My
previous work was concerned with the “Literary Agamben” although its primary
interest was Agamben’s extensive work on poetry. While indifference was a central part of that
study, it was completed before the availability of the key works on method and
language and so in some ways is deficient in answering the question as to the
actual significance of poetry for Agamben’s work. That said it is a detailed study of the
question so I can allow myself the luxury of a very simple summary here, a kind
of concluding statement on poetry which is perhaps missing from the previous
book.
Poetry is a signature in
Agamben. It operates according to the
logic of the common and proper by assigning prose to the realm of the common
and the poetic or semiotic to that of the proper. Agamben repeatedly talks about the signature
of poetry in terms of the semantic/semiotic split, the age-old antagonism
between philosophy and poetry, or indeed that between prose and poetry. The semantic element of this signature is
assumed to be writing that places the communication of meaning ahead of that of
the medium of communication. Poetry,
represented by the technique of enjambment, interrupts clarity and coherence of
communication by favouring the semiotic over the semantic. Thus, simply put: a sentence in a poem, if it
is longer than the designated syllabic allocation stipulated by the metrics in
play, let us say here ten syllables, will be interrupted by a line-break, the
sentence concluded therefore on the next line.
The line break naturally imposes a pause, it traditionally gives extra
emphasis to the word at the end of the line due to where it is not what it
says, an emphasis often enforced by the use of rhyme and by semantic-semiotic
shifters such as ending lines on words like fall, dead, drop, pause etc. Enjambment is not the only technique that
foregrounds the semiotic in poetry, but it is the strongest paradigm amongst
all the various semiotic techniques to hand.
This is especially because of the relation between enjambment and
caesura. The caesura interrupts the flow
of the line, in the opposite manner to the way in which enjambment interrupts
the coherence of the sentence. This
model or signatory paradigm is to be found in a pronounced fashion both in
Derrida’s work on Literature/literature and Deleuze’s work on the relation
between segment and flow in the theory of the assemblage. Put simply, the semiotic is only made
operative by means of it rendering momentarily inoperative the semantic.
The complexity here that perhaps was
beyond my previous study is that poetry is defined in Agamben as the tension
between the semantic and the semiotic, not as it has seemed so far, the material
singularity of the semiotic. There are
then two poetries in play here. Small p
poetry is the foregrounding of the semiotic, while large P Poetry is the
relation between semantic and semiotic.
Thus Poetry as signature is the oikonomia
between the semantic and the semiotic in our tradition, whose moment of arising
is Plato’s Republic and the “expulsion of the poets” myth promulgated
there. This is further confused by
Agamben coming to call this the Idea of Prose.
Prose is actually, after Agamben, Benjamin and Walser, indifferent
Poetry. The distraction is the assumption
that, after Heidegger, and more recently Derrida, Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe and
Badiou, it is the singularity of the poetic in terms of its asemantic
materiality that defines its nature as a signature. Or poetry’s poiesis as opposed to philosophical dianioa to paraphrase Badiou.[i] Rather, what now must be concluded is that
Poetry is the impossible economy between philosophy as dianoia or as universal truth irrespective of its mode of
communication, and poetry as poiesis
or material singularity that communicates nothing but communicability as
such. This viewpoint is strongly
supported by my own comments here as to the origins of communicability in
Kant’s third critique and its extension by Heidegger’s work on art which
eventually became attenuated to considerations of poetry alone. Thus poetry’s tension is the constant
interchange between its meaning and its form, and its definition as this
tension between the semantic and the semiotic is not its definition as object,
but its revelation as process in the modern sources cited by Agamben: Valéry,
Milner, Heidegger…
This being the case Poetry is the
inoperativity of the ancient metaphysical division of thought and its
expression. In this way it is a special
signature which again makes its excavation rather tricky. For example, it suspends the signature
through which we come to understand indifferent suspension: philosophy. Plus it suspends the quality of singularity that
The Coming Community defines as
central to indifference. In that it is
concerned with semantic and semiotic, it of course suspends language as a
signature and its reliance on signified and signifier in metaphysics. In that the semiotic has been defined as the
essence of poetry as the art of all arts since Hegel, reified almost by Heiedegger’s
later work and the manner in which poetry as the material singularity of
language per se catches hold of such thinkers as Derrida, Nancy,
Lacoue-Labarthe, to some Degree Badiou, and as it often seems in the earlier
work Agamben, Poetry renders indifferent and thus inoperative the signature Art
of which it should be epiphenomenal.
Naturally in Agamben’s paradigm—signature model there is no epiphenomenal
relation here meaning that poetry must be a paradigm of the arts.[ii] Finally, as the semiotic is presented by this
tradition as the foregrounding of language as
such as the communication of communication per se, before above or to the
side of what is being communicated, in other words communicability as such, if
poetry is suspended, so too is communicability.
Poetry then is a special case. First it is a signature and a paradigm in
Agamben’s work. Second, when it is a
paradigm it is a paradigm of art as such in terms of its semiotic materiality,
although Agamben does not pursue this signature. Third, when it is a signature it suspends
another key signature, Philosophy.
Fourth, in so doing it also suspends a second signature, the most
important of all, Language. Fifth, as it
is defined as the foregrounding of language as such as semiotic, Poetry is
another name for the communicability as such of language encountered in terms
of its material support for all signatures.
A materiality whose Being however it also suspends in terms of its
traditional counter-definition as not-semantic, not-communication,
not-philosophy, not-universal, not-true.
This makes Poetry, for me, the most difficult of all the signatures to
explain in Agamben’s work, or better the longest to explain in a shortened form
in that this fifteen hundred or so words has taken me ten years to arrive at.
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