This article was downloaded by: [University of Hong Kong Libraries]On: 12 November 2014, At: 07:50Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK

Textual PracticePublication details, including instructions for authorsand subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtpr20

Taking steps beyond elegy:poetry, philosophy, lineation,and deathWilliam WatkinPublished online: 10 Dec 2009.

To cite this article: William Watkin (2009) Taking steps beyond elegy: poetry,philosophy, lineation, and death, Textual Practice, 23:6, 1013-1027, DOI:10.1080/09502360903361717

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502360903361717

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all theinformation (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform.However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, orsuitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressedin this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not theviews of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content shouldnot be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions,claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilitieswhatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connectionwith, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly

forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

ong

Kon

g L

ibra

ries

] at

07:

50 1

2 N

ovem

ber

2014

William Watkin

Taking steps beyond elegy: poetry, philosophy, lineation,and death

No longer will we turn our pain into elegies. We will no longercapitalize on our losses. (Jean-Luc Nancy)1

For whom or as whom does Nancy speak here? On the face of it he isspeaking in the plaintive voice of those ‘post-Heideggerian’ philosopherswho must tread the crooked path of an exhausted metaphysics bequeathedto them by the old, German rambler himself. To his fellow philosophers ina volume called, philosophically, The Birth to Presence, Nancy seems tospeak in Badiou-esque register as if declaiming: ‘Enough, let’s end thismournful Late Romantic rhetoric and move on. If a metaphysics relianton a transcendental principle is at an end,’ he might rally, ‘let’s have acourse of action, let’s take steps to find another path to wander’.

At the same time, speaking in another register yet walking in the samefootsteps, Nancy seems to speak for the poets. Indeed, numerous modernpoets writing on loss, in their refusal to use representation to name deathinto familiarity, echo precisely Nancy’s sentiments here. In a volume, there-fore, seemingly addressed to philosophers, whose first section is entitled’Existence’, no less, Nancy also finds himself in step with contemporarypoetics, as is indicated by the naming of the second half of the collection:’Poetry’. Between existence and poetry one assumes presence is born, butborn to what? Born to pain, and loss it would appear; in danger of beingstill-born?

For whom and as whom and with whom does Nancy speak? In whosefootsteps does he follow, on whose sill is he perched, whose debate doeshe step in on, whose dance does he join: philosophy’s or poetry’s? In thecase of poetry, this is increasingly an impossible distinction to make. Inthe case of philosophy, this is increasingly an impossible distinction tomake. Poetry and philosophy are not the same thing, but nor are theyopposed. They are radically dissimilar, yet when faced with loss anddeath they confront the same aporias and, stepping up to the lectern,

Textual Practice 23(6), 2009, 1013–1027

Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online # 2009 Taylor & Francis

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals

DOI: 10.1080/09502360903361717

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

ong

Kon

g L

ibra

ries

] at

07:

50 1

2 N

ovem

ber

2014

declaim the same refusals. Literature cannot transform pain, and philos-ophy cannot make capital out of loss. They may not be the same whenit comes to how they speak of death, for, as Nancy shows, they speak intwo distinct voices (existence-poetry), but when it comes to the refusalto speak, the negation of any pretension to the representation of thenon-representable, at this point it is as if poetry and philosophy are tread-ing on each others’ toes.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone.Nancy believes that all forms of representation, especially philosophy,

are incapable of what he calls ‘true mourning’:

In the end, the dead will be represented, thus held at bay. . . Butmourning is without limits and without representation. It is tearsand ashes. It is: to recuperate nothing, to represent nothing. Andthus it is also: to be born to this un-represented of the dead, ofdeath.2

In this quite astonishingly accelerated commencement of The Birth toPresence, Nancy states the case for kicking away from what he calls the‘epoch of representation,’ which is ‘as old as the West’ and which ‘desig-nates itself as limit’.3 This epoch of the West, if it exists, is indeed anepoch in the fullest Greek and also Husserlian sense of the word aspause, hiatus, break, bracketing, ending, point in time; for the West‘opens the world to the closure that it is’.4 The epoch of the West, there-fore, appears almost as a false trail down which we are enticed to step, onlyso that the cutting off of any destination can be felt more powerfully. It isthe epoch of the epoch, or an opening prised open so as to once more snapshut. There are many things one could call this almost sadistic, seeminglyfruitless, pursuit: a rat-trap, cul-de-sac, blind alley, or no through road: areal clock-stopper. As Nancy concedes: ‘This closure is named in manyways (appropriation, fulfilment, signification, destination, etc.)’, but, inparticular, it is named ‘representation’. Representation is what determinesitself by its own limit. It is the delimitation for a subject. . . of what “initself ” would neither be represented or representable’.5

