The Age of the Poets and Other Writings on Twentieth-Century Poetry and Prose

The Age of the Poets and Other Writings on Twentieth-Century Poetry and Prose. By Alain Badiou. Edited and Translated by Bruno Bosteels. London and New York: Verso, 2014.

The Age of the Poets consists of a superb, though narrowly focused introduction by Emily Apter and Bruno Bosteels followed by fifteen essays on literary figures by the French philosopher Alain Badiou, spanning his career. There are nine essays concentrating on poetics, one on general aesthetics, and five on prose writers. Wallace Stevens makes what is fundamentally a cameo appearance in providing the motto for an essay devoted mostly to the work drawing does.

Badiou argues in his essay using Stevens that "every work of art, especially every work in contemporary arts, is a description without place" (75). Fie thinks an installation is "the creation of a place which (dis)places all things in it" (75). And in the case of drawing, "some trace without place creates as its place an empty surface" (76). In this withdrawal, this thinking as making which creates its own place, "we can perceive a secret relationship between drawing and femininity" because in the work of art "appearing and being are indiscernible" (77). Politics, too, comes into play because we see through drawing how the classical politics of description with place is bankrupt. Political thinking needs to go beyond the domination of place to a "purely displaced politics, with absolute equality as its fundamental concept" (81). Then we will finally "find a form of action where the political existence of everybody is not separated from their being-a point where we exist in so intense a fashion that we forget our internal division" (82). Such a vision brings out the political aspect of Stevens' claim that "being there together is enough" (CPP 444) because it realizes the "Victory of fragility. Victory of femininity, maybe" (Badiou 82).

I have a few problems with this analysis. First, in general the work of poetry has to negate its fealty to a distinct place since it involves the imagination. This is not news. The test of theory is...