I was reading a book chapter on postcolonial resistances when I came across a poem by Mehmet Al-Assad, titled *Asylum*:
``` Through the wire
one last time
please observe
I am sewing my lips together
that which you are denying us
we should never have
had to ask for. ```
Following the poem were two distinct readings of the poem, one by a scholar of law and the other by a scholar of literature. David Farrier, the literary scholar, quoted Giorgio Agamben extensively throughout the chapter. In fact, the first section was almost Farrier paraphrasing Agamben, including Agamben’s own reading of Al-Assad’s poem.
After having read through quite a bit of political philosophy and the like, I was prepared for a dry, lemon-squeezer reading of Al-Assad. It is not enough to say that Agamben surprised me; Agamben took me by my heartstrings, shook me upside down and put me back. I could try and paraphrase Agamben here, but I do not think I will do a good job—I am not sure even Farrier did a good job translating Agamben’s thrust. Instead, here is an excerpt:
Just as reading Agamben is to encounter emergent forms of new political relations, reading, for Agamben, constitutes an engagement with the politics of liberation in literary form. In an essay on ‘The End of the Poem’, he traces a parallel between the exception and enjambment as a threshold of indistinction in poetic form. As the point at which a line breaks according to metrical rather than syntactical sense, enjambment leaves a poem poised (Agamben’s term is ‘abandoned’) on the threshold of itself. Ultimately, enjambment, like the exception, presupposes a crisis: confronted with the imminent coincidence of sound and sense in its final line, the poem enters a condition of suspense that resembles the exception: ‘At the point in which sound is about to be ruined in the abyss of sense, the poem looks for shelter in suspending its own end in a declaration, so to speak, of the state of emergency’.
I think the last sentence is poetic in itself. “At the point in which sound is about to be ruined in the abyss of sense, the poem looks for shelter in suspending its own end in a declaration, so to speak, of the state of emergency.” How often do you come across poetry in scholarly literature?