Back to Silence: Lyric Discourse, Subjectivity and Desubjectivation

Abstract

According to the definition promoted by Western philosophical tradition, poetry would not be a speaking of things in the logical sense of providing a shareable definition nor a speaking to things as addressees of a message. It would rather be an uttering that the thing purely is, without saying what it is or how it is. It would be a revealing and manifestative language, and not an onto-logical one. Through a careful reading of two exemplary poems: Shelley’s Hymn to Intellectual Beauty and the seventh of Rilke’s Duino Elegy, the article wants to understand if such a ‘revealing language’ is a feasible possibility for the lyric – that is to say, a specific form to be adopted –, or rather it is one of the opposing models employed by the discourse of the logic to identify its practice distinguishing itself from the alternatives and, in turn, it is the ideal model adopted by the lyric discourse to establish itself as autonomous from the defining discourse of Western logic. The main aim is to distinguish, in the cases taken into consideration, what poetry says it wants to be and what it makes instead in its practice. It seems that subjectivation happens in the attempt/effort to construct a sense, which is a never ending and never definitive operation. But, in the lyric, what gives a direction to such an operation seems to be a desire for desubjectivation, because achieving the fullness of presence and sense the Western subject, whose subjectivity is defined as always looking for a sense, must disappear. The article wants to catch the irreducible difference between lyric saying and lyric making itself to understand how the two levels of its rhetorical construction interact in the text.