VII The World of Poetry and Art

When speaking of art, we - all of us, producers and consumers of art - think of poetry and prose (what we call literature), of theatre, of music and dance, of painting, of sculpture and architecture, and finally of the graph­ing of movement, that is to say, of cinematography.

All the particular configurations of poetry and art imply a specific and quasi-autonomous problematic.

Poetically and artistically, the how is at least as important as the what.

This history of the distinction, of the unity or the identity between form and content is troubling, since they are neither identical nor different.

As long as the original bonds which unite physis (nature) and techne (art- and-technique) remain completely hidden, we will only speak and write intelligent or stupid things about poetry and art.

A word already pronounced says: ‘Art and technique are much weaker than necessity.’

The work - mobile - creates and makes its listeners, spectators, readers, destroyers, and is created and made by them. Because works of art are also made by the waves and vogues, the currents and counter-currents, simulta­neous and successive, of listeners, spectators, readers, in short, of consumers.

We make the question concerning art - a question that nonetheless concerns us - easy by following art into its history, from prehistoric times up to now, by grasping also the becoming of every art historically, and by going so far as to envisage the fabrication of a museum of future art.

How do art and poetry fertilise and stylise the art of living?

Can one sacrifice life to art, or inversely? Can one pose the problem in these terms, as if there were life without art and art without life? Nonetheless, in the conflagration of a museum the question could pose itself: save the most precious canvas or a meowing cat? Caught in the intertwined play of ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ motivations and acquisitions, turns and detours of unicity and multiplicity, productivity and reproducibility.

It is the history of art that assigns an object its place and its role in the universe of art. But the history of art is not eternal: its place and role are waiting to be circumscribed.

Realising that art is created by artists, we want to put our finger on the wound of art creators, we seek the links that unite artists to their works and these two powers to our own ‘states of mood’. We indulge to our hearts’ content in the psychology of art, feverishly dig through the biography of great artists, dissect their passions. Intrigued by the secret links which con­nect genius and madness, we push our insatiable scientific curiosity and our psychological hunger as ‘far’ as the extreme limits, and become promoters of the psychopathology of art. A good number of great artists, after having lived a troubled and troubling, anguished and anguishing life, not conforming to norms and forms, finally found the supreme protection in suicide or madness.

It is principally the art of artists that interests us and not their lives. And, in any case, we do not know how to read in the play of the discord­ant accord that gives rhythm to both art and life. This happened in the nineteenth century, this undeciphered century which we have great diffi­culty leaving (perhaps because it is still not sufficiently mondialised, all that it prefigured still not accomplished). Turner was not a very great painter. How strange are the value judgements of the stock market, the school notes which distributed and redistributed the grades to the very good, the good, the average and the bad students. Turner, however, an English painter of the nineteenth century, at the height of his glory, died, under a false name, in an attic, where he went at irregular intervals, in ragged clothes, to meet with a woman who was neither young nor beautiful, to whom he gave just enough not to die of hunger and who, not knowing about her strange and intermittent companion, was deeply grateful for what this provincial petty bourgeois, called from time to time to London for his business, did for her.

Having filled our bloodless curiosity for the individual - the artist - we equally turn towards the social side; knowing that society is the terrain of life and human works, we then apply ourselves to build the sociology of art, as if art were only the embellishment - or the aesthetic expression - of that which happens somewhere else in society. The politicisation of our epoch makes us particularly apt to open our eyes to the ‘social side’ of art, perhaps because we no longer experience the world of a work of art.

What does it signify now, to contemplate a mutilated statue torn from its world? Where then does the being or the truth of the statue reside? To whom does this already broken statue unveil itself? To the estimating gaze of the archaeologist, to the amazed eyes of the tourist, to the compre­hensive vision of the art lover, or to the children who play hide-and-seek around it?

It is not only we who judge the works; they judge us too.

Apparently nothing obliges or hinders the poet or the artist from being serenely integrated into the world or being a rebel.

Poetry and art are destined to become more and more frustrating, even and especially for those who participate as collaborating producers or consumers.

Society consumes words and images in which it does not believe, and which are diverted from their original function (in what did it reside?).