The augmentation of infinity a death but incomplete.Representation is death, in other words, yet, at the same time, and

because of the very logic of the self-determination of self-limitation,death is the one thing that cannot be represented. Representation candetermine its own limits by the founding of limitations, but it can nevertruly name and thus give a case of itself. Because of this aporia, forNancy, representation is death or a kind of death. It is death to itself. Itis not born dead. It is dead before the point of birth. It is aborted time.This is the staggering logic of the epoch of course, no sooner begun, no

Textual Practice

1014

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

ong

Kon

g L

ibra

ries

] at

07:

50 1

2 N

ovem

ber

2014

sooner opened, than it has ended; it’s trap shut. This being the case,although it mutely speaks with the paralysed tongue of death, represen-tation (the West) can never, by mourning tongues, speak of death insuch a manner as Nancy and others have called true mourning.

But is the earth as full as life was full, of them?How are we, as a culture, to speak of the only thing left that we, after

metaphysics and post-presence, must speak of: the absolute alterity ofdeath? Philosophy cannot speak of it, for philosophy is of the West.Philosophy is representation. It is instead to what Nancy proposes as thepoverty of thought – thinking that cannot represent – that we mustturn in order not to write death out of existence and thus deny ourselvesthe essential human activity of mourning loss. How and in what waycan thought be said to be poor? Nancy speaks of what exceeds represen-tation and comes to be outside of the limit of limitation, as that whichis ‘merely to be born to presence. . . Thought is poor, insofar as birth isthought.’ However, the poverty of thought is not to be named birth,rather, birth is a quality of which it partakes. So what shall we namepoor thinking?

At this juncture it might be fruitful to speak with other philosopherson this matter. If one were Badiou, would one not call this intermittencyof thinking, borrowing the idea from Andrew Gibson,6 the event?Like birth, the event is what exceeds. It is also super-numerary to the situ-ation, by which Badiou roughly means in excess of limits. This event, asBadiou passionately delineates it, is poor for it is very rare, of the void,subtractive, and perceptible only through traces and a militant fidelityon the part of subjects who seek to honour the event by staying true tothe act of naming it. Such fidelity is a process which Badiou neverterms commemoration, but which structurally shares a good deal incommon with mourning. Fidelity to the event appears as a form of affir-mative mourning, although it is certain that Badiou would reject such aformulation.

So one could call poor thought the thinking of the event, or, if oneturns to Agamben, one finds a similarly intermittent figuration of thinking,which he names, in The Coming Community, the halo. Glossing on a fabletold by Benjamin, Agamben speaks of the messianic world to come whichis reputed by the Hassidim to be like our own, only ‘just a little different’.7

This is surely another sort of poverty one might term the poverty of excessor of what is not needed. The thesis of the tiny displacement of excess inthe to come of the end of time is what Agamben means by the halo: anabsolutely inessential supplement that hovers in the space of ease at theperiphery between the thing and itself. The halo is a vibrational presence,a mere glow at the edge of that which is already perfect, something there-fore added to the plenitude of the current state of absolute fulfilment, that

William Watkin Taking steps beyond elegy

1015

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

ong

Kon

g L

ibra

ries

] at

07:

50 1

2 N

ovem

ber

2014

is, the time of the messiah. The halo exceeds a situation that is alreadycomplete. It is minor and unnecessary. It is poor.

Call it a halo or call it an event, just as fidelity to the poverty of theevent structurally resembles mourning, so too this conception of thehalo relates to death, of course. It is in the messianic event to come thatthe halo’s poverty will be added to life as the epitome of the end ofdeath and of life. Like the naming of the event, therefore, the halo is some-thing that is added after, and which occurs between. After life, between lifeand death, this is where philosophy has habitually sought the poverty ofthinking.

Whether one speaks of birth in terms of the event (Badiou) or thehalo (Agamben), clearly the proposition of poor thinking in relation to apost-evental state excites and occupies the mind of certain contemporaryphilosophers. The remaining essays in Nancy’s The Birth to Presence,located literally in the space between existence and poetry, struggle tocome up with a satisfactory name for this poverty of thought, whichcannot be philosophy of course, but three are always in contention: litera-ture, art, and, most obviously, poetry. Poetry’s commitment to singularity,as noted by numerous modern philosophers – each time a new birth oflanguage in its unique non-representing usage – short-circuits thinkingand allows new ideas to come into being. This is, in part, what I takeNancy to mean by the birth to presence.8 It is the belief that singularity isessential to modern mourning and that death can only be approached inthis way, a belief that informs a wide range of modern thinkers on loss. Italso brings us closer to an idea of a contemporary elegy that is able towrite about loss due to death without taming or distancing either phenom-enon. This ‘poetry’, a type of faulty thinking, is rather general in Nancy’swork, but it manifests itself in contemporary poetry by a kind of prosodyof loss and it is this that I want to approach.

