Geopoiesis, or the Responsibility of Literature

Abstract

How are we to conceive poetry if, as Derrida maintains, it is not a mode of literary representation? How are we to conceive poetry's place if, as he observes, literature emerges in a cultural location which is not that of poetry? Reading Derrida's comments on the genealogical separation of poetry and literature, as well as his remarks on Europe's departure from Greece and Rome, suggests that European literature has not successfully overcome or renounced poetry, but has incorporated it as a secret responsibility. Rather than a linguistic or textual legacy, the secret that literature inherits from poetry is of a cultural inhabitation that cannot, strictly speaking, be defined in terms of European territorial limits.