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MULTIPLE ARTS

Stanford University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments...................................................ixPART I: LITERATURE1 Making Poetry...................................................32 Taking Account of Poetry........................................103 Around the Notion of Literary Communism.........................224 He Says.........................................................355 Vox Clamans in Deserto..........................................386 Paean for Aphrodite.............................................507 Les Iris........................................................618 On Writing: Which Reveals Nothing...............................709 Roger Laporte: The Page.........................................7810 In Blanchot's Company..........................................8211 On Blanchot....................................................8512 Deguy l'An Neuf!...............................................8913 The Necessity of Sense.........................................10914 Ja, Bs........................................................11815 Robert Antelme's Two "Phrases".................................126PART II: ART16 Georges........................................................13117 Catalogue......................................................14318 Interviews.....................................................15919 Res Extensa....................................................16620 Lux Lumen Splendor.............................................17121 Held, Held Back................................................17522 The Title's a Blank............................................18123 The Technique of the Present: On On Kawara.....................19124 The Soun-Gui Experience........................................20725 The Look of the Portrait.......................................220Sources...........................................................249Notes.............................................................253

Chapter One

If we understand or, in one way or another, accede to a dawning of sense, we do so poetically. This is not to say that any kind of poetry constitutes a means or medium of access. It means-and this is almost exactly the opposite-that poetry cannot be defined except by such access, and that poetry occurs only when such access occurs.

This is why the word "poetry" refers indiscriminately to a type of language, a particular artistic genre, and a quality that may be present elsewhere, and indeed may be absent from works of this type or genre altogether. According to Littr, "poetry," used absolutely, signifies "those qualities that characterize good verse, and may be found elsewhere than in verse.... Poetic intensity and depth, even in prose writing. Plato is full of poetry." On this account, poetry is the indeterminate unity of a set of qualities that are not restricted to the kind of writing called "poetry" and can be described only by applying the adjective "poetic" to terms such as depth, intensity, daring, feeling, and so on.

Littr also states that, in its figurative sense, "poetry refers to everything that is elevated or moving in a work of art, or the character or beauty of a person, and even a product of nature." In this way, as soon as it is taken out of the literary context, the word "poetry" takes on a solely figurative meaning, albeit one that is merely an extension of the absolute sense, that is, the indeterminate unity of qualities that may be characterized generically by the terms "elevated" and "moving." Poetry as such is therefore always properly identical with itself, whether we are dealing with a piece of writing or a natural object, yet at the same time it is always only a figure of that properness, which is indeterminable according to any proper, properly proper sense. "Poetry" does not exactly have a sense; rather it has the sense of an access to a sense that is each time absent, and postponed until later. The sense of "poetry" is a sense that is always still to be made.

Poetry is in essence something more and something other than poetry itself. Or, to put it another way: poetry itself may indeed be found where there is no poetry at all. It can even be the reverse or the refusal of poetry, and of all poetry. Poetry does not coincide with itself: perhaps this noncoincidence, this essential improperness or impropriety, is properly what makes poetry what it is.

Poetry, then, may be deemed what it is only insofar as it is (at the very least) capable of negating itself, in the sense of renouncing, denying, or abolishing itself. By negating itself, poetry denies that the access to sense may be equated with any given mode of expression or figuration. It denies that what is "elevated" may be brought within reach, and that it may be possible to overcome the distance between us and what moves us (which is of course why it moves us at all).

Poetry, then, is the negativity by which access makes itself what it is-that which has to yield, and for that reason first refuses and withdraws. Access is difficult-but this is not a contingent quality; it means that difficulty is what makes access occur. Something that is difficult is something that resists our efforts to make something of it, and this is properly what makes poetry occur. Poetry is difficult, and hard to please. But because this is what it does to us, poetry seems too easy, and this is why it has long been treated as something frivolous. There is more to this than mere appearance. Poetry is at ease with the difficult, the absolutely difficult. With ease, difficulty yields. This does not mean it can be brushed to one side. It means that this is indeed poetry, presented for what it is, and that we are engaged within it. Suddenly, easily, we are in access, that is, in absolute difficulty, both "elevated" and "moving."

The difference between the negativity of poetry and that of its double, the discourse of the dialectic, at this point becomes apparent. The negativity of the dialectic, according to the logic of identity, puts to work the refusal of access as the truth of access. But it makes it not only into an extreme form of difficulty but also into an ever-present, regulatory promise of resolution and thus of an extreme form of easiness. Poetry for its part is not the slightest bit interested in problems: making things difficult is what it does.

(All the same, this difference cannot be resolved in terms of a distinction between poetry and philosophy, since poetry refuses to be confined to a single mode of discourse: "Plato" himself can be "full of poetry." Philosophy versus poetry does not constitute an opposition. Each of the two makes difficulties for the other. Together, they are difficulty itself: the difficulty of making sense.)

It follows that poetry is negativity, too, in the sense that it negates, in the access to sense, what would otherwise turn access into a moment of passage, either a way or a path, and that it affirms access as a presence, or an invasion. Suddenly (easily), being or truth, heart or reason yields its sense, and difficulty is there, holding us in its grip.

Correlatively, poetry denies that such access may be determined as one among others, or one relative to others. Philosophy accepts that poetry is another path (and at times, too, religion). Even Descartes can write that "within us are the seeds of truth: philosophers extract them through reason, while poets pull them out through the imagination, making them gleam with greater splendor" (I am quoting from memory)....