Philosophy after Auschwitz is barbaric.

That sentence, which is true in the sense that it is possible, that we can say & think it, can hear echoes of other similar sentences within it, can substitute any discipline into that first word-slot – mathematics after Auschwitz is barbaric – can substitute any horror into the third position – mathematics after Hiroshima is barbaric – can even, if we are prepared to cross a line not everyone will be comfortable with, substitute any characterization into the last slot – mathematics after Hiroshima is transparent – bedevils me.

Poetry & philosophy are twins, each looking to the other, anxious to compare. For every Adorno or Sartre or Cavell who addresses literature as a professional philosopher, we have poets who mime, as well as mine, philosophy itself, from Ezra Pound to John Taggart to Anne Carson & Susan Stewart, from Charles Olson to Charles Bernstein to Allen Grossman to Geraldine Kim. And then there is Wittgenstein, more widely imitated by poets, yours truly included, than any other practitioner of a “non-poetic” genre, more even than Bob Dylan. Not to mention Walter Benjamin – him I see as philosophy’s Jack Spicer. Both were obsessed with the task of the translator.

Like a lot of poets, I enter into this with a history & a bias. My formal training in philosophy consists of two classes, one on set theory, the other an intro course at Merritt College while I was picking up the units needed to transfer from the creative writing program at San Francisco State, which had been decimated by the 1968 student strike, to the English Department at UC Berkeley. My instructor was an Algerian-born Frenchman who’d gone into exile when it became unsafe for the French in Algiers, and who used Bertrand Russell’s decidedly idiosyncratic history as his text. Like a lot of kids – or at least guys with intellectual pretensions – of my generation, I’d read around in Kierkegaard & Heidegger in high school primarily so that young women would notice me reading the books. By the time I got out of high school, tho, I had the idea that a poet probably ought to know as much as possible about linguistics and about philosophy in order not to be simply a fool with a pen.

I found Chomsky’s linguistic texts impenetrable. The most intelligible line I ever read there, to this day, is ”Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” though I think it’s considerably more meaningful than does he. On the other hand, Dwight Bolinger’s Meaning and Form, a basic text, and the writing on linguistics by Charles Hockett in Scientific American, had a deep and lasting impact, sending me back through the history of linguistics first to Saussure & then to Roman Jakobson. It is not an accident, I think, that when MIT math major George Lakoff wanted to take a course on poetry & got Jakobson as his teacher, that Lakoff was destined – one might say doomed – to become a linguist. Nor is it an accident that when Claude Levi-Strauss heard Jakobson at the New School while in exile in New York during World War 2, that Levi-Strauss was similarly doomed to develop the structuralist school of cultural anthropology, which is exactly the structuralism to which all post-structuralism today imagines itself to be post-. The series Levi-Strauss attended was later published as Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning. Sound & meaning, not accidentally, are the critical dimensions of the poem. Jakobson’s ideas first began to percolate when he was still in Russia, where he was a young poet collaborating with the likes of Mayakovsky. This is how Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov & their kin among the doomed poets of the Russian revolution, ultimately begat Derrida, begat Deleuze, begat Gayatri Spivak, begat Zizek, none of them the wiser.

Reading Wittgenstein for me was a life-changing event, perhaps because I read Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations back to back & could see there the passion of the self-tortured mind. Passion, I would argue, is precisely what separates the very best philosophers from the bulk. It’s what I love about Willard Van Orman Quine & about Sartre, with whom I never ever agree. It’s what I love about Adorno, even if his attitude toward jazz makes me want to club him with a saxophone. Philosophy is all about feelings, but that’s not all.

Poetry & philosophy are two practices that propose their texts as instances of the self-valuable word. It would be easy enough to sketch them out, one pulling on the side of connotation, the other denotation. But as twins, this pair is incestuous. One could argue that continental philosophy is on the side of connation, analytic philosophy on the side of denotation, that continental philosophy as such has been infected with the poetic.

When I was a creative writing major in the 1960s, the obsessive quest of such programs was to help young poets find their voice. It was early in that decade when Charles Olson first drafted the nines essays that make up Proprioception, the closest thing we have ever had to a dialectic of, by, and for poets. Over the decades since the obsession with voice has changed. We live now in the age of flarf – at least one definition of which is poetry created to be deliberately awful or anti-literary – as a genre and of Google-sculpting & myriad chance operations as everyday literary devices, of appropriated texts & found ones. Kenny Goldsmith, sometimes known as Kenny G, writes &teaches what he calls uncreative writing, scanning in an entire edition of The New York Times, offering us a year’s worth of weather reports. Today, younger poets find themselves in exactly the inverse position of the one I confronted 40 years ago, seeking not so much their Voice as ways out of it, seeking not their Self but their Other. But what does that mean? I think it’s at least as nebulous as the concept of voice. My own goal for this week is to explore that dividing line in as many ways as possible.

§

This statement is for a panel, to include Elizabeth Willis, Anne Waldman, Chris Tysh, Donald Preziosi and me, Monday morning, June 26. The description of the panel itself is as much instruction as we were given, save to prepare a statement, seven to ten minutes in length:

What is it in philosophy that writers find so attractive? How important should philosophy be to a writer? Panelists will discuss how philosophical inquiries have informed their thinking and writing. Be it Marx, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Jean-Luc Nancy, or some other French guy, our panelists will discuss the philosophers they have been reading. Panelists will also discuss which investigations‹whether class, gender, society, desire, philosophy of language, or other areas‹most inform their work and thinking.