Between Philosophy and Poetry

230 Pages·2002·0.757 MB·230\230

by  Massimo Verdicchio, Robert Burch

BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND POETRY
TEXTURES – PHILOSOPHY/LITERATURE/CULTURE
SERIES
Series editor: Hugh J. Silverman, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New
York, USA
An interdisciplinary series, Textures addresses questions of cultural meaning,
difference, and experience.
Extreme Beauty: Aesthetics, Politics, Death
Edited by James E. Swearingen and Joanne Cutting-Gray
Thresholds of Western Culture: Identity, Postcoloniality,
Transnationalism
Edited by John Burt Foster Jr. and Wayne J. Froman
Panorama: Philosophies of the Visible
Edited by Wilhelm S. Wurzer
Between Philosophy and Poetry: Writing, Rhythm, History
Edited by Massimo Verdicchio and Robert Burch
B E T W E E N P H I L O S O P H Y
A N D P O E T RY
WRITING, RHYTHM, HISTORY
EDITED BY
MASSIMO VERDICCHIO AND
ROBERT BURCH
Continuum
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London, SE1 7NX
370 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10017–6503
First published 2002
© Massimo Verdicchio, Robert Burch and the contributors 2002
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, or transmitted in any
form, or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 0–8264–6005–4 (hardback)
0–8264–6006–2 (paperback)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Between philosophy and poetry: writing, rhythm, and history / edited by Massimo
Verdicchio and Robert Burch.
p. cm — (Textures)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–8264–6005–4 — ISBN 0–8264–6006–2 (pbk.)
1. Philosophy. 2. Poetry. I. Verdicchio, Massimo, 1945–. II. Burch, Robert, 1949–.
III. Textures (New York, N.Y.)
B66 .B48 2002
101—dc21
2002074053
Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Biddles Ltd, Guildford and King’s Lynn
CONTENTS
General Introduction: Thinking Between Philosophy and Poetry 1
Robert Burch
Part One: Ethics of Writing
Introduction 11
1 Gesture and Word: The Practice of Philosophy and the Practice
of Poetry 15
Carlo Sini
2 The Rise and Fall of Reality: Socrates, Virtual Reality, and the
Birth of Philosophy from the “Spirit of Writing” 27
Alessandro Carrera
3 Analogical Thinking as a Friend of Interpretive Truth:
Reflections Based on Carlo Sini’s Images of Truth 41
Forrest Williams
Part Two: Truth, Texts, and the Narrative Self
Introduction 59
4 When Truth Becomes Woman: Male Traces and Female Signs 63
Eve Tavor Bannet
5 Orality and Writing: Plato’s Phaedrus and the Pharmakon Revisited 73
P. Christopher Smith
6 Ethics of the Narrative Self 91
Richard Kearney
Part Three: Poetry, Philosophy, and the Spirit of History
Introduction 101
7 Woburn on My Mind and in My (Mind’s) Eye: Beckett’s Poi¯esis 105
Stephen Barker
vi CONTENTS
8 The Naming of the Hymn: Heidegger and Hölderlin 117
Karen Feldman
9 On Transvaluing History: Rilke and Nietzsche 125
Richard Detsch
Part Four: The “Force of Rhythm” in Life, Philosophy, and Poetry
Introduction 139
10 Reflections on Speed 143
David Halliburton
11 The Meaning of Rhythm 161
Amittai Aviram
12 Mousike¯ Techn¯e: The Philosophical Practice of Music in Plato,
Nietzsche, and Heidegger 171
Babette E. Babich
Abbreviations 181
Notes 185
Bibliography 207
Index 215
Acknowledgments 219
Contributors 221
Editors 223
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
THINKING BETWEEN
PHILOSOPHY AND POETRY
Robert Burch
Ever since Plato banished poetry from the just regime – ironically, in a dia-
logue that has itself an essential narrative structure, an eiko¯n at its “logical”
center, and a myth at its conclusion – philosophy has looked askance at the
poetic. Metaphors, figures of speech, dramatic flourishes may be thought to
favor or hinder the exposition and promulgation of philosophical truths, but as
a rule they are judged accidental to the truth attained. In the extreme version
of this story, the accidental is cast as decidedly villainous. Not merely is
“figurative language” so much “frippery ornament” to the essential tasks of
philosophy, as for example Jeremy Bentham warns, but in its ambiguity and
pretence to real reference, it is virtually “unclean,” befuddling and upstaging
the “majestic simplicity of good sound sense.”1 Thus portrayed, the true danger
of figurative language does not lie in its being literally false but in its being a
sham, a mere “semblance of thinking,” a Scheingedanke in Frege’s words, that
comes on the scene unabashedly as if it possessed a genuine truth-value.2
Nowadays, however, this story is often told with a quite different plot,
moral, and characterization. In place of the primacy of nominal reference, we
are now advised à la Saussure “that signs, taken singly, do not signify anything,
that each one of them does not so much express a meaning as mark a divergence
of meaning between itself and other signs.” Accordingly, “the ability of lan-
guage to signify a thought or a thing directly is only a secondary power derived
from the inner life of language” itself.3 It follows then that metaphors and the
like cannot be straightway condemned as obvious deviations from an original
literal purity, and thereby as departures from “serious speech” and “truth,” since
on this account literal references themselves come into play only through a
prior interaction of signs. This tale, too, has its extreme version. Linguistic
meaning is not only said to originate from the interactions of signs, but this
interaction is also held to be both “omni-” and “infinite,” constituting a “differ-
ential network” in which “nothing, neither among the elements nor within the
system, is anywhere ever simply present or absent. There is only everywhere
2 BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND POETRY
differences and traces of traces.”4 In this version of the story, the traditional role
of philosophy – to make the absent, occluded “true in itself” totally present by
means of the “literal” word – is played out as merely one more substitution
within an open-ended interweaving of text. Traditional philosophy is thus
deprivileged, not on skeptical grounds that its word falls short of what lies
outside it, but because this story admits of no “outside” to the open play of
significations, no positive entities, and no center to “arrest and ground the play
of substitutions.”
However familiar this juxtaposition of extremes may now be, if it is taken at
face value and used to characterize what is at issue for thinking between phil-
