Philosophy, Poetry, Parataxis

At the heart of the relationship between philosophy and poetry, and of the philosophical and the literary tout court, is the relationship between poetry and prose. In the increasingly influential work of Giorgio Agamben, whose impact continues to grow across a wide range of disciplines, the relationship between philosophy and poetry, poetry and prose, receives renewed attention and significance. Situating Agamben’s philosophical, poetic prose in relation to the legacy of the prose poem from Charles Baudelaire through Walter Benjamin and Rosmarie Waldrop, “Philosophy, Poetry, Parataxis” explores the implications of what Agamben calls “whatever being” or “whatever singularity” for our understanding of the potentialities inherent in the relationship between contemporary writing practices and what Agamben calls The Coming Community. In contributing to the development of innovative, alternative forms of textuality at once “philosophical” and “poetic,” contemporary writers such as Agamben and Waldrop share an understanding of the informing role of parataxis in inflecting philosophy and poetry, poetry and prose, toward what we might call an aesthetics and politics of apposition.

Wittgenstein once wrote that ‘philosophy should really only be poeticized’ [Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten] . . . As for poetry, one could say . . . that poetry should really only be philosophized.

—Giorgio Agamben, Idea of Prose

. . . Baudelaire sometimes did not understand in understanding himself (though he did write the prose poems, which redeem all.)

—Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience

At the heart of the relationship between philosophy and poetry—the “quintessence,” as Charles Baudelaire understood, of the literary tout court—is the relationship between poetry and prose. While the genre-announcing, genre-defying preface to Arsène Houssaye in Baudelaire’s Le spleen de Paris emphasizes the creation of a “prose poétique,” its two concluding prose poems—“Assommons les pauvres” (“Beat Up the Poor”) and “Les bons chiens” (“The Faithful Dog”)—are at least as concerned with the question of a poésie philosophique or philosophie poétique. ¹ The latter becomes in fact, as the collection develops90 across its fifty-one discrete yet interlocking texts, an increasingly acute, sustained emphasis through the final ironic, genre-confounding pronouncement of its closing sentence:

And every time the poet dons the painter’s waistcoat he is forced to think of faithful dogs, philosophic dogs, and of Indian summers and the beauty of women past their prime. (PS 107)