Introduction: Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Before Sunrise

2019

My thesis elaborates a philosophy of poetry in two interrelated ways: a philosophical study of poetry and an exploration of the impacts of poetry on philosophical investigations. Whereas poetry was considered as one of the highest arts in the 18th and 19th century aesthetics, 20th century analytic aesthetics has left poetry aside, focusing much more on visual arts or music. The so-called ‘analytic-continental divide’ which has shaped the philosophical landscape in the 20th century provides an element of an answer to explain this disappearance: following the ‘linguistic turn,’ the dominant conception of language in the analytic tradition is the representational conception of language which fails to give an account of what happens in poetry. On the continental side, on the contrary, some philosophers such as Heidegger have gone as far as to consider philosophy as poetry. These two extremes map out two questions that a philosophy of poetry must answer: What conception of language can give an account of poetry? And how does poetry affect philosophical investigations, especially regarding the question of style? Nietzsche and Wittgenstein both offer interesting insights to answer these questions and bringing them together lead to reconsidering the analytic-continental divide and the ‘quarrel between philosophy and poetry.’ I approach poetry by transposing Wittgenstein’s notion of ’seeing-as’ to ‘reading-as,’ and bring this notion in relation to Nietzsche’s perspectivism. Following these ideas, I consider poetry as a way creating perspectives and elaborate the notion of ‘perspectival poetics’ in the etymological sense of poiesis, creation or making. Philosophy’s encounter with the language of poetry does not only entail a change in conception of language, but also a change in philosophy’s own use of language. Philosophy’s encounter with poetry brings the question of style to the fore and leads to reconsidering the relations between philosophy and poetry.

F.Grosser/N.Sahraoui (eds.), Heidegger in the Literary World: Variations on Poetic Thinking, Rowman & Littlefield: Lanham/Boulder/New York/London, 2021

Carnap's article, "The Overcoming of Metaphysics Through the Logical Analysis of Language" is well-known for its critique of Heidegger, but Carnap concludes with considerable praise for Nietzsche. I argue that what Carnap appreciated about Nietzsche is the commitment to "modernism" which they both shared. In the case of Carnap, it is precisely his commitment to modernism which leads him to embrace "modern logic," and as a result of that commitment, to push his own expression of that commitment to the margins of his early texts.

Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, 2017

Most philosophies of poetry attempt to define what poetry is, either as a genre or subgenre of literature or as a specific use of language whose characteristics are different from ordinary language. The problem of such essentialist approaches is that poetry, like art in general, seems to defy definition and to always offer counterexamples to the philosopher’s definition. In this paper, I therefore shift my attention from attempting to define poetry or its characteristics to understanding what we can learn from its difference from ordinary speech. The etymology of poetry, poiesis, brings to the fore the idea that poetry involves a making or a creating. Following ideas from Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, I understand poetry as involving what I call a perspectival poetics. At the heart of this poetics is the task of creating perspectives which reveal new viewpoints on the world. To elaborate this notion, I focus especially on Wittgenstein’s idea of ‘seeing-as’, which can be relevant to poetry by transposing it into ‘reading as’, and on Nietzsche’s perspectivism which brings the idea of creation of perspectives to the fore.

History of European Ideas, 1995

The discourse on poetry in this essay persistently recaptures the strictures of language and simultaneously the efforts of two great philosophers to overcome them. Heidegger and Rosenzweig mediate the voices of poets such as H61derlin and Goethe, in reinscribing these poets' perceptions of their vocation as well as in the re-enactment of their verse. They both execute the movement away from traditional philosophical discourse (which they identify as rational and propositional) to poetic discourse (which consists of regions more vast and deep than words could convey). They not only speak of poetry but, in their rejection of traditional philosophical discourse, they employ a form of thinking (or poetising) that juxtaposes interpretation of their most inspired poetic verses, with meditations on language as a primordial experience. They both privilege the spoken word over the written word, and sustain the dialectics between poetry as an art form and as a state of being. Finally, they both reach the site where the word bears witness to the unsayable and therefore transcends itself and enters into silence.

diacritics, 2015

This text focus on Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of “co-appearing.” We claim that Nancy understands “co-appearing” as a non-subjective process of original synthesis, which provides the ultimate ontological grounds for a post-hermeneutical understanding of Being. We also suggests that “co-appearing” allows to elaborate a reinterpretation of transcendental logic. As original synthetic process, “co-appearing” describes the way in which meaning produces itself, without involving the category of a subjective, or even existential, “understanding.” We identify the production of meaning through an analysis of metaphors in Aristotle’s Poetics. Metaphors create meaning by opposing terms that “appear with” one another. My hypothesis is that the production of metaphors offers a clear example of how meaning is produced abandoning any presupposition concerning self-reflection and subjectivity. It is in that sense that “co-appearing” challenges transcendental logic and pushes us to reinvent it.

2016

This chapter starts with the question of truth in literature, noting that this question has several interrelated senses: can literature present (significant) truths at all?; what does its presentation of truths (if it exists) have to do with its manner of presentation (with literary language)?; and is the presentation of truth a central aim of literary art? The chapter surveys a variety of neo-Fregean (Lamarque and Olsen, Walton) views that reject the very possibility of literary truth as well as a variety of anti-Fregean views (Goodman, Heidegger) that endorse it. But those endorsements often do not say enough about literary language and its grip on specific actualities. To move beyond this dispute, the chapter argues that Hegel, in his remarks on literary imagination in his Lectures on Fine Art, shows illuminatingly how literary writers sometimes arrive (and centrally aspire to arrive) at a distinctively poetic grasp of the world: die poetische Auffassung der Welt.

British Journal of Aesthetics, 2016