Saturday, February 12, 2005

Tractatus Pathetico-Poeticus [4.1ff.]

(Click on the number of each proposition to link to Jonathan Laventhol's hypertext of Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Please note, however, that he uses C. K. Ogden's translation and that I work mainly with the Pears & McGuinness translation, often working from the German when it is to my advantage. Click on the text of the first proposition to see what taking advantage of Wittgenstein and his translators amounts to.)

4.1 Sentences resent the ebb and flow of current events.

4.11 The totality of just sentences is the totality of cultural politics (the totality of cultural polities).

4.111 Poetry is not one of the cultural polities.
(The word 'poetry' must mean something whose place is inside or outside the cultural polities, not beside them.)

4.112 Poetry aims at the passionate intensification of feelings.
Poetry is not a heresy but a facticity.
A poetic work consists existentially of irritations.
Poetry does not result in 'poetic sentences', but rather in the intensification of sentences.
Without poetry feelings are, as it were, slack and mushy: its task is to make them intense and to give them hard cores.

4.113 Poetry raises questions about the core of cultural politics.

4.114 It must reach the core of what can be felt; and, in doing so, of what cannot be felt.
It must reach the core of what cannot be felt by working inwards through what can be felt.

4.115 It will signify what cannot be said, by presenting intensely what can be said.

4.116 Everything that can be felt at all can be felt intensely. Everything that can be put into words can be put intensely.

1 comment:

Thomas said...

Thanks, Laura. I was a bit impressed with the result myself. It's good to see you still haunt the realm you no longer host. Hope all is well with you. (As for the war I hear about, hope I'm running guns and sharpening knives for the good guys.)