The Fundamental Field

Thought, Poetics, World

The Book

2021

Essays
19,8 x 13 cm
184 pages
Softcover
ISBN10: 9781474485272
Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.

Originating in a series of conversations between the poet Kenneth White and the philosopher Jeff Malpas that took place over four days at White’s Breton home, The Fundamental Field is made up of two essays: the first is by White on Malpas; the second is by Malpas on White. The volume closes with a set of three new philosophical poems by White. Inspired by poets from John Donne to Hölderlin, and philosophers from Nietzsche to Heidegger, the essays address questions of world, place, narrative, language and politics, from within two constellations of ideas: White’s geopoetics and Malpas’ philosophical topology/topography. Together, and in their separate essays, the poet and philosopher traverse a common field, one in which both poetry and philosophy are founded.

Publisher’s presentation

Extract

This is a short book, but a highly concentrated one, and rather complex.

From the organisational and structural point of view, it is more than the juxtaposition of a philosopher and a poet, with Malpas (the philosopher) writing on White (the poet), and vice versa.

It consists of two approaches, each with its references (some shared, some different) to a field common to them both, which both have explored in their own way over the years, and concerning which they attempt here not only to make a summing-up, but to reach a culminating point.

A risk is taken in calling this field ‘the fundamental field’. A risky enterprise in a cultural context where the plural takes precedence over the singular, and where the indefinite article is preferred to the definite one.

The risk is increased further by extending the notion of ‘field’ to that of ‘world’, which, in normal usage, has all kinds of socio-political and historico-cultural implications.

Preface [extract]

Review

In his dialogue with Malpas, White notes that his thought experiment leads the Australian, beyond a domestic dialectic between the internal and the external, to an ‘outside’, a path that leads him from ontology to topology. Malpas, for his part, emphasizes in White’s work “the absolutely central role of place as an opening to the world and that this takes place in a dual relationship between movement and rest, residence and travel, departure and return”[1]. For Malpas, these characteristics are those of poetry and philosophy, but also of geopoetics, and even of topology and hermeneutics — which makes the field of the great geopoetic work, thus stated, a particularly rich place of convergence. Similarly, he notes that geopoetics could be understood as world-poetics (the English sounds better than ‘mondo-poetics’), if it were not for the fact that it could be unduly compared to world literature or world music. The translation into French highlights the problem a little more: if the world literature desired by Goethe – which for a time had its best pupil with comparative literature – could be compared to the intellectual nomadism that was inspired by it, it is nevertheless very different from geopoetics; on the other hand, if White has repeatedly used the expression ‘world music’, it has nothing to do with world-music, which is a kind of globalization of music, but everything to do with non-human world music.

Régis Poulet, from “La Maison et le Monde — écologie et géopoétique” — Proceedings (in French) from the First “Rencontres géopoétiques Kenneth White” (Trébeurden, France, July 2023)

[1] Jeff Malpas & Kenneth White, The Fundamental Field, op. cit., p. 73 “the absolute centrality of place as the opening of the world, and the way that occurs in relation to both movement and rest, staying and journeying, departure and return.”