poetry is not representation, but it is composition: against the theologico-poetic

Most of the efforts of 20^th century poetics, and up until today, have been oriented at eliminating representation from language by seeking a different relationship with speech. This has to be viewed in the context of capitalism where representation inevitably summons the question of value, and hence the production of surplus value in representation. To counter the valuation of language, poetic research has aimed at a non-exchangeable, non-representational idea of speech, something intransitive.

All quest for viscerality goes in this direction. Language is here re-endowed with a power of summoning forces that are beyond representation, be these forces in the here and now of performance, or in the there and then of metaphysical sublimation.

In parallel, there is the opposite tendency, that of producing an excess of signification --an infinite multiplication of representational trajectories that confound and disable their valuation.

Both are forms of non-paraphrasis, both are ways towards a poetry of anthropology, an approach that undoes the exchangeability of meaning. This also means defusing any productivity, and hence any meritocratic hierarchy.

But this struggle against representation falls in the trap (in poetry no less than in anthropology) of its own search for authenticity, as if viscerality was more real, truer, better than representation. When this happens, a specific political-theology (i.e. poetical theology) is at work. The claim to experience (against representation) transforms poetry into a metaphysics, and anthropology into an account of the really human, or the radically different, which is the same. The poetry of anthropology is antithetical to this posture. While opposing the quantitative equivalence of language in exchange, it also rejects the absolutism of embodiment’s will to truth, as if the really real was accessible without mediation. Disempowering representation, while also undoing the absoluteness of viscerality, the poetry of anthropology does not disavow either of them but puts them into a different relationality, a relationality composed of micro-epiphanies that are sustained by the co-constitution of desire and form: no composition without mechanism, no language without mediation, no outside.