Based on the double character of “as if,” it is argued in this paper that “the surplus of meaning” turns out to be “the surplus of being,” which reveals a human being who interprets his or her own being and also acknowledges this being as be-ing at the same time. In this article, 1) the notion of “as if” is retrieved from Ricoeur’s early work in relation to the “poetics of being” aspired to by him. This leads us to 2) (...) examine the relation between the “semantic surplus” and the “becoming of being.” 3) Addressing the problem of metaphorical reference, the key philosophical problem of poetics, is, therefore, inevitable. Only after this analysis will we 4) be able to consider whether there is a kind of “poetics of being” in the work of Paul Ricoeur. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty characterizes the poetic or literary use of language as bringing forth of sense as if it is a being that is an interlocutor with its readers. Sense will be explored as interwoven with a deeper imagination that works within the temporality of institution to become more fully manifest. Throughout the essay will be seen the overlap with Claudel’s ontology as expressed in L’Art poetique and Claudel’s approach to language. Why Merleau-Ponty’s articulation of embodiment and perception must culminate in the (...) poetic expression of the flesh ontology will be seen in: 1) how the phenomenology of sense leads to the flesh ontology as closely tied to the literary dimension of language, 2) that the analysis of sense leads to the vital importance of the physiognomic or vertical imagination as opening the latent depths of perception by its expression within poetic language, and also tracing the link between metaphor and the flesh ontology, and that 3) the expression of the latent sense of perception as the interplay of lateral relations as access to Being is the reversibility of the flesh, also articulated by Claudel as co-naissance, and calls for an “interrogative knowing,” a “question-savior.” The articulation of the texture of Being is an overlapping endeavor with Claudel as the poetic articulation of a stream of sense below our reflective life.Merleau-Ponty caractérise l’usage poétique ou littéraire du langage, en tant que producteur de sens, comme s’il s’agissait d’un être qui est un interlocuteur pour ses lecteurs. Le sens sera exploré comme entrelacé à une imagination plus profonde qui opère dans la temporalité de l’institution pour devenir pleinement manifeste. Dans cet article nous étudierons l’empiètement avec l’ontologie de Claudel telle qu’elle est exprimée dans l’Art poétique et avec l’approche de Claudel au langage. Les raisons pour lesquelles l’articulation merleau-pontienne de l’incorporation et de la perception doit aboutir à l’expression poétique de l’ontologie de la chair seront alors recherchées : 1) dans la manière dont la phénoménologie du sens conduit à une ontologie de la chair si étroitement liée à la dimension littéraire du langage ; 2) dans le fait que l’analyse du sens conduit à l’importance vitale d’une imagination physionomique ou verticale qui ouvrirait les profondeurs latentes de la perception par son expression dans le langage poétique, et aussi en traçant le lien entre la métaphore et l’ontologie de la chair, et 3) dans le fait que l’expression du sens latent de la perception, tout comme l’interaction des relations latérales et comme l’accès à l’Être, consiste dans la réversibilité de la chair, aussi décrite par Claudel comme co-naissance, et qui invite à une « connaissance interrogative », à une « question-savoir ». Ainsi, la tentative d’articuler la texture de l’Être s’entrecroise avec les réflexions de Claudel, comme l’articulation poétique d’un flux de sens au-dessous de nos vies réflexives.Merleau-Ponty caratterizza la poetica o l’uso letterario del linguaggio come portatore di senso, come se si trattasse di un essere che interloquisce con i suoi lettori. Il senso verrà esplorato come intrecciato con un’immaginazione più profonda che opera nella temporalità dell’istituzione per diventare pienamente manifesta. In questo articolo si esaminerà la sovrapposizione tra l’ontologia di Claudel, espressa nell’Arte poetica, e il suo approccio al linguaggio. Al fine di evidenziare i motivi che portano l’articolazione merleau-pontiana dell’essere incarnato e della percezione a culminare nell’espressione poetica dell’ontologia della carne si vedrà: 1) come la fenomenologia del senso conduca all’ontologia della carne in quanto strettamente legata alla dimensione letteraria del linguaggio ; 2) che le analisi del senso conducono all’importanza vitale della fisiognomica o dell’immaginazione verticale in quanto schiudenti le profondità nascoste della percezione, attraverso la sua espressione all’interno del linguaggio poetico e rintracciando, altresì, il legame tra la metafora e l’ontologia della carne; 3) che l’espressione del senso latente della percezione, sia come intreccio di relazioni laterali sia come accesso all’Essere, è la reversibilità della carne, che Claudel articola attraverso la nozione di co-naissance, ed esige un “sapere interrogativo”, un “sapere domandante”. Così il tentativo di articolare la trama dell’Essere si sovrappone all’articolazione poetica in Claudel di un flusso di senso che sottende la nostra vita riflessiva. (shrink)

Taking Maurice Natanson's posthumously published book, The Erotic Bird: Phenomenology in Literature, as its point of departure, the essay argues that "fictive reality" is the specific content of transcendental-phenomenological reflection. Elaborating this concept allows us to see how phenomenological concepts such as constitution, horizon, and the "transcendental" have a tropological, rather than a psychological, meaning. Specifically, the article considers the metonymical structure of reality's "spatial horizon" and the metaphorical structure of reality's "temporal horizon." This latter is demonstrated on Natanson's analysis (...) of Thomas Mann's concept of the "leitmotiv" in The Magic Mountain. The essay concludes by pointing toward the ontology of metaphor entailed by Natanson's analysis, while suggesting the difference between phenomenology, as the "poetic essence" of philosophy, and philosophy itself, as the categorial elaboration of what phenomenology uncovers. (shrink)

This paper proposes to define metaphor as a visual-material structure, the sphere of which is ontological rather than cognitive or conceptual. It argues that the essence of metaphor, as either an aesthetic or a communicative unit or both, resides in the qualitative dimension and appearance, or even materiality, of the metaphorical medium and its form. The paper thus offers a new theory of metaphor, focusing on the medium of metaphor, which composes and transfigures or reconstructs its (...) target anew: a composition that is prior to understanding or conceptualizing the target. In doing so, the paper presents a formalist ontology of metaphors, established via an externalist account of metaphors, as opposed to the prevailing cognitivist-conceptualist account which I characterize as internalist. The various kinds of metaphor – linguistic, poetic, visual or material – are based on their external structure, rather than an internal-conceptual mechanism of understanding, as assumed by a significant segment of the literature. Visual metaphor, therefore, is the paradigmatic kind of metaphor, the analysis of which can be generalized to other kinds of metaphor. Furthermore, the paper tries to overcome the current discrepancy between the formalist character of the metaphorical medium and the dominance of cognitivist and conceptualist theories of metaphor. Challenging these, I claim that if the identity of metaphor is indeed based on its composition, then it is actually based on its aesthetic qualities. That is to say, not only are there autonomous visual or material metaphors, that are not based on linguistic or conceptual ones, but linguistic and conceptual metaphors are based on visuality: they are enabled by the structural possibilities offered by visual media. (shrink)

The favourable reception of the analytic philosophy of language plays a central role in the composition of Ricœur’s literary hermeneutics. Following a brief description of the historical and methodological context of this reception, we show how Ricœur intends to link up phenomenology and analytic philosophy of language. Then we examine the role allocated to the analytic philosophy of language in establishing the idea of metaphor as a “more fundamental mode of reference” in The Rule of Metaphor . But (...) once again Ricœur situates this semantic interpretation of metaphor within the context of an ontology. The result is methodological difficulties that mark the limits of Ricœur’s reception of the analytic philosophy of language. Keywords: Semantics, Metaphor, Ontology, Structuralism, Poetics. Résumé La réception de la philosophie analytique du langage joue un rôle central dans la constitution de l’herméneutique littéraire de Ricœur. Après avoir tracé le cadre historique et systématique dans lequel s’inscrit cette réception, on montre comment Ricœur se propose d’articuler phénoménologie et philosophie analytique du langage. On étudie ensuite le rôle assigné à la philosophie analytique du langage pour la mise en place de la conception de la métaphore comme “mode plus fondamental de la référence” dans La métaphore vive . Mais Ricœur situe encore une fois cette interprétation sémantique de la métaphore dans un cadre ontologique. Il en résulte des difficultés systématiques qui marquent les limites de la réception de la philosophie analytique du langage par Ricœur. Mots-clés: Sémantique, Métaphore, Ontologie, Structuralisme, Poétique. (shrink)

