Absolutization of Poetry

The article examines the intellectual tendency that, in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, fostered an intensified convergence between poetry and philosophical thought, gradually granting poetic practice the status of a universal form of knowledge. The study considers both the historical preconditions of this process and the conceptual shifts through which the poetic began to be perceived not merely as an aesthetic phenomenon, but as a distinctive mode of thinking capable of revealing truths inaccessible to traditional philosophical methods. The author analyzes how changes in the intellectual climate influenced the interpretation of poetry within the Western humanities tradition and offers a reconstruction of this shift. A significant part of the article is devoted to the analysis of how Jean-Paul Sartre conceptualized poetic writing in the context of his critique of «surrealism». Sartre views poetry as a linguistic mode that does not submit to logic and thus destabilizes the usual structure of meaning-making. He emphasizes that the poetic word is freed from the desire to accurately fix events or objects, and therefore inevitably disrupts classical notions of the «order of objectivity» or subject–object relations. Sartre’s warnings about the «poeticization» of prose demonstrate how threatening he considered the mixing of generic and semantic regimes to be, especially when language loses transparency and shifts into the realm of ambiguity. In this reading, Sartre appears not only as a critic of a particular artistic movement but also as a thinker who was among the first to grasp the broader cultural turn toward a poetic mode of thinking. Sartre’s diagnosis is juxtaposed with the position of Jean Paulhan. The latter characterizes the cultural situation through the opposition of «rhetoricians» and «terrorists», showing how the poetic gradually came to occupy a place that had previously belonged to philosophical discourse. The article highlights that both conceptual frameworks help to clarify the principles that facilitated the expanding power of the poetic word. Part of the study is devoted to Alain Badiou’s theory, according to which the «age of the poets» is the period in which philosophy transfers its prerogatives concerning truth to art. The author argues that, although Badiou assigns a central role to Heidegger, the origins of this shift should be sought earlier – in Nietzsche’s interpretation of poetry as a universal mode of apprehending life. An analysis of The Birth of Tragedy shows that poetry, for Nietzsche, arises at the intersection of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, forming a space of productive tension between individuation and self-forgetting. The article concludes that postmodern forms of philosophical writing emerged largely under the influence of Nietzsche’s understanding of poetry as a privileged model of knowledge. It was Nietzsche’s reconceptualization of the poetic in The Birth of Tragedy that created the conditions under which authors of philosophical texts could abandon linear argumentation and turn toward fragmentary, metaphorical, and multilayered styles of exposition. In this sense, postmodern theory follows Nietzsche’s gesture, radicalizing it in its own experimental linguistic practices

Intellectual history · Poetry · Realm · French Literature and Criticism · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics · Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre

• Manifestoes of Surrealism

  Andre Breton, Richard Seaver et al.•Manifestoes of surrealism•1969

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• Engendering Literary History

  Open Access•Christine Doran•Histories•2024

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• Alain Badiou's Age of the Poets

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• The Linguistic Terror in France according to Jean Paulhan and Jean-Paul Sartre

  Jonathan Doering•Journal of the History of Ideas•2022

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• Heidegger and Poetry in the Digital Age

  Rachel Coventry•Heidegger and Poetry in the…•2023

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