Can the scientific and technical history of the (historicised) becoming of art, powerfully seconded by archaeology and philology, psychology and psychopathology, sociology and politics, not solve the enigma, even by con­jugating their efforts? Let us therefore resort to the supreme remedy, to the all-powerful, global and synthetic, formal and material aesthetic, that is to say, to the general theory of art, the philosophy of art, from which neither rhythms, nor styles, nor worlds, nor forms, nor contents can escape. For those who denounce the historical, psychological and sociological approach, as well as all their possible combinations, furiously launch into formal exege­sis and metaphysical discourses on forms and what they express, thus imag­ining themselves as bringing to language what a work of art says and hides.

Literary and artistic criticism, entangled in questions of taste and lan­guage, form and message - more than vacillating and generalised, funda­mentally anachronistic and superficially futuristic - greatly needs to be reinvented. Neither the romanticism of the past, nor the actualism or the cynicism of the present, nor the romanticism or the technicism of the future can animate it any more. It does not know of what it speaks and what it says.

Our attitude regarding art presupposes that the latter is no longer under the sign of the sacred, is no longer in a world of celebration; cut off from its roots, without earth and without sky, it remains snatched from its world.

Without any doubt, a profound sense remains hidden behind all these conquering and organising activities; yet this sense still escapes us, and it is extremely difficult to see in what it constitutes the (let’s say negative) aspect of a mode of (let’s say positive) access to what is not easily shown. And erratic and worldwide art, thus planetary, by fulfilling its functional function, follows its path, today too, but not like yesterday.

Can one rediscover the sense of the fete? Can one reinvent it? Can one not imagine a fete or dream innocently of it, but see it in foreseeing it? Can we grasp the stridence of its absence? A fete that unfolds itself in nature and implicates the sacred and the word, a fete transforming festive humans into protagonists of its theatre, letting the sounds of music be heard, matching the movement to dance. Can the poetry of such a fete unite, on a place and for a moment, the here and the elsewhere, the past, the present and the future, the native and the foreigner, the settled and the erratic? The fete signifies that the encounter is possible somewhere and for some time. Little children, adults and the elderly, the wise and the crazy are surely at the fete, when there are acrobatics, prestidigitation (with destiny), divination. When men and women confront each other in the combat of festivity, when the play becomes sacred - mortally sad and ecstatically joyous - when mortals get a bit and for a bit out of their habit, sad habit. Then the fete makes be the unity of totality, and human beings unite to break bread and drink wine.

The world no longer fetes humans and humans no longer fete the world. Humans begin to comprehend it. And the world? The fete thus does not cry over its defeat. The fetes of the past appear to us - because they do not appear to us anymore - as too particular and local (even if they were ‘univer­sal’), and our own globality, having turned its back on both the tragic fete and the comic fete, as well as on the passion of the fete and on the fete of passion, can no longer support what, in its active errancy, it considers as sur­passed if not erroneous truths. Is it not a matter of constructing the future? The network of reason and the virus of virtue seize all so-called cosmic ful- guration and technically organise festivities and festivals. The being of the world shines forth from now on in the artificial glitter of scaffolded being and busy mundanity. Since the bourgeois revolution and its socialist prolon­gations, an unlimited positivism does not cease to occupy the whole scene. Robespierre had established the cult of the supreme being and intended to install the reign of virtue. Comte wanted himself high priest of being and the religion of humanity. The world of being becomes a world of representation and anticipation, of the will to power and planning. It’s up to us to push this process to its final consequences. So the fete has been excised from the world. Was it a useless branch? The fete however - in its infinite veiled sad­ness - had suspected it for a very long time: it knew that it implied the secret of its disappearance; it foresaw its inescapable destiny.

