No abstract
Browsing petitions, lettres de cachets, internment records, and administrative and police documents from the beginning of the eighteenth century at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Michel Foucault confesses in Vie des hommes infâmes that the reading of these archives disconcerts more than any literary text. These documents sealed the fates of ordinary individuals -squandered and abused spouses, disobedient young people -such as Jean-Antoine Tousard, who, after being found guilty of committing sodomy and being an atheist, was sent to and confined at the Chateau de Bicêtre on 21 April, 1701. Even though the exhumation of ordinary lives, of secondary actors as opposed to historic memorable figures, has been anchored in recent historiographical debates and in a renewed interest in the archive, 1 Foucault did not intend to analyse or decipher their meanings but rather to show how they articulated certain norms of their times and reflected the encounter between political mechanisms and discourse. From the material observation of the lives etched into these archives came the idea of a collection -as opposed to a rational classification -which consisted in gathering these 'poèmes vies' 2 according to specific pragmatic and stylistic criteria in order to restore their sparkle, intensity and violence:Les documents que j'ai rassemblés ici sont homogènes ; et ils risquent fort de paraître monotones. Tous cependant fonctionnent au disparate. Disparate entre les choses racontées et la manière de les dire ; disparate entre ceux qui se plaignent et supplient et ceux qui ont sur eux tout pouvoir ; disparate entre l'ordre minuscule des problèmes soulevés et l'énormité du pouvoir mis en oeuvre ; disparate entre le langage de la cérémonie et du pouvoir et celui des fureurs ou des impuissances. Ce sont des textes qui regardent vers Racine, ou Bossuet, ou Crébillon ; mais ils portent avec eux toute une turbulence populaire, toute une misère et une violence, toute une "bassesse" comme on disait, qu'aucune littérature à cette époque n'aurait pu accueillir. Ils font apparaître des gueux, des pauvres gens, ou simplement des médiocres, sur un étrange théâtre où ils prennent des postures, des éclats de voix, des grandiloquences, où ils revêtent des lambeaux de draperie qui leur sont nécessaires s'ils veulent qu'on leur prête attention sur la scène du pouvoir. (Foucault 238)What drew Foucault's attention to these disparate discourses was that, beyond the contrast between the minuscule wrongs of pitiable lives and the grandiloquent rhetoric, they rejected the hypostasis of the first person narrative, not only since they were reported in the third person singular depriving these men of voices and faces, but also in that their discursive and stylistic heterogeneities elicited a lack of clear generic assignation ("ni quasi-, ni 'souslittérature', ce n'est même pas l'ébauche d'un genre") (Foucault 253).This ambitious project at the intersection of history and literature, renewing the minor genre of the Lives -a tradition that can be traced back to Plu...
This article explores Christophe Tarkos's poetic work and analyses which conception of thought and sensation is developed in his work. His poetry, I argue, rests on a materialist conception of poetic writing construed as a kneading process in which language can be shaped and reshaped continually. This manipulation gives rise to a complex, paradoxical discourse, characterized by a lack of causality which reflects an idiotic perception of the world and objects. This immanent conception of language reduced to its simplest expression stands in stark contrast with past poetic models and conveys a new definition of anti-lyrical poetic writing and of the poetic subject.
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