Poetry as Experience

Lacoue-Labarthe’s Poetry as Experience addresses the question of a lyric language that would not be the expression of subjectivity. In his analysis of the historical position of Paul Celan’s poetry, Lacoue-Labarthe defines the subject as the principle that founds, organizes, and secures both cognition and action – a principle that turned, most violently during the twentieth century, into a figure not only of domination but of the extermination of everything other than itself. This thoroughly universal, abstract, and finally suicidal subject eradicates all experience, save the singularity of this experience of voiding. But what is left, as Paul Celan insisted, is a remainder accessible to the lyric voice alone.