Juan Luis Martínez’s Philosophical Poetics

Book excerpt: Juan Luis Martínez’s Philosophical Poetics is the first English-language monograph on this Chilean visual artist and poet (1942–1993). It has two principal aims: first, to introduce Martínez’s poetry and radical aesthetics to English-speaking audiences, and second, to carefully analyze key aspects of his literary production. The readings undertaken in this book explore Martínez’s intricate textual formalisms, the self-effacement that characterizes his poetry, and the tension between his local (Latin American, Chilean) aspect and the cosmopolitanism or transnationalism that insists on the global relevance of his work. Through his artistic engagement with a number of esoteric concepts—for example, his recuperation of pataphysical “logic” and Oulipian combinatorics, mathematical reasoning, Eastern thought, and the historical avant-gardes—Martínez creates a rigorous quasi-system of citation and erasure that is a philosophical poetics as well as a poetic philosophy. Juan Luis Martínez’s Philosophical Poetics thus addresses all major publications by this groundbreaking Chilean artist and poet in order to read his difficult, experimental texts by focusing on the tension he creates between philosophical, political, literary, and scientific discourses.