parallax
, 2001, vol. 7, no. 4, 48–65
Poem, Theorem
Stephen Clucas
What philosophy worthy of its name has truly been able to avoid the link between poem and theorem?
Michel Serres
1
In his introduction to a recent edition of Ce´sar Vallejo’s
Trilce
, Julio Ortega suggestedthat Vallejo’s linguistic experiments should be seen as a series of theorems, hypothesesor demonstrations:This movement of language between fragments, this counterposingof symmetrical, analogical and antithetical spaces, works as anexploratory logic which presents evidence, compares proofs, testshypotheses, deduces conclusions.
2
Ortega’s comparison draws sustenance from the post-Heideggerean thematic whichpresents the poetic as innately theoretical – but can links between the poetic and thetheoretical be taken in anything other than an analogical or metaphorical sense (or isthere something immanent within the poetic itself which we can call truly theoretical)?What I propose to investigate here are the uneasy vacillations within contemporaryphilosophy and cultural theory regardingthe relations between the arts and the sciences,and more particularly between the poetic and the theoretical. What follows are somecritical observations on some signicant moments in this clandestine contemporarydebate – Alain Badiou’s re-visioning of poetry’s relationship to philosophical thoughtand Gilles Deleuze and Fe´lix Guattari’s identication of art and literature as ‘blocs of sensations’ distinct from the ‘conceptual personae’ of philosophy – together with somemore general reections on the relationship between the poetic and the theoreticalprompted by the work of Michel Serres.
Poem or Matheme?
If in Heidegger’s accounts of the early Greek philosophers ‘poetizing and thinking’(
Dichten und Denken
) were seen as virtually identical,
3
the relationship between themhas been completely recongured by more recent philosophical projects. In theirdi
V
erent ways (and in the name of very di
V
erent philosophical objectives) AlainBadiouand Gilles Deleuze and Fe´lix Guattari have attempted to locate poetry outsideof philosophical thought as
non-conceptual
.
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ISSN 1353-4645 print
/
ISSN 1460-700X online
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2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd
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journalsDOI: 10.1080
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13534640110089258
48
Badiou’s monumental study of the theory of multiplicities,
L’E ˆ tre et L’E ´ vene ´ ment
,presents a dilemma for contemporary philosophy, ‘La nature: poe`me ou mathe`me?’His resolution of the dilemma involves an unambiguous turn towards mathematicsand away from the Heideggerian thematic of ‘thinking from the word’, with itsprivileging of the ‘dictum’ of the poet-philosopher:It is clear then that two paths, two orientations command the wholedestiny of Western thought. One supported by nature in its originalGreek sense, receiving in poetry the appearance as ad-venient presenceof being. The other, supported by the Idea in the Platonic sense of the word, submitting lack to the matheme, subtraction of all presence,and thus disjoining being from appearance, essence from existence.For Heidegger, the poetico-natural path which lets-be presentationas non-concealment, is the authentic origin. The mathematico-Ideal path, which subtracts presence and puts forward evidence, ismetaphysical closure, the rst step of forgetting.
4
Badiou’s solution to the dilemma of the two orientations involves, he claims, not a‘reversal, but an
other
arrangement of these two paths’.
5
This ‘other arrangement’,however (despite his claims to be protecting the autonomy of poetry
qua
poetry fromthe aggressive incursions of philosophers) is e
V
ectively the subordination of poetryto the matheme. His own ‘recourse to poetry’ in
Conditions
, where he devotes twolong chapters to the ‘methods’ of Mallarme´ and Rimbaud, ultimately reduces poetryto a function of his own philosophy of the event.In his essay ‘Le recours philosophique au poe`me’, Badiou sets out to rethink therelationship between poetry and thought, charting the historical genesis of thisrelationship from Parmenidean ‘fusion’ (in which – a`la Heidegger – poetry andthought are co-identical), to Platonic ‘expulsion’ (in which poetry is ‘banished’ andreplaced by mathematics as the organizing principle of philosophical thought)through the Aristotelian ‘inclusion’ of poetry as a sub-domain within philosophy(poetics), to the Heideggerian ‘suture’ of poetry and philosophy in the rst half of the twentieth century.
