From Blind to Blinding: Saturated Phenomena and the Speculative Lyric of the Invisible in Andrew Joron’s Poetry

Abstract

This essay presents a critical reading of Andrew Joron’s speculative oeuvre from a phenomenological standpoint. Proceeding from the poet’s cosmic perspectives, it focuses on the central issue of language in relation to the emergence of meaning and the world. Through a close reading of both Joron’s poetry and poetics, this essay demonstrates his conceptual affinity with the work of contemporary French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion, arguing that both Joron’s poetry and Marion’s phenomenology of givenness postulate an emergence of meaning and the world that is absolutely unconditioned and unconditional, an emergence characterized by an intuitively blinding richness that saturates the phenomenon over and beyond any limit and, hence, makes the phenomenon invisible.