Giambattista Vico first published his masterpiece The New Science in 1725, but it did not receive much attention from the academic world until the middle of the twentieth century. The last fifty years of academic research have witnessed a so-called “linguistic” and “cultural” turn which has revived our interest in this great Italian thinker. Looking at the Vichian scholarship of the recent past, it seems that Vico’s theory of poetic wisdom has gained a great deal of recognition and deservedly so, (...) but his concept of sensus communis is yet to be fully appreciated. The present article thus tries to discuss the constructive and imaginative function of language and culture not just through the notion of poetic logic but also in relation to that of common sense, which hopefully can shed some light on the perennial debate over the criterion of truth and aesthetic judgement. (shrink)

In this paper I explore two distinct but related emphases in Deleuze's later philosophy, both on his own and in collaboration with Félix Guattari, having to do with literature. The first is the emphasis on the work of literature as an assemblage whereby the author constructs lines of flight in the pursuit of self-experimentation and self-transformation. The second is the rejection of metaphor across Deleuze's work. I use Difference and Repetition to chart the origins of these emphases, by unpacking (...) the metaphysics of language contained in Difference and Repetition. I first recount the basic structure of Deleuze's intensive ontology, before going on to discuss the way in which the ‘fundamental encounter’ forces thought to formulate Ideas, which, as they are transmitted through the subject, alter her nature. This self-transformation is tantamount to a kind of ‘death’, whereby one is continually explicated, but this explication implies the transcendental Other-structure at the end of Difference and Repetition, wherein the Other, through language, gives birth to ‘possible worlds’. I end with the development of an unexplored concept in Difference and Repetition, the loquendum, which is what must be spoken precisely because it is inexpressible, the purely intensive. Language comes closest to this intensive use in its aesthetic, poetic, literary modes whereby authors distort their own languages. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In his published work, Levinas only mentions metaphor for the sake of dismissing its relevance to his ethics of transcendence. Metaphor is aligned with the poetic imagery and the rhetorical devices that weave together an ontology of immanence, whereas transcendence is said to occur through an immediate encounter with the other. But Levinas's unpublished lecture “La Métaphore” is of interest precisely because it troubles this distinction through the notion of a “metaphorical transcendence.” Although Levinas abandons this terminology (...) after his lecture, this article suggests that an implicit, but unavowed, operation of metaphor persists in the guise of his ethics of substitution. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 33.2 (2000) 137-153 [Access article in PDF] Metaphor and the Making of Sense: The Contemporary Metaphor Renaissance William Franke Metaphor has gained a new lease on life through the revival of rhetoric in recent decades. For promoters of "la nouvelle rhétorique," such as Gérard Genette and Roland Barthes, rhetoric came to coincide with a total science of language that is practically coextensive with (...) all social and human knowledge, while in the Anglo-Saxon world, Wayne Booth, in the wake of Kenneth Burke, repristinated rhetoric as, not just a technical discipline, but a moral one, and, in fact, an all-embracing criticism of the humanities. 1 The fortunes of metaphor have revived and flourished in tandem with those of rhetoric as a whole. Over the more than two millennia of a progressive eclipse of rhetoric, during which it shrank from its original primacy as the master art of persuasion in law, literature, and politics and, moreover, as the general framework of culture, to the status of an ancillary art of elocution of exclusively formal import, metaphor was eventually confined to being just one particular instance within the schemes of classifications of tropes. It became an affair of style, an ornament of decorative discourse, as rhetoric came to be identified with mere elocutio and was no longer essentially also inventio--the finding of arguments, in which metaphor's role is actually paramount--and dispositio--the ordering of discourse into its syntactic parts, such as exordium, narration, discussion, peroration. As the originally tripartite art and science of rhetoric was amputated of two of its main divisions in the classical model established on the basis of Aristotle's three-book treatise, 2 metaphor became a merely formal enhancement and lost its roles as substantive and structuring for knowledge and discourse.The decline of interest in philosophical, Aristotelian rhetoric had much to do with metaphor's reduction to a merely technical or decorative device. But with the recent widening practically without limit of the terrain of rhetoric, and particularly with its restoration to its original standing as a philosophical discipline comprehending the substance of argument, metaphor [End Page 137] has once again acquired cognitive status and, moreover, has tended to become the name for figurative language in general and even, emblematically, for the rhetorical or rhetoricity as such. Where the power of rhetoric to reshape cognitive meaning and even to reinvent, or at least reconfigure, reality was once again recognized as irresistible throughout all the realms of discourse, the source and unity of this power seemed to require a name, and more often than not metaphor--on account of the transformative, inventive power associated particularly with it--has been adopted to serve this purpose.Today, under the aegis of metaphor, the power of figurative language, arguably the originating power at the source of all language and even of an articulated world as such, has newly become an object of research and general theoretical speculation. This extension of the concept of metaphor is bound up with a renewed view of figurative language in general as not only a substantive bearer of the content of discourse, but also as ontologically constitutive of the world, as operative at the origins of things and their identities. It has become possible to view all language as being metaphorical, and accordingly metaphorical operations of transfer and redefinition have been recognized as being the very essence of language and of all that comes to articulation through it. Furthermore, as witnessed by burgeoning publications and conferences, metaphor has become a topic onto which practically all the classic philosophical problems of ontology and epistemology are projected and appear in a new, specifically linguistic, light. 3This new ascendency of metaphor is certainly not uninflected or uncontested, even within the camps of the new rhetoricians. Genette, in "La rhétorique restreinte" (1972), resists the "inflation of metaphor" to become the trope of tropes and the figure of figures in a wide range of writers epitomizing modern poetics--particularly Marcel Proust, Roman Jakobson, and Michel Deguy (1969). Genette argues against reduction of... (shrink)

The essays in this volume discuss the life and work of French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, exploring the context of his thought, the relationship between his work on science and on poetry, and his approach to language. Contents: include: 1. "Bachelard in the Context of a Century of Philosophy of Science," by Colin Smith; 2. "Gaston Bachelard: Phenomenologist of Modern Science," by Alfons Grieder; 3. "Gaston Bachelard and Ferdinand Gonseth: Philosophers of Scientific Dialectics," by Henri Lauener; 4. "Science and Poetry in (...) the Ontology of Human Freedom: Bachelard's Account of the Poetic and the Scientific Imagination," by Noel Parker; 5. "Bachelard and the Refusal of Metaphor," by Jean-Claude Margolin; 6. "The Place of Alchemy in Bachelard's Oneiric Criticism," by John G. Clark; "Unfixing the Subject: Gaston Bachelard and Reading," by Mary McAllester. Co-published with the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty has long been known as one of the most important philosophers of aesthetics, yet most discussions of his aesthetics focus on visual art. This book corrects that balance by turning to Merleau-Ponty's extensive engagement with literature. From Proust, Merleau-Ponty developed his conception of "sensible ideas," from Claudel, his conjoining of birth and knowledge as "co-naissance," from Valéry came "implex" or the "animal of words" and the "chiasma of two destinies." Literature also provokes the questions of expression, metaphor, and (...) truth and the meaning of a Merleau-Pontian poetics. The poetic of Merleau-Ponty is, the book argues, a poetic of the flesh, a poetic of mystery, and a poetic of the visible in its relation to the invisible. Ultimately, theoretical figures or "figuratives" that appear at the threshold between philosophy and literature enable the possibility of a new ontology. What is at stake is the very meaning of philosophy itself and its mode of expression. (shrink)