osophy and poetry, it proves altogether misleading. For it takes for granted that
what is at issue in such thinking is a relation in which two discrete terms,
philosophy and poetry, are to be brought together, compared, and ordered. Yet
this is already to proceed in the traditional manner of philosophy. For it is to
assume in principle that the “disciplinary,” “textual” identities of philosophy and
poetry are determined in and through a relational opposition in which one or
other of the terms must inevitably be privileged as the positive term from
which the relation is first posited. The privileged term will then serve to define
the ground of the relation as such. Of course, traditionally, philosophy has
claimed this privilege for itself in the name of “Truth.” Yet even were one to
reverse this traditional order of privilege, so as to valorize poetry over
philosophy in the name of a superfluity of meaning, the same traditional
assumptions and implications about the issue itself would remain in place.
Consequently, in the first instance, we would be left with a “philosophical”
reduction of meaning to truth in which the poetic dimensions of thinking were
deliberately occluded and excised. In the second, we would be left with a
“poetic” reduction of truth to meaning, which brings with it all of the trad-
itional relativist complications, along with the problematics of deriving refer-
ence from sense. In either case, a genuine space for thinking between philosophy
and poetry would effectively vanish.
It might well be argued, however, that this way of setting up the issue in the
first place misrepresents at least one of the alternatives. To subvert philosophy’s
traditional role as truth-teller in the name of infinite semiosis and the superfluity
of meaning is not simply to put poetry by default in the traditional place of
privilege. It is instead to render the interplay of poetic and philosophical dis-
courses ultimately undecidable, in such a way as to make untenable the assump-
tion that their relational juxtaposition is absolute and original. Thinking between
philosophy and poetry would occupy the space of this ultimate “undecidability.”
The essays collected in this volume are intended as characteristic examples of
such thinking. As such, they serve by example to define the interplay of phil-
osophy and poetry as what (in Heideggerian terms) might be called die Sache des
Denkens, the matter of thinking. They represent a wide variety of perspectives
and concerns both within and upon the topic. Their collective purpose, how-
ever, is not to summarize the various possible “positions” that might be taken on
the philosophy/poetry relation, or to indicate which, if any, of these positions is
according to current fashion academically reputable. Even less is their purpose
to advance (either directly through a sustained argument or indirectly through
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 3
the juxtaposition of the essays themselves) any one particular position as being
the “last word.” As it is construed here, thinking between philosophy and poetry
does not so much represent a position as a “dis-position” to sustain the
philosophy/poetry interplay. By means of a variety of concrete examples, we
have sought in this volume to hold open the space for such thinking as the topic
of our shared interest. The attempt, however, calls for a few words of introduc-
tion, if only to help clarify – albeit superficially and even tendentiously – the
initial terms around which this volume has been organized.
By the term “poetry” we understand here neither exclusively nor even prin-
cipally what in the current lexical definition typically falls under the rubric of
“poesy,” that is, metrical and/or imaginative discourse designed above all to
evoke an aesthetic response, as opposed, for example, to discourse having as its
purpose apophantic truth-telling. Without pausing to discuss this disavowal in
detail, suffice it to remind ourselves that, since Nietzsche and Heidegger, no
one can simply take for granted the divisions and determinations of the
apophantic and aesthetic upon which this usual definition of the poetic turns,
nor the ready equation of poetry with meter and verse that it posits. Instead, to
begin with we understand the term “poetic” here in the broadest etymological
sense to encompass the whole domain of poie¯sis as that of the creative production
of meaning. Following etymology, we likewise construe the term “philosophy”
in a similarly broad way as philosophia, the love of wisdom, expressed in the
quest for truth. In the broadest terms, then, as a tentative, working characteriza-
tion we mean by thinking between philosophy and poetry, a discourse bounded
by the interplay of meaning and truth.
Admittedly, there is a sense in which this initial characterization might
seem to offer little or no advantage. If it served in effect merely to recast the
interplay of philosophy and poetry as a relation between truth and meaning,
then it would only serve to reintroduce under different names the very closures
and oppositional relations from which we seek expressly to abstain. How we
might avoid this lapse thus needs at least some explanation.
The case of poetry ought to be a familiar one. According to tradition, “the
race of poets is divine,” and as such does at least occasionally hit upon truth, if
only by the unmethodical means of grace and inspiration.5 In this regard, even
the prosaic Aristotle concedes that poetry is “more philosophical and serious
than history,” insofar as it tells a “general truth [ta katholou].”6 Traditionally,
then, the issue has not been whether poetic meaning is related to truth but how
it is related and how its claim upon truth is warranted.
The case of philosophy is less familiar, precisely because it is one that the
philosophers themselves have tended to suppress. According to tradition,
Pythagoras coins the term philosophos to denote one who “seeks for truth
[the¯ratai ... te¯s ale¯theias].”7 In offering this characterization, however, he uses a
metaphor, that of the festival, ta Olumpia, with philosophers being cast as
theatai, the “spectators,” whose defining excellence is that they simply look at
the Games in order to get the sense of it all. In the metaphor, the philosopher’s
love of truth is at the same time a love of “the finest sights” (to¯n kallisto¯n
theo¯rian), from which they glean a comprehensive meaning. Thus, according
to this hagiograph, philosophy has situated itself from the beginning