–30, 33 Gorgias, 75 Guattari, Felix, 195, 200, 203, 205, 207 Habermas, Jürgen, 119, 301 Haines, Simon, 3 Hartman, Geoffrey, 165, 167, 171, 172 Hegel, G. W. F., 10, 15, 16, 24, 70, 76, 113, 217, 236, 253, 255, 272, 294, 303 Hegel: Three Studies, 126 Hegelian master, 317 hegemony, 65 Heidegger, Martin, 12–17, 19–20, 44, 65, 76, 86, 90, 93, 100, 103, 105–10, 144–49, 155–56, 215–23, 225–27, 236, 241, 249–50, 251–54, 256–59, 261–65, 267, 272, 312–19, 322 Heraclitus, 20 “Hiatus Irrationalis,” 99–101, 104, 107 historical materialism, 50–51 History and Class Consciousness, 113 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 204–6 Horkheimer, Max, 115–17, 120, 122–24 Hölderin, Friedrich, 86, 90, 215–19, 223, 225, 249, 253–54, 257, 260, 264–66, 313, 314, 318 Hugo, Victor, 17, 103, 110 Human Condition, The, 77 Husserl, Edmund, 17, 134, 182–83, 187 Impossible, The, 59, 61 Infancy and History, 311 Inner Experience, 63 In Search of Lost Time, 199 In the Beginning She Was, 220 Involuntary Surrealism, 103, 110

I n dex Ion, 3 Irigaray, Luce, 219, 299 Jacob, Max, 111 Jacotot, Joseph, 287 Jakobson, Roman, 210, 216, 301 Jaspers, Karl, 17 Joyce, James, 97–98, 239, 306 Kafka, Franz, 74, 78–79, 186, 195–96, 200, 239, 313–14, 318 Kant, 7–10, 16, 24, 26, 43, 73, 74, 76, 79–80, 117, 271, 171, 292–93, 302, 314–15 Keats, John, 6, 323 Klee, Paul, 177 Koyré, Alexandre, 100 Kristeva, Julia, 19, 196, 210 Lacan, Jacques, 17, 27, 137, 186, 195–96, 211, 216, 250, 252, 254, 256, 261, 265, 303 Laclau, Ernesto, 254, 304 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 106–7, 251, 257–58, 262 Lautréamont, Comte de, 302, 318 Laws, 2 “Letter on Humanism,” 24–25 Levin, Susan, 3 Lévi-Straussian mana, 27 Lévy-Valensi, Éliane Amado, 102 Life of the Mind, 70, 72, 74 linguistic feminism, 211 logos, 104, 106 Ludions, 98 Lukac, Georg, 101, 113, 124 Lyotard, Jean-François, 26, 253 Lysis, 3 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 14, 18–19, 89, 104–5, 132, 134, 135, 137, 140, 211–13, 217, 241, 253, 267, 289–90, 292, 294, 298, 302–3, 318 Man, Paul de, 25 Mandelstam, Osip, 253, 285–86 Manifesto for Philosophy, 251, 255–60, 262 Man Without Content, The, 316 Margaroni, Maria, 303–5

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Maritain, Jacques, 1 Marx, Karl, 43, 48, 51, 76 Mayakovsky, Valdimir, 301 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 18, 77 Meditations, 78 Meditations on First Philosophy, 271 Meno, 3 Michon, Pierre, 289 Moi, Toril, 299 Mouffe, Chantal, 254, 304 Mute Speech, 285, 291–92 Nancy, Jean Luc, 16, 26, 106–7, 272 Negative Dialectics, 118, 125, 128 Nicomachean Ethics, 5 Nietzsche, Friedrich 9, 11–12, 16, 24, 144, 252, 256–57, 261, 272, 314, 320 nonidentitarian thinking, 124 Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg), 24, 35, 292 Nussbaum, Martha, 195 Orientalism, 308 “Origin of the Work of Art, The,” 25–26, 34–35 Parmenides, 20 Perricone, Christopher, 19 Pessoa, Fernando, 253, 267 Petronius, 108 Phaedrus, 3 Phenomenology of Perception, 77 philosophical anthropology, 58 Photography, 46–48 Plastic, 6, 8 Plato, 2–5, 9, 16, 20, 23, 75, 88, 272, 298, 314 “Plato’s Hystera,” 211, 213, 220, 224 Poe, Edgar Allan, 195 poematic, 14 Poesia, 235 Poetics, 5 poetic translation, 106 Politics, 5 Politics of the Siren, 291 Ponge, Francis, 14, 18, 132, 133–34, 137, 175–78, 238, 241

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Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, The, 214 Process of being, 151 Problems of Philosophy, The, 272 Proletarian Nights, 284–85 Protagoras, 3 Proust, Marcel, 18, 122, 195, 199, 200, 204 “Purloined Letter, The,” 195 Quarrel, 1–3, 6, 7, 10–20 Questions de poétique, 211 Racine, Jean, 15, 154, 288 Rancière, Jacques, 18, 20, 251, 257–58, 260 Remnants of Auschwitz, 323 Republic, 2, 23 Revolution in Poetic Language, 297 Richard III, 69–73, 75, 79–80 Riegl, Alois, 48 Rilke, Maria, 70, 78–79, 86, 94, 167, 215, 217, 219, 223, 227, 249, 253, 267, 314, 318 Rimbaud, Arthur, 15, 18, 63, 101, 153–54, 176, 180, 253, 267, 288–91, 293, 314, 318 Romains, Jules, 15 Russell, Bertrand, 272 Sade, Marquis de, 63 Said, Edward, 308 Santayana, George, 2 Santi, Sylvain, 58 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 18, 58, 176, 183–85 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 292 Schlegel, Frederich, 10, 240, 241, 292 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 263 Schmitt, Carl, 51 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 7–9 Searle, John, 236 Semiotic, 298 Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 135, 136 Shakespeare, William, 14, 69–70, 77–79, 154 Simon, Claudel, 18 Speculum of the Other Woman, 209, 211, 212–13, 217, 222, 230 Spivak, Gayatri, 299 Stabat Mater, 306–8

Stanzas, 317, 322 Stendhal, 18 supersensible, 7 Surya, Michel, 62 Symbolic, 298 Symposium, 4 Tales of Love, 297, 307 “Task of the Translator, The,” 43–44 Techne poietike, 277–78 Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila, 305–6, 308 This Sex Which Is Not One, 209 thing concept, 27–28 Thousand Plateaus, A, 203 Trakl, Georg, 253–54, 257, 264, 266 Truth and Method, 84, 265 Tudal, Antoine, 98 Ulysses, 306 Unheimisch, 39 Valéry, Paul, 12, 14–17, 18, 100, 103, 107–10, 153, 155, 176, 180, 184, 191, 236, 241, 314 Vasalau, Sophia, 9 Veret, Désirée, 284 Violence and Metaphysics, 143 “Waste Land, The,” 17, 108 “What Are Poets For?,” 215–16, 219, 220, 224 What Is Philosophy?, 198 Who Am I and Who Are You?, 93 Wickhoff, Franz, 48 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 252, 261 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 10 “Windhover, The,” 204, 207 wonder, 5, 13, Woolf, Virginia, 200 Wordsworth, William, 167, 285–86, 288, 292 Xenophanes, 1 Young, Julian, 9