The Abyss Above
Subtitle: Philosophy and Poetic Madness in Plato, Hölderlin, and Nietzsche
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: July 2002
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 224
ISBN-13: 9780791454275
Subjects: Aesthetics; Literary studies: general; History and criticism; European - German; German; Hellenic languages; Literary Criticism; Philosophy; Criticism; History & Surveys - General; Ancient and Classical; History; Literature and mental illness; Poetry
Description: "In The Abyss Above, Silke-Maria Weineck offers the first sustained discussion of the relationship between poetic madness and philosophy. Focusing on the mad poet as a key figure in what Plato called "the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry," Weineck explores key texts from antiquity to modernity in order to understand why we have come to associate art with irrationality.

She shows that the philosophy of madness concedes to the mad a privilege that continues to haunt the Western dream of reason, and that the theory of creative madness always strains the discourse on authenticity, pitching the controlled, repeatable, but restrained labor of philosophy against the spontaneous production of poetic texts said to be, by definition, unique."--BOOK JACKET.