Ales Steger

 

Aleš Šteger: I am somewhat suspicious about the expression “philosophical exactness”. Take, for example, Deleuze’s and Guattari’s fascinating A Thousand Plateaus. One could hardly speak about exactness there. Rather, the book delineates a certain energy of thinking, one that requires a vast space for its concepts to be expressed in a precise way. A great majority of contemporary philosophical books are commentaries to older philosophical texts. Yet, many contemporary philosophers seek a new role for philosophy, often attempting to bring philosophy closer to mass media or at least some sort of cultural criticism. It is a common thing that if one speaks about abstract concepts, few will listen, yet if one speaks about the war in Afghanistan or Wikileaks one could expect a full auditorium. What has all this to do with poetry? I believe that poetry is gaining back some of the grounds that it has lost to critical thought after WWII. Generally speaking, poets (with a few exemptions) did not play the role of public commentators as much as philosophers (like Bernard-Henri Lévy, Peter Sloterdijk, Slavoj Žižek and others) have done in the past. In present France, for example, poetry appears to be distrusted, regarded almost as an outlived form of expression, something that was appropriate in the times of Baudelaire, but not today. And yet, both ways of thinking and writing, philosophical and poetical, were once understood as sharing the same grounds in exposing and crafting abstract thinking. Heraclitus’ texts, for example, may be read both as philosophy and poetry. With philosophy transforming and taking a path towards journalism, poetry has much more free space than it had decades ago.

To answer your question. There is no doubt that exactness is mother of art. But there are different kind of exactnesses and different goals that could be achieved through attempts at precision. Although rational, my poetry is not preoccupied with highlighting exact logical procedures. Rather, it aims at throwing light at dark corners, gaps, broken meanings, abysses between ideas, words, showing the failure of speech, the wreckage of language. Writing for me is an act of constant failing of language to become a firm exactness. My texts hope to enable and explore places where these failures can happen.