The predominance of post-modern thought in the latter half of the 20th century has brought philosophy to a crisis of confidence in its ability to investigate and understand our current reality. The complacent relativism that has emerged from post-modern discourse leaves us unprepared to face either the dominance of a dis-associative free-market or the emergence of regressive fundamental totalitarianism. Alain Badiou tasks philosophy with recovering the process of logical investigation into the primary forces which shape our lives, and he does so by equipping philosophy with both a means and an end: philosophy is a mathematical ontology in the endless pursuit of truth. In an attempt to address the issues of infinitely relative position and totalitarian authority, I understand Badiou to draw most significantly from Wittgenstein's (not Sartre's) notion of the situation and Heidegger's notion of Being, placing both of these insights within the mathematical framework of set theory as informed by Paul Cohen, doing so in the distinctly Platonic spirit of an appeal to truth as the antidote to the sophistry of post-modern thought. Such concerns with the intersection of authority and position are distinctly modern ones, and for Badiou we remain caught on the horns of the modern dilemma of the undisputed Master and the infinite Place. The process of overcoming such a false dichotomy, Badiou suggests, involves a return to the scene of its founding in the century's imagination, the moment of its poetic enunciation. Through an investigation of the critical and creative work of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot between the wars, I present their striking awareness of this problem and their attempts to overcome it, focusing on their respective moments of success and failure as understood through a critique based on Badiou's ethics and aesthetics. / English

This dissertation explores the social and political dimensions of aesthetic autonomy as it is given formal expression in Wallace Stevens’s poetry of the 1930s and the early 1940s. Whereas modernist claims to autonomy are often said to rest upon an ideological assertion of art’s detachment from socio-historical concerns, I argue that, in Stevens’s work, autonomy is conceived in relational terms, which gives rise to new lines of interconnection between his poetry and its cultural situation. Written over a period when the political efficacy of literature became a staple of discussion among a myriad of writers and critics, Stevens’s poetry offers an understanding of autonomy not as an escape from, but as a productive condition for imagining alternative forms of engagement with the historical crisis with which it has to reckon. In taking into account the cultural context from which Stevens’s poetics of autonomy emerged, my study aims to highlight the significance of the concept to the poet’s exploration of the tension between aesthetic and social domains, to his imaginative formations of collective agency, and to the vexed relationship between poetic and philosophical modes of thinking. By transposing the theoretical discussion of autonomy into the register of historical scrutiny, I hope to pave the way for a rethinking of autonomy and its relevance to the period’s radical and modernist writing, literary debates, and cultural politics. For this purpose, I draw on recent theories, such as those offered by Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, on poetry, politics, and (in)aesthetics, which serve to complicate the working definitions of modernist autonomy as literature’s immunity from the world, and to indicate an alternative path for analyzing its critical and contextual implications.