Toward a homological poietics

Abstract

"The word ‘homology’, which I take from Heraclitus, stands here for a kind of practice, which is at once of art and of thinking. To homo-logize is to say the same (to agree), to say as another says, to speak likewise — not just to say what another says, but to speak in the same manner. What is said, the nature of this other which says it, and the manner in which it is said — all of this remains to be determined. In any case, homology is a speaking in accordance with something heard and heeded, and this in such a way as to let the latter itself speak and be heard in one’s own speech, which is thus no longer simply one’s own. A homological poietics is thus to be clearly distinguished from the conception of art as self-expression on the part of the artist qua creative ‘genius’. In saying this, I do not seek to deny ‘creativity’ but to situate its responsive character, from a site where art might be grasped as testimony rather than self-expression. Perhaps we respond to something which addresses us even when we take our activity as self-sprung and recognize no such address and no genius in the original sense of a guiding ‘tutelary spirit’. On the other hand, homology is also to be distinguished from mimesis, whether this be taken ‘objectively’ or ‘subjectively’. Homology is not an external duplication of something heard, which may be exact down to its subtlest modulations of tone yet without having really heard, i.e. been struck by it. What is heeded in homology attunes it in advance, so that it already speaks from an accord and does not need to produce a ‘likeness’. But nor is it a matter of imitating something in the sense of pretending to be it oneself. Rather, homology is a saying-the-same in which the difference between that which speaks and the one who hears and speaks likewise is not reduced, effaced, or dissimulated, but heightened. To homologize is to bear witness, precisely by speaking likewise, to the alterity of an other voice, to bespeak an other speech to which one’s own speech cannot do justice other than by letting it exceed. Homology does not imitate, but rather intimates this speech