As Frances has worked on YB the rest of us should pay attention to
what she says - I still haven't found a moment to go away and look
again at his work. But to widen the discussion a little, it may be
the status of "attention" which is at issue. Generic words, rarely
open to any adjectival nuance, become important to Bonnefoy who
delights in the smaller vocabulary of French. This is elemental but
does it lead necessarily straight to essentialism (it's always
philosophers who tack on that "ism")? Perhaps these words have the
quality of what Husserl called "obtrusions", which as I understand it
are primary objects around which the patterns of perception
themselves come to coalsce (creative memory again, and JD drew the
idea of logocentricity out of Husserl). I'm nervous though when that
label "logocentric" gets slapped on, particularly onto poets (and
some would say it can't even be applied to Hegel). In terms of paying
attention (which Gillian Rose suggested as a way round any fascism of
representation) we could go back to the old Cambridge Platonist
distinction between comprehension and apprehension: logocentrism sees
comprehension as perjorative, but doesn't take account (when appealed
to in this way) of either the poetic or religious understanding of
apprehension. Coleridge's distinction between the All and the Whole
works along the same lines. For STC too the "whole" is only glimpsed
in a fragmentary mode. "Oneness" can be seen as what gets between
things (rather like ecological pressure-relations) rather than just
sitting on top of them.
Peter
Peter Larkin
Philosophy & Literature Librarian
University of Warwick Library
Coventry CV4 7AL UK
Tel: 01203 528151 Fax: 01203 524211
Email: [log in to unmask]
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|