A la dérive

The notion of the formless found a lasting definition in Documents, the dissident Surrealist magazine led by Georges Bataille, Carl Einstein and Michel Leiris from 1929 to 1931. In an unassuming short entry for its ‘Dictionnaire’, Bataille presents the informe emphatically not as a system or a structure, but as ‘un terme servant à déclasser’; yet neither the disruptive impulse of the 'Dictionnaire', nor the more recent exhibitions it has generated, can avoid a measure of taxonomic organisation (L'Informe: mode d'emploi, 1996; Undercover Surrealism, 2006). In the realm of poetry, free verse has eroded the boundaries of the poetic, but its freedom from formal constraints is limited too; as Jay Parini (2008) contends, ‘formless poetry does not really exist, as poets inevitably create patterns in language that replicate forms of experience.’ Through a small number of case studies, this chapter will consider the legacy of Bataille’s definition while assessing the ongoing tension between form and its undoing in textual and visual art of the twenty-first century.

Certeau’s Landscapes

The chapter alternates between a reading of Certeau’s L’Invention du quotidien centred on the practice and the issue of the image, and a wider theoretical reflection on the image’s agency vis-à-vis analytical categories through which we engage with the real of modernity. The image possesses agency in that it brings about a ‘rectification’ of prevailing representations of the everyday, by means of a holistic and therapeutic rationale that is distinctive. The mobility of forms that is the basis of Certeau’s vindication of the image is compared with the work of several more recent anthropologists, namely Tim Ingold, Philippe Descola and Eduardo Kohn, in whose writings comparable figures are subsumed into what can be termed an anthropology of sustainability.

A Voice Takes Form

This chapter focuses on Louis-René des Forêts’s poetic sequence, Poèmes de Samuel Wood (1988) in order to highlight the relationship between poetic form, authorial voice and the genre of autobiography. Des Forêts’s sequence comprises a 559-line poem divided into thirteen sections, attributed by its title to the heteronymous author-figure Samuel Wood. Notwithstanding its form and authorial disguise, the poem is obliquely autobiographical and forms part of the overall project of the long, final phase of his writing, best exemplified by the fragmentary work of 1997, Ostinato. My analysis seeks to stake out a distinctive way of conceiving the relation of poetic form to autobiographical genre (taking a distance, notably, from Lejeunian typological approaches), and in order to do so endeavours, on the one hand, to work with the idea of form as active, dynamic and mobile, a process of forming, deforming and reforming which is always temporally emergent and variable, rather than a structure that might simply contain something like content or experience, and on the other hand, to connect that mobility of form to des Forêts’s pursuit of a distinctive autobiographical mode. Far from reflecting and securing authorial identity, this mode might be considered as one that concerns an impersonal or anonymous level of experience that is fundamentally insecure and ultimately inappropriable; we might think of this mode as a kind of degree zero of autobiography, an autobiography in the neuter, or an ‘autobiographie intérieure’.

Eugène Savitzkaya

With the publication of his novel Fraudeur in 2015, Eugène Savitzkaya appears to return us to his first novel Mentir published in 1977. In the intervening years Minuit has published nine novels by Savitzkaya and each of them has put the form of the novel in play through a variety of devices ranging from paratextual commentary on the generic status of the novel to the integration of autobiographical materials. The focus of this chapter will be on the figure of the mother as inscribed within Mentir and Fraudeur and how she is at once both a biographème that signals the author’s past and referential horizon yet also a source of fiction that exceeds the autobiographical even as it draws upon it. In reading both these novels I want to explore the formal relationship between the novel and auto/biography in terms of fiction.

The Eclipse of Form in Roland Barthes’s

This chapter charts the process whereby the text of Barthes’s La Chambre claire sidelines form as a critical concern applicable to photography. An overview of the value system he brings to photography (quite unlike the one he applies to the Novel in the lectures he was delivering contemporaneously) shows that the priority accorded to the referent over the photo as such, to authentication (“ça-a-été”) over representation, and to the disturbing punctum over the disturbed studium, necessarily entails the priority of force over form, not least because each dominant term in these pairs undermines the value of the photograph as something outwardly visual and concretely visible. Force, or intensity, can be tracked not just in the photograph, but also in Barthes’s emotions, whether as beholder of the photo, son in mourning, or essayist repudiating critical sterility, proposing instead to construct a personal phenomenology incorporating the force of affect. A short conclusion via the ideas of René Thom on salient and pregnant forms will suggest a way of bridging the gap between form and force.

