Dear Prof. Kearney,
In the introduction to your book Poetics of Modernity, you discuss the Greek sense of ποιησις as 'any productive activity having an end or value beyond itself.' Now, as far as Angelus Silesius' famous couplet 'The rose is without why, it blooms because it blooms/It pays no attention to itself, asks not whether it is seen', I've read somewhere that Jorge Luis Borges understood it to be a negation of Aesthetics.
Given your summary of poetry, & extending it to aesthetics at large, it seems that Angelus' 'without why' would disarm the rose/poetry/aesthetics. Poetry can still produce effects, even without a why, just like the rose can still bloom (& be seen, smelt, etc.). But poetry without a why would reject its effects as defining itself as poetry (pace Aristotle). The rose blooms whether or not it's seen, & poetry is poetics whether or not it has effects. It would exist not for its effects, nor even for itself, but just because it is. Is Angelus' couplet legitimately applicable? Can aesthetics/poetics be negated?
Gabe
Dear Gabriel,
This is an excellent question and I don't really know how to answer it as I have never thought it through myself.
I do not know the Borges reference but I suppose he means that if Aristotle is right in the Poetics that poiesis produces something beyond its own activity, a final product that can be seen (theatre) or read and heard (epic/lyric), then Silesius' 'blooming of the rose', as an act in itself, is more praxis (for Aristotle, an act which is its own end) than poiesis. Remember also that God is defined in Aristotelian and later metaphysics as 'pure act subsisting in itself' (actus purus non habens aliquid de potentialitate). So, by the Aristotelian account, divinity is closer to praxis than poiesis. This might explain Silesius’s thinking as that of a Christian mystic.
On this account, the 'without why' of Silesius' rose might be seen as a sort of mystical-divine praxis in and for itself.
On the other hand, you could read the 'without why' in a sense more inclined to poetry than praxis if you interpret according to a fin-de-siecle aesthetics of art for art’s sake (see Oscar Wilde and the symbolists etc). Or even according to Sartre's definition of 'poetry' in What is Literature - namely, as a form of linguistic self-absorption, self-regard and passivity - indulgent, solipsistic, antipathetic to real social and political action (the task of 'prose'). For Sartre and the social realists, in short, poetry is less than prose because it is an end in itself: without why. Against this, Sartre argues for a politically committed art which uses language as a loaded gun that aims and fires at its target - prose in order words which dismisses poetry as a useless, impractical, mystical (or bourgeois) luxury.
Hope that helps a bit?
Best,
Prof Kearney
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
let it be...
“to look after a ‘thing’ or person in its essence means to love it, to favor it…Such favoring is the proper essence of enabling, which not only can achieve this or that but also can let something essentially unfold in its provenance, that is, let it be” (“Letter on Humanism” in Basic Writings, Harper Collins, 220)
Monday, April 5, 2010
Giving Up the Ghost
I.
Let me be completely clear. No, really, I want to make myself clear. I want to be transparent with you. As transparent as a ghost, actually, one who can pass easily through all that which divides us, all those walls and thresholds, without losing anything of himself. I want to be this ghost that passes back and forth between author and reader, between original and translation, that lives in the flesh of each, of self and other, and makes finally possible their adequation. But I can't be this ghost, this ghost that is locked, encrypted, within language. And who is dead anyway. Why did I ever want to be this dead thing? I guess I cannot be completely clear with you, nor do I really want to be. But we could make something, you and I, in all our difference. We could "construct a comparable," a world in which we could mutually (if not perfectly) co-dwell. We could share a horizon for a while, like in those Corona commercials. I would flick a lime wedge with my finger and you would hear it plop into the ocean, and we'd know that we'd shared something, which, for all of its elusiveness and vitality, for all its endlessness, is worth a lot more than that damn ghost ever was. How could we share if we were exactly the same? That's the ghost's dream, not mine. He still haunts me though, haunts this Corona horizon of ours. This beach might be a burial ground, in the end. When we leave we'll take him with us, even though we don't see him. He might have been what we shared all along. A secret, one which we keep but can't know. But that was him, alright, haunting up the place. We'll ferry him to the next place we say with words, like pallbearers of a closed, Times New Roman casket. He was a good man, they'll say at the funeral, and died tragically. Killed, really, at Babel, when the tower fell. Why is it that towers are always falling? Now he's just a ghost, something I could never be, not until I'm dead myself. But I have put so much of myself in this new horizon, the one that we share, the one with the Coronas, that I am not sure I could ever die, so long as people are reading my words. I won't be a ghost anyway, I'll be a different kind of dead, or not dead at all. It doesn't seem so great anymore, to be that ghost.
II.
Pentecost strikes me as one of the moments in scripture so overdetermined, so symbolically freighted that it threatens to unhinge itself from the canon. Marc, your theological interpretation of this moment in Acts (that's where I find it anyway) is very much illuminating; an articulation of the multiplicity of voices within the church, a plurality treated as gift rather than as fracture. If I may play it fast and loose for a moment, I see some extra-ecclesiastical postmodern commentary running through this episode. Actually, more than postmodern commentary, it seems a comment on postmodernity.
