Poems are not the only things we sometimes call poetic. We experience as poetic also prose passages, as well as films, music, visual art, and even occurrences in daily life. But what is it exactly for something to be poetic in this wider sense? Discussion of the poetic in this sense is virtually nonexistent in the extant analytic literature. The aim of this article is to get a start on trying to come to grips with this (...) phenomenon—the poetic as an aesthetic category that outruns poetry as an art form. It proposes an initial sketch of an account in terms of the fittingness of certain affective reactions to artworks and other things, reactions featuring notably elements of tenderness and elevation. (shrink)

In _The Poetics of Political Thinking_ Davide Panagia focuses on the role that aesthetic sensibilities play in theorists’ evaluations of political arguments. Examining works by thinkers from Thomas Hobbes to Jacques Rancière, Panagia shows how each one invokes aesthetic concepts and devices, such as metaphor, mimesis, imagination, beauty, and the sublime. He argues that it is important to recognize and acknowledge these poetic forms of representation because they provide evaluative standards that theorists use in appraising the value of ideas—ideas (...) about justice, politics, and democratic life. An investigation into the intertwined histories of aesthetic and political accounts of representation—such as Panagia presents here—sheds light on how modes of poetic thinking delimit the questions of unity and diversity that continue to animate contemporary political theory. Panagia not only illuminates the structure of much contemporary political theory but also shows why understanding the poetics of political thinking is vital to contemporary society. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s critique of negation and his privileging of paradox as the source of political thought, Panagia suggests that a non-teleological concept of difference might generate insight into pressing questions about foreignness and citizenship. Turning to the liberal/poststructural debate that dominates contemporary political theory, he compares John Rawls’s concept of justice to Rancière’s ideas about political disagreement in order to demonstrate how, despite their differences, both thinkers comprehend aesthetic and moral reasoning as part and parcel of political writing. Considering the writings of William Hazlitt and Jürgen Habermas, he describes how the essay has become the exemplary genre of what is considered rational political argument. _The Poetics of Political Thinking_ is a compelling reappraisal of the role of representation within political thought. (shrink)

Caretaker-infant attachment is a complex but well-recognized adaptation in humans. An early instance of (or precursor to) attachment behavior is the dyadic interaction between adults and infants of 6 to 24 weeks, commonly called "babytalk." Detailed analysis of 1 minute of spontaneous babytalk with an 8-week infant shows that the poetic texture of the mother’s speech—specifically its use of metrics, phonetics, and foregrounding—helps to shape and direct the baby’s attention, as it also coordinates the partners’ emotional communication. We hypothesize (...) that the ability to respond to poetic features of language is present as early as the first few weeks of life and that this ability attunes cognitive and affective capacities in ways that provide a foundation for the skills at work in later aesthetic production and response. By linking developmental social processes with formal cognitive aspects of art, we challenge predominant views in evolutionary psychology that literary art is a superfluous byproduct of adaptive evolutionary mechanisms or primarily an ornament created by sexual selection. (shrink)

The Poetic Structure of the World is a major reconsideration of a crucial turningpoint in Western thought and culture: the heliocentric revolution of Copernicus and Kepler. FernandHallyn treats the work of these two figures not simply in terms of the history of science orastronomy, but as events embedded in a wider field of images, symbols, texts, and practices. Thesenew representations of the universe, he insists, cannot be explained by recourse to explanations of"genius" or "intuition."Instead, Hallyn investigates the problem of (...) how new scientific hypothesesare actually formed and the complex way in which certain facts and not others are selected tosupport a particular theory. He contends that the scientific imagination is not fundamentallydifferent from a mythic or poetic imagination and that the work of Copernicus and Kepler must beexamined on the level of rhetorical structure. Hallyn shows the sun-centered universe to beinseparable from the aesthetic, epistemological, theological, and social imperatives of bothneoplatonism and mannerism in the sixteenth centuryFernand Hallyn is a Professor in the Departmentof French Literature at the University of Ghent. Distributed for Zone Books. (shrink)

House. From cellar to garret. Significance of the hut -- House and universe -- Drawers, chests and wardrobes -- Nests -- Shells -- Corners -- Miniature -- Intimate immensity -- Dialectics of outside and inside -- Phenomenology of roundness.

In Poetics of Reverie he considers the absolute origins of that imagery: language, sexuality, childhood, the Cartesian ego, and the universe.

The Poetics of Psychoanalysis explores the literary aspects of the twentieth-century psychoanalytic tradition that has come to be known as British Object Relations psychoanalysis. It focuses on the writing of Klein, Sharpe, Riviere, Isaacs, Winnicott, Milner, and Bion. Giving a central place to literary and aesthetic concerns, it makes connections with particular works of literature and art. The Poetics of Psychoanalysis is aimed at literary readers, but will also be of interest to psychoanalytic practitioners.

'Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science is a survey that attempts to describe a hypothetic philosophy--the avant-garde pseudo-science imagined by Alfred Jarry. 'Pataphysics is a supplement to metaphysics, accenting it, then replacing it, in order to create a philosophic alternative, whose discipline can study cases, not of conception, but of exception: variance , alliance , and deviance . 'Pataphysics synthesizes the romantic schism between a literal, scientized discourse and a figural, poeticized discourse, and my thesis suggests that this revision (...) of the signifier "science" by 'pataphysics is symptomatic of a postmodern transition in science from a paradigm of absolutism to a paralogy of relativism. Structured as a descriptive explication, which emphasizes a theoretical perspective, this survey is divided into five chapters: the first chapter recounts the history of the conflict between science and poetry ; the second chapter examines the avant-garde pseudo-science of 'pataphysics itself ; and finally, the last three chapters discuss the influence of 'pataphysics upon the poetics of its subsequent successors . While my thesis focuses upon theories of textual poetics rather than poetry itself , my thesis does nevertheless strive to be as conceptually encyclopedic as 'pataphysics itself: instead of normalizing 'pataphysics within one theoretical perspective, this survey alludes intermittently to 'pataphysical enterprises that constitute exceptions to such a genealogy of Jarryites. What is at stake is the status of poetry in a world of science. How might poetry reclaim its own viable truth? How might science benefit from its own poetic irony? For the postmodern condition, such questions have already opened up a novel space for speculative imagination; hence, this survey presents itself as a kind of primer for a future of possible research. (shrink)

The Poetic Character of Human Activity: Collected Essays on the Thought of Michael Oakshott is a collection of nine essays by two Oakeshott scholars, most of which explore the meaning of Oakeshott’s pregnant phrase, “the poetic character of human activity” by comparing and contrasting this central idea with similar and opposing ones, in particular those of the Chinese thinkers, Zhuangzi and Confucius, but also of Western thinkers such as Plato, Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin. Common themes addressed include (...) the poetic or non-instrumental aspects of philosophizing, teaching and learning, morality and governance. (shrink)

"A close analysis of the Republic's diverse literary styles shows how the peculiarities of verbal texture in Platonic discourse can be explained by Plato's remolding of tropes and techniques from poetry and the Presocratics. This book argues that Plato smuggles poetic language into the Republic's prose in order to characterize the deceitful coloration and polymorphy that accompanies the world of Becoming as opposed to the Real. Plato's distinctive discourse thus can transmit, even to those figures focused on the visual (...) within his Republic, the shiftiness of the base and the unjust."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

The Poetics of Resistance: Heidegger's Line is a well-informed, carefully written, and detailed treatment of the political implications of Heidegger's philosophy in its Derridean acceptation. It argues that what Heidegger calls poetic dwelling--an element of Heidegger's later thinking often ignored by his more vehement critics--is at once disruptive (of the smooth functioning of technology) and community-founding. To engage in such thoughtful, poetic dwelling is to "cross the line."Roth argues, with Derrida against Heidegger, that crossing this line is not (...) a move into irrationalism (to say nothing of National Socialism); and he argues, with Heidegger against Derrida, that crossing the line, successful resistance, is possible. Grounded in the classics of German scholarship but reaching out to its creative appropriation in postmodernism, The Poetics of Resistance makes an important and timely contribution to the recuperation of a political philosophy from postmodernity. (shrink)

The Poetic Structure of the World is a major reconsideration of a crucial turning point in Western thought and culture: the heliocentric revolution of Copernicus and Kepler. Fernand Hallyn treats the work of these two figures not simply in terms of the history of science or astronomy, but as events embedded in a wider field of images, symbols, texts, and practices. These new representations of the universe, he insists, cannot be explained by recourse to explanations of "genius" or "intuition."Instead, (...) Hallyn investigates the problem of how new scientific hypotheses are actually formed and the complex way in which certain facts and not others are selected to support a particular theory. He contends that the scientific imagination is not fundamentally different from a mythic or poetic imagination and that the work of Copernicus and Kepler must be examined on the level of rhetorical structure. Hallyn shows the sun-centered universe to be inseparable from the aesthetic, epistemological, theological, and social imperatives of both neoplatonism and mannerism in the sixteenth centuryFernand Hallyn is a Professor in the Department of French Literature at the University of Ghent. Distributed for Zone Books. (shrink)

