Living in the post-traumatic age – after Auschwitz – and still witnessing on a daily basis various forms of barbarism ranging from local wars, nationalisms, to classism, racism, sexism and numerous other yet-to-be-named ‘-isms’, we have reached the point when awareness of our own being has been radically shaken. Self-doubt prompted many academics to depressively …
Tag Archives: Poetry
Poem as witness
Poem as witness, as transmitter of multiple meanings, coming from an unknown space, remaining beyond the reach of universal language and aesthetic forms and norms, is conditioned as an act of resistance and struggle, a protest against violence and political order – carrying the ghost of witness through time. Celan calls upon his readers to …
What Does the Poem Think? – Que pense le poème?
A public lecture on poetry by Alain Badiou at Théâtre de Vidy in Lausanne, Switzerland. For the philosopher, “poetry has always been a place of thought, a procedure of truth”, but unlike philosophy, poetry is a thought in action, which realizes in language, the singularity of the presence of sensibility.
On Poetry, Art, and Elitism
Writing about poetry is at the same time a difficult and interesting endeavour because it requires complete freedom from the constraints of both form and methodology. Following the rules of traditional theoretical research, writing within the field of poetics often seems pretentious and somehow forced, similar to how aesthetic writing about music, dance or theatrical arts usually considers it impossible to penetrate the unknown ‘creative zone’ and to translate that moment even into simple language, let alone into an academic explanation of something that does not have the power or desire to directly address and contemplate the inexplicable.