The lyric is a form or genre of poetry often intimately related to subjectivity. But is a lyricism divested of the subject possible? By examining the philosophical refl ections of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe upon lyricism, poetry, and their relation to subjectivity, this article explicates how an impersonal lyricism is not only possible, but perhaps necessary. If we wish to do justice to the phrasing or saying of poetic language, then we must endeavour to think the displacement of the subject in and (...) by the very language that the poem expresses. Following Lacoue-Labarthe, this article explores the paradoxical turn of lyricism—that it is bound to the subject, but not to its personal expression; rather, to its disappearance, its displacement, in the expression of language itself. By tracing a sketch of Lacoue-Labarthe’s poetics, relating this thought to the lyrical theories of Hamburger and Culler, and providing a brief explication of one of Lacoue-Labarthe’s “poetic” writings, lyricism is shown to be the testament to the disappearance of the subject, the remainder of a disappearance already passed insofar as the poem remains. What remains is that the lyrical subject would be no “subject” at all—only language itself, intimating its own diction. (shrink)

Rather than examining the possibilities of the relation between phenomenology and literature as they are conditioned by the imaginary image, this paper takes up the impossibility essential to this relation, bound to the question of its experience, to the experience of literature. The question of what “the experience of literature” is, what it signifies and directs itself towards, is explicated and unravelled in an analysis of the experience of the writer (and, at times, the reader), with the aid of Emmanuel (...) Levinas’ few engagements with art and literature, paired with the thought of Maurice Blanchot on the interruption of writing (in both the subjective and objective genitives). In tracing what passes through consciousness in this experience of literature, marking its impasses and its faltering approaches, the impossibility exposed in the experience of literature shall be shown to be necessary for opening and maintaining the distance binding phenomenology and literature in their separation and their traversal of the image. (shrink)

The question of communism as a real political possibility, if not the most necessary political possibility, seems entirely foreign or strange in our world today. Just as striking is the claim that communism is inextricably linked with literature. But both of these claims are made by the often-overlooked and as-yet untranslated French thinker and political activist Dionys Mascolo. By examining and explicating Mascolo’s strange (re)conception of communism, with the aid of the thought of his friend Maurice Blanchot concerning communication and (...) friendship, this article will explore another communism, between politics and literature—a communism of the future, a communism of thought, which approaches human need in a manner radically different from the common conception of communism. (shrink)