Twenty-second International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Contemporary poetry, increasingly accused of hermeticism and incomprehensibility, seeks to problematize the experience of the world of liquid modernity. In this paper, I show how concepts derived from the writings of contemporary biopolitical philosophers allow us to overcome this incomprehensibility and thus deepen our understanding of both the present poetic field and individual poems. I use two Polish poetry volumes as interpretive examples: “Osobnikt” by Krzysztof Siwczyk and “Eating the Sovereign” by Kacper Bartczak. Analyzing the phenomenon of “traveling concepts” and “transfer of ideas” between literature and speculative thought, I present the convergence of the poetic projects with the key views of philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben, Rosi Braidotti, Ernesto Laclau, and Roberto Esposito. In both cases, the “transfer” is an openness to anything that being and thinking can push on a new track, into new regions of intellectual work, where there are hidden elements uncalculated, spontaneously capable of contributing to a vital understanding of the relationship between the poetic self and an unfavorable biopolitical/anarchist environment. In my view, Siwczyk’s Osobnikt and Bartczak’s Sovereign (re)arranges space, seeing the poem, which undertakes self-creation, as a reservoir of potential modeling of interpersonal and interspecies space. The purpose is to show that contemporary European poetry insists on the recovery of the individual’s autonomous position. The stakes of literature relating to displacement and transgression are to create a constellation of keystones of being, in which individual points of thinking interfere with such domains as life, law and logos.