Options
Imaginative capacity as form-of-life: Giorgio Agamben, Wallace Stevens and the ‘inoperative’ potential of poetry
Citation
Tan, I. (2023). Imaginative capacity as form-of-life: Giorgio Agamben, Wallace Stevens and the ‘inoperative’ potential of poetry. Paragraph, 46(2), 244–258. https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2023.0432
Author
Tan, Ian
Abstract
This essay compares the poetic and political theories of contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben with the poetry of Wallace Stevens in order to outline a dynamic of ‘inoperativity’ that foregrounds the intimate relationship between language, form and an existential expression of possibility. Through a reading of Stevens’s prose essays and poetry, I demonstrate how Agamben’s reconceptualization of potentiality as a power kept in a non-relational relationship towards its formal realization can be mapped onto the self-conscious articulations of Stevens’s poetic speakers who employ poetic tropes and forms only to question and expose their claims to truth and foundationality. Rather than follow a tradition of poststructuralist readings of Stevens’s destabilizations, I argue for a framework of ‘inoperativity’ that preserves Stevens’s poetic attitude towards life, while showing how his emphasis on potentiality delineates an imaginative vigour that brings the poetic self into renewed attunement with his or her environment.
Date Issued
2023
Publisher
Edinburgh University Press
Journal
Paragraph