6
Badiou sees the Heideggerian position as a dominant one(especially within the French poetic tradition from Rene´Char to Michel Deguy) andconsiders it imperative ‘to reformulate that which conjoins and disjoins the poemand philosophical discursivity’.
7
In a ‘contestation’ of Heidegger’s position heattempts ‘the reconstruction of
another relation
, or de-relation, between poetry andphilosophy’.
8
We philosophers can, and indeed ought, to leave to poets the concernfor the future of poetry beyond all that which the concern of philosophical hermeneutics burdens it with. Our singular task is ratherto rethink, from the point of view of philosophy, philosophy’sconnection or non-connection with the poem, in terms which cannotbe those of Platonic banishment, nor those of Heideggerian suture,nor that of the classicatory concern of an Aristotle or a Hegel.
9
This seemingly benign concern for poet’s ‘burden’ (he wants to see the poem ‘freedfrom philosophical poetization’),
10
is in fact a clandestine attempt to banish it from
parallax49
philosophical meaning. Given the paradigmatic importance of Plato’s discussion of the One and the Many in the
Parmenides
in Badiou’s project (as the rst philosophyto ‘think multiplicity’ in the Western tradition), it is hardly surprising to see himrepeat the Platonic banishment, albeit in a more indirect fashion.
11
While Badiou concedes that philosophy ‘uses ctive incarnations in the texture of its exposition’,
12
and refers briey to the various ways in which philosophy makesuse of dialogue, image, comparison, rhythm, narrative, parable and fable, theseoccurences of the literary within the philosophical are emphatically qualied:However, these occurences of literature as such are placed under the jurisdiction of a principle of thought which they do not constitute.They are
localized
in certain points where, in order to establish aplace where they can articulate how and why a truth makes a gap inmeaning and escapes interpretation, it is necessary, through a para-dox of exposition, to propose a fable, an image or a ction, tointerpretation itself.
13
Poetry, then, in Badiou’s model is strictly subordinate to (under the
jurisdiction
of) a‘principle of thought’ which is exterior to it – it is a localized means, or instrument,of philosophy and not philosophical in itself. This subordination is clearly visible inthe other two essays on poetry in
Conditions
, where Badiou discusses the poetry of Mallarme´ and Rimbaud as ‘methods’.
14
Mallarme´’s poems are seen in terms of Badiou’s own philosophy as acts of ‘evenemental naming’ (
nomination e´vene´mentielle
),
15
which function by mean of threekinds of negation: ‘disappearance’ (
l’evanouissement
), ‘annulation’ (
l’annulation
), and‘foreclosure’ (
la forclusion
). Disappearance, for example, involves the introduction of what Badiou calls ‘disappearing terms’ (
termes e ´ vanouissants
), that is names or termswhich are cancelled or obliterated. For example the poem ‘A la nue accablante’,which evokes a ‘sepulchral shipwreck’ (
se´pulcral naufrage
) is said to introduce the vanishing term ‘ship’ (
navire
) which is then obliterated in the event of shipwreck. ‘Theship is not evoked except through its abolition’, says Badiou, and this is characteristicof the naming-event, in that it inscribes terms in the indecidable and ‘summons fromthe place or situation its void, which is its being insofar as it is being’.
16
For Badioupoetry (or at least Mallarme´’s poetry) is the ‘thought of the event
as such
’ – ‘only thepoem’, he says, ‘can give us the gift of the event
along with its indecidability
’.
17
Rimbaud’s poetry, on the other hand, operates according to a di
V
erent logic, whichBadiou calls ‘interruption’. ‘The poem’, he says, ‘is its own interruption’.
18
This‘interruptive function’ (
la fonction interruptrice
) which Badiou sees as reaching its apogeein Rimbaud’s poem
Me ´moire
, is that which disrupts thought, but also that which‘disorders the order of speech’.
19
The poem of Rimbaud is most often consecrated to interruption itself,to that which inscribes in language less the ecstacy of donation or theunrepresentable obligation of being-there, than the instantaneousoscillation between the one and the other.
20
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Poem Theorem by Stephen Clucas
Parallax, Volume 7, Issue 4 October 2001
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