The Poetic Structure of the World is a major reconsideration of a crucial turning point in Western thought and culture: the heliocentric revolution of Copernicus and Kepler. Fernand Hallyn treats the work of these two figures not simply in terms of the history of science or astronomy, but as events embedded in a wider field of images, symbols, texts, and practices. These new representations of the universe, he insists, cannot be explained by recourse to explanations of "genius" or "intuition."Instead, (...) Hallyn investigates the problem of how new scientific hypotheses are actually formed and the complex way in which certain facts and not others are selected to support a particular theory. He contends that the scientific imagination is not fundamentally different from a mythic or poetic imagination and that the work of Copernicus and Kepler must be examined on the level of rhetorical structure. Hallyn shows the sun-centered universe to be inseparable from the aesthetic, epistemological, theological, and social imperatives of both neoplatonism and mannerism in the sixteenth centuryFernand Hallyn is a Professor in the Department of French Literature at the University of Ghent. Distributed for Zone Books. (shrink)

One of the central features of Western existence is the objectification and use of other beings in creating the subjectification of human beings. My argument is for a Christian veganism that rejects the dependence of the subject on the object status of other beings. The roadblocks to recognizing the necessity for Christian veganism I call the pedagogy of the oppressor. I propose that one way to change the subject-object relationship is a poetics of Christian engagement. Christian veganism may seem a (...) radical position theoretically and pragmatically, but I will offer suggestions for expanding Christian engagement with other animals and for the food and environmental justice movements of which veganism is a part. (shrink)

What is it about the nature of "soul" that makes it so difficult to adequately capture its complexity in a strictly discursive account? Why do some of the most profound human experiences elude our attempts to theorize them? How can a written document do justice to the dynamic activity of thinking, as opposed to merely presenting a collection of thoughts-as-artifacts? Finally, what can we learn about the activity of philosophizing, and about the human soul, by reflecting on the possibilities and (...) limitations of writing? These concerns, in various forms and in different registers, have preoccupied Michael Davis throughout his distinguished career. This volume is in honor of, and in dialogue with, Davis's work, which spans ancient philosophy and literature, continental philosophy and political philosophy. It includes original essays by numerous distinguished scholars in the fields of philosophy and political science. The remarkable range and caliber of the contributions attest to the breadth and depth of Davis's influence. The essays in Part I of the volume explore the nature of soul through the lens of tragedy. Part II consists of three essays that explore the human longing for perfect knowledge and completion--and the obstacles to the fulfilment of that longing--in relation to the divine. In Part III, the essays address the distinctive challenges of the political sphere and philosophy's relation to it. And while the relationship between philosophy and poetry is an implicit theme throughout the volume, the essays in Part IV focus directly on philosophy's aestheticizing tendencies. Many different philosophical and literary works are discussed throughout these chapters, including ancient works such as Plato's Republic, Euthydemus and Laws, Homer's Iliad, and Euripides' Trojan Women, as well as works by modern philosophers such as Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. In addition, three essays analyze some of Shakespeare's plays in relation to the thought of Plato and Machiavelli. All of the essays are thematically linked by a common thread as they attend to the poetic dimension of philosophical thinking. Michael Davis is Professor of Philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College, where he has taught since 1977 and has been the Sarah Yates Exley Chair in Teaching Excellence (2003-2005). He has also taught on the graduate faculty at Fordham University and the New School for Social Research. He is the author of numerous articles and books, which include: Ancient Tragedy and the Origins of Modern Science; The Poetry of Philosophy: On Aristotle's Poetics; The Politics of Philosophy: A Commentary on Aristotle's Politics; The Autobiography of Philosophy; Rousseau's The Reveries of the Solitary Walker; Wonderlust: Ruminations on Liberal Education; and The Soul of the Greeks: An Inquiry. He is also co-translator (with Seth Benardete) of Aristotle's On Poetics. Contributors include: Abraham Anderson, Jonathan Badger, Robert Berman, Ronna Burger, Kenneth DeLuca, Gwenda-lin Grewal, Scott Hemmenway, Paul Kirkland, Mary Nichols, Denise Schaeffer, Paul Stern, Richard Velkley, Lisa Pace Vetter, Ann Ward, Lee Ward, Catherine Zuckert and Michael Zuckert. About the Editor: Denise Schaeffer is Professor of Political Science at the College of the Holy Cross. She is the author of Rousseau on Education, Freedom and Judgment and contributing co-editor (with Christopher Dustin) of Socratic Philosophy and Its Others. She is co-editor (with Gregory McBrayer and Mary P. Nichols) of the Focus Philosophical Library edition of Plato's Euthydemus, for which she authored the Introduction and co-authored the Interpretive Essay. (shrink)

