The turn / and the

pause: Agamben, Derrida and the stratification of Poetry

This paper will consider the relations and schisms between Agamben and
Derridas work on the role of the poetic in upending the ambitions of general,
categorical and universal philosophical thinking due to poetrys perceived
characteristics of singularity, nontranslatability and performativity. In particular it
will orchestrate its critique around two events within the performance of the poetic,
the turn of the poetic line at its limits, and the pause intrinsic to each line marking a
second, in this instance internal, limitation. In this sense it will attempt to describe a
double stratification. In the first instance it will consider how contemporary
philosophy has stratified poetry by classifying it as typical of singularity. In the
second it will actually consider the textual/spatial act of the layering of broken lines as
the presumed semiotic cause of said singularity within the poem itself.
The paper will begin by briefly outlining the rather complex inter-relationships
between Agamben and Derridas work ranging from hostilities over the trace, parallel
pathways of thinking in relation to the figure of exclusion to be found in Homo Sacer
and Rogues, to a strange act of ventriloquism on Derridas part in Che Cos la
poesia where he seems speak almost as Agamben. It will then outline a central
similarity not only between the work of these two philosophers but working as a seam
of thought on poetry in western philosophy since Heidegger, namely poetic
singularity. This has led to a 20th century narrative of poetry told by philosophers,
which describes how philosophy, in somehow losing its disciplinary soul to poetry,
refinds its own relation to truth through the performance of the failures of its
generalised mode of thinking which either emulate poetic performativity, or become
poeticised.
Having set out the ground for the debate, I will then hone in on two key
moments in the poems performance of nontranslatability definable as a linguistic
effect radically tied into the context of its occurrence which is non-compressible in
terms of its repetition. The first is the verso of verse or its ancient reliance on the
premature turn of the line. This turning is central to Agambens definition of the
poem as a semiotically enforced truncation of semantics enacted by the syllable rather
than idea-limited length of the poetic line. Yet it is even more intrinsic to Derridas
work, with echoes beyond any idea of poetry. Although the turn is addressed in The
Double Session through the figure of the fold in the hymen, it is also central to the
idea of the trait/re-trait being the re-turn of singularity in the moment of its essential
iterability.
The second moment in the event of the poetic line, if indeed poetry can be
described as materially an event, is the result of, but also precedes, the first (this being
the complex temporal status of the caesura in the poetic line). The pause is in some
ways a conception so layered with resonances in Agamben and Derrida, that it is hard
to retain its meaning within one event of signification. The pause, therefore, becomes
in Agamben hesitation, the caesura, silence, a stop, an interruption and a gaping.
While in Derrida one finds a wider dissemination of the pause located less in the
interior of the line than at its impossible limits, thus in the place of the interior caesura
one finds the date, the cut, the signature, iterability, the gap, the aporia, the limit, and
blanks. In both thinkers the pause marks the hesitation of the space-time of being
between, or that which shows through the overlay of the mark onto the radical,
differential presence of space.
Agamben makes it transparent on a number of occasions his inability to accept
the idea of the trace foundational to Derridas oeuvre. Yet over issues of poetry the

two thinkers seem less inclined to conflict. This paper will ask the question: are their
ideas about singularity and philosophy really at odds? In addition other issues come
to the fore of which I will mention two here. The first is the possibility that two of the
most important thinks of our age have made poetry a central part of their aims and
ambitions whose revelations have yet to be gauged in the field of literary studies. The
second raises the problems attendant to the appropriation of poetry as the dwelling of
singularity by philosophy, enacted by the difficulty of translating poetic effects into
philosophical prose as the diacritic awkwardness of my title shows. Is poetry truly
singular, and where does singularity reside, in the general semiotic potential of the
poem as Agamben argues or in the performance of its nontranslatability within the
readers event of reading and countersigning as Derrida asserts?
Taking its cue from the dual conception of stratification, this paper then will
set out excavate some of the layers of compression and overlay to be found within the
increasingly fraught drama between these two thinkers through a close analysis of the
centrality of the poetic acts of turning and pausing to the idea of poetry, the
controversy of ideas, and the wider project of the collapsing of philosophy into poetry
to be found in the work of Agamben and Derrida.
The stratification of poetry then, is to be taken simultaneously as a
problematic classification of the poetic reliant on the specific textual/spatial effects of
the layering of lines at the moment of the turn and of the overlaid presence of the
mark upon the space of the pause.