Recently, philosophers have discovered that they have a lot to learn from, or at least to ponder about, fiction. Many metaphysicians are attracted to fiction as a model for our talk about purported objects and properties, such as numbers, morality, and possible worlds, without embracing a robust Platonist ontology. In addition, a growing group of philosophers of mind are interested in the implications of our engagement with fiction for our understanding of the mind and emotions: If I don’t believe that (...) Anna Karenina exists, can I really pity her, or hope or desire that she extricate herself from her tragic situation? And why is there no “morality fiction,” analogous to science fiction? I suspect that philosophers have been especially comfortable thinking about fiction because it seems, at least prima facie, to employ the imagination in a way that conforms to a standard model of the mind. Specifically, contemporary philosophers tend to think of imagination as a form of mental pretense. Mental pretense can take two main forms: a cognitive attitude of supposing a set of propositions to be true (make-believe) or else an experiential state of imaging a scenario as if it were before one (imaging). Much of our pretense intertwines the cognitive and experiential modalities, of course. But both share a crucial common feature: all of one’s imaginative effort is invested in pretending that certain contents obtain. In this sense, we can understand imagination as the “offline” simulation of actual beliefs and perceptions (and perhaps other attitudes as well), where we analyze these in the normal way, as states individuated by their attitude and representational content. While I share the burgeoning interest in fiction, I want to suggest that we also have a lot to learn from poetry, and in particular from poetic metaphor. I will argue.. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 29–35. Translated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei from Jeroen Mettes. "Politieke Poëzie: Enige aantekeningen, Poëtica bij N30 (versie 2006)." In Weerstandbeleid: Nieuwe kritiek . Amsterdam: De wereldbibliotheek, 2011. Published with permission of Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam. L’égalité veut d’autres lois . —Eugène Pottier The modern poem does not have form but consistency (that is sensed), no content but a problem (that is developed). Consistency + problem = composition. The problem of modern poetry is capitalism. Capitalism—which has no (...) image: the unrepresentable Idea of “everything.” The problem is that a poem cannot be justified. There is no excuse for it. Political poetry— pure poetry—has to be problematic, though not in a mannerist way. Yes, its problem is first its own problem—poetry’s existence in the same world as the newspaper—but therefore also always everybody’s problem (the problem of any world at all). The cult of the sublime points at a suspect desire for transcendence, nostalgia for paradise lost (the womb?). Melancholia of the post-. But a problem neither sorrows nor mourns, it is alive, and the fact that it is alive is the problem—the problem for death (rigidity, the status quo). Our symbols and ideologies do not hide any god: symbolic = state; imaginary = human; real = money. Problem: the possibility of communal speech (poetry) in the absence of a “we.” Or: what is a “we” that is not a collective subject (or in any case is not a volonté générale )? What is a universal history that is not a History? This work was started in the shade of the anti-globalization protests at the end of November 1999. I considered N30 to be the closure of the nineties, of my adolescence, and of the a seemingly total extinction of social desire. From the beginning I was skeptical about the alterglobalization movement as the avant-garde of a new politics, but something was happening . Maybe this event did not show that, as the slogan would have it, “another world” is possible, but for me it indicated that such possibility was at least still possible. That naked possibility is carrying forward. And if the fundamental tone of this work sounds more desperate than utopian, this is not caused by the catastrophic sequence that since 1999 has plunged us ever deeper into the right-wing nightmare—a nightmare that this work also gives an account for—but because my hope as yet remains empty. Composition . Composition is no design, but the production of an autonomous block of affects (i.e. a POEM), rhythmically subtracted from the language of a community. A poem does something. Is something. New Sentence . Choosing the non sequitur as compositional unit has the advantage that an abstract composition is subjected to the stress of concrete, social references. Where there is a sentence, there is always a world. (This does not hold necessarily for words on their own.) And where sentences collide, something akin to a textual civil war takes place. It is not about “undermining” whatever, or de-scribing the raging global civil war, but about writing social (or even: ontological) antagonism -- including all its catastrophic and utopian possibilities. Minor resistance. Why would poetry be the no protest zone par excellence? It is nothing but protest, not simply qua “content,” but in its most fundamental essence: rhythm. Rhythm is resistance against language, time, and space, and the basis of (what we will continue to call) autonomy. Rhythm starts with the anti-rhythmic caesura as Hölderlin remarked about Sophocles, a disruption of the quotidian drone. The destruction of everything that is dead inside of us. The noise of the avant-garde has never been the representation of the noise of (post)modernity (from the television or shopping mall), but the sober noise of the systematic exchange of an unbearable worldview. The poet does not describe, but looks for a way out: There is a Grain of Sand in Lambeth that Satan cannot find Nor can his Watch Fiends find it, tis translucent & has many Angles But he who finds it will find Oothoons palace, for within Opening into Beulah every angle is a lovely heaven William Blake was not mad. And there has always been only one poetry: the poetry of paradise. The principle is that there is something in art (the essentially creative element) that is disgusted by that which, unlike art, does not aim for the supreme. Wonder is not supreme, tranquility is not supreme, beauty is not supreme. Even amusement is not supreme! The supreme is supremely open, “das Einfache,/ Das Schwer zu machen ist” 1 : paradise. That is abstract. Literally. For me it is not about a concrete imagination, an idyll or utopia. There is no doubt a need for that, but it is not so much the supposed lack of imagination or ideals (human rights are ideals), but a fundamental lack of desire (human rights are no desires) that we suffer from, and from which we do not need to remove Nietzsche’s label of “nihilism.” “We.” George Oppen: “ Of Being Numerous asks the question whether or not we can deal with humanity as something which actually exists.” What is less actual than humanity? Nowadays it appears as a lifeless ideology of cynical power politics. Or as what makes one think. It is a shame to be human. The event is the caesura that defines rhythm. Writing toward the event is not the description of the event, but marking an abstract and intense space in which the event may unfold and keep itself. It is a task. “Remember that thou blesseth the day on which I seized thee, because such is thy obligation.” The event is a contraction (or a series of contractions) with its own rhythm and unique qualities. It is more than an explosion or demonstration. But at the same time less. The endless repetition of images and stories in the media points to a fear for the indeterminate and indeterminable void of the event. In the end there is nothing to see. We do not live in disaster’s shade or miracle’s light, but rather in the rhythm, which is contracted time, having little to do with omnipresent representations. For this book I did not intend a rhythm of evental representations (a narrative rhythm), but a rhythm which would be an event itself , because it draws the border between artwork and history. My desire for a direct engagement with the “extra-textual reality” has nothing to do with the representation of “rumor in the streets.” (What has less street cred than representation?) Naturally, a poem is no historical event and does not change anything. But a poem is a part of history that wants to be repeated forever, constructed in such a way that it is worthy of repetition. It is a part of desire (composition) made consistent (durable). The “historical event” flares up and burns down, and has to burn down to be effective. The leftovers are images and stories (representations), History—no event. The artwork—that is the ambition— remains event (though monumental and inefficient/inoperable). (No wonder that a historical singularity, a revolution, reminds us of a work of art; the resurrection yearns for a judgment, an affirmation; everything depends on it.) Hence the title does not summarize the book, let alone contract its “content” into a quasi-transcendental signifier. The title is juxtaposed to the book, like everything else inside the book, and in that relation it precisely forms a part of it. The ideal work is an open whole, lacking nothing but to which everything may be added. I have been interested in this “everything,” the world, or as I said above: capitalism. “Everything” is not the space for “wonder”—a code word, a shibboleth for petty bourgeois imagination (I recognize myself in the strangest things, a speaking dog, a canal, a pond standing straight—oh my god). No. The world is a social world, not YOUR world, poet. Power is number one. I will call “Dutch,” or “shitty,” whatever denies this power. That hurts, but this pain is an expression of the desire in the world to write another world, or as Blanchot says, “the other of all worlds” 2 : the world. Not as what “is there,” but rather as that which urges for an escape from what “is.” This is a testament of how radical reality has become, for me—or rather, a writing body—in a having-been-written. I am not interested in the problem of “meaning” as misunderstood by literary scholarsi: “order” in “chaos,” “symbolization.” Bullshit. What is there, hop, hope, now: the meaning of the taste in my mouth. Bullshit. I am not interested in the frustration of interpretation; I am writing for readers who do not want to interpret. I do not know how many “professional readers” will hear the music of a paragraph like: Sun. Sushi. Volvo. I hope more than I would think. There is a suggestion (or rather, an actual production) of speed and infinitive owing to the absence of plosives, i.e. articulations such as /k/, /t/, or /p/. Can you hear the slick suaveness? Driving car dark, vocal chiaroscuro of the word “sushi.” The unstressed /i/ stands in the middle of dark vowels and thus acquires its own special out of focus , like a momentary flash or brilliance—an obscure light. It is not about recognizing a story, but about avoiding any story whatsoever: the car disappears in the glow, cars and raw fish have nothing in common except their articulation in a language that brings them together, blurring them. A world appears in its disappearance. For a moment, light is a metaphor for language, though it cannot be reduced to tenor. It is not necessary to be a linguist or philosopher to hear this—a “difficult” poem all too often becomes an allegory of its own impenetrable being-language. The only demand: leave your hermeneutical fetish at home. This was no interpretation. Most shit has been stolen etcetera. That is no longer interesting. You cannot shoot the body with information and let your lawyers reclaim the bullets. So every sentence has been stolen. Also the ones “out” “of” “my” “head.” Why would I be allowed to steal from myself and not from others? Man takes what he needs to move forward. Whatever he encounters, finds in front of him, “occurs” to him. The writer as text editor, or singing pirate. Nothing new here. Important difference with for example Sybren Polet’s 4 montage technique: anti-thematicism. Most of the time ferocious citation from whatever I was reading, listening to, ended up in, and so on. I wrote chapter 12 on my laptop while watching CNN. On the air instead of en plein air . I often employed search engines to generate material. Chapter 20 offers the purest example of this. Often I stop recognizing a particular citation after some time. It is not uncommon for a stolen sentence to conform itself to the paragraph in which it finds itself. Sometimes I nearly arbitrarily replace words. Arbitrariness as a guarantee for absolute democracy. It is a poetics of the non sequitur : a conclusion that does not follow from the premises, the strange element in the discourse. A discourse of strangers. No logical, narrative, thematic unity. There is unity in speed/flight. It has to be read linearly, but not necessarily (not preferably) from beginning to end. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but this line precedes every point. The middle, the acceleration, comes first. A point occurs where two lines cross. It has been written from up close, at the level of the tension between sentences. Nothing to be seen from a distance: no form except the exchange of form, no geometrical or mythical meaning. You have to get in, “groping toward a continuous present, a using everything a beginning again and again” (Stein). 