Jérôme Game Bücher

What does contemporary French poetry do to the subject? This book examines the means and effects of the subject’s transmutation into various processes of (de-)subjectivation by looking at the works of four contemporary writers: Christian Prigent, Dominique Fourcade, Olivier Cadiot and Hubert Lucot. The author explores their work in the context of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy, building a critical apparatus – a ‘poetics of becoming’ – that informs close readings of poems and prose. Moving beyond established criteria of classical literary criticism, the book both offers a comparative discussion of Deleuze’s notions of literature and provides new insights into French writing, addressing the political dimension of contemporary poetry from the perspective of current theoretical radicalism.

After the key moments of the livre d’artiste (from Manet/Mallarmé to Picasso/Reverdy) and Surrealist art, how did the text/image relationship evolve in twentieth-century French culture? By what epistemological and aesthetic frameworks was it determined and, in turn, what new signs and practices, what new meanings did it produce? This book offers a series of answers to these questions by looking at several case studies including Marguerite Duras’ filmic rewriting, Pierre Klossowski’s shift from writing to painting, contemporary video-poetry, Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical engagement with Bacon and Giacometti, and CD-Rom aesthetics. What brings the various essays in this volume together is a challenging new reading of the text/image relationship as a porous boundary through which texts and images no longer merely illustrate or stand by each other but interpenetrate, hybridise or restructure one another.