In Praise of Hybrid Purity: Nomadism and Pierre Joris

This essay addresses the notion of ‘nomadic poetry’, in a theoretical as well as a practical sense. The first part of the contribution discusses certain theoretical presuppositions of nomadism (as practised by Pierre Joris), more specifically its praise of textual hybridity and readerly freedom or, if one wants to put it in a negative manner, its reluctance toward purity and rhetoric. The chapter starts from Jan Baetens’s own writing, which is both nomadic and non-nomadic, and further relies on examples drawn from modern French literature. The text suggests that all complex forms of nomadism should also take into account its own ‘other,’ namely purity and rhetoric. The final part of the essay discusses some aspects of the genesis and never ending transformations of a literary project, ‘Ce monde’ (‘This World’), which represents Jan Baetens’s creative response to Joris’s work – a displaced and nomadic one, of course.