5 In Dutch, experimental poetry has been mainly dense: a small rectangular form filled with a maximum amount of poetic possibility. But at the moment the poem starts to relax, the anecdotical content seems to increase. This is what is called “epic”: long, narrative. I believe that an epic is more than that, in fact something completely different. An epic is “a poem including history,” 6 a long poem tied up with the life of community, that as a whole does not need to be narrative. The American poets of the twentieth century (Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, Oppen, Olson, Silliman) have put the epic back on the map by interpreting the poem itself as a map, and writing it as navigation. They have invented the experimental epic, a genre that has generated little original following in “our” poetry. N30 is the middle part—“always start in the middle”—of a trilogy, the contours of which remain as of yet unclear, although each episode investigates one of the three “ecstasies of time”—past, present, future—concerning society X. N30 concerns itself with the PRESENT: not with the description of actual facts but of the rhythm and the intense depth in which facts appear to us. Where are we? We are camping in the desert. Sometimes we are looking at the stars. As opposed to maximum density and minimal tension (a characteristic of most (post-)experimental lyricism), I have sought a minimal density and maximum tension in this book, considered as a long non-narrative prose poem. On the one hand, the minimal density is obtained by the inherent formlessness of prose, on the other hand by the conscious refusal of any active (formal, non-rhythmic) synthesis: the poem tells nothing, shows nothing, has no theme. I did not seek maximum tension either by loading the quotidian with epiphanic radioactivity (“wonder,” confirmation from above), or by means of the intensity of the linguistic structure. I want an abstract tension, but social in its abstraction, in other words, not neutralized by and subjected to Form. Instead of form (transcendent): composition (immanent). The concept is series. Ideal: every unit is necessary for the efficacy of the others and the whole, their relation is purely linear, i.e. non-hierarchic, non-syllogistic, non-discursive, non-narrative. Sentence related to sentence like paragraph to paragraph and chapter to chapter; the whole means nothing and represents nothing. Inside the sentence: syntax (Chomsky’s tree, a type of parallel circuit), outside: parataxis (coordination, an asyntactic line through language and world). I consider duration—the energy of duration (rhythm)—to be the fundament of a poem, the temporal inclination to delimit a “space.” Being as consistency, its consistency. A spatial part of time is not merely a metaphor for an inevitable trajectory, an inescapable time, something like “our time.” Not merely—because rhythm comes from language and is not projected onto it; the poem derives from the world like a scent and a color and a life from a flower. A series, a sequence: nothing potential, but truly infinite—the movement of an infinitude. The infinite series = everything minus totality. That means that there is no container—no Form, no Self, no Image, no Structure, not even a Fragment—just “the prose of the world.” No representation, but also no staging of the impossibility of representation (the postmodern sublime). These are no fragments, no image of a fragmented world or personality, no cautious incantations around the Void. It does not exist. It is a movement. Buying bread, a flock of birds, a bomb falling—they do not depict or represent anything, not literally, not metaphorically. There is an Idea, which is however nothing more than a rhythm, in the same way that capitalism is nothing more than a pure function. Parataxis: the white space between two sentences stresses, which is nevertheless always there, also between words, even between letters: the out of focus of idle talk, the gutter, the irreducible Mallarméan mist which renders even the seemingly most transparent text legible. The white space suggests a neutral medium for free signification, a substance of language. A non sequitur is an element from a foreign discourse, which stresses the white space as space, and problematizes freedom for supra-sentential signification. I start by withdrawing material, leaving the initiative to the sentences. In general a word presupposes less often a discourse than a sentence. What discourse is presupposed by “dog”? We could think of several, but why would we? It is more probable that, when faced with the naked word, we think of its naked (dictionary) meaning, of its denotative signified. By means of two simple interventions we may also write the word as sentence: Dog. In no way this suggests the discourse from which this sentence originates, but in any case we’re presupposing one. This is shown by questions like: “Whose dog? Who’s a dog? What kind of dog?” Etc. (Sentences are question marks.) A sentence implies/is a microcosm—a subject, a verb, an object, and so on. Even an incomplete or ungrammatical sentence does so. My main fascination while writing this book is the worldly and social aspect of language, an aspect that often becomes invisible, or rather, transparent in narrativity—the stretching of sentences into stories. Narrativity organizes a new discourse and a new world, and places a sometimes all too dispersing relation of transparence in between. The conventional novel is the brothel of being. I do not intend to prohibit brothels, and I have certainly not intended to write an anti-novel (THIS IS A POEM), but I do consider narrativity (in general, in poetry, in the news, in daily life) to be ontologically secondary with regard to an immediate being in the world through sentences, also if the latter have been withdrawn from a narrative or otherwise externally structured discourse (which in that case would therefore be chronologically primary ). Naturally, two or more sentences are always in danger of telling stories or arguing, just like the world is always in danger of becoming an objective representation, facing us, strangers. That is why need to wage war—against representation and against the interface, against interaction. AGAINST THE “READER.” To the extent that a sentence is worldly, writing is a condensed global war, and in so far as there is ultimately only one world and one open continuum of languages, it is a global civil war. Nice subject for an epic. The elaboration of a singular problem—prose as the outside of poetry, the form of the novel as purely prosodic composition scheme—“expresses” the universal problem: capitalism as Idea of the world vs. poetry as language of an (im)possible community. The paragraphs are blocks of rhythmically contracted social material. By choosing the sentence as the basic compositional component, an abstract whole may contain social sounds, without telling a story or showing an image. Composition is subrepresentative —a rhythmic, passive synthesis, or rather: a synthesis of syntheses. I never write large blocks of prose in one sitting, because there is no obvious organizational vector —plot, theme, conscience—outside the inherent qualities of the material itself. Usually I write down one sentence, sometimes two, but rarely more than three. Those sentences are usually placed in the text which I am editing at the time. In fact, there is no original composition, new chapters split off from chapters which became too long during the editing process. (Revision mainly consists of adding and inserting, displacing and dividing; only during the last phase, when the text has gained enough consistency, there may be subtraction to tighten the composition; each chapter requires a season of daily revision). This constant revision, accompanied by a continuous influx of collective background noise (to speak with Van Bastelaere), 7 makes every chapter a block condensed (“historical” and “personal”) time. The block itself is a-personal and a-historic; it is ontologically autonomous. If there is such a thing as a spirit of the times, I do not try to offer an image of it, but rather to cancel something of it by erecting a monument of its own excrement within its own boundaries. Tuning and dis-tuning , “in de taal der neerslachtigen een eigen geluid doen klinken,” 8 in other words, desiring in an Elysian way. In this sense I have intended to be able to write a political poetry. The ultimate political poem is the epic, “the tale of the tribe.” I consider N30 to be a prolegomenon to a future epic (of which it in the end will form a part a structural moment, as introduction-in-the-middle), an extended pile on top of an epic as narrative, a question of the tribe and question of its history. I was burdened by too much satire, too much bullshit. But: satire willy-nilly = the only justifiable satire. Against the abstract universalism of the market (“globalism”): concrete disgust, a positive way of saying “No.” Moreover, disgust is a specifically total attitude, which ultimately concerns the world as a whole. I hate this or that, but I am disgusted by EVERYTHING (when I am disgusted), and so it appears that satire is in fact related to the epic, in so far as it concerns society, the cosmos, history. Maybe it is no coincidence that the Dutch literary canon knows no great poet of disgust; what could be more fearful to us than society, the cosmos, and history? The T-tendency (T from Tollens 9 ) clearly points into the direction of the small, friendly, ironic, melancholic, acquiescent, wondrous, and so on. The anti-political, anti-cosmic, anti-historical. (Why am I so philosophical? To scare away the Dutchies.) And most of all: the “poetical” (the pseudo-mysticism from the backyard). Yes, the N in N30 also stands for the Netherlands (just like 30 indicates the number of chapters). I was not in Seattle, I do not live in Iraq. But is not the whole world bleeding to death on Dutch paving stones? Let’s hope that we mowed away something with this total satire, also “in myself.” The arrogant stupidity that definitely thinks to know the essence of freedom (the free development of esthetic needs inside the void), that cannot take anything serious, only believes in the disciplined bestiality of the individual (“norms and values”) and the mere functioning of a social factory which finds no justification whatsoever outside its functioning (“get to work”)… Who knows. A certain aimed destruction leaves grooves and craters, mapping out a next adventure. Pound’s periplum : sailing while mapping the coasts. Immanent orientation. The terrain changes with the map, history changes with the poem. Maps never merely organize the chaos, transcendent schemes imposed on a formless Ding-an-sich . They organize from within, surfing. But they are most of all routes back into the chaos or forward to paradise (final identity of chaos and paradise; Schlegel: “ Nur diejenige Verworrenheit ist ein Chaos aus der eine Welt entspringen kann ”10). A poem is not only a piece of history, it is also a flight from history. Maps give chaos to the form of reality , open escape routes, break through representations, make us shivery and dazed. Paradise is immanent to a fleeting desire. History is the history of labor—this is Adam’s curse—and the poet works too: For to articulate sweet sounds together Is to work harder than all these, and yet Be thought an idler by the noisy set Of bankers, school masters, and clergymen The martyrs call the world 11 But: the poet works in paradise. The paradox of the artwork, the work that is no work, the piece of history that cannot be reduced to History—this is explained by The Space of Literature , a virtual space, an autonomous rhythm, not outside, but in the midst of the noise, a piece of paradise in hell, a postcard from the vale of tears addressed to paradise, to X. Political poetry means: a poetry that dares to think about itself, about its language and about its world and about the problematic relation between both, which is this relation as problem. A poetry that thinks at all, articulates its problem. It has nothing to do with journalism or morality or debate, let alone the law or the state. It has nothing to do with “criticism” if this means the replacement of incorrect representations by other, more correct representations. It has something to do with ethics in the sense of learning to live. It has something to do with the community and the language of the community (whichever that may be) and the role of the poet regarding the community. It concerns justice without judgement or measure. In the end the just word is just a word , to paraphrase Godard: it is from a future that is unimaginable. It Is no rational engagement, but an aversion against everything that obstructs life, and love for everything what is worthy of having been loved. The world is engaged with me, not the other way round. First Exodus, then Sinai. A desire does not start with an agenda. To answer the question whether I am really so naive as to want to change the world: “We only want the world.” Justice is the world appealing to us to liberate it from all possible chains, from each organization and inequality, to be it, smooth, equal, under a clear sky—a desert and a people in a desert. That moment between Egypt and the Law. It is not a revolution, but the sky above the revolution. Poetry = the science of escape. There is no art that we already know. The weakness of modernistic epic poetry seems to me to be the unwillingness to completely abandon narrative as a structural principle, in favor of a composition “around” or from an event. The China Cantos and Adams Cantos are the low point, and the Pisan Cantos the high point of Pound’s poetry. Two types of research: archival representation of the past vs. ontology of the present (which virtually presupposes the entire history). Presupposing an event means that it is impossible for the poet to stage his own absence, but in no way makes the work personal. An event is the unknown, the new invading into the business as usual, so also the personal. The question heading this research is not: “Who am I?” but “What is happening?” The book is as little illegible as Mondrian’s work is invisible. Form is of interest only to the extent that it empowers liberation. Ron Silliman So no formalism, but what it means to live in this world and to have a future in it. I want something that holds together that’s not smooth. Bruce Andrews The past above, the future below and the present pouring down: the roar, the roar of the present, a speech— William Carlos Williams If my confreres wanted to write a work with all history in its maw, I wished, from the beginning to start all over again, attempting to know nothing but a will to create, and matter at hand. Ronald Johnson NOTES 1) “The easy thing/ that is difficult to make.” Bertold Brecht, Lob des Kommunismus . (All footnotes are the translator’s) 2) Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature , trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press (1989), 75. 3) Mettes uses the word “Neerlandicus,” which refers to scholars of Dutch language and literature. 4) Dutch poet. 5) Gertrude Stein. “Composition as Explanation.” A Stein Reader . Ed. Ulla E. Dydo. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press (1993), 495-503. 6) Ezra Pound. 7) Flemish poet. 8) “Resounding an original sound in the language of the despondent.” A. Roland Holst, De afspraak . 9) Dutch poet. 10) “Only such a confusion is a chaos which can give rise to a world.” 11) W.B. Yeats, “Adam’s Curse.&rdquo. (shrink)

