Literary Plurimateriality and Poetico-political Vibrations in Muriel Pic’s Work

Abstract

More and more works testify to the pictorial turn which marks francophone literary production since the end of the twentieth century, “immersed in the world of the modern images and mass media,” as Magali Nachtergael pointed out. The textual and visual regimes are thus no longer inscribed in a logic of competition but arranged in a perspective of co-adjunction, of fertile crossings. From this perspective, we examine Affranchissements (2020) by Muriel Pic; this “wandering-book” is structured in six parts which deploy a nonlinear narrative, brimming with many visual materials and where everything starts from “the magical grimoire of a stamp album” and from a “debt to be paid.” This article analyzes this fundamentally hybrid book which, in a decompartmentalization of semiotic regimes, activates a poetic plurimateriality and makes of the literary space a—political—place of renewal of the real, of a redrawing of the material and symbolic space, as Jacques Rancière would say.