»Man che trema«

Focussing on a few poetic legacies of the 20th century, this article discusses the function of handwriting in which the “manus propria” becomes the “manus aliena.” Handwriting did not lose its significance with the rise of the typewriter; rather, it manifested itself in a new function, one which is not reducible to manualness but which renders psychic automatism visible. In this article, particular attention is devoted to automatic writing among the surrealists and in Fernando Pessoa. At the same time, the function of illegibility is conceptualized, which makes it possible for something to persist in the realm of the recorded that cannot be articulated at the level of literal meaning. If the surrealists initially excepted that automatic writing would grant them the possibility of being liberated from the bonds of the symbolic law, Djuna Barnes reminds us in her play The Antiphon of how the hand, which an alien force begins to guide from within, places us at the very intersection of all the tensions of the symbolic. The final part of the article is devoted to the later poetic legacy of Djuna Barnes; there the text presents precisely the extreme (but never finished) handwritten elaboration of the typed pages in a new manner of existing that resists legibility and transcription, while nullifying the opposition between presence and absence on which the logic of the signifier is based