Paul Ricœur’s ontology of art is derived from his hermeneutics, and Ricœur’s hermeneutics bridges his idea of aesthetics and ontology. Paul Ricœur’s ontology of art (in which the concept of refiguration plays a central role) sheds a new light in understanding and experiencing works of art. Ricœur discusses the metaphorical reference of poetic texts that opens up the realm of possible worlds. This idea of metaphoric reference can be extended to works of art as well. Both fictional narratives and artworks (...) may be defined by the formula seeing as, and this formula represents their ontological status that may be defined as being as. Paul Ricœur argues that non-linguistic symbolic systems such as gestures, sounds and pictures also have the power to make and remake the world. Ricœur’s narrative theory can be applied to both to literature and visual arts as it identifies narrative capacity of artworks. Ricœur introduces the concept of refiguration that includes the transformation of reality, which is first prefigured in the consciousness of the author (mimesis 1). It is then configured in the artwork (mimesis 2), and finally into the experience of the viewer or listener of the artwork (mimesis 3), which leads to comprehension. (shrink)

Paul Ricœur’s ontology of art is derived from his hermeneutics, and Ricœur’s hermeneutics bridges his idea of aesthetics and ontology. Paul Ricœur’s ontology of art (in which the concept of refiguration plays a central role) sheds a new light in understanding and experiencing works of art. Ricœur discusses the metaphorical reference of poetic texts that opens up the realm of possible worlds. This idea of metaphoric reference can be extended to works of art as well. Both fictional narratives and artworks (...) may be defined by the formula seeing as, and this formula represents their ontological status that may be defined as being as. Paul Ricœur argues that non-linguistic symbolic systems such as gestures, sounds and pictures also have the power to make and remake the world. Ricœur’s narrative theory can be applied to both to literature and visual arts as it identifies narrative capacity of artworks. Ricœur introduces the concept of refiguration that includes the transformation of reality, which is first prefigured in the consciousness of the author (mimesis 1). It is then configured in the artwork (mimesis 2), and finally into the experience of the viewer or listener of the artwork (mimesis 3), which leads to comprehension. (shrink)

