By heart: a reading of Che cos’è la poesia?, by Jacques Derrida

Abstract

Poem, dialogue, essay, enumerations, or nothing like that: maybe Che cos’e? la poesia? even be a “thing”, that which escapes representation. In the erasure of poetry, the writing of the poem, in the erasure of ontology, the writing of the thing, in the erasure of being, the writing of the animal. For two economic enumerations, four paragraphs. In double, many folds, in addition to these two propositions, these two figures, these two words, “par coeur”. In a memory economy, a libidinal economy, a theory about poetry, a philosophical thought, an ethics, the incalculable. If Western metaphysics traditionally separated brain and heart, philosophy and poetry, incorporeal and corporeal, Derrida articulates them in this essay and makes us think that it is through a “par coeur” knowledge that poematic experience can be thought of as a crossing in which it launches and is launched, at the same time, to an exposure to love and catastrophe.