The present volume brings together the papers presented at the one-day Symposium "Paul Valéry and the aesthetic of poiesis" (Paul Valéry e l'estetica della poiesis), as well as few other essays. The Symposium was organized in Palermo by the International Study Center on Aesthetics on April 15, 1988.

Aldo Trione, Beyond Symbolism
After having pursued the most significant and exemplary pathways of symbolism, and after undertaking a sort of problematic journey through the work of Mallarmé, Valéry moves away from it, taking up his stand on a decidedly antiliterary theoretical horizon, on which "doing, producing, acting" become modes of complex exploration, not only in some "figures" of "poiesis", but also in the empire of reason, in its mechanisms, in its possible strategies. The literary work "becomes" the very locus of the adventure of the mind. Going beyond symbolism means, then, not only getting out of the "ideology" of literature, but beginning an investigation of the possibilities of our thinking, our understanding.

Maria Teresa Giaveri, The poetic of the angel
«At the basis of my story - wrote Paul Valéry - there is a revolution: considering art not so much as the work but rather as its fabrication, and poetry as making poetry. The object attained is accessory, the important thing is the being that in this way one becomes». His poetic theory, then, is built up at one and at the same time as an itinerary of writing and of personal transformation: construction of the self as much as and more than of a text, or rather of a capacity to produce a certain quality of texts. This process of "fabrication" is investigated in three directions: its theorization, its biographical roots, certain constants and variants of textual genesis (as they emerge from the analysis of the "avanttextes" to the "poèmes"). Through these progressive technical and thematic choices in writing, light is thrown not only on the poetic production of Paul Valéry, but also on the "fabrication" of the poet who is the prime result of that work.

Giuseppe Panella, For the slowness: Ethics and aesthetics in Paul Valéry
For Paul Valery's thought, possibility means potentality. He defines it "implexe": this concept is very important to understand his theory of creation and his ideas about the meaning of existence. In Monsieur Teste (1895), he imagines a thinker who thinks about himself while thinking and cannot think exactly when he wants because he is disturbed by feelings. That destroys Teste (and his literary project). Teste ("alter ego" of the poet) tries to realize himself like a pure mind not driven by sentiments and passions. After a long period, Valéry gives an answer to the problems that annihilate Teste. In his most celebrated poem, Le Cimetière Marin, he connects poetry and ethics in view of a larger settlement of the question. In his line «Il faut tenter de vivre», he acknowledges the importance of getting over pure theoretical problems (the motion paradoxes) to find an operational link between nature and "esprit". He gives to this linkage the name of "implexe" and esteems it a sort of web that joins science, philosophy and art. By means of the implexe, Valéry can answer the question of Monsieur Teste: What can a man? The answer is that he'll be able to realize everything ("poièin") with a long and careful work of framing.

Giovanni Lombardo, Valéry and the poetic of the Sublime
Two fundamental themes of the aesthetics of Paul Valéry are the idea of art as "construction" and the "agonistic" conception of literary activity, whereby the author/reader must identify with the compositional movements of the works he enjoys. These two themes hark back to antiquity, in the Pseudo Longinus essay Perì hypsous, which assigns a decisive role in the constitution of the poetic text precisely to the moment of "synthesis" or "composition" and conceives of the act of reading/recreation of a text as the capacity to reexperience the genius that has produced it. This essay endeavours to establish some analogies between Longinus and Valéry with a view to enriching the network of cultural implications of the modern aesthetics of "poiesis".

Appendix, Valéry and the philosophers
We reproduce here the documentation of two discussions following the lectures held by Paul Valéry at the Société Française de Philosophie. The first, given on 28 January 1928, had as its subjects La création artistique; the second, given on 2 March 1935, was entitled Réflexions sur l'art. The texts of both the lectures and the discussions (in which not only philosophers but also scientists and epistemologists appear to have taken part) were published in the "Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie" (respectively in January 1928 and MarchApril 1935) but were not included in Valéry's Oeuvres, published in Paris by Gallimard.