Resumo O presente artigo se encontra na interface entre literatura e religião e trata-se de um estudo da linguagem presente na obra de João da Cruz intitulada “Chama viva de amor”, utilizando-se, para tal, de alguns recursos da crítica literária. Esta obra teve a redação de seu poema realizada entre os anos de 1582-1584 e de seus comentários nos anos de 1585/86 (primeira redação) e 1591 (segunda redação). É um texto que, tanto em sua dimensão poética quanto em sua prosa, (...) retrata algumas das especificidades da forma do místico trabalhar com a linguagem ao tentar traduzir sua experiência “inefável”: ou seja, desconstrói e a reconstrói para que seja capaz de comunicar algo do vivido. Com vistas a atingir este objetivo, após uma breve introdução à vida e a obra joãocruciana, abordar-se-á brevemente a estrutura e as principais temáticas presentes na obra supracitada. A seguir, apresentar-se-á alguns dos recursos lingüísticos utilizados por João da Cruz, tais como o uso de paradoxos, antíteses e antônimos com freqüência, neologismos e arcaísmos, ressignificações de conceitos, aproveitamento da polissemia de muitos vocábulos, a forte presença de metáforas e símbolos e uma forma particular de lidar com os registros espaço-temporais e a lógica racional. Palavras-chave : João da Cruz, teologia negativa, mística, linguagem mística.The present article is placed in the isthmus of Literature and Religion, and consists of a study of the language that is present in the work of João da Cruz entitled “Chama viva de amor” (Living flame of love) , using, for such purpose, some of the Literary Criticism’s resources. This work had its poem written between 1582-1584, and its comments, in 1585/86 (first writing) and 1591 (second writing). It is a text that, as much as in its poetics dimension as in its prose, pictures some of the mystic’s method of working with the language when trying to communicate their ineffable experience: that is, deconstruct it and reconstruct it so that it can communicate something from the experienced. Aiming at that purpose, after a brief introduction to the life and work of João da Cruz, the study will approach the structure and the main themes present in the aforementioned work. Furthermore, some of the linguistics resources used by João da Cruz will be presented, such as neologisms and archaisms, concepts resignification, the use of polysemy of many words, the strong presence of metaphors and symbols, and a special way of working the spatial-temporal accounts and the rational logics. Key words: John of the Cross, negative theology, mysticism, mystical language. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger’s writings on modern science as well as his stray remarks on communication are important theoretical resources to understand the character and contour of, and our response to the Anthropocene epoch. John Caputo distinguishes between the early hermeneutic account of science in Heidegger’s corpus and the later deconstructive account, claiming that the former would have sufficed to fulfil the critical task of the latter without its pejorative and dismissive reading of modern science. Accepting Caputo’s distinction but rejecting his critique (...) of the deconstructive account, this paper argues that Heidegger’s abandoning of the hermeneutic account was premised on the refusal of the Western metaphysical baggage that still pervades and is endorsed in that account, a baggage which is now leading to the Anthropocene epoch and the consequent ontological communication of distress. The deconstructive approach evokes the communication of scientific phenomena in plural ways such as fictional, poetical and metaphorical narratives, thus undercutting the reductionist and monolithic character of modern science. (shrink)

Miller first examines the New Critics’ theory of metaphor, then presents his own views. There is one chapter on Hulme and Richards, one on Empson, Tate, Ransom and Brooks, and a third on Wimsatt, Wheelwright, and Krieger. Chapter Four contains Miller’s position and applies it to some metaphors from the metaphysical poets, and Chapter Five examines the problem of the objective status of a work of verbal art. Miller uses Richards’ distinction between the tenor and vehicle of a (...) class='Hi'>metaphor; in "My love is a red, red rose," "love" is the tenor and "rose" the vehicle, and a metaphor occurs only in the tense convergence of tenor and vehicle. With this formal scheme he defines surface and submerged metaphors—the former having both elements stated, the latter having the tenor unstated but implied; Miller distinguishes these from moribund metaphors, like the "foot" of a mountain, in which the appropriate tenors are forgotten, not submerged. He distinguishes positive and negative metaphor, depending upon the emphasis the metaphor places on either the fusion or the resistance between tenor and vehicle, for both forces must operate within a lively metaphor. He distinguishes simple, complex and compound metaphors, to the extent that tenor and vehicle are either simple terms or else contain, each or both of them, metaphors inside themselves. In the case of compound metaphors, sometimes the vehicle can be submerged, and if the critic can find what the vehicle is, the poetic passage acquires a more condensed and unified logical form. Miller’s application of these schemes to concrete instances of metaphor are carried out to good effect. His treatment of the epistemology and ontology of a work of verbal art is less successful; he wishes to accommodate both subjective and objective aspects, but tends to consider a manifestation of a poem as the poem itself. He considers the written documentation of a poem to be marks on a surface which serve as stimuli to the reader’s awareness; but units of documentation are written words, not marks, and the process of reading is not, as he claims, a process of decoding. He distinguishes between oral documentation and performance, but seems to think records, tapes and films are instances of the former; would not memory, or perhaps even recitation by rote, be better examples of oral documentation? He considers Saussurian langue as an example of a "cultural object" which finds manifestation in parole; but if this is so, how can there ever be intermediate cultural objects like poems or stories? Langue would be the only verbal cultural object there is. It would be better to consider poems and stories as cultural objects, and language as a potential matrix for them, much as matter is a matrix for substances. Miller objects to the metaphor of "organism" for a poem, because, he says, when we take a poem apart in critical analysis, we do not kill it; therefore the metaphor of "machine" is better—something that can be taken apart and put together again. But surely the correction here is not to replace organism by machine, but to change one’s understanding of what it is to take apart. The critic takes apart in thought, the way a mathematician does, and not like a butcher. Miller’s book is extremely interesting, asks many good questions, and should be read with profit and delight by philosophers interested in language.—R. S. (shrink)

