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  • Creating Poetic Subjectivity in María Zambrano and José Lezama Lima
  • Tania Gentic

In a 2007 article published in a special issue of the journal Cultural Studies, devoted to elaborating a new "decolonial" approach to knowledge, Aníbal Quijano argues that postcolonial hegemony is rooted in the perceived relationship between self and other that is the cornerstone of Western post-Enlightenment thought. In the same issue, Arturo Escobar goes on to say that one possible challenge to this hegemony would be a reformulation of Western epistemology through the recuperation of "worlds and knowledges otherwise." Presumably such a project would entail, at least within the realm of Hispanic letters and history, a recuperation of indigenous, non-Western modes of thought. Yet in order for such a project to effectively break down the imposed (and, decolonial theorists aver, intimately linked) systems of coloniality and modernity, I would stress that attention must be paid to how "worlds and knowledges otherwise" would be put into dialogue with the established Western epistemologies with which we continue to frame our theoretical discussions of literature. This essay takes a small step in that direction by studying how a similar breaking down of traditional structures of thought might occur from within the very rational tradition that spawned the theory and practice of postcoloniality, by studying the poetic theories of Spanish philosopher-cum-mystic María Zambrano (1904–1991) and Cuban poet-philosopher José Lezama Lima (1910–1976). One a woman writer in exile after the Spanish Civil War, the other a reclusive, voracious reader and poet who only once left the island of Cuba, both form part of the canon of Spanish-language literature but also occupy the outer margins of it. Both also formulate theories of poetic aesthetics that present an alternative conception of subjectivity to that traditionally posed by rational philosophical structures rooted in ideology, statehood, or other forms of Western epistemology. Finally, although both writers' theories are necessarily products of the Cartesian notion of subjectivity that grounds Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought, they also strive to break through it by thinking poetry, affect, and subjectivity together, challenging the self-other dichotomy in the process. In this article, I seek to make connections between José Lezama Lima's "poetic system" and the "poetic reason" of María Zambrano that both conceptually preceded [End Page 173] and was influenced by it.1 More specifically, I consider how they ground their approaches in metaphors of space that call into question the geographical limitations of nation and state, allowing us to link their questioning of the self-other dichotomy to the postcolonial relationships that exist between state, nation, and subject. I will argue here that reading their poetic theories together as a model of Transatlantic movement, rather than stasis, may permit us to heed Quijano's and Escobar's calls to destabilize Western epistemologies of power by finding alternative ways of figuring knowledge and, in this case, the concepts of selfhood that derive from it. My analysis will focus primarily on Zambrano's works "La reforma del entendimiento español" (1937), "La metáfora del corazón" (1941), and "La Cuba secreta" (1948). For Lezama, I draw mainly from his essays "Introducción a un sistema poético" and La expresión americana, published in 1954 and 1957, respectively. I also put these works into dialogue with the concepts of "deterritorialization" and "nomadism" formulated by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their seminal work A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

Just one aspect of Lezama's extensive, dense, and complex work is the "poetic system" he elaborated in bits and pieces throughout his oeuvre.2 The texts that most directly address this system include his best-known novel Paradiso (1966) and its unfinished sequel Oppiano Licario (1977), poetry from "Muerte de Narciso" (1937) to the posthumous collection Fragmentos a su imán (1978), and disparate essays such as "Coloquio con Juan Ramón Jiménez" (1937), "Introducción aun sistema poético"(1954), the series of essays La expresión americana (1957), "Confluencias" (1968), and "Introducción a los vasos órficos" (1971), among others. Given the contradictions bound to arise in a work of such breadth, Lezama's poetic...

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