A few further echo-ideas out of Doug's rich train of thought - which
I hope won't prove duologic. The triumphalism of the avant-garde, or
potted moments of intellectual subversion which mean we are no longer
capable of appreciating why or how past people (broadly as
conscientous as
we lay claim to be) thought as they did - this is one of the bugbears
of our time where sheer flare casts up its own shadows to flicker
over. We need the a sort of forgetting which is pulse
and flow-through, but not one which is a brittle victory of a self-
storied present.
 So, for example, a worry of mine is over the much vaunted "end of
metaphysics" which appears such a moment of moral & cultural
progress. But isn't that based on an underlying identity
between knowledge and violence, so that any difference within such
coinciding is being refused? Is there only one mode of knowing, only
one tradition of metaphysics? Another more fruitful route might be to
pluralise metaphysics rather than simply declare its demise from
within a succession of philosophical king-(sic)makers. I think of
Gillian Rose asking us to consider knowledge as a
mode of attending to (and so precisely relational), and the
new Cambridge theology which reminds us that there has always
been another metaphysics not based on God as first cause
or guarantor of any ontological norm, but as precisely transcendent
at that point. And this is the point "at which the transcendent
is made known". Here is a becoming, but not one in terms
of a nihilistic flux or thanatological ecstasy, but one which lives
sustainably and desiringly always towards the horizon of the
transcendent.
  This is how there might be a "higher" that is not readable as the
interminability of surfaces (for one thing, doesn't something happen
when one surface reveals another, or is grown over by another - isn't
that as such a "site" of transcendence?). "Higher" in poetry might
not be to address some more elevated mode of being, but to be quite
simply a turn or modality at the horizons of the text which directs
 from gift as origin towards praise as the capacity to enter into
gift-exchange, or a community of being-becoming. I suppose its a plea
for poetry as more primarily a contemplative than a critical act, a
techne whose finite aim is to enable a textual turn which
offers phronesis and the sustainable correction which emerges from
the living, rather than the sublime freezing-out of cultural
fallibility at a self-subverting infinitized teche which has become
its own horizon.

Sketches of ideas: for the sake of exchange I've not supplied any of
the qualifications & reservations which naturally make swarm at this
point.
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]


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