Poetry, Performativity, and Ordinary Language Philosophy

How can Ordinary Language Philosophy (OLP) help us understand poetry? Against John L. Austin’s exclusion of poetic utterances as parasitical, Philip Mills explores how contemporary poetics broadens the aims and scope of OLP. Through the analysis of French and American poetry that reinterprets notions such as illocution, perlocution, and language-games, Mills develops a poetic philosophy of language, revealing its viral and transformative nature. Poetry, Performativity, and Ordinary Language Philosophy bridges philosophy and poetry, showing how poetry contaminates and reshapes our ways of thinking and being in the world, and combining the poetic and the ethical in the notion of ‘poethics.’ This Open Access book offers a new perspective on the poetic and literary potential of OLP and the intersections between the philosophy of language and poetry.

1. Introduction Poetic Promises: Austin Meets NietzscheIntroduction Poetic Promises: Austin Meets Nietzsche.- Part One. Parasites, Viruses, and Baisetioles.- 2. Austin’s Parasites and the Resistance of Poetry.- 3. Viral Poetics as Performative Philosophy of Language.- 4. Intentional Misfire: From Normative Illocution to Poetic Perlocutions.- Part Two . Performative Poethics.- 5. Wittgenstein’s Performative Poetics and Contemporary French Poetry: Henri Meschonnic, Emmanuel Hocquard, Christophe Hanna, Florent Coste.- 6. Poetic Documents: Transforming Forms of Language, Transforming Forms of Life.- 7. Poethical Force (Muriel Pic, Claudia Rankine, Rosa Alcalá).- 8. Conclusion Poetic Stitching or Recovering the World.

Philip Mills is a postdoctoral fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften of the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of A Poetic Philosophy of Language: Nietzsche and Wittgenstein’s Expressivism (2022).