Resumo

BAUMGARTEL, Stephan. Poetic experience through the alchemy of the fetish: displacements of sensuality and transcendality in Charles Simic’s poem Beauty. Imaginario [online]. 2006, vol.12, n.12, pp.327-344. ISSN 1413-666X.

Analysing the rhetorics of eroticism in Charles Simic’s poem Beauty, this essay discusses within a contemporary context the relation between poetic experience and eroticism as a fetishistic one. It develops a reading of fetishism beyond the confines of clinical psychoanalysis, as a phenomenon that undermines a clear separation between the transcendental and the quotidien aspect of human experience and incites a wandering desire that is constantly on the move between both aspects. It shows how Simic, by using the fetichist rhetorics in this particular way, situates his poem critically in relation to modern strategies of rupture and transgression in the wake of Bataille as well as to the blind and uncouth sensual promises of the post-modern world of late capitalism, although it makes the poem partake in both contexts through a celebration of the erotic impulse.

Palavras-chave : Contemporary american poetry; Fetishism; Eroticism.