A költészet adománya. Jacques Derrida: Che cos’è la poesia?
The Gift of Poetry – Jacques Derrida, Che cos’è la poesia?

Summary/Abstract: Jacques Derrida’s text Che cos’è la poesia? appeared for the first time in the journal Poesia (1. Nr. 11) in Milano, in 1988. One year later, the text was published in the French journal Poésie (Nr. 50, 1989) in Paris. In 1990, the Italian, French, English, German version came out in Berlin, translated by such prominent Derridean readers and writers as Maurizio Ferraris, Peggy Kamuf and Alexander García Düttman. Derrida, known for his resistance to such philosophical questions as „‘What is ...?’ (ti estí, was ist... istoria, episteme, philosophia)” and prized for the literary strength of his writings gives a sophisticated and poematic answer to this question. In my paper, I would like to argue that Derrida’s text is a prose poem or a critical poem evoking such figures as Socrates, Benjamin, Joyce, Mallarmé, Ponge, Celan, such genres as philosophical dialogue and a prose poem, inventing such figures as herrison, istrice, Igel, hedgehog, using such idioms as “apprendre par coeur”, “Auswendig”, “hafiza a’n zahri kalb”, “to learn by heart”. I would also like to involve in my paper the Derrida-game we played with my students, their transcriptions of Derrida’s text in different genres: poem, dialogue, and visual poem.

• Details
• Contents