Agorapoetics: Poetics After Postmodernism

Agorapoetics hinking European Worlds Series Director, Peter Carravetta Stony Brook University, New York Advisory Board Angela Biancoiore Remo Bodei Armando Gnisci Renate Holub Santiago Zabala his Series will host works dealing with European thought in a number of areas, particularly revisions or reinterpretations of European philosophy, history, migration, postmodernity, geopolitics, theMediterranean, the role of nationalism in the shaping of European identities, metissage, mythologies, technoscenarios, relations between Europe and other continents, the future of the Humanities, and the European Union. It will explore the many critiques of Eurocentrism and its rhyzomatic presence in all corners of the globe. he Series will also host the republication of forgotten texts or of past and present thinkers previously unavailable in English. Peter Carravetta, he Elusive Hermes: Method, Discourse, Interpreting Armando Gnisci, “We, the Europeans . . .” Italian Essays on Postcolonialism Rolando Pérez, ed., Agorapoetics. Poetics Ater Postmodernism Olaf Breidbach and Federico Vercellone, hinking and Imagination. Between Science and Art Agorapoetics Poetics ater Postmodernism Rolando Pérez, Editor he Davies Group, Publishers Aurora, Colorado Copyright (c) 2017 Rolando Pérez All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in an information retrieval system, or transcribed, in any form or by any means-electronic, digital, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise-without the express written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Names: Perez, Rolando, editor. Title: Agorapoetics : poetics ater postmodernism / Rolando Perez, editor. Description: Aurora, Colorado: he Davies Group, Publishers, 2016. | Series: hinking European worlds | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identiiers: LCCN 2016006896 | ISBN 9781934542385 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Poetry—20th century—History and criticism. | Poetry— 21st century—History and criticism. | Poetry—History and criticism— heory, etc. | Poetics—History—-20th century. | Poetics—History—21st century. Classiication: LCC PN1055 .A34 2016 | DDC 808.1—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016006896 Printed in the Unites States of America 0123456789 Contents Contents Preface by Rolando Pérez ................ vii he Contributors ................ xi Introduction: Rolando Pérez, “Against Nihilism, or the Negation of a negation” ................ 1 Peter Carravetta, “AFTER ALL: Critical heory and the Geography of Culture at the End of the Postmodern Age.” ................ 29 Alessandro Carrera, “One-Word Poems: On Poetic Philosophy.” ................ 71 Richard Milazzo, “A Poem is Political, How?” ................ 9 7 AmmielAlcalay, “Republics of Poetry.” ................ 113 Nuria Morgado and Rolando Pérez, “he Complicated ‘colonization” of Mr. Cayo: Or Miguel Delibes’ Poetics of Critique and Irony for a (post)Modern Age.” ................ 141 Mario Moroni, “Towards a PoEthics.” ................ 167 Rolando Pérez, “No Poetry Without Poetics: A Manifesto that is a Plea for Manifestos and a Call for Pro-ductive Action.” ................ 175 Angela Biancoiore, “Land Ethics and the Appropriation of Living Beings.” ................ 19 9 Index ................ 2 29 vi Preface In 1987, when I was a philosophy student at Stony Brook, I had the “rare” opportunity (in today’s sense) to publish two pieces in “Brook Spring 87,” a small literary magazine published by the Graduate Student Organization of the University. In it I published a poem and a one-act play. But more importantly, in that same very issue appeared a wonderful political poem by the great American poet, Amiri Baraka (19342014). What I had forgotten until recently is that I also had the privilege to read with him that same year, on March 3, at the Poetry Center of Stony Brook, as part of a Multi-National Poetry Colloquium on the topic of “he Relativity of Poetics”; which leads me into how this book came about. For in 2008, Peter Carravetta, Alfonse D’Amato Professor of Italian and Italian American Studies in the Department of European Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, organized the irst of