Marcel Duchamp once asked whether it is possible to make something
that is not a work of art. This question returns over and over in
modernist culture, where there are no longer any authoritative
criteria for what can be identified (or excluded) as a work of art.
As William Carlos Williams says, "A poem can be made of anything,"
even newspaper clippings. At this point, art turns into philosophy,
all art is now conceptual art, and the manifesto becomes the
distinctive genre of modernism. This book takes seriously this
transformation of art into philosophy, focusing upon the systematic
interest that so many European philosophers take in modernism.
Among the philosophers Gerald Bruns discusses are Theodor W.
Adorno, Maurice Blanchot, Arthur Danto, Stanley Cavell, Hans-Georg
Gadamer, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,
Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe, and Emmanuel Levinas. As Bruns demonstrates, the
difficulty of much modern and contemporary poetry can be summarized
in the idea that a poem is made of words, not of any of the things
that we use words to produce: meanings, concepts, propositions,
narratives, or expressions of feeling. Many modernist poets have
argued that in poetry language is no longer a form of mediation but
a reality to be explored and experienced in its own right. But what
sort of experience, philosophically, might this be? The problem of
the materiality or hermetic character of poetic language inevitably
leads to questions of how philosophy itself is to be written and
what sort of community defines the work of art-or, for that matter,
the work of philosophy. In this provocative study, Bruns answers
that the culture of modernism is a kind of anarchist community,
where the work of art is apt to be as much an event or
experience-or, indeed, an alternative form of life-as a formal
object. In modern writing, philosophy and poetry fold into one
another. In this book, Bruns helps us to see how.
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