Johanna Skibsrud - The Nothing That Is: Essays on Art, Literature and Being

The following essays are records of my various attempts, over the last ten years or so, to think about Nothing. I borrow my title from one of Wallace Stevenss best-known poems, The Snowman a poem that through playful reflection on the tension between something and nothing, presence and absence, meaning and non-meaning, distinctively demonstrates the peculiar capacity of poetic language to represent the integral, non-binary relationship between these seemingly oppositional terms.

I ask: is there a way that we can allow ourselves to dwell in paradox and contradiction and still find a way to confront what exists beyond language and form? By attending to the many different ways of thinking about and representing nothing in literary and artistic practice, I hope these essays will help to conceptualize this possibility, while also working to elaborate what I see as the fundamental ethical relation implicit within poetic approaches to thinking and being.

Rather than representing or describing the apparent, or what already is, poetry forges connections between concepts and things that would otherwise remain distinct and remote from one another their potential and/or actual relation left invisible, unheard. These essays aim to decentre our relationship to history, as well as to a predictive or probable model of the future, by drawing attention to the way poetic language activates the multiple, as yet undesignated, possibilities replete within every moment, as well as within every encounter between a speaking I and what exceeds subjectivity: a listening Other, the possibility of community, the objective world.

Despite the prevailing interpretation of poetrys etymological root, poiesis, as to make, poetic or literary language instead unmakes ready meaning through the playful juxtaposition of seemingly disparate subjects and objects, and by drawing attention to the inherent gap between language and the material reality that language can neither supplant nor conceal. Rather than transcending difference or producing anything, poetry points to the ultimate non-equivalence of words and things as well as of self and world. I liken this operation to the way Luce Irigaray imagines a revitalized feminist philosophy as one that would rethink the horizon of a reality, wherein the other of address would not be overshadowed by projecting a world of ones own. According to Irigaray, the repeated error of Western philosophy is its incapacity to think past the abstract transcendental subject a subject who, though presumably universal, tends to see the world from a masculine (and predominantly white European) perspective. There are obvious limitations to a philosophical design whereby, as Irigaray writes, the whole of existing beings are approached from a single transcendence corresponding to the necessities of the masculine subject but how to move beyond these limitations is not yet clear. The essays collected here explore art, poetry, and other literatures as modes of pushing past the projection of a world of ones own; they argue that fundamental to a poetic approach to language and being is a space of encounter between the finite subject and what exceeds that finitude. Rather than making something out of nothing, what follows is an endeavour to express the potential of language and thought to encounter what is infinitely beyond both yet to be imagined.