Ethica nullius

The article specifies the ethical project of J.H. Prynne's later poetry by discussing the persistence into contemporary poetic thinking of ideas and tropes originating in sycretistic cosmogonies of the Italian Renaissance. The cosmogonic figure of man as the centre of the earth and the extremity of its parturition is recast as catastrophic literalism. Some connections are drawn between this idea in the writing of Pico della Mirandola and its resurfacing in abstract guise in the writings of phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty and Michel Henry. Prynne's later poetry is described as an attempt to delineate an ethics incommensurable with subjectivity. This attempt is argued to be specific to the tradition of cosmogonic writing identified.