The Correspondence: The Order of Heavens and the Order of the Earth

Though Thomas Traherne’s punctuation has been harshly criticized for its idiosyncrasy, scholars have also frequently admired the stylistic effects that it creates. His punctuation is linked to baroque art and music, the use of periods to highlighting subordinate ideas, capitalization to its inability to foster figurative language, and parentheses to his writing and editing process. This essay draws attention to a related, but different, issue that has remained unaddressed: what does Traherne himself have to say about punctuation? An examination of Traherne’s works shows that Traherne’s understanding of punctuation falls into two broad categories: the complex-metaphoric and the politico-religious. His metaphoric understanding, which belongs to a long tradition, can be gleaned from his references to the oracle of Delphi’s capital letters inscription; Ficino’s translation of Plato; and Ben Jonson’s borrowing from a fourteenth-century translation of Julius Scaliger’s grammar. Traherne’s politico-religious understanding of punctuation emerges most clearly in his Roman Forgeries (1673) in which he critiques a long list of ecclesiastical sources—epistles, church canons, multi-volume works of the councils—to argue that Catholic scribes and editors used punctuation for ideological purposes: to obfuscate, hide, and forge religious doctrines. Traherne’s comments reveal that early modern readers were likely to skip over text within parenthesis and marginal annotations and to be impressed by the use of all capital letters. Traherne’s textual criticism through the lens of punctuation helps us to understand early modern reading habits as well as the history of textual editing and textual transmission.

Reviewed by: Wallace Stevens: Poetry, Philosophy, and Figurative Language ed. by Kacper Bartczak and Jakub Mácha Krzysztof Ziarek Wallace Stevens: Poetry, Philosophy, and Figurative Language. Edited by Kacper Bartczak and Jakub Mácha. Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Warszawa, Wien: Peter Lang, 2018. As the title aptly conveys, this collection contains essays devoted to exploring the relation between poetry, philosophy, and language—in particular, the figure of metaphor—in Wallace Stevens’s poetry and essays. Most of the contributions were first presented as papers at the PhiLang conference at the University of Łódź, which took place on May 12–14, 2017. The introduction underscores the “amazingly contemporary and wide significance” of Stevens’s modernist poetry (11) and argues for the continuing interest in taking philosophical approaches to his work. It sketches briefly Stevens’s contribution to the aesthetic shifts in modernist poetry as well as the philosophical context (William James, George Santayana) in which his thinking about poetry developed. It also provides summaries of the essays and points to the growing scholarship that continues to read Stevens through the prism of philosophical approaches to knowledge and language, extending from Kant, Nietzsche, James, Husserl, and Heidegger to Derrida, Rorty, Murdoch, and Davidson. The eight essays are divided into two parts: the first four focus on the relation between poetry and philosophy while the second group addresses Stevens’s understanding of metaphor in the context of various philosophical and literary notions of metaphorical language. The essay opening the collection, “One Reason the Poetry of Wallace Stevens Matters Today,” by Charles Altieri, challenges the New Materialist approaches to aesthetic experience, which emphasize sensible, natural energy as influencing decisively the workings of the mind. Altieri invokes Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics, in particular his notion of “inner sensuousness,” to stress the formative role of consciousness in shaping poetic sensibility. Wit Pietrzak’s “‘They Will Get It Straight One Day at the Sorbonne’: Wallace Stevens’ Intimidating Thesis,” critiques what he sees as reductive philosophical approaches to Stevens’s poetry, turning to the work of Simon Critchley, Richard Rorty, and American pragmatism to argue that the poetry resists any finality that philosophy (in Pietrzak’s and Stevens’s view) tries to impose upon it. Instead, poetry continues to develop new fictions, and this is what philosophers will get straight one day. The third essay, by Karl-Friedrich Kiesow, consists of two shorter texts, which explore the relationship between philosophy and poetry in Stevens and Paul Weiss. Its contribution lies in focusing on the role that Stevens’s work, especially the notion of “supreme fiction,” plays in Weiss’s understanding of human equality and dignity and in his theory of art. The essay closing the first part, Mácha’s “Reality Is Not a Solid: Poetic Transfigurations of Stevens’ Fluid Concept of Reality,” offers a very interesting conception of multiple layers or dimensions of reality in Stevens, outlined against the backdrop of Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism. Part of his argument, contra Critchley, is that Stevens’s poetry can in fact help elucidate the obscurity of Schelling’s philosophical approach to the work of art. The most illuminating aspect of Mácha’s discussion is the fluid movement he traces in Stevens’s exploration of the changing relation between the mind and [End Page 292] the world through the various layers of “reality”—extending from what he terms initial reality through imagined reality to the final and then total reality. Crucial to his argument is the insistence on the essentially fluid character of reality in Stevens, which accounts for the fact that what Mácha calls the “agency” (more than human agency) moving and motivating reality in Stevens— sometimes called “Being”—cannot in fact be given any final or unique name. This Stevensian sense “of mere Being” can in turn help us understand how Schelling’s ground of all beings is no longer conceivable as a subject. Part Two of the collection offers essays devoted to language and metaphor in Stevens. Chris Genovesi’s “Au Pays de la Métaphore: Wallace Stevens and Interaction Theory” casts metaphor as a creative force that, though subjective, contributes to understanding and meaning on an objective level. Genovesi...

