Socrates banished poetry from the ideal republic, adopting the
philosophical position that poetic language operates outside the
conventions of public discourse and is private in expression. But
what does the banished language of poetry say about its relation to
public space? Is it possible to draw a line severing the language
of beauty from the language of truth? Derrida asks whether the line
ought rather to pass between Western metaphysics, with its logic of
polar opposites, and another way that does not organize everything
in oppositional terms. The verbal economy organized around the poem
as inscription, for instance, fits awkwardly with a division
between a public discourse under the aegis of truth and a private
one regulated by aesthetic pleasure.
"Poetry's Appeal" takes the reemergence of a viable poetry in the
politicized culture of revolutionary and post-revolutionary France
as a signal that poetry's sentence of exile from the public arena
is unresolved. It finds that poetry addresses history and the
political through a disjunction between its illusory status as a
song of private, lyrical intent and its actual state as a material
inscription, inevitably public in character.
The book confronts several issues raised by the gap between
poetry's aesthetic status and its material state. It shows that
this gap allows poetry to make a strong critique of symbols as
weapons for waging ideological warfare. As lyric, a poem
naturalizes linguistic structures whose artificiality, as
inscription, it makes manifest. Inscription thus enables the poem
to act subversively against the ideology it supposedly supports.
Furthermore, the chances and economies of the letter, the mark, and
the page can have productive, positing power in poetry. The author
argues that the zones and pockets that emerge thanks to
nonsignifying elements of language have analogies for reading the
city space.
In chapters on Chenier, Hugo, Baudelaire, Mallarme, and Valery, the
book details some of the struggles between the ideological and
material sides of poetry with the nineteenth-century remappings of
political space: memory and the archive, the censorship of material
history, the propping of founding performatives, the legibility of
founding texts, the need to redefine action where technique is
productive, and the recognition and assimilation of zones owed to
technique.
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