Republic and Poem

Abstract

Jacques Lezra’s postulation of a savage materialism not only differs from modern cosmologies and ontologies articulated around an organizing principle of what there is, but it also manifests politically as a savage republicanism; a republicanism that differs from both the liberal and the normative model of republican order. What is at stake with this savage republicanism, and with its thematization of the difference between terrorism and terror? ¿What are the consequences of this savage republicanism’s radical interrogation of the sovereign and normative fundaments of the onto-political western thought? And finally, what function/position fulfill the poem –not only Lucrecio’s famous poem, but the poem at large (if there is such a thing)–, for this random, savage, and defective political imagination? With these questions we will proceed to interrogate one of the multiple dimensions of a thought, Lezra’s, concerned with the worldly condition of thinking, whose relevance seems self-evident. At the end, we will incorporate some thoughts on Néstor Perlongher’s poem “Cadáveres” (1987) as an instance of the Lucretian proliferation of what there is.