The Groove of the Poem: Reading Philippe Beck 1945414162, 9781945414169

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THE GROOVE OF THE POEM READING PHILIPPE BECK Tra n

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Jacques Rancière

The Groove of the Poem Reading Philippe Beck

Translated by Drew S. Burk

UNIVOCAL

Le sillon du poème En lisant Philippe Beck © NOUS, March 2016 This edition published by Univocal Publishing as The Groove of the Poem Reading Philippe Beck by Jacques Rancière Translation © Drew S. Burk, 2016 © Univocal, November 2016 411 N. Washington Ave, Suite 10 Minneapolis, MN 55401 Special thanks to Jacques Rancière, Philippe Beck, and Judith Balso No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any other information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher or owner. Cover design by Jason Wagner Distributed by the University of Minnesota Press ISBN 9781945414152 Library of Congress Control Number 2016950292

Table of Contents

Author’s Note.........................................................................9 Notes on Transcendental Buphonia....................................11 From Poetry to the Poem....................................................21 Poems...................................................................................55 Discussion at Cerisy, August 28, 2013................................63 Dialogue with Philippe Beck................................................81

Author’s Note

The title and the sub-title of this book require a short explanation. The reader will not find within these pages a general theory of poetry applied to a specific poet. For me, the word poetry denotes a node between a practice of language and a figure of thought. Here, as in some of my other books, what I’m interested in is a particular form of this node. I first began this essay by way of an invitation from Philippe Beck to write about his oeuvre in a special volume of Il particolare which was devoted to his work in 2002, and I took it back up once again for the colloquium that discussed his poetic work in 2013 at Cerisy. To respond to this solicitation first of all meant to respond to a provocation of a certain practice of poetry today. In order to do this, one must immerse oneself within the singularities of this practice starting with its language, which I did by way of the term “transcendental buphonia,” before inscribing this buphonia within the groove of an interrogation of poetry dating back to Schiller, the Brothers Schlegel, and Hegel: how to think a poetry after? A poetry after this real or mythical time, when poetry would have been nourished by a poeticity inherent to life itself, but also a poetry which would rewrite and transform the poems written before it, reanimating faded genres, poeticizing the prose from popular tales and even the commentaries about poems. Such a reflection cannot simply be done by taking poems for one’s object of study. It also supposes, above all when the poet is himself a philosopher and poetician, that a dialogue be taken up regarding what these poems attempt to do as well as the idea of the poetry which serves as their foundation. This is the reason why my studies are accompanied by two discussions. The first one took place orally at Cerisy in response to my presentation there. The second dialogue was 9

written with Philippe Beck after having time to reflect upon the issues that were raised in the first meeting. All this to say that if I find myself authoring a book about Philippe Beck, this book is also one where he shares his own reflections on the practice and thought of poetry.

10

Notes on Transcendental Buphonia

It is understood that nature takes place. From now on, it remains to be seen whether or not it is still possible to add to it. They say that the forest and the locomotive will not enter into the poem, since their entrance into the poem prevents us from closing the volume. But the Trans-Siberian and the little Jeanne of France1 are at ease upon the unfolded surface of Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay’s poem/painting, like bark, metal discs, and poetic fragments on one of Schwitters’s canvases. Thus, one has to clarify the Mallarméan equation: namely, of what part of nature is poetry from then on deprived, and what must come to its rescue. A lock of hair, the gold of a frame and the crystals of a chandelier can always, of course, replace the vanished sun, not to mention the trust we grant to cinematic soundtracks in replacing the sounds of the trees, the birds, and the headwaters. But the nature that has taken place — as we have known ever since Schiller — is something else: nature as a way of being in communion with the mountain ridges, the marble quarries, the sculpted gods, the courage of the Hoplites, and the chanted poems: nature as culture, culture as nature — this fabulous past of the poem carved out of the stuff of a place, an age, a people, all the more forgotten and lost as retrospection allows it to be; what Schiller summarizes under the name of naïve poetry and what Hegel situates within the world of the epic poem. This is something we no longer imitate — moreover, have we ever imitated it within the pages of a book? — it is no longer the blue of the sky and the murmur of 1. Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay, La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jéhanne de France, trans. Timothy Young (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 11

rivers; it is nature as originary production, the breath of life, the ethos of community: Même l’Écrivain Epik de maintenant, le rêvé le souhaité justement, travaille à travailler comme la culture qui violonne les dispositions de l’époque2 Even today’s Epik writer, the dreamt and rightfully wished for, works at working like culture that plays the strings to the tone of the times

As we know, fiddling [violonner] is what fiddlers do, so as not to confuse them with violinists. A poetry after — what Schiller calls a sentimental poetry, Schiller who did us the favor of inventing specific names for all the swarms [nuées] to come — instead of the chant of origins. No sacrificial goat for making tragedy identical to the changing of the seasons and to festivals. The ox which replaces the goat in humid climates emblematizes the separation between the grooves of verse and those of plowing. The fiddler has moods [les airs] for his material and instruction, the sentimental artist has words, phrases, and poems. These aforementioned materials are definitively here moreso than in nature and even the railroads; they have their own density, which eventually will make tree trunks and railroad crossings superfluous. Mallarmé’s Gloire bears witness to this, including not only the Paris-Fontainebleau — including autumnal foliage — but also, by way of association, the street grids of the rue de Rome overhanging the railway and the train smoke mixed with the locks of the young girl painted by Manet. Perhaps this is what “didactic poetry” can mean, this word, this 2. Philippe Beck, “4. Writer” in Didactic Poetries, trans. Nicola Marae Allain (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2016), 36-38. 12

idea that Philippe Beck borrowed from the Brothers Schlegel. The brothers wanted to paradoxically restore honor to it, when the age of Enlightenment seemed to have definitively condemned it by way of placing Georgiques within the age of technology and the modern economy. The new didactic poetry can no longer be the art of putting into verse agronomical instruction for the illiterate. Didactic poetry must understand its “solicitude for the non-writing majority”3 in a different way: as a shared respect for the thickness of words and the density of sentences. Didactic poetry no longer means putting into verse lessons about things, but rather the education of the poet by the poem. From then on, poetry is called literature: about life, which is not life, not even “the true”; but also, words and phrases that neither the inspiration of the subject nor the rule of a book can arrange in a specific way. The “pohètes” must perform their mourning mocked by the novelist, Flaubert, who understands better than they do the new poem of anonymous life — and very soon after even the poets, slyly stripped bare by the lexicologist of the trema that crowned them: nothing remains that is “naturally poetic.” This is why philosophy — “the art of being a poet when nothing is naturally poetic” — must get mixed up with several of yesterday’s poets who became obsessions for Kant, Fichte and Schelling — or we could take the case of several of today’s philosophers who have learned by way of Schiller, Hölderlin, Rilke, and Mallarmé but also by way of the less probable: Pushkin, Leopardi, Pavese, or La Fontaine. “Transcendental idealism” was the banner under which the first nuptials took place, when poetry was supposed to make the philosophers sensitive and the people rational. “Transcendental buphonia” is the notion that has been forged to echo this by the philosopher-poet of today: echoing it but also opposing it. The ox is not merely the animal condemned to go in one direction and then another, reminding poetry of the “babelian word for word,” of this oxcart labor which the idea must free the ox from. The expression also implies the separation between the empirical ox and the transcendental ox: the philosophical apparatus of a poem that no pasture can ensure, which is the expression of no poetic life whatsoever other than the life of texts. 3. Ibid., “6. To Read,” 42-46. 13

(Un homme souriant n’est pas une fleur, Et son amour des fleurs ne fleurit pas, il est là.) De là les BOUSTROPHES.4 (A smiling man is not a flower, And his love of flowers does not bloom, it is there.) Hence BUSTROPHES.

There is no longer anything that is naturally poetic. Some have deduced from this that one should return to the lost and forgotten water sources and once again traverse the river of the dead in order to give back to things new words for their birth or to awaken the decidedly necessary myths in order for the scientists and scholars [savants] not to become separated from the people so that the creators of the future do not plunge us into the great abyss without memory. Here it is a good idea to remain in dialogue with Leuco as much as with Malte Laurids Brigge. But orphism, in wanting for words to be gaged by way of distant powers — sonic powers from on high or mute powers from below — ends up making of its priest a bohemian sociologist, nostalgic for some Port-aux-Foins that would feed the poem’s vigor through the nourishment of the greenness of language.5 The new name of the river of the dead, since Les Misérables, is the Great Debt Collector. And the new Orpheus finally makes of himself an accomplice of the “disamphibologists” who want to restore to language its clarity or an accomplice of the doctors of society, for whom: La santé de l’esprit dépend de l’art de détecter le banal sous le fabuleux.6 The mind’s health depends upon the art of detecting the banal beneath the spectacular.

There is no legend of Being that doesn’t end up alongside this medicine. During the age of literature, the forces that compress the 4. Beck, Dernière mode familiale (Paris: Flammarion, 2000), 110. 5. Beck, “43. Anticritical” in Didactic Poetries, 127-129. 6. Beck, Aux recensions (Paris: Flammarion, 2002), 178. 14

sentence and harness the poem come neither from celestial bodies nor the earth; they are deployed at the level of words that call upon other words and let themselves be transformed and deformed by other words. There is no Nantucket from where one could embark on a hunt for the white whale. But there still remains the hawthorn, included in the name of a friend. The space of poetry is the infinite fabric of words and phrases of poems, words and phrases about poems. Le point de départ est un Sac impersonnel sans arrière-boutique là pour le justifier.7 The starting point is an impersonal Bag without a back shop there to explain it.

This has nothing to do with the autotelism denounced by the disgruntled lamenters of who knows what Golden Age where the solidity of rational public opinion would have been engendered within the friendly discussions held in salons. The poem speaks of the poem. It is not the mystical rapport of the same to the same. On the contrary, it’s the becoming-other of each of the terms. Language is the instrument and material. The material is instrument, the instrument is material. The universe of words which lend themselves to alterations is not Narcissus’s mirror but the great impersonal cloth [nappe] where the stranger is appropriated and the proper mispropriated [déproprié]. car le corps excitant et excitable étrangèrement personnel.8 for the exciting and excitable body is strangely personal.

7. Beck, “3. The Urns” in Didactic Poetries, 33-35. 8. Ibid., “48. The Last Man,” 143-146. 15

The proper weapon of the “strangely personal” poem on the terrain of this undefined extension is the contraction: the tiny Schlegelian hedgehog, rolled into a ball to sum up a world, and spiky, not merely for protection but also in order to gather up, in passing, any woolen piece of Ariadne’s thread or gold dust clinging to the coattails of a passerby. The Schlegelian hedgehog’s weapon is the foundry of words and phrases, the slope of lines and the slippage of meanings that instrumentalize the large amount of writings, from which an illuminating witticism arises [mot d’esprit], granting to numbed and tired words a newfound energy, a novel capacity for catching hold of other words and granting to them a new clarity or opacity. To invent words in order for us to state what the words we have read speak of, what the words we have written about these words speak of, the words which have made us: this is the work of poetry after nature. There are two ways of squeezing the lemon of words: the way whereby we uncover banal meaning, propositions, and interests via the pressure of phrases, and the way whereby, inversely, we see mundane, pedantic, and vicious banality returned to its spectacular virtuality: a virtuality of enchantment and instruction. To properly squeeze the lemon of words, could mean to replace proper names by that which metamorphosizes them, for example: replacing Paul Verlaine with Paul Absinthe, who, as Paul Absinthe, has the virtue of resisting drink: as we know words no more drink than they bark, without which there would be no remuneration of the poem. But to properly squeeze the lemon of words could also mean to thin out the proper name, all the way to impersonalizing the initials of a P.V. addressed toward the cursed poet S.M. The poetry of Philippe Beck does more than simply adhere to these reductions. His work sets itself a task inverse to derivation, the task of expressing, by way of every substantive, its power for creating animals from out of fabulatory language: action verbs one must take up the task of completing: to gentlemenize, to fontainize, to re-densify [redenser], to demerle [démerler], disorphicized or to semantico-melodize; adverbs indicating the proper way of being: not simply nervous, but FAWNICALLY — or phonicallynervous; adjectives that underscore dispositions (Lanson’s injustice is versely-billable) or rebrand them (the repetitive attacker, Retté, assuredly deserves to be called attacktive; substantives that 16

populate the world of words with new beings: the workatory [travailloir], impersons [les impersonnes]. Intensive contraction and undefined extension go together, as the “general outline” — Penelope’s web — and the “divisionary currency” of humor. The poem object, the matter and education of the poem, is not the poem brought to the quintessence of the ideal flower absent from every bouquet9; on the contrary: it’s the poem in the multiplication of its states: the poem as dilated, inventoried, commented, interpreted, and parodied. Such is the consequence taken from the principles of the transcendental buphonia, which also refutes the professor of Monsieur Jourdain from Le Bourgeois gentilhomme. The “neither verse nor prose” is no longer the gaffe of the ignorant. It is perhaps the law of modern poetry that one should nevertheless understand in a way that is rather distant from the “musical” reveries of the Symbolist age. It is not the new intimacy of the various musics of the soul that ruins ancient verse but on the contrary, is the impersonality of the poem that everyone and no one writes: […] rien n’est vers sous l’aspect de l’éternité. La versure appartient à l’histoire des interprétations du corps creuseur.10 […] nothing is a verse under the guise of eternity. Reversal belongs to the history of interpretations of the digging body.

All in all, one only ever hollows out according to the horizontality of the groove. And the Mallarméan groove — it’s as long as the frozen lake, the “ptyx” sonnet or the misty vive nue11 — the mass 9. For the interested reader, the author refers here to Mallarmé’s prose work “Crisis of Verse,” in Divagations, trans. Barbara Johnson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006). [TN] 10. Beck, “37. Steer’s sacrifice,” in Didactic Poetries, 118. 11. For more on the term “vive-nue,” see Mallarmé’s poem “La chevelure vol d’une flamme à l’extrême.” The term vive-nue was created by Mallarmé himself and has created much debate on its varied significations, at once referencing “lively nakedness” or “misty 17

of words that just as quickly pour over them: four hundred fifty tightly written pages if we are only counting, along with Bertrand Marchal, the commentaries written upon the French soil and language during the life of the poet. “The one-says is fabulous.” Poetry disseminates into the speech held for it, against itself. This is where one must venture in order to uncover the poetic material for the contractions of the poetic form that are not simply an exercise in semiology but fables. The collection of Mallarmé’s inventories is indeed l’histoire des fables de bêtes qui fabriquent un temps 12 the history of fables of animals that construct a time

Hegel spoke of the animal kingdom of the spirit. One recognizes the severity of the philosopher who believes or pretends to believe that, poetry having been, the flight of the owl is from now on without common measure with the work of the ruminants. As we know, what Hegel above all refuses, is for the poem, far from being finished with its “poetic nature,” to be on the contrary the field of indefinite extensions offered up to improbable condensations. Counter to Hegel, Beck agrees with the Brothers Schlegel: the communication of today does not pit itself against the poem of yesterday. And if poetry is still the order of the day, it’s not in order to grant a more pure meaning to the words of the tribe, but in order to allow for the creation of new words of alliances and disagreements within the tribe. Words form society and this society lends itself to new “didactic poems,” it lends itself to be taught anew by way of the teaching that society furnishes for itself. The teaching of a society regarding the teaching that the society itself provides: this is willingly called fable. And it is by way of the mode of the fable lightness of a cloud.” The reader is simply provided with the reference to the poem to explore on their own other possible commentaries. For more on Rancière’s own reading of the work of Mallarmé, see Mallarmé: The Politics of the Siren (New York: Bloomsbury Academic Publishing, 2011). 12. Beck, Aux recensions, 178. 18

that Philippe Beck speaks to us of the “animal kingdom of the spirit.” For the cicadas, the ants, the cats, and the weasels that represent the characters of their time, Beck substitutes new characters, those which open up new words to society: the inventorior, the commenter, the sourcer, the titilator, the charader, the journaler, the disamphibologist, the ink manager, the worrier of trending events, and other intellectual animals, titles which no doubt evoke Elias Canetti more than Jules Renard, and which denote certain attitudes with regard to words, rather than being representative of human passions. For this is precisely what “fable” means: not simply stories about animals, but a practice of language that actualizes an idea of language. The fable is a way of saying one thing in order to say another. The fable willingly presents itself as having been translated from some other, more ancient fabulist. To Fontainize today, is precisely this: instead of returning to the sources of the sacred rivers, we have this derivation that creates a verb out of the proper name, which then grants to this proper name the concrete connotations of flowing water but also grants to all natural or artificial fountains their virtues as proper names. It is the work of condensation that places L’absent au rêve habitué (sur un arbre imaginé perché)13 The absent one habituated to the dream (perched on an imagined tree)

Mallarmé in place of the raven, himself bringing Poe back to La Fontaine, cheese in the place of the ptyx and, within the sacred blank spaces managed by Mallarmé, an extended prose from the ingenious Wyzewa, from the bad-tempered Retté, or from the erudite Brunetière — or rather “responses” that each of their interventions inspire. These responses rarely object — even if they reject any eclectic complaisance. More often they enjoy singularizing this kind of babbler but at the same time, desingularizing him, shattering his phrases, deforming his words in order for them to no longer speak of grave or petty reasons for someone to devote their ink to the prince of poets, so they can speak of the work of writing itself which is not to become mired within itself but to 13. Ibid., 174. 19

denote a common history [histoire]. Make no mistake, the poetics of the “witticism” [mot d’esprit], which pulls from out of each word all its potentialities, has nothing to do with the “yau-de-poêle” effect. No doubt the entire fabric of language is susceptible to emerge with every hooked stitch. But the work of the poem is precisely to renounce the unlimited richness that is offered by the gesture of displacement. The work of the poem is to contradict one infinity by way of another: the infinity of associations that sound and meaning offer by the gesture of the necessary and sufficient condensation proper for singularizing the poem-hedgehog as a contraction of the infinite. The Dense of the equation against the dance of the liberty of words. “A regularity will remain,” concluded Mallarmé, invoking the two of the rhyme against the pleasantries of the temporary stage of a poetry attuned to the music of each soul. No longer in style, rather this specific music is pitted against its opposite: the universal roosterto-the-donkey that is imposed, with the two of the bustrophe, the principle of necessary and sufficient derivation. “Progressive and universal poetry” is not the vertigo of the maddening signifier but the art of punctuating the labor of weighing words against words which compose the fabric of what one calls history. The stamping of Philippe Beck’s poetry, hollowing out the heavy grooves surrounding a thin Mallarméan groove, are no more gratuitous than the infinite arabesques that Jean-Luc Godard sketches in obstinately launching encounters between cinematic shots or actualities from one century with a few phrases borrowed from Giraudoux, Hermann Broch, or Élie Faure. Beck’s hollowed-out poetic grooves would perhaps also not be foreign to the “versification” that Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Hullet operate upon Elio Vittorini’s prose in order to grant it the confirmatory potency of the power of the common [puissance commune]. What takes place above and beyond nature is in the end what we call history. And history has only reached its end for imbeciles. Whomever has learned to take the round-trip trajectory of the bustrophes can take back up a dialogue with those on the run [les cavales], the bull, the werewolf, and Pavese’s savage beast.