What Forms Can Do: The Work of Form in 20th- and 21st-century French Literature and Thought

This introduction provides a context for the volume by opening up the question of the agency of form and the work it accomplishes in a range of texts — including fiction, life-writing, poetry and thought — that explore the everyday and the real. The chapter addresses the broad trajectory and some of the key articulations and tendencies of form in the period covered by the volume and argues that form is not simply about the nature of aesthetic objects but a term that can be linked to translation and to social and ideological constructs that work to pattern and shape the ways we act and think. Indeed, in engaging with the contents of the volume, the authors of the introduction argue that form is about the potential for transformation. As such, form transforms us and also serves to transform how we see and read the world. The introduction thus provides a set of key considerations to guide the reader through the book, and also beyond it.

‘La recherche que l’on peut dire formelle’

This chapter makes the case that Proust's Recherche offers a way of perceiving how our pleasure in aesthetic objects (novels, septets) can, when viewed from the appropriate angle, reveal the topography of the social world through which we must all necessarily find our way. How might the experience of a particularly social level of reality be communicated in a novel? The social world can be understood in Bourdieusian terms as a space of immanent tendencies, one in which some people are more likely to follow one kind of social trajectory than another. Proust’s novel shares with Bourdieu’s sociology an interest in how a work of art, being the product of a social world, can on occasion serve as an instrument that reveals something of the immanent structures that contribute to the shape of the social topography around it. It does so by producing differential effects on its public. The Vinteuil Septet is presented in the Recherche as a work that has this kind of differential social effect: by producing different effects on different listeners it becomes a diagnostic instrument revealing the social topography around it.

Form and Energeia in the Work of Barbara Cassin (For M)

For Barbara Cassin, the distinguished French philosopher and Greek philologist, and editor of the acclaimed Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles, the question of form coalesces at the juncture of several intertwined disciplinary interests, and theoretical enterprises: the ever-expanding ‘Untranslatables’ project, in which literary and aesthetic form are at the heart of a very different way of 'doing philosophy' multilingually; the reading of Lacanian psychoanalysis as a form of modern-day sophistry; and the critique of Google’s domination of the information age. This chapter reads 'form' in her work through a consideration of how it functions in each of a series of interrelated operations — the sophistic challenge to Platonic or Aristotelian form; the status of transformation in Lacanian psychoanalysis; an Austinian performative reading of political discourse; and how the so-called information age is redefining the very form itself of knowledge — all of which, I will argue, are tied in different ways to the core notion of the untranslatable.

Convulsive Form

Starting from Giorgio Agamben's proposition, in 'Notes on Gesture', that the 20th-century is beset by a 'crisis of gesture' this chapter explores the convulsive or 'innervated body' in the work of Walter Benjamin and Georges Bataille. Taking a less melancholy approach than Agamben, I ask what can the convulsive body do and what forms can it produce. Both Benjamin and Bataille invest the convulsive body with a power susceptible to provoke affective 'discharge' and thus with a kind of political agency. Their approaches differ, however, over the nature of this politics; while Benjamin accentuates the potential of play and its gesturality, especially in his writing in cinema, Bataille pursues convulsion on the terrain of ritual and sacrifice, particularly in the novel Le Bleu du ciel. For both, however, the dangerous continuity between the convulsion and an authoritarian politics is at stake.

Aesthetic Form and Social ‘Form’ in À la recherche du temps perdu

The frequency with which Proust uses the word ‘goût’ (taste) in À la recherche du temps perdu contributes to the patterning or ‘form’ of the novel, while raising questions about social ‘form’. Proust plays with the concept of ‘taste’ or ‘tastes’ in such a way as to interweave the bodily, the historical and the imaginary, constructing scenarios that depend on ‘taste’, variously interpreted, and that are – alternately or simultaneously – comic, quasi-anthropological or poignant (for example, those staging gay eroticism); he also creates puns that draw on both oral and aesthetic meanings of taste/s. Throughout the novel, he depicts the relativism of tastes, the battlegrounds on which these are fought out, and the complex relationship between taste and disgust. (Arguably, in some cases the battlegrounds are peculiarly French, given the political importance of ‘taste’ in the national culture.) Characters such as Albertine, Brichot and the ‘low-life’ Jupien all have their – sometimes unexpected – roles in these taste-wars.