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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.

The introduction explores how Bonnefoy rejects the conception of poetry as an act of representation or a subversion of linguistic codes in his early work but nonetheless struggles to find the right performative medium. Analysing a change that occurs in his poetry with the publication of Dans le leurre du seuil in 1975, it examines how he comes to perceive of writing as an inherently scenic exploration of the interactions that occur between linguistic, corporeal, and material forces in any gesture of communication. It also investigates how the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy develops a similar conception of textual performance when he conceives of the act of writing in ontological terms, as a way of actively experimenting with the dynamics of relation that bring existence into being.

This chapter investigates how Bonnefoy experiments with spacious ways of entering into contact with the material world in the snow poems of Début et fin de la neige, published in 1991. It compares how both Bonnefoy and Nancy use the biblical scene of Noli me tangere to reflect on the human desire to grasp a metaphysical essence and on the exhaustion of this desire by the endlessly shifting forms of material existence. Exploring how the loss of an absolute principle inspires a newly spacious conception of touch, the chapter analyses how both Bonnefoy and Nancy foreground the loose and airy interactions that occur between language, sense, and matter in the scene of writing. It explores how they present a spacious form of textual performance as an immersive way of exploring the world’s dynamics of exposition ‘de l’intérieur’.

This chapter investigates how Bonnefoy develops a theatrical model of poetic performance in the long sequence of poems ‘La Terre’, published in Dans le leurre du seuil in 1975. Examining how the poet repeatedly stages apostrophes to a flame and acts of address to a lover, it explores how he models his poetic performance on the fleeting movement of the light and the restless interactions between the lovers’ bodies. It analyses how Bonnefoy develops an inherently rhythmic conception of the act of relation, presenting it as an ecstatic gesture that has to be repeated endlessly. Investigating how both Bonnefoy and Nancy present this rhythmic act of relation as a generative worldly dynamic, this chