Search Results (14)

Poetry is not philosophy, nor was it meant to be, except on rare, glorious occasions. And only Wittgenstein seems willing to claim that philosophy should be written as poetry. Yet it is difficult to imagine poetry not wanting to impinge on the cultural roles played by at least some philosophy. And some philosophers, like Hegel and Heidegger, want to influence the course of poetic practice. So it seems useful to inquire into the various ways these two disciplines can overlap or complicate one another’s modes of inquiry, even if one has no hope of securing abstract definitions for either practice. Those with the appropriate philosophical background, for example, could articulate tensions within a culture’s intellectual life as a means of specifying how an author develops emotionally resonant concrete experiences grappling with this environment. One example might be examining how the need to address Humean skepticism helped shape the development of Romantic ways of making constructive imagination inseparable from attentive states of perceptive involvement in the world. Another example might focus on efforts by contemporary poetry to correlate the work performed by ordinary language philosophy with Heideggerean ideals of building and dwelling potentially applicable to the frameworks provided by philosophical grammar. Full article

The first half of the 19th century witnessed the rise of Romantic poetry, which focused in depth on individual consciousness, inner worlds, and metaphysical inquiries. This poetic orientation became particularly evident in works centred on themes such as solitude, alienation, and existential quests. Within this context, the present study aims to examine the archetypal and poetic resonances of the poetic voice in Mihail Lermontov’s poem The Demon, based on its sixth and final version dated 1841, in relation to Nikoloz Baratashvili’s poem Secret Voice. Lermontov’s poem is analyzed through the English translation by Charles Johnston, published in 1983, while Baratashvili’s poem is discussed based on the 24-line version included in the fifth edition (1895) of the anthology Poems and Letters (Leksebi da Tserilebi). This study explores the thematic and structural similarities between the two poems within the framework of comparative literature and psychoanalytic criticism, focusing on Romantic archetypes, the uncanny, the shadow figure, and ontological solitude. Furthermore, the dialogue established between Lermontov’s demonic narrator and Baratashvili’s introspective poetic voice reopens discussions on the boundaries of cultural memory, oral narrative patterns, and poetic identity. Ultimately, this comparative analysis reveals the implicit influences of The Demon on Georgian poetry and discusses the intercultural resonances of themes such as voice, self, and archetype in Romantic poetry. Full article

In this article, we employ a Batesonian systems thinking approach to analyze politically polarized and politically polarizing encounters in the contemporary United States. We bring together Bateson’s concepts of schismogenesis, double binds, metacommunication, and transcontextualism with recent work on recognition and resonance in order to show how these encounters create moments of transcontextual double binds that produce mutual dysrecognition. We show how these moments of mutual dysrecognition become both animating forces of political polarization in the moment while also becoming constitutive poetic resonances for making sense of future events. When these moments of dysrecognition are considered alongside the removal of mechanisms that restrain schismogenesis, the United States body politic is becoming increasingly schizophrenic—split in two with both parts incommunicado with the other such that the whole system is veering towards collapse. We close by briefly considering the kind of deutero-learning, to use Bateson’s term, that might help to stave off such a collapse. Full article

This essay reads Oji-Cree poet Joshua Whitehead’s full metal indigiqueer in relation to hybridity. Whitehead’s poems are both lyrical and experimental, offering a hybrid poetics that resonates with existing critical discussions of hybridity, but he also extends hybrid poetics in new directions through his engagement with posthuman and Indigenous futurism and through his development of Zoa, the hybridized trickster figure who combines the technological and the biological, who features so prominently throughout the collection. Indigiqueerness emerges in these poems as a hybrid identity positioned not only to survive but to thrive in the twenty-first century and beyond. Full article

In the wake of post-truth politics, neo-oral media, and epistemic fragmentation, qualitative researchers face intensified pressure to justify the legitimacy of our methods. This essay explores the idea that writing itself can be a form of research—not merely an act of representation, but an epistemic, institutional, and affective method. Structured in two voices—one stylized and poetic, the other scholarly and conceptual—the piece moves through five acts to examine writing as a form of border-crossing. It argues that voice-rich, situated writing is not indulgent; it is a way of thinking, navigating complexity, and holding space for uncertainty. Drawing on traditions of performative autoethnography, collective biography, data feminism, and more-than-human inquiry, the essay considers how writing can generate insight, foster civic resonance, and resist epistemic conformity. A heuristic table offers readers practical entry points for approaching writing as method. This essay is for those moments when something in the sentence feels off, but we write it anyway. It asks what becomes possible when we write not to comply, but to inquire. Full article

Bantu African divination is firmly established in South Africa in the context of modernity and is protected, endorsed and regulated by law. It is received in the therapeutic field. Important explorations were performed in the early 20th century by psychiatrists and psychoanalysts of Jungian orientation. Their cultural, philosophical, spiritual, and academic backgrounds are relevant to this reception. Jungian thought, Spiritual Spiritism, and traditions of European philosophy of divination resonated with the experience, observation, and understanding of Bantu divination. (‘Bantu’ designates the cultural and linguistic realm from Cameroon and Kenya southwards). Religious-philosophical traditions, as well as the conceptualisations of ‘divination’ by Plutarch and Iamblichus, are preserved. The reception and appreciation of Bantu divination in South Africa emerged from it, and resonated with these European traditions of religious-philosophical thought. Out of this development a distinct ‘South African modernity’ emerges. A parallel reception process developed in Brazil, in the belief systems of Umbanda and Kardecism. These developments are illustrated at present in the literatures of South Africa and Brazil, specifically in Afrikaans literature, black South African poetry and its poetics, and Magic Realism in Brazilian literature. Lastly, a perspective is offered of modernity’s reception by black scholars and diviners, continually interacting with Jungian psychoanalysis. Full article

That the Drancy transit and internment camp—the main camp from which Jews were deported from France—is currently inhabited, having reverted to its pre-war name ‘La Muette’ and initial function as a housing estate at the end of the 1940s, remains little-known. As a result of this multi-layered history, the site is deeply ambivalent, being both haunted and inhabited. Through a theoretical framework informed by psychogeography, this article brings to light the concentrationary presence that is layered onto the space of everyday life at the site of Drancy–La Muette and investigates the possibility of resisting the resulting spatial politics of dehumanisation. Through a close reading of Alexandre Lacroix’s novel La Muette (2017) and its spatial poetics, this article argues that it is by elaborating new ways of seeing, whereby the interpenetration of past and present, the visible and the invisible, comes to the fore, that the traumatic space of Drancy–La Muette may open up. This, in turn, allows for the circulation of affective resonances between the built environment and the individual, which resist the concentrationary logic. Full article

A sequence of Old English riddles from the Exeter Book allow an implement to speak. This article focuses on one example, Riddle 5, generally solved as either a shield or a cutting board, to show how each interpretation gives voice not just to an inanimate object but also to a non-elite member of early medieval English society—either a foot-soldier or a kitchen hand. The two solutions come together because the two answers are captured in a single Old English word—“bord”—and also because the two interpretations resonate in parallel ways, creating sympathy for down-trodden members of society who rarely get so much attention in the surviving poetic record. This article argues that Old English riddles provide an enduring legacy of social critique crafted through humor. Full article

This paper is an investigation of the divine feminine power as depicted in the texts of Hispanic mystics from Sufi, Hebrew, and Christian traditions. This work is intended to investigate the origin and subsequent development of a transcendent reconciliation of polarity, its diverse manifestations, and the attainment of a common goal, the quintessential of the Perfect Human Being. The architect of the encounter that leads to Union is “Sophia”. She is the Secret. Only those who are able to discern Her own immeasurable dimension may contemplate the Lady who dwells in the sacred geometry of the abyss. Sophia is linked to the hermetic Word, She is allusive, clandestine, poetic, and pregnant with symbols, gnostic resonances, and musical murmurs that conduct the “traveler” through dwellings and stations towards an ancient Sophianic knowledge that leads to the “germinal vesicle”, the “inner wine cellar”, to the Initium, to the Motherland. She is the Mater filius sapientae, who through an alchemical transmutation becomes a song to the absent Sophia whose Presence can only be intuited. Present throughout the Creation, Sophia is the axis around which the poetics of the Taryuman al-ashwaq rotates and the kabbalistic Tree of Life is structured. Full article

Motivated by “the need to embody … the palpable tension between the North and the South as it is reflected, articulated, and interpreted in contemporary cultural production”, documenta 14’s selection of Athens as a “vantage point … where Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia face each other” is in line with the ancient Greek concept of the ‘cosmopolite’, a term that Diogenes first coined “as a means of overcoming the usual dualism Hellene/Barbarian”. In this article, I suggest that Naeem Mohaiemen’s feature film, Tripoli Cancelled (2017), commissioned by documenta 14 and premiered at the National Contemporary Art Museum in Athens, proposes a rich and compelling model of cosmopolitan world-making. Shot at the abandoned Elliniko Airport, the film is poetically suspended between fact and fiction, past and present, the historical and the incidental, the local and the global. Creatively positioning the concepts of cosmopolitanism, nostalgia, and hospitality in dialogue, I develop a theoretical model through which I seek to explore how the literally and metaphorically liminal space inhabited by the film’s anonymous protagonist resonates with the contemporary conditions of desperate migration. Full article

This essay explores the aesthetics of Bertolt Brecht’s compositions of poetry with photography in the so-called photo-epigrams of his 1955 book War Primer. The photo-epigrams have mostly been viewed and appreciated as interventions in photography; but in this essay I aim to show their novelty and efficacy as poetic inventions. To do so, I draw on Karl Marx’s and Walter Benjamin’s views apropos the decline of poetry under modern, industrial capitalism to argue that Brecht, in his photo-epigrams, is responding to—and attempting to counter—a specific problem at the heart of modern poetry: the crisis in perceptibility and accessibility. By coupling poems with photographs—in unique and uniquely politicised ways—Brecht provides a resonant critique of the deadly ideologies of the ruling classes engaged in World War II, as well as a method for addressing the decline in the readability of poetry in the modern era. Full article

This paper offers a discussion of J. G. Ballard’s first four novels, The Wind From Nowhere (1962), The Drowned World (1962), The Drought (1965), and The Crystal World (1966) that centers on their portrayal of environmental transformation. Drawing on revised conceptualizations of the second law of thermodynamics and recent materialist scholarship, I illustrate how Ballard invokes material transformations that are ambivalently coded as terminal stasis and morphogenesis. In anticipations of the paradigm of the Anthropocene and ecocritical approaches to global climate change, Ballard’s novels re-embed the human in an ecology of inhuman forces and modes of self-organization that radically challenge entrenched ontological divisions and systemic boundaries. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which emergent structures, such as hurricanes and crystals identify his landscapes as dissipative systems far from equilibrium and rife with potential for the spontaneous generation of form. This resonance with scientific frameworks reveals itself in poetic registers that parallelize metaphors of life and death, and hinge on an estrangement of not only landscape, but also temporality, thus literalizing what it might mean to understand the human as a geological subject in the age of the Anthropocene. Full article

This article examines three contemporary Australian poems that concern themselves with matters of the sacred within the modern Australian city. Noting that Australian poetry and the sacred have often been studied in terms of the landscape, the article approaches these poems as part of an undercurrent of spiritual or sacred writing that takes up urban Australian spaces as important and resonant sites. Through readings of Kevin Hart’s ‘Night Music’ (2008), Jill Jones’s ‘Where We Live’ (2007) and Benjamin Frater’s ‘Ourizen’ (2011), the article demonstrates the various ways that contemporary Australian spirituality is poetically expressed in cities such as Brisbane, Adelaide and Sydney. Full article

This paper analyses Paul Valéry’s theories relating to his stated goal of poetic production: the attainment of “resonance” and a “singing-state”. My intention is to defend Valéry’s theory as a valid and consistent model of the creative process in poetry. To that end, I will draw support from T. W. Adorno’s claim that Valéry’s manner of reflective journalising in his Notebooks can furnish us with what he calls “aesthetic insight”. The consistency of Valéry’s theory will be supported by comparisons with the inferentialist understanding of semantics. Valéry proves to be a reliable exemplar of what might be called a “practice-led” aesthetics. Full article