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Alain Badiou's Age of the Poets: The Desacralizing of the Poem
- Postmodern Culture
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 31, Number 3, May 2021
- 10.1353/pmc.2021.0000
- Article
- Additional Information
Abstract:
This essay examines Alain Badiou's claims concerning the historical end of what he calls "the Age of the Poets": a configuration of thought that keeps philosophy sutured to poetry, which can never be the only condition of philosophy but merely one of them. The Age of the Poets stretches from Friedrich Nietzsche to Paul Celan, and Martin Heidegger becomes its major upholder and representative. For Badiou, undoing the poetico-philosophical suture is a condition of the freedom of philosophy. This essay proposes that Badiou's liberation of philosophy from poetry is simultaneously a liberation of poetry from philosophy that makes a better encounter possible.