Ropes, or, the law

Abstract

Sourced from the nightmare of hereditary doom, "Ropes, or, The Law" develops an understanding of poetic language as a state of exception and attends to the dialectic inherent in the law: an oscillation between the violence that establishes a limit and the violence that interrupts it. Haunting this relationship is always a third: the great criminal; the sovereign; the poet; the liar; the third man; the parasite; the Conqueror, who brings Death itself a sentence. The critical preface, drawing on the work of Georges Bataille, Walter Benjamin, Marcel Duchamp, and others, elaborates a notion of the creative act as a process of loss and a theory of poetry as excess—the irrational discourse that is opposed to rationality everywhere, the inscrutable, pure information, the interruption that troubles the signal, the beyond-sense given in any communication system, of which poetic language is a clearly marked case.