Let’s get rid of poetry. Let’s get rid of philosophy. We have enough two minute advertisements to fill the gap of the absence of poetry and philosophy. There are enough guys sitting on a chair beside a table with flowers and a glass of water talking spiritual stuff. There are enough bra commercials that tout raised and firm breasts. There are enough erectile disfunction pills and treatments that promise to keep men hard long into their deepest fantasies. Who needs poetry and philosophy?
Who today would claim that he is equally at home in the essence of thinking and in the essence of poetry?
—Martin Heidegger, “Why Poets?” (206)
Is it true? Badiou states: “Since Nietzsche, all philosophers claim to be poets, they all envy poets, they are all wishful poets or approximate poets, or acknowledged poets, as we see with Heidegger, but also with Derrida or Lacoue-Labarthe” (Manifesto 70). This provocation is the least of it, because Badiou’s main thesis is even more disturbing: “I maintain that the Age of Poets is completed” (71); “the fundamental criticism of Heidegger can only be the following one: the Age of Poets is completed, it is also necessary to de-suture philosophy from its poetic condition” (74). Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe responds gently but in a somewhat panicky tone:
Should poetry cease to be of interest to philosophy? Must we—as a necessity or an imperative—sever the tie that for two centuries in Europe has united philosophy (or at least that philosophy that is astonished at its origin and anxious about its own possibility), and poetry (or at least that poetry that acknowledges a vocation toward thought and is also inhabited by an anxiety over its destination)? Must philosophy—by necessity or imperative—cease its longing for poetry, and conversely (for there is indeed reciprocity here), must poetry finally mourn every hope of proffering the true, and must it renounce?
We would not be asking such a question, or we would be asking it differently, if Alain Badiou had not recently situated it at the very center of what is at stake today in philosophizing—in the very possibility of philosophizing. (Heidegger 17)
(--Alain Badiou’s Age of the Poets: The Desacralizing of the Poem in Volume 31 – Number 3 – May 2021, Alberto Moreiras)
Even prose and poetry scuffle. "Perhaps [a different] Alain said it best for all who hold this view: True prose must be “poetry refused".” (French: La prose est poésie refusée)
(note: Alain is the pseudonym of Émile-Auguste Chartier (born March 3, 1868, Mortagne, Fr.—died June 2, 1951, Le Vésinet, near Paris). He was a French philosopher whose work profoundly influenced several generations of readers. (cf.Britannica)
I refuse poetry. I also refuse prose. I furthermore avoid anyone proclaiming poetry or prose.
We are simple people. Talk to us like simple people. Tell us how to inject ourselves so as to lose 40-50 pounds. Show us how to do tai chi chair yoga so as to look like someone who deserves E.D. pills and grateful women and men. Remind us that we can cash in our longterm insurance policies to help make our current lives more spectacular.
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.
Or, in prose: Damned crow shakes snow on back of my neck. Caw caw, cold!
I’m giving up poetry and prose.
I’m taking to my swirl chair by front window where I can watch cars and trucks, chickadee and cardinal go by. Where I can watch my life go by without considering thought or meaning; not the screams of war or the squeals of orgasm covered by last night’s cold snow; not the mute and mutant psyche of a nation free to check the stock market for their true love’s readout.
Alla salute! Saluti a tutti i miei fratelli e sorelle!
