Voice and Subjectivity in Les Planches courbes

This chapter analyses Bonnefoy’s experimentation with sound in Les Planches courbes, published in 2001. Offering a close reading of the eleven-poem sequence ‘La Voix lointaine’, it investigates how Bonnefoy uses the motif of listening to a distant voice to present self-presence as a space of resonance. It examines how the poet critiques visual tropes that present subjectivity as a scene of self-reflection and instead uses the rhythms of poetic voicing to explore how consciousness emerges from the reverberations between linguistic, sensual, and material forces. Analysing how Bonnefoy and Nancy both present resonance as an originary dynamic, this chapter investigates how they both use this larger conception of resonance to explore how human subjectivity emerges from an endlessly mobile and relational physical world.