Abyss Above: Philosophy And Poetic Madness In Plato, Holderlin, And Nietzsche; Author: Weineck, Silke-Maria; Paperback

Author: Weineck, Silke-Maria
Paperback
179 pages
Published: July 2002
State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791454282

In The Abyss Above, Silke-Maria Weineck offers the first sustained discussion of the relationship between poetic madness and philosophy. Focusing on the mad poet as a key figure in what Plato called the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry, Weineck explores key texts from antiquity to modernity in order to understand why we have come to associate art with irrationality. She shows that the philosophy of madness concedes to the mad a privilege that continues to haunt the Western dream of reason, and that the theory of creative madness always strains the discourse on authenticity, pitching the controlled, repeatable, but restrained labor of philosophy against the spontaneous production of poetic texts said to be, by definition, unique.