My Research

"Ugliness, Loquaciousness: Ekphrasis, Fetishism, and the Poetry of Tuvia Ruebner" (in progress)

Abstract

In a series of  ekphrastic poems, titled A Molten and A Graven Image, the poet Tuvia Ruebner relates in his poetic praxis to a corresponding series of drawings of (para-)angelic figures by the painter Paul Klee. Most notably, his genre-conscious approach to ekphrasis, the poetic description of visual artifacts, interprets and recasts this genre by giving it a ventriloquistic turn: the poems are not so much descriptions, but ascriptions, namely of a voice, which is given to several individual angel-like figures sketched out by Klee. Ruebner's poems thus ostensibly purport to render their inner monologue, thus not simply making the (visually) absent present in the imagination of readers and listeners, but even giving access to the figures' own (self-)imagination and authentic self-speech. But in doing so, the poems escalate the illusionary nature of poetic speech, staging the categorical difference between poem and picture, or ‘voice’ and ‘phenomenon.’ In thus disrupting what Derrida calls the “essential link between logos and phone,” the poems, conscious of the problematic status of the (self-)referential function of language, highlight the complicated philosophical relationship between consciousness and language, encapsulated in the word logos itself. Meaning both 'word' and 'reason,' with 'reason’ in turn connected to the eidos, the (real or ideal) image, the ‘logicity’ of the logos seems to depend on the mind's ability to describe to itself what it contemplates in its philosophical anamnesis: to articulate its ideas, with this descriptive articulation signifying the full recovering of the idea. Through the lens of Ruebner's poems, this paper will trace how the discourses on ekphrasis, between Horace and Lessing, give testimony to this vexed relationship between the ‘visual’ and the ‘linguistic’ in Western thinking, as outlined by Derrida in his critique of Husserl.