The Status of the Poetic Subject Penetrates Literary Genres

Abstract

The poetic subject is an elusive concept for critical and theoretical reflection, given its complexity and ambivalent relation with the author’s figure. Maurice Blanchot and Michel Foucault have meditated on the problematic condition of the literary enunciation subject in relation to other issues such as the nature of poetical meaning and the specificity of literary genres. Following the abovementioned authors, I put forward that the thought from outside and its discourse correlate, the writing of the disaster, can be adequate starting points to reconsider the problematic relationship between writing and subjectivity, as well as theoretical devices to question the feeble distinction between literary genres. According to this line of thought, I consider the series poetry/letters/diary/essay/chronicle as terms or singularities that share the same condition; "the movement from which the text comes" is the problematic aspect. This movement is neither an inner part nor a content of the text but its outside, the outside that determines and goes through it.