Conclusion

Abstract

The conclusion argues for seeing the poem’s philosophical and poetic project as fundamentally erotic drawing on Leo Bersani’s account of Freudian jouissance in which excessive excitement causes a shattering of the self. The text’s indeterminacy is understood to offer its readers an erotic intellectual exercise, a philosophical game that depends on the pleasurable unpleasurable tension between certainty and uncertainty and in which it is not always clear whether the aim is knowledge (‘profit’) or pleasure (‘delit’). The text promises truth coupled with the absence of definitive authorial sentences so that it turns the obligation of authority away from the author and reflects it back at the reader who must assume an interpretative autonomy.