The Challenges of Critical Lyricism. Readings of Agamben, Benjamin, and Cavalcanti
In the introduction to Stanze, Giorgio Agamben recalls the Jena Romantics’ project of “universal poetry,” which aimed to “abolish the distinction between poetry and critical philology.” Hence, the designation of critique can only be applied to works that welcome their own negation, whose object is what is always what is already in flight. The project of this impossible task is accomplished in a “topology of the unreal” that is characteristic of the stanza as poetic form, the strophe of the medieval Tuscan canzone. In it resides the breath of love, the spiritus fantasticus from which it is possible to conceive a theory of poetic language and critical lyricism as overcoming the metaphysical gap of presence.