Miller first examines the New Critics’ theory of metaphor, then presents his own views. There is one chapter on Hulme and Richards, one on Empson, Tate, Ransom and Brooks, and a third on Wimsatt, Wheelwright, and Krieger. Chapter Four contains Miller’s position and applies it to some metaphors from the metaphysical poets, and Chapter Five examines the problem of the objective status of a work of verbal art. Miller uses Richards’ distinction between the tenor and vehicle of a (...) class='Hi'>metaphor; in "My love is a red, red rose," "love" is the tenor and "rose" the vehicle, and a metaphor occurs only in the tense convergence of tenor and vehicle. With this formal scheme he defines surface and submerged metaphors—the former having both elements stated, the latter having the tenor unstated but implied; Miller distinguishes these from moribund metaphors, like the "foot" of a mountain, in which the appropriate tenors are forgotten, not submerged. He distinguishes positive and negative metaphor, depending upon the emphasis the metaphor places on either the fusion or the resistance between tenor and vehicle, for both forces must operate within a lively metaphor. He distinguishes simple, complex and compound metaphors, to the extent that tenor and vehicle are either simple terms or else contain, each or both of them, metaphors inside themselves. In the case of compound metaphors, sometimes the vehicle can be submerged, and if the critic can find what the vehicle is, the poetic passage acquires a more condensed and unified logical form. Miller’s application of these schemes to concrete instances of metaphor are carried out to good effect. His treatment of the epistemology and ontology of a work of verbal art is less successful; he wishes to accommodate both subjective and objective aspects, but tends to consider a manifestation of a poem as the poem itself. He considers the written documentation of a poem to be marks on a surface which serve as stimuli to the reader’s awareness; but units of documentation are written words, not marks, and the process of reading is not, as he claims, a process of decoding. He distinguishes between oral documentation and performance, but seems to think records, tapes and films are instances of the former; would not memory, or perhaps even recitation by rote, be better examples of oral documentation? He considers Saussurian langue as an example of a "cultural object" which finds manifestation in parole; but if this is so, how can there ever be intermediate cultural objects like poems or stories? Langue would be the only verbal cultural object there is. It would be better to consider poems and stories as cultural objects, and language as a potential matrix for them, much as matter is a matrix for substances. Miller objects to the metaphor of "organism" for a poem, because, he says, when we take a poem apart in critical analysis, we do not kill it; therefore the metaphor of "machine" is better—something that can be taken apart and put together again. But surely the correction here is not to replace organism by machine, but to change one’s understanding of what it is to take apart. The critic takes apart in thought, the way a mathematician does, and not like a butcher. Miller’s book is extremely interesting, asks many good questions, and should be read with profit and delight by philosophers interested in language.—R. S. (shrink)

Sortally incorrect sentences have traditionally been referred to as "category mistakes" (Ryle ()) or "type crossings" (Drange ()). Sortal incorrectness is a ...

Assesses Merleau-Ponty’s contribution to ethics as calling for a poetic interplay between perception and imagination, and between silence and solidarity, that reveals our place in the world, and our obligations to ourselves and others. Before his death in 1961, Merleau-Ponty worried about what he saw as humanity’s increasingly self-enclosed and manipulative way of experiencing self, others, and the world—the consequences of which remain apparent in our destructive inability to connect with others within and across cultures. In Merleau-Ponty and the Face (...) of the World, Glen A. Mazis provides an overall consideration of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy that brings out what he sees as a corrective prescription for ethical reorientation that is fundamental to Merleau-Ponty’s thought. Mazis begins by analyzing the key role that silence plays for Merleau-Ponty as a positive, powerful presence rather than a lack or emptiness, and then builds on this to explore the ethical significance of the face-to-face encounter in his thought as one of solidarity rather than obligation. In the last part of the book, Mazis traces the development of what he calls “physiognomic imagination” in Merleau-Ponty’s work. This understanding of imagination is not fancy or make-believe, but rather brings out the depths of perceptual meaning and leads to an appreciation of poetic language as the key to revitalizing both ethics and ontology. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s published works, lecture notes, unpublished writings, and the work of many phenomenologists and Merleau-Ponty scholars, Mazis also offers incisive readings of Merleau-Ponty’s work as it relates to that of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Gaston Bachelard, and Emmanuel Levinas. (shrink)

Concreteness ratings are frequently used in a variety of disciplines to operationalize differences between concrete and abstract words and concepts. However, most ratings studies present items in isolation, thereby overlooking the potential polysemy of words. Consequently, ratings for polysemous words may be conflated, causing a threat to the validity of concreteness‐ratings studies. This is particularly relevant to metaphorical words, which typically describe something abstract in terms of something more concrete. To investigate whether perceived concreteness ratings differ for metaphorical versus non‐metaphorical (...) word meanings, we obtained concreteness ratings for 96 English nouns from 230 participants. Results show that nouns are perceived as less concrete when a metaphorical (versus non‐metaphorical) meaning is triggered. We thus recommend taking metaphoricity into account in future concreteness‐ratings studies to further improve the quality and reliability of such studies, as well as the consistency of the empirical studies that rely on these ratings. (shrink)

This paper furnishes a brand storytelling account of the Covid-19 pandemic. By adopting a fictional ontological standpoint, the virus’ narrative space is mapped out by recourse to metaphorical modeling. The disease imagery stems from global mainstream media in the context of Covid-19’s brand globalization, as increasing interconnectedness of and interdependence between social, cultural and economic discourses. The main narrative components (actors, settings, actions, relationships) are outlined as episodes that make up the virus’ brand personality, against the background of a reading (...) grid. Subsequently, a nexus of ontological (deep) metaphors is identified as the virus’ master narrative, by identifying transfers between the global mediascape and the brand’s narrative space. Deep metaphors are equivalent to cultural archetypes or mythopoetic structures which make up a collective structural unconscious. Deep metaphors stem from reducing surface metaphors to their most universal semantic dimensions by identifying permeating themes. Instead of ascribing primacy to the . (shrink)

This paper gives a close reading of a number of poems by Fernando Pessoa, in particular by his ‘heteronym’ Alberto Caeiro. On that basis, a poetic ontology focused on the concept of ‘surfaciality’ is sketched which is then made more concrete through a discussion of the concepts of understanding and interpretation in Heidegger’s Being and Time. As an elaboration of this ontology, the paper concludes with a close reading of important long poem by Wallace Stevens, ‘Description Without Place’.

In this interesting study, Shalom Lappin argues that any adequate theory of sortal incorrectness must meet four requirements. First, it must account for the truth valuelessness of sortally incorrect sentences. Second, it must provide a means of distinguishing truth valuelessness arising from sortal incorrectness from other sources of truth valuelessness. Third, it must be able to capture inferences which depend on sortal factors, while preserving those implications and formulae of classical logic which are unaffected by sortal factors. And fourth, it (...) must supply an account of a significant but often overlooked class of sortally incorrect sentences, viz., those whose sortal incorrectness is introduced via adverbial phrases. (shrink)

_A profound meditation on Leopardi’s art and thought as well as a reframing and reassertion of Negri’s own philosophical and political project of liberation._.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Kantian Symbol The Schopenhauerian Metaphor? The Schopenhauerian Metonymy Gracián's Poetics and Schopenhauer as Poetic Metaphysician Conclusion References.

Job Jindo applies recent studies in cognitive science and explores how we can view metaphor as the very essence of poetic prophecy—namely, metaphor as an indispensable mode to communicate prophetic insight.

