Yves Bonnefoy and Jean-Luc Nancy

This book explores how the French poet Yves Bonnefoy (1923–2016) develops a newly affirmative, tactile, and embodied practice of poetic performance in the latter half of his career. It investigates how this shift is prompted by a conceptual change that Bonnefoy undergoes in writing Dans le leurre du seuil (1975) as he comes to perceive finitude not merely as a force of dissolution but as a dynamic of opening and exposure. Analysing how this transformation convinces the poet of the generative nature of the act of relation, this study examines how Bonnefoy no longer perceives the poem as an isolated body that reaches out to the material world from a distance but presents it as an ontological performance: an exploration of the dynamics by which linguistic, corporeal, and material forces reverberate side by side and by which worldly existence opens up in and through the poem. Using Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophical writings to cast new light on this practice of poetic performance, this book explores how the poet and the philosopher both stress the immersive nature of this kind of textual experimentation. It investigates how they insist that the text does not speak about the world but experiments with its creative force from within, exploring the spacious dynamics of exposition that bring the poem into being, asking us to situate ourselves within these dynamics and to be opened up by them, to reimmerse ourselves in an endlessly mobile and relational world.