20

From Poetry to the Poem

To speak about Philippe Beck’s poetry is perhaps first of all, for me, to speak of what is striking in this phrase: “Philippe Beck’s poetry.” There are people we call poets because they make poems, in the way we call people “hairstylists” because they style hair. But we know that there are people we call poets because they posit their fabrication of poems as the accomplishment of an essence of poetry, because they assume a poet’s posture, a poetic program, and therefore are connected to an awareness of a kind of mission for poetry to accomplish. And so, on one hand, we can say Philippe Beck clearly belongs to this second category of poets. That is to say, someone who does not simply make poems but who has the posture of a poet and who defines for himself a poetic program; there is something very serious at work in Beck’s poetry, serious, we could say, about a “mission” conscious of itself, and which expresses itself. But, at the same time, this quasi-missionary awareness and practice leads us to a figure that is the complete opposite of the expected figure based on these premises, which is that of a somewhat oracular figure, the equation of an inspired poet, “the shepherd of being,” the dialoguer with the dead, the confronter of the unnameable, etc. If Philippe Beck holds onto a relation between poetry and truth, for me, this truth is the opposite of any etymon: there is no return to any originary speech that we could find by resuscitating some primordial meaning [premier sens] of words. So, if you will, no logos that would lead to a harvesting or a primordial contemplation; completely the opposite. Philippe Beck gladly tells us that poetry is the business of the pump, the foundry, the steam engine, the wringer, and other prosaic instruments. If his poetry is indeed the search for some sort of equation, this equation is not at all 21

on the side of an originary speech, but completely the opposite: this speech would be an equation that would be found on the side of strange words, technical words, Anglicisms, neologisms (that are more or less barbaric), and also fine words [bons mots], fine words that eventually are of poor taste (in the sense that we normally understand it) — the most screaming of these “fine words with poor taste” is practiced upon the divine Word, secularized within the grammatical function of the “Personal Pronoun,” in Chants populaires, and I refer you here to the chant below, in the chant entitled “Porte” [Door] which is an “update” of the “Tailor in Heaven”: the small tailor, who entered by way of the door in the sky, noticing that the Personal Pronoun has an absence — not that it is an absence, but has an absence.1 The irony is applied even further by way of the commentary that the poet places in parentheses, a commentary that is hardly “poetic”: “(He plays a non-match?).”2 Which is nevertheless the most radical, and the most radically, ridiculous equation for the great ordeal named the “Death of God!” Prose is thus at the heart of Philippe Beck's poetic mission. But a remark must be made in this regard. We have spoken at great length of “prose 1,” we spoke yesterday of “prose 2,” I in no way want to take up this term in the way it has been defined within the poetry and thought of Philippe Beck. For me, I would say the question about prose is located within the interval [écart] between prose as a manner of speaking, the prose of Monsieur Jourdain (“Nicole, bring me my slippers”), and prose understood as a kind of transcendental of the time period, a kind of grand horizon upon the edge of which speech is deployed, as when we speak of the “kingdom of prose” — we describe a world where Monsieur Jourdain would finally be king. Of course, the historical-theoretical home of Philippe Beck’s poetry is, for me, nevertheless (and we spoke of this yesterday) the Schillerian rupture of the naïve and the sentimental, thus the situation of a poetry that has lost its naïve unity — the unity of nature inside and the nature outside, of nature and culture, or of a poetic function assimilated to an assured ethical function in the world of shared morals. Sentimental poetry, as we know, is poetry that 1. Beck, “16. Porte” in Chants populaires (Paris: Flammarion, 2007), 57: “HE is not there. Personal Pronoun has an absence.” 2. Ibid. 22

knows that it is creating poetry, and which, at the same time cannot, for all that, renounce what we just uncovered within the idea itself of naïve poetry: namely that there is only poetry to the extent there is a poetic character which is already contained within the things themselves. This is the problem at the heart of Schiller’s problematic, and which we know was also produced in a variety of general forms in the work of Novalis (a universal progressive poetry), in Schlegel, and Hegel (the theorization of the end of art), all things which are somewhat constantly present in the work of Philippe Beck. I wanted to provide this framework in order to situate the question of prose at work in Philippe Beck — so, if you will, to speak of “my Philippe Beck.” The question of prose in his work is not about knowing (according to a somewhat vulgarized Hegelian equation) how we can still be poetic within a prosaic world — like those great questions we find in the nineteenth century (“How can we still create sculpture with black garments covering people?” etc.). I would say that the question does not reside there. Which means that the poetic mission dismissed any sacral nostalgia, and it has declared itself via Philippe Beck as being of the order of conversation. Here, I want to refer to a text of Philippe Beck’s which he had the generosity of providing to me, and I will not abuse his generosity, nor that of the editor, who perhaps doesn’t yet know that he has provided me with this gift. Contre un Boileau3 states that in poetry, a person speaks to other people. This person that speaks to other people, they speak, to use Schillerian language, as if for a humanity to come — or, in Deleuzian language — for a people to come. So, it’s a conversation: it’s a person (and we will come back to this) who speaks in order to speak to. To speak to others. Here, obviously things get complicated at least a little bit, since this person who speaks to other people is not an “I” that speaks to other “I”s, but someone who makes and rolls stones, stones of impersonal speech which will be weighed within a kind of neighboring zone, which is at the same time a zone of separation between hearts. So, first, this conversation takes place by tossing stones that roll and by stones of impersonal speech.… Then, this impersonal speech is distinguished from everything to which we would normally assimilate it, that is, the individual voice 3. Philippe Beck, Contre un Boileau (Paris: Fayard, 2015). 23

which is erased within the chant, or the voice that is lost within the great universal voice, the prose of the world, the noise of unanimous life, this Whitmanian democracy, eventually transformed in France by people like Blaise Cendrars or Jules Romains. What links one to another is the common, that is to say, the impersonal, but this impersonal is not given: brass does not become a bugle by way of any symphony of depths. One has to make the impersonal, and make it by way of the mode of saying. We know to what extent the poetic privilege of “making” is important in the work of Philippe Beck: poetry is firstly a making, the equivalence of a saying and a making, their equivalence as fabricating action. In these passages which are somewhat polemical against philosophy4 — Alain Badiou spoke yesterday of the anti-philosophical polemic in Philippe Beck — there is this trenchant manner of positing difference. Poetry appears as the unique activity that makes what it says and says what it makes. Which, moreover, problematizes the role of whoever comes to speak here… and which could have served as a reason for me, as for anyone else, not to attend! Since, does a poetry that says what it does and does what it says need to say anything more? And of course this question more specifically poses itself for the one who wears the hat of the philosopher supposedly responsible for stating what practices do, and we know that Philippe Beck adamantly disqualifies philosophy for its pretension of coming afterwards, for solving the Schiller affair in the style of Hegel: Beck tells us that it's the poem that teaches, and it teaches because it does or makes something. As for philosophy, it does not do or make anything. Philosophy is content with being its discourse, and it teaches to not do, or rather — since there are many styles of not doing — philosophy teaches the improper way of not doing things, namely: explaining things instead of acting on them [de les agir], or philosophy teaches the way to reconcile the nonseparated (the naïve) with the separated (the sentimental), but does so in order to avoid the task of seriously thinking: which is to activate their tension, to make them act in view of a further along, of a further ahead, namely, also in view of a kind of closeness between humans. 4. Philippe Beck and Gérard Tessier, Beck, l’impersonnage (Paris: Argol, 2006), 189-191. 24

So, coming to speak here when I have every excuse not to come here is precisely a way of betting on the fact that it is nevertheless possible to say something about this activity that says what it does, and does what it says, and perhaps we can break with the circle of “Nothing more to say” by way of questions such as: “How does it do what it says?” or “How does it say what it does?” Which implies that we must distance ourselves from the crystalline and brilliant declarations of Philippe Beck regarding the poetic articulation of saying and doing and the ethics the poetic implies: superb equations and impeccable demonstrations, notably in Contre un Boileau, but I won’t speak of them here, because in a certain way that would lead to having nothing left to say, save for summarizing the book that does not yet exist! What then remains for me to do, or what, quite simply, can I do? Perhaps I can take a couple of examples of Philippe Beck’s poetry and stop at the point of asking myself several questions: “What is it that he says?” “What is it that he does?” What is it that he says he does?” “What does he say without doing it?” “What does he do without saying it?” Which also means sliding a bit between the lines, spreading them apart, adding to them, re-cutting them, aerating them, or making them denser, all operations which are moreover validated and labeled as Beckian operations, for the benefit of drawing forth phrases and characters of the poems and stretching them a bit, by instituting the poem as a kind of echo chamber, of simple echoes, which are the echoes within a poem about other poems, about other poetry collections, etc., but also echoes coming from elsewhere, farther off, and susceptible of displacing the characters or the impersons and the actions and dictions of the poem, displacing them onto stages other than those constructed for them by the poet. An activity of appropriation that may evoke what Alain Badiou spoke about yesterday evening. For me, this question of appropriation will play itself out by way of different terms. It is not a case of philosophy’s appropriation of poetry, but simply the appropriation of words by other words, or thoughts by other thoughts — words and thoughts setting to work and simultaneously bringing to the light of day a power of speech [parole] and of thought that does not belong to a proper or specific academic discipline, whose power is perhaps derived from the fact that it is not beholden to a specific discipline. So, it 25

would be a question of talking not as a philosopher or poetologist, but simply as a reader; this is what I will attempt to do or what I would have liked to have done, since you will see that I’m still very far from achieving it, starting with two examples from the work, Chants populaires,5 which have the advantage of being part of a poetic work whose principle the author explained in his “Ouverture” — and this afternoon we had a very detailed elucidation of this explanation.6 I simply retain the equation here that summarizes the program: “Here, the songs wring out the dryness / of the tales.”7 Regarding the two examples, “Musique” [Music]8 and “Plainte” [Complaint],9 that you have between your hands, I will ask how the wringing dry is done and said.

*** I will start by way of the simplest definition of “wringing dry”: that is, getting rid of humidity. To wring fairy tales dry, more specifically a certain number of Grimms’ fairy tales, we can imagine what this means, at its most basic level: to reduce each one of these fairy tales to its most essential part, to know the schema of what each fairy tale tells us, about its action, and this also means narrowing the fairy tale down to what the tale tells us, what we generally call its morality. And in one way or another, each Chant does this; each Chant more or less tells us, and often in a more enigmatic manner, what is happening in the tale and, at the same time, it summarizes. That is to say, on one hand, it somewhat carves out the action, reducing it to its most simple elements, as in the good old days of narratology; but on the other hand, it brings out their moral, and their moral which is always more or less a lesson regarding “doing.” And the Chant states this lesson in telling us what the Chant itself does, which is to say, by way of adding its “doing” to the carving out of the doings of the tales. 5. Philippe Beck, Chants populaires, (Paris: Flammarion, 2007). 6. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Commence — toujours (sur les rédifications beckiennes)” in Philippe Beck: Un chant objectif aujourd’hui (Paris: Corti, 2014), 194-213. 7. Beck, “Ouverture” in Chants populaires, 11. 8. Ibid., “3. Musique,” 26-27. This poem is reprinted in French and English on pages 55-57 of this book. 9. Ibid., “12. Plainte,” 46-48. This poem is reprinted in French and English on pages 58-62 of this book. 26

The chant therefore has two essential activities: it condenses as well as supplements the tale. And it’s precisely the conjunction of these activities that is the chant’s expressive action. So, for example, let’s take the first of the chants, which is “Music,” which follows one of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales, “The Marvelous Minstrel.” I will briefly remind you of the story of the Marvelous Minstrel : it’s about a minstrel who has a wonderful violin, and who uses it to play in the forest, but who finds that in the end it’s a bit boring to play simply for the leaves, and then endeavors to seek out a companion. He goes into the forest to meet a companion. He first encounters a wolf, who tells him, “Teach me to play.” This isn’t what the minstrel wants to do, he doesn’t want a wolf for a companion; instead of agreeing to the wolf ’s request, he pulls a ruse on him and tells him: “To learn how to play the fiddle, what you need to do, is place your paws into the crack of this tree,” whereupon, following his instructions, the wolf is trapped. The same kind of misadventure happens to the following candidates for learning how to play music: a fox will find himself suspended from tree branches, a hare will end up tied up around a tree by a string. After these encounters, on the fourth attempt, the minstrel will finally encounter the right companion when he meets a woodcutter. Meanwhile, the animals have freed themselves and united in order to reap their vengeance on the minstrel; and at that moment, the woodcutter intervenes, raises his axe and the animals scurry off. So, this is the tale, and here Beck’s “Music” becomes somewhat summarized: “Once there was M.,” “Musical grabs hold of a Wolf.,” “They untangle themselves/ and vanish.,” “Music pleases the woodcutter.,” “And they take off deep into the forest.” But this abbreviation is controlled by way of a much more fundamental abbreviation which comes at the end of the first verse: “Once there was M.” The Marvelous Minstrel is summarized by a single letter, an initial, and of course, an initial is a point of departure, and more specifically, the point of departure of a metamorphosis, since the Marvelous Minstrel is going to be transformed into another type of persona or impersonnage [impersona], who in the fourth verse will be called, “Musical.” What does “Musical” refer to? Let’s say it refers to a number of products simultaneously: a subject rid of its article; but also an 27

adjective that has been de-adjectified, substantified, and also it refers to a common noun that has become a proper noun. A noun that is the result of three operations upon grammar, that we can consider in a certain way as theoretical operations, interventions upon the thinkable, since they blur the boundary between substance and accident, the concrete and the abstract, proper nouns and common nouns; and I believe it is important to think a bit about the solidarity of these operations in order to think the gait [marche] of the poem, that is to say, the way in which Philippe Beck makes it walk and the direction in which it walks. These are operations upon the categories of thought, and we could say, if we wanted to follow Philippe Beck’s polemic, that this kind of thought operation is what philosophy doesn’t want to do, cannot do, and that poetry itself does: theoretical operations that in a way disrupt categories that normally organize the thinkable. Theoretical operations that are therefore simultaneously political, like all operations that touch at the distribution of words, the regime of nouns, and the calculation of bodies. The fact that common names and proper names are no longer distinguishable will evoke something specific for the reader of Mallarmé, who remembers the end of the prose poem, “Conflict,” about these “births” fallen “into anonymity,” of the bodies “driven” into the ground on a Sunday evening, and the people who have no names, who are called “Poitou” or “the Norman” “according to their mothers or the province.”10 Mallarmé reminds us that to distinguish proper names from common names is not simply a way to distinguish grammatical categories, but is also part of the distribution of humanity into those who have a name for themselves, a true name, and everyone else [le reste]. The same goes for the distribution of the concrete and the abstract: it is something that separates those who are devoted to one from those who are devoted to the other; and it is significant that the movement of abstraction in the work of Philippe Beck is rightly linked to a movement for creating the common. Here we can evoke the big question of “participation” that Alain Badiou evoked yesterday, and which I translate in terms of “distribution,” in order to indicate everything concerned with the relation of the intelligible and the sensible, of the one and the multiple, of the one and several, 10. Stéphane Mallarmé, “Conflict” in Divagations, trans. Barbara Johnson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), 41. 28

which is also a way of distributing bodies and their capacities. We can say that here there is something of a re-distribution, linked to other poetic operations, which are also operations of thought. I want to pause for a moment regarding “Once there was M. / who walks in the Forest.” The expression “walks in the forest,” is in one sense an abstraction that dries out the mythological forest, and moreover, in Didactic Poetries, Beck accuses Pavese of only remaining at the prairie, at the forest, at these mythological abstractions, an accusation that we could perhaps still make toward the filmmakers who have taken back up Pavese, namely the Straubs: indeed, the forest, the prairie are here identical to their own myth. But what is interesting is that this abstraction in the work of Philippe Beck passes by way of a very particular language game: Musicking does not walk in the forest. He “goes for a walk in the forest”; we know this is a healthy weekend activity for our fellow countrymen; we go for a walk in the forest, and after, we make ourselves something to eat, eventually. Here again what is important is the way in which Phillipe Beck grasps the phrase in order to abstract the mythological forest, in order to hold onto what counts: namely the gait. Here we find what we spoke of earlier about prose, about the way in which Philippe Beck constantly uses prosaic language as an operator, precisely in order to isolate the space of the poem from prose, understood as the horizon of the ordinary thinkable. Thus, what counts is the gait of walking, “Alone toward a lone.” “There are two very interesting ways that this verse is remarkable. Remarkable by way of its manner of summarizing the poetics elsewhere declared by Philippe Beck: poetry as conversation, as communication, with the entirety of the active role that it grants to the addressee, to the interlocutor, to the reader. But the verse is also remarkable by way of how it says this, by way of the equivocation of the French word vers: “vers” which is at once a preposition of location, but it is also the homonym of a common noun [the French for “verse,” “vers” also means “toward”], and not just any word, since it is indeed the word “verse.” In other words, this “verse” makes “alone” rhyme with “a lone,” and it states the destination of the poem as being one with its gait. Thus, the poem now states what the poem is doing: it says what it’s doing, and it says it twice, in the form of a wordplay, and further along in the form of what will become a clear phrase: “He fiddles with an eye 29

toward the end of the island,”11 an “expandable” decasyllable, if you will, eventually making a dieresis. What is important is that the actions of M. are the actions of the poet. The minstrel walked and played in order to find a good companion; he dreamed of this good companion. M. walks and dreams. He walks, because M. is also the point of identity between Musical and another character we could call, rather than Walker, Walking. To walk is first of all to take off walking, to begin, to not wait, and if we want to play off the initials, we could note that M., if we invert it, becomes W.,12 and that this inversion plays out in the title M. The poem “Musical Marchant” becomes, Musical Walking, we have the initial W, which brings us back to what we spoke about yesterday in regard to Wallenstein,13 the character created by the same poet who theorized the whole affair of the naïve and the sentimental: Schiller. Two words concerning Wallenstein: I think Wallenstein is much more than a mere strategy, the kind of madman who lets a moment pass in order to wait for another. There is something in Wallenstein, the strategist that doesn’t act because the stars have not yet said that it’s the right moment to speak; for me, he is a key-character of modern times [des temps modernes], in relation to which the “doing” and the “doing what one says” of the poet is defined. The character symbolized by Wallenstein is the one who does not act, because he wants too much, that is, he wants to be wanted, he wants for his action to be desired by the law of the world. This figure of the general of the Thirty Years War can be found within a variety of incarnations. He could just as easily be the figure of the revolutionary strategist waiting for the law of history to determine the moment of action; but also, and moreover this is what is stated in poem 47 from Didactic Poetries about Wallenstein, the man of the ivory tower, which nevertheless, refers to the domain poem, and which can make one think of what is said in “Steer’s Sacrifice,”14 concerning the poet who prepares for the new his entire life. So, something 11. Beck, “3. Musique,” in Chants populaires, 26. 12. In French, to walk is written as marcher, and the line from the poem referenced, "Musical Marchant", would thus be translated as “Musical Walker” and therefore the English language reader will not be able to distinguish this inversion of the letter Jacques Rancière is referring to regarding Philippe Beck’s poem. [TN] 13. Beck, “47. Wallenstein,” in Didactic Poetries, 134-142. 14. Ibid., “37. Steer’s sacrifice,” 118. 30

