Poetry, Philosophy & the Enigma

Against those who emphasise—with some justification—the primacy of what exists and is concrete over the empty abstraction of the concept or common notion, and, conversely, against those who—with some justification too—emphasise the primacy of the latter, insofar as it can be generalized and communicated, over the limitations of the particular and the concrete, both poetry and philosophy point, in different ways, towards another dimension that supplements, at once, the concrete or existent and the abstract or generalizable.

Both—philosophy and poetry, poetry and philosophy—point, albeit differently, not so much towards the painfully ephemeral, whose mortal wound the particular carries within itself, nor towards that which, by virtue of its universality, is too readily interchangeable to possess any vital value, but towards another dimension—which, for now, let us mention by means of just three of its possible names—that of the admirable (τὸ θαυμαστόν [to thaumaston]), that is, the extraordinary (τὸ δεινόν [to deinon]) and the strange (τὸ ξένον [to xenon]), which neither the concrete nor the concept can, by definition, bring to light or preserve. And thus—though, once again, each in its own way—poetry and philosophy, philosophy and poetry return us, after a double shipwreck in the waters of the universal and the particular, to the domain of what is given, or, more precisely, what opens itself (τὸ ἄνοιγμα [to anoigma]) as enigma (τὸ αἴνιγμα [to ainigma])—hence, as that which awaits to be unconcealed.

In the case of philosophy, the enigmatic that it seeks to bring out of concealment (ἀλεθεῖν [alethein]) is the purely thinkable (τὸ νοητόν [to noeton]), or, more precisely, the richness (οὐσία [ousia]) of the purely thinkable. This can be illustrated by means of two examples: on the one hand, the notion of λέγειν (legein), the gathering in which saying—any saying—ultimately consists; on the other, the notion of τὸ δυνατόν (to dynaton), the possible. For the possible can be viewed from two different angles, from two distinct perspectives: either as that which is not contained in what is given, as that which exceeds what is given and can therefore present itself only under a certain, negative degree of indeterminacy; or, from a positive perspective, as that which is determinable, that is, as that which is susceptible to receiving this or that determination. Philosophical thinking thus brings to light the richness of an apparently simple notion—namely, that of the possible—which can no longer be defined solely as that which, in general, stands opposed to the necessary. It does so, moreover, while simultaneously resisting any reduction of the possible to this, that or something beyond, that is, any subsumption of the possible under the particular.

The case of λέγειν is perhaps somewhat more complex, but ultimately no less clear. Λέγειν is the verbal action performed by the λόγος (logos), that is, by saying-as-gathering, in which all speaking ultimately consists. But what are the minimal and, at the same time, essential forms of this gathering? On the one hand, there is predication: saying something of something or, viewed from the standpoint of that of which something is affirmed or predicated, showing something as something: Achilles is brave. Another form of gathering, likewise minimal and essential, but simpler still, consists in placing two things in conjunction: this and that, the day and the night. And, of course, disjunction is merely a variant of conjunction, since, by opposing two things and thus through their opposition, it gathers them together: the day or the night. All other things that are neither one nor the other are thereby not called upon to appear in saying, whereas these two are indeed summoned to do so. Finally, there is perhaps the simplest case of all, but possibly also the most essential: not A is B, nor A and B, nor A or B, but simply A. For something to appear as something—in this case, A—it must be distinguished from a background against which, otherwise, that something would remain blurred. A thus names the difference of something as something, its irreducibility in contrast to the undifferentiated background from which it is drawn out; and it does so necessarily by bringing together this or that set of distinctive features that distinguish A from everything else.

In both cases, what thus appears provokes admiration, astonishment; in other words, it amounts to the admirable, τὸ θαυμαστόν, because it unexpectedly complicates what has previously been thought, drawing out its richness, its οὐσία. The fruit of this extraction is εἶδος (eidos), the idea.

In the case of poetry, τὸ θαυμαστόν does not appear by means of this or that εἶδος, this or that idea. Rather, it appears by means of an image: the poetic image, through which, once again and nevertheless, something is added to both the particular and the abstract, allowing something no less strange, ξένον, and extraordinary, δεινόν, to appear. Just as, for instance, in Mallarmé’s “Sonnet in -yx”, anguish is neither the anguish felt in the chest by the poet—which lacks a voice and hence proves at once present to him as something real but absent due to its silence—nor the anguish named through the universal notion that would conventionally be assigned to it—before whose trivial presence the anguish thus felt would recede into absence: it is rather that thing of hard (whether white or black) “nails” like “onyx” by virtue of which the particular—anguish susceptible to being felt by any one of us, which is never exactly generalizable—and the universal—the general notion of anguish that allows us to communicate our feelings and recognize those of another—give way before that which Heraclitus calls τὸ δῦνόν (to dynon), that which never sinks beneath the surface. Yet here we are no longer dealing simply with the richness of the thinkable; rather, we are dealing with being extracted from becoming…

Odilon Redon, Béatrice (1890)