Too warm, too close, and not enough like pain.Although many poets still habitually write elegies, it is true to say that theelegiac as a tonality has overtaken the form of elegy proper in muchcontemporary poetry. As Jahan Ramazani has noted, the neat performativeformulas of traditional, consoling elegy – loss–withdrawal–consolation–recovery/return–commemoration – have, in the last century, given way toa more open-ended elegiac architecture where the poet simply refuses tofeel better by the end of the last line.9 In my own work, I have speculatedon the devilish deal of the poem of consolation, where the success of elegyin overcoming the emotional and cultural dangers of the radical absence ofbeing has to be at the expense of the poem itself.10 If a poem has a purposeand is successful, then the remains of the poem become excessive, useless,and, to some degree, improper or unclean (tears and ashes, post-evental,haloic).

Textual Practice

1016

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

ong

Kon

g L

ibra

ries

] at

07:

50 1

2 N

ovem

ber

2014

Modern, Christian-Romantic, introspective, consolatory, monumen-tal, commemorative, elegy, such has been practised in Anglophone literaturesince at least Milton, now faces two powerful threats to its continued pres-ence within the canon, both, based on the aporetic paradoxes of its own,carefully developed a formal combination of Romantic self-centerednessand Christian ideas of otherness. The idea of the elegy as a time for thepoet to reconsider her own being and its relation to the other, beforemoving back into normal, less self-reflexive, intersubjective formulations,is confronted with two basic truths: all being is incomplete, not just thebeing of mourning, and the other person is always profoundly unknowable,Godlike in their alterity, not just from the moment that their physicalpresence is eradicated. At the same time, the performative nature of elegycan either succeed against these ontological crises at the expense of poetryitself, reducing poetry’s singularity to mere prosaic or philosophical instru-mentality, or save poetry; the only thing that can save us in times of trouble,but remain aesthetically ineffective and emotionally depressing is Ramaza-ni’s ‘melancholic mourning’.11

Elegy is supposed to be an example of how poetry can disclose beingthrough a close contact with death but without actually dying. Instead, ithas come to be a rather fatuous reaction to loss that results in a smug, well-dressed doppelganger for subjectivity and a poetry that is self-defeating.Indeed, such belated contemporary elegy is not poetry at all but its nega-tion, through the reduction of its singularity to instrumentality. Thosepoets who have realised this and yet still appreciate the founding relation-ship between poetry and the presence of absence have no choice but toabandon traditional elegiac form. They either, as Ramazani describes,develop an open-ended form, or they pursue the less tangible elegiacpoem. This latter entity is suffused with a sense of contemporary loss ofcertainty and belief, which becomes arche-loss, or the absence discoveredretrospectively at the beginning of the birth to presence. Here, elegybecomes a vague thematics or tonality: the elegiac. It is not within theremit of this essay to analyse such poetry in detail, but one could notethe work of poets such as John Ashbery, Susan Howe, Rachel BlauDuPlessis, John Ash, and Lee Harwood, among others, all of whomwrite a poetry replete with a sense of loss, even if they are not writingspecifically of a loss. Thus, contemporary elegy in a postmodern worldwill tend to be formal yet open-ended, taking loss somehow as itssubject matter without openly stating this, and allow the tincture ofsadness to inform its imagery even if the poem appears celebratory orlight-hearted.

It becomes unutterable and must be said, in a whimper, in tears.A recent trend in post-Heideggerian philosophy, however, has raised a

third possibility for the contemporary poet of loss, which is that death is

William Watkin Taking steps beyond elegy

1017

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

ong

Kon

g L

ibra

ries

] at

07:

50 1

2 N

ovem

ber

2014

inherent to poetry, both in terms of what poetry actually is, and in terms ofthe metaphysical effects or implications of poetic semiotics, in particularlineation. These modern philosophers, I will here touch on the work ofDerrida, Blanchot, Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Agamben, obfuscatesome basic assumptions about a poetics of loss, including most notablyelegy, making it much more difficult for poets and critics alike to useterms such as mourning, consolation, and commemoration uncritically.In fact, the similarities between the idea of death and the idea of poetryin our culture become so marked that poetry as such seems to becomean aesthetics of death marked by a semiotics of loss/absence, makinggeneric subdivisions such as ‘elegy’ all but meaningless.

