추상성, 상상력 그리고 무의미

Abstraction, Imagination and Nonsense - Coleridge, Stevens and Deleuze

This study starts with L. B. Leggett’s argument that Stevens has a great debt to Ⅰ. A. Richards’s Coleridge on Imagination concerning the word abstraction. According to Leggett, Stevens found this book very pertinent to shaping the notion of abstraction in that Richards attempted to reconcile two romantic conceptions of the imagination. Firstly, Richards’s argument that the imagination-reality dilemma as the central problem of philosophy results from “systematic linguistic illusion” leads to Stevens’s argument that the world is no longer an extraneous object but an image. That is, to acknowledge that the world external to the mind has no meaning in itself and that any formulation of it in language is a fiction or an image means that an abstraction process would be of necessity. Also Deleuze’s recent argument on “the logic of sense” helps us get a fuller understanding of Stevens’s abstraction. Especially, Deleuze’s ‘nonsense’ can be said to have similar function with Coleridge’s or Stevens’s idea in that its existence or circulation enacts the donation of sense and contributes to new sense being produced, although it itself has no meaning.