Poetry, Performativity, and Ordinary Language Philosophy

by Philip Mills

Overview

How can Ordinary Language Philosophy (OLP) help us understand poetry? Against John L. Austin’s exclusion of poetic utterances as parasitical, Philip Mills explores how contemporary poetics broadens the aims and scope of OLP. Through the analysis of French and American poetry that reinterprets notions such as illocution, perlocution, and language-games, Mills develops a poetic philosophy of language, revealing its viral and transformative nature. Poetry, Performativity, and Ordinary Language Philosophy bridges philosophy and poetry, showing how poetry contaminates and reshapes our ways of thinking and being in the world, and combining the poetic and the ethical in the notion of ‘poethics.’ This Open Access book offers a new perspective on the poetic and literary potential of OLP and the intersections between the philosophy of language and poetry.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783031786143
Publisher:	Springer Nature Switzerland
Publication date:	01/01/2025
Pages:	215
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Philip Mills is a postdoctoral fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften of the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of A Poetic Philosophy of Language: Nietzsche and Wittgenstein’s Expressivism (2022).

Table of Contents

1. Introduction Poetic Promises: Austin Meets NietzscheIntroduction Poetic Promises: Austin Meets Nietzsche.- Part One. Parasites, Viruses, and Baisetioles.- 2. Austin’s Parasites and the Resistance of Poetry.- 3. Viral Poetics as Performative Philosophy of Language.- 4. Intentional Misfire: From Normative Illocution to Poetic Perlocutions.- Part Two . Performative Poethics.- 5. Wittgenstein’s Performative Poetics and Contemporary French Poetry: Henri Meschonnic, Emmanuel Hocquard, Christophe Hanna, Florent Coste.- 6. Poetic Documents: Transforming Forms of Language, Transforming Forms of Life.- 7. Poethical Force (Muriel Pic, Claudia Rankine, Rosa Alcalá).- 8. Conclusion Poetic Stitching or Recovering the World.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“J.L. Austin ostentatiously excluded poetic language — a mode of language use he called parasitical, hollow, and void—from his theory of the performative speech act in How to Do Things with Words. Philip Mills’ timely study charges the forms of language restored to intellectual credibility in ordinary language philosophy with ‘forms of life’ witnessed by contemporary poetry with ‘poethical’ force.” (Eric Lindstrom, University of Vermont; author of “Jane Austen and Other Minds”)

“Philip Mills offers a fresh take on philosophy’s ancient quarrel with poetry by putting the works of ordinary language philosophers such as J. L. Austin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Stanley Cavell in conversation with continental philosophy, deconstruction, queer theory, literary theory, and contemporary works of literature. Poetry, Performativity and Ordinary Language Philosophy turns the old quarrel into a productive and sometimes provocative intellectual intercourse; asking, not only what ordinary language philosophy can do for our understanding of poetry, or what poetry can teach us about the limits and possibilities of ordinary language philosophy, but more urgently: what philosophical resources there is to be found within the perlocutionary forces of poetry itself? For Mills, the perlocutionary effects of poetic language use are not merely the subject matter of the book; they are deliberately and argumentatively utilized in his clear and enjoyable prose and style of thinking.” (Ingeborg Löfgren, Lecturer in Literature at the Department of Literature and Rhetoric, Uppsala University, Sweden)