L’annulation du visage: une «morale substitutive»?

Cancelled face, a «moral substitute»? The pandemic affecting our world in 2020 leads us to question a centuries-old socio-cultural practice, namely the wearing of masks, and to rethink their use in light of the current context. Depending on the civilizations and eras, masks have had various functions: religious, social and artistic. None of these functions corresponds, however, to the recent use of masks. Henri Michaux, Jean Starobinski, Michel Butor and Yves Bonnefoy will help us to answer these questions: How the wearing of masks does change our relation to identity? our relationship with others? Does not seeing the whole face make it possible to see others better?

Poetik des Kolibris

Lange Zeit galten Reiseberichte als Wegbegleiter des Kolonialismus. Dies ändert sich im Lateinamerika der 1920er Jahre, wovon die in Vergessenheit geratenen Feuilletonartikel, Tagebücher und Aufzeichnungen der chilenischen Nobelpreisträgerin Gabriela Mistral, des »Papstes des brasilianischen Modernismus« Mário de Andrade und des belgisch-französischen Avantgardisten Henri Michaux zeugen. Marília Jöhnk geht dem wissensgeschichtlichen Interesse der drei Reisenden am Kontinent und ihrem Spiel mit etablierten Formen literarischer Wahrnehmung nach. Mit dem tief in der aztekischen Mythologie verankerten Kolibri eint deren kleine Reiseprosa nicht nur die kompakte Größe, sondern auch die Mobilität und Geschwindigkeit.

A Disintegrating Lyric? – Henri Michaux and Chinese Lyricism

This essay examines the perplexing triangular relation between Henri Michaux's ambiguous and attenuated lyricism, the French lyrical tradition, and Michaux's Chinese-inspired poems. I explore how Michaux's West-Eastern cross-cultural straddling relates to the way he renders the lyric problematic, and how this relation can help us re-read and perhaps unread the lyric (at least, its European understanding) in a comparative way. I first read some poems that are representative of Michaux's uneasy and disintegrating lyricism; then I consider how Michaux's poems that allude to Chinese and Far Eastern sources of inspiration reinstate his lyric voice, but in a new, ‘Asianised’ way. This raises the intriguing question of why there exists a coincidence between Michaux's ‘Chinese-style’ and his lyrical moments. Besides considering Michaux's Chinese influences and the Orientalist stereotyping of Chinese literary style, I argue that a stronger comparative approach to this question is to consider lyricism in the Chinese context and how shuqing (approximately translated as ‘lyrical’) writing – despite its very different conceptual framework – may shed light on Michaux's poetry and dislodge Eurocentric views of the lyric. Finally, I propose that Michaux's poetry marks the point of simultaneous lyric disintegration and reformulation. Although Michaux's Chinese-inspired dimension sustains certain lyrical moments, the transcultural aesthetics of his West-Eastern lyric in fact resists fusion and reconciliation, presenting instead a juxtapositional tension and splintering of poetics between Michaux's French and Chinese sides.

Char, Michaux e as questões da poesia

Segundo Jacques Rancière, a literatura interfere na construção do olhar sensível sobre a realidade contribuindo para o constante rearranjo do jogo social. Os poetas René Char e Henri Michaux atravessaram um tempo de intensas transformações no campo social, no entanto, suas obras apontam para caminhos menos explícitos de ação, o que nos autoriza formular novas hipóteses sobre a relação entre os meios que a possui para mediar o olhar do homem sobre o mundo. Seguindo essas pistas, este artigo pretende investigar de que modo a escrita desses poetas contribui para uma literatura que constrói caminhos de intervenção política e social.

La presencia de la lengua francesa y las producciones culturales francófonas en la creación literaria de Chantal Maillard

Con apenas 11 años, la filósofa y poeta Chantal Maillard abandonó su Bélgica natal para establecerse en Málaga. Desde entonces, aunque su lengua materna era el francés y se nutría de lecturas literarias y filosóficas en dicho idioma, adoptó como lengua vehicular de su escritura el español. Este artículo tiene como objetivo analizar y poner de manifiesto la influencia y presencia de la lengua francesa en la obra literaria de la escritora, así como la influencia de filósofos franceses como Deleuze y de pintores y poetas belgas como Henri Michaux.

Tanatología Mística: S. Mallarmé, H. Michaux, G. Scelsi

The fifth and last string quartet of the great composer, musician and poet Giacinto Scelsi, written in 1984 in memory of his friend Henri Michaux who has just died, which is his last work, stripped, austere, is based on a Fa that fades between a white noise, and that reappears at the end in a vibrato that is the composer’s last breath. His music, Michaux will say, «is magnetized by the ineffable». This quartet constitutes an austere and naked funerary wake, with an overwhelming effect, a testament of Scelsi himself. The composer and poet die two years later than Michaux, taking with him all the secrets of his creation. Song of the swan that precedes the final silence of death, symbolized by the two empty, white pages that close their poems. These white pages constitute in Mallarmé a self-referential Nothing: «Sur le vide papier que la blancheur défend». The viaggio al centro del suono to which Scelsi aspired leads the musician poet to the death of the verbal images and the return to silence of the white surface of the page: «suddenly the white surface», he writes in one of his poems. Annihilatio mystica in the form of a blank page that in the three authors –Mallarmé, Michaux, Scelsi– leads to a wisdom of emptiness.

“A alegria é una”: O poema em prosa e a poética da ironia / “Joy Is a Unity”: The Prose Poem and the Poetics of Irony

Resumo: O estudo propõe uma reflexão sobre diversas utilizações da metáfora da imersão n’água enquanto a chave para a compreensão da estrutura da subjetividade encenada no poema em prosa. Destarte, ao investigar a presença da ironia romântica voltada para a falta de acabamento e para a representação da dissimulação, duas importantes características da estrutura do poema em prosa, que surge em meados do século XIX enquanto uma forma de resistência não apenas às injunções do mercado literário do folhetim, como também ao espírito da massificação em geral, o estudo debruça-se sobre a afirmação da reunificação subjetiva como o principal desafio da poética híbrida. Os poetas tais como Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry, Henri Michaux e, mais recentemente, a polonesa Ewa Lipska são os principais interlocutores nessa tarefa proposta pelo texto de Charles Baudelaire O spleen de Paris. Seu principal desafio é a articulação da estrutura paradoxal do espírito moderno composto da tendência herética e da autocrítica.Palavras-chave: poema em prosa; literatura francesa; ironia; riso; subjetividade.Abstract: This paper establishes a reflection on the different uses of the metaphor of immersion in water as the key to understand the structure of the subjectivity staged in prose poems. In investigating the presence of the romantic irony aiming the lack of completion as well as the representation of dissimulation, characteristics of the prose poem structure, which emerges in the middle of the XIX Century as a form of resistance not only to the feuilleton literary market, but also to the massification spirit in general, the study analyzes the affirmation of the subjective reunification as the main challenge to poetic hybridity. Poets, such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry, Henri Michaux and more recently the Polish author Ewa Lipska, are important participants of this fascinating task put forward in Charles Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen. Its main challenge is the paradoxical articulation of the modern spirit structure constituted both by the heretical tendency and self-criticism.Keywords: prose poem; French literature; irony; laughter; subjectivity.

Tocar la escritura. El cuerpo en obra gráfica de Henri Michaux y el caso de 'Saisir' para una 'retórica del trazo'

El problema del cuerpo escritural es una de las entradas clave para acercarse a los grafos del pintor-poeta Henri Michaux y, por ello, en este artículo se propone una mirada inédita desde las nociones de Jean-Luc Nancy y Jacques Derrida que tocan la escritura misma. Así, a través de textos teóricos y obras del artista, se da cuenta de su comienzo alrededor del cuerpo figurado, para pasar a escribir el propio cuerpo en trayectos ideográficos que abstraen el alfabeto occidental y, especialmente, libros de artista en los que se explota el grafo como escritura pre-literal, tomando el término derridiano. En este sentido, se propone una lectura del libro gráfico Saisir como caso paradigmático de la búsqueda del cuerpo escritural, desde la centralidad que ocupa el tacto en su obra.