Snail Conversions: Derrida's Turns with Ponge

Abstract

Conversion is at work in prayer, promise, psychoanalysis and poetry. This paper begins by turning around Jacques Derrida's discussion of the importance of ‘anasemic conversion’ (linguistic traces not yet or no longer endowed with meaning) in the work of Nicolas Abraham and turns into a reading of the aneconomic effects of the silvery trail deposited by the eponymous snails in Francis Ponge's prose poem ‘Escargots’ (Snails). Anasemic conversion wrests language from meaning and returns it to its material, non-mattering, primal matter. Made of slimy spit, the snail's trail is not a product per se, but rather a by-product, an excessive residue, perhaps even a waste product. This silvery wake is a poetic amalgam of all elements pertaining to the snail's vital activities (expression, secretion, affection, excretion) and converts snails’ life experiences into a photographic figure of writing, a critique of an anthropocentric aesthetic, and a poetic death sentence.