Lacoue-Labarthe's Poetry as Experience addresses the question of a lyric language that would not be the expression of subjectivity. In his analysis of the historical position of Paul Celan's poetry, Lacoue-Labarthe defines the subject as the principle that founds, organizes, and secures both cognition and action-a principle that turned, most violently during the twentieth century, into a figure not only of domination but of the extermination of everything other than itself. This thoroughly universal, abstract, and finally ...
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Lacoue-Labarthe's Poetry as Experience addresses the question of a lyric language that would not be the expression of subjectivity. In his analysis of the historical position of Paul Celan's poetry, Lacoue-Labarthe defines the subject as the principle that founds, organizes, and secures both cognition and action-a principle that turned, most violently during the twentieth century, into a figure not only of domination but of the extermination of everything other than itself. This thoroughly universal, abstract, and finally suicidal subject eradicates all experience, save the singularity of this experience of voiding. But what is left, as Paul Celan insisted, is a remainder to the lyric voice alone: Singbarer Rest. Lacoue-Labarthe's detailed analyses of two decisive poems by Celan, "Tubingen, Janner" and "Todtnauberg"-the one a response to Holderlin, the other to Heidegger-and his sustained reading of "The Meridian" present Celan's verse of singularity as the movement at and beyond the border of generalizable experience, i.e., as an experience, a traversing of a dangerous field, in which language no longer dominates anything, but rather commemorates the voiding of concepts and the collapse of the constitutive powers of the subject. For Lacoue-Labarthe, poetry after the Shoah, the poetry of bared singularity, is no longer a poetry that would correspond to the concept of the subject-or, for that matter, to the concept of poetry-but is rather the language of the decept. Only by being disappointed of the heroic language of idealistic poetry, and of the mytho-ontological tendencies of philosophy, can Celan's poetry keep open the possibility of another history, another future.
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Seller's Description:
Fine in Fine dust jacket. Translated by Andrea Tarnowski. The dust jacket is protected by a Brodart mylar cover and is not clipped. Not an ex-library copy. No remainder marks. No names or marks in the text. Most books shipped within 24 hours. All books mailed with Delivery Confirmation in a heavy cardboard box. Unread. Fine condition in fine dust jacket. Selling Used and Rare books on line since April 1998 and from our bookstore in the heart of the Bluegrass since 1984. This was originally published in French in 1986.; Meridian Crossing Aesthetics; 8vo.; viii, 144, iii pages.