Abstracts Physics

Readings of Leibniz: metaphysics in the writings of S.I. Witkiewicz, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis

by Mark Michael Lester

This study examines the manner in which Leibniz's philosophy is engaged by three modernist authors: the Polish playwright, novelist, painter and photographer S. I. Witkiewicz, Ezra Pound, and Wyndham Lewis. For each, the confrontation with Leibniz marks a decisive turn in the development of an aesthetic. In the case of Witkiewicz, the result is a materialist monadological perspectivism having a great deal of resonance with Gilles Deleuze's philosophy inasmuch as it too emphasizes both a non-Hegelian conception of difference and the idea that identity is founded upon events rather than essences. His ideas are articulated in a series of plays, novels and essays in which nonsense is distinguished from the absurd and sense itself is found to rely upon a notion of the Event similar to that elucidated by Deleuze in Logique du sens. In contrast, Pound's reading of Leibniz is more conventional and issues in a poetic expression or interpretation of the system articulated by the writer he considered "the last philosopher who 'got hold of something.'" Rather than problematizing Leibniz, Pound draws upon components of his system in order to develop a variety of poetic devices. The ideogrammatic method, for example, is modeled on Leibniz's combinatoria. Pound was attracted above all by the coherence of Leibniz's system and sought to employ it as the basis of a poetics allowing for the expression of what he hoped would be a unified vision. Lewis, for his part, takes issue with Pound's conservative reading. His criticism of Pound is founded in large part on his denial of any philosophy or science based upon an ideal of totality or completeness, the paradigm of which is found in Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason. In this light, Lewis's criticism and fiction is seen to afford a reading of Leibniz addressing many of the same concerns raised by Witkiewicz and Deleuze. Exploring the different ways in which these three authors read and respond to Leibniz, in light of more contemporary appraisals of the philosopher's work, provides insight into the problems confronted and articulated by modernist writers as well as the relation of modernism and poststructuralism.