Articles - September 2012

Early on in her 1996 study of “Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary,” a book entitled Wittgenstein’s Ladder, Marjorie Perloff puts forward the thesis — one which has circulated widely — that Wittgenstein wrote “‘philosophy’ as if it were ‘poetry.’”[1] Both “philosophy” and “poetry” appear in quotation marks, giving us to understand that a certain metaphorical grammar may be at work here, although equally it may be the very literality of these terms that Perloff wishes to insist upon, in order in some sense to “undo.” In evoking this proximity of poetry to philosophy, even by way of an analogy — of an analogical writing — Perloff calls to mind, without naming,[2] the figure (we might say spectre) of a form of “poetry” that writes as philosophy; which negates itself (as poetry) in a moment of zealous assertion of its truth (as philosophy). Perloff’s implied interlocutor here is the Plato of The Republic. In the background of Perloff’s discussion of Wittgenstein, of “poetic language,” and of “estrangement,” the three books of the Republic dealing with the exclusion of “poetry” from the ideal polis — in fact its interdiction — evoke the ambi-violence of a type of primal scene: on the one hand describing a castration-effect of language under the dominion of the philosophic Signified, and on the other describing the locus of a return of the philosophical “repressed,” its Unheimlich, its strangely resemblant yet disconcerting and innately threatening other.