In Insister – À Jacques Derrida Cixous declares that she will have to write ‘the book of words’, among which ‘words of power’ will be vermögen (to be able), together with Unvermöglickeit (impossibility), and tragen (to carry), along with austragen (to bear to term) and übertragen (to transfer, translate, also in the sense of metaphor). By examining Derrida's reading of Cixous in H. C. pour la vie, c'est à dire … this article deepens the association of tragen with life and power that fascinates Derrida in the second year of his final seminar where he tracks a thread between Austrag, Walten, Trieb, and Vermögen. Its point of departure is a passage towards the end of H. C. pour la vie where Derrida speaks of the trap of metalanguage or, rather, metaphrasis that lurks in the c’est of c'est à dire. I link this passage both to the discussion of metaphorization in the earlier ‘Le puits et la pyramide’ and the characterization of puisse as ‘the exhaustion [ l'épuisement] of the sun before its time’ in the essay on Cixous to associate puissance with the wearing-out of the world and its usure in the double sense elaborated in ‘La mythologie blanche’.

This essay begins by focusing on four cultural characters that signify different but associated aspects of the changing destiny of the human figure at the end of the twentieth century and beyond. These characters embody the human figure, in the double sense of form and metaphor, at work, at leisure and at war, and as gendered cultural and philosophical ideal. It is our suggestion that they provide excellent images of a general economy of the future present. Their significance as indices of the destiny of the human resides in the way that they disclose the effects of a restricted economy that overflows its boundaries to incorporate, utilise and restrict every element of its generalised expenditure, to use the categories of Georges Bataille: its sumptuary excess, its sacred forms, its abjected waste, its modes of eroticism, its violence. The essay continues by discussing the implications of, and consequences for, human life in the face of the corporate or techno‐bureaucratic drive to incorporate the ‘impossible‐real’. For Paul Virilio, the technological desire to overwrite the temporal and spatial dimensions of ‘the actual’ discloses something of the ‘divine’ in this new technology. In conclusion, then, the essay questions what resistance there might be to the law of the machine‐God who lies, impossibly, as the immanent being of machinic efficiency, operativity and becoming excellence.

The central idea of this paper is that different understandings of metaphor divide science from hermeneutics, that science as modern heir to the project of rational knowledge is committed to and requires a sharp division of the literal and metaphorical sense of language, and that hermeneutics can acknowledge the fundamental metaphoricity of thought and the role of metaphor in the general process of producing concepts. Consequently, science by its very project, goals, and self-understanding must truncate what metaphor can be and constrain what it can do whereas hermeneutics can embrace the full semantic import of metaphor. In doing so, hermeneutics can make sense of a project of participatory knowledge that differs radically from the project of knowledge as rational accounting.