This volume integrates aspects of the Poetics into the broader corpus of Aristotelian philosophy. It both deals with some old problems raised by the treatise, suggesting possible solutions through contextualization, and also identifies new ways in which poetic concepts could relate to Aristotelian philosophy. In the past, contextualization has most commonly been used by scholars in order to try to solve the meaning of difficult concepts in the Poetics. In this volume, rather than looking to explain a specific concept, (...) the contributors observe the concatenation of Aristotelian ideas in various treatises in order to explore some aesthetic, moral and political implications of the philosopher's views of tragedy, comedy and related genres. Questions addressed include: Does Aristotle see his interest in drama as part of his larger research on human natures? What are the implications of tragic plots dealing with close family members for the polis? What should be the role of drama and music in the education of citizens? How does dramatic poetry relate to other arts and what are the ethical ramifications of the connections? How specific are certain emotions to literary genres and how do those connect to Aristotle's extended account of pathe? Finally, how do internal elements of composition and language in poetry relate to other domains of Aristotelian thought? The Poetics in its Aristotelian Context offers a fascinating new insight to the Poetics, and will be of use to anyone working on the Poetics, or Aristotelian philosophy more broadly. (shrink)

This paper intends to understand the experience of enlightenment in Zen Buddhism from a perspective of poetics. Enlightenment is understood as an existential breakthrough, which delivers people from the habitual or conventional mind set into new horizon of consciousness. This breakthrough takes place in one’s overall consciousness rather than only in cognitive thought. Therefore, it cannot be adequately described on an abstract level with a conceptual paradigm. The poetic language provides a significant alternative for capturing this leap and revealing (...) the spiritual meaning and the practical wisdom of enlightenment. Enlightenment, as concrete experiences in the “flux” of the mind, can be most directly expressed and effectively transmitted in poetic language. (shrink)

Elkins provides an abundantly illustrated history of the theory and practice of perspective. Looking at key texts from the Renaissance to the present, he traces a fundamental historical change that took place in the way in which perspective was conceptualized; first a technique for constructing pictures, it slowly became a metaphor for subjectivity.

W. B. Yeats's great celebration of the human imagination, ‘Byzantium’, of which these are the first and last verses, is concerned with the tension, reconciliation and movement between two types of sensibility, the sensual and the spiritual, that of natural life and that of transcendent symbol, in this poem imaged as ‘the fury and the mire of human veins’ and as ‘bird or golden handiwork . . . of changeless metal’. In it, as Richard Ellmann puts it, ‘the teeming images, (...) “that dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea”, flood up to the marbles of Byzantium itself, where they are at last brought under control by “the golden smithies of the Emperor”’ – himself, inter alia , an image of poet. (shrink)

In The Poetic Axis of Ethics, Kelly Oliver argues that in Derrida's The Beast and the Sovereign Volume II, a line of poetry from Celan becomes the axis around which Derrida's analysis of world, death, and ethics revolves: ‘Die Welt ist fort, ich muß dich tragen’ [The world is far away, I must carry you]. Oliver maintains that the Celan fragment, which is repeated in nearly every session, is not only the axis around which Derrida binds the unlikely duo (...) Robinson-Heidegger, but also it is a performance of a certain poetic world making that Derrida proposes as a counterbalance to sovereign world building. (shrink)

The essays collected in this issue offer complementary critical perspectives on the mature lyric work of Derek Walcott, the acclaimed Nobel laureate from the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. The centerpiece of the ensemble is a previously unpublished essay in which Walcott’s reflections on poetics illuminate his project in the masterpiece, _Omeros._ Other contributions by literary scholars in North America and the Caribbean focus on fundamental dimensions of Walcott’s craft and on such thematic preoccupations as the intersection of pictorial and (...) verbal modes of representation, the deployment of nuanced intertextual strategies (especially in relation to the Greco-Roman canon), the invention of a viable artistic identity in a postcolonial intercultural milieu, and the psychosocial modeling of the process of literary apprenticeship. _Contributors. _Edward Baugh, Peter Burian, Gregson Davis, Carol Dougherty, Joseph Farrell, Judith Harris, Timothy Hofmeister, Derek Walcott. (shrink)

The essays collected in this issue offer complementary critical perspectives on the mature lyric work of Derek Walcott, the acclaimed Nobel laureate from the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. The centerpiece of the ensemble is a previously unpublished essay in which Walcott’s reflections on poetics illuminate his project in the masterpiece, _Omeros._ Other contributions by literary scholars in North America and the Caribbean focus on fundamental dimensions of Walcott’s craft and on such thematic preoccupations as the intersection of pictorial and (...) verbal modes of representation, the deployment of nuanced intertextual strategies, the invention of a viable artistic identity in a postcolonial intercultural milieu, and the psychosocial modeling of the process of literary apprenticeship. _Contributors. _Edward Baugh, Peter Burian, Gregson Davis, Carol Dougherty, Joseph Farrell, Judith Harris, Timothy Hofmeister, Derek Walcott. (shrink)

