The Philosophy of Absence: the Poetry of Branko Miljković and Ontology

Abstract

The paper draws attention to the concept of absence as the basic concept of Miljković’s ontological inspiration and the foundational idea of his poetry. In his poems, essays and critical reviews, Miljković shed light on this concept poetically, philosophically and aesthetically. He did so by starting from the "apparentness" of physical reality, which according to him implies outdated mimesis and which can be overcome by the absence of phenomena from that reality, but also by their obligatory return from «pre-existence» into the reality of new poetry. Then, Miljković points out different kinds of absence as well as forms of absence in his poetry. Miljković agrees with Valéry that reminiscences as a psychological form of absence are the basic motif in poetry. But Miljković, having an education in philosophy, wanted to test his forms of absence at the highest level, in ontology, the fundamental branch of philosophy.