Lyric and tragic wanderings: Unworking the aesthetic

This thesis explores the implications of writing as an unavowable community by articulating the aesthetic community and tracing tragedy's and lyric's exorbitant place in that articulation. I argue that the metaphysical exigency of the aesthetic community is to make time (a) work. To form relations the aesthetic presents (darstellt) them as the work of a common being. Tragedy and lyric rupture this being, leaving the uncanny question: "Who is there?" With this question they unwork aesthetics, encountering an unavowable community between time and knowledge, the other and the same, and language and being.;Chapter 1 focuses on de Man's argument that aesthetics works as a technical mediation between language and phenomenality. He concentrates on the impasse to this technical community that haunts the aesthetic notion of language as presentation.;Chapter 2 shows how Kant's "technic of nature" presents the relations between beings and being as the work of the common being of subjectivity. Holderlin's writings on tragedy "caesura" this work by indicating how being and beings turn away from each other, leaving language to "wander under the unthinkable.".;Reading Also Sprach Zarathustra, Chapter 3 argues that Zarathustra's eternal return returns to the unthinkable void between language and experience. For Nietzsche this void is Dichten (fictioning, poetizing, writing). Heidegger sees Dichten's abysmal community to be the modern, technological community, more profoundly characterized by poetry's "destitute time" of the retreat of Being.;Chapter 4 focuses on lyric language as a "depresentation" which "unworks" the work of presentation. I discuss the poetry of Hart Crane as the disaster of language's rupture from being. I look at language as the repetition of awaiting and awaiting the repetition and in terms of Orpheus's envoi of the absence of the work, a sending without the message (of) being delivered.;Chapter 5, on Cesar Vallejo, discusses writing's anguished narrowing of the word towards wordlessness. Vallejo's Trilce writes the end of the covenant between language and the temporality of memory and promise, leaving language unable to testify to its essence. In the absence of bearing witness, writing wanders through a temporal void that it cannot make its own work.