This paper explores how the poetic speaks to philosophical treatments of post-truth. In doing so, it reconsiders the relationship between poetry and philosophy, and the aspects of the poetic that are pertinent to the performance of rumour. It examines classic performances of rumour in both philosophy and poetry, through the lens of Nietzsche’s account of poetry as a rhythm that creates an economy of memory. In doing so, it suggests that the poetic can alert us to the (...) ways in which different dimensions of rhythm and memory are at work in the ‘post-truth age.’. (shrink)

The Ancient Greeks understood both art and technology (techne) as imitation (mimesis) of Nature (physis). This article argues that the rapidly growing ecological innovation strategy known as biomimicry makes it possible for technology to leave behind the modern goal of “mastering and possessing” Nature and instead to rediscover the initial vocation it shared with art: imitating Nature. This in turn suggests a general strategy for philosophical inquiry into the biomimetic principle of “Nature as model”: the transposition of philosophical analyses of (...) concepts associated primarily with poetics and related fields—mimesis, mimicry, translation, analogy, metaphor, etc.—into the philosophy of biomimicry. (shrink)

Heidegger repeatedly performs the encounter of thinking and poetry, explicitly for the sake of inaugurating a non-metaphysical way of thinking. This transformed thinking is to be poetic and non-conceptual, eschewing the comfort of transparent meaning, the grasping power of concepts, the presentational force of images, or the self-evident correctness of propositional statements. The need for such a non-metaphysical thinking arises historically, at the endpoint of the epoch of the completion of metaphysics, when it comes to roost in the Gestell, (...) the technological essencing of being, which pervades and powers all that is in being: all beings, entities and occurrences. Poetic thinking responds to the modern drive to maximum availablity and dispose-ability of being and beings, freeing up the possibility of a path alternative to the dominion of calculative thought and its technological metrics. (shrink)

In general, discussions of the poetic process have tended to fall into one of three classes. The first of these, generalizing the process, analyzes the faculties or the activities supposedly involved and arranges these in their logical order, to produce distinct stages or periods of the process. The second kind describes the working habits of an individual poet in terms of characteristic external or internal circumstances or conditions. The third kind gives us, in the same terms, the history of (...) the composition of a particular poem. To illustrate these in reverse order: W. D. Snodgrass' essay The Finding of a Poem tells us how he discovered the meaning—for him—of the elements entering into a particular poem; Paul Valéry's essays on his own poetry—Poésie et pensée abstraite, for example—generally describe his working habits and his experiences while at work; and the following passage gives a typical account of the poetic process as a series of logically ordered stages: "There is, first, a period of hard thinking, during which the mind explores the problems; then a period of relaxation, during which the rational processes of the mind are withdrawn from this particular problem; then the flash of insight which reveals the solution, organizes the symbols, or directs the thinking, during which the formula is tested, the work of art shaped and developed...Graham Wallas calls the four stages Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, and Verification..." [Wilbur L. Schramm, "Imaginative Writing," 1941] Elder Olson, poet and critic, has received numerous awards for his work. He is the author of, among other works, Penny Arcade, a collection of poetry, and of criticism, On Value Judgment in the Arts and Other Essays. His contributions to Critical Inquiry are "On Value Judgments in the Arts" , Part 1 of a "Conspectus of Poetry" , and Part 2 of a "Conspectus of Poetry". (shrink)

ABSTRACT Departing from the hegemonic position of epidemiology in population physical activity research and policy, I argue for the significance of a complementary, holistic approach: human movement ecology. The argument is developed in two steps. In a first step, and using perspectives from body ecology and eco-philosophy, I emphasize the potential in movement of a ’dynamic and spontaneous ecologization’, which opens for the development of ecological consciousness and sustainable practice. In a second step, I test HME towards a ’hard case’: (...) everyday routine walking in urban settings. Even here, and paying particular attention to the nature of habitual movement and the need for a ’greening’ of urban environments, I point to a significant movement ecological potential. I conclude that HME provides a fertile and complementary conceptual alternative to PA epidemiology. The challenge of low population PA levels is probably best met with facilitating for movement as an integral part of a sustainable everyday life. Actually, with an increased realization of HME ideals in practice, instrumental PA policies would become less relevant and, on a longer-term basis, perhaps not needed at all. (shrink)