The origin of this modern confluence between poetry and death canbe traced, I believe, to Heidegger’s attempt to define Da-sein, or being, asbeing-towards-death. In Being and Time, Heidegger famously makes a casefor being as only being complete if it has a conception that it can end, anending that cannot be a part of living being but without which beingcannot be. This results in an ontology of complete incompleteness particu-larly to be found in Derrida’s later elaborations on this theme.12 At thesame time, Heidegger defines two different ways of coming to termswith death. There is the inauthentic public mode which he calls everydaydeath, as spoken about by the they, or society around you. The aim of sucha talk about death conducted by the ‘they’ is ‘constant tranquillisationabout death’.13 Death is stupefied by distancing and generalising it, anact performed less for the comfort of the dying person than for thosewho remain.14 In contrast, Heidegger’s definition of authentic deathrequires that you keep the possibility of death with you at all times,precisely so that you cannot get over it. Authentic death as a preconditionof true being is profoundly different to the everyday death of westernculture and elegy, as Heidegger makes clear in his dense definition:

Da-sein is concerned about its being-in-the-world absolutely. Itsdeath is the possibility of no-longer-being-able-to-be-there. . . As apotentiality of being, Da-sein is unable to bypass the possibility ofdeath. Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility ofDa-sein. Thus death reveals itself as the ownmost nonrelationalpossibility not to be bypassed.15

This more radical death remains within subjectivity as the possibility of itsending or limitation that, paradoxically, is the very condition of being assuch. Being that can end becomes being in all its singularity that definesbeing as singular to itself, existent irrespective of cultural, historical, oreveryday relations. This is, being in its possibility, the chance to becomewho you are at the very moment when this life is potentially at an end.

Textual Practice

1018

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

ong

Kon

g L

ibra

ries

] at

07:

50 1

2 N

ovem

ber

2014

The end of being cannot be avoided because it is the possibility of endingthat we all carry within us that allows us to be.

This conception of death, along with Heidegger’s later ideas aboutlanguage and poetry, has lead many contemporary philosophers to associ-ate poetic singularity with death. Like death, poetry exists as self-sufficient,closed to external relations, an unfulfilled possibility of language as puresaying without meaning, a form of non-instrumental utterance that cannever fail to represent or express things in the world because it neverreally strives to. Poetry is the imminence of the end of language, or themoment when word and thing will no longer be separate. If such a stateof profound indistinction was to occur it would be the death of language,just as death would put an end to being, but without this imminent threat/promise, language as such cannot exist. The parallels with being here areonly too apparent.

This page only is the end of nothing to the top of that other.Apart from singularity, poetry and death share other features in

common. The origins of western poetics reside in elegy and so poetryhas always been deathly at root. In addition, the topography of post-Heideggerian philosophies of death, primarily the idea of the border, onone side of which is limited singular being, and on the other illimitablealterity, becomes, interestingly, a clear prosody in the poem. Issues ofsingular units, gaps, edges, space, ellipses, inexpressible or glossolalicmaterials, and linguistic excess have all become central semiotic tools forcontemporary, experimental prosody, uniting philosophy and poetryalong this essential thematics: the impossible possibility of speakingabout death. Not that these works are all elegiac, rather, in their use of aprosody of disjuncture and absence, they investigate, dramatise, and testlanguage as the location of the very limit of being. They make a kind ofprosody of death. The versions of contemporary elegy being performedby the diverse material possibilities of innovative poetics are rich indeed,and I have dealt with them elsewhere;16 here, I will limit myself to onecentral semiotic feature of all poetry and its metaphysical inferences: thepoetic line of enjambment and the space it produces at the boundariesof language.

