The thought, the poem

Proposing to introduce a distinction between thinking and thinking, or between the cognitive and the intellective, I suggest that certain uses of language are out of the ordinary and capable of transporting us beyond the limits of our ordinary thinking. Poetry, in particular, is that verbal art which, based on some reprogramming of speech, goes beyond even the logic of its own "algorithm" . In the second part of this lecture, I focus on three different uses of language, and consider in turn questions of the poem's semantic elasticity, the rhythmic possibilities of verse that emerge from the usual prosody of orality, and the highlighting - through textual functioning - of a linguistic irreducibility of thought. Along the way, I read a little Greek and French theater, Chinese and Italian criticism, American poetry.

Biography

Laurent Dubreuil is the author of a dozen books situated between literature, philosophy and cognitive science. His publications include L'empire du langage (2008), L'état critique de la littérature (2009), Génération romantique (2014), The Intellective Space (2015) and Poetry and Mind (2018). For many years, Laurent Dubreuil was associated with the journals Labyrinthe and diacritics, which he edited from 2011 to 2017. Professor of Comparative Literature, Romance Studies and Cognitive Science at Cornell University in the USA, Dubreuil is also the International Chair of Transcultural Theory at Tsinghua University in Beijing.