Thinking Poetry: Philosophical Approaches to Nineteenth-Century French Poetry

233 Pages·2013·0.867 MB·English

by  Joseph Acquisto

Thinking Poetry
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Thinking Poetry
Philosophical Approaches to
Nineteenth- Century French Poetry
Edited by Joseph Acquisto
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thinking poetry
Copyright © Joseph Acquisto, 2013.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States— a
division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by
Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England,
company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has
companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United
Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN: 978- 1- 137- 30363- 9
Library of Congress Cataloging-i n- Publication Data
Acquisto, Joseph
Thinking poetry : philosophical approaches to nineteenth-c entury French poetry /
Joseph Acquisto, editor.
p. cm.
ISBN 978- 1- 137- 30363- 9 (alk. paper)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. French poetry— 19th century— History and criticism. 2. French literature—
Philosophy. 3. Philosophy, French, in literature. I. Acquisto, Joseph.
PQ439.T56 2013
841'.80915— dc23 2012035149
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Scribe Inc.
First edition: Februrary 2013
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Contents
Introduction 1
Joseph Acquisto
1 Baudelaire through Kierkegaard:
Art, Fallibility, and Faith 9
Edward K. Kaplan
2 Passages through Baudelaire:
From Poetry to Thought and Back 25
Catherine Witt
3 Otherwise than Being: Levinassian Ethics in
Victor Hugo’s “La Force des Choses” 43
Bradley Stephens
4 “Je est un autre”: Identity, Alterity, and Drug
Use in Baudelaire and De Quincey 59
Alain Toumayan
5 “Poésie- boucherie”: Baudelaire’s Aesthetics
and Ethics of Execution 75
Ève Morisi
6 Absolutely Absolute: Mallarmé, Blanchot,
and the Absence de livre 97
John McKeane
7 Blank Phenomenality 113
Claire Chi- ah Lyu
8 Mallarmé’s Tragico- Poetic Modernism 131
Emile Fromet de Rosnay
9 Mallarmé and the Ontologization of the Poem 149
David Nowell Smith
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vi Contents
10 Poetic Form and the Crisis of Community:
Revisiting Rancière’s Aesthetics 167
Alison James
11 Baudelaire with Badiou: Event and Subjectivity in
“L’Héautontimorouménos” 185
Joseph Acquisto
12 “Mesure parfaite et réinventée”: Édouard Glissant
Reinvents Nineteenth- Century French Poetry 203
Hugues Azérad
Contributors 221
Index 225
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Introduction
Joseph Acquisto
French poetry studies are at an important crossroads. While cul-
tural studies approaches have for some time dominated the field of
prose fiction, these methods have not proven as fertile in the domain of
lyric poetry, where theoretical points of reference often stretch further
back to the era of deconstruction. Recent years, however, have seen a
renewed interest in lyric poetry among literary critics whose work inter-
sects with philosophy. Contemporary philosophers such as Alain Badiou
and Philippe Lacoue- Labarthe have made nineteenth- century poetry cen-
tral to their philosophical projects in ways that suggest a potentially rich
site of interaction between philosophical inquiry and poetic production.
Other figures, such as Jacques Rancière and Giorgio Agamben, operate at
the boundary of philosophy and political theory, again with frequent ref-
erence to poetry, while contemporary poet- critics such as Michel Deguy
and Yves Bonnefoy often ground their writings on poetry in a dialogue
with their nineteenth- century poetic predecessors. On the contemporary
Anglo- American critical scene, the “ethical turn” in criticism that figures
in work by authors such as Martha Nussbaum, Richard Eldridge, and
Rita Felski invites us to examine poetry as a privileged site of expression
of subjectivity and relationship to an other.
This volume seeks to analyze and extend the connections between phi-
losophy and poetry as they manifest themselves in nineteenth- century
poetry studies. Featuring authors from both sides of the English- speaking
Atlantic, the book does not seek to treat nineteenth- century French poetry
merely as an “example” of philosophical concepts, or to claim that poets are
philosophers in disguise, but rather to establish a dialogue between poetry
and philosophy where each could be said to read the other. Why is it that
poets have played such an important role for contemporary philosophers?
What can that role be said to be, exactly? Can the new philosophical invest-
ment in poetry be seen as an extension of, or in opposition to, the ways in
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2 Joseph Acquisto
which deconstruction made poets such as Baudelaire and Mallarmé central
to its approach? How can poetry serve as an important link between phi-
losophy and political theory? How do formal considerations intersect with
philosophical approaches? These are some of the broader questions that
guide the authors in this volume. The theorists and philosophers studied
in these essays are among the most important and groundbreaking writ-
ers working today, such as Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, and Giorgio
Agamben, whose works push the boundaries of literature, philosophy, and
