Denis Roche’s Éros énergumène, a Writing of Agape Against the Thanatic orgy

Abstract

To evoke poetic writing is, more often than not, to bring to memory a sum of artistic conventions established from age to age through genres, currents and conceptions of poetry. Thus, in spite of the revolutions and upheavals that have taken place, the poetic art is difficult to separate from generic and theoretical partitions, at the very least, watertight. However, the topicality of French literature reveals that some texts of the second half of the 20th century seem to grant a sort of ‟vacancy” to poetry, so that it may be more active in language autonomy. Denis Roche’s Éros énergumène illustrates fundamentally this aptitude of poetic writing to ‟see oneself” as such and to dematerialize oneself in a perspective altogether spiritualist. Roche’s poem can be understood as a way of accessing a form of intellectual play where the informed reader is finally engulfed in the whirlwinds of a language that has no other stake than an absolutely ‟liberated” freedom.