I argue that Simone de Beauvoir’s only play Les bouches inutiles reveals the centrality of failure in Beauvoir’s feminist account of political freedom. In recent years, political theorists have mobilized failure to capture the diverse ways of being and doing that stand outside of hegemonic models of political life, with some conceiving of failure as a form of negativity. Negativity, on these accounts, captures an “antisocial” form of resistance by which subjects refuse configurations of sociality in order to achieve freedom. (...) I argue, however, that this form of negativity runs counter to the collective conception of freedom in Beauvoir’s political thought. To make this case, I interpret the play as a performance manqué and demonstrate that the failures that the women encounter in Les bouches inutiles are conditional on responses from the men. This allows me to recover a conception of failure as a form of positive negativity. What Beauvoir does in her literary theory is to conceptualize that same place of negativity, to which men have consigned women, as a place from which women might disclose themselves and their unique situations. Read in this way, failure is both the foreclosure of the space of intersubjectivity between women’s appeals and men’s responses, and at the same time opens ways for women to resist those failures. I then leverage Eve Sedgwick’s theory of the periperformative to show how, by engaging in poetic practices, women re-signify the political meanings of their bodies and become free with and through others. I conclude by stepping outside of the frame of the play to evaluate its recent resignification by contemporary readers. Doing so underscores the point that resisting failure requires ongoing practices of contestation and disclosure by subjects and audiences across time to affirm the collective dimension of freedom in feminist political theory. (shrink)

Hackles have been raised in biosemiotic circles by T. L. Short’s assertion that semiosis, as defined by Peirce, entails “acting for purposes” and therefore is not found below the level of the organism (2007a:174–177). This paper examines Short’s teleology and theory of purposeful behavior and offers a remedy to the disagreement. Remediation becomes possible when the issue is reframed in the terms of the complexity sciences, which allows intentionality to be understood as the interplay between local and global aspects of (...) a system within a system. What is called “acting for purposes” is not itself a type of behavior so much as a relationship between a dynamic system that “exists for a purpose” and its microprocesses that “serve purposes.” The “intentional object” of philosophy is recast here as the holistic self-organized dynamics of a system, which exists for the purpose of self-maintenance, and that constrains the parts’ behaviors, which serve the purpose of forming the system. (A “system” can be any emergent, e.g. an abiotic form, an adapted species, a self, a conditioned response, thought, or a set of ideas.) The self-organized whole, which is represented to the parts in their own constrained behaviors, assumes the guiding function so long attributed to the mysterious “intentional object.” If emergent self-causation is not disallowed, creative originality, as well as directionality, becomes part of the definition of purposeful behavior. Thus, key tools used here, required for understanding emergence, come from poetics rather than semoitics. In the microprocesses of self-organization, I find what I call “accidental” indices and icons — which are poetic in the sense that they involve mere metonymic contiguity and metaphoric similarity — and which are preferentially selected under constrained conditions allowing radically new connections to habituate into an “intentional” self-organized system that, not coincidentally, has some of the emergent characteristics of a conventional symbolic system. (shrink)

In this book, Erickson analyzes of how the politics of fear operate, To outline one possible response to the intentionally paralyzing logic of fear.

This is a general reading of Callimachus' work within the socio-political context of Ptolemaic Alexandria. "Alibis" refers to the constitutionally expatriate nature of the populace and culture established there, which in Callimachus gives rise to a poetics based on the principles of displacement and convergence. Close analysis of a wide variety of passages, drawn principally from the epigrams, Aetia, and Hymns, demonstrates how the "order of the alibi" informs all major aspects of the poet's work, from the lexical make-up of (...) his texts to their larger narrative and thematic structure. Certain poems in the corpus, such as the Lock of Berenice and the Hymn to Apollo, not only require detailed knowledge of Greek literature, history, and religious institutions, but also draw extensively on Egyptian mythography and cultural models, which do not so much replace the Hellenic matter as-characteristically-cohabit with it. In this respect, Callimachus served both as a key architect of the new, multi-ethnic culture that the Ptolemies institutionalized in Egypt and as its most penetrating critic. (shrink)

A magisterial exploration of poetry’s place in the fine arts by one of the twentieth century's leading poets In this book, eminent poet Anthony Hecht explores the art of poetry and its relationship to the other fine arts. While the problems he treats entail both philosophic and theoretical discussion, he never allows abstract speculation to overshadow his delight in the written texts that he introduces, or in the specific examples of painting and music to which he refers. After discussing literature’s (...) links with painting and music, Hecht investigates the theme of paradise and wilderness, especially in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. He then turns to the question of public and private art, exploring the ways in which all the arts participate in balances between private and public modes of discourse, and between an exclusive or elitist role and the openly political. Beginning with a discussion of architecture as an illustration of a more general theme of discord and balance, the penultimate lecture probes the inner contradictions of works of art and our reactions to them, while the final piece concerns art and morality. (shrink)

In this article I develop Heidegger's phenomenology of poetry, showing that it may provide grounds for rejecting claims that he lapses into linguistic idealism. Proceeding via an analysis of the three concepts of language operative in the philosopher's work, I demonstrate how poetic language challenges language's designative and world-disclosive functions. The experience with poetic language, which disrupts Dasein's absorption by emerging out of equipmentality in the mode of the broken tool, brings Dasein to wonder at the world's existence (...) in such a way that doubt about its reality cannot enter the picture. (shrink)

