Ethics of the time of immaturity
New book by Vincent Vivès from Presses universitaires du Septentrion
Summary
"Poetry will no longer pace the action, it will be forward", says Arthur Rimbaud. What, then, is being forward? Advancing ahead of humanity, working to liberate humanity. But also to be in an exit from poetry.
Rimbaud inaugurates a poetry that comes out of poetry and establishes a new relationship to literature, which we'll call ethical. It is to understand the scope of this ethic that the present reflection sets out. Fundamentally, works like Une saison en enfer or Illuminations build nothing that does not seek to crumble. And Rimbaud's rapid, radical journey will have been no more than a succession of seasons, resembling Christic stations, communalist crises or tamed deliriums, all ineffectual in their participation in the discourses of the world. But if Rimbaldian poetics emerges from itself, to the point of disappearing, it is also to engage an ethics in the reader, returned to the immaturity of the game and the freedom of meaning.