To suddenly hear the primordially familiar--one's birth language--coming from the mouth of the other. This would be shocking. Implicit here is a refiguration of authenticity, dislodged from its dogmatic filliation to the idea of origin. Authenticity's source is found sub contrario, flowing upstream, so to speak, from the other to the self. In this way, It appears to me that the Pentecost episode in Acts narrates the "construction of the comparable," as Ricoeur terms it, an intersubjective space wherein the self and the other may participate in some experience of mutuality. Over and against Ricoeur's "third text," the ghastly absolute text which perfectly indexes the self and other--what Benjamin calls the messianic horizon of translation--this intersubjective space is a fourth text. [To numerate: not the text of the self (1), the other (2), the divine/ghost (3), but a 4th.] The fourth text is imperfect, immanent, concrete and collaborative. In this privileged-if-not-sacred space, the self and the other may experience the epiphany of corroboration, that is, the recognition of the self in the other, the closure of what had previously been perceived as an infinite distance separating the two. As the Pentecost illustrates, this closure occurs in language. To invoke Ricoeur again, the self and other mutually indwell what he elsewhere terms the "world of the text," which could also be termed the world of translation. Here the self and other are witness to a shared truth, or perhaps a truth shared in pieces, one among many. Authenticity is, then, not so much linked to the content but to the mode of that truth's disclosure, i.e., translation; the construction of the "comparable" and intersubjective fourth text, whereupon we may project our ownmost possibilities.
So, to just lay it on you, I think that Pentecost documents the new filiation of authenticity to translation, a moment which is concomitant with 1) the interment of what Ricoeur termed the absolute "third text," and 2) the invention of a "fourth text." This fourth text, an intersubjective space of mutual discovery, is what we call literature. The annulment of the absolute text did not yield silence but rather a proliferation of tongues; of truths. Literature does not precede translation, but, as Acts suggests, miraculously proceeds from it. It is in literature, in this infinite elegy for the absolute, where we find each other, and thus also our authentic selves.
Zach
PS
Please excuse these free associative wanderings.
Let me be completely clear. No, really, I want to make myself clear. I want to be transparent with you. As transparent as a ghost, actually, one who can pass easily through all that which divides us, all those walls and thresholds, without losing anything of himself. I want to be this ghost that passes back and forth between author and reader, between original and translation, that lives in the flesh of each, of self and other, and makes finally possible their adequation. But I can't be this ghost, this ghost that is locked, encrypted, within language. And who is dead anyway. Why did I ever want to be this dead thing? I guess I cannot be completely clear with you, nor do I really want to be. But we could make something, you and I, in all our difference. We could "construct a comparable," a world in which we could mutually (if not perfectly) co-dwell. We could share a horizon for a while, like in those Corona commercials. I would flick a lime wedge with my finger and you would hear it plop into the ocean, and we'd know that we'd shared something, which, for all of its elusiveness and vitality, for all its endlessness, is worth a lot more than that damn ghost ever was. How could we share if we were exactly the same? That's the ghost's dream, not mine. He still haunts me though, haunts this Corona horizon of ours. This beach might be a burial ground, in the end. When we leave we'll take him with us, even though we don't see him. He might have been what we shared all along. A secret, one which we keep but can't know. But that was him, alright, haunting up the place. We'll ferry him to the next place we say with words, like pallbearers of a closed, Times New Roman casket. He was a good man, they'll say at the funeral, and died tragically. Killed, really, at Babel, when the tower fell. Why is it that towers are always falling? Now he's just a ghost, something I could never be, not until I'm dead myself. But I have put so much of myself in this new horizon, the one that we share, the one with the Coronas, that I am not sure I could ever die, so long as people are reading my words. I won't be a ghost anyway, I'll be a different kind of dead, or not dead at all. It doesn't seem so great anymore, to be that ghost.
II.
Pentecost strikes me as one of the moments in scripture so overdetermined, so symbolically freighted that it threatens to unhinge itself from the canon. Marc, your theological interpretation of this moment in Acts (that's where I find it anyway) is very much illuminating; an articulation of the multiplicity of voices within the church, a plurality treated as gift rather than as fracture. If I may play it fast and loose for a moment, I see some extra-ecclesiastical postmodern commentary running through this episode. Actually, more than postmodern commentary, it seems a comment on postmodernity.
To suddenly hear the primordially familiar--one's birth language--coming from the mouth of the other. This would be shocking. Implicit here is a refiguration of authenticity, dislodged from its dogmatic filliation to the idea of origin. Authenticity's source is found sub contrario, flowing upstream, so to speak, from the other to the self. In this way, It appears to me that the Pentecost episode in Acts narrates the "construction of the comparable," as Ricoeur terms it, an intersubjective space wherein the self and the other may participate in some experience of mutuality. Over and against Ricoeur's "third text," the ghastly absolute text which perfectly indexes the self and other--what Benjamin calls the messianic horizon of translation--this intersubjective space is a fourth text. [To numerate: not the text of the self (1), the other (2), the divine/ghost (3), but a 4th.] The fourth text is imperfect, immanent, concrete and collaborative. In this privileged-if-not-sacred space, the self and the other may experience the epiphany of corroboration, that is, the recognition of the self in the other, the closure of what had previously been perceived as an infinite distance separating the two. As the Pentecost illustrates, this closure occurs in language. To invoke Ricoeur again, the self and other mutually indwell what he elsewhere terms the "world of the text," which could also be termed the world of translation. Here the self and other are witness to a shared truth, or perhaps a truth shared in pieces, one among many. Authenticity is, then, not so much linked to the content but to the mode of that truth's disclosure, i.e., translation; the construction of the "comparable" and intersubjective fourth text, whereupon we may project our ownmost possibilities.
So, to just lay it on you, I think that Pentecost documents the new filiation of authenticity to translation, a moment which is concomitant with 1) the interment of what Ricoeur termed the absolute "third text," and 2) the invention of a "fourth text." This fourth text, an intersubjective space of mutual discovery, is what we call literature. The annulment of the absolute text did not yield silence but rather a proliferation of tongues; of truths. Literature does not precede translation, but, as Acts suggests, miraculously proceeds from it. It is in literature, in this infinite elegy for the absolute, where we find each other, and thus also our authentic selves.
Zach
PS
Please excuse these free associative wanderings.
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