This dissertation explores the problematic of "care of the self" in the unpublished later work of Michel Foucault. In his major published works, Foucault studied how subjects are fabricated within relations of power and knowledge. He revealed that modern political power is a "bio-power." Its legitimacy derives from its capacity to nurture individual life. It does this by forging individuals whose bodies, capacities, pleasures, comforts, desires, etc., are intrinsically integrated into the state's productive force. One of the main techniques for (...) bringing about this integration is to incite individuals to talk about their desire, to think of themselves as subjects of desire. This practice of reflecting on oneself in order to acquire and express self-knowledge is "hermeneutic" in nature. It uncovers the hidden truth of the individual. Through this hermeneutic practice individuals fashion their subjectivity around the discovery, expression, liberation and fulfillment of their true desire. Foucault shows that this subject of desire first emerges within the confessional practices and spiritual exercises of Christian ethics. However, his work also revealed that prior to the formation of Christian practices a whole range of possible experiences of ethical subjectivity was to be found in ancient philosophy---relations and practices which were not hermeneutic. ;I argue that Foucault's genealogy seeks to historicize our particular formulation of self-knowledge as a hermeneutic of desire. He finds in ancient philosophy an experience of subjectivity that was "aesthetic" and "poetic" rather than hermeneutic. The foundation of ancient philosophy was the practice of "care of the self" in a philosophical life. This dissertation shows that in his lectures at the College de France from 1982--1984, Foucault develops an ethics of care of the self as a response to modern bio-power and the hermeneutics of desire. His genealogy of philosophy reveals a multiplicity of practices of care of the self and self-knowledge. Rather than being an effect of bio-power, or a true desire, the self of care is a material to be formed and a task to be accomplished. (shrink)

Mythopoesis must rescue Israel from its colonial crisis. YHWH and prophet achieve textual existence via multi-voiced figural realism. A poetics of voice lends them efficacious illusion and resilient generative appeal.

Meaningful work refers to the idea that human work is an integral part of the way we think of our lives as going well. The concept is prevalent in sociology and business studies. In philosophy, its discussion tends to revolve around matters of justice and whether the State should take steps to eradicate meaningless work. However, despite the breadth of the recent, general literature, there is little to no discussion about how it is in fact the case that work is (...) meaningful. There is a basic assumption that certain facts about work make it meaningful. After noting the shortcomings in the literature, this essay argues that we can better understand the production of meaning in work by an analogy to speech acts. Using Paul Ricoeur’s theory of action as discourse, one can see how meaning is predicated in the performance of work in ways that are locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary. (shrink)

In this paper, I try to expatiate on the poetic function of language on the basis of considerations by Jakobson and Waugh. I try to bring in the consideration that pragmatics plays an important role in elucidating the poetic function of language. Contextualism allows us to interpret a poem: referents must be fixed or need not be fixed due to the requirements of the discourse; citations are brought in through pragmatic ways; polyphony is achieved by taking into account (...) the context of previous analyses of a poetic text; the vicinity of a certain word, or concept or line is likely to affect the interpretation of a certain expression; the poetic text can take different forms, from graffiti to discourse at the market place, to discourse between lovers. All these forms of poetic text would not exist if the notion of poetry did not include the idea of semantic/pragmatic compression which is matched, in interpretation, by expansions. (shrink)

