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  • In Search of Lost Prose
  • Alain Badiou
    English Translation by Jacob Levi and Lucy Bergeret

March 25, 1984, a quarter century ago. Let us imagine Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe on the banks of the Neckar, near the tower. It is here that we can situate Lacoue's French translation of the definition of poetry that Paul Celan proposes in The Meridian. A translation that follows, and at least in certain places opposes, the translations by Blanchot, André du Bouchet, and Jean Launay:

Poetry, Ladies and Gentlemen—: that infinite speaking of pure mortality and the in-vain. [La poésie, Mesdames et Messieurs—: ce parler à l'infini de la mortalité pure et de l'en vain.]

(qtd. in Poetry 105)

Poetry is thus: a knotting of speaking, the infinite, and death.

April 13, 1984, the same spring, in Barcelona. In a translation of Celan, this time Lacoue situates a definition not of poetry, but love. This definition lies in the space between the first and last lines of the poem, "Les Globes," from the collection The No-One's-Rose [Die Niemandsrose].

The first line:

In the eyes all awry—read there:

[Dans les yeux fourvoyés—là, déchiffre]

The last lines:

All things,even the heaviest, werefledged, nothingheld back.[Toutmême le plus lourd, allait [End Page 1254] voler, rienne retenait.]

(qtd. in Poetry 106)

After which Lacoue concludes, "it defines love" (106).

Love: a visionary blindness [un aveuglement extra-lucide], a decoding of existence where everything is uprooted for the sake of the invisible, where restraint no longer exists.

I would like to suggest that poetry and love are ultimately fused together [fusionnés] under the name of "prose." And that "prose" designates the inscription or emergence [laisser-venir] of the phrase, contra so-called "poetry," which we can also call poetry without love.

For Lacoue, the destiny of thought can and even must pass through these five terms: 1) the phrase, which comes from elsewhere, and is "what has spoken within me—in the distance, elsewhere, almost outside—for a very long time [ce qui se prononce en moi—loin, ailleurs, presque dehors, depuis très longtemps]" (Phrase 11). 2) Love, which eliminates the restraints that caused the dispersion of the phrase. 3) Poetry proper, which inscribes in speaking the phrase as the edge [comme lisière] of the infinite and death. 4) So-called "poetry," which pompously declares restraint, and flees the phrase. 5) Prose, also called "literature," which is para-phrase, it is poetry in unrestrained love and the renunciation of so-called "poetry."

When I say, "in search of lost prose," as an allegory for the destiny of Lacoue's life and thought, it is in this sense: in the beginning, there is corrupting "poetry." To renounce this implies love as unrestraint, and poetry as experience. Hence the phrase can become the prose that it always was, which gives meaning to justice, the only justice: just prose.

Or further still: so-called "poetry" is divine rhetoric, it is judgment and prayer. But if God is silent (as he is today), if we can only love on Earth and only speak on the verge of death, then we are delivered, Lacoue tells us, from "the irresistible magnetism that [God] brings to language," we are delivered from prayer. Thus, Lacoue concludes, "we can get a glimpse of a wholly other [tout autre] poetry, and this is perhaps what Celan ultimately saw, and which drove him to despair."

This wholly other kind of poetry is prose, which makes possible the phrase. It is indeed this glimpse that, alas, drove Lacoue to despair, just as it did Celan. The bridge to prose is lacking, but it is nonetheless indicated to us by these two brilliant martyrs. Martyrs of poetry as prose.

But let us retrace this journey.

In the beginning, yes, there is fallacious "poetry," submissive prayer or ferocious judgment, the corruption of love. There is, to cite the words of Phrase XIX: [End Page 1255]

this bitter falsification, this evasivediscourse, these residues (or this excess) of "poetry"which have ruined our most just prose.

(Phrase 114)

Lacoue adds these crucial parentheses:

(I do...

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