How can Ordinary Language Philosophy (OLP) help us understand poetry? Against John L. Austin’s exclusion of poetic utterances as parasitical, Philip Mills explores how contemporary poetics broadens the aims and scope of OLP. Through the analysis of French and American poetry that reinterprets notions such as illocution, perlocution, and language-games, Mills develops a poetic philosophy of language, revealing its viral and transformative nature. Poetry, Performativity, and Ordinary Language Philosophy bridges philosophy and poetry, showing how poetry contaminates and reshapes our ways of thinking and being in the world, and combining the poetic and the ethical in the notion of ‘poethics.’ This Open Access book offers a new perspective on the poetic and literary potential of OLP and the intersections between the philosophy of language and poetry.

Philip Mills is a postdoctoral fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften of the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of A Poetic Philosophy of Language: Nietzsche and Wittgenstein’s Expressivism (2022).