like “the one who wants to be wanted,” and Wallenstein would be the figure and the manifestation of a nihilist backdrop, and in the end, of a wanting. In a certain manner, walking becomes a way to exit this circle of “wanting,” not waiting for the end in order to determine the meaning of the gait. Here I can do nothing but wholeheartedly agree with what Alain Badiou stated yesterday evening about how what is important for thinking today is for thought to become the gait which orients us, namely to think an orientation that is not finalized by a conceived end. To walk also means to refuse the realist intimidation that fixes the correlation between vision as precondition for the proper use of one’s legs. I refer you here (it’s a bit of the poetics of the echo-chamber which I spoke of earlier) to the poem “From Realism,” which can be found in Didactic Poetries, where it is stated, specifically regarding the “disideologocians,” that the “agile eye / lacks lucidity / if its lucidity isn't exercised.”15 This is why what is at stake is to walk, and not to want. Walking goes hand in hand with dreaming, which is not understood here in the typical sense of dreaming — the Beckian poet does not work by way of dreaming like the surrealist poet. We are not talking about dreaming. We are talking about reveries that suspend the ends of action in order to make themselves receptive to the intensities and rhythms of the world; this reverie is a reference to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s famous text Reveries of the Solitary Walker (more specifically, the chapter entitled, Fifth Walk), where the scene he describes as the solitary walker — whether stretched out full-length in the boat on the lake, gazing up at the sky, letting the water take him wherever it may, or simply sitting on the lake's green shores, listening to the continuing flow of the water — allows him to escape the entire universe of waiting.16 What this means is that the reverie must be positively included within the decision: the determination to walk. Thus: “Musical dreams.” And once we have said that he walks and that it is good to walk, have we not rendered the story of the minstrel superfluous? Have we not wrung out and dried the tale to the point where we have simply said that the moral of the tale, the moral we have assigned to it, is the principle of the poem? In fact, Philippe Beck's poem 15. Ibid., “54. From Realism,” 166-167. 16. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of a Solitary Walker, trans. Russell Goulbourne (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011). 31

seems to completely forget the story told in the Grimms’ fairy tale by opening up a long parenthesis that doesn't refer to anything in the tale. Les jambes avancent avec les jambes. Corps-compas. Jambes mathématiques. Ressort et progression. Elles font des blagues d’en haut et on cherche la matière des jambes. Corps pose des reliefs. Il fait des traces précises. Legs advance with legs. Body-compass. Mathematical legs. Resillience and progession. From on high they joke and look for the matter of legs. Body composed of reliefs. It makes precise traces.

By way of the minstrel in the forest we have drawn forth walking, and from walking we have brought forth legs.… And now the subject of the story is going to be: legs, and the body. Legs and body are now the subjects of the action, an action that is now going to identify the narrative to the gnomic, in stating what legs do, and also in doing what legs do. Legs are no longer content simply traversing space, they become a compass, the executions of a calculation on a piece of paper; they are artists who leave and inscribe traces upon the ground, inscribing reliefs, which in the end make space spin, since what is at stake now within this division in relation to the tale is also a perpendicular that is traced, that is shown to be traced as the very act of the poem: the vertical that constructs the poem, a relation between the cave 32

and the sky, or a movement from above to below (a distribution), but also from below to on high. Philippe Beck insists on this: it is not enough for one to descend into the lines of verse, one must rise again, one must read again, etc., an entire movement that we can envision by way of the ox that goes in one direction and then another, but which we can illustrate by way of another figure, since Philippe Beck tells us here that legs “joke from on high,” which can make us think of the legs which make a jokester out of someone like Charlie Chaplin, referenced in Didactic Poetries,17 in “Attitude” — this gag from the escalator in a grand shopping center that doesn’t stop going up and down.… But in jambe [leg] we hear first of all enjambement, and there are several enjambements in a technical sense: “and we look for matter / legs.,” “they make precise / traces.” But I believe enjambement is more than a technique; for me, it defines a poetics. It’s to create a stairs in order to forbid what we will call the enchantments of prose, or the enchanting continuities of prose. What Philippe Beck does is to invert what enjambement has historically signified regarding the poem invaded by prose. There is the infamous story by Victor Hugo of the secret staircase (Hernani, I, 1, 1830).… The enjambement or the rejet which comes in advance in order to erase the rhyme and its humming, in order to resemble the movement of life that overflows the frame into which we have placed it. And, as we know, this ordeal of the hidden staircase is the point of departure of the great revolution, that of the great upheaval that Mallarmé summarizes in his famous text that opens with this announcement of the great event: “Verse has been tampered with.”18; and we all know what was created in Mallarmé’s time around the dismemberment of the giant by the Hugolian ogre. And, in one sense, we can say that Philippe Beck inscribes himself within this continuity of a verse that is no longer a verse while nevertheless being a verse; of a verse which will make a music by way of variability itself, and no longer by way of its self-identity, the rhythmic beat of rhyme. But what is interesting to me is that we find in Philippe Beck’s work the requirement that music doesn’t signify the Verlainean haziness of the “nothing to say,” reverie doesn’t become a lullaby. The Beckian enjambement 17. Beck, “17. Attitude,” in Didactic Poetries, 72-78. 18. Stéphane Mallarmé, “Music and Letters” in Divagations, 183. 33

provides for the verticalization of the poem, something like an escape route, a way for verse to regain its foothold over prose, and therefore also reclaim its inactive musicality. For the peril does not arise so much from the sentimentality of the awkward line of verse than from the enchantments of the new combinations of prose. Several times, Philippe Beck alludes to the author who spoke of this, who tells us that all combinations of poetic verse have pretty much been discovered, but that all the combinations of prose have yet to be invented. The author is of course, Flaubert, the one who, in his own manner, resolved the “Schiller problem” in stating: We can no longer make Greek art, the harmonious unity between the nature outside us and the nature inside us, but we can rediscover the lost totality if we forge the instrument that de-specifies prose, that de-specifies at the same time poetry, which allows us to hear inside any phrase whatsoever, and inside any recited tale whatsoever, the music of the whole. Let us say that this is the poetry of prose that we can summarize within the first illustrious lines from the penultimate chapter of Sentimental Education, a title that in a certain manner, is created out of two other pieces from titles by Schiller: He traveled. He came to know the melancholy of the steamship, the cold awakening under canvas, the stupor induced by scenery and ruins, the bitterness of aborted friendships. He returned.19

Perhaps here we have new prose combinations, the enchantment of prose counter to what Philippe Beck strives to reclaim with poetic verse, and perhaps this is the enchantment of this circular voyage, a theme amplified by this dreaming prose made out of craftily dislocated alexandrines. And we could amuse ourselves in attempting something like a Beckian sabotage of Flaubertian prose, in order to invent a parody of Philippe Beck parodying Flaubert. A poem that would be something akin to this:

19. Gustave Flaubert, A Sentimental Education, trans. Perdita Burlingame (New York: Penguin, 1972), 412. 34

Young man steps aboard.
 Always the same sea.
 The morning cold bites the campers. Impressive monuments. Friends come and go.
 YM returns.
 To where he began.

What I have created here is a deliberate caricature. But it is perhaps instructive concerning the function of mathematical jokes, which is what is at stake here: knowing how to shatter musical prose. And from then on, in one sense, it is the enjambement that deprosifies, the enjambement as the action of shattering the new combinations of this prose that, of course, does much better than the old poetry or the new poets, and which has the dubious function of balancing [égaliser] the noise of the world, and of plunging sound into meaning and meaning into sound in order for it all to wonderfully turn in a circle. And in a certain manner, the Beckian enjambement is there as if for a second wringing dry: to drain the sea of this happy fusion of sound and meaning; to make it so that the phrase endlessly shatters, so that the phrase loses its music of oblivion, providing an attentive reminder concerning each one of its parts by reminding us what each one of them do. At times, these tiny Beckian lines of verse make me think as well (since Beck is also a cinephile) of what Robert Bresson used to often say regarding film as being made of absolutely equal unities, which doesn’t mean that each shot has the same duration, but rather that each shot has fundamentally the same importance. This poetics of the staircase, we can include it within all operations that use prose as an ordinary manner of speaking, contrary to prose as the great fusional symphony. Perhaps we could compare this poetics of the staircase with another of Philippe Beck’s operations upon language, another operation that also tends to question in some way the happy unity of sound and meaning within the music of prose. Perhaps it is in this way that we can understand all of his neologisms: “bucolicity,” “chateaubriandity,” “herbagery,” “lontanesse,” “pompique,” “olympial,” “didomesticating,” “disidealogical,” “to glass,” “to example, “to sad,” etc…. Strange words, but whose strangeness comes precisely from the fact that they are constructed according to meaning, and that in 35

specifically deriving a word from meaning, one produces strange constructs, monstrosities within language, and perhaps at the same time, one re-establishes the hardness [dureté] of the world. These prosaic legs are part of this work: calculating a vertical that obliges one to go up and down, eventually turning prose against itself in order to attain new combinations of poetic verse. This is just as meaningful here as the minstrel who, in spite of everything, enters the forest with the animals and makes one think of Orpheus, and what Philippe Beck does here is precisely contrary to orphic poetry: as it so happens, the minstrel makes his task easier since he has understood that the animals were not there to be charmed, but to be captured, and what then is necessary is not the sweet sound of the lyre, but that of the ruse. He thus tricks them in order to continue toward his true destination, which is toward someone with whom he can truly speak. It’s at this point that Philippe Beck returns to the story of the Grimms' fairy tale. Musique plaît à Bûcheron. B. rêve. Son cœur monte. Hache est une harpe inconsciente? Harpe de vent presque conscient? Elles voient le Défenseur Emu. L’homme des coups de harpe. Et repartent au fond des bois. Grâce à la hache mélodique. Music pleases the Woodcutter. B. dreams. His heart rises. Axe is an unconcious harp? An almost concious wind harp? They see the Moved Defender. The man of the harp strokes. And take off again deep in the woods. Thanks to the melodic axe.

The one with whom the Musician must speak in order for the poem to take place is the other man, the woodcutter, the man with the tool in his hands, who attacks the harshness of the forest, and whose actions, in a certain way, are the inspiration of the 36

poem. Faced with this woodcutter who also falls into a reverie, and for whom the axe changes into a harp, I can’t help but think of the pages in Philippe Beck’s work regarding the poetic vocation of exhibiting the force of a future humanity, which is present within the capacity that each person has for making or building something by speaking, and by way of speaking builds something. The poet is someone who builds something, who constructs in the mode of exemplification of the power to construct that exists within each being of language, but he also constructs by way of the presupposition of the capacity of attention to the constructions of language, which is present for those who simply are attentive to what they are doing. And this is developed in a superb manner within Didactic Poetries, in poem 6 titled, “To Read,”20 dedicated to Pavese. In this poem, what is the question we are dealing with? In the beginning, it is about a general request for writers to be clear, to be simple: L’appel est un appel à de la sollicitude pour le nombre qui n’écrit pas. The call is a call to solicitude for the non-writing majority.

All of us who have been asked to provide a text for a journal or the radio know about this appeal: “Make it simple! You are speaking to a large public audience! Don’t use complicated words! Etc., etc.” This is the ordinary solicitude for the large non-writing majority. What is interesting is that here, the solicitude is overturned by Philippe Beck: those who know how to read are those for whom reading is difficult. Which is to say, first of all for the child, the child in the middle of tracing the curve of words with his eye, or his hand or the worker who is preoccupied with the materiality of people and things. The poem pits these readers against professional readers, of whom the poem tells us: Ils n’ont plus le respect dans la peur 20. Beck, “6. To Read” in Didactic Poetries, 42. 37

de l’enfant en train de tracer la courbe des mots avec son œil ou sa main (levier, outil de direction, pinceau). They no longer have the respect within the child’s fear while tracing the contour of words with his eyes, or his hands (lever, directional tool, paintbrush).

The one who knows how to write is also the one who knows how to take care of things: Celui qui a affaire à des choses ou à des hommes plutôt qu’à des livres, qui sort le matin et rentre le soir endurci voit, quand il regarde une page, du rebutant, de l’étrange, du fuyant et du fort, qui le violente et prend des forces. Il est plus proche de la vraie lecture, étonnée et résistant à l’étonnement, que les habitués mal habitués. He who deals with things or men rather than books, who leaves in the morning and returns in the evening hardened sees, when he looks at a page, offensiveness, strangeness, elusiveness and toughness, 38

which assails him and gains strength. He is closer to real reading, amazed and resisting amazement, than badly versed devotees.

So, the true solicitude for those who don't write is the solicitude for the one for whom writing and reading are particularly difficult things, presenting something that is hard, strange, fleeting, resistant. This discovery of the common power of humanity that is present everywhere, where the attention to the tracing of signs equates to the gesture of the hand, becomes difficult for me to not recognize within it Joseph Jacotot’s emancipatory intellectual equations, and his voyages into the forest of signs, and the story of the locksmith who learns, who enters into the universe of letters in calling O a whole, calling L a carpenter’s square, or Jacotot’s reference to the glove makers from Grenoble who, by way of his emancipatory intellectual method, learn to read and learn words and phrases from the gloves. I wanted to mention this passage in order to show an external echo: it’s about stating what, within the saying and the works of Philippe Beck, speaks to me. And here, of course, the rhyme of “alone with a lone” is confirmed in a striking manner by way of the assonance of the French words “hache” [axe] and “harpe” [harp]. The worker’s axe, the axe which is also the weapon with which he makes the animals flee, becomes somewhat like a harp with which, in a certain way, he charms them. The poet is the one who deploys this assonance between “la harpe” and “la hache,” who melodizes the blows of the axe and the splitting wood into the warblings of the harp. And we could also say that the poem speaks to the woodcutter, to the autodidact, because the poem in its own way is an autodidaxia, an apprenticeship in the middle of the forest, an apprenticeship regarding the similarities between the creation or doing [faire] of the axe and the creation or doing [faire] of poetic verse. The problem may reside in the fact that it seems like too much of a happy ending. We could ask ourselves: has this wringing dry of the tale not transformed it into an allegory of the poem, substituting the poem of the poem for a re-writing of the tale? I spoke earlier of parenthesis…. Do we not have within this well-oiled poem something like two foreign bodies looking at each other, 39

the gait of the poem gazing at its dreamed-of goal (but here in the sense of dream, of a wish) in what the tale offers up to it, namely the happy encounter: the woodcutter is there, and he also dreams of the axe transforming into the harp. To such an extent that, in the end, the poem draws forth from the tale a moral that develops from the poem into a poem, perhaps at the price of the tale granting it what it was expecting: namely the famous interlocutor, the dreamed-of reader, who is the man who works with his hands. It is not a question of saying: “Okay, all of this is simply elitist poetry. And in any case, no ordinary woodcutter will read it.” It is not a question of formulating the old argument of those from May ’68. Where as soon as someone spoke up, we would hear: “Go say that at the gates of the factory!” After which, obviously, there was nothing left to do other than to keep quiet. I think that Philippe Beck, in his own way, applies the Jacotist principle: recognizing that the equality of intelligences is a presupposition, a condition for poetic action, and it is not, obviously, the business of a statistical truth. But the problem remains of this happy way in which the tale comes to prove by way of the stairs of the poem that it has indeed reached its end. It’s a bit like the suspicion that a given popularity, a popularity that is recognized, admitted, recorded, that of a popular tale, here comes to guarantee another popularity, which, is itself, problematic: that is, the popularity that the poem constructs, the popularity of a people or of a humanity to come. A problem which is perhaps linked to another: namely what, in the end, makes these legs move? Because there is not simply a desire for walking, there is not simply a desire for going toward the other that sets the legs into movement. This concretely implies that the staircase of the poem is not simply the precise calculation of compass-legs: the poet is not a virtuoso in the art of producing downward slopes within language. Because the idea of the form that imposes its law on matter is one more thing Schiller put an end to. The condition for art, the condition for humanity is for the activity to be discovered as equal, counterbalanced, impeded by a powerful receptivity. This makes it so that the two-way movement of the poem cannot be the result of the poet’s ingenuity. It is a dynamic affair. It is a question of motor energy produced by something that doesn’t come from the poet, but something that comes from the outside. It’s this outside, the world, that must 40

produce the movement of the machine. And we find that this is expressed in Contre un Boileau, where the technical rules, the instructions for creating the poem are always printed by way of a state of the world. And we know to what degree the pressure — the idea that there must be a pressure, in the most literal sense of the term — plays a considerable role; we uncover this quite a bit in the work of Philippe Beck. What can create the pressure for legs to not simply walk by way of a mere clever calculation of the mathematician’s compass? The answer is perhaps that the forest must become the site of another encounter than that of the minstrel and the animals, the forest must become the site of harsh encounters, encounters of confrontation, violence, and crimes. I refer here to Dans de la nature, 29: Nature est vie invécue? Non, car elle embrasse discrètement Cultures et Crimes.21 Nature is unlived life? No, for it embraces discreetly Cultures and Crimes.

Here we have an answer to the question of what sets the legs into movement, outside of the desire of going to see the woodcutter: it’s that nature is history, the forest is a theatre of histories. And this is what another poem tells us, which I have chosen: “Plainte” [Complaint] drawn from the Grimm fairy tale, “The singing bone.” If I use this poem entitled “Plainte,” it’s obviously not in order to return to the polemic that took place yesterday, regarding the question of knowing whether or not the essence of Philippe Beck’s poetry was the activity of a complaint. So, I will not speak for complaint. I will simply attempt to untangle the logic and the problems posed by the singing bone….

21. Beck, Dans de la nature (Paris: Flammarion, 2003), 41. 41

I will take the first five lines of the poem. Dans un pays, Bête stylise des champs. Ses défenses font peur. Elles écrivent quoi? Le sentiment du plus grand. In a country, Beast stylizes the fields. His tusks frighten. What do they write? The feeling of what is big.