This article presents the conceptual groundwork for a “poetics of the self” by theorizing how and why a creative praxis rooted in Ricoeur’s philosophy of the will and hermeneutics of the living metaphor contributes to an individual’s on-going development of self-awareness. Its focus is on the affective fragility that manifests in an individual’s intermediary status of polarities – finitude and infinitude, freedom and nature – in conjunction with Ricœur’s tensional status of metaphorical truth. The act of writing poetry, it (...) suggests, can be an aesthetic mediation that develops insight into the primordial discord of the servile will. (shrink)

U radu se najprije razmatra značaj Nietzscheovih ideja za genezu i razvoj književnoteorijskih koncepcija Harolda Blooma, pri čemu je najveća pažnja posvećena revizionističkim temeljima ideje »straha od utjecaja«, kao i Bloomovoj polemici s onim suvremenim teorijskim orijentacijama koje je objedinio pežorativnom oznakom »škola resantimana«. Potom se pojedini elementi Bloomove poetike sučeljavaju s ničeanskim naslijeđem prisutnim kod dvojice filozofa, Michela Foucaulta i Richarda Rortyja, da bi se ukazivanjem na sličnosti i razlike – ali i na stavove koje su o naznačenim pitanjima (...) zauzeli autori poput Gillesa Deleuza i Paula de Mana – potvrdilo kako Nietzscheovo djelo, pored ostalog i zahvaljujući mogućnostima različite interpretacije, posjeduje ona svojstva koja Bloom naziva »kanonskima «. (shrink)

Language understanding is one of the most important characteristics for human beings. As a pervasive phenomenon in natural language, metaphor is not only an essential thinking approach, but also an ingredient in human conceptual system. Many of our ways of thinking and experiences are virtually represented metaphorically. With the development of the cognitive research on metaphor, it is urgent to formulate a computational model for metaphor understanding based on the cognitive mechanism, especially with the view to promoting (...) natural language understanding. Many works have been done in pragmatics and cognitive linguistics, especially the discussions on metaphor understanding process in pragmatics and metaphor mapping representation in cognitive linguistics. In this paper, a theoretical framework for metaphor understanding based on the embodied mechanism of concept inquiry is proposed. Based on this framework, ontology is introduced as the knowledge representation method in metaphor understanding, and metaphor mapping is formulated as ontology mapping. In line with the conceptual blending theory, a revised conceptual blending framework is presented by adding a lexical ontology and context as the fifth mental space, and a metaphor mapping algorithm is proposed. (shrink)

Abstract:This essay performs an anticolonial and poetic methodology of combining Black and Native feminists' deconstruction of metaphor and metaphysics in order to argue for the centrality of colonial metaphor to colonial metaphysics. I combine their analyses of the separate gendered metaphors of Blackness and Indianness and the centrality of these metaphors to the development of a global metaphysics as well as the transference of the terms of metaphysics to whiteness. I then apply this method of combined terms and (...) readings to white colonial writing that compares Black and Native America, which transforms both communities not only into individually potent, gendered metaphors but into an essential poetic pairing, a poetic couplet. Drawing on the work of Black and Native feminists, I further argue that when we take this paired model to evaluate the political concerns of Black and Native America, we come to a more complete and global understanding and refutation of whiteness. The creation, connection, and comparison of the gendered metaphors and archetypical figures of the "African Slave" and "Indian Savage" are important to each other and to the creation of a Western conception of the globe. Colonialism uses gender to compound metaphor's ability to create, by combining metaphors of gender with metaphors of race and colonialism to develop new symbolic amalgamations. This gestalt of metaphors comes together in order to create a fictive European metaphysics used to ameliorate white fears of the diversity of life on planet Earth and to satisfy white desires to control it. In this coupled metaphoric form, Blackness and Indianness are not connected by analogy but by the open-ended cut, the caesura, of poetry and the violence of slavery and conquest. I offer this anticolonial and poetic pairing as a model for political imagining between Black and Native theory. (shrink)

The Extent of the Literal develops a strikingly new approach to metaphor and polysemy in their relation to the conceptual structure. In a straightforward narrative style, the author argues for a reconsideration of standard assumptions concerning the notion of literal meaning and its relation to conceptual structure. She draws on neurophysiological and psychological experimental data in support of a view in which polysemy belongs to the level of words but not to the level of concepts, and thus challenges some (...) seminal work on metaphor and polysemy within cognitive linguistics, lexical semantics and analytical philosophy. (shrink)

Reacting against the turn to transcendence that heavily characterized the medieval worldview, the modern worldview is fundamentally exemplified by a threefold turn to immanence, consisting of a subjective turn, a linguistic turn and an experiential turn. Language plays a pivotal role here since it mediates between the subjective and the experiential. Ricoeur’s treatment of metaphor, significantly laid out in his The Rule of Metaphor, is crucial in bringing about this linguistic turn that mediates the subject and its experience (...) of the world. Through an analysis of “seeing as” as a poietic reconfiguration of reality in the subject’s experience, language transforms and founds the world as a “being as.” What is disclosed in this interpretative transformation of reality is not simply an hermeneutical ontology but possibly—also through language—an hermeneutical axiology. (shrink)

In this paper we examine the effect of two cognitive variables, Semantic Neighborhood Density and Interpretive Diversity, in first, distinguishing between literary (poetic) and nonliterary metaphor, and second, in determining what makes for a good metaphor. Analyses of items taken from a widely used set ofmetaphor norms indicated that while literary and nonliterary metaphor did not differ in many ways, the poetic items tended to 1) contain concepts that came from a more dense semantic space, 2) contain (...) topic and vehicles that came from equally dense semantic space, 3) suggest a greater number of possible interpretations as the topic and vehicle became more semantically dissimilar, and 4) evoke more emergent interpretations (i.e., less likely to be a characteristic of the topic or vehicle when considered separately). In addition, we found one way that the two variables were related to metaphor goodness: better metaphors were those with vehicles that came from increasingly less dense semantic space. This correlation was only reliable for literary, poetic items, presumably because these items were taken from a richer semantic environment suggesting many more alternative possibilities. (shrink)

Our usual view of the Renaissance poetic, as we derive it from the explicit statements which we normally cite, sees it primarily as a rhetorical theory which is essentially Platonic in the universal meanings behind individual words, images, or fictions. Accordingly, poetic words, images, or fictions are taken to be purely allegorical, functioning as arbitrary or at most as conventional signs: each word, image, or fiction is seen as thoroughly dispensable, indeed interchangeable with others, to be used just so long (...) as we can get beyond it to the ultimate meaning which it presumably signifies. This rather simple—if not simplistic—semiology leaves the body of poetry as empty as modern post-Saussurean linguistics often leaves the body of language. By treating all poetic devices as transparent elements through which various universal "truths" are revealed, the rhetorical/allegorical theory converts all the poet's dispositions of words into devices of persuasion on the service of a function higher than that of poetry. Such is the way that, for example, a conservative, widely influential theorist like Scaliger clearly formulated the principle. And for as careful a commentator on Renaissance imagery as Rosemund Tuve, these are the farthest reaches of the Renaissance poetic; she argues that any more subtle a claim is merely the consequence of the modern mind trying anachronistically to sophisticate an older tradition. Her examination of explicit statements by major Renaissance writers on poetics finds reinforcement in the logic of Petrus Ramus as she extends it to a total stylistics, or even to a linguistics.1 · 1. Rosemund Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery: Renaissance Poetic and Twentieth-Century Critics . Murray Krieger, University Professor of English and director of The Irvine School of Criticism and Theory at the University of California at Irvine, is the author of, among other works, The Tragic Vision, The Classic Vision, and, most recently, Theory of Criticism: A Tradition and its System. The present essay is part of his book, Poetic Presence and Illusion: Essays in Critical History and Theory. "Fiction, History, and Empirical Reality," his previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, appeared in the Winter 1974 issue. (shrink)