In a World of Material Presence, Début et fin de la neige

Abstract

This chapter investigates how Bonnefoy experiments with spacious ways of entering into contact with the material world in the snow poems of Début et fin de la neige, published in 1991. It compares how both Bonnefoy and Nancy use the biblical scene of Noli me tangere to reflect on the human desire to grasp a metaphysical essence and on the exhaustion of this desire by the endlessly shifting forms of material existence. Exploring how the loss of an absolute principle inspires a newly spacious conception of touch, the chapter analyses how both Bonnefoy and Nancy foreground the loose and airy interactions that occur between language, sense, and matter in the scene of writing. It explores how they present a spacious form of textual performance as an immersive way of exploring the world’s dynamics of exposition ‘de l’intérieur’.