Revue Romane. Langue et littérature. International Journal of Romance Languages and Literatures - Volume 46, Issue 1, 2011

RETRACTION NOTICE. This article has been retracted. For more information, please read the Editorial in Revue Romane 50:1 (2015).

In the textualized universe of Denis Roche, the poetic impulse is inextricably linked to the unstable framework in which such matter is cast. Utterances of language translate the power of transgression.The text is birthed as an object of inquiry, ultimately to be dismantled : the poem is both “inadmissible” and “inexistant.” As a self-fixed interrogator focused upon the residual matter that it is and which it only can be, it is no longer subservient to the references it struggles to invoke, much less to signify. Writing, then, is an unending auto-reflexive process of annihilation and reification, and subsists, as such, to the sole extent that it disassociates from all conventional voices of articulation. More obtusely, to poeticize is to re-transcribe — otherly and with abruptness — the withered sputtering(s) of the artistic imperative. Poetry, like photography, aims and frames, slices the world into sequences and images — partial, scattered, at once undone so as to be resuscitated, briefly, again. The extant is eschewed. At stake and at center-stage : a propelled form of motivity, speed, accelerations and dead-stops, an aleatory array of unremitting shifts, “instantanées” — obstinately un-emblematic. Raging or controlled, the poem or the photo can only be a non-representational sliver, the transitory residue of an infinite combinatorics of possibles. Hence, arbitrary breaches, clamoring interruptions, ludic contortions of incompleteness. A curious dynamic.