“Let's Make a List”: James Schuyler's taxonomic autobiography

August 21, 1970 A few sound[s] are embedded in the fog – a gull mewing, different far off fog horns – like unset polished stones laid out in cotton wool. Tuesday, March 5, 1985 At six AM the heavy gray burns a heavier blue. Rain, water drops clinging to the balcony. There is an ethical consideration in James Schuyler's Diary. While we have spent the last fifty years grappling with the aesthetic problems of how to represent the unrepresentable, how to present the unpresentable, and how to signify the significant, little time has been spent considering the status of representations of the unremarkable. There is a whole history in American poetry and literature of validating the everyday, making it special, but Schuyler never really does that. Are things special just because we say so, or rather because we note them down? Do we name things into being, at least linguistic or literary being? The Diary asks these questions and in doing so it broaches the kind of postmodern ethical questions that one finds in the recent work of Lyotard, Derrida, and Nancy. These questions are significant not in the normal sense of the reasons for such interrogations or the answers expected, but rather because they represent a desire on the part of Schuyler to ask after otherness, to try to elicit a response from the other while respecting that such a response may not be comprehensible even if it is forthcoming. I would like here to posit a desire to ask after the other first before one asks after oneself, to enquire without any hope of a satisfactory answer as such as the postmodern ethical position, and to suggest that the autobiographical slant of Schuyler's work is, paradoxically considering the nature of autobiography, just such a positioning of his self in relation to the world

Tabularity: Poetic Structure in Shelley, Agamben, Badiou, and Husserl

The recent history of the intense relationship between philosophy and poetry has concentrated on the poiesis of poetic language. Poiesis is the truth-revealing nature of poetic materiality and linguistic singularity. The ‘truth’ it reveals is that truth itself, as expressed by philosophy, is under erasure in a manner that cannot be expressed philosophically, and so must instead be performed poetically. At the same time, however, what has been neglected is the manner by which material poiesis, for example lineation, is located within a wider poetic structure. If a poem disrupts what Badiou calls dianoia, at the local or linear level, it constructs meanings at the ‘global’ level in the form of its structure. So that while poems may be gifted with truth-revealing poiesis, they are also dominated by truth-developing structures. So far a philosophical interaction with these structures is lacking. This article will consider the philosophical nature of a poem’s structure as a means of generating local and global poetic meanings through a development of what will be called poetry’s tabularity. Using Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’, it will consider the work of Agamben, Badiou and Husserl in relation to how meaning is generated across the poetic, two-dimensional or tabular field

The Time of Indifference: Mandelstam's Age, Badiou's Event, and Agamben's Contemporary

There has been little direct discussion between perhaps the two leading philosophers of our age: Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben. Yet both men have written about the same poem by Osip Mandelstam, ‘The Age’, around the topic of time. Significantly, Agamben’s response, written after Badiou’s, is a subtle and damning critique of Badiou’s conceptualisation of time, in particular extended across the categories of the modern, the contemporary, and the now or the event – although it never actually mentions Badiou by name. In this paper the lens of the central role of indifference in the work of both is used to present alternating and competing views as to the nature of modern, contemporary, and ‘now’ time. Specifically, a contrast is drawn between Badiou’s use of indifference as both quality-neutral and absolutely non-relational, and Agamben’s application of the indifferent suspension of the temporal signature as such. The paper concludes that while Badiou uses temporal indifference to question and problematise the idea of modern time as ‘now’, through a theory of the event, Agamben appears to go further. Rather than analyse the nature of modern time, the contemporary, and the now through his reading of Mandelstam, Agamben usesMandelstam’s poem to suspend theWestern conception of time as a line composed of points in its entirety

α-d-Tagatopyran­ose

The title compound, C6H12O6, also known as d-Tagatose, occurs in its furanose and pyranose forms in solution, but only the α-pyran­ose form crystallizes out. In the crystal, the molecules form hydrogen bonded chains propagating in [100] linked by O—H⋯O interactions. Further O—H⋯O bonds cross-link the chains

(S)-3-Dimethyl­amino-2-{(4S,5R)-5-[(R)-2,2-dimethyl-1,3-dioxolan-4-yl]-2,2-dimethyl-1,3-dioxolan-4-yl}-2-hydroxy­propanoic acid

The Kiliani reaction on 1-de­oxy-(N,N-dimethyl­amino)-d-fructose, itself readily available from reaction of dimethyl­amine and d-glucose, proceeded to give access to the title β-sugar amino acid, C15H27NO7. X-ray crystallography determined the stereochemistry at the newly formed chiral center. There are two mol­ecules in the asymmetric unit; they are related by a pseudo-twofold rotation axis and have very similar geometries, differing only in the conformation of one of the acetonide rings. All the acetonide rings adopt envelope conformations; the flap atom is oxygen in three of the rings, but carbon in one of them. There are two strong hydrogen bonds between the two independent mol­ecules, and further weak hydrogen bonds link the mol­ecules to form infinite chains running parallel to the a axis

3-O-Benzhydryl-2,5-dide­oxy-2,5-imino-2-C-methyl-l-lyxono-1,4-lactone

The title bicyclic lactone, C19H19NO3, is an inter­mediate in the synthesis of chiral α-methyl­prolines and branched C-methyl pyrrolidines; the absolute configuration was determined by the use of d-erythronolactone as the starting material. It exhibits no unusual crystal packing features, and each mol­ecule acts as a donor and acceptor for one C—H⋯O hydrogen bond

2-De­oxy-2,3-O-isopropyl­idene-2,4-di-C-methyl-β-l-arabinose

X-ray crystallography unequivocally confirmed the stereochemistry of the C atom at position 2 in the carbon scaffold of the title mol­ecule, C10H18O4. The pyran­ose ring exists in a chair conformation with the methyl group on the C atom in the 2 position in an equatorial configuration. The absolute stereochemistry was determined from the starting material. The crystal structure consists of O—H⋯O hydrogen-bonded chains of mol­ecules running parallel to the b axis

2,3-O-(S)-Benzyl­idene-2-C-methyl-d-ribono-1,4-lactone

The crystal structure of the title compound, C13H14O5, establishes (i) the (S) – rather than (R) – configuration at the acetal carbon and (ii) that both the acetal and the lactone form five- rather than six-membered rings; the absolute configuration is determined by the use of 2-C-methyl-d-ribono-1,4-lactone as the starting material. The compound consists of hydrogen-bonded chains of mol­ecules running along the a axis; there are no unusual packing features. Only classical hydrogen bonding has been considered