The first comparative study of Heidegger and Schelling, recognizing Schelling's place in post-Kantian GermanIdealism and his contribution to Heidegger's later thought.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Veils: The Poetics of John Rawls*George Armstrong KellyPlutarch recounts in Sais, a holy place of Egypt, the image of Isis, understood by the Greeks to be a version of Pallas Athena, bore the inscription: “I am everything that has been, that is, and that shall ever be: no human mortal has discovered me behind my veil.” 1 This recalls a very different god, Yahweh, whose claim is also to (...) compress all knowledge into an eternal present and whose dwelling, in Solomon’s temple, is in a special sanctuary, the Holy of Holies, also guarded by a veil.There, one might say, the similarity ends. Yahweh is a masculine diety (“the father of his people”), though imagistically he remains a space or an absence filled by a name (“I Am That I Am”) indicative of the transcendent distance of the eternal. Isis is a female shape imaging carnal knowledge behind her veil (with its Machiavellian, Baconian temptations). Her truth, as Plutarch makes clear, is driven by desire, truth being a “desire for divinity,” “a study... and work more holy than the vow and obligation of chastity or the guarding and sealing of any....” 2 The almost certain wages, however, for the would-be ravisher is unfulfillment and death, whereas Yahweh, having become the God of the Christians, promises eternal life through the sacrifice of his only-begotten son and a truth above knowledge “that shall make you free” (John 8:32). [End Page 343]To the Semitic mind the name expressed and represented the power of the person: God was present in a special way wherever the “Name of Yahweh” was. 3 The content of the Holy of Holies, originally portable in the ancient Ark of the Covenant, was the two stone tablets of the Law received by Moses at Horeb (1 Kings 8:9). God’s presence, once installed in the Temple of Jerusalem, was represented as “a cloud [that] filled the house of the Lord” (ibid, 8:10; cf. 2 Chronicles 5:10, 13). God was cloud; knowledge was duty. Of the physical place of this indwelling principle of knowledge, Jesus said (John 2:19): “Destroy this sanctuary: within three days I shall raise it up again.” The evangelist explains that his metaphor is transferred to the new Christian idea of the word made flesh. 4 John’s gospel does not cite the rendering of the veil of the temple, but the synoptic gospels all recount that it was “rent in twain from top to bottom” (Matthew 27:51, Mark 16:38, Luke 23:45) at Christ’s Crucifixion. The idea is essentially that knowledge as command and duty has been surpassed by a knowledge that is love in the crucified revelation of the Son of God. This returns us, ambiguously, to the image of the goddess Isis; for even in Hebrew scripture it is foretold: “The watchmen that went about the city found me, they smote me, they wounded me; the keepers of the walls took away my veil from me” (Song of Solomon 5:7). If there is here a clear prefiguration of the fate of both Christ and the temple, there is also an echo of the likely fate of the harlot Rahab, who let Joshua’s spies into Jericho, had God not saved her from the ruin of that city (Joshua 6:17).The purpose of this essay is not to dwell on obvious imagistic and psychological attachments between wisdom and sexual knowledge, but early notice of this liaison is needed to connect the philosophical discourse on veils with motifs disclosed in figurative literature. For the veil that hides the object of desire may also hide the reality of the name or of naming; preserving the veil may be a mode of love, just as challenging it is also. For example, when John Rawls writes: “The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance. This ensures that no one is advantaged or disadvantaged in the choice of principles by the outcome of natural chance or the contingency of social circumstances,” 5 what does his image of the veil intend to convey? What exactly is on each side of this veil? From... (shrink)

This article explores the role of affect in the disorganized language and thought that can manifest itself in bipolar disorder. Bipolar disorder, or as it was previously known, manic-depressive illness, can produce psychotic language and thought in its more extreme forms. During the production of discourse in bipolar disorder, there is a strong correlation between the underlying affective state, i.e., depression, euthymia, hypomania, and mania, and linguistic and cognitive performance. A psycholinguistic model of the dynamics between language, thought, and affect (...) in bipolar disorder based on McNeill¿s concept of a ¿Growth Point¿ is proposed. In particular, the poetic structural phases of discourse production in bipolar disorder, which vary according to the underlying affective state, provide a phenomenological bridge between the psychotic discourse of mania and normal language production. (shrink)

The poetic names our capacity to transcend our finitude as subject and rejoin our worldly ground, that which links us to our origin despite the evential separation. It is the dimension of our existence which opens us to that from which our existence is nonetheless radically exiled, going, as it were, against the stream of the subject’s enclosure; it is that which, in us, reverses the evential separation, the only recourse against this separation. It is thus what makes it (...) possible to apprehend being from the viewpoint of the world, whose product and ostention it is, and not only from our viewpoint as separated beings.Le poétique désigne l’aptitude que nous avons à transcender notre finitude de sujet et à rejoindre notre sol mondain, ce qui nous relie à notre origine en dépit de la séparation événementiale. Il est la dimension de notre existence qui nous ouvre à cela dont elle est pourtant radicalement exilée, à contre-courant pour ainsi dire de la clôture du sujet; il est en nous ce qui inverse la séparation événementiale, le seul recours contre cette séparation. Il est donc ce qui permet de saisir l’étant du point du vue du monde dont il est le produit et l’ostension et non plus seulement du nôtre, comme êtres séparés.Il poetico designa la capacità di trascendere la nostra finitezza di soggetti e a ricongiungerci col nostro suolo mondano, è ciò che ci riconnette alla nostra origine a dispetto della separazione evenemenziale. È la dimensione della nostra esistenza che ci apre a ciò da cui essa è tuttavia radicalmente esiliata, risalendo controcorrente, per così dire, la chiusura del soggetto; è ciò che in noi rovescia la separazione evenemenziale, solo soccorso contro quella separazione. È dunque ciò che ci consente di cogliere l’ente dal punto di vista del mondo, di cui esso è il prodotto e l’ostensione, e non più soltanto dal nostro punto di vista di esseri separati. (shrink)