Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Adam Rosenthal'sPoetics and the Gift, from its earliest pages, announces itself as a provocation: the Western poetic tradition must be reframed in terms of the highly unstable concept of the gift.More specifically, the very instability of the distinction between poiemata and poiesis must now be rethought in relation to the oikos/oikonomia of the gift in Derrida's philosophy.Rosenthal's book is nothing short of a reassessment of Western poetics by recentering and privileging what has been taken for granted, as a given.The gift -in its affirmation and negation, in its acceptance and refusal -is inextricable from the poetic per se, however unstable this concept, along with those of poetics, poetry, and poem, becomes in Rosenthal's ingenious prose.Gift and poetry both implode and explode in Rosenthal's hands; this is the scrupulous gesture that guides the book's entire argumentation.They fold in, in their ipseity, looking backwards to the Sun and to their divine origins, but exorbitantly fold out, their excesses deforming teleology and threatening their very existence or, to take it a step further, their supposed essence and, consequently, their definition.This necessitates, of course, that poetry remain undefined and undefinable, precisely because, in its essential relation to the gift, it 'articulate[s . . .] the very failures of the gift/economy, art/commodity, aesthetics/economics, and poetry/prose binaries'.Rosenthal's point of departure is the complicated status of poetry and of poetics in the Derridean canon.For Rosenthal, a strange abandonment takes place in Derrida's thinking of poetry once he begins thinking the gift.Rosenthal locates this abandonment in the movement of two texts, or rather from one text to another: from 'Economimesis'
Source: Derrida Today
Author: Bruno Penteado
Institution: Texas Tech University
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4403335554