Poetry, Performativity, and Ordinary Language Philosophy

“In his clear and enjoyable prose and style of thinking, Philip Mills turns the old quarrel between philosophy and poetry into a productive and sometimes provocative intellectual intercourse by putting the works of ordinary language philosophers in conversation with continental philosophy, deconstruction, queer theory, literary theory, and contemporary works of literature.” —Ingeborg Löfgren, Lecturer in Literature at the Department of Literature and Rhetoric, Uppsala University, Sweden How can Ordinary Language Philosophy (OLP) help us understand poetry? Against John L. Austin’s exclusion of poetic utterances as parasitical, Philip Mills explores how contemporary poetics broadens the aims and scope of OLP. Through the analysis of French and American poetry that reinterprets notions such as illocution, perlocution, and language-games, Mills develops a poetic philosophy of language, revealing its viral and transformative nature. Poetry, Performativity, and Ordinary Language Philosophy bridges philosophy and poetry, showing how poetry contaminates and reshapes our ways of thinking and being in the world, and combining the poetic and the ethical in the notion of ‘poethics.’ This Open Access book offers a new perspective on the poetic and literary potential of OLP and the intersections between the philosophy of language and poetry. Philip Mills is a postdoctoral fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften of the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of A Poetic Philosophy of Language: Nietzsche and Wittgenstein’s Expressivism (2022).