Freedom and the Unconscious: Some Observations on the Ethics of Poiesis

Abstract

The ethics of literature is defined by the imperative not to give up the workings of the unconsciousness. Literature is poiesis, creating, becoming, an event of being (Seyn). “The art belongs into the event of being” (Ereignis). On that background it is possible to figure out the incredible importance of the famous saying by Samuel Beckett from Worstward Ho: “Try Again. Fail again. Fail better” (81). And with the famous end words of the novel Unnamable: “I don’t know, I’ll never know: in the silence you don’t know. You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on” (116). Beckett wrestles with the silence, he circles around the silence, which is impossible to catch by words. “The silence is the Real, so far it resists to be symbolized by language, though it is the very it that frames the symbolic before and after” (Chattopadhyaya 51). Lacan coined the neologistic term “extimacy” to address that inner nature of the Real. The extimacy offers the answer to the hermeneutic question of ethics in literature, of an event (Ereignis) of literature as the generosity (Urbančič, O krizi 11) of being (Seyn), to the question of the unconscious workings of literature not in its aesthetics or morality (neither in its religiosity or the religious jump as Kierkegaard would suggest it), but in its extimity, the silence/abyss of being (Seyn). In a short expose I analyze the poem “Zaupanje” (“Trust”) by Muanis Sinanović from his last poetry collection Dvovid (Dual Seeing) in the light of the philosophical premises, schematized in the article, and show how the poet the above sketched event does not work out in the view from the outside but from the within as an event in progress, which actualizes the reader herself.