Jacques Dupin’s lacunary poetics

Abstract

Voice, in Jacques Dupin’s poetry, is singularly captured in the state of sufferance. It emerges by way of the operations of separation, division and destruction of the poetic subject within the ‘cruel geography’ of Dupin’s universe. Focusing specifically on the poem ‘La Double jarre’, in Contumace, the article surveys different kinds of poetic constructions of vocal dilapidation, particularly via the contrasting operations of imaginary doubling and inscriptive violence. In so doing, it will account for Dupin’s use of distinctive typographical patterns. The key theoretical reference is Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s notion of ‘typography’ as a critique of discourse that foregrounds the process of vocal estrangement or ‘enunciative depropriation’. By conducting the analysis within the triple thematic perspective of death, origins and writing, the article claims to further advance recent and current work on the nature and limits of representation.