De Maldoror aux Poésies. Extravagance et défi de lecture

• Main Author: Alain Trouvé
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Association Portugaise d'Etudes Françaises 2012-01-01
• Series: Carnets
• Subjects: Madness; Reason; Unconscious; Reading; Dialectic; Axiology
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/carnets/6720

When examining the extraordinarily fruitful interpretive legacy of Lautréamont-Ducasse’s short but brilliant contribution to literature, one is inevitably struck by the two-winged release of both Chants de Maldoror and Poésies. While the eccentricity of Chants could apparently be subsumed if their unheard-of rhetoric was explained through the modern tools of linguistics and Freudian metapsychology, the formal and thematic negation introduced by Poésies dooms criticism to stray again between the hermeneutic models of axiological dialectics and formal dialectics. It appears that the second form of eccentricity, tougher and more productive than the first, is fostered by a particular figure which turns out to be shared by the whole oeuvre: the void, located in the gap between the two dissimilar wings, as well as in the difficulty one is faced with when trying to put together the arrière- texte of the poetical language.