ABSTRACT
This chapter’s speculative exercise in philosophical poetics draws from Heidegger and Agamben in reflecting on how the predicament of ineffability with which Dante struggles from the beginning to the end of the Paradiso becomes the generating source of one of the most fecund veins of poetic expression in Western literature. Philosophical and theological backgrounds, ancient and modern, are brought to bear in order to render intelligible the paradoxically loquacious expressivity of poetic experience vis-à-vis what cannot be said. The limits of language are dramatically realized by Dante in such a way as to break language open to the infinite and to the whole of reality. It remains undecidable whether Dante invents his poetics of the ineffable in order to cope with his religious experience, or whether the experience of faith to which Dante witnesses in the Paradiso instead translates his encounter with transcendence in his experience of language. In any case, in his wake, the experience of what transcends proper linguistic expression in various immanent, worldly registers, including that of poetic language, has continued to engender a wide range of at least quasi-religious reactions in symbolic works in various genres down to our own times.