Right away, the scene is set. We are dealing with writing: “Beast stylizes / the fields.” To stylize is a verb that returns several times, generally for the worse; to stylize is to create bad writing. Again, it is a question of a certain kind of writing, a writing dealing with Justice, and first off, an Injustice: hence the writing made by the animal's tusks. The story of the singing bone is obviously a story about violence and writing. It’s the story of a wild boar that plunders the fields and no one dares to go into the fields any longer. The king promises his daughter to the person who can kill the animal, and there are two brothers who set out to accomplish this task: the good brother and the bad brother, the crafty and lazy brother and the simple and kind-hearted brother. The good brother, the simple and kind-hearted one, because he is goodhearted, encounters a stranger who gives him a spear with which he can kill the animal. The Simple brother kills the beast, while the Crafty one is at a tavern drinking in order to muster the courage to do so. When Crafty exits the tavern, he encounters Simple with the body of the animal on his shoulders; Crafty says: “Okay, good job, let’s go home, father will be happy, and the king even more so.” What then happens is that, at the moment they cross the bridge, Crafty kills Simple, buries his cadaver and triumphantly returns with the animal, and he marries the king’s daughter. Some time later, a shepherd passes by and discovers the bone, and declares “this bone will make a nice mouthpiece for my horn in order to call out to the animals”; and then, unfortunately or fortunately, the bone does something all together different. Instead of simply 42

letting him carve it into a mouthpiece for his horn, the bone begins to speak. It tells the story of a crime. The bone says that he is the one who killed the beast and who has been killed by the brother. After this story, the shepherd, somewhat astonished, goes to see the supreme authority, namely, the king, who understands the situation immediately. Crafty is thrown into a sack, and Simple will be granted the honors. So I have given you a bit of the story, providing you an entry point to see how the poem is situated: right away, the death machine is writing. I don’t know if we should evoke Kafka here, but what is certain is that with Philippe Beck “champ” [field] rhymes with “camp” [camp] or evokes “camp,” and when it is a question here of the “vertical wilderness,” we can’t help but think of this vertical gas chamber which is referenced in Deductions: “Gas chamber has sense of a Cruel Vertical.”22 Here the theme of the crime and the response to the criminal action is immediately presented as an affair of writing. Whereby the poem follows the tale whose actions it abridges and whose characters it renames: Simple kills the beast, Crafty kills Simple and marries the girl; the shepherd finds the bone, and the bone with which he wanted to make his horn does something else: it “sings for its own sake,” and in order to do this, the bone is renamed: it is “the Remainder of the Simple one,” which will itself later be abridged once again to “Remainder.” The bone will sing. But at the exact moment when the bone sings, we have the intervention of a large parenthesis or gap between the poem and the story. Normally, we expect from a bone that remains at the scene of the crime to bear witness as a mute witness, a bone that bears witness by being the expression of its own existence, in the manner of what historians name the mute witness which speaks by way of the expression of his or her own materiality, or the Lanzmannian witness, who speaks like the one who cannot speak, and which one must force to speak in order to say what he cannot say. This is the “normal” witness. However, here, it’s as if the expected figure of the witness has been evacuated. The “Remainder of the Simple one” sings for his own account. Not only does he not want to become a mouthpiece for a horn, but he does not want to become merely a mute witness. Hence the question here: “Does the bone have a poetics?” This is perhaps the strangest question one can pose to 22. Beck, Déductions (Marseille: Al Dante, 2005), 12. 43

a bone. How can a bone have a poetics? Of course, here we have a positive answer to this question: the bone has a poetics of the “human / the pensive” — I’m the one summarizing here. Starting from here, we have the development of a kind of great poetic art in the form of a poem, described as the genesis of the poem that “the Remainder of Simple” will produce. It is a somewhat complicated operation: L’humain pense aux consonnes de monde. Voyelles musiquent des lettres ou trous de la flûte qui demande des doigts pour un discours. Par chant, bouche est l’instrument qui refait un ramage d’oiseau laborieux. R. éclairable. Bouche est absente d’abord. The human thinks of the consonants of the world. Vowels musicate letters or flute holes who beg for fingers for a discourse. By chant, mouth is the instrument that reconstructs a laborious birdsong. R. illuminable Mouth is firstly absent.

The world provides consonants. One thinks of the tusks; one thinks of the bone. The world provides the hard consonants, and then language, language will provide the vowels, and “Vowels,” the elements of language, will “musicate” the “holes of the flute”; the flute’s holes will ask for “some fingers,” the fingers will ask for “a mouth.” A mouth will create itself. And starting from the moment when we have a mouth, we can borrow the “idea of breath” from “the windswept reeds”; and once we have borrowed from the windswept reeds the idea of a breath, we have a “voice,” and this voice will finally recreate the instrument, “the instrument

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within nature/ inside, historied.”23 In other words, the singing bone who should not be capable of saying anything about the history of the murder becomes an expert in the art of poetics, who tells us of the conditions for a new poetry, namely, the naïvesentimental poetry or sentimental-naïve poetry, a poetry which unites the nature of the inside with the nature of the outside, which recreates itself as a union of the “inhuman outside” and “the inhuman inside.”24 The inhuman outside is the animality written upon places and bodies; the inhuman inside is the impersonal machine which produces the singularity of the poem. The inhuman outside is the violence of History, with its death machines whose poet par excellence is Shakespeare, creator of the archeologist of the crime evoked in Didactic Poetries, Hamlet, who assumes the role of the investigator of the murder, and who, as with the singing bone, takes within his hands this skull who “had a tongue / and knew how to sing / before drying up,”25 and becomes an archeologist of the murder; where Hamlet becomes the antiWallenstein. And then there is the inhuman inside: which is the music-making machine, which is set into movement by way of this power of the inhuman outside. The machine is presented here via a series of somewhat complicated operations: the importing of the consonants “of the world,” the creation of the flute’s holes, the education of a breath, a voice that re-constructs the instrument.… To be a bit crude, we could say that we don’t really understand what’s going on. But it’s not because Philippe Beck doesn’t do a good job of explaining himself. And, in any case, there is nothing to explain: the poems are not made in order to be explained. If we don’t understand them very well, it’s because we find ourselves at the heart of a contradiction which is always one and the same: the Schillerian contradiction, of knowing the contradiction of this new poetry which must be born beyond the opposition of the naïve and the sentimental; this poetry that must build something that is like “nature,” so something that is in a way “not built,” so we have the union of contraries, the built before creating the non-built. The answer can be problematic: if the builder can create the non-built, it’s because it is itself the production of a 23. Beck, “12. Plainte,” in Chants populaires, 47. 24. Beck, “35. Blotting Paper,” in Didactic Poetries, 115. 25. Ibid., “58. Tomorrow Hamlet,” 172. 45

certain construction, of a certain dynamics, or caloric energy, an external pressure that sets into motion the construction. Philippe Beck tells us that poems are like a machinery dependent on the world, a world which manipulates them, and applies pressure into them: not pressure onto them, but pressure into them. To speak of pressure is to clarify that the constraint of the outside is not merely a question of obligation (the Lanzmannian witness) but of a creation of a heat, which is transformed into energy activating the pipes. Time and time again, this metaphor of pressure shows up in the work of Philippe Beck, applying itself against the wall faces, producing heat, a heat that produces energy, with the rising and descending air, into the pipes, of the flute’s holes.… For me, this metaphor is the conjunction of three ideas: first, there is the idea of what forces one to think, in this case, the vertical wasteland, the cruel vertical of the death machine. Next, there is the idea of mediation: indeed, what sings is not the bone as bone, nor is it the silent witness. What forces one to think, the pressure of the world or the violence of history is not simply produced by way of a direct form of crying out, of expression that is imprinted. The passage to expression happens by way of a laboring but also by way of a moment of suspension (reverie or passivity). But there is also a third idea which tends toward fulfilling the metaphorical relationship between pressure [pression], impression, and expression, making the machinery a true machine, a kind of anthropological process — I want to refer you here to the extraordinary machine described in the poem “Ouverture” found in Chants populaires, and which Jean-Luc Nancy commented upon at great length this afternoon. I will return to it and simply remind you of several elements: Au ventre de Conteur, il y a la forge, qui suggère parfois la colère précise. L’eau aide la forge. Cœur la chauffe. Il est le centre de forge. Le centre de marteau. Ebullition fait une vapeur de vie 46

que des poumons ou soufflets envoient à Gorge, qui monte au métier de la bouche. Phonerie est la suite. Car vapeur d’eau a des sons dans le préconteur. Il a une pression de vérité en lui.26 In the belly of the Storyteller, There is the forge that sometimes suggests a precise anger. The water helps the forge. Heart warms it. It is forge’s center. The hammer’s center. Boiling makes a vapor of life that the lungs or bellows send to Throat, which rises to the profession of the mouth. Phonery comes next. For water vapor has sounds within the pre-storyteller. He has a pressure of truth inside him.

I’m summarizing it, even though the text is rather astonishing, with this machinery of pressures which is perhaps a kind of anthropological model of the poem. We could consider this anthropological model that sometimes seems to fascinate Philippe Beck, namely the anthropology of Marcel Jousse, which is evoked in Didactic Poetries. For Marcel Jousse, the human being is like a rhythmic or mimetic being, for whom words are gestures integrating the “rhythms of the world,” the pressures of the World. On one hand, Philippe Beck takes back up the idea of this expression machine; on the other hand, he seems to manifest a bit of derision in regard to it: in “Attitude,” one finds a bit of irony regarding 26. Beck, “Ouverture” in Chants populaires, 13. 47

this Marcel Jousse who believes to have resolved the problem of another Marcel, named Proust: how to go from impression to expression? Here, the Jousse machine is a machine for producing tales, whose cost comes in the form of excess steam which the poem’s task is to wring dry. But at the same time, the impersonal machine that transforms the pressure of the world into poetic expression will perhaps remain as a kind of metaphor which states what the poem would like to be, rather than equalizing the saying of the poem with the doing of the poem. And the metaphor of the poem, with this strangely amplified bone, runs the risk of appearing like an interpolation within the narrative schema of the tale. Indeed, once it has developed this poetic art, the poem will take back up the end of the story, the compensation for the good and the punishment of the bad, before adding its own ending, this moment where the poet takes back the reins, and also sings, for his own sake, in the final lines: Reste du Simple du Matin est chanté. Comme un soldat connu. Enroué. Qui fait tapisserie. Et vérité est historiée. Motif dans le tapis. Remainder of the Simple One of the Morning is chanted. Like a known solider. Hoarse. Who makes a tapestry. And truth is historied. Motif in the carpet.

At this specific moment, we can say that the poem will find itself secured, densified, by way of an encryption, which is something that the poem does without saying that it does it, in weaving a certain number of threads, and we can recognize the threads. The first thread: the “unknown soldier” refers to another poem from Didactic Poetries, “The Unknown,”27 inspired by the unknown soldier who, for Philippe Beck, is

27. Beck, “33. The Unknown,” in Didactic Poetries, 113. 48

L’homme à l’article. Ou l’homme déterminé par un article défini, un Général Concret sans Corps. The man in the article. Or, the man determined by a definite article, a Bodiless Tangible General.

Here we go from a poor generalization, of the “Bodiless Tangible General,” toward the good generality that the body of the poem proposes. The second thread is given by way of “makes a tapestry.” And once again we find the Beckian tactic of the inversion of prosaism: “makes a tapestry” here means, prosaically, “simply being there as decoration, as an accessory.” And here the meaning is inverted: “makes a tapestry” signifies becoming the organizing figure of saying, and what is then evoked is the figure in the carpet, the famous short story by Henry James. But this second thread is just as quickly twisted by way of a third thread which will invert it. The image in the carpet, in the work of Henry James, is the emblem of the virtuoso, the all-powerful writer, who possesses the vanity of hiding his secret in the carpet, stating: “Take a look, you are not going to see it!” And yet, it is clear that the tapestry in question here, the one appealed to by way of the story of the singing bone, is of course the tapestry of Philomela, the daughter of the king of Athens who, according to Greek mythology, is raped by her brother-in-law, Tereus, who rips out her tongue to prevent her from talking. She can no longer speak but she can still weave; she will weave the tapestry that will appear before the eyes of the king, and it is precisely this history of rape and mutilation that she will weave. The truth is revealed by way of the weaving by the one whom the criminal had believed to be deprived of speech. Fortunately, everything in the poem is secured at this specific moment. The provoked confusion of this complicated machine of vowels that creates holes, creates a mouth, all the complex stories of vacuum tubes, steam, and other things, that transform the pressure of the world into the singing of the melodious pipes, are found erased, harmoniously covered over by the tapestry, or the puzzle which is constructed by way of adjusting several language formations: the pieces from fairy tales, bits of ancient myths, and finally the stories of those who escaped the camps, all of these 49

language segments are gathered up and brought together into a braid by way of an industrious hand like that of a servant from another of the Grimm fairy tales, “Odds and Ends.” In other words, what makes the poem, what succeeds in making the poem, that is, what grants the poem its power, of speech addressed to an equal addressee, of speech actualizing the capacity for making present in each one of us, is what Philippe Beck (in his dialogue with Gérard Tessier, Beck, l'impersonnage), calls “the return to studies.” “The return to studies” is first of all the retracing of all the already existing current linguistic actualizations of this equal capacity; it is once more a plunge into all these books which bring to the light of day the virtualities of creation that are found within shared or distributed language, starting with the dictionaries of those languages that we willingly claim are dead, whereas Philippe Beck tells us, they open up the impersonal life of meaning. This allows me to cite several beautiful lines from Beck, l’impersonnage: Some speak poorly of the dictionary, of its knowledgeable candor. Dico [dictionary] (Rancière: here again we have the return of the prosaic) is the sphinx of the era. It’s a space that obliges one to read poetically, where legendary definitions are pressed; common nouns are like proper nouns, each time sheltering a life of meaning, the polysemy of the character Word, which is not alone. Dico makes sentences, and cites sentences. It cites the interlines. The body leaning over it feels the availability of the past where people were generalized (nomothetes, linguists, politicians, writers…). In leaning, the body also generalizes, like a researcher in worried pleasure.28

In other words, the condition in order for a lone, a singularity, to succeed in its march toward the other, or to weave a circle of commons, is not simply for the legs to be athletic, nor is it simply for the legs to be set into movement by way of the pressure of the world, but that the lone itself is several, that its hand is also several hands. And the impersonal is perhaps also first and foremost this as well: to be a plurality of egos, or a fabric made by several egos, an intensity composing a multiplicity of intensities created within language and by way of language. In Contre un Boileau, it is stated that discourses “also belong to objects striking the body’s organs” and exerting a pressure on each composition of the body and the 28. Beck and Tessier, Beck, l’impersonnage, 27. 50

soul. But I would say that the “also” is too modest: the discourses of the people don’t “also” arise to complement the objects striking the body’s organs; it’s more than an “also.” It’s the blow [frappe] of several people, of the weaving of the several as such. As much as we want to highlight the ambulatory and productive energy of the artisans of the poem, so strong that we insist on the world’s intensities and the disasters of history that create pressure, that strike against the walls, that make an incision into the body of the real, the impersonal milieu, the resource for producing this impersonal milieu is first of all the great fabric of the productions of language — productions of language which are at once offered up for new operations, but also as the living witness of the productive capacity of the beings of language. At this point, I think it is possible to remove a certain figure of the impersonal: the pressure of the inhuman in its dual figure: the figure of the absolute crime, that moreover has already been greatly developed, which places speech under the injunction of having to speak starting from the horror of the concentration camps, or the soft horror of a horizontal present, of a soft totalitarianism, of an infinite concentration camp which would be the nomos of modernity; and also the pressure of the inhuman other: in the form of the internal machine transforming pressure into expressive energy. Here, the pressure that incites one to write takes on a more positive and affirmative figure, the power drawn forth from a confidence in the common capacity of invention, thus, a capacity of community, not of course being a capacity of emotional embraces, but first of all the capacity for bringing together what doesn’t go together, or which doesn’t yet go together, or no longer goes together. This is what is done by those small communities of distributed [partagé] and shareable bits of language that are woven and re-woven. The capacity of the “rhumans” [rhumains], as I understand it, is not the capacity of the survivors, as we sometimes might be tempted to define it, but the capacity which reactivates the capacity to speak, to create, to walk, present in everyone, but which, by way of their invention, elicit other capacities: the “rhuman” being the one who takes back up the thread, who proves the common by way of the singular inventions he inscribes, on its behalf, into the common of language, and this is done even at the risk of these communities of 51

bits of language taking on the appearance of tiny hedgehogs who evade anyone who would try to grasp them. Perhaps that would be the moral of another tale, the most celebrated children’s fairy tale: “Sleeping beauty,” re-written by Philippe Beck as “Shrub.”29 And in “Shrub,” Philippe Beck insists on the positivity of the separation, regarding the closely clasped branches of the shrubs that surround the castle and which imprison those daring few who are attracted to it; the branches, he says, are like “clasped hands. With firmness.” These clasped hands with firmness protect the moment of the encounter against the pornography of the “sirens with eyes (…) fallen from commerce.” Those who endeavor to pass, attracted to these sirens of commerce, are materially transformed by way of the thorny branches into what they spiritually are, namely, “Addicts.” Like the parting waves of the Red Sea, the branches will only open and let loose their hold for those who know the price of waiting. Bonheur est la suite du Complément des bras ou demi-cercles de la Parenthèse Longue Amour. Happiness is the next stage of Complement the arms or half-circles of a Long Parenthesis Love.

One will notice something interesting here: “Love” is a poetic line of verse unto itself. Here, I’m not going to refer back to the discussion regarding love which takes place in Lyre Dure. Quite clearly, the love of the prince and the princess, the famous kiss, is immediately commented upon as a metaphor for the love that the poem itself assumes. Love is defined elsewhere by Philippe Beck as “ambition + erudition.”30 Ambition, the ambulatory decision, but also the erudite decision, not simply of someone who knows language, but also the decision to rid language of its vulgarity, 29. Beck, “20. Buisson" {Shrub] in Chants populaires, 68. 30. “ambition + érudition = amour,” in Garde-manche hypocrite, (Paris: Textuel, 2004), 59. 52

the vulgarity of the desire of possession. The ambition which lets the sleep of the treasure be, a treasure that is perhaps first and foremost that of language. Belle a vécu à l’arrêt avec des bêtes et des gens derrière le rideau des branches dans le temps. Belle lived at the stop with beasts and people behind the curtain of branches within time.

And at the same time: Beau a senti la nouveauté du bois et de la mer des élans. Le moment d’Amour est redépart des braises et retard important du gris dans la pluie de monde. Par suite des sphères dehors. Beau felt the novelty of the wood and the sea of the rush. The moment of Love is a redeparture from the embers and an important delay of the grey in the rain of the world. By way of the outside spheres.

