Folding Poetics, From Ontology to the Text

Abstract

Submission date: 7/10/2025

Acceptance date: 6/11/2025

Publication date: 30/12/2025

This research proposes the project of “Folding Poetics” as an attempt to re-found poetic theory in light of the contributions of Gilles Deleuze’s ontology. It proceeds from the diagnosis that contemporary texts—routinely labeled “postmodern” despite the absence of stable criteria—require a unifying theoretical frame capacious enough to read them without flattening their heterogeneity. On the premise—historically grounded—that art, and literature in particular, has been bound to ontology, the study locates in **the ontology of the fold a conceptual home for such texts: a framework premised on )difference, multiplicity, and becoming(. Accordingly, the approach moves beyond stylistic description or formal analysis toward an open philosophical horizon that treats poetics as a living practice, mimetic of the world’s own processes of becoming, with meta poetic passages by “Adonis” and “Mahmoud Darwish” serving as focal case studies.

Building on this basis, the article argues that Poetics of the Fold—understood as a general frame—can recompose dispersed concepts in modern and contemporary poetics (from structuralism to postmodernism), such as defamiliarization, gap/void, intertextuality, death of the author, and fragmentation, by reinterpreting them within its own philosophical space. A comparative probe of deconstruction and the fold shows convergence in rejecting centrality and fixity; yet whereas deconstruction is governed by strategies of undoing and deferral, the fold exceeds it with a generative, productive orientation that makes the poem a dynamic field open to inexhaustible possibilities.

The study concludes that, despite rejecting closed systems and metaphysical totalization, Folding Poetics proposes a comprehensive framework in the creative sense: one capable of hosting and reactivating the poetic and critical archive within an open movement that renders the poem a site of plurality, difference, and continuous invention.