Œuvide! Œuvide! Verbalization and Corporality in the Poetry of Christian Prigent

Abstract:The poetry of Christian Prigent focuses on the act of articulation involving both the body as a site of muscular movements and language as a codified system. This act is captured in the figure of the œuvide as a conflation of œuvre / œuf and vide insofar it conforms to the structure of desire and the void that lies at its centre. The study aims to gauge the significance of the œuvide by taking into account Prigent's theoretical and critical writings, including his explicit reference to Lacan. It proceeds by introducing two concepts that Prigent does not often refer to, namely full speech and imaginary excess, with the aim of showing how the melding of verbalization and corporality functions in Prigent's now substantial body of poetic work. Full speech appears in its association with the void around which Prigent's poetry gravitates in line with the negative logic of desire, and imaginary excess accounts for the role of the fantasized body and the constant interplay of body parts in the context of a poetic strategy that seeks to foreground the physical site of verbal emission. The notion of sceptical Cratylism is introduced to round out the analysis, specifically by demonstrating how Prigent, in presenting his version of verbal embodiment, avoids reducing the body to either the rule of representation or the idea of nature.