A literary angle

I really enjoyed reading Annabel Martín's "Critical Basque Studies" about a month ago and its equally interesting now.  In particular, I like her suggestion, following Adrienne Rich, that literature slows down the intelligible world and brings us metaphorically to the unintelligible or invisible.

In the case of literature, this would entail a writer's unique struggle with language to name the unknown, with the writer's attempt to give form through metaphor to the unintelligible, with being truthful to the complexity of reality, with learning how to suspend a "netted bridge over a gorge."  (177)

The literary attitude calms down its objects of inquiry, categories that no longer merely consist of books but a plethora of cultural objects.  Martín is shy to utterly shun literature in the face of cooler, shiner texts.  Yet she does not discount the importance of other mediums (nor do I).  Instead, she looks back to the literary as a way to again urge for engaged questioning in the public sphere.  This has everything to do with my work on causality between Merleau-Ponty and Lezama Lima, which attempts to evaluate their forms of phenomenology in relationship to object-oriented thinking (including poetics and ontology).  The category of the unintelligible might be extended to consider the invisible, the unthinkable and the horrific, to name a few.  Literature gives a space to engage the gaps and holes in human thinking, not necessarily to provide neat answers but to unravel their yarns in messy situations.