Machaut’s Virtual Voir Dit and the Moment of Heidegger’s Poetry

Abstract

As a counterpoint to Machaut scholarship that focuses on the materiality of the book and the professionalization of the poet in the Livre dou Voir Dit, this essay suggests that the immaterial aspects of Machaut’s work can reveal something about poets and poeticity in his time. The narrative disruption and formal interplay that are characteristic of the Voir Dit can be seen as strategies of preservation, and offer glimpses of a virtual book that would safeguard the author’s work against the ravages of time, which the material book will not escape. This article draws on Heidegger to examine the play of temporality in Machaut’s Voir Dit, specifically as temporality comes to bear on the material and the virtual. Machaut’s use of the virtual brings together two threads of Heideggerian thought: the Augenblick and the role of the poet. It is through a reading of Machaut’s virtual book that I bring together these two threads in an effort to see how the blink of an eye — whether the Augenblick or the flashes of Machaut’s virtual book — can project a poet and his work into continuous futurity.