Thus, as early as with the Greeks, three possible regimes for the link between poetry and philosophy have been found and named.

1. The first, which I will call Parmenidean, organizes the fusion between the poem’s subjective authority and the validity of those statements held to be philosophical. Even when certain ‘mathematical’ interruptions figure under the heading of this fusion, they are ultimately subordinated to the sacred aura of proffered speech, to its ‘profound’ value and its enunciating legitimacy. Imagery, language’s equivocity, and metaphor all escort and authorize the speaking of truth. Authenticity resides in the flesh of language.

2. The second, which I will call Platonic, organizes the distance between the poem and philosophy. The former is held in the gap that separates a dissolving fascination, a diagonal seduction, from truth; and the latter must exclude the possibility that whatever it treats could be treated by the poem in its stead. The effort to extricate oneself from the prestige of poetic metaphor is such that it demands that one find support in that which, in language, stands as its opposite – that is, the literal univocity of mathematics. Philosophy cannot establish itself except in the contrast between poem and matheme, which are its primordial conditions (the poem, of which it must interrupt the authority, and the matheme, of which it must promote the dignity). We might also say that the Platonic relation to the poem is a (negative) relation of condition, which implies that there are other conditions (the matheme, politics, love).

3. The third, which we will call Aristotelian, organizes the inclusion of the knowledge of the poem into philosophy, itself represented as the Knowledge of knowledges. The poem is no longer thought according to the drama of its distance or its intimate proximity, it is caught in the category of the object, in what, having been defined and reflected as such, delimits within philosophy a regional discipline. This regionality of the poem founds what will become aesthetics.

We might also say: the three possible relations of philosophy (as thought) to the poem are the identifying rivalry, the argumentative distance and the aesthetic regionality. In the first case, philosophy envies the poem; in the second it excludes it; and in the third it classifies it.

With regard to this triple disposition, what is the essence of the procedure of Heidegger’s thinking? I will schematize it according to three component parts:

1. Heidegger has very legitimately re-established the autonomous function of the thought of the poem. Or, to be more precise, he has sought to determine the place – a place itself withdrawn or concealed – from where to perceive the common destiny of the conceptions of the thinker and the utterances of the poet. We can say that this tracing of a community of destiny is opposed most of all to the third type of relationship – the one subsumed under an aesthetics of inclusion. Heidegger has subtracted the poem from philosophical knowledge, in order to render it onto truth. In doing so, he has founded a radical critique of all aesthetics, of all regional philosophical determination of the poem. This foundation is acquired as a pertinent feature of modernity (its non-Aristotelian character).

2. Heidegger has shown the limits of a relation of condition, which would shed light only on the separation between the poem and the philosophical argument. In fine particular analyses, he has established that during a long period, starting with Hölderlin, the poem serves as the relay of philosophy on a number of essential themes, principally because philosophy during this whole period is the captive either of science (positivism) or of politics (Marxism). It is its captive just as we said that for Parmenides it was still a captive of the poem: with regard to these particular conditions of its existence, philosophy does not create enough room to establish its own law. I have proposed to call this period the ‘age of the poets’. Let us say that, by investing this age with unprecedented philosophical means, Heidegger has shown that it was not always possible or just to establish a distance from the poem by way of the Platonic procedure of the ban. Philosophy is sometimes bound to expose itself to the poem in far more perilous ways: it must think for itself the operations by which the poem takes note of a truth of its time (for the period in question, the principal truth that has been poetically taken charge of is the destitution of the category of objectivity as the obligatory form of ontological presentation). Whence the poetically crucial theme of presence, albeit for instance in Mallarmé, in its inverted form, the isolation or subtraction.

3. Unfortunately, in this historical set-up, and more particularly in its evaluation of the Greek origin of philosophy, Heidegger has only been able to revert to the judgment of interruption, and to restore, under subtle and varied philosophical names, the sacral authority of poetic proffering – and the idea that the authentic lies in the flesh of words. There is a profound unity between, on one hand, the recourse to Parmenides and Heraclitus considered as the delimitation of a site of the presencing of being prior to its oblivion; and, on the other hand, the heavy-handed and fallacious recourse to the sacred in the most questionable of the poetic analyses, especially those of Trakl. The Heideggerian miscomprehension of the true nature of the Platonic gesture, with at its heart the miscomprehension of the mathematical sense of the Idea (which is precisely that which, by denaturalizing it, exposes thought to the retreat of being), entails that in the place of the invention of a fourth relation between philosophy and poetry, which would be neither fusional nor distanced nor aesthetic, Heidegger prophesies in the void a reactivation of the sacred within the undecipherable coupling of the saying of the poets and the thinking of the thinkers. (The Age of the Poets)

Poetry always says what is essential. Communist poetry from the 1930s and 1940s recalls for us that the essential aspect of communism, or of the communist Idea, is not and never has been the ferocity of a state, the bureaucracy of a party, or the stupidity of blind obedience. These poems tell us that the communist Idea is the compassion for the simple life of the people afflicted by inequality and injustice – that it is the broad vision of a raising up, both in thought and in practice, which is opposed to resignation and changes it into a patient heroism. It tells us that this patient heroism is aimed at the collective construction of a new world, with the means of a new thinking about what politics might be. And it recalls for us, with the riches of its images and metaphors, with the rhythm and musicality of its words, that communism in its essence is the political projection of the riches of the life of all. (The Age of the Poets)

 STATEMENT 1

Art is not ideology. It is completely impossible to explain art on the basis of the homological relation that it is supposed to maintain with the real of history. The aesthetic process decentres the specular relation with which ideology perpetuates its closed infinity. The aesthetic effect is certainly imaginary; but this imaginary is not the reflection of the real, since it is the real of this reflection.

STATEMENT 2

Art is not science. The aesthetic effect is not an effect of knowledge. However, as differentiating realization and denunciation of ideology, art is closer to science than to ideology. It produces the imaginary reality of that which science appropriates in its real reality.

[...]

STATEMENT 3

We must conceive of the aesthetic process not as a redoubling but as a reversal [retournement]. If ideology produces an imaginary reflection of reality, then the aesthetic effect produces in return [en retour] ideology as imaginary reality. We might say that art repeats in the real the ideological repetition of this real. Nevertheless this reversal does not produce the real; it realizes its reflection.

[...]

STATEMENT 4

What the aesthetic process transforms is differentially homogeneous to that which does the transforming. The ‘raw material’ of aesthetic production is already in itself aesthetically produced. The history of art thus possesses a regional autonomy. But this history by no means corresponds to the history of creators or their works. It is the theory of the formation and deformation of aesthetic generalities.

[...]

STATEMENT 5

By ‘aesthetic mode of production’, we understand the combination of factors whose effect is to operate the reversal. To operate the reversal means to give an ideological function to certain real-imaginary elements that are regionally produced by a historically determined state of the aesthetic process.

STATEMENT 6

To be more precise: an aesthetic mode of production is an invariant and invisible structure that distributes ways of linking real elements in such a way that these elements can function as ideological.

STATEMENT 7

An aesthetic mode of production is manifested in a double articulation:

• that which assembles the operators of transformation (presence-effect).

• that which concerns elements transformed by the place prescribed to them by the operators (effect of signification).

But the structural reality of the mode of production lies in the mechanism by which the first ‘encounter’ the second. Indeed, the operators are nowhere given other than in the elements, since the structure as such is invisible. There is thus a vectoral, or oriented, reality to the process of production: one can figure it as a ‘field’ in which are distinguished two hierarchical regions. One is the region of the operators, the other the region of the thematic elements. But the operators are themselves thematic so that their presence in the structured field is simply given as the encounter, or double function, with the characteristic asymmetry that makes it such that the first function renders possible the second, according to a rule (the visible i) that is the structure itself.

STATEMENT 8

The theory of an aesthetic mode of production supposes:

I) The definition of its elementary articulation.

II) The synchronic law of its effect (production of a new reality as ideological).

III) The diachronic law of the conditions for the conservation of its efficacy. (A real element that is ‘ideologized’ indeed risks henceforth becoming ideologically repeated, that is, non-transformed. In that case, it remains undoubtedly ideological, but the process that integrates it into ‘the work of art’ is itself ideological and not aesthetic. Or again, within the aesthetic process itself, the ideological element functions as such on its own).

STATEMENT 9

The complete intelligibility of an aesthetic mode of production presupposes that one conceives of its genealogy, that is to say, the process of the dissolution of the mode, anterior or contemporary to it, whose elements are rearticulated in the mode under investigation. (The Age of the Poets)

The communist hypothesis remains the good one, I do not see any other. If we have to abandon this hypothesis, then it is no longer worth doing anything at all in the field of collective action. Without the horizon of communism, without this Idea, there is nothing in the historical and political becoming of any interest to a philosopher. Let everyone bother about his own affairs, and let us stop talking about it. In this case, the rat-man is right, as is, by the way, the case with some ex-communists who are either avid of their rents or who lost courage. However, to hold on to the Idea, to the existence of this hypothesis, does not mean that we should retain its first form of presentation which was centered on property and State. In fact, what is imposed on us as a task, even as a philosophical obligation, is to help a new mode of existence of the hypothesis to deploy itself.

What to say of today’s world? A solitary power whose army is terrorizing the entire planet dictates its law of the circulation of capital and images and proclaims everywhere, with the most extreme violence, the Duties and Rights of everyone. Behind it run valets and rivals, Europeans, Russians, Chinese… Often disagreeing on means, they never cease testifying to their basic agreement. Because they have no other idea of how to give value to the world.

Under the imposed name of “terrorism,” those most violently opposed to this hegemony of the brutal West, for which “democracy” is spiritual ornament, are in reality part of it. Some nihilist criminals killed at random thousands of inhabitants of New York. This mass crime is evidently an avatar of a contemporary pathology. It is a cold mise en scène of a hackneyed motif: the fury of inspired barbarism against sated imperialism. The American army and the “terrorists” replay the old and bloody historical scene of civilization encircled by brutes. It’s enough to remind us of Rome: a solitary power, which in its own eyes incarnates civilization, disposes art in two directions. On the one hand, a sort of flashy celebration of its own power, a morbid and repetitive drunkenness, proposed to the people as an opiate for its passivity. These are circus games, of which today professional sports and the culture industry, be it musical or filmic, give us the exact equivalent. This kind of entertainment works on a grand scale. To the names of victim and gladiator correspond today the commerce of colossal media budgets and doping in sports. This art is the art of pomp which makes of the funereal power of the Empire the material of games and fictions increasingly more allegorical and bombastic. The natural hero of this art is the Killer, the torturing serial killer. In short, the perverse gladiator.

In the other direction, a meager sophistication, itself finely wrought through a kind of formalist excess, tries to oppose to pompous massiveness the unctuous discernment and subtle perversity of people who can, without suffering too much from it, pretend to retire from general circulation. This art is Romantically morose: it expresses impotence and portrays it as nihilistic delectation. It freely reclaims great forests, eternal snowfalls, softened bodies through a native or oriental wisdom. But this art is all the while bound up with the twilight of pompous art, like the pairing of circus horns with Martial’s deliciously obscene epigrams. Or the flamboyant rhetoric of the generals with the ascetic sermon of the Christians in catacombs.