Katerina Deligiorgi / Angela Livingstone / Joe Friggieri / Hilary Lawson / Simon Critchley / Ulrich Schoedlbauer

Co-organised with Centre for Literature and Philosophy, University of Sussex
10:00 am – 5:00 pm | Saturday 9 February 2008
Chichester Lecture Theatre University of Sussex

Speakers
Katerina Deligiorgi, University of Sussex
Angela Livingstone, University of Essex
Joe Friggieri, University of Malta
Hilary Lawson
Simon Critchley, New School for Social Research
Ulrich Schoedlbauer, Fern University Hagen

Chair
Nicholas Bunnin, University of Oxford

Philosophical Poets draws inspiration from Three Philosophical Poets, the 1910 volume in which George Santayana discussed Lucretius, Dante and Goethe. Our presentations and panel discussion on modern poets will explore different ways that poets can be philosophical poets, that poetry can be seen as philosophy and that philosophical and poetic analysis can be related in understanding the works of the featured poets. We shall have readings of some of the poems we discuss in English and in the original language.

Katerina Deligiorgi on ‘Philosophy and Mercy- Self-Knowledge in Cavell and Auden‘

Angela Livingstone on ‘Boris Pasternak: What is Art if not Philosophy in a State of Ecstasy?‘
I shall refer to Pasternak’s prose (the poetic and quasi-philosophic prose of his early youth) as well as to his early poetry, concentrating on (a) the 1911 essay on Heinrich von Kleist, in which he ponders the difference between being a philosopher and being a poet; (b) a couple of “philosophical” passages from “A Safe-Conduct” (autobiographical work, 1930, about the origin of poetry in his life); and (c) five or six poems – three or four from “My Sister Life” (1917, published 1922), including “Definition of Poetry”, “Definition of Creation” and “Let’s drop words . . .”, and two from 1931. I will provide the texts, in my own translation. Themes: “What is art if not philosophy in a state of ecstasy?” (P, aged 17); poetry is about its own origin; inspiration alters reality. [Pasternak devoted himself to poetry only at the age of 23; before that, he was preparing, first for a career in music, and then for one in philosophy – he studied philosophy in Moscow and also in Marburg under Hermann Cohen.]

Joe Friggieri on ‘Montale’s Metaphysics’
Poetry resembles philosophy in that both are ways of directing the mind to a better apprehension of some aspect of human experience. The best poets, like the best philosophers, present us with some kind of overall view of the world and of our place in it. In different ways, they call our attention to those features of existence which we tend to lose sight of in our everyday interaction with things. It has been said that a philosophy unaware of mystery would not be a philosophy at all, and that poetry always involves some kind of revelation. This is particularly true of the works of Eugenio Montale, which may be seen as an attempt to deal with the mystery at the heart of existence and at the way the world presents itself to us, expressing a metaphysics in poetic terms. In my talk I will look at the kind of vision emerging from Eugenio Montale’s poetic works and the special devices the poet uses to convey it. I will do that through a close reading of three poems, one from each of Montale’s main collections: Ossi di seppia, Le Occasioni and La bufera e altro.

Hilary Lawson on ‘The Poetic Strategy’
Is poetry capable of approaching a truth which lies beyond the grasp of literal meaning? In the face of the perceived failure of the literal to describe the nature of the world, philosophers, from Heidegger to Rorty, have been tempted by poetry as a possible alternative strategy. What however is the poetic strategy capable of delivering? If poetry avoids saying something in particular how is it capable of saying anything at all? Using TS Eliot’s Quartets as a focus I will explore the potential and the limits of such a strategy and outline some consequences for our understanding of language and the world.

Simon Critchley on ‘A Few Poems by Fernando Pessoa, One by Wallace Stevens and a Brief Sketch of a Poetic Ontology’
I have two simple, but tricky questions: What does it mean to see poetically? and What might the poet’s descriptions of the surfaces of things imply for our relation to things, ourselves and the world? Building on the words of Fernando Pessoa’s major heteronym, Alberto Caeiro and a late poem by Wallace Stevens ‘Description without Place’, I will try and sketch a poetic ontology.

Ulrich Schoedlbauer on ‘Approaches to Philosophical Poetry’
I would like to consider three ‘zones’ in poetry as ‘philosophical’, concerning (a) the unbearable, (b) the unthinkable and (c) the unpassable, represented by the self, death and power. I will illustrate these zones through discussion of my works Ionas (2001) and PoliFem (2004), about mythological figures pointing to (a) and (c) and through examination of the conception and structure of Organum Mortis (2004), my contemporary ‘book of the dead’.