The posthumous life of acuteness

the drama of the lyric Passim by Michel Deguy

Abstract

The article carries out a close reading of “Passim”, which, like a poem in parallax, forges, with the device of fragmentarism, an anomalous unit of discourses on death, and constitutes an in extremis demonstration of the limits and possibilities of poetic discourse. Thus, horror and mourning, sore points of Western culture, are recognized in the poem as defining the dispute between the knowing self, on the one hand; and inchoative thought, the impossibility of meaning and erasure, on the other, formulating an agon about the very being-on of the existence circumscribed by the awareness of the finitude and fragility of life. The article, finally, identifies the intimate links between the legibility of the lyric, the discursive montage, the performative condition of the self and its dramatization in the ritualization of mourning – links conditioned to the care of the rhetorical artifices, which remain ruinous and re-updated, still productive in Deguy's contemporary poetry.