La poétique valéryenne de l’esprit et son héritage structuraliste : une morphologie générale

Abstract

A famous disciple of Mallarmé, Valéry (1871-1945), in pursuing his master’s research on autotelicity, anticipated a side of structuralism, in the broadest sense, which thinks of artistic creation and novelty in continuity with the forms of nature. In Valéry’s case, the productions of the mind, envisaged within the framework of his chair of Poetics at the College de France, thus take physiology as their model. Sometimes surprisingly, Valéry’s developments find a form of descent in the textualism of Barthes and in the aesthetics of Deleuze, which unfolds in Difference and Repetition. Motifs and forms such as enantiodromy, templum and arabesque will escort us through a reflection on autotelicity, making the opposition between Physis and Technè obsolete.