”Zuhaelter der Woerter”: H. C. Artmanns erotische Poetologie

This article seeks to close a gap in the current research of Austrian Avantgardist poet Hans Carl Artmann (1921 – 2000) regarding the systematic commentary to a ‘poetology of the erotic’ in the context of aesthetic social criticism in the Austrian Post-War period.

Based on a post-structuralist analysis of Artmann’s work and on aspects of Roland Barthes’s theory of “The Pleasure of the Text”, Michel Foucault’s concept of delimitation, as well as George Bataille’s theoretical celebration of libertinism as a self-wasting squandering of energy without return, the article presents a new reading of Artmann’s texts as poetic representations of corporeal concreteness and strategies of a subjective subversion of the universal order.

H.C. Artmann’s work is discussed as the result of an erotically charged process and the article seeks to establish an initial relationship between this particular kind of poetical production and Artmann’s generally avant-gardist aesthetics.