Поэзия как опыт

by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe

Эта книга посвящена творчеству крупнейшего современного немецкого поэта Пауля Целана. Его сложная и интересная поэтика предстает здесь объектом глубоких интерпретаций французского философа Филиппа Лаку-Лабарта.

Genres: Poetry, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe—philosopher, literary critic, and translator—is one of the leading intellectuals in France. He teaches philosophy and aesthetics at the University of Strasbourg. Among his works translated into English is Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics (Stanford paperback edition, 1998).

Reviews

[Lorraine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think that this is brilliant. It can be abstruse, but read intuitively and you realise it's a desperate attempt to articulate what we've been feeling about poetry all along. That, in my view, is the essence of good criticism -- the desperation to say, somehow or other, how art affects us. Or non-art, since in this book Lacoue-Labarthe talks about how art is the unheimliche, and how Celan seemingly dialectically opposes 'the human' to that -- how this dialectic is not even a dialectic because poetry is not the other of art ['the human' is not the anti-thesis of 'art'] but rather takes place within art itself. The difference of art from itself. What he says is quite true, that speaking is forgetting the human, when you speak you forget who you are -- utterance alienates. The challenge is to speak without speaking, to remember, to preserve singularity and to retain, in that, openness.

This talks about the deterioration of the subject (wrt lyric poetry) -- the shift from the focus on 'the subject' to the possibility of address, in that sense *shifting* the attention from 'self' to 'other'. But phillippe lacoue-labarth is careful to say that this shift, in addressing a person (I avoid 'subject' due to theoretical problems) while open to alterity, is openness and NOT alterity, though always threatened by the fact that alterity might overwhelm. An address to being, which is nothingness -- not alterity. He talks about JF Lyotard's sublime and criticises it for talking about the unrepresentable as 'beyond representation' -- that already 'stabilises it' and turns it into the *unpresented*. That IS quite true. He asks us to think of poetry as a *movement* (it occurs to me this is useful for irony), a gesture. The movement of relating self to other (the act of defining them, by negative definition) is a more primal difference than the difference between self and other. Specifically it is a DIFFERANCE, in Derrida's terms 'the gift of the other within the same', as Lacoue-Labarth so smoothly puts it (structurally, also the difference of art within itself). The argument is very very neat.

I think, though, that this is very difficult to read without some knowledge of Blanchot, Derrida, Freud and Heidegger. That is probably the drawback. I don't blame him -- these things are not easy to articulate.

It ends with a quote from Anna Akhmatova's Requiem, which I find very touching: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/requiem/

I think that it is a GREAT book for pausing and thinking what our experience of much art is -- and what the often abused concepts of 'transcendence' and 'beauty' actually mean.

[Mohammed Yusuf · Rating 3 out of 5]

ان التجربة عند هيدغر هي ثلاثة أجزاء تلقي ومعرفة و تحول و هي ما تحرك خلاله الناقد الفرنسي لابارث لحكاية قصة تسيلان الشعرية فالشعر الذي افترضه كائن يملي على الإنسان ويحوله كأنه اخر بداخله ينتقل من التواصل معه إلى تغييره وهذا الكائن الغريب عنا هو تجربة نعيشها في الوقت ذاته ، ان تسيلان بعد اوشفيتز يتم تصويره كمحارب بيده قصيدة

أحتكاك النقد الفرنسي بالتأويل الألماني شئ مثير للاهتمام ولكنه يضيف لعبات لغوية زائدة إلى هذه الفلسفة التفكيكية وعلاقة هيدغر بتسيلان تظل تتكرر في قراءاتي ثانية و نوعا ما أحببت هذا الهوس عند النقاد بربط حكاياتهما معا

[Epifras]

Kasta sig i glömskans vatten och plaska, dricka från Lethe och glömma

Vattnet vid Neckar, Rhenfloden

Magikern i Hölderlins dikt som dras runt i floden

Vi blir till mumlande gamla gubbar, yra av vattnets virvlar

Oidipus - blindhet och insikt - Tiresias

Diktande som säger att den inte längre säger någonting men ändå måste säga det, poesins avsägande avverkande - ett gapande svalg

Poesin var alltid länge förbunden med bönen, en bön till någon som man åkallar, den man åkallar (gud) - att göra något, åstadkomma något, hjälpa oss

Farväl till tron och bönen, Gud som blir en Ingen, en keiner, nirgend

Farväl till diktens åkallan och vilja, viljan att påverka

Hölderlins ljuvliga blå - den blå himmelen som visar sig i sin undandragenhet, liksom gud visar sig genom sin frånvaro

Saker som blir synliga genom sin osynlighet

Mimesis - himmelens blå och guds avbild

Svårt att lösgöra sig från avbilder

[jesse]

Its subject is an important one (Celan with Heidegger) and its worthwhile moments are worthwhile. With that in mind: was pretty surprised by how shallow a lot of Lacoue-Labarthe's analysis was, especially in the second half of this. Not rigorous enough to be philology (even at time relishing in his laziness and ignorance) nor enjoyable enough to count as freeform continental riffing.

[Genjiro]

Lacoue-Labarthe, like his associate Nancy, can be impossible reading without having some cursory understanding of the larger field of references. Even so, the rigor of his analysis and the subject matter make for an illuminating encounter. I started re-reading this book, one I picked up several years ago and put down after a dozen pages, but this time I feel a stronger identification with the contents of his discourse having read some of Celan and Holderlin's poetry, and the recently published work based on the encounter between Heidegger and Celan.

[Ammon · Rating 5 out of 5]

The importance of Celan for French Heideggerians cannot be overstated.

[Calum · Rating 5 out of 5]

Provocative, questioning rumination on Celan, Holderlin and the possibility of saying, of connecting, and the meaning of poetry.