Pizarnik in the “l’âge des poètes”: from Badiou to Žižek

Abstract

This article establishes a relation of proximity between Alejandra Pizarnik’s poetry and the category-period of l’âge des poètes as developed by Alain Badiou. This approximation, conceived as a complementation of the category of the ”poètes maudits“ that so frequently gravitates around Pizarnik’s work, is then corroborated and justified through two žižekian readings of her poetry: an analysis of the parallactic tensions that can be found in a number of poems from the collection Árbol de Diana, and a more broadly formulated examination that, based on Žižek’s concept of ontological incompleteness, illustrates the fundamental role silence plays in Pizarnik’s ontology.