Abstract EN:

Pierre Jean Jouve’s poetry builds up on the intrication of the two primordial instincts of life and death, which accounts for the impact of the encounter between the poet and psychoanalysis in the 1920s. In 1935, death is incarnated as Hélène, the main character of the novel Dans les années profondes in which death of the woman appears as a necessary condition to poetic creation. With this drama, Jouve stages the process of sublimation underlying the act of writing. From then on, his poetry will constantly draw on this fouding death. An original way to keep the work alive, motion from the absence of the feminine body to its presence transmuted into presence of the words. In Jouve’s poetry, rythm itself rises from the interplay between presence and absence of the feminine body. Our purpose in this work is to unfold the stakes of this problematic. First, an epistemological stake, which implies a reflection on the notion of poetic rythm. Then, a psycho-analytical stake since with the novel about Hélène, Jouve reveals the sublimating operation of the writing process, showing how, triggered by desire, the act of writing implies the presence of the writing subject’s instinctual body. A philosophical stake as well because the beating in Jouve’s poetry ― between presence and absence ― might be considered according to the movement of oscillation between virtual and actual which characterizes the concept of the fold (Le pli) developped by Gilles Deleuze. Finally, a stylistic stake insofar as death is at work. Words bear the marks of absence. Hence, specific poetic procedures remind us constantly of the source from which words draw their intense presence.