Singular Brevities: Effects and Variations of the Brief in Henri Michaux’s Qui je fus and Tranches de savoir

Abstract

Based on the notion of the brief as defined by Gérard Dessons, this article provides a poetic approach to the effects of brevity in three collections of short statements by Henri Michaux: “Prédication”, “Principes d'enfant” and “Tranches de savoir”. The aim of the analyses is to show, in keeping with the nominalism of Dessons' theory, that brevity exists only in singular discursive occurrences and that it produces different effects in each work, depending on the particular discursive system that it characterises. We therefore observe how, in the context of collections of short statements that define themselves in relation to the possibility (contested or not) of a gnomic or injunctive sapiential enunciation, brevity can generate an obscuring effect which, for the subject led to coenunciate the collected statements, constitutes a questioning of the obviousness of the referential and cultural universe of reference in “Prédication”, an alternative to the traditional rhetoric of knowledge in “Principes d'enfant” or the trial of an oriented spiritual exercise in “Tranches de savoir”.