Faire craquer l'épidermico-sémantique

Abstract

“The practices of poetry for me is a gesture of infraction in the body of the langue. It aims to break up the epidermic-semantic seams that there exists. When it breaks up, that’s my bet, the real glows” (Prigent, 2009: 67). Here we have the major challenges of the writer and poet Christian Prigent. We could imagine his writings as a kind of assembly, a word-act performed by the mouth with its organicity and its prosodic unfolding. An act that is as important as the sense. Prigent reworks the idea of polyphonic diversity, framing his discourse in a literature that dismantles the symbolic totality of the sense, pluralizing it, transforming it on senses (the real that glows, as he says). We would like to discuss some fundaments of Prigent’s literature, considering its trans-linguistic and polyphonic richness. And also considering his main aesthetical proposal, that is not to spare sensible nature and discourse. Prigent’s literature dissolves the symbolic and imaginary bonds by which we represent a narrative experience, producing effects of discontinuity upon the epidermis of the sense. Once he recognizes a “work of the negativity” operating in the core of his literature, how could we understand it? What would be the status of this work, which refuses the dialectic tension between sensible apprehension and intelligibility?