Dense language and opening: another vindication of poetry as an organ of knowledge

Abstract

This work is framed within the innumerable vindications of poetry. It begins with the development of the four characteristics of “poetic language” as “dense language”. Figurativity or metaphoricity, its allusiveness, form-content identity, and poetic realism. In the second section, these characteristics are analyzed in the light of the categories of “significance” and “interpretant”. The heideggerian ontology and the peircean semiotics enrich the concept of dense language and clarify its epistemic power. Finally, I analyze some aspects that Nietzsche, is his rhetorical period (1869-1874), elaborates on language, aspects that prefigure and expand the notion of dense language. I focus there on the idea that all language is, in its origin, rhetoric, and in the way in which the communicative process attacks that origin. I am particularly interested in the notions of “fixation”, “forgetting” and “restoration”.