There is something surprising in this finale: despite the antiRimbaudianism of Philippe Beck, this “re-departure from the embers” sparks the flames for the clarion call for a new love, this new love being simply a modest objective for an “important delay of grey within the rain / of the world.” There is something striking in the act of describing as such this re-departure of the fanning of the flames for what we could call a modest objective, of delaying the rain for a brief moment, and perhaps there is more strength within this modesty than meets the eye. “Music” staged the reconciliation of the axe and the harp, as the happy encounter of two 53

reveries, as a utopia of the poem understood as a happy image (and perhaps too happy, and immediately suspect). To delay the grey thanks to these stones or well-protected hedgehogs, is to also do away with the illusion of the happy encounter, to re-affirm the unconditional “re-departure of the fanning of the flames” which proposes each time to delay the grey, which means to keep the grey at bay, but also to re-deploy the space of the possible. Alain Badiou spoke yesterday about the function of the possibilization of the poem, and I can do nothing more here but wholeheartedly agree in this sense, even if I do so by way of a different manner of argumentation than the arguments he made. The moral of the poem would be this: take time to not finish, in order to begin again, to affirm anew, for example to take up affirmation through the act of creating or making [en faisant], this common capacity of humanity which perhaps has no other sites than these renewed actualizations, but a capacity which nevertheless creates a common world by way of these renewed actualizations. Earlier I evoked the polemic of Philippe Beck, pitting philosophical cowardice against the courage of poetry as the courage of those inventions of thought that jostle thought by way of jostling language; this courage of invention functions on the presupposition of a capacity of those who don’t wait for statistical verifications of this capacity and who don’t let themselves be deterred by realists who claim that none of that will get you very far, that in the end it’s only words on paper, and that furthermore, we don’t understand any of it. I believe that we can indeed see this courage within Philippe Beck’s poems, this power of making the new in taking back up something else and in anticipating the refrain. Modestly, in celebrating this courage, I will nevertheless add a reservation that may prove decisive regarding the argument we spoke of yesterday: namely, the courage demonstrated by the poems, by these singular inventions, will perhaps not be able to present itself as a field or theme of a discipline, or as a specific form of discourse without perhaps rendering itself suspect. Its form is that of thinking, working, and speaking singularities. Which will be my conclusion, after a very long discourse, neither as a philosopher, nor a poet, but simply as a reader.

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Poems

The two poems examined by Jacques Rancière in his presentation are “Music” [“Musique”], poem 3 from Chants populaires (Flammarion, 2007, p. 26-27) and “Complaint” [“Plainte”], poem 12 from the same book (p. 46-48). 3. Musique Il y a une fois M., qui marche en Forêt. Seul vers un seul. Musical rêve. Le venant spirituel prend le dedans de légende. Les jambes avancent avec les jambes. Corps-compas. Jambes mathématiques. Ressort et progression. Elles font des blagues d’en haut et on cherche la matière des jambes. Corps compose des reliefs. Il fait des traces précises. Traces du corps musiquant. Ou musicant. Il violonne en vue de la fin de l’île. Grâce aux études symphoniques. Il ignore la peur. Il attire les bêtes. 55

Musical serre un Loup. Un Renard. Un Lièvre. Attachés au tremble dans l’été. Ils défont les liens, et s’emportent. Musique plaît à Bûcheron. B. rêve. Son cœur monte. Hache est une harpe inconsciente? Harpe de vent presque conscient? Elles voient le Défenseur Emu. L’homme des coups de harpe. Et repartent au fond des bois. Grâce à la hache mélodique. Musicien recommence une pensée de forêt. Ou étude. Il étudie la coupe des pans de glace ou de bois en art, peut-être. Sur la terre qui vient. D’après “Le merveilleux ménétrier” 3. Music Once there was M., who goes for a walk in the Forest. A lone toward alone. Musical dreams. The arriving spiritual takes the inside of legend. Legs advance with legs. Body-compass. Mathematical legs. Springs and progression. From on high they joke and one looks for the matter of the legs. Body composes reliefs. It makes precise traces. 56

Traces of the musicking body. Or musicing. He fiddles with an eye toward the end of the island Thanks to his symphonic studies. He knows no fear. He attracts animals. Musical traps a Wolf. A Fox. A Hare. Attached to the aspen in the summer. They undo the knots, and take off. Music pleases the Woodcutter. B. dreams. His heart rises. Axe is an unconcious harp? An almost concious wind harp? They see the Moved Defender. The man of the harp strokes. And take off again deep in the woods. Thanks to the melodic axe. Musician begins again. a forest thought. Or study. He studies the slabs of ice or wood art. Upon the earth to come. Adapted from “The Strange Musician”

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12. Plainte Dans un pays, Bête stylise des champs. Ses défenses font peur. Elles écrivent quoi? Le sentiment du plus grand. Forêt est laissée. Friche verticale. Qui tue Bête épouse Belle. Supposément. Deux frères avancent. Un rusé, un simple. Simple a bon cœur. Ils vont des deux côtés de forêt. Rusé du côté du soir, Simple Bon du côté du matin. Simple Bon Supposé. Rusé tarde et boit pour avancer. Lièvre de la Peur? Peur est une course. Le plus grand est là. Simple va dans le matin froidement. Et pointe le cœur de Bête. (Il pense à Belle?) Il porte Bête sur le dos. Rusé est grinçant. Il tue le simple frère sur un pont. Et marie la Fille. Plus tard, berger trouve dans le sable un os qui brille. Reste Brillant Seul va chanter. Il convient à la corne d’appel. Pour charmer un troupeau. Foule de bêtes aime un Os de trop. Mais le Reste du Simple chante pour son compte. Groupe dedans. A-t-il une poétique? 58

Voyelle d’os, âme de lettres dans un axe ou corps sans âme avant le pré-chant, le cri absorbé: post-cri, et le pré-discours dans l’apparente jeunesse qui habille l’humain pensif. L’humain pense aux consonnes de monde. Voyelles musiquent des lettres ou trous de la flûte qui demande des doigts pour un discours. Par chant, bouche est l’instrument qui refait un ramage d’oiseau laborieux. R. éclairable. Bouche est absente d’abord. Vent des roseaux ou guirlande dans le sable d’avant un cri donne idée de souffle dans des roseaux ou des os. Cri = consonne + voyelle. Bien. Puis voix refait l’instrument dans de la nature dedans, historiée. Est-ce qu’Humain siffle puis chante et souffle absence? Il siffle dans la main qui pose. La main-roseau prend et fait un message. Sur les grincements. Main souffle quelqu’un. Quant au Monde, il pré-chante par instants d’absence. Reste chante donc un air qui dit l’histoire du pont. Bout de Simple, roseau dur, chante seul, à cause d’un souffle 59

campagnard. Pièce morale. Par campagne. Vérité est éventée. Frère du Soir l’admet. On le coud dans un sac. Une rugosité. Il est à l’eau pour la peine. La peine seconde. Reste du Simple du Matin est chanté. Comme un soldat connu. Enroué. Qui fait tapisserie. Et vérité est historiée. Motif dans le tapis. D’après “L’os chanteur”

12. Complaint In a country, Beast stylizes the fields. His tusks frighten. What do they write? The feeling of what is big. Forest is left vacated. Vertical wasteland. Who kills Beast marries Belle. Purportedly. Two brothers advance. A crafty one, a simple one. Simple One has a good heart. They enter into the two sides of the forest. The Crafty One on the night side, The Good Simple on the morning side. The Good Simple Supposedly. The Crafty One dawdles and drinks in order to advance. Hare of Fear? Fear is a competitive race. The biggest is there. 60

Simple One goes in the morning coldly. And clocks into the heart of Beast. (Is he thinking of Belle?) He bears Beast on his back. Crafty One howls. He kills the simple brother on the bridge. And marries the Daughter. Later, shepherd uncovers a bone which shines in the sand. Remains Shining Alone will sing. It is suitable as a horn. For enchanting a herd. Crowd of beasts like one Bone too many. But Remainder of the Simple One sings for his sake. Groups inside. Does it have a poetics? Vowel of bone, soul of letters in a row or soulless body before the pre-chant, the absorbed scream: post-scream, and the pre-discourse within the apparent youth which clothes the human pensive. The human thinks of the consonants of the world. Vowels musicate letters or flute holes who beg for fingers for a discourse. By chant, mouth is the instrument that reconstructs a laborious birdsong. R. illuminable. Mouth is firstly absent. Wind of reeds or garland in the sand before a scream provides idea of breath 61

in the reeds or bones. Scream = consonant + vowel. Good. Then, Voice reconstructs the instrument of something of nature inside, historied. Does the Human whistle then chant and blow absence? It whistles in the hand that holds. The reed-hand takes and makes a message. From out of the howlings. Hand breathes someone. As for the World, it pre-chants by moments of absence. Remainder therefore sings an air which says The story of the bridge. Piece of the Simple One, hard reed, chants alone due to a rustic breath. A morality play. By countryside. Truth is revealed. Brother of the Evening admits it. He’s stitched into a sack. A rough patch. He is in the water as penalty. The second penalty. Remainder of the Simple one of the Morning is chanted. Like a known solider. Hoarse. Who makes a tapestry. And truth is historied. Motif in the carpet. Adapted from “The Singing Bone”

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Discussion1

Philippe Beck: If you’ll allow me to reassure you right away, Jacques…. I have never used the expression “philosophical cowardice,” you do agree with me there.… You would hardly find one of my texts where that phrase shows up.… Jacques Rancière: Perhaps it was in, let’s say in Beck,

l’impersonnage.…

Philippe Beck: I didn’t speak of cowardice.… Jacques Rancière: …you didn’t speak of cowardice but it ends up referring to pretty much the same thing, anyway. Philippe Beck: No, don’t forget I’m also a professor of

philosophy.…

Jacques Rancière: Yes, I know! Philippe Beck: I would even be rather — how should I put

it — rather wary of such a discourse.… But the distinction between being and doing, is a somewhat underlying one, you no doubt noticed this. I was being somewhat provocative there.…

Jacques Rancière: …That is how I took it! Philippe Beck: …Within the framework of the dialogue, of the

dialogued monograph, in order to say, well: “The philosopher is

1. Transcription by Maxime McKinley. 63

his discourse; the poet is not his discourse.” This is, incidentally, the poet’s humiliation, right? The humiliation of the posture of the poet, because stating that he is not his discourse, his poem, is much more of a humiliation than stating that philosophy is its discourse; in my opinion. Now, when I say that the philosopher does not make his discourse, well, I’m referring, let’s say, to a traditional form of discourse. Jacques Rancière: You say that philosophy teaches one to not

make.…

Philippe Beck: …it teaches one to not make oneself ! Not: to not make in general. Jacques Rancière: Well, okay, we don’t have the exhibit which

we’re referring to here in front of us.2 In any case, it’s not a big

2. The “exhibit” they’re referring to is in Beck, l'impersonnage, (Paris: Argol, 2006) 190, chapter XXV, “Ellipse”: “The difference between philosophy and poetry corresponds to the difference between being [être] and doing or making [faire]. The philosophical élan is a desire (…) for being a lightening within the vibrating expanse. It begins by way of the blinding of many. (…) An appeal to the courage for being major (sapere aude) posits that many are minor and slaves. (…) For Poetry, Reader, the Hypocrite, is major. The major man is and does. (…) The goal of philosophy is officially the aptitude for any man to be a thought, to be the thought that is made in the soul. Philosophy observes the absence of human courage. Poetry acknowledges human courage. Human = maker or doer [faiseur]. Poetry educates beings, who are makers or doers, self-teachers, educators. Human = educator. Philosophy educates children, admits that they are and encourages them to do. Here, to encourage and say everything become one. Philosophy, however, renounces saying everything instantly and infinitely. It implies a negative poetry. A poet, practitioner of the material ellipse, can teach philosophy. The teaching of philosophy is not poetry, or rather it’s a negative poetry. If Poetry refused the themes of thought, it would be absolute suggestion (…) but it would then suppose the absolute maturity of humanity, as animal and divine! (…) Infinitely sensitive poetry states that the human is poetry. Absolute suggestion says nothing. (…) Suggestion places its bet on the sensuality within intelligence. The hatred of the concept is founded upon misology (…), but the hatred of poetry is the hatred of progressive sensuality that philosophy implies. To say everything and to say nothing are one on the indefinite circle of humanity. (…) The passivity of the reader of philosophy, who is wrecking himself within the discourse he cherishes, is a receptivity within consciousness of the aptitude for doing or making something. It’s passivity founded upon worrisome immaturity. The passivity within the reader of poetry is a provisional passivity of the maker or doer [faiseur], it’s an apparent passivity. It’s the receptivity of someone who does or makes something. His reading is an activity or action [acte]. He begins to stretch or pull the discourse like one stretches or pulls back a bow in tension. The contemporaries make and act. This is one of the reasons for the increasing number of poets today. (The precipitation, the assumption of readers of poetry is not at question here.) Fortunately, the patience of those who read philosophy is not infinite, and in order to be one must make and act.” 64

deal. It is quite clear that my interest here is to make things a bit more lively and to exaggerate your discussion a bit.… Philippe Beck: Let’s say that I’m playing the part of the bone! Isabelle Barbéris: Thank you very much, Jacques Rancière, for this magnificent intervention. You said that you exaggerated a bit regarding Philippe’s intentions as a poet. I would like to begin my comments starting from there. It seems to me that you exaggerated the heteronomous dimension of Philippe Beck’s poetry, that is, for me it seemed that you spoke of the distinction that there is between an autonomous art and a heteronomous art, which is not quite the Schillerian distinction but more so the distinction made by Lessing, since you insisted on the Joussian dimension, on this Joussian attitude that is found in the work of Philippe Beck.3 And the question that I then ask myself in listening to you speak about this problem of receptivity is also one based around this impersonnage…. Who is he? Is he someone who is a receptor or a neutral receptacle? Does he play by way of resemblance by way of contact, in order to cite someone else?4 Or perhaps, on the contrary, is he found within autonomy, and within the most rigid autonomy? Because rigidity [dureté], is also both a resistance and an autonomy, and thus a resistance to this heteronomy, to the forest of signs that you described for us.… Jacques Rancière: Well, I didn’t put things in terms of autonomy and heteronomy, because what interests me is not putting something into words, into oppositions, let’s say, borrowed from the Modernist doxa. What interests me is really the Schillerian question of the naïve and the sentimental and what it implies, namely: how to construct the non-constructed [non fabriqué]? It’s true that, well, there is a writer of prose who tells us how — Flaubert — and who does it. And then, there is a poet who claims: “That’s cheating” (Proust said this already, in his own manner, in talking about the Flaubertian “moving sidewalk”). Philippe Beck 3. What is in question here is the autonomy of each art, which is the question that concerns Lessing, but autonomy always risks encapsulating itself into a form itself, and thus does not simply remain a “genre.” 4. Georges Didi-Huberman, La Ressemblance par contact (Paris: Minuit, 2008). This refers to a construction by a mold or direct tactile impression. 65

says: One shouldn’t cheat, one must undo this sort of enchantment coming from prose. But despite everything, it always comes back to this question — where everything gets mixed up with a kind of imperative: on the one hand, the impersonal is something that is produced, but it also must be produced by something that is itself impersonal, something that escapes the person. Which is what leads us to the hydrolic machine inspired by Jousse. But in a certain way, despite everything, everything that the world proposes to us as the source of the poem — whether the source arises out of the most horrible crimes imaginable or even from something good, such as the love of a man for a woman which Alain Badiou spoke about yesterday, this source is never transformed into a kind of hydraulic machine that would produce the poem's energy. One must still hold on, in some way, to this impersonal, which at the same time, in the end, cannot be proven, and can only be infinitely metaphorized if, of course, one refuses the intervention of the witness. To ascribe a poetic art to a bone is obviously a powerful gesture, let’s say a trick, which does nothing more than brutally rehash the problematic of this poetic art itself. So, that’s what I tried to say. I’m not sure if I can say much more about it. At bottom, despite everything, the question really concerns the role of all these machine metaphors. In the end, what is it that makes a metaphor? The metaphor is organized, in a certain manner, by way of the demand of a formulation which otherwise is impossible. But does the metaphor grant this otherwise impossible formulation in the form of the exposed tension, or non-reconciliation? Or does the metaphor grant it, despite everything, in the form of a kind of sleight of hand? Philippe Beck: Well, in that case, we could return to the Schillerian demand.… At bottom, you’ve established a connection between Chants populaires and Didactic Poetries, that not everyone has done.… Jacques Rancière: No. Philippe Beck: On one hand, there are narrative poems —

which, all the same, are still narrative poems (I agree, it’s a bit complicated, but they are still narrative poems). Then, on the 66

other hand, you have didactic poems (which, moreover, can also have narrative dimensions). In the end, you have transformed the Chants, well, not transformed them, but, to simplify things, you have taken the Chants for didactic poems…. Jacques Rancière: …Well, as poems that could be explained by way of the poetics found in Didactic Poetries. We could put it somewhat like that…. Philippe Beck: Right. And, rightly so, should we understand them in the sense of reflexive poems which Alain Badiou evoked yesterday, namely, poems which simply, in the end, posit themselves outside of themselves, or is it a question of didactic poems in the sense that Schiller dreamed of, which is to say, poems that, while being didactic, would still entirely remain poems? On the back cover of Didactic Poetries [referring to the original French version], there is the following passage: “The didactic poem wherein thought itself is poetic and remains so is yet to be seen.” And what is utterly striking, and you are right in saying so, is that it was a dream for Schiller himself, namely: there are extraordinary passages within his correspondence with Goethe, where he doubts what he dreams — that is, he doubts the capacity of the poem to arrive at the limit of itself while still remaining a poem. Well, obviously, it was easy for Hegel to say, in his Lectures on Aesthetics, that in the end, when poetry arrives at its own limit, it ends up spilling over onto the side of the philosopheme, on the side of the philosophical. Hegel has the tendency to simultaneously simplify and remind himself, that he is aware that this question of poetry’s limit is rather complicated: he is always at the edges of somewhat difficult questions, and then he just stops. But Schiller explicitly says: “The didactic poem in which the thought itself is poetic and remains so is yet to be seen.”5 “Remains poetic,” which means that it would, obviously, always risk ceasing to be so. So, I asked myself if, at bottom, the contradiction that you highlighted, the effect of Chants populaires transformed into didactic poems — in order to simplify things — was a contradiction that perpetuated Schiller’s contradiction — Schiller’s problem which can be 5. Friedrich Schiller, On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime, trans. Jules Elias (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1967), 131. 67

summarized via the following phrase — either it was made in order to simply state, in a Hegelian way, that in the end, the poem arrives quite simply at its limit (here we’re dealing with “the death of art,” if you will, in order to simplify things), and poetry spills over into something other than poetry. Since you said you are taking a stake in the Schillerian ground, let’s say, have you not yourself discreetly, spilled over into the Hegelian side, or…? Jacques Rancière: No, but the Schillerian site for me is not

simply the question of knowing whether the didactic poem is still a poem: it’s the question of the naïve and the sentimental.… The question of didactic poetry is inscribed within the interior of the question of the naïve and the sentimental and of their hypothetical ascent into an “ideal” poetry. If we take didactic poetry as an idea that can be transmitted in a musical manner [se musique], well, obviously, we find ourselves returning to a prejudicial question, namely, whether there is a possible poetry which is not a re-elaboration of something that is already poetic. As far as the precise question concerning a didactic poetry, I can’t help but refer back at the same time to the more general question at the heart of Schiller’s preoccupation — which obviously can be used as a kind of transition toward the Hegelian operation — namely the possibility of a poetry that isn’t always preceded by an already pre-existing poeticity. This is what allows me, in a certain manner, to play this kind of game, between Didactic Poetries and Chants populaires, even though I’m well aware of your way of making [faire], which, in a certain way, is an attempt at reanimating certain genres by adopting the poetics which suits each of them. And I would understand if you eventually ended up unsatisfied since you attempt to follow the logic of a genre, and someone callously arrives and, just like that, takes a bit belonging to one genre and pastes it onto one belonging to another….