It was the work of Giorgio Agamben on lineation in Idea of Prose andThe End of the Poem that first suggested to me the possibility that themetaphysics of singularity in relation to poetry and philosophy couldbe traced at the micro-level of poetic semiotic procedures. Agamben’sinsistence on the end of the line as the point wherein language gives upsense in favour of sound, only to fall back into sense by the commence-ment of the next line through the continuation of the line of thought, hisdefinition of poetry,17 adds a powerful dimension to Heidegger’s idea ofbeing-towards-death. This is a dimension in keeping with Heidegger’s

William Watkin Taking steps beyond elegy

1019

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

ong

Kon

g L

ibra

ries

] at

07:

50 1

2 N

ovem

ber

2014

later idea that language is the house of being pursued dynamically along aline, which he describes as being on the way to language.18 This muchcited concept is, among other things, an ontology of the poem combin-ing, paradoxically, the containment of the dwelling, house or room in ahouse (stanza), and the serial, linear, incompleteness of the poetic line ofenjambement, always on the way to language but also always cutoffbefore it gets there. Taking my lead from Agamben, it is apparent thatthese are not topographical or metaphorical coincidences. Rather, thedevelopment of philosophy occurs along with, because of, and at theexpense of, poetry. Poetry and philosophy are the two sides of being inlanguage resulting in an essential logopoiesis or mode of thinkingthrough poetry.

Several points need to be made here. The first is that the poverty ofthought, which we seek in poetry, occurs at that moment at the end ofthe line where the content is sacrificed for what Nancy terms the funda-ment, usually referred to as form.19 While the end of the line cannot becalled an event as such, nor is every enjambement suffused with the glowof the halo, it does share certain characteristics with these other contendersfor the name of a poverty of thought. Like the event, the line endingis excessive to the situation of the line, and like the halo this excessivenessis interposed between presence and absence. This is one commonality. Thesecond is that this collapse of thinking is itself a loss of language asdiscourse so that representational, naming language, essential to philos-ophy, becomes, briefly, bereft and so susceptible to mourning. A thirdpoint is that the end of the line is the onset of poetic singularity as itboth defines poetry as not prose, stops poetry from generalised, instrumen-tal thinking by interrupting such cognitive procedures, and is a one-offevent of language-in-action that cannot be reproduced by prosaicgeneralisation at a later date, for example, in criticism. Fourth, thissingularity is continually being born, line after line, the birth to presencein ending that Nancy seeks in order to update Heidegger’s idea of thecentrality of being-towards-death.20 The final point to make is thatthe end of the line launches us either into ineffable space in the right-hand margin, or forces us to drop down back into discourse. It marks,therefore, the limits of thinking through the imposition of a limit to limit-ation, or what Derrida, through a complex reading of Heidegger, callsthe aporia.

To pass through pain and not know it, to emerge on an invisible terrain.Derrida’s Aporias results from a reading of Heidegger’s possible

impossibility of the ends of being and leads to yet another powerfulparadox. Death limits being, imposes limits on being in life, due to thefact that it is the border beyond which life cannot proceed, marking theouter limit of existence in the world. Yet, Derrida notes, death itself is

Textual Practice

1020

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

ong

Kon

g L

ibra

ries

] at

07:

50 1

2 N

ovem

ber

2014

the illimitable, making a nonsense of our western discursive practice ofcategorisation through naming (death cannot be named). Death doesnot offer a limit to being then, a border, which would be a crudereading of Heidegger, but undermines ideas of limit, structure, definition,and the like:

Let us consider, for example, this negative sentence: ‘death has noborder.’ Or else, . . . ‘death is a border,’ ‘according to an almost uni-versal figure, death is represented as the crossing of a border. . .’ Here,now, is an interrogation: ‘Can death be reduced to some line cross-ing, to a departure, to a separation, to a step, and therefore to adecease?’. . . is not death, like decease, the crossing of a border, thatis, a trespassing on death [un trepas], an overstepping or a transgres-sion. You have noticed that all these propositions, whatever theirmodality, involve a certain pas [step, not].21

The word pas here and one or two other comments in the book are the onlyindications that Derrida’s consideration of the aporia is a form of poetics ofbeing-towards-death. This, however, is my contention. The pas in Frenchis both the step and its negation, containing, therefore, the paradox of ‘theexperience of the aporia (these two words tell of the passage and non-passage and are thereby coupled in aporetic fashion)’,22 which not onlytouches on being but also on Agamben’s very robust definition of poetryas the linebreak where sense is sacrificed for sound. The end of the lineis also an aporia. It marks the moment where marks come up againstspace, and poetics in general is defined by the oscillating dynamic of thepas, the step, and its negation. This travels from the very smallest syllabicunits, where stress must be followed by its ‘negation’ unstress, throughlineation, all the way to the sense of the poem as a single entity. At eachstage of the poem’s taking a step, I need not mention the importance ofthe metaphor of walking to prosody, it also enters into its negation andthis impossible possibility of language, never fully realised, is what linkspoetry, philosophy, and death. Speaking in a rhetoric of impossibleorigins and summarisations, more intended as provocations perhaps thanserious argumentation, poetry is the pas(s) through pain or the intrinsiclink at the very origin of the poetic word between loss, pain, and theprocess of its experience through the prosodic steps poetry takes to cometo being. Surely one cannot reduce the whole history of western art tothis one formulation: surely one cannot speak of any art in the Westwithout it.

