Abstract EN:

Apparently anachronistic and yet always pressing, the quest for a literary work at once corporal and poetic has haunted the XXth century. Whether as an effort at textual incorporation or in the pursuit of an adequate verb, " writing the body " should be understood less as a theme than as a process of formal and critical renewal, which has inscribed the body within theory. Contested and yet at issue, the very stakes of this quest have fueled a debate confronting various writers and divergent understandings of the body. From Valéry and Claudel to Noe͏̈l or Prigent, this study explores both the project itself and the discursive community formed around the desire to write, or uncover in the text, an Other of the text. To this end, we have inventoried the arguments of a topic in which the body is represented as being "excribed" (J. -L. Nancy), i. E. Beyond the reach of all utterances, and yet also inscribed within every poem. And we have excavated the sites either assigned or refused to the "corpoème" (J. Sénac) in the models provided for the conceptualization of the work. Discussing the desire to mix the poem and the body leads to question the limits assigned to literary theory and history, and to connect different disciplines and temporalities. The quest also elicits the idea of a "global text", understood in terms of symbol, icon and index-- three levels articulated according to complex competing and compensatory strategies. Here, "writing the body" cannot be reduced to a struggle against language. It has generated an assortment of fruitful new poetics, which capitalize on the organic structure of the text or consider it as a trace allowing for the reproduction of a gesture. . .