Philippe Beck: But genres are contiguous…. Jacques Rancière: Yes, of course, but I said what I was going

to do…. Perhaps I did it rather poorly.… I said that was the case!

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Philippe Beck: But in any case, I reassured you. You had every

right to say what you were doing and to do what you were saying … which you did magnificently, by the way.

Isabelle Barbéris: Are there any other questions from anyone

else? Or any comments, surely.…

Stéphane Baquey: I’m going to attempt to ask a question, but

it’s really indeed nothing more than an attempt. At the beginning, Jacques Rancière, you made a distinction between participation and distribution. You said that what comes from the participation of the multiple and the One [du multiple et l’Un], in the manner Alain Badiou understood it in Lyre Dure, you reformulated it as a distribution [partage]. And yet, you didn’t choose the same book as the book you chose to read, and you chose the figure of the interlocutor, or interlocutors.…

Jacques Rancière: It was about the proper name and the com-

mon name, I wasn’t intervening regarding the interlocutor. It was about grammatical operations that are, at the same time, operations which displace [bouger] the relations of the specific and the common, of the abstract and the concrete, of substance and the accident. That is still what is done by Philippe Beck’s subjects.…

Stéphane Baquey: …and about multiplicities. The multiplici-

ties of the name....

Jacques Rancière: Yes. I simply meant to say something so as

to provide an opening for a question which should be developed for its own sake. This simply means that these operations indeed have something to do with the question of participation. In any case, the question of participation is found everywhere, even if it is not exactly the same in regard to Lyre Dure. Except, for me, the question of participation is always tied to another question which is that of distribution [partage]. We could say, to put it in a somewhat brusque and hurried manner, that the political relation of the One with the multiple is always tied to the relation of several ones with the multiple. What we could call the cognitive question of the relation of the One with the multiple is always tied in some 69

way to taking into account those who can account for the One, of those who are considered as individuals, as individualities, as unities and of those who are not considered unities, but who are only accounted for as belonging to the mass. I’m saying all of this so I can remind you that I made an allusion to Mallarmé, regarding the relation of the poem to those who don’t have a proper name, to those whose “births fall into anonymity.”6 But maybe I misunderstood your question.... Stéphane Baquey: …No, but my question wasn’t heading any-

where else ... it was simply a remark.…

Jacques Rancière: Once again, what I wanted to do was simply

to throw something out there in order to provide a horizon for my reading of those two poems by Philippe Beck, but that would really require devoting several hours to them.

Isabelle Barbéris: Yes, you have a question, Rémi Bouthonnier.… Rémi Bouthonnier: You spoke about the “inhuman outside.” And you spoke of the violence of history made for this inhuman outside. And yet, it’s an intra-inhuman or an interhuman, that humanity must bear. So it’s a human inhuman, if I can put it that way. And for me, it’s not a blind force: it’s not a storm, or a cataclysm. So, I wanted to make this comment in order to simply ask you for your insights into this.… Jacques Rancière: So here we have the equation — the relation between the inhuman outside and the inhuman inside — I didn’t invent this relation. I’m not sure where it is in the work of Philippe Beck, but well.… Perhaps it’s nowhere, in the end! Sometimes we make things up [invente].… Earlier, with Philippe Beck, we talked about one of Béla Tarr’s cinematic shots which I assured him did not exist in Béla Tarr’s work, whereas, perhaps I am actually speaking of a passage from the work of Philippe Beck which doesn’t exist in Philippe Beck’s work.…

6. Stéphane Mallarmé, “Conflict,” in Divagations, 46. 70

Philippe Beck: Oh it does … yes.…7 Jacques Rancière: I think that he wrote something like that somewhere. The inhuman outside is clearly a reference to the violence of history, that is, of course, a reference to humanity’s inhumanity, humanity becoming a beast, if you will, of humanity becoming, obviously, a destructive force of humanity. In any case, it's an inhuman that has nothing at all to do with the post-human being discussed a lot right now. Really, the inhuman is not the parliament of things [le parlement des choses], nor the role granted to the specters and cyborgs within “post-human” politics. It’s truly the human inhuman. Philippe Beck: Alain, I’d like to hear what you have to say

regarding this question of didactic poetry.…

Alain Badiou: But I didn’t have the intention of speaking about that at all.… At bottom, if we take the poem “Music”: what you said, which is a real problem, is that the poem, initially, does not appear in a state for stating why “Musical” and “Woodcutter” go together. And yet, this is precisely what is truly at stake. And truthfully, the poetic solution — and it’s here where we can really question its status — resides in the correlation between the words “harp” and “axe.” This is how the question of the “Musical” and “Woodcutter” can be poetically resolved, which is at the same time, the true heart of the poem. So, when I re-read it, the poem begins by way of very significant questions.… Axe is an unconscious harp?”

Second question: An almost concious wind harp? They see the Moved Defender The man of the harp strokes. And take off again deep in the woods. Thanks to the melodic axe. 7. The expression “the inhuman outside” appears in “35. Blotting Paper” in Didactic Poetries, 115; and in Beck, l’impersonnage, 154-155. 71

In reality, the poem — after having formed a question — effectuates the answer to the question in actually transforming the harp into an axe, and the axe into a harp since the harp becomes a melodic axe, and the harp itself becomes an axe. So, what I would like to know is how you yourself qualify the precise status of this operation, as, in a strictly internal way to language, the act of the poem proposing the solution to the question it itself poses.… Because it is here within this very act where we can say that the fabrication, the poetic machine, is calibrated, that it functions, literally! Furthermore, it is the poem’s capacity to transform an axe into a harp that is the effective solution to the problem that is posed, as a problem that, in the end, came from the world. The poem of the relation between the artist and the people, metaphorized here as the relation between the Musical and the Woodcutter. Philippe Beck: Can I add one more thing? The figure which is behind this comparison between the axe and the harp — which is not merely phonetic, or phonic — is the figure of the Aeolian harp. Which is simply to say that when the axe cuts, it makes a sound: the wind can be heard. When I wrote this, I was thinking about that. So, the intermediary figure kills, passing into silence, it’s the Aeolian harp as the instrument of nature itself. It is the wind harp. The musician is the wind. There is also an allusion to that as well.… So, the question is, obviously, the link between instruments that have a specific utility and musical instruments which are not supposed to be useful; but ethnomusicology has demonstrated to a large degree to what extent things are much more complicated. The work of Schaeffner, as well as many others, has shown over the years to what degree there were musical arcs, etc. So, we’re not dealing with a simple case of reverie or an arbitrary dream.… Alain Badiou: I wasn’t at all implying that! Philippe Beck: Well, within the concrete context that we can imagine, if you allow me to gloss the poem — and excuse me for also being a reader of my own work … as it so happens, within the anamnesis of the poetic operation in question, the 72

woodcutter — who, moreover, dreams of making music, and who is available for learning music — is someone who is, still, quite close to what the poem is also speaking about: namely, recognizing the first moment when musical instruments are invented. There is also a passage that is almost a wholesale utterance of Lucretius, dealing with the musical reed. So, here we have a re-staging of this scene which took place in the poem. It might seem to be arbitrary … well, we all know that an axe is not a musical instrument. But in reality, ethnomusically speaking, it’s very complicated. There are several reasons for thinking, moreover, that useful instruments often arise out of musical instruments. So, well, I’m not going to go into the details about this…. I say this simply in order to weaken the eventual expression claiming an arbitrary phonetics, etc. But this woodcutter who chases off the animals with his axe, who scares them, simply by lowering his axe, in making a frightening noise, is standing within the beginnings of music, and quite simply, the beginning of sound, the moment when the hand continues in order to make a sound. And there is a kind of unity here, that eventually becomes unconscious, between the activity of the woodcutter and the activity of the musician. Namely: within the woodcutter, there resides a powerful musician and not simply someone who wants to learn music. So, there you have my quick gloss … but…. Alain Badiou: Well, you provided us with a rather coarse reading, but also with a rather large unspoken dose of considerable erudition…. Philippe Beck: Yes, but I think this reading can be had as well, at

least I believe it to be the case….

Jacques Rancière: Well, I’m not so sure about that. I do think

that the question is the relation between the two people who work with their hands. It’s not the artist and the people. If the opposition is posed, what is at stake is still proving that the violinist, with his violin, activates the power which resides within the woodcutter. One must place it in relation with the tradition that makes an anti-poet out of the woodcutter, that is, the one who destroys the beloved trees of the poet. And even then, the woodcutter 73

also resides within the principle of the anti-poet. If we think of “Against the Woodcutters of Gastine” by Ronsard, for example. But I do think that’s what is at the heart of it, and I think we can say that it is resolved by way of an excess [dépassement], because what disappears is the violin. In a certain way, if the relation is between the violin and the axe, the violin can only reconcile itself in the end by disappearing: the axe becomes the harp. Philippe Beck can always propose an anthropological or ethnomusicological explanation, but that is an explanation for him alone. For the reader, what truly functions is really the assonance. The assonance of “hache” and “harpe,” which is a kind of formidable linguistic invention, because even the Aeolian harp does not make us think of the axe.… Even if there is wind — and the wind, we all know the role it plays in regard to the reeds, etc. — and the Aeolian harp, normally wouldn’t evoke an axe to anyone. Annie Guillon-Lévy: In the poem, “Complaint,” the bone is

also the mouth … the bone passes immediately by way of the mouth … and it’s the mouth which is going to come take…. Par chant, bouche est l’instrument qui refait un ramage d’oiseau laborieux. By chant, mouth is the instrument that reconstructs a laborious birdsong. And: Voyelle d’os, âme de lettres Vowel of bone, soul of letters

To me, it seems like what’s taking place here is a kind of translanguage. Well, this is how I read it.… And then, the bone and the reed, obviously.… To me, the reed also beckons the mouth.…

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Jacques Rancière: Yes, but at the same time, it is stated that the “Mouth is first of all absent.” But obviously, at this point in the poem, it’s the vowels that invent the: trous de la flûte qui demande des doigts pour un discours. flute holes who beg for fingers for a discourse.

Mouth then simply appears at this moment. So, I don’t know if it’s here that Lucretius intervenes, or if that has any importance here or not. Philippe Beck: Yes, yes, it does. In the end, what we’re dealing

with here is sound. Does the mouth not begin within natural sound? And this is precisely what is at issue. In any case, I’m not going to gloss the poem, but.… And perhaps I haven’t truly authorized the extension of your question by my gloss?

Annie Guillon-Lévy: Not yet…. Alain Badiou: It’s not really an extension.… I was looking for a way to isolate an example of an operation which would be, in all respects, strictly poetic — around which we could all agree that it was completely poetic, and moreover, strictly within language — and which operates here, within the poem, as the solution to a problem posed by the poem itself and which is its fundamental morality, because it’s the poem of the possibility of a poem — incarnated, within the circumstances, by the musical [le musical], the musician, etc. — that would resolve the problem of the addressing of the poem to something other than.… You see? Moreover, in several ways the poem, in addressing itself to the woodcutter, is the poem operational with respect to the woodcutter? That is: they go off into the forest together, then they were separated, then they are brought back together. This much is clear.

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Judith Balso: We no longer even have “Musical” and “Woodcutter,” we have “Musician.” And we have a displacement. Because you haven’t commented on the end of the poem.… Musicien recommence une pensée de forêt. Ou étude. Musician begins again a forest thought. Or study.

So something else takes place, it’s not simply the happy encounter. Jacques Rancière: Right. Judith Balso: At the least, this happy encounter produces a new

space, which is that of a “forest thought.”

Alain Badiou: Precisely. Judith Balso: We all agree on that in any case.… Alain Badiou: Yes, precisely. This poem is really a political fable, that is incontestable. To use some big words, it’s the fable of the linking of the masses [liaison de masse]. It’s the intellectual lost in the forest who can only find his way out by way of an alliance with the woodcutter. Tiphaine Samoyault: But to follow this line of thinking, it’s

a question that has been posed by poetry for a very long time, since it’s also a political response similar to Ronsard’s injunction — “Listen, woodcutter, can you stop with the arm a bit”8 — where the poet places himself in the position of an imperial, or in any case magisterial, lesson in relation to the woodcutter, in asking him to listen to the music. And here, on the contrary, we are within a form of equality where this request is no longer there, or in a certain way, it has been completed, it’s been worked out. Well, it has been worked out, precisely in the way that Alain 8. Pierre de Ronsard, “Contre les bûcherons de la forêt de Gastine,” in Élégies, XXIV. 76

Badiou just spoke of, and which you also demonstrated, namely: from within the interior of poetry. And this is where I think there is also another political stake that we shouldn’t forget. I imagine you also thought about this, Philippe? Philippe Beck: I thought about this, then I also thought about

what one could reproach about it, including [Jean-Baptiste] Lully: being a woodcutter, with this staff.…

Judith Balso: He died from it! Philippe Beck: He died from it.… There is even a fable about it,

“the little prophet of Boehmischbroda.” We say that the musician would have had a magnificent career as a woodcutter, that he missed out on his vocation. And this poem is somewhat a reversal of that one.… Okay, just one other remark.… Like everyone else, I laughed when I heard you do a pastiche of a pastiche of Flaubert, etc. I thought: “At bottom, why don’t I do that?” I didn’t wonder why you decided to do it, but I wondered why I didn’t decide to do it. Obviously, I know why I didn’t decide to do it, that is, to do a pastiche.… For the simple reason that I don’t practice the pastiche. But it’s true that I do condense tales — well, it’s more like narrative poems — I once condensed Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner into a compact poem of fifteen lines of verse, if you will, in a manner that nevertheless was syntactical. Whereas, Flaubert … who is obviously present in Contre un Boileau, and not simply as a foil.… Why — and not simply because I don’t do pastiche — wouldn’t I do it, in regard to a section of a novel (since that’s what we’re talking about)? You quoted the beginning of Sentimental Education, almost as a prose poem, right?

Jacques Rancière: Yes, there is also the question of the invasion

of the novel by the prose poem. All this is connected, how the novel, born as an imperial genre, is at the same time phagocyted [phagocyté] by its other, which is the prose poem. In the end, we can summarize it all with four lines from Flaubert.

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Philippe Beck: I will come back to what Tiphaine said this

morning.… Actually, I won’t go into it.…

Tiphaine Samoyault: Because it’s not the guide-prose. It’s

another prose.…

Philippe Beck: At the same time, I won’t go into it. There is a writing which is that specific kind, and I have no reason to make it compact, to summarize it. As for the Brothers Grimm, that’s a whole other ordeal. By simply reading their tales to my children, I said to myself: “This is weird.” Something very weird is happening in these fairy tales, there are some real gems here. It’s as if there were, within the prose, truly powerful poems, as if they were calculated for giving off the virtual presence of a poem, with all that the poem can imply, with its constrictions, its densifications, and everything else. And in reading them, I said to myself quite simply: “There is this possibility that is opened up by prose.” So, I touched at this, a bit if you will, in a certain way. Despite the fact that they remain what they are and that at the end of the poems, I denoted them as, “Adapted from.…” (Jean-Luc Nancy spoke a bit about this “Adapted from”). But I would never do that, I would never make a pastiche out of prose. I didn’t do that. It’s a bit crazy, but I’ve never tried to do this with a section of a novel. Short stories, fairy tales, that’s a completely different matter; for me, the novel is something else. Fairy tales and short stories, for me, are something completely different than the novel. Jacques Rancière: But in any case, for me here, it’s nothing more than a way to emphasize the poetic work of the disenchantment of prose. That was the object of my intervention. In any case, my joke was indeed a way of highlighting the operation made by the enjambement in regard to the lovely continuity of the prose. Philippe Beck: Well, the enjambement…. Okay, well, we’re

not going to speak too long about that, but enjambement, in the manner that Malherbe critiqued it, was that enjambement denied verse, because the phrase continued, but it did not simply continue until the beginning of the next line: literally, it could go very far (all the way to considering Proustian poems). But the 78

rejet is an entirely different ordeal. Conversely, the rejet to the extent that it’s at the very beginning of the next line, implies a return to the preceding verse. And here, you’ll have to excuse me for being a bit technical, but one has to really make a distinction between a “rejet” and an “enjambement,” because the “enjambement” stretches the verse out, all the way to a negation of the preceding verse (at the least it appears that way), whereas the rejet, in certain manner remunerates the line: it helps it to exist.… Jacques Rancière: …Right, that’s an object up for discussion.

I’m not convinced about this distinction between the two, and that we can’t in any case exchange the use of enjambement or rejet for the same operations. That is, that we can certainly provide a different meaning to each function, but which perhaps is the same function. We can’t say for example in “escalier / Dérobé,”9 the “dérobé” really magnifies the preceding line.… Philippe Beck: …well, it doesn’t exactly …“magnify,” but.… Jacques Rancière: …or that it even refers back to the preceding

line; it is forgotten!

Philippe Beck: But if you have a decasyllable then a disyllable,

obviously there is a truncation, a cut-up alexandrine, but the alexandrine is remunerated by way of the cut itself. You see what I’m getting at? What I mean is that it’s not the same thing as stretching out the line — as Royère said in regard to the subject of La Fontaine — all the way to the entire stanza, or to the entire poem; whereas here, obviously, we can pose the question about the status of the line.…

Jacques Rancière: Right, well, this is the whole question about legs which reveal themselves as legs.… Philippe Beck: Here, we uncover your first movement.… In the

beginning, when we started speaking about this colloquium, your idea for a topic was “Genre and Form,” then “From poetry to the poem,” and now you.… I was going to say, you are returning to

9. See the beginning of Hernani (1830) by Victor Hugo. 79

prose. But the journey of your thought is interesting. In any case, I want to thank you for it.

