Introduction

The Grateful Dead describes its lyrics and music as expressing part of a larger whole. This larger whole is a reservoir of creative potential that the band tapped in its best performances, although any given night’s music could only gesture toward its source. This conception of artistic activity is amenable to consideration in terms of the literary fragment as conceived by Romantic philosophers and revisited by later figures, including Jean-Luc Nancy. For these thinkers, the fragment offers both its local significances and, by virtue of its incompletion, the processes of poetic production. The fragment is thus the form that most readily opens itself to exchange between creation and destruction from which poetry is born. Furthermore, it offers a means to conceive of the Grateful Dead’s music, and especially its lyrics, in terms of an elusive but inexhaustible reserve of poetic potential evident in their best compositions and performances.