lure of a metaphysics of absence - of Jacques Derrida’s by now totemic cautionary
insistence:
Play is the disruption of presence ... Play is always play of absence and
presence, but if it is to be thought radically, play must be conceived of
before the alternative of presence and absence. Being must be
conceived as presence or absence on the basis of play and not the other
way round.3
The site of poetry is, for Bishop as for Char, or for Yves Bonnefoy, 'a place
of unfinished and Unfinishable business, of ever-(ex)changing transaction'. Poetry, as
in Richard Stamelman’s memorable formulation of Lost Beyond Telling, performs for
Bishop t∞ as 'the void filling its own lack; absence distilling a presence'. As with
Collofs inescapable onomatopoeias, infrasignifications again abound. Here, for
instance, in Andre Frenaud’s Ta-pres', past, pres-ence, absence ('ld'), nearness ('prds')
are performed out of separateness or, as Bishop expresses it, 'presence [is] knotted into
an imperceptible that is its other name'. Instances of such knotting from Denise Le
Dantec, Martine Broda, Janine Mitaud and Heather Dohollau lead him to speculate,
multiply, on the modes and necessities whereby 'presence flees [and] will not be shut
up'.
The mutest of eloquent presences is perhaps one of the most familiar
resources of French poetry, namely the powerful 'speaking E. Elisabeth Cardonne-
Arlyck’s entree to her essay on women poets is Hdldne Cixous’s 'Vite, les signes.
Avez-Vous bien mis votre sexe ce matin?'. In a poignant excursus into the trobairitz
pasζ Cardonne-Arlyck sets up her argument that Ъу means of this gendered split
within the poem, the question of poetic subjectivity is, by a woman, written into the
beginnings of the lyric tradition'. From the very restriction-cum-resource of a
linguistic form, such female inheritors of the tradition as Andree Chedid, Jacqueline
Risset and Marie-Claire Bancquart are shown to 'exploit an essential constraint of the
French language' to open up 'un espace pour une indecision de la Subjectivitd'
(Cixous). In 'signifying passage merely by its oscillation between presence and
absence', the E not only acts for Cardonne-Arlyck as a particular instrument of poetic
analysis but might also be said to perform as the shuttle-effect, the mobile third term,
of post-structuralist critical dis∞urse in general. The language Cardonne-Ariyck
ch∞ses to express her subtle insights conjoins such critical practice with the
deconstructive turn: 'the "excessive" E represents, then, an extraordinary economy
of means. Absent or present, it signifies, in poetry signed by a woman'. The radical
bite of such theorising comes in the claim: 'the feminine E enables the poet to affirm
sexual identity (and therefore personhood), even as it drains the voice of "personal"
attributes'.