Yves Bonnefoy (1923-2016) was a central figure in post-war French culture, with a lifelong fascination with the problems of translation. Language, for him, was a visceral, intensely material element in our existence, and yet the abstract quality of words distorts the immediate, material quality of our contact with the world. This concern with what separates words from an essential truth hidden in objects involved him in wide-ranging philosophical and theological investigations of the spiritual and the sacred. But for all his intellectual drive and rigour, Bonnefoy's poetry is essentially of the concrete and the tangible, and addresses itself to our most familiar and intimate experiences of objects and of each other. In his first book of poetry, published in France in 1953, Bonnefoy reflects on the value and mechanism of language in a series of short variations on the life and death of a much loved woman, Douve. Douve, though, is the French word for a moat, that uncrossable body which separates us from safety and from danger. With this undercurrent at work we read the poems as if they are about the divide between us and death as much as they are about the divide between us and the untouchable reality of text. This is dangerous writing, fulfilling Derrida's "fatal necessity" by making us substitute the textual sign for reality. In his introduction, Timothy Mathews shows how Bonnefoy's poetics are enmeshed with his philosophical, religious and critical thought.

As the French philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault defined the concept, 'biopolitics' is the extension of state control over both the physical and political bodies of a population. Poetic Biopolitics is a positive attempt to explain and show how the often destructive effects and affects of biopolitical power structures can be deconstructed not only critically but poetically in the arts and humanities: in architecture, art, literature, modern languages, performance studies, film and philosophy. It is an interdisciplinary response to the contemporary global crisis of community conflict, social and environmental wellbeing. Structured in three parts - biopolitical bodies and imaginaries, voices and bodies, and social and environmental turbulence - this innovative book meshes performative and visual poetics with critical theory and feminist philosophy. It examines the complex expressions of our physical and psychic lives through artefact, body, dialogue, image, installation and word.

Alberto Giacometti's attenuated figures of the human form are among the most significant artistic images of the 20th century. Sartre, Breton, and Winnicott are just some of the great thinkers who have drawn upon the graceful, harrowing work of Giacometti, which has continued to resonate with artists, writers, and audiences. In this book, Timothy Mathews explores the themes of fragility, trauma, space, and relationality in Giacometti's art and the texts that respond or refer to them: the novels of W.G. Sebald, Samuel Beckett and Cees Nooteboom, and the theories of Bertolt Brecht, which recasts the iconic L'Homme qui marche as Walter Benjamin's Angel of History. During his lifelong quest to represent the human form, and to locate the humanity at the heart of conflicting conceptions of modernity, Giacometti returned to the key notions of depth and flatness, memory and attachment, through his sculptures and writings. Both a critical study of Giacometti's life and work, and an investigation of their affective power, this book asks what encounters with Giacometti's pieces can tell us about the history of our own time, and our ways of looking; about the nature of human attachment, and the humility of relating to art.

In Literature, Art and the Pursuit of Decay, Timothy Mathews examines work by a range of writers and painters working in France in the twentieth century. The well-illustrated book engages with canonical figures - Guillaume Apollinaire, Marguerite Duras and Jean Genet, Roland Barthes, Pablo Picasso and Rene Magritte - as well as more neglected individuals including Robert Desnos and Jean Fautrier. Mathews draws on psychoanalysis, existentialism and poststructuralism to show how both literature and fine art promote the value of generosity in a culture of anxiety and intolerance. Decay emerges as a surprising ally in this quest because of its ability to undermine intellectual complacency and egoism. Integrating theoretical and material approaches to reading and viewing, Mathews engages with the distinctive features of different literary genres and different types of painting to develop an original history of artistic ambition in twentieth-century France.

Timothy Mathews examines work by a range of writers and painters working in France in the twentieth century. This book engages with canonical figures--Guillaume Apollinaire, Marguerite Duras and Jean Genet, Roland Barthes, Pablo Picasso and René Magritte--as well as more neglected individuals including Robert Desnos and Jean Fautrier. Integrating theoretical and material approaches to reading and viewing, Mathews engages with the distinctive features of different literary genres and different types of painting to develop an original history of artistic ambition in twentieth-century France.

Tradition, Trauma, Translation is concerned with how Classic texts - mainly Greek and Latin but also Arabic and Portuguese - become present in later cultures and how they resonate in the modern. A distinguished international team of contributors and responders examine the topic in different ways. Some discuss singular encounters with the Classic - those of Heaney, Pope, Fellini, Freud, Ibn Qutayba, Cavafy and others - and show how translations engage with the affective impact of texts over time and space. Poet-translator contributors draw on their own experience here. Others offer images of translation: as movement of a text over time, space, language, and culture. Some of these images are resistant, even violent: tradition as silencing, translation as decapitation, cannibalistic reception. Others pose searching questions about the interaction of modernity with tradition: what is entailed in 'The Price of the Modern'? Drawing, as it does, on Classical, Modernist, Translation, Reception, Comparative Literary, and Intercultural Studies, the volume has the potential to suggest critiques of practice in these disciplines but also concerns that are common to all these fields.

Cette etude innovante retrace le parcours de l'ecrivain, musicien, dramaturge et peintre italien Alberto Savinio afin d'evaluer sa place dans l'avant-garde parisienne. Elle examine l'apport litteraire et la pratique de l'art moderne du frere de Giorgio de Chirico, cet autre Italien adopte par la capitale francaise. Cette etude couvre de maniere exhaustive l'oeuvre de Savinio durant la periode 1911-1937, annee de publication de son roman autobiographique Tragedia dell'infanzia. Elle replace ainsi l'artiste italien au coeur de l'avant-garde et du modernisme, le situant dans une lignee qui va d'Apollinaire a Marinetti et Breton, entre autres. L'auteur demontre que Savinio, artiste pluridisciplinaire, a participe activement a la revolution artistique et a la recherche de " l'homme nouveau " qui ont preoccupe les avant-gardes du debut du XXe siecle. Elle eclaire ainsi de facon originale une dimension peu connue de la contribution italienne a l'elaboration des idees et des pratiques d'avant-garde a Paris dans la premiere moitie du dernier siecle.