On the Anarchy of Poetry and Philosophy : A Guide for the Unruly

Gerald L. Bruns

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9780823226320
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

This book takes seriously the 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-François 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.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations for Frequently Cited Texts
• Preface
• Part I: The Modernist Sublime
• Chapter 1: Modernisms — Literary and Otherwise: An Introduction
• Chapter 2: Ancients and Moderns: Gadamer’s Aesthetic Theory and the Poetry of Paul Celan
• Part II: Forms of Paganism
• Chapter 3: Foucault’s Modernism: Language, Poetry, and the Experience of Freedom
• Chapter 4: Poetic Communities
• Chapter 5: Francis Ponge on the Rue de la Chaussee d’Antin
• Chapter 6: The Senses of Augustine: On Some of Lyotard’s Remains
• Part III: Anarchist Poetics
• Chapter 7: Anarchic Temporality: Writing, Friendship, and the Ontology of the Work of Art in Maurice Blanchot’s Poetics
• 8: The Concepts of Art and Poetry in Emmanuel Levinas’s Writings
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index