Poetry as a Foreign Language: Unhoused Writing Subjects in the Extrême Contemporain

This article argues that a variety of contemporary French poetic writing engages challengingly with the relations between the institution of the 'mother' tongue and the figure and/or practice of the (variously) 'other' tongue. The idea as well as the reality of the 'other' tongue is seen to provide a radical pragmatic corrective to linguistically naturalized order and conventional imaginings of generic practice. The discussion develops with particular reference to four works by significant figures in contemporary French writing, all published by P. O. L: Olivier Cadiot's L'art poétic' (1988); Katalin Molnár's Quant à je (kantaje) (1996); Christian Prigent's L'âme (2000), and Dominique Fourcade's Est-ce que j'peux placer un mot? (2001). While the system of language imagined as a stable communicational order is undermined in these works by distinctive practices of disruption and interference, this is ultimately a move which may itself be argued to participate in the systematization or generic domestication of both intra- and inter-linguistic otherness. In this move, the subject of 'poetic' speech is both reflected and individuated in the break with homogeneity. This shared break performs the existence of a poetic subject in various ways, but it is argued to operate predominantly in terms of a subject's emergence in the process of being 'spoken through' - as if the discursive approach of self were most fully realized through the embrace of linguistic estrangement.