When sleep at last has come on limbs that have run wild.The simultaneous literary and ontological significance of the paradox

of the pas is perhaps nowhere more fully realised than in Blanchot’s

William Watkin Taking steps beyond elegy

1021

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

ong

Kon

g L

ibra

ries

] at

07:

50 1

2 N

ovem

ber

2014

The Step Not Beyond. Early in the text, Blanchot considers the role of thelaw in imposing the limit of limitation as such:

The circle of the law is this: there must be a crossing in order for thereto be a limit, but only the limit, in as much as uncrossable, summonsto cross, affirms the desire (the false step) that has always already,through an unforeseeable movement, crossed the line. . . The lawreveals itself for what it is: less the command that has death as itssanction, than death itself wearing the face of the law. . . Death isalways the horizon of the law.23

In trying to define elegy, or indeed to write a poem of loss, one must comeup against the law and somehow transgress it. If, as Blanchot suggests,death is the horizon of every law, luring us into the paradoxical experienceof the aporia and crossing the non-crossable that can only be termed death,then surely the issues surrounding elegy are even more complex than wefirst thought. For the law dictates the very idea of genre itself, as well asthe basic conception of literary constraint; even at the expense of transpar-ent content, that is, the founding definition of the literary as not environedby discourse. At issue here in the pas, the step and its negation, would seemto be the very ideas of generic definition and, beyond that, our post-Kantian conception of literature as dictated by critical taste itself is justanother form of generic categorisation.24

What I am suggesting is the following: the ontology of death, soprevalent in post-Heideggerian philosophers, always occurs along with aconsideration either of poetry as such or, in Derrida’s case, through thedevelopment of a poetics. Clearly, post-metaphysical philosophy ofbeing, death, and poetry are linked. This is for at least three reasons:death’s singularity is shared by poetry, philosophy and poetry are intrinsi-cally linked so that one cannot proceed in a direction in one field without aconcomitant movement in the other (what I mean by logopoiesis), andfinally, the topography of death is matched by that of poetry. They existproximately within the same environment. Of what does this environmentconsist, and can one map it?

Death is the pas, the step beyond the limit that one must take in orderto exist – there is no existence without the imminent presence of the possi-bility of the end of existence – but which one cannot take and continue toexist. It is the step you take and then take back or retrace (pas being stepand its negation). The space beyond the border is without borders andthus calls into question the very idea of limitation and category, in otherwords, philosophical thought. How can one have a border whose lengthis limited on one side and is illimitable on the other? Yet, without thisillimitable field philosophy would have nothing to build a border with.

Textual Practice

1022

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

ong

Kon

g L

ibra

ries

] at

07:

50 1

2 N

ovem

ber

2014

The space beyond the step is destabilising of categorical thought, and alsofoundational of it. Death’s topography is present as unmappable: onecannot produce a case of it because it is infinitely vast and totally singular,that is, irreducible.

Elegiac western imagination.Developing from Agamben, one can state that the topography of

death is also that of the poem, in particular, here, the broken line thatdefines the poem upon which contemporary experiments in semioticsand absence are based. In the poem, one is asked to make a step, at theend of the line, into the infinite space of the right-hand margin. The useof double columns in Ashbery’s ‘Litany’25 and Derrida’s Glas26 are twonotable elegiac works that test this rule. DuPlessis goes one step furtherin ‘Draft 5: Gap’, by blacking out her two columns at one point tomake graphic this often ignored central element of poetry and emptiness.Without this step, which breaks the line, there is no poetry. However, onecannot step off the line into space and retain the poem. Agamben is quiteclear about this: poetry exists in the tension between sound and sense.27 Itis not pure glossolalic sound. Therefore, each line steps out into space tobreak with prose, only to step back into prose in the following line. Agood example of this is Ashbery’s experimentation in hypertactic lines,culminating in the manner in which the lines self-consciously cut acrossthe imposed dizain boxes in his mournful ‘Fragment’, dramatising thepassage from life to death. Perhaps the most astonishing consideration ofloss and lineation in contemporary poetry, however, is Susan Howe’s‘Thorow’, which moves from narrative prose through disjunctive proseto poetic lineation, while considering the desecration of the lands ofAmerica and their lost peoples. Towards the poem’s conclusion, Howesteps out onto new ground with her three pages of palimpsests, beforeending with a collection of words suspended in lines in space that arelines of neither prose nor poetry:

anthen uplispth emend

adamap blue wov theftthe28

This semiotic step out of prose but not beyond it is what defines poetry.As the space beyond calls into question philosophical thinking, poetry’sdeliberate existence on the edges of this space is where its renunciationof general thinking allows it to argue for its own singularity. Poetry par-takes of death so as not to be thought. The step, therefore, is whatpoetry takes to confound philosophy into being. Impossible though it isto say whether poetic or categorical thinking came first, in the West atleast, poetry and philosophy were born at precisely the same moment.