Is possibility always that which withdraws from all apprehension, even if one of its faces would be realised? It is the becoming of negativity, the play of time. The world launches itself, with a lot of boredom, into the search for constant passing novelty, itself caught in the gears of permanent surpass­ing. All is fleeting, all solidifies and freezes, flexes and reflects. Expansion and amplitude seem to hate concentration and depth. It will be up to the human to experience the hardness of its destiny in a terrible sobriety and far from the lustre of fetes, in a world without a visible destiny and devoid of feasts. Humans will have to let themselves be grasped in a new manner through the link uniting proximity and distance; for the old fetes disguised the nearby worlds and the distant worlds, marked the times and masked the play. (Perhaps some party-poopers will succeed in stirring up the anxiety and the indifference that will inhabit the hearts and guts of the fragile fabricators of a world strangely submitted to productivity and sphericity.)

The fete was that momentary play of the dilapidation of energies and riches, of unproductive consumption of accumulated goods, that safety valve, that periodical authorised explosion, that rule disguised as misrule.

Before and after the poetry and the fete, the recall to order reigns. Of what is this order then made?

The space and time of poetry and art are no longer strong, namely myth­ical. However, they remain outside daily space and time, although mixed and grappling with an everydayness lived somnambulantly, and become a problem.

At the end of the count and in the penultimate analysis, what to do with this conflict between the trivial and prosaic everyday and the aspiration to the exceptional and poetic fete?

In and under every landscape spreads a deep, dark underground current which participates in the cosmic and is impregnated by the historical; it remains implicit and expresses itself not explicitly through those whom it carries and who are also its carriers. Magical and mythical elements, a certain original religiosity, poeticity, words and gestures can sometimes let emerge the living presence of this current - dead among the living, living among the dead - however without accessing light and mediation. Fetes and manifestations, the cycles of the seasons and life, plays, songs and gestures constitute relics very difficult to feel and analyse. Distant and fleeting, viv­ifying absences, it withdraws from immediate apprehension. It disappears from the eyes and the glasses of the narrowly rationalistic analysis, without being able to be envisaged from another angle - just as unilateral - where one would see eternal souls, in eternal landscapes, appearing from time to time in eternal art.

Is black stronger than white? What happens to grey?

Poetry and art work with full times, that is to say, eliminate or transmute dead times.

It still remains for us to decipher the depth of superficiality, the secret of baseness, the attraction of banality, the enigma of lightness, the romance of stupidity. For we still do not know the hidden spring of avidity for the void, the utility of futility, the ageing of novelty.

What did Aristotle the Stagirite, a scientific and serious philosopher and in no way a fantastical and delirious boy, mean by writing in the Poetics those lines that one can read and try to comprehend by taking the trouble: ‘Poetry is closer to wisdom and more important than historical investigation, because poetry speaks rather of the total, while history is treating the particular.’ Should not these words be meditated by those who do not renounce poetic thought, that is to say active and creative, while refusing to see in the poeticity of poetry a simple form of the super­structure or a free and literary activity? Could not poetry be the ally of thought in the combat where language is engaged beyond the death of the work of art?

The poetical passes like a meteor, a hurricane, a comet, which does not stop it from being a builder.

Thought and poetry do not simply express their epoch; they are precur­sors; it is as precursors that they are great: true and errant.

If one looks into the Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, if one looks into the Letters of Van Gogh, one will perhaps then understand the openness of an artist who thinks. The first, the conqueror, writes: ‘Nothingness has no milieu and its borders are nothingness... Among the great things that are to be found among us, the being of non-being is the greatest.’ And the second, hit by the thunderbolt: ‘One will end up having enough of cynicism, scepticism, joking, and one will want to live more musically. How will that be and what will one find? It would be interesting to be able to predict it, but it is even better to foresee this instead of seeing in the future absolutely nothing but catastrophes, which will not fail to fall like so many terrible flashes on the modern world and civilisation through a revolution or a war or a bankruptcy of worm-eaten states.’

The thought of metaphysical philosophy launched at the start of the game against the poetic and pictorial games that were in its eyes only imitations of imitation: the sensible being a copy of the model of the idea, poetry and painting are copies of copies.

It is to the prose and poetry of the game of the world that the poetic and prosaic activities of humans respond in their temptation to provoke a poetic- ity and a flat text that interfere and correspond with one another.

Poets announce things that will not happen as they have been stated.

Would art also be a wish for what does not exist?

