Between The Desert and the Garden: Inscriptions of Alterity in the work of José Ángel Valente

Abstract

This thesis aims to explore the poetry of José Ángel Valente in terms of his ethical commitment to alterity. It is argued that Valente’s ethical stance can help us to understand the tensions inherent to his theorization of poetry – a poetics of plenitude (the garden) and a poetics of the void (the desert). These tensions are traced in a reading of Valente’s relation to the Jewish thought of Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin, the Jewish poets, Paul Celan and Edmund Jabés, his relationship to Spain and Galicia and the problematic notion of community, his writing of the body and the animal, as well as the presence of death in his work. These themes are linked with a twentieth century philosophy of alterity, represented by the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, Maurice Merleau Ponty, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben.