ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses in detail on the historical context of the second phase of my “poethical trajectory”, arguing that the post-war years in America, from around 1945 to 1970, set the conditions for a renewed commitment to poethical praxis with the revival of a counter-cultural politics, a challenge to conventional poetic form, and the recrudescence of the public poetry reading. Foremost in this transition, I consider the famous Beat writer Allen Ginsberg as important, not only for his dissension from societal conformity on ethical grounds, but also for his poetic practice—drawing largely on Jack Kerouac’s unique prosody—that deterritorialised the boundaries of Cold-war identity-thinking. Whilst the so-called Beats have been historicised as delinquent rebels, this chapter will focus not only on the sociopolitical context, but on Ginsberg’s Beat aesthetic, demonstrating how his poetry maintains the ethical openness and responsibility at the core of Levinas’ philosophy. In my reading of Ginsberg’s poetry, I will argue that the Beat aesthetic is inextricably linked to a Beat sensibility, an essential humility that enables the parallel with Levinas’ ethical philosophy. Indeed, as we shall see, the Beat aesthetic sensibility seeks to fulfil Levinas’ demand that ‘in order for the alterity that upsets the order not to become at once participation in the order, in order for the horizon of the beyond to remain open, the humility of the manifestation must already be a distancing’ (Levinas 1994, 57).
