Preface
p. 13-14
Texte intégral
1In Henri Michaux’s œuvre, body and consciousness are inseparable. « The inner space » opens up a territory which the poet continually explores from all angles in an attempt to « close in on the problem of being ». He reconstitutes himself as laboratory. An experimenter as much as an object of experimentation, this subject that is « born flawed », whose imagination flees in all directions, lacking self assurance, long rapt in himself, is to discover within himself the forms of an unease which rapidly becomes the fundamental principle of consciousness. He bases on his own short-comings, on this « style of being in the midst of difficulties » which is his own, his tribulation and his training. That is to say that he sites his work (as poet or painter) directly on the wound from which the voice originates, as close as possible to inadequation and to imbalance, like the two lips of a cut through which press and pour forth the batallion of signs.
2 For a time a traveller to the Equator or to Asia, after 1933 Michaux became a nomad of his intimate holdings. That is to say that he attached himself to his own patch of disinherited earth, and thus to his body, less in order to cultivate than to reap the elemental principles of subsistence. He no longer moved in terms of exterior geography, but in terms of his interior folds and undulations. He was committed to studying himself and to probing his own transient nature, rather than to transiting through different worlds. Within Michaux, it is the inner that is the most vast; it is in the interior that the distant is to be found.
3Michaux travels to study himself, but also to verify this study. The journey not only has as its objective going forward, or going further into « the insatiable », it is also that which makes a return, that which comes back, that which insists or obsesses. The reader of Michaux’s work bears witness to a large quantity of cinematic repetition, of recurrent reveries on trace and impact, on related creatures and on analogous situations. This process is thus also that of examining oneself, as one would touch one’s body in order to convince oneself that one is really there.
4This volume is a collection of studies presented on this theme during the seminar course « Plume » which has been running for several years at the École Normale Supérieure de Fontenay/Saint-Cloud. It marks both the fruit of work and of an interweaving of sympathies. To study Michaux is also to share the inexhaustible re-reading of the simple « adventure of being alive ».
Auteurs
ATER, ENS de Fontenay/Saint-Cloud.
Professeur, ENS de Fontenay/Saint-Cloud.
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