two conferences on “Poetics ater Postmodernism.” he irst one took place on February 29, 2008, and the second, a year later, on March 18, 2009. he papers gathered here represent the conversations that took place during and ater, as this is not by any means, a book of proceedings. hey will give the reader an idea of what was discussed, as well as a sense of how the very diversity of these transversal approaches relect an ongoing interest concerning the question of poetics, the relations between literature and philosophy, and the connective tissue of postmodernism. Peter Carravetta’s “Ater All: Critical heory and the Geography of Culture at the End of the Postmodern Age,” is an in-depth study of intellectual European and American history from 1945 to the present; that is to say, from the end of World War II to the 1990s and the post 9/11 world of surveillance. Can the philosophical/theoretical debates (e.g. from Galbraith, Chomsky, Glissant, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Negri, et al), be said to have had an impact on the very world they are describing, interpreting, and “hoping to change”? asks Carravetta in his article. Or at the very least, could the concepts help us to understand our present viii agorapoetics “postmodern” condition? Carravetta’s article goes a long way in contributing to sundry debates on what is postmodern and postmodernity, and how this epoch or “condition,” as Lyotard called it, has changed so much of our world in very concrete terms. Alessandro’ Carrera’s essay “On Poetic Philosophy” is an inquiry— vis-à-vis an engagement with Croce and other Italian thinkers—on the limits of both philosophical and poetic language. While Carrera agrees that there are important factors that unite them, in the end, he argues, they express the world diferently. For Leopardi, says Carrera, philosophy harms poetry as much as poetry corrupts philosophy. his is an interesting position in light of the fact that if analytic philosophy attempted to align itself with scientiic discourse (e.g. Russell and Chomsky) twentieth-century Continental philosophy (e.g., Heidegger and Derrida) has attempted to align itself with poetry Richard Milazzo’s “A Poem is Political, How” is an impassioned essay on the role of poetry within the polis. Whether the poem is about the experience of the Holocaust, as with Celan, or about anything else that has to do with our life-world, that life-world is constituted by and through history. here is no “poem” in the abstract, as with Heidegger, where the “poem,” as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has so well pointed out, really means “mythos”—the necessary ingredient to create that most dangerous of things, a national ontology, as the Heidegger of the Black Notebooks so well-knew. he poem is always concrete, says Milazzo, because it deals with human sufering, and “transforms it before our very eyes into an exquisite record of our failing humanity.” Ammiel Alcalay’s article, “Republics of Poetry” connects with the latter part of twentieth-century North American poetry, and speciically with Charles Olson. For Alcalay, as he says at the beginning of his article, it is diicult to make sense of “North American culture in the 20th century, and situate ourselves in the 21st” without considering Olson. Olson, Alcalay argues, “hoped to provide a ‘sense of belonging’ among fellow writers, thinkers, and artists, but always in a ‘human universe,’ rather than as humanism.” his is what constituted his own brand of “postmodernism.” For Olson, concludes Alcalay, the polis was a living preface ix community (as in Black Mountain College), be it of writers and poets (e.g. Robert Duncan, William Carlos Williams, Amiri Baraka, et al), or simply of human beings. In “he Complicated ‘colonization’ of Mr. Cayo: Miguel Delibes’ Poetics of Critique and Irony for a (post)Modern Age,” Nuria Morgado, and myself (primarily as a translator and contributing editor), examine questions of political representation (speaking for others) in light of the clashes of three worlds: the pre-modern, the modern, and the postmodern. To this end, Spanish writer, Miguel Delibes’ novel of 1978 El disputado voto del señor Cayo [he Contested Vote of Mr. Cayo], and Antonio Giménez Rico’s ilm of the same title (1986) served as the starting point by which to consider a subject (Mr. Cayo) who lived in a pre-modern world up until the irst democratically held elections ater Franco (1976), and the incursion of postmodern politics into such a world. he novel and the ilm, each in their own way, question the values of modernity as much as post-modernity, while leaving us with a poetics that is at once critical (modern) and ironic (post/modern). Mario Moroni’s brief but insightful essay, “Towards a PoEthics” puts into question the postmodern notion that ethics as a “‘grand narrative,’ must be discarded.” In refutation of this position, Moroni cites Matthew Jenkins’ book, Poetic Obligation: Ethics in Experimental Poetry ater 1945 (2008). And for this notion of the primacy of the Other in postmodern thought, Jenkins turns to Levinas. “It is important to see how an aspect of postmodern thought, that of Levinas, ofers the possibility both to overcome the diatribe against ethics as a non-viable category in postmodern culture and to ind a new way of looking at poetry and ethics,” writesMoroni. his way of conceiving of poetry’s ethical responsibility towards the Other, is what Moroni calls “poethics.” In “Land Ethics and the Appropriation of Living Beings” Angela Biancoiore asks us to consider the fate of humans and their dwelling in the universe. It is the purview of ecocriticism to consider such momentous problems as global warming, the pollution of the world’s oceans through oil drilling and garbage disposal, and the contamination of the soil through fracking, etc. Clearly, as the theory of Anthropocene points x agorapoetics out, human intervention in the biosphere has contributed to all the things that presently threaten the life of our planet. And here is where “literature, philosophy and the arts” can play an important role “in the development of this new [postmodern] paradigm” that calls, not just for a human ethics, but also, and just as importantly, for a land ethics. Finally there is my article, “No Poetry Without Poetics: A Manifesto that is a Plea for Manifestos and a Call for Pro-ductive Action.” Here I take on some of the most negative tenets of postmodernism: its infantile romance with technology via such notions as electronic writing, “digital” thinking, the “post-human,” etc. Katherine Hayles’ idea, for instance, that electronic literature “calls forth from us new modes of attending—listening, seeing, moving, navigating—that transform what it means to experience literature (‘read’ is no longer an adequate term)” is, of course, put into question. I end my piece with some excerpts from my book, he Electric Comedy (2000). And so now I wonder what did we mean on March 3, 1987 at the Poetry Center in Stony Brook, by “he Relativity of Poetics”? Did we know then? Do we know now? I hope the reader will ind these essays thought-provoking. Contributors Ammiel Alcalay, Queens College–CUNY, scholar, critic, translator and poet/prose writer, has taught Sephardic Literature (both Hebrew and in-translation), and a variety of courses on Middle Eastern and Mediterranean literacy and intellectual culture and its contemporary and modern reception, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, as well as creative writing. A comparatist by training, he specializes in these topics and in Balkan literatures and history, poetics, and theories of translation; he publishes translations of Hebrew and Bosnian, as well as his own poetry. Among his many publications are Ater Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (1992); Memories of Our Future: Selected Essays 1982–1999 (with Juan Goytisolo, 2001); Islanders (2010); a little history (with Fred Dewey, 2012); from the warring factions (with Fred Dewey, 2012). Angela Biancoiore is a professor of Italian Studies at Paul Valéry University (UM3) in Montpellier, France. She has written numerous essays on art and literature, in particular: L’opera e il metodo: da Baudelaire a Valéry (Edizioni Milella 1991); Benvenutto Cellini artisteécrivain (L’Harmattan 1998); Pasolini (Palumbo Editore 2003), which won the International Prize Giuseppe Sormani in 2006, awarded by the Gramsci Foundation in Turin, Italy; Pasolini: Pour une anthropologie poétique (Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2007); Entre rêves confus et apparitions: la poésie de Sandro Penna (Dobu/Cladole 2011), written in collaboration with Christelle Balderas Laignelet), and Pasolini, devenir d’une création (L’Hartamattan 2012.) Professor Biancoiore is also the author of various books on the art of writing, among them, La scrittura degli elementi (Adriatica 1988); Cartes sans territories/Maps Without Territories (Euromedia 1996); Signes nomades (Euromedia 1999); Corpi radianti (Eidos 2007). In 2011 she founded the electronic journal, Nótos: Espaces de la création: arts, écritures, utopies. Her website, which features many of her writings, may be accessed at http://www.angela-biancoiore.net/. xii agorapoetics Peter Carravetta is the Alfonse M. D’Amato Professor of Italian and ItalianAmerican Studies at Stony Brook University, New York. Founding editor of DIFFERENTIA, review of italian thought (19861999), he has published Prefaces tothe Diaphora: Rhetorics, Allegory, and the Interpretation of Postmodernity (1991), Dei Parlanti (2002), Del Postmoderno: Critica e cultura in America all’alba del duemila (2009), he Elusive Hermes: Method, Discourse, Interpreting (2013), Sulle tracce di Hermes (2014), La funzione Proteo (2014). He has coedited Postmoderno e letteratura (1984) and Poeti italianid’America (1993). Carravetta is also the author of seven books of poetry,including delle voci (1980), he Sun and Other hings (1998), and he Other Lives (2014). He has written widely on critical theory, poetics, migration, history of ideas, and cultural studies. He has just inished a book titled Ater Identity: Migration, Critique, Italian American Culture (Bordighera 2016). Alessandro Carrera is director of Italian Studies and Graduate Advisor to the M.A. in World Cultures & Literatures at the University of Houston. He has published extensively on Continental Philosophy, Italian Literature, Literary heory, and music criticism. His most recent books include Lo spazio materno dell’ispirazione. Agostino Blanchot Celan Zanzotto (Fiesole: Cadmo, 2004), I poeti sono impossibili (Rome: Il Filo, 2005), La consistenza del passato. Heidegger Nietzsche Severino (Milan: Medusa, 2007), La consistenza della luce. Il pensiero della natura da Goethe a Calvino (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2010). He has edited Massimo Cacciari, he Unpolitica: On the Radical Critique of Political Reason (New York: Fordham UP, 2009), and recently has published a novel, Skyline (Lecce: Manni, 2009) and a collection of short stories, Libroilia (Milan: Cairo, 2010). For Feltrinelli publisher in Milan he has translated Bob Dylan’s songs and prose (Chronicles Vol. 1, 2005; Lyrics 1962–2001, 2006). Richard Milazzo is an art critic, curator and poet. Among his most recent books are Saint Clair Cemin: Sculptor from Cruz Alta (New York: contributors xiii Brent Sikkema Editions, 2005); An Earring Depending from the Moon: Poems 2006 (Venice: Sotoportego Editore, 2006); Alogon: Early Poems 1969-1981 (Tokyo: Tokyo Publishing House, 2007); he Paintings of Ross Bleckner (Brussels: Editions Alain Noirhomme, 2007); Il Facchino di Venezia (he Porter of Venice) (Venice: Sotoportego Editore, 2007); Green Nights / Golgotha / Love’s Quarrel: Poems 2001- 2003 (Belgrade: Dossier Publishing, 2007); Stone Dragon Bridge: Poems 2006-2007 (Modena: Emilio Mazzoli Editore, 2007); Circus in the Fog: Poems 2005–2006 (Venice: Sotoportego Editore, 2009); Eastern Shadows: Poems 2008–2009 (Craiova: Scrisul Romanesc, 2010); Keats Dying in Your Arms: Poems 2007–2008 (Brussels: Editions Passage St.-Hubert, 2010); he Flower Paintings of Ross Bleckner (A Study) (Modena: Galleria Mazzoli Editions, 2011); and With Grass Ropes We Dragged the World to Her in Wooden Boats: Poems of Jordan, Syria and Egypt 2008, with accompanying works on paper by Alessandro Twombly (Turin: Libri Canali Bassi & Paolo Torti degli Alberti, 2011). Nuria Morgado is Associate Professor of Spanish literature and culture at College of Staten Island and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research interests include modern and contemporary Spanish literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, and the relationship between literature and philosophy. She is also part of the