The Poetic Significance of the Thing-in-Itself

Abstract

This remark by Barthes echoes one of dominant critical commonplaces concerning modern poetry. Sartre had put it following way: in one fell stroke poet has given up view of as tool; he has chosen once and for all poetic attitude that views words as things and not as signs.2 Coming from author of Being and Nothingness, this statement is perhaps not surprising: world of signs for Sartre is of less interest than phenomenological world that reveals being. Yet when we find anti-sign doctrine of thing-in-itself pioneering semiotic study paradox becomes evident. In Mythologies Barthes notes that modern poetry attempts to recapture an infrasignification, state of language and that it tries to reach a sort of transcendent quality of things.3 Now if main message of Mythologies is that every aspect of cultural life (including literature) is organized as signsystem, then it is an obvious contradiction for Barthes to see modern poems operating at presemiological level of the thing itself.4 It would appear that Barthes is momentarily won over by professed aim of such poets as Char and Bonnefoy, which is to reach realm beyond any system of semiotic conventions. He is not alone this respect since we find Jean-Pierre Richard also insisting his study of post-war French poetry that all poets discussed been grasped at level of an original contact with things.5 How can we account for poetry's commitment to concreteness, as Susan Sontag has called it,6 from within semiotic theory? If we were unable to do so, very axiom of semiotics concerning omnipresence of signs culture would have to be revised order to allow for certain exceptions. We would also have to allow validity of paradoxical proposition that objective poetry like Char's presents itself as an anti-language.7 It is, however, clear