Poetry and art plunge us into a sort of wakeful torpor.

The art of words and that of poetry push us to the threshold at which language becomes song and silence.

Rhythm, harmony and alternation, repetition, refrain and cadence punctuate speech and silence of poetry and art in their movement.

The novelistic [romanesque] is strongly bookish: it operates an identifi­cation between novel and life; from the novelistic - which comes from the Roman, Latin, Romance language - the romantic proceeds: it operates an identification between poetry and life. But what is the source of the novel­istic and the romantic?

Certain games of poetic aspect develop the mechanics of the fantastic, the marvellous and the symbolic - for example, the surrealist games - in a world of quasi-autonomous play cut from the play of life.

Very often, moreover, art and poetry set in motion only a cerebral - logical - and psychological mechanics of the imaginary.

Too often humans live ‘aesthetically’ what they do not experience ‘existentially’.

It would be - and within the measure of the realisable possible - about trying to live artistly rather than artistically.

As the familiar phrase recognises: people, in trying to live their lives, are making cinema. The play of the total scenario precedes any particular scene.

To describe in all its tonalities and in its totality an entire day would be equivalent to seeing and speaking, hearing and saying, experiencing and thinking, a haughty although altered sequence from the film of life.

The cinema realises, as it can, the Platonic metaphysics of ideas and idols, in modern caves.

The theatre is only a condensed and stylised expression of the theatrical­ity of life.

Every scene fixed and frozen in a theatrical setting appears so ‘really unreal’.

The world envisaged as a theatre, where everyone plays a role, is the fact of the play of the theatre, which itself comprehends a theatre in its play.

Repetition takes place before the play of the piece and then repeats the piece played.

Too bad if different roles contradict each other and don’t attain their ideal imago.

Tragic illusion and comic illusion correspond and are part of a certain basic theatricality.

To play comedy signifies always and again that one plays more? less?

In the small, the middling and the great theatre of the shadows neither the lights nor the shadows are radicalised ‘sufficiently’.

The theatre finds itself sent back to its limit that it cannot exceed: it remains a play of presence-representation.

Theatricality and theatre put us into question, even when they do so in a theatrical manner.

Poetic and artistic theatricality brings the confusion and the chiaroscuro of life to a certain stylised clarity.

Are the arts becoming more transparent by installing the theatre in thea­tre, the painting in painting, the cinema in cinema and so on?

Art and life are a fabric of lyric, comic, tragic illusions. How would the real murder of an actor onstage be taken?

Great among the greatest modern authors are those who knew how to integrate and surpass tragedy and comedy, the psychological and the social: Shakespeare and Dostoevsky.

Dance being the art of movement, would music be the art of silence? By letting it speak and erupt?

During the time of his madness, Holderlin played a harpsichord without strings.

Architectural art and technique inscribe themselves into the heart of the city, sketch its body, suggest its spirit and form the world of urbanism. Building and dwelling are some of the most concrete and most abstract problems. To a programmatic exigency an effectiveness responds strongly. Offering open structures is a good demand, but it still must be realised. How to build and where to dwell? The romantic and passe version demands horizontal constructions in flat space. The technicist and futuristic version calls for vertical constructions in the air. No coherent theory manages, however, to consider with consequence premises and consequences. We know more about how we built and dwelled, and how we still do so, but we know neither what future architecture and urbanism will be, nor how we want and wish to build and dwell. The Greek polis was inscribed in physis and constructed, around the acropolises, cities for the citizens, free men (Rome confused the play). The Christian cities built residences for humans around cathedrals and castles. The modern, bourgeois and European era gave birth to cities favouring trade and family life. All this was still to the measure of man. The planetary epoch sees the emergence of the metropolis-necropolis, while waiting for the cosmopolis. The city and urbanism also surpassed humanism in their own manner. Machines and techniques are put in charge to facilitate habitation, complicating the problem to the extreme. This type of city continues to flourish and decay. Until when? What will come next? Where will the decisions fall? And in which direction? With what kind of building and habitation will the play of a mobile and polyvalent, combinatorial and flexible architecture end? Is a radical change in perspective foreseeable? Could we suppose that, also in this domain, evolution will not be linear and will not so much effectuate what is projected, but will experience a more or less radical change? In what knots and meshes will these - new? - arts and techniques of building and habitat be caught?

All great civilisations and cultures find their final form in an asphyxiating urban type.

The destiny of the house - to be inhabited poetically and prosaically - still remains totally unresolved.

In the twilight of our sprawling cities is profiled - undoubtedly falsely - the shadow of Alexandria.

In art, it is not about constructing but about building.

Oedipus did not see as long as he had his eyes. Destiny escaped him. Tiresias, ‘because’ he was blind, saw far. The dialogue between the king and the seer lets us see and hear what, ordinarily, we do not see, that to which we do not listen. Oedipus looks around him (and in him, we say) and hardly sees anything; he hears neither the voice of destiny, nor the word of Tiresias. Tiresias, whose eyes do not see, is visionary, sees and speaks; he grasps becoming, for he accords himself with destiny. It is when Oedipus saw that he gouged out his eyes, becoming, in his turn, a blind man who sees.

The modern human seems to be a being of Seeing. Since the Renaissance, this reign is deployed: reign of perspective and the third dimension, point of view and the axis of the vanishing point towards the distance. What was a conquest consolidated its positions, planned subsequent conquests, became an eye that wants to see all. But do we look at everything without seeing anything or do we see things without looking? The primacy of the visual transforms everything into a specta­cle worthy of being seen, and this century of optics, view and point of view is astonishingly lacking in fundamental perspective and penetrating vision.

We have hardly begun to understand what the phrase signifies: it is the plastic arts that teach us to see the things of the world.

The primacy of perspective, of the third dimension, of the point of view, and of viewing is at the same time the primacy of imagination and of rep­resentation. Things become images of things; one can imagine everything, and a cloud of the imaginary begins to cover what is. Every presence trans­forms itself into representation (whether concrete or abstract, formal or informal, is of little importance), into representative mental activity. The visual, the imaginary, the representation release increasingly their power, capture landscapes and faces, and not only through the means of painting and cinema, penetrate the individual and historical existence of humans and peoples. What was called a tragedy of private or public life mutates into a comedy ruled by the forces of representation. All that, which is, is put to playing a role, integrated into the total spectacle - the world of the spec­tacle and the world as a spectacle - and every human being becomes actor and spectator, while life itself tries to imitate art.

In the unique constraint that connects and confuses the gaze and gazed-at, who has the primordial role?

Seeing and being seen generally go together.

The cry of peoples in world empires who want to establish their empire over the world is and remains: panem et circenses. Subsistence and satisfac­tion. Possession-dispossession.

Everything becomes spectacle and abolishes itself equally, at the time of the closure and the exacerbated continuation of representation.

At the threshold of the closing of the area of representation, we attend the spectacle of participation in the spectacle.

Images frame every view - everything becomes image - and at the same time they become blurry and are torn. The image of the world, the images of beings and things, tend to disappear. To the benefit of what signs?

All images can be inverted.

‘Finally’, everything loses itself in the ‘infinite’ play of mirrors.

One cannot traverse the mirror without breaking it; it then stops func­tioning as a mirror.

What kind of game is the image that no longer represents anything ‘figurative’?

Channelling the powers of imagination by using imaginative force has at ‘all times’ been a task imposed upon the human.

The picture is not to be comprehended or executed like a window onto the world. And let’s avoid making too much of literature, in life and with writing.

Modes and styles centred on the ornamental and the decorative, the overwritten and the mannered, diverse formalisms, serious or frivolous, also apply a system of conventional rules appearing as imperious, obeying the canon of permitted and tolerated things.

The genius of childhood and adolescence - poetic genius - loses itself in general in the prose of the so-called adult life, ripe for old age.

If the lava does not become stone, it cannot endure, to impose the frozen fires of hothouse games.

Art, supposed to have appeared at a certain moment of becoming, is it doomed to death? Are we effectively living the death of art? As for its supreme destination, has art ceased to exist?

Art was supposed to be the intuitive (and sensible) figuration of the absolute (intelligible), and to give forms, aspects, faces (εfδη) to the form, the aspect, the face of being (the idea). As a superior form of artisanry, art imitated and created models. Calling it idealist or realist is of little impor­tance, since it always worked with formations neither entirely sensible nor entirely intelligible. Its network unified sensation, sensibility and signifi­cation. And now? In a world without prototypes and without ideals? What will the twilight of idols generate?

The question remains open: is art for us, and regarding its exceptional, massive and decisive import, something of the past - of a surpassed world? Will it continue to stylise, condense and isolate total moments? Or do we still have art so as not to die of asphyxiation in the ‘truth’ of the real and technicist world? However, does not art also belong to the empire or democracy of this world? Losing its specificity, ceasing to constitute a world (even when set apart enough), will it become an integral part of life and the world?

Literature - the literary fact - is a specific mode of being - for producing and consuming - the word and the written thing.

Do art and poetry not cease to exist from the moment they become art and literature? Before this turning they are; after this turning, do they still exist?

Are poetry and art engendered by individual creators, labelled and performing a particular activity, called to disappear? Will art and poetry turn into activities of the whole, become the business of ‘all’, thus finding another rhythm, style and gesture? Language, decoration, functional and industrial art, architectonics, collective orders of words, sounds, colours and movements, will they be taken over by a technique producing total-partial wholes?

‘Art’ turns more and more to documentary and reporting and at the same time becomes strongly experimental. That is to say that its base decreases, and that it seems to be made for the critique that, it too, provokes the critique of the critical critique.

A certain intense creativity horrifies mediocrity; the latter captures it, after having neutralised it. Thus the most radical breakthroughs - poetic and artistic, and not only poetic and artistic - are assimilated and ren­dered harmless, enter textbooks, museums, are part of the style of every­day life, official and private, are adopted and adapted until they become the name of a street, bust of a square, postage stamp, object of scholarly studies.

The game has desacralised itself, it has lost its decisively dangerous inspi­ration. Free and disinterested activity, the filling of free time, the pursuit of adventures of all kinds, and the sportive search for danger are only the vulgarly visible forms of the game that rules the world, gives birth to art, and plays us sovereignly.

Before poetry and art are ‘surpassed’, do they have to be reached in some way by all? Probably not.

Born of nature, linked to divinity and developing itself in society, does art become an activity that affronts a (dead) nature and gods that have ceased to exist? Does art reduce itself to this activity that begins and ends at visible moments? Will the being in becoming of the totality of the world no longer reveal itself to the eyes of the creator, in the shadow and light of the lightning tearing the horizon? Will the cosmic game continue to inspire its word and its hand? Will plastic reality, as the setting into work of nature and technique, not manifest - even through an infinite distress - what was natural and what lines and colours, sounds and speech are always trying to capture? Will the drama of art not continue to pursue itself in the midst of this struggle of subjects and objects, marching towards their surpassing, the concrete and the abstract, deeply united, the figure and disfiguration, faces of the same, a struggle in which the voices of stridence and those of silence are confused? Does not the world aspire to find its expression - one should almost say: its foundation - lingual, plastic and musical in all its - and in all their - plenitude and dislocation? According to what necessity has every work and every residency of yesterday, of today - and even of tomorrow - become problematic?

The crisis of poetry and art is part of a much more global (and more than social) crisis.

Literature already shows us that there is nothing to say, except this noth­ing or the nothing, which it says. The painting opens our eyes and reveals to us that there is nothing to see, except... The sculptures seek their places and their spaces, while architects feverishly construct and increas­ingly encumber asphyxiating cities, these cancers that are wearing ‘well’. The theatre becomes anti-theatre and no longer knows which kinds of presences to represent. Art turns against itself. All the arts are irresistibly attracted by their self-destruction. Diverse gestures and writings become writings and gestures of silence.

Art was intimately linked to artisanry; it does not go without artifice.

It is manifest that art is going to technicise itself, according to the rhythm of the global technicity. At the same time, however, poetry and art rejoin their enigmatic origin - which no one can explicitly name or figure - from which they detached themselves to constitute themselves in worlds and to constitute the world; thus, poetry and art, strangely overwhelming the auton- omised poem and work, tend to find their end and to surpass themselves - Hegel and Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger glimpsed it - in that and by what one calls, in stammering, world and becoming, life and being.

Very often, when poetry, the theatre, the novel or the cinema do not know what to do with a character, they make it die.

When one speaks of art and life, it is as if art was not already in life from the start. And when one says that art-and-poetry is the last chance of life, one is delusional about its chances of survival.

Art and technique realise their unitary and future logos in technology.

Poetry and art solicit us to be present and elsewhere (where?).

The myth of poetry and art will be destroyed, for the benefit of what mirage?

Every art aspires to be total. All the arts would like to harmoniously compose the total art. There is, however, no integral art.

Collective art, more or less made by everyone, that is to say, by all and for all, does not exist, in any case, not yet, although artistic production is already collectivised and socialised in a certain manner.

Free art! A childish slogan.

Art is the liberator of constraints, according to what constrains it to these liberations.

All configurations of poetry and art that do not enter into an experience surpassing poetry and art remain residual forms.

Poetry and art show us what one does not live and what one does not see before they showed it to us.

Where does the border go between what is artistic - as such and/or seen as such - and what is not?

Moment and totality, poetry and art possess a certain specific autonomy, while being surrounded, encircled, penetrated by other moments and other totalities.

Poetry and art operate through transmutations that consist as much in archaeological creations as in creations of new worlds.

Art and poetry relate neither to strictly sensible and personal taste - combining sense, sensations and sentiments - nor to a rational and universal acceptance - based on commonly recognised signi­fications. Their median position, their double game, confers on them the force of roots and the power of the breakthrough towards the vast horizon.

All languages and all poetic and artistic works invite the reader, the lis­tener, the viewer to complete them, to perfect them.

It is a natural and cultural fact that within every artistic activity each participant has their own, small or grand, theory.

The circular aesthetic judgement, which circulates among us, has come to its most reduced form: I like it, I do not like it, I half like it.

The new new constantly chases the old new in this century of febrile novelties, passably antiquated.

All creations have an air of being against preceding creations to prove themselves and to prove that they put into work a production missing and unheard of until now. Without posing the problem of the new?

From a negating threshold, it seems that one could not go further - in the same direction. However, one can circumvent this threshold.

Poetry and art provoke and are provoked by a certain formative awaken­ing, participating in both drunkenness and sobriety. How, in the future, will this awakening vivify the inevitable stylisations?

Poetry and art situate themselves in the rift and the gulf, uniting what is predicted, projected, with that which is effectuated, per-fect. It is also in this that they give birth to open, moving, fluid works.

Poetry and art consist in a creative questioning, in a productive shaking of the ‘sense’ of the world.

Poetry and art emerge in the midst of a community and seek it, a rarely organic and most often critical and problematic community.

From moving, art became motion and becomes more and more kinetic.

Authors and writers begin to note: no one can situate themselves any longer from the point of view of an omniscient narrator who sees everything from all sides, a sort of little literary god.

Little by little, an understanding of poetic and artistic language and production will more clearly emerge that will not make them an affair of expression.

The attraction of the classic - formative, durable and canonical - is per­sistent, although we don’t know what to make of it.

The great creators did not want to make what the diverse posterities dis­covered in their works. Strictly speaking, they did not even want to make what they made.

One necessarily abandons what one wanted to make for the benefit of what is made.

Why, according to a conception that emerged in time, is it uninteresting to accomplish a work that comes in second place?

The poet and the artist die many times to be able to give birth to living works.

The masterworks of art and poetry are not immortal.

In museums and libraries a future life quietly dies.

Through its permutations, it is the game of the world that becomes an open work.

What should be maintained is not tradition, but remembrance. What is decisive is not the avant-garde, but the forerunner. What reveals itself as important is not progressivism, but annunciation. What becomes necessary is not the modern human, but the precursor.

Into what do poetry and art dissolve? Into being-nothingness, all-nothing, the unworldly world. What do they discover? The game of the world.