Rethinking the Value of Lyric Closure: Giorgio Agamben, Wallace Stevens, and the Ethics of Satisfaction

Abstract

Lyric poetry's investment in structural delimitation has been read as a commitment to the exclusion of otherness and more specifically of other people. But delimitation need not be synonymous with exclusivity. Giorgio Agamben suggests that lyric closure and the satisfaction it affords may be a model for achieving peace with the other—a model of how we might find, in or with another, not merely alterity but contentment. Wallace Stevens offers examples of how such contentment might be realized between text and reader, as an effect of the bounded aural intensity of lyric language. Agamben's poetics and Stevens's poems complicate our assumptions about the sociality of lyric structure. In addition, they offer a provocative alternative to the Levinasian models that influence much of our current thinking about ethics.