Poetry and the assets of precarity: understanding aesthetic politics as a quest for intensity in precarious meanings

The political dimension of poetry is a relatively recent discovery in the field of International Relations (IR). While the “aesthetic turn” led to a new appreciation of the relevance of poetry, there still remains a question of where exactly, and precisely how, politics can emerge from poetry. Does a poem need to be about a political subject in order to count as political, or can there be other forms of political expression that develop on another level of engagement with this type of text? This article approaches this question on a conceptual level with a main focus on M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (2008). It argues that by using language in unusual, minor ways, the placement of letters, spaces, and words can unsettle meaning and create conceptual openings in a process of aesthetic discovery with its own political effects. This poetic practise is then re-interpreted as a means of deterritorialization by a minor literature (Deleuze and Guattari 1983), in which intensities act as a guiding sensation of aesthetic expression. In this type of writing, everything is political, as shown in examples of poems that are otherwise considered “unpolitical.” This reading unlocks an understanding of poetic expression as an essentially liminal practice that always contains an unsettling moment of challenge—but also shows that the politics of this process are open-ended, and can escape authorial direction. The paper puts forward a conception of poetry as a political experience of precarious meaning, which adds a deeper appreciation of poetic devices to IR scholarship.