Badiou on Plato’s banishment of the poet from the state:
“Plato does not hesitate to write that ‘the city whose principle we have organized is the best one, and especially, I think, because of the measures taken in the matter of poetry.’ All the same, this is an astounding sentence! The fate of the political depending on the fate of the poem! The poem here is recognized as having almost boundless power” (31)
This section, in tandem with what Badiou had been discussing, which is about the poem as a form of thought - not knowledge, but thought. Knowledge requires an object to orient it; thought does not. Badiou writes: “The thought of the poem does not begin until after a complete de-objectification of presence. This is why we can say that, at the farthest remove from knowledge, the poem is an exemplarily a thought that is obtained in the retreat, or the defection, of everything that supports the faculty to know.”
Badiou then states, this is why poetry has always troubled philosophy. I would extend this troubling to a particular, toward the political philosophy, or lack thereof, as it forms human imagination.
Say I desire the Unknown. Perhaps I contextualize this desire for the Unknown as a child desires the Unknown, as a movement through the world of objects. I think of discovering this unknown and exploring it as My Glory. In exploration, knowledge aware us, but to what? The limits of mimesis, the perjury of objects. We know desire cannot exist without an object. Yet I become aware that to objectify is domination. The Unknown, as a concept, becomes the the imagination of the dominant. What extends past the individual's curiosity for Glory as an active agent for the State is an unconscious desire to find an object to fix in ownership, as knowledge-possession.
This is how a poem, and the thought-wiring of poetic thinking, presents it's threat. The poet knows, through the de-objectification of presence, there is no such thing (pun intended) as undiscovery, only unacknowledged use, i.e. novelty. By refusing to name the object as presence he presents instead a defection from presence of the object, at the refusal to implicate an object to possess.
This is why the poet mourns. For against the unrelenting struggle against the rhetoric-world of the status quo, which he cares for, but ethically, cannot join.
“Plato does not hesitate to write that ‘the city whose principle we have organized is the best one, and especially, I think, because of the measures taken in the matter of poetry.’ All the same, this is an astounding sentence! The fate of the political depending on the fate of the poem! The poem here is recognized as having almost boundless power” (31)
This section, in tandem with what Badiou had been discussing, which is about the poem as a form of thought - not knowledge, but thought. Knowledge requires an object to orient it; thought does not. Badiou writes: “The thought of the poem does not begin until after a complete de-objectification of presence. This is why we can say that, at the farthest remove from knowledge, the poem is an exemplarily a thought that is obtained in the retreat, or the defection, of everything that supports the faculty to know.”
Badiou then states, this is why poetry has always troubled philosophy. I would extend this troubling to a particular, toward the political philosophy, or lack thereof, as it forms human imagination.
Say I desire the Unknown. Perhaps I contextualize this desire for the Unknown as a child desires the Unknown, as a movement through the world of objects. I think of discovering this unknown and exploring it as My Glory. In exploration, knowledge aware us, but to what? The limits of mimesis, the perjury of objects. We know desire cannot exist without an object. Yet I become aware that to objectify is domination. The Unknown, as a concept, becomes the the imagination of the dominant. What extends past the individual's curiosity for Glory as an active agent for the State is an unconscious desire to find an object to fix in ownership, as knowledge-possession.
This is how a poem, and the thought-wiring of poetic thinking, presents it's threat. The poet knows, through the de-objectification of presence, there is no such thing (pun intended) as undiscovery, only unacknowledged use, i.e. novelty. By refusing to name the object as presence he presents instead a defection from presence of the object, at the refusal to implicate an object to possess.
This is why the poet mourns. For against the unrelenting struggle against the rhetoric-world of the status quo, which he cares for, but ethically, cannot join.