Badiou’s strategy for a philosophical investigation of the arts – and of avant-garde poetry in particular – relies on a belief that art is one of the key conditions for the emergence of universal truths. Accordingly, a poetry capable of hosting such an exigent possibility must negate both the mimetic impulse (to represent/express emotions, images, experiences, etc.) as well as the lyrical demands of conventional prosody such as form and sound, the unity and cohesion of an authorial voice, poetic subject matter, etc. As Elie During has recently written in Alain Badiou: Key Concepts (Acumen, 2010), “Badiou’s underlying poetics is at once anti-mimetic and anti-lyrical. Hermeneutics and aesthetics are thereby rejected in the same stroke.”
It's been awhile since I read any breathtaking poetry theory, so this hit a good spot. I'm in the middle of Deleuze and Guattari's, Thousand Plateaus, a text that surely by anyone's standards becomes poetry at times, and is full of breathtaking poetry theory (though incidentally, or by inference, or by who it inspires), at least it keeps sending my imagination into its outer limits, even on second and third reads, which may take me into the Fall at the rate I'm going, but Badiou is on the list for next.
No comments:
Post a Comment