theory, positing new relations between aesthetics and politics in ways that
aim to give each its due. Other philosophers analyzed in this volume con-
centrate on the relationship of poetry to ethics, thus helping build the kinds
of bridges recently advocated by Rita Felski between “high- minded” theory
and lived experience (Felski 13). The authors in this volume contribute
to our understanding of the relationships between literature and philoso-
phy and between theory and lived experience, all the while providing new
insight into important poets of the nineteenth century.
There are many ways to conceive the relationship of philosophy and
poetry, from complementary to antagonistic; what emerges most strongly
from recent remarks by poets and philosophers about this relationship is
that it is most helpful to think of the rapport as a series of moments of
bringing together and drawing apart, a resonant and suggestive yet always
temporary reevaluation of how the two interact. Philosopher Nicolas Go
has recently commented on these interactions, and his comments could
serve as an effective starting point for dealing with these questions: “If the
philosopher seeks . . . truth, the poet aims rather at accuracy . . . The same
man can start as a philosopher and become a poet. Or vice versa. But then
he necessarily changes his relationship to language and the real” (Go 111).
What unites poetry and philosophy, then, is their goal of establishing a
relation with the real. Once we arrive at this joining point, however, we
are immediately aware that the common goal is sought by highly contrast-
ing methods and, most significantly, different concepts of what the real
at which we aim might be, how we might come to know it, and how we
could express that knowledge. Perhaps the most outspoken recent voice
to note the potential antagonism between philosophy and poetry when
it comes to defining and expressing the real is poet Yves Bonnefoy, for
whom poetry must necessarily surpass philosophy because it surpasses the
conceptual thinking that is philosophy’s trademark: “For me the idea of
poetry is that it should transgress conceptual thinking, and aim to ensure
the proper functioning of what such thinking renders difficult or even
impossible: namely, to become aware of our essentially finite nature and
of the needs and aspirations that it creates in us, to perceive the meaning
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Introduction 3
that poetry can find in life— that is, another way of knowing— and ulti-
mately to renew our relationship with others, which has been spoilt by
our inevitably abstract and fragmented approach through analytic think-
ing” (xix). Poetry, like philosophy, can be a way of knowing, and perhaps
even one that initially depends on philosophy but must ultimately affirm
other modes of human experience that cannot be expressed in any other
way and thus cannot be reduced to the logical arguments of philosophical
discourse. In this sense Bonnefoy is calling not for a rejection of the philo-
sophical enterprise through poetry but rather its extension and deepen-
ing; his arguments about the limits of standard prose discourse provide
an imminent critique of philosophy by using its methods, even though he
ultimately phrases these objections as a personal feeling (“for me”). Poetry
thus becomes another kind of philosophizing, although Bonnefoy would
not want to reduce poetry’s specificity by assimilating it to philosophy in
that way.
Perhaps it is best, then, to insist that what is most valuable in poetry lies
in the fact that it cannot be separated into its constituent elements without
losing all that would make it valuable. Bonnefoy hints as much when he
criticizes a “fragmented” approach; other theorists such as Jacques Rancière
have hearkened back to Stéphane Mallarmé himself in order to take up
these ideas of the extent to which a poem can contain a philosophy. He
notes that Mallarmé calls for philosophy to be “included and latent” in the
poem and goes on to ask what this could mean. Assuredly not, Rancière
says, “a ‘philosophical meaning’ to be discovered” in the poem (Rancière
81). Rather, philosophy must be present “in the specific way in which the
thought ‘takes place’ and the Idewa inscribes itself in the form of a poem,
beyond the ordinary forms of discursive thought” (81). But here the discus-
sion is starting to sound firmly anchored in the nineteenth century rather
than in our day; after all, the sorts of idealist perfection that Mallarmé
evokes have been greeted with much skepticism since his day. Alain Badiou
underscores the distance that separates us from Mallarmé’s generation but
still maintains the possibility of a space for poetry:
But the imagery of the poet- guide, already obsolete by the end of the nine-
teenth century, is utterly ruined in the twentieth. As heir to Mallarmé, the
twentieth century establishes another figure, that of the poet as secret, active
exception, as the custodian of lost thought. The poet is the protector, in
language, of a forgotten opening; he is, as Heidegger says, “the guardian
of the Open.” The poet, ignored, stands guard against perdition. We are
still immersed in the obsession with the real, since the poet guarantees that
language preserves the power to name this real. Such is the poet’s “restricted
action,” which remains a very elevated function. (Badiou 20– 21)
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