Thursday, March 01, 2012

What Remains

After a poem has caused its "stir" and has become "a depleted fashion", said Ezra Pound, "only emotion remains." He means that quite abstractly. The emotions of the poem itself, he says, "are those of a maître-de-café."

A work of philosophy will stand in the same (questionable) relation to its concepts. There will be much excitement about the "recent development" in philosophy and the "progress" that the work in question signals. Only concepts will remain. Concepts that no longer belong to the work.

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