The Poetic Word in the Taking-Place of Language: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Politics

Abstract

This work aims to investigate the nature and function of the poetic word from its relation with aesthetics, ethics, and politics. We are stirred to know the ways poetic language, inscribed within language, may appear as a gesture of resistance and subversion. This is due to its investments both in non-representation and in the presentation of an (almost) rising being in a hic et nunc of its presence in the “taking place” of language. Contemporary philosophers, such as Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben, suggest possible answers to this question through the operation of negativity that takes place in language so as to make it uninformative. Barthes also seems to follow the same path by lingering on the emptiness of the appearance of “this is” in the poetic form of haiku, which prevents any further interpretation. We expect that these ways of thinking the poetic may offer literary criticism new investigative parameters.