The notion of poethics has been used to approach the way in which forms of language and forms of life are interdependent and to reveal the ethical dimension of poetics. However, the interaction must go both ways; there must not only be an ethical dimension to poetics, but also a poetic dimension to ethics. To what extent is ethics dependent on poetics? In this essay, I argue that Nietzsche’s life-affirming ethics can be understood only in this poethical framework. The (...) specificity of Nietzsche’s ethics, and why it is so difficult to locate on the spectrum of ethical theories, lies in the fact that his ethics is a poetics. By focusing mainly on The Gay Science, I explore the interaction between ethics and poetics that lies at the heart of Nietzsche’s ethical thought. Both poetics and ethics involve the question of value, and a poetic ethics (a poethics) reveals that the creation of ethical value is something necessarily poetic. Nietzsche’s ethics of creation is not a mere theory, but a poetic way of life. (shrink)

Drawing upon the work of various critical race theorists, including Frantz Fanon, Kevin Quashie, Hortense J. Spillers, Calvin L. Warren and Sylvia Wynter, this article suggests that if Blackness has historically been, and continues to be, cast outside of being and into being, or what Wynter terms désêtre, then for Blackness to give expression to itself and/or to prove (or improvise) its “aliveness” is a necessarily “poetic” process, given that poetry/ poiesis is the bringing into being of that which previously (...) did not exist. Looking at a range of films, including Arthur Jafa’s Dreams are colder than Death (USA, 2014) and Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death (USA, 2016), Barry Jenkins’s The Gaze (USA, 2021) and Paige Taul’s I am (USA, 2017), the article considers this cinematic poiesis in the light of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of poetry, drawing out the structuring antiblackness at work in the latter and in modernity more generally, before suggesting that cinematically to present Blackness in a loving fashion/to love Blackness through film is what Denise Ferreira da Silva might term a radical and “poethical” gesture, using poetry to decolonise our white supremacist world. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that Donna Haraway's figure of the cyborg needs to be reassessed and extricated from the many misunderstandings that surround it. First, I suggest that we consider her cyborg as an ethical concept. I propose that her cyborg can be productively placed within the ethical framework developed by Luce Irigaray, especially in relationship to her concept of the “interval between.” Second, I consider how Haraway's “cyborg writing” can be understood as embodied ethical writing, that is, as (...) a contemporary écriture feminine. I believe that this cyborgian “writing the body” offers us a way of both creating and understanding texts that think through ethics, bodies, aesthetics, and politics together as part of a vital and relevant contemporary feminist ethics of embodiment. I employ the term “poethics” as a useful way to describe such a practice. (shrink)

The world as we know it is structured by intersecting forms of systemic violence. It might seem obvious that this violence calls for critique. But this essay experiments with another, more radical possibility inspired by Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Black feminist poethics and by abolitionist refusals of critique as an end in itself and a substitute for collective action. To what extent might phenomenology, even in its most critical form, be so deeply invested in the Kantian tradition of transcendental (...) critique that it confirms the logic of the world as we know it? And how, if at all, might a praxis of phenomenology beyond critique imagine and affirm a poethical world in which entanglement, indeterminacy, and simultaneity generate virtual possibilities for being, knowing, and doing beyond and against racial violence? (shrink)

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. (shrink)