Academic Committee of the Miguel Delibes Chair, founded by the Graduate Center (CUNY) and the University of Valladolid (Spain). Professor Morgado is the co -founder of the electronic publication, Letras Hispanas: revista de literatura y cultura, and the Book Review Editor of the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies. Her publications have appeared, in such literary journals as Hispania, Revista Hispánica Moderna, Siglo XXI: literatura y cultura españolas, and Culture & History Digital Journal, edited by the History Institute of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientíicas (CSIC), to name a few. She is the author of the book Voces de mujer (Voices of Women), a critical edition of selected short stories by Spanish writer Lourdes Ortiz. She is the co-editor of Filosofía y culturas hispánicas: xiv agorapoetics nuevas perspectivas, an edited volume of essays on philosophy, literature and Hispanic cultures, forthcoming from Juan de la Cuesta in 2016; and a book of essays on Cervantes, Cervantes ayer y hoy, to be published by he Hispanic Society of America in late 2016. Professor Morgado is Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Cuadernos de ALDEEU. Mario Moroni is professor of Italian in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Binghamton University. Professor Moroni has also taught at Yale University, the University of Memphis, and Colby College. He has published seven volumes of poetry and one of poetic prose. In 1989 he was awarded the Lorenzo Montano prize for poetry. His poems, articles, and essays have been published in numerous journals and anthologies. As a critic, Mario Moroni has authored, Essere e fare (Luisè, 1991), La presenza complessa (Longo, 1998), and Al limite (Le Monnier, 2007). He has co-edited three collections of essays: Italian Modernism, with L. Somigli (U. of Toronto Press, 2004), From Eugenio Montale to Amelia Rosselli, with J. Butcher (Troubador Press, 2004), and Neoavanguardia, with P. Chirumbolo and L. Somigli (U of Toronto Press, 2010). Rolando Pérez is professor of Spanish and Latin American literature and philosophy at the Romance Languages Department of Hunter College—CUNY. He is the author of numerous publications on the Neo-Baroque, and the relation between literature, the visual arts, and philosophy. He has written on Severo Sarduy, César Vallejo, Alejandra Pizarnik, Octavio Paz, as well as on Bartolomé de Las Casas, Enrique Dussel, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Emmanuel Lévinas, Alain Badiou, and François Laruelle. Pérez is also the author of a number of literary works, some which have been anthologized in he Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (2012). His most recent publication, Severo Sarduy and the Neo-Baroque Image of hought in the Visual Arts was published in 2011 by Perdue University Press. Forthcoming in early 2016 is a bilingual edition of he Electric Comedy/La comedia eléctrica, translated by Óscar Curieses, to be published by Amargord Ediciones contributors xv Michael Taormina is an Associate Professor of French in the Romance Languages Department at Hunter College. He has translated French poetry, plays and philosophy. Taormina’s translations include Jacques Derrida’s “Deconstructions: he Im-possible” in French heory in America (Routledge, 2000), Crepuscular Dawn: he Genetic Bomb (Semiotexte, 2002) and he Accident of Art (Semiotexte, 2005) by Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer, and Gilles Deleuze’s Desert Islands and Other Texts (Semiotexte, 2004) and Two Regimes of Madness (cotranslated with Ames Hodges, Semiotexte, 2006). Having translated two plays, Eugene Ionesco’s Journeys in the House of the Dead (Division 13, 2003) and Emmanuelle Marie’s CUT in Act French: An Anthology (ed. by Philippa Wehle, Performing Arts Journal, 2007), Michael recently completed a translation of Jean Racine’s Andromaque in rhymed, iambic-pentameter couplets. He has written articles on Malherbe, and on the tragic theater of Corneille and the novella Ourika by Claire de Duras. Taormina also has a strong interest in creative writing. Most recently, he founded a micro-press with his wife, Jennifer Merdjan, creating handmade books that combine poetry and visual (www. unclusion.com).