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Yves Bonnefoy knew the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky perfectly and called him, in a lecture of 1979, the greatest of novelists, but there are also good historical grounds for asserting that, besides Dostoevsky, other aspects of early twentieth-century Russian culture provided an essential element his formation. One was Boris de Schloezer, who played a significant role in France's cultural and particularly musical life as critic en titre for the Nouvelle revue française until his death in 1969. Among Bonnefoy's translations were several works of the émigré Russian philosopher Lev Chestov, including Le Pouvoir des clefs, which played an important role in his own literary and spiritual development. Bonnefoy's own elucidation of the essential creative intuition from which his poetry springs bears an uncanny resemblance to William Wordsworth's description of those “spots of time” that furnished him, Wordsworth, with poetic inspiration.

This section discusses the drawing/design of the arts and how the arts act simultaneously like stages, senses, and zones. In its own way, art remains inapparent and is not the coming into appearance or phenomenality that presents it. In other words, one must be sensitive not only to the form but also to the withdrawn movement of a formation. Immanuel Kant speaks of aesthetic judgment’s “claim to universality,” a suggestion that art is devoted to the communication of sensibility, or more precisely, a sensibility communicating itself for its value or for its own sense, rather than for its sensory, informational values. Art is communicated sensuality; it informs, deforms, and transforms a broad ensemble of forms around it. More importantly, it spreads imperceptibly something of its desire, of the new sensibility and sensuality for which it is the drawing or design. Also included in this section is a “Sketchbook” of quotations on art from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Yves Bonnefoy, Pierre Alechinsky, Pablo Picasso, and Jacques Rancière.

This section characterizes drawing as the opening of form, which can be envisioned in two ways: opening in the sense of a beginning, departure, origin, dispatch, impetus, or sketching out, and opening in the sense of an availability or inherent capacity. In the first sense, drawing evokes more the gesture of drawing than the traced figure. In the second, drawing implies that the figure is essentially incomplete. Also included in this section is a “Sketchbook” of quotations on art from Yves Bonnefoy, Éliane Escoubas, Antonio Saura, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Jean-Christophe Bailly.

This section describes the concept of formative force in drawing and argues that drawing is the idea, the true form of the thing. More precisely, it is the gesture that arises from the desire to show this form and to trace it so as to reveal the form—but not to trace in order to show it as a form already received. Drawing designates the form or idea, but its “fait accompli” is not simply that of the thing’s monstration; it is the monstration of the form, idea, or thought. Also included in this section is a “Sketchbook” of quotations on art from Henri Matisse, Félix Ravaisson, René Char, Yves Bonnefoy, Max Loreau, and Pablo Picasso.