Edgar Poe

Summary

Dominique Pagani sees Poe mainly as the intellectual master of Baudelaire, who translated him and made him known in France, and of Mallarmé's school1. He often comes back to Mallarmé's "Tombeau" for Poe, which he links to Poe's death in Baltimore and to a poetry that America reduced to a drunkard's talk, although this speech purifies words2. He follows "The Purloined Letter" closely: the diverted letter, delayed indefinitely, whose contents nobody knows. He compares it to Kafka's "An Imperial Message" and to Lacan's reading34. He also reads "The Domain of Arnheim," with its landscape garden where everything is thought out yet looks natural, and its line that "he who has death in his heart" avoids distant perspectives. He attributes to Poe the phrase "Anywhere out of the world," taken up by Baudelaire, and connects it to a desire that can only be satisfied outside this world5. Finally, he notes that Poe founded the detective genre and describes an abstract painting in "The Fall of the House of Usher."

1. 1#3.5 From Ulysses to Daedalus1 Aug 2017 · 19:40
2. 2#2.2 Between crisis and war: philosophising?15 Feb 2016 · 46:20
3. 3#5.9 Kafka, “An Imperial Message”29 Jul 2019 · 10:18
4. 4#17 Interpretation25 Mar 2021 · 1:21:49
5. 5Worldliness in Clouscard: desiring what? Through whom?3 Sept 2023 · 1:00:22

Summary produced automatically from 41 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.