The Age of the Poets: And Other Writings on Twentieth-Century Poetry and Prose | Reviews | Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

This quantity gathers collectively Alain Badiou’s fugitive writings on literary modernism, or what Badiou calls “the age of the poets,” which on his chronology extends from Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91) to Paul Celan (1920-70). Badiou’s touchstone is Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98), particularly Mallarmé’s conception of la poésie pur during which the poem is now not a type of mediation however a materialization of language whose phrases are scattered as if by probability throughout the white house of the printed web page.[1] In “Crise de vers” (1896), for instance, Mallarmé writes:

If a poem is to be pure, the poet’s voice have to be stilled and the initiative taken by the phrases themselves, which will probably be set in movement as they meet unequally in collision. And in an alternate of gleams they may flame out like some glittering swath of fireside sweeping over valuable stones, and thus change the audible inhaling lyric poetry of previous — change the poet’s personal private and passionate management of verse.[2]

What makes Badiou’s occasional items of curiosity is that they quantity to a Marxist’s protection of poetry towards, for instance, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Marxist anti-modernist polemic, Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (1947):

Poets are males who refuse to make the most of language. Now, because the quest for fact takes place in and by language conceived as a sure sort of instrument, it’s pointless to think about that they purpose to discern or expound the true . . . . The truth is, the poet has withdrawn from the language-instrument in a single motion. As soon as and for all he has chosen the poetic perspective that considers phrases as issues and never as indicators.[3]

Poetry, turned away from the world (on the improper aspect of language), is mere bourgeois aestheticism. Against this, for the author of prose (Marx, for instance, or Sartre as he imagines himself) phrases should not issues however actions (p. 23). They’re interventions by which the author engages the world so as to change it: “To put in writing is each to reveal the world and to supply it as a process to the generosity of the reader” (p. 65).

Badiou doesn’t instantly gainsay Sartre (his mentor). The truth is, he says that poetry “is just not an aesthetic class” (“The Age of the Poets,” p. 3); somewhat, it’s a type of considering with out predication, as when Mallarmé, in a well-known letter from 1867, describes his mental “disaster” as a self-annihilating expertise during which “My thought has thought itself by and reached a pure thought”: specifically, the thought of nothingness, le Néant (Mallarmé, p. 93).[4] Whereas conventional philosophy has “sutured” itself to science and politics, poetry is pure considering — “a type of considering with out data, and even: a correctly incalculable thought” (“What Does the Poem Suppose?” [1992], p. 33).

The suspicion that Heidegger has had a hand in shaping Badiou’s place is confirmed by his essay on “The Philosophical Standing of the Poem after Heidegger” (1992), the place poetry is alleged to free considering from the logic of propositions during which phrases are mere “phrases” of designation in representational-calculative considering. As Heidegger says in Was Heisst Denken? (1954), “Considering has this enigmatic property, that it itself is dropped at its personal mild — although provided that and solely so long as it’s considering, and retains away from persisting in ratiocination about ratio.”[5] Considering is, on this respect, untheorizable. It isn’t fabricated from ideas however, like poetry, is fabricated from phrases, the place phrases are somewhat extra sounds than indicators or devices of nomination, assertion, and illustration. Considering is much less an act than a duty or responsiveness to what requires it, specifically (like Augustine’s time) that which resists the grasp of ideas, as if considering had been drawn earlier than the rest towards the unthinkable.

In any occasion, Badiou’s paradoxical place in “What Does the Poem Suppose?” is that “the poem is an unthinkable thought” (p. 48) — for instance, “the pure notion of ‘there’s,’ within the very effacement of its empirical objectivity” (p. 51). Recall Emmanuel Levinas on the “there’s” (il y a), existence with out existents: “There’s, basically, with out it mattering what there’s, with out our having the ability to repair a substantive to this time period. There’s is an impersonal kind, as in it rains, or it’s heat. Its anonymity is crucial.”[6] Because the il y a is just not something that is, so poetic considering is, like Mallarmé’s poem, autonomous, as if one may say that considering is only intransitive: it thinks.

Which is all very nicely, till one realizes that Badiou appears impatient along with his personal paradoxes, as when, in “The Age of the Poets,” he extracts from poetry “sure maxims of thought” — for instance: “Rimbaud . . . declares the expiration of the cogito because the investigation of all potential thought” (p. 6). Or, once more, when he cites the Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa (writing underneath certainly one of his heteronyms, Álvaro de Campos): “it’s indispensable to consider nothing” —

To consider nothing

Is to totally possess the soul.

To consider nothing

Is to intimately dwell

Life’s ebb and stream.[7]

If Badiou’s thesis is that “the age of the poets animates a polemic towards which means” (p. 16), he however finds such clear assertions handy to his goal. Likewise in “Poetry and Communism” (a 2014 lecture on the Sorbonne revealed right here for the primary time), poetry is just not “excited about nothing” however engagement in Sartre’s sense (notably in its celebration of the Spanish Civil Battle):

These poems inform us that the communist thought is the compassion for the straightforward lifetime of the individuals stricken by inequality and injustice — that it’s the broad imaginative and prescient of a elevating up, each in thought and in follow, which is against resignation and adjustments it right into a affected person heroism (p. 107).

Little doubt it is unreasonable to require occasional writings (spanning almost a half-century) to suit collectively just like the consecutive integers of an argument. Dialecticians, in spite of everything, have at all times bent the legislation of non-contradiction. For instance, in “The Autonomy of the Aesthetic Course of” (1966), Badiou remarks upon “the paradox of the vital process of socialist realism,” which “consists in figuring out the ideological existence of the artworks, by producing the ideas of their historic belonging. Nevertheless it additionally consists in unveiling the theoretical existence that marks the singularity of the ‘nice works'” (p. 114). On this occasion the social realist “will use neither the scientific ideas used to explain the historic course of, nor ideological ideas. It is going to require new ideas which may register the literariness of the textual content” (p. 116).

And the place are these “new ideas” to be discovered besides within the writings of poets and artists themselves? Mallarmé is Badiou’s exemplar, however one may begin with the early German Romantics, who invented the notion of poetry as such: poetry that’s now not within the service of the Church, the State, and the College, nor of something exterior of the phrases of which it’s made. Therefore Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829) in certainly one of his “Athenaeum Fragments”: “The romantic sort of poetry is the one one that’s greater than a form, that’s, because it had been, poetry itself” (#116).[8]

Maybe one may consider Badiou as certainly one of “the final romantics” whose socialist realism divides him towards himself (consider Rimbaud’s well-known motto: Je est un autre). In “What Does Literature Suppose?” (2005), he states the realist’s place that the “concept that literature thinks . . . can solely imply that it opens up the realm of the actual” (p. 133), however his mannequin is however “Flaubert’s prose, which, because of its fashion (a vital operation in literature), the writer supposed to exist in its personal proper, with no imaginary referent on the earth” (p. 135). (Recall Flaubert’s dream of writing

a ebook about nothing, a ebook depending on nothing exterior, which might be held collectively by the energy of its fashion, simply because the earth, suspended within the void, is dependent upon nothing for its help; a ebook that may have virtually no topic, or at the very least during which the topic could be virtually invisible, if such a factor is feasible.)[9]

So maybe it’s not stunning that Badiou devotes a lot of the second half of his ebook to readings of leftist novelists like Natacha Michel, whose work is “wise and formal on the similar time,” bewitching philosophy “to the purpose the place which means is able to doing with out the idea,” and who “holds quick to the literary montage of machines, and even of machinations, whose formal autonomy is apt to open up and seize — with out submitting to — the supply of some which means” (p. 155).

Likewise, in “Void, Collection, Clearing: Essay on the Prose of Severo Sarduy” (2000), Badiou admires Sarduy’s indifference to “every part that could possibly be acknowledged as agreeable kind, or as kind whose labour of recognition we may do with out in order to go straight to no matter wise signification it organizes” (p. 184). And in his closing essay, “Pierre Guyotat, Prince of Prose” (2015), Badiou engages the infamous writer of Éden, Éden, Éden, banned in 1970 (in France!) for its seemingly infinite stream of sexual and scatological imagery, however which Badiou admires for its extravagant phrasing — the heaping up of typically weird nouns and verbs linked by innumerable commas and semicolons earlier than terminating arbitrarily in a interval.[10]

Whether or not the texts of those authors could be counted as examples of “what literature thinks” is just not at all times clear, except what requires considering is just “the phrase as such,” the phrase left unaddressed by logic, linguistics, and philosophy of language — what Marjorie Perloff, writing on the Russian Futurists, calls “the phrase let loose” from every part besides its personal materials disposition on the web page.[11]

As if language remained philosophy’s “unthinkable thought.”