On the relationships between philosophy and literary theory

This paper addresses the potential of philosophy to renew the critical assumptions of literary theory by examining two key aspects. On the one hand, it challenges the belief that the identification of philosophy with literature, promoted by deconstruction, implies the exclusion of other forms of relationship between their respective fields of expertise. On the other hand, it proposes a way to make philosophy productive for theory which involves not so much the expansion of the textual referents already established by Poetics but rather the full exploration of its original contexts. Instead of promoting speculation around new philosophical references, what is at issue here is to restitute these references to their original textual environments in order to derive new implications from ancient theoretical formulations.