The Topography of Presence: Bonnefoy and the Spatialization of Poetry

Summary Critics have usually read Bonnefoy's poetry as a kind of writing seeking its own annihilation in the face of presence. Using Du mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve as a laboratory, this paper sets two goals for itself: One, to investigate the theoretical rigor of the critical concepts presupposed by both Bonnefoy himself and his most influential readers. Two, to analyze a typical Bonnefoy poem in the attempt to demonstrate that it in fact doesn't reduce itself in the service of the extra‐textual. Du mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve is an elegant example of the recalcitrance of poetry. It refuses to be subsumed into that version of Hegelian dialectics that most critics of Bonnefoy's work have tended to use, either explicitly or implicitly, as a theoretical infrastructure upon which to situate the poem. Instead, it perforais its resistance to speculative negation by thematizing its own linguistic materiality.