Poetic Thinking. Now

This book presents my concept of poetic thinking in the context of debates around the anthropological question, that is ‘what is being human?’, building on ‘thinking language’ and dialogical thinking, developing a poetological anthropology. It evokes political and social issues to demonstrate why poetics is of general relevance for our times. The chapters relate these questions to insights of quantum physics and neurosciences and discuss aspects of contemporary technology, media and medicine, employing notions such as atmospheres, immanent transcendence, silence and presence from contemporary thinkers. Poetic thinking considers the world in its togetherness, offering an alternative to the opposition of subject and object. It demonstrates the transformative power in the interaction of the form of language and the form of life. Poetic thinking takes place when a subject constitutes itself in creative and dialogical language, transforming its ways of feeling and thinking, in short, its way of perceiving the world.

Marko Pajević took up an EU funded Professorship of German Studies at the University of Tartu in January 2018 after holding positions at the Sorbonne, Paris IV and Queen’s University Belfast, as well as Royal Holloway and Queen Mary University of London. He has published widely in German, English and French on poetics, with (co-)edited volumes on Paul Celan, multilingualism and the political, German and European poetics after the Holocaust and on the connection between poetry and musicality. He wrote monographs on Paul Celan and Franz Kafka. At the heart of his work stands the development of a poetological anthropology, as presented most prominently in a German-language monograph and in this book. His interest in thinking language resulted in special issues on Wilhelm von Humboldt and Henri Meschonnic and an English language Meschonnic Reader. Recently, he has worked on health and biopolitics with an edited volume and a forthcoming special issue, and on the notion of the abyss as a concept for cultural theory an edited volume is forthcoming. This is part of his overarching research project: see the website APT (Academia for Poetic Thinking): apt.ut.ee.