The Fundamental Field: Thought, Poetics, World

Product Description

The Scottish poet Kenneth White and the Australian philosopher Jeff Malpas came together by chance when Malpas heard an interview with White on ABC radio. Malpas contacted White, and from there they exchanged books and ideas. They arranged to meet at White’s place on the Breton coast, where a conversation about poetry and philosophy developed over four days. Inspired by poets from John Donne to Hölderlin, and philosophers from Nietzsche to Heidegger, they discussed the world, place, narrative, language and politics. This book records that conversation.
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.

From the Back Cover

Thought? a thin white line on a great blackboard which at rare so very rare moments is alive with light. At Skjolden: Salutations to Wittgenstein The Scottish poet Kenneth White and the Australian philosopher Jeff Malpas came together by chance when Malpas heard an interview with White on ABC radio. Malpas contacted White, and from there they exchanged books and ideas. They arranged to meet at White’s place on the Breton coast, where a conversation about poetry and philosophy developed over four days. Inspired by poets from John Donne to Hölderlin, and philosophers from Nietzsche to Heidegger, they discussed the world, place, narrative, language and politics. This book records that conversation. 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. Jeff Malpas is Emeritus Distinguished Professor at the University of Tasmania in Hobart and Distinguished Visiting Professor at LaTrobe University in Melbourne. He lives in the Huon Valley in Tasmania. Kenneth White as a Scoto-European writer publishes in English and French. He held the Chair of Twentieth Century Poetics at Paris-Sorbonne from 1983 to 1996. He lives on the north coast of Brittany.

About the Author

Jeff Malpas is an Australian philosopher and is currently Emeritus Distinguished Professor at the University of Tasmania in Hobart and Distinguished Visiting Professor at LaTrobe University in Melbourne. He was founder, and until 2005, Director, of the University of Tasmania’s Centre for Applied Philosophy and Ethics. His work is grounded in post-Kantian thought, especially the hermeneutical and phenomenological traditions, as well as in analytic philosophy of language and mind, and draws on the thinking of a diverse range of thinkers and writers including, most notably, Albert Camus, Donald Davidson, Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer. A Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, he is the author, among other works, of Place and Experience (Routledge, 2018) and Heidegger’s Topology (MIT, 2006). He lives in the Huon Valley in Tasmania.

Kenneth White is a Scottish poet, academic and writer. He has published numerous works of poetry and prose, with volumes and essays in French as well as English. His work has also been translated into several languages. He is the recipient of many awards and honours, in Europe and Scotland, including the Grand Prix du Rayonnement Français by the Académie française for his work as a whole (1985), the Édouard Glissant prize from the University of Paris VIII for his ‘openness to the cultures of the world’ (2004) and Prix de poésie Alain Bosquet for Les Archives du Littoral, a bilingual poetry collection (2011). White holds honorary doctorates from the University of Glasgow, the University of Edinburgh and the Open University and is an honorary member of the Royal Scottish Academy. In 1989 he founded the International Institute of Geopoetics to promote further research into the cross-cultural, trans-disciplinary field of study which he had been developing during the previous decade. It has since produced six Cahiers de Géopoétiq