Philosophy and Poetry, edited by Ranjan Ghosh (introduction)

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

T

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.

m 21

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.

PRAISE FOR

PHILOSOPHY and

Poetry

“This indispensable gathering of essays by some of the most compelling critics and philosophers writing today provides a comprehensive and decisive investigation of European philosophy’s engagement with its ancient and enduring adversary.

These studies are admirable for the clarity and attention to detail that they bring to often difficult texts. As a result, one begins to understand in new ways the ancient paradox that without poetry philosophy would be unable to recognize itself, and in the bargain philosophy becomes for poetry an indispensable poetics of words and things of the world.”

—GERALD L. BRUNS, author of Interruptions: The Fragmentary Aesthetic in Modern Literature

“This very exciting collection offers admirably concise and often brilliant essays on twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophers and their relationship to, reliance on, commentaries about poetry. Any student of European thinking, especially of those central strains of the ‘continental tradition’ that take their origin in phenomenology, will learn a great deal not only from the specific essays in this collection but also from the interplay between them.”

—JOHN MICHAEL, author of Secular Lyric: The Modernization of the Poem in Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson

Columbia University Press New York cup.columbia.edu Printed in the U.S.A