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Dialogue with Philippe Beck

Jacques Rancière: Behind the more or less ludic question regarding the quarrel between poetry which makes and philosophy which is, there is the essential question of what poetry does: what poetry does to language within the practice of the poem; what poetry does to thought as intervention regarding language; what poetry does to politics by way of its manner of pooling words for an appeal to a possible community. Your practice of the poem strongly ties together these three themes starting with a ground which is that of the Romantic’s problem of the poem about the poem. A manifesto of a programmatic vocation within the texts of Athenaeum in your work becomes an effective labor of a re-poeticization of the poetic, whether it’s a question of re-awakening the latent poetry within prose — found in popular fairy tales or critical examination of texts — or a question of reviving supposedly defunct or obsolete genres — from the idyll to the didactic poem. It always seems to be at the same time a question of obeying a dual condition: to reconstitute a dense fabric of the poetic and to rework this fabric by way of operations with a reflexive character. And this dual labor is located within the horizon of the vocation of poetry that is willingly expressed by way of an anthropology of the poetic instrument. I would like to return to this node — language, thought, community — starting from what is most obvious: the combination you make between the lyric — in the broadest sense — and the reflexive, between a specific labor in the hammering of language and an operation by which the poem returns to the already constituted poetics, to a poeticity which is already present within the things themselves, whether in an explicit or latent manner. If we start with the two poems I commented on, we could say that within the two Brothers Grimm fairy tales that are used, they perform several operations 81

simultaneously: they extract a discourse from the tale regarding the poem, a discourse that is articulated around an equivalence between two materialities (the axe and the harp in “Music”; the bone and the mouth in “Complaint,” simultaneously united by way of the indirect link of the flute and the direct link of Latin); they re-mythologize the fairy tale, the popular German fairy tale in re-awakening the tapestry of Philomela behind the story of the singing bone; but above all they perform three broad formal operations on the text: a refinement which, outside of the ordinary practice of the contraction of the text, goes through constant processes within your poetry (the short phrases, the subtraction of adjectives, the use of initials); a scansion which tends to verticalize the horizontal of the tale; an interpolation, which is presented here as an interpretation of the tale (the anthropology of the poetic instrument). Of course, these levels become mixed (for example, the suppression of adjectives is also a means of re-mythologizing). But I would like to try to untangle them by starting from the most immediate question: to what extent can these formal operations of poetry that return to already existing texts, be thought of as reflexive operations? Philippe Beck: There are several points in your question, but I see a center in them: didactic lyricism (rather than lyrical didacticism) or the reflexive chant [chant] inasmuch as it forms a poem. In replying to your question, I’m not trying to make an external theory of the didactic chant, but to reconstitute the formal forces in the manner in which they are preferred practically within poems. It’s a question of usus, of need or necessity for a number of speakers [parlants]. First of all, I should say that I don’t inscribe myself within the continuity of the first Romanticism, if only inasmuch as the synthesis of poetry and philosophy is now at the very least put on hold; the “critical poem” in the sense of Mallarmé is probably suspended as well. But fragment 116 of Athenaeum should be re-read closely, and we’re not here for that. Contre un Boileau is opposed to the tautegorical and synthetic power of the hedgehog-poem. Let’s say that I’m not making a “universal progressive poetry” unless you convince me otherwise! The project of reconstituting the poem in the form of prose is easily explained by the fact that certain prose always circulates within what is 82

(still) called a poem. Do I continue to overestimate the poetic texture that results from it? No doubt I cling to the idea of poetry, because we cannot not think prose without a preliminary poetic idea, without the idea of an exact text where each word is the best, etc., for example in order to “give prose the rhythm of verse.”1 Which means that the problems raised by the first Romanticism are still pending. But I don’t have the intention of re-mythologizing the singing and sung figures within the textural reasoning of a language that remains poems, which I call “chants” at the risk of provoking modernist irony or conservative compassion. At the least, I’m sure that I’m not engaging in a re-mythologization of the poem, if that implies the reconstruction of a tyrannical tale, of a texture which would imprint itself onto all beginning or continuing souls. Rather, I’m attempting to rediscover the texture of these contemporary souls within a language that translates their affects and “undulations” within movement. (Moreover, it’s not another language than their own — than our own.) Can you tell me what you mean by “re-mythologization?” We can agree on the fact that the announcement or program of a “new mythology” is not what we need. The question remains of the didactic poem; it’s the question of Schiller, and Hegel (a Schillerian), more so than the question of the first Romantics. Schiller has a non-romantic expectation: “The didactic poem in which the thought itself is poetic and remains so has yet to be seen.”2 What is a didactic chant that remains a chant, or a reflexive chant stating its outside (the rhythm of the instructed and instructive world)? Now, is re-writing a reflexive operation ipso facto? The poem gives way to an intensification of latent or non-developed processes within re-written or “deduced” corpus, the impressive corpus; the condensation, the dry, objective (rhumid [rhumide]) critical lyricism, finds a place in the non-singing [non chantant] text, which is the foundation (the beautiful lessoning [leçonnante] prose of the Brothers Grimm, contemporary recensions, etc.). The “nonsinging” text (but which is a song or chant labored upon or powered by the idea of an exact chant) is the starting point for a “dense deduction (its intensity is at the same time tight and 1. Gustave Flaubert to Louise Colet, 22 July 1852, in The Letters of Gustave Flaubert: 1830-1957, trans. Francis Steegmuller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980) 182. 2. Schiller, 131. 83

loose)”: wherein a reflection of the poem in its aged and living material is operated upon rather than used as the pretext for a meta-poem or an unfolded recorded tape roll of “selfconsciousness.” The poetic operations that you detail or enumerate to me seem, in some way, directed by the pressure placed on us by our epoch as continued children. To which we might add the fact that writing is always re-writing: Rabelais re-writes Castiglione who re-writes Plutarch (and Rabelais re-writes Plutarch, etc.). Writing is a conditional thaw. Reflexivity is a modality of the chant which re-writes already condensed efforts and, sometimes, the chant reflects its process of reprisal and displacement. As for the meta-poem, it relegates the chant (the intensity of the Saying which is always a re-making or a “re-edification”) and takes itself for an object in a mirror, whatever the material may be; in my eyes, the reflexive chant places into tension what is thought in a latent and frustrating manner (and creates a need) within the material of deduction. There is a kind of cry of mundane material [matériau mondain], which is progressively elaborated in the history of men and which requires transpositions or “communications.” The said [le dit] or the to say [à dire] is never indifferent or secondary, since there is always something to say again, which is already being said again under the sun. We can call what you speak of a deductive, analytic, or sentimental chant, and not simply a poem of the poem. It’s rather a question of a poem which reflects the problems of the world within an “old” form that has become material for a new form. It’s a Baudelairian problem. Because the forms are not alone; they swing “between the hem and flounces.”3 It still remains true that the figures such as the singing bone or others take on a reflexive importance, and speak of speech, etc. Speech is a thing of the world. The “instances of the poem” are not the lone characters of Chant populaires; I would say that they are characters among others. Besides, the words themselves are characters, and they all have, in principle, an equal importance. Have I answered your question?

3. Charles Baudelaire, “To a Passer-by” in The Flowers of Evil, trans. William Aggeler (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954). 84

Jacques Rancière: To re-mythologize can, actually, be taken

in several ways. And I was not thinking here about the project created by the young Schelling, simply about the effect of certain poetic procedures that are familiar to you, such as the suppression of the article. To subjectify [subjectiver] by way of these proper nouns — Music, Discourse, Grovel, Language, or Gesture (Lully and Rameau) — is to create an operation that recalls these jousts between personified abstractions which rightfully served as a prologue for the operas of early times [temps premiers] and which themselves recalled the personified abstractions of Homer or Hesiod more so than the Greek tragedy which these operas wanted to resuscitate. But, obviously the heart of the problem is not the re-mythologization but the rapport between rewriting and reflection. A rapport which I don’t think we can get rid of by simply stating that “writing is always re-writing.” Because, the demands [l’exigence] of the poem have often precisely been identified as that of a writing which is not a re-writing: whether it is a question of thinking a poem that immediately arises from out of its inner source or a poem that bears witness to the impossibility of saying and always projects toward the indeterminate future of a Poem to come — a figure to which we can reattach the poet which you evoke in Opéradiques in order to illustrate “pagism.” The “re-” creates a problem. And if many have said, since the Brothers Schlegel, that the poetic precedes poetry, we would be hard pressed to find another poet who so systematically took a pre-existing textual corpus for the materials of his poems. More specifically, what creates a problem is the rapport between the “re-” and the “pre-.” Because there are two ways of understanding it. There is the manner of viewing poetry as the soul itself of prose and which proposes itself to the “re-poem” of freeing the poetry that is virtually present in this or that prose, for example, in one of the Grimms’ fairy tales or an article by Wyzeva; and there is the manner where poetry is directed to listen for the poetry that arises before language, out of the power whereby all material reality tends toward a becoming-expressive, for example, like the biosystem of a California forest analyzed by Bernie Krause. The two “popular chants” that I chose for my study weave a significant braid between these two ways of considering poetry. The latent poeticity freed up by way of the poetic re-working liberates 85

a poetry that is also a reflection “on” poetry. And this reflection itself refers to a certain anthropology which gives birth to the power of the poem alongside the instrument: the harp is related to the axe or the anthropological machine which reconstitutes the passage from the bone to the revelatory chant. In the same way your “frozen words” are not content with re-writing Rabelais, re-writing Castiglione re-writing Plutarch. Within Rabelais’s tale, they interpolate a whole other story [histoire] than that of the thawing of words — even if Orpheus is used in order to create the connection: the sawmill, heard by Thoreau, the orphic chant-like sound of the wood shredding which anticipates its future vocation as a musical instrument (Thoreau says “perchance,” which adds to this possible future and its normal future as material for construction in order to house humans). Everything happens as if the thawing of words could only come to symbolize the poetic act by following a certain vision of the “pre-” as the anticipation of art within the work of material matter [matière] on material [matière]. As if the operation of “re-writing” specific to every humanist tradition should be re-activated by way of a new myth of “the invention of music” in order to give rise to these operations (abbreviations, enjambements, or rejets) which, like a saw, cut up the wood of the “frozen” text into new units of thinking speech. Would the life of wood / within the transcendentalist forest be a kind of necessary imaginary transversal in order for the vertical of the poem to render operational — and instructive — the humanist operations of re-writing? Philippe Beck: I understand better what you mean by “re-

mythologization,” even if I refuse to use that word, for all sorts of reasons and above all for political reasons. Yes, a sensitive reasoning is a kind of joust of personified abstractions, common nouns becoming proper nouns within the spaced thinking of the poem, and proper nouns, becoming otherwise common and proper, in tension or “ballet”: for us, on a daily basis, the choreography of entities, idealities, etc., are nothing more than the ballet of their “incarnations” — they present themselves, become incorporated, and are simply the body of their presentations. This is also why I take La Fontaine seriously. We could ask ourselves why, despite its status as a classic, the La Fontaine poem is no longer taken very 86

seriously today. This can’t simply be explained as a result of the “minor” genre of the fable (brimming with Aesopian morality), nor by the fact that the fable is meant (or addressed) for children since “everything speaks in my work, even the fish.” Children are reasoning beings, and the poem seeks out its great children, its true children who perceive the serious game or ballet of entities and concepts. There is indeed a balance scale [une pesée] of sensitive reasons within the heterometry, the undulating game of figures who appear and withdraw in order to better make their return and make sense, dramatically. If I make the poem out to be “absolutely scenic, not just ‘capable of being staged’ but ‘demanding the stage’”4 according to Mallarmé’s acute expression, it’s first of all because thought, by way of language, always has to deal with poetic impersons that dance, circulate, in or out of tune (Lully and Rameau, Lully and La Fontaine — the Florentine Wolf and the Lamb remaining a Lamb, etc.). The “mythological” question that you pose is in reality Orpheus’s question: what can he do to language, to thought in the language of today? What is his force? It’s true that here, there is a mise-en-abyme, within “Mot gelés”5: Orpheus is the possible origin of sounds whose frost didn’t empede the sounds of his chant. Orpheus can’t avoid glaciation; so we’re dealing with a conditional orphism. Of course, the poem can’t do everything, and nevertheless the erudition contained within it is the erudition of everyone (Pantagruel formulates available hypotheses) — since even Orpheus knows that the world with its texts precedes him. (He does not represent the beginning of oral literature.) To make language again can only be done by way of exercising a new violence upon the material and making the wood scream, sawing the wood of words in order to compose the thinking-dwelling of a world. Orphism is a violence. Humanism is diffuse or horizontal, if you will, which is also the transmission of the violence of tales and myths, etc. Rabelais doesn’t escape from this violence, Rabelais who first of all embeds a theological satire addressed to the “literalists” and idolaters of Papimania; but is the position of those who left Papimania that simple? They were the ones who heard and drew attention to the sounds of the words 4. Stéphane Mallarmé to Henri Cazalis, June 1865, in Selected Letters of Stéphane Mallarmé, trans. Rosemary Lloyd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 32. 5. Beck, “Mots gelés” [Frozen words] in Opéradiques (Paris: Flammarion, 2014). 87

by “thawing them.” They don’t wait for springtime to arrive. Who will administer this thawing? It’s not the Inherited Orpheus. I try to feel all these questions by way of a “literal rhythm” within a kind of heterometric warbling. I don’t think I do away with the pending question of re-writing within the reflective poem that I have chosen to reflect upon once again by claiming that the recirculation of antique or previous texts is exercised in a democratic mode rather than an aristocratic (humanistic) one. We’ve been completely stuffed full with “humanities,” whether we know it or not. “Rhumanity” is at stake. Humanism is this violence of its transmission within our words, which is transmitted within us; the row of assassins align themselves in the frozen sea of the poems of each of us, and each of us must find the abandoned axe in order to break through the ice, including the ice of the poetic expression illusorily called to compensate (to re-enchant) the prose of the murderous world. Hence the displacement of the usage in the goal of “re-charming charmless” (the process of reduction, etc., which you spoke of, which shouldn’t turn into “ticks-tricks”), rather than a negation of the usage actually using, used and full of possibilities: not just any poet can invent another language and, nevertheless, Khlebnikov matters to Celan. So, what is produced in the past is simply a possible; and so there is also the possible of a violence within the assemblage of inherited-disenherited words. The re- already began in the pre-, but the preliminary brutality of the sirens’ song or that of the humanist lullaby under the charm of the fatal melodies always enter into the composition of the new poems: they are not condemned to perpetuating violence, and therefore must reflect it, bearing to think it by way of language, and in a sensitive way. This does indeed provide the warble with a reflexive and critical aspect. But children reflect quite a lot, as you know: for them, everything is a game of forces and forms in tension, everything is a ballet of notions, a ballet that is simultaneously polemical and playful (they play and act out war, for example), alternating between thawing and refreezing, awakening reason and putting it to sleep, an impressionability in search of the tools and resistant to “ist” modes of elaboration of said tools under the fluorescent lights of classrooms. When they seek refuge in the country of dreams and magic, they stumble yet again upon tales that veil the destiny of magic: Merlin ends up renouncing 88

his powers, frightened by the consequences of the strategy, the epic, and the education that he had promoted. The final Merlin is hidden; Orpheus nearly takes up the entire place of poetry, even within Rilke’s contortions for an angel of history, and Merlin was not part of an alternative “solution” without producing the sterile counter-myth of the rejection of words, or sung putrefaction. The warble warms up the frozen sugar pills [dragées glacées]; it doesn’t abandon them to a mute or unarticulated elegy. Jacques Rancière: Within the idea of thawing, there seems to

me to be two kinds of words for practicing the method of thawing and two methods for thawing. On one hand, what needs to be thawed is the ordinary of spoken language [du parler]. Somewhere you speak about the “esotericism of the quotidian,” whereby we would be able to understand the obscurity of a language that is mechanically employed, where the work done to saying and to the thought has been withdrawn. The “heterometric warbling” is also a means for rupturing the continuum of this prose, of placing the saying back within the said. But this thawing itself moves by way of an indirect path which can appear paradoxical. It moves by way of a detour through textual corpuses from the past, which you unthaw in order to produce this warble that must unthaw the present. Moreover, the past itself seems to divide itself: there is the model of the heterometric warble given by La Fontaine. But everything happens as if this model wasn’t imitated or rather its imitation passed by way of another usage of the past, by way of texts that one must thaw and create anew in order to hear the language of this lost warble. Knowing whether the thing is created aristocratically or democratically is effectively of secondary importance. The first question is knowing whether this detour is a necessity or if it is a choice, and then what motivates this choice. Above all it’s a question of knowing how to think the operation of unthawing. This is where you seem to me to propose two models. There is the most immediate model adapted to the task of unthawing, the calorific model: one must reheat words and this is the work of the heart-valve [cœur-pompe] which receives the breath of the world and transmits its own breath to the hand of the poem. And it’s for this reason that the calorific work is at the same time a rhythmic work: the beats of the world 89

find themselves struck once more by the forge of Vulcan. The mythologico-poetic divine blacksmith (the one Mallarmé still appreciates in a poem by Banville) is relayed by an entire anthropology of the production of the poem which we have already spoken about and which itself perhaps refers to a phenomenological background. But if this caloric/rhythmic model easily lends itself to explaining the genesis of the poem, I’m less sure that it is indeed what is operating within your poems where the meter and the heterometry lend themselves less to the movement of breath than to the operation, which aerates this breath in spacing it out. It seems to me that it is first of all an operation of writing which contrasts the verticals on the page with what you call the flow of copied phrases [phrase conformes]. And the oscillation of dense equations is perhaps first of all an effect of condensation — of the constriction of discourse into two or three words, of a brutal passage to a line, of parentheses and ironic question marks, of the shock of significations and linguistic registers into a single expression: the poetics of writing and witticism whose punctuations and displacements themselves aerate the air produced by the valve, in helping themselves more than once to these “prosaisms” which I evoked in my text (God who plays a non-match). In the “Singing bone,” which I commented on at Cerisy,6 there is a long unfurling of the genesis of the chant starting with the wind in the sand and then by way of the reeds and then there is, indicated in the form of a wordplay, Philomela’s tapestry: it is no longer so much a question of breathing but of stitching and weaving; a relation of kinds of speech [paroles] no longer in regard to the wind but to other endless forms of speech. Of course, we can say that the two models are not exclusive to each other. In spite of everything, it seems to me that one of them is more at the service of the saying of the poem and the other one takes as its object its saying. Philippe Beck: Do you mean that the breath of the world is more obviously left to its own space, or that this “ante-predicative” breath obviously returns within poetic arts, so above all within a prose of reconstitution? I should remind you here that Contre un Boileau, which you're alluding to, is a “poetic prose-ometer,” 6. Isabelle Barbéris and Gérard Tessier, Philippe Beck, un chant objectif aujourd’hui (Paris: Corti, 2014), 231 et sq. 90

