The Abyss Above: Philosophy and Poetic Madness in Plato, Hölderlin, and Nietzsche

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SUNY Press, Jul 3, 2002 - Philosophy - 179 pages
In The Abyss Above, Silke-Maria Weineck offers the first sustained discussion of the relationship between poetic madness and philosophy. Focusing on the mad poet as a key figure in what Plato called “the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry,” Weineck explores key texts from antiquity to modernity in order to understand why we have come to associate art with irrationality. She shows that the philosophy of madness concedes to the mad a privilege that continues to haunt the Western dream of reason, and that the theory of creative madness always strains the discourse on authenticity, pitching the controlled, repeatable, but restrained labor of philosophy against the spontaneous production of poetic texts said to be, by definition, unique.

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Contents

VI
19
VII
49
VIII
58
IX
64
X
79
XII
87
XIII
100
XIV
108
XV
117
XVI
121
XVII
125
XVIII
127
XIX
137
XX
167
XXI
175
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Page 3 - As for a common language, there is no such thing; or rather, there is no such thing any longer; the constitution of madness as a mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, affords the evidence of a broken dialogue, posits the separation as already effected, and thrusts into oblivion all those stammered, imperfect words without fixed syntax in which the exchange between madness and reason was made. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason about madness, has been established...

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About the author (2002)

Silke-Maria Weineck is Assistant Professor of German Studies at the University of Michigan.

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