William Watkin Taking steps beyond elegy

1023

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

ong

Kon

g L

ibra

ries

] at

07:

50 1

2 N

ovem

ber

2014

As Lacoue-Labarthe says, glossing on the experience of poetry as developedby the poet Celan:

The poem must clear a way between silence and discourse, betweenmutism’s saying nothing and the saying too much of eloquence. It isthe poem’s narrow path, the straightening: the path that is ‘mostnarrowly’ that of the I. But this path does not lead to speech orlanguage. It leads to only one word. . . Irreducibly, to the languageof a single person. . .29

Straightening is perhaps the word that Nancy was looking for all alongwhen he embarked on an attempt to nominate the poverty of thought aspoetry. And if Lacoue-Labarthe is correct here, that poetry must existlike the evental halo between muteness and representation, sayingnothing or saying too much, then, according to our logic, yet anothername for the straightening impetus in poetry is the elegiac.

Through a brief overview of modern theoretical forays into poeticsand death, I have suggested two things. The first is that the ontology ofbeing-towards-death is also that of being-towards-poetry, or perhapsoccurs only by virtue of the location of poetry on the edge between lifeand death. The second is that, apart from elegy as genre, poetry by defi-nition is a semiotics of loss and recovery to be found most clearly in linea-tion. It also exists in a number of other semiotic elements, such as thecaesura, margins, interior spacing, non-sequitorial phrases, tensionsbetween poetry and prose, and so on. Contemporary innovative poetry’sexploration of these semiotic/prosodic features, therefore, is not merelysignificant in terms of aesthetics. It is through these experiments in formthat a generation of poets have been approaching an elegiac prosodythrough retracing their steps towards the fundamentals of poetry andtheir relation to the philosophical problem of death as the limit and disclos-ure of thinking being. These poets, and I have named only a handful here,are taking steps beyond elegy into a profound poetics of absence and loss; anew faulty thinking about death, the ends of which we can only begin toglimpse in the confluence of poetry, philosophy, lineation, and death.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes

Brunel University, West London

(While I have not footnoted a number of citations from modern elegies, itshould be apparent that I have borrowed the words of a number of poetshere. Rather than reduce the poetry to mere citation, I have let them standin the text so that they may speak as a part of the text, not a supplement toit. That said, it is only courteous to acknowledge somewhere within the

Textual Practice

1024

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

ong

Kon

g L

ibra

ries

] at

07:

50 1

2 N

ovem

ber

2014

environment of my paper the sources, and that somewhere is here, at thefoot of the bill so to speak. Therefore, in order of appearance: W.H.Auden, ‘Stop all the Clocks’; Lyn Hejinian, ‘The Cell’; Frank O’Hara,‘A Step Away from Them’; Thom Gunn, ‘Lament’; Derek Walcott,‘Oddjob, a Bull Terrier’; John Ashbery, ‘Fragment’; John Ashbery, ‘AWave’; W.B. Yeats, ‘Easter 1916’; Susan Howe, ‘Thorow’; and AnneSexton, ‘The Truth the Dead Know’.)

Notes

1 Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Birth to Presence, translated by Brian Holmes and others(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 281.

2 Ibid., p. 3.3 Ibid., p. 1.4 Ibid.5 Ibid.6 Andrew Gibson, ‘Thinking Intermittency’ Textual Practice 26(6) (2009),

pp. 1045–1066.7 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, translated by Michael Hardt

(Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 53.8 Nancy attempts, in the collection of essays entitled The Birth to Presence, to

sidestep the limitations of presence highlighted by post-Heideggerian thinkers,especially Derrida, by concentrating on being not as a limited entity riddledwith aporias but as defined by its perpetual coming into being. Instead ofconceiving of subjectivity in terms of limitations, through representationand death, Nancy aims to reconfigure it in terms of its potential, singularity,and natality.

9 Speaking of the writer of ‘melancholic mourning’ he notes: ‘in their fierceresistance to solace, their intense criticism and self-criticism. . . unlike theirliterary forbears or the “normal mourner” of psychoanalysis, they attack thedead and themselves, their own work and traditions. . . Scorning recoveryand transcendence, modern elegists neither abandon the dead nor heal theliving’. Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardyto Heaney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 4.

10 See in particular: ’Poppy-petal: Elegy and Consolation’ in William Watkin,On Mourning: Theories of Loss in Modern Literature (Edinburgh: EdinburghUniversity Press, 2001), pp. 53–83.

11 Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p.4.

12 Key texts in this regard are ‘Signature Event Context’, Memoires for PauldeMan, Aporias, and The Gift of Death.

13 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by Joan Stambaugh (New York:SUNY Press, 1996), pp. 234–235.

William Watkin Taking steps beyond elegy

1025

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

ong

Kon

g L

ibra

ries

] at

07:

50 1

2 N

ovem

ber

2014

14 In such tranquillising modes of discourse, death is seen as a familiar eventoccurring in general to all of us eventually, but which cannot be conceivedof in relation to the singular subject at the moment it is represented ordiscussed. It occurs at the end of life and so, in some ways, is not to bedwelt on in life and also marks the end of life. Finally, Heidegger suggeststhat they disallow what he calls angst about death or brooding on it. Deathas a word is only used to distance, tranquillise, estrange, or generalise thebasic fact that being must be defined at all times as being-towards-death.These facts of everyday death, which lead to an inauthentic idea, not only ofdeath but also of life, are most certainly intrinsic to traditional elegy. Whileelegy often ruminates on the fact that we all will die, it is the specific eventof a death that is not our own that brings it into being as a work. Furthermore,the general consolation we are all to take from a specific death means that eventhe singularity of the specific death is lost in a generalised idea of death andmourning (ibid., p. 222). Clearly, elegy is more for the living than the dead,a point commonly made, for indeed how are the dead actually to profitfrom it? Finally, the whole purpose of elegy for the elegist is to allow themto come to terms with death and thus resume life, to refuse angst or, whatwe more commonly call, melancholy or depression.

15 Ibid., p. 232.16 See Watkin, ibid., pp. 84–119.17 As I have extensively glossed this definition elsewhere, in this context I merely

refer the reader’s attention to Giorgio Agamben, The End of Poem: Studies inPoetics, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 1999), p. 109.

18 Speaking of language as way-making, that is not on the way to but providingthe way to being, Heidegger asks: ‘What is a way? A way allows us to reachsomething. Saying, if we listen to it, is what allows us to reach the speakingof language’. Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, translated byPeter D. Hertz (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1971), p. 126. This sayingHeidegger calls appropriation, likening it to a clearing in a forest beforestating: ‘Appropriation grants to mortals their abode within their nature, sothat they may be capable of being those who speak.’ (Ibid., p. 128). Finally,he concludes: ‘Language is the house of Being because language, as saying, isthe mode of Appropriation’. (Ibid., p. 135).

19 See Nancy, The Birth to Presence, translated by Brian Holmes and others(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 216–232.

20 Nancy refigures this, through his idea of poetry, as a being towards birth due tothe event of death, or how thoughts are born out of their collapse from senseinto sound.

21 Jacques Derrida, Aporias, translated by Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press, 1993), p. 6.

22 Ibid., p. 19.23 Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, translated by Lycette Nelson

(New York: SUNY Press, 1992), pp. 24–25.

Textual Practice

1026

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

ong

Kon

g L

ibra

ries

] at

07:

50 1

2 N

ovem

ber

2014

24 Both Agamben and Nancy identify the Kantian, eighteenth century, value oftaste leading to judgement as the beginning of aesthetic appreciation as aspecialised field open only to those who are gifted with taste. This is simul-taneously the beginning of aesthetic criticism and the demise of art in themodern period. For more on this, see Giorgio Agamben, The Man WithoutContent, translated by Georgia Albert (Stanford: Stanford University Press,1999), pp. 13–27 and Nancy, The Birth to Presence, translated by BrianHolmes and others (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 254–265.

25 John Ashbery, As we Know (New York: Penguin, 1979), pp. 4–138.26 Jacques Derrida, Glas, translated by John P. Leavy Jr. and Richard Rand

(Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).27 Agamben, End of the Poem, p. 109 and pp. 112–115.28 Susan Howe, Singularities, (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1990),

p. 59.29 Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience, translated by Andrea

Tarnowski (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 56.

William Watkin Taking steps beyond elegy

1027

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

ong

Kon

g L

ibra

ries

] at

07:

50 1

2 N

ovem

ber

2014