and not a “philosophical prose-ometer,” according to the distinction suggested in the “coda.” It’s not a simple prose in any case: heterometric poems space it out, and a new braiding or weaving do take place from out of this. I’m poorly positioned to say what my poetry is “from God’s point of view,” and don’t have the desire to justify its forge by way of the anterior breath of the world: the forged breath within saying appears with necessity or does not, as the closest to the real poem. That being said, there is not a silent anterior world which would succeed in creating a poem in order to express itself, to fashion itself in a lively (waking and wakeful) manner. The poem is already engaged within a spoken world, woven with Saids or frozen legends that are more or less thawed, etc. The irony of wordplays, everything that, let’s say, belongs to language games, only comes after the world that has already been spoken and unspoken, cut up into discrete units, never purified of judgment or tales, of chit-chat [parlerie] and language seeking [de chercherie en langue], of acknowledged and sedimented experiences or experiments. The aeration processes of prose within the poem and as poem are, inevitably, suggested by the world contained inside me. Nothing which comes to one in the mind can be without having a relation with the insufficient breath of things or their beats waiting for other outside and spoken beats or breaths. I’m not saying this in order to downplay what I’m attempting and to appeal again to the right of inspiration in order to make some kind of ultimate and undisputed right out of it (everything is debatable and interpretable); the breath doesn’t enter into the poem all by itself. There is, in the poetic process of elaboration, always a disposition for leaving to the verse the mark or impression of the once beaten and beating world, according to the affects of language, which live everyday and become misrepresented within language. Disposition is a word for saying a necessary choice. It’s language itself that suffers a reasoned and discreet derangement, and commands interventions; their mode is an “arbitrary constructive [change]” in someone. Thawing is potential, or a contrasting activity within the world if, by imitating or contrasting or remaining fixed, it is capable of being lived or endured. Thawing is no doubt not a decree, a voluntary effect or a choice without some kind of necessity. Indeed, it remains to be seen if the reader of the poem will awaken as a bugler, having 91

experienced discontinuity, or if the reader will be captured within the ice of the words for good, or if the reader feels closer to the always possible thawing of the poem within ordinary language, if the reader in being reanimated, disrupted in order to begin again, to continue, now being more sensitive to the proper rewarming of the “spiritual material” of words attracted to the common being that the reader always is. But do you feel that there is some kind of necessity for thawing, “a difference inside oneself ” that “Mots gelés” practices within the idea of science fiction today? Newspeak never purely reigns, no more so than popular prose assures the happiness of the sentences which we habitually count on in order to re-make ourselves. An idea of poetry affects the life of speech for the better, which is an effort, a withdrawal from the icy sleep of thought (the esotericism of the quotidian depends on its narcotic power, to its hazardous decompensations). What I’m formulating and reconstituting here in a somewhat harsh way is the warmth of a process. The thawing out takes time and doesn’t just suddenly transform (in the manner of a revelation) from a solid state into an exposed fluid state; it is therefore the utopia of the undoing itself of language. A prose is not a pure continuity, and all the better. The “heterometric warble” is thus less destined to disrupt the continuity of prose than it is to accentuate its internal movements, the emotions of the invisible volcano within the prose, its anti-rhythmical powers of “exaction” or expression. But you’re right (I will agree with you here), one must aerate the anterior breath that accompanies the pressure of the world upon the poem. To the question of “Who will administer the thaw?” the lone reply seems to be: “Each of us within each one of us.” Which means: each effort for a common signature. The common signature begins by way of the effort of each one of us to follow the stirred movement of air, since the air is full of men. Effort signifies: movement accompanied by a signatory affect, a singular refrain [reprise]. I’m saying this here in prose (without a dialogic prose-ometer), but it would be rather surprising if the poems were capable of saying or making anything else heard. The spacing of the breath of the world aerates the movement of breath, and this is why all the “tricks” of the poem always operate upon prose. There is not prose but always some prose. [Il n’y a pas la prose, mais il y a toujours de la prose.] And it’s not about a silent prose of the 92

world, or an anti-predicative and mute prose. To say: “There is not one single prose,” is to say that there is at once various circulating and breathed forms of prose and that the verticals always work the prose in a kind of dissatisfaction. This banal dissatisfaction incites the emergence of the idea of a poetry of the poem within the esoteric quotidian. The idea of an esoteric poem seems to me to be aristocratic: it supposes that certain things shouldn’t be said. The difficulty of the poem depends on the necessity of saying and showing the verticals and the discrete units of densities, the non-linear problems, that affect the various kinds of prose and the transmission of the discourses and histories rhythmed through the time of man. For you, is it density or condensation that seems adapted for the necessary thaw? Jacques Rancière: If we consider the metaphor as rigorously as possible, it is difficult to conceive of a thaw as a densification. This is also why I maintain that one of the terms denotes the practice of the poem and the other term denotes the poem’s idea. The densification is certainly adapted for denoting a certain number of precise operations upon language, by which poetry “makes up for language’s deficiencies.”7 Thaw, however, in no way denotes an operation of poetry but rather poetry’s idea and utopia, the idea of the derangement that it carries into the normal order of the world. There are no frozen words and operations that thaw them. Words flow all too well. The frozen words, if we step outside of Rabelais’s text, are not a state of language, but a metaphor for a certain state of the world. The flaw that one must therefore compensate for is the flaw of the world. It’s the revolution that is frozen over — the Great Pan is dead, and the world and beings have become cold. To assign to poetry this thawing is essentially to assign to it the protest against a state of the world: “Poetry tirelessly and vocally denotes the insufficiency of the world as it is.”8 With the exception that, of course, it is in being insufficient itself — in not being its own discourse — that it can reply to this insufficiency. But, starting from there, another problem reveals itself which is that of the specificity of the poetic form, and more generally of the tradition of the idea of the poem within the system of genres of 7. Stéphane Mallarmé, “Crisis of Verse” in Divagations, 206. 8. Beck, Contre un Boileau, 269. 93

discourse. If it’s about responding to the insuffiency of the world or to that of the esoteric quotidian, we can quite easily deduce that there is poetry as soon as there is an “effort,” not so much in regard to style in general but more specifically in regard to the dense equation, and where the verticals of the poem are a particular form of this effort which traverses and reconstitutes all kinds of prose. In regard to all that, your distinctions and warnings seem somewhat fragile. You caution that Contre un Boileau is a “poetic prose-ometer” and not a “philosophical prose-ometer” and refer back to the final note which emphasizes the parallelism of the oppositions found within the theory of the interior/exterior and that of power/action. But the distinction there is between two ideas — two ideas of the idea — and not between two practices of language and of thought by way of language. The fact that, here and there, Contre un Boileau includes several sequences with verse is obviously not the heart of the problem. The question bears on the way in which its horizontal equations effectuate and on the way in which they effectuate, on the manner itself whereby they say what they do and do what they say. For example, in order to pose the right question, let’s take four phrases from Contre un Boileau: The thinkable and expressible real is a ghost bear, an upright bearskin that still resists, arousing a dramatic wind; this wind of perceptions forms a flock of sparrows or discontinuous scarecrow for a dismayed soothsayer. For the sparrows or the monads rounded up in spite of themselves, the streamers in the wind, the Flugschriften, the broadsheets, the windswept leaves, the bound tracts and brochures, in their fantastic number want and do not want to say the tenor of the perceptions of they arouse. To say, is to consent to feeling by thinking and to think by feeling the formulation of words.9

Can we say the final phrase pronounces in the clear language of theoretical formulations the thought expressed, by way of figurative language, through the metaphors of the bearskin, of the wind, the sparrows, and leaves? Can we say that the movement which goes from the evoked bearskin to the pronounced thesis, by way of the movement of equivalence of the specific [du propre] and the figurative (the amphibology of the windswept leaves), is 9. Beck, Contre un Boileau, 445. 94

in fact the movement itself, language’s transition into thought, which produces the equation of thought that “summarizes” it? What is the difference between the operation produced by these argumentative lines and the operation produced by way of poetic verticals that are arranged and declared as such? And if it is the poetic mode of thought that is defined by this, does this mode not also impose its operations of densification specific to philosophy and to the thawing of the world that we are waiting for? I once ended a text on Mallarmé and Badiou by saying that philosophy was more radically subjected to the poetic “condition” than Badiou realized, given that poetry is not only one of the truth procedures that conditions the existence of philosophy, but also a mode of thought internal to the approach of philosophy itself. What I questioned in his work was the specificity of poetry as a procedure that subtracts its own thought. What seems symmetrically problematic in your take is the opposition between being one’s discourse and forming one’s discourse. I understand very well that we can distinguish between the various ways of returning the said to a saying [le dit à un dire], the various ways of returning thinking to feeling. My question is whether these diverse modalities of the exercising of thought within language define different genres of discourse, of whether, outside any formal language, every discourse that says something is not always constrained to cut up its equations “upon the ridgeline between sound and sense,” a ridgeline which itself only exists as a metaphor. In short, we always revert back, under a variety of forms, to the question of the relation between the genre of exercise that we call poetry and the poetic condition of the speaking being: that of the divided common. Philippe Beck: I willingly concede to you that today these dis-

tinctions are essentially fragile and insufficient in regard to the state of the world. But this fragility does not erase the distinction between the poem and prose. The effacement of the distinction would ruin the very idea of a prose constituted as such: if a prose wants to head straight toward the insufficiency of the world, a prose can do nothing more than fight against the dense curve, against the thyrsus that is at once dense (so, waking-awake) and fluent, undulating, rhumid [rhumide], which prose intends on 95

redirecting toward the proper path. A prose by its very nature is contrary to the idea of an arabesque that the writer of prose dreams of redirecting by way of an efficient intervention hoped for among those beings and things that have been windswept. So rightfully it follows that the relative thawing of the sequence of words (because I maintain that the use of words is likely to freeze) allows for other densities: there is a density of a stream or a river. La Fontaine is the name for the principle of the stream (from the dry and somber flow like a strong air current) that Boileau moreover also calls for: both of them refuse the torrent and are bizarre accomplices in this. You speak about a thawing which is not the same one I’m referring to: the torrential flow of solid words — that are unconscious and employed within the insufficiency of the ordinary and which nevertheless believes it suffices ­— presupposes, by way of its precious unconscious, an idea of the poem, which is no doubt utopian. But language left to its proper and improper life, is figurative and deformed, imprecise or left to wander, is also a bearer of its own utopia: it is the quotidian utopia of our re-densified interventions. The densifications and untightenings, the interval within the chains of vehicular or vernacular prose, fix nothing more than a practice that undoes itself and which is always in the process of transformation in regard to the idea of lively and precise — as well as a touching and efficient — density (a condensing) that speaks to people. The thaw is the utopia of the forms of everyday proses, of their forgetful and forgotten densities. So, I don’t believe that the thaw corresponds at all to any kind of poetic operation, quite simply because the thaw is the utopia of any exercise (of any practice) into language. An intervention into language, whatever it may be, is a process of reanimation by way of a relative densification: poetic densification is relative, relational, and is in no way opposed to the spacings of so-called ordinary prose (the ordinary is an idea). The orphism of ordinary utterances can be forgotten. I don’t believe at all in the pure interruption of Orpheus in the poem, but the critic Orpheus is not the purveyor of the myth of the thaw: the thaw is always done one by one, within the divided common [commun divisé], and not by way of the imposition of a transcendental poem. The form of the poem, the labor done to the verse, is what is officially remunerated as the model of proses 96

(its ideal or its idea), and this is why people “want poems” (why they dream of them, in spite of it all, and in spite of the ordinary, they dream of the poems, of their most simplistic or emphatic, fossilized versions); the poem is not made in order to remunerate (to compensate or restitute) the supposed flaws of language. What I do goes well beyond the living utopia of the ordinary. In no way am I denying that the exercises of thought in prose are conditioned to the idea of a poem; everything within Contre un Boileau indicates the opposite of this, and you’re providing me with the occasion to indicate it once again. I simply say that a poetic art recalls the non-substantial but operational difference between the labor of verse and the effort of the style of thought, between poetry and prose, inasmuch as there is not one Prose. “Prose is admissible, besides it doesn’t exist” is equivalent to “prose is inadmissible, moreover it exists”: by way of modes of prose, a certain prose strives to seek itself out as the undiscoverable [introuvable] prose. The idea of a single prose is poetry. You see, really what I’m doing is inverting the proposition by Novalis-Benjamin (“the idea of poetry is prose”10), this would be in contradiction with your take. But it is obvious that my relative or critical orphism is not a formalism: in no way whatsoever does a form take (or draw) its force from itself, and the essential element of art is not within the art. The idea, the intelligible image of the ridgeline simply corresponds to the structure of intentionalities into language: the scale that tips toward signification is simply the constraint of prose. This doesn’t mean that this prose can be summarized by the scale tipping to the side of signification; its resistance to simple transparent communication, its appetence for the formation of a foundation no longer needs to be proven! The temptation of form is a constant within the movement of its erasure; hence the dream of diaphanous forms.… The poem can in no way be summarized by tipping the scale toward the saying or the form. (Formalism remains the temptation of poetry.) The “true poem” is the remuneration of the ridgeline as such. And to this extent your thought experiment is clearly poetic, and certainly conditioned to the idea of the poem. In the end, in your opposition to formalism, but not to the idea of form, do you agree with (do you feel like you 10. Walter Benjamin, “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” in Selected Writings: 1913-1926, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 173. 97

are on the side of ) the idea of a post-poetry? It would seem that I counteract it by way of poems. Jacques Rancière: I don’t know if, in speaking of a postpoetry, you’re referring specifically to Jean-Marie Gleize who used this expression or if you’re referring to the more general idea of the “post.” As I’m outside of the poetic milieu and the debates that take place within it, I hold to the more general aspect of the question. When one speaks of the post in regard to art, I think that one should remain close to the Hegelian diagnostic: an art enters into its post age when it becomes nothing more than art. Previously, it was something other than art: a mode of thought, a form of life, a form of religious worship, a service, etc. If the term post-poetry has a meaning, it would then be a poetry which would have found its rightful place, what you call humbled poetry [poésie humiliée] — even if this humility is willingly made through arrogance by presenting itself as maintaining the temple by the last of those loyal to purified language. Your poems counteract this by way of a multiple tenacity: the tenacity to think that poetry is a mode of discourse that matters for thought itself. If this issue regarding poetry as a necessary mode of discourse was not at stake, why return to the apparently long-since-resolved question of the relation between what is well conceived and what is uttered clearly? The stubbornness to think poetry as a history to which one must always return in order to continue, a field that one must continue to plow during any era, because what we can draw forth from it once again matters for the way humans relate to each other. An affirmation of the specific virtue of meter, distinct from that of rhyme and assonance and exceeding the power of the image for which the disposal of lines on a page is relatively indifferent. An attention for what the evolutions of language spoken by everyone authorize as the invention of new poetic equations. Your poetry therefore imposes itself as a profoundly original attempt to use a poetic form in order to think poetry and to think of it as a form of thought. So there is no place for situating it as far as the idea of a post-poetry is concerned, or for identifying it with some sort of epochal determination from which it would draw its legitimacy. It exists by itself. It allows us to think a number of things regarding poetry and thought. For me it’s a poetry which comes after, and 98

not a post-poetry. An after that is not one full of pride for having found some new equation of new times or a morose delight of an end, but which maintains an openness to the future. So it is an after-before which is at the same time an interval, a space-between [un entre-deux]. In my opinion, the best phrase for thinking it remains the one Schiller invented and which you yourself echo: sentimental poetry — between the lost dream of a world that would spontaneously be translated into poetic formulas and the impossible dream of a finally discovered harmony of language with thought. A poetry after could be defined as a poetry that knows Hegel took place and nevertheless acts as if one should, as much as possible, delay the hour of his arrival.

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The Groove of the Poem: Reading Philippe Beck Jacques Rancière A careful reading of one of France’s most important contemporary poets by one of today’s most engaging thinkers of aesthetics.

Grafts: Writings on Plants Michael Marder A vital call for the cross-pollination of philosophy and plant sciences.

A Love of UIQ Félix Guattari An exciting attempt by one of France’s most well known thinkers wherein he explores his thought through the form of a cinematic narrative.

Desert Dreamers Barbara Glowczewski An ethnographic adventure exploring the Warlpiri and their cultural practices of “the dreaming” in relation to their societal laws, ritual art, and connection with the cosmos.

Cartography of Exhaustion: Nihilism Inside Out Peter Pál Pelbart A meditation on the possibility of fighting off the exhaustion of our contemporary age of communicative and connective excess.

Other Univocal Titles A Love of UIQ .................................................................................... Félix Guattari ABC of Impossibility ..................................................................... Simon Critchley Affirmation of Poetry .......................................................................... Judith Balso [... After the Media] ................................................................... Siegfried Zielinski The Arachnean and Other Texts ................................................ Fernand Deligny Archaeology of Algorithmic Artefacts ................................................. David Link Being a Skull: Site, Contact, Thought, Sculpture .......... Georges Didi-Huberman Béla Tarr, the Time After ........................................................... Jacques Rancière Biogea ............................................................................................... Michel Serres Cannibal Metaphysics ................................................ Eduardo Viveiros de Castro Cartography of Exhaustion: Nihilism Inside Out ....................... Peter Pál Pelbart Cosmic Pessimism ....................................................................... Eugene Thacker Desert Dreamers ................................................................. Barbara Glowczewski Dictionary of Non-Philosophy ................................................... François Laruelle Didactic Poetries ............................................................................. Philippe Beck The Different Modes of Existence .............................................. Étienne Souriau The Dionysian Vision of the World ......................................... Friedrich Nietzsche Flusseriana: An Intellectual Toolbox ..................................................................... Grafts: Writings on Plants ............................................................ Michael Marder The Groove of the Poem: Reading Philippe Beck .................. Jacques Rancière The History of the Devil .................................................................. Vilém Flusser The Intelligence of a Machine ......................................................... Jean Epstein Introduction to Non-Marxism .................................................... François Laruelle Machinic Eros: Writings on Japan .................................................... Félix Guattari Mad Like Artaud .......................................................................... Sylvère Lotringer Natural:Mind ..................................................................................... Vilém Flusser On Doubt .......................................................................................... Vilém Flusser On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects ..................... Gilbert Simondon Philosophy and Non-Philosophy ............................................... François Laruelle Philosophy of Language .................................................................. Vilém Flusser Photo-Fiction, A Non-Standard Aesthetics .............................. François Laruelle Post-History ...................................................................................... Vilém Flusser Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction ....................... Quentin Meillassoux Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy ............ François Laruelle Telemorphosis .............................................................................. Jean Baudrillard Two Lessons on Animal and Man ............................................... Gilbert Simondon Variations on the Body ...................................................................... Michel Serres Women Who Make a Fuss ....................... Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret

Jason Wagner, Drew S. Burk (Editors) Univocal Publishing 411 N. Washington Ave., STE 10 Minneapolis, MN 55401 www.univocalpublishing.com Publisher: Jason Wagner Director: Drew S. Burk Production Manager: Gina Newman Design Assistant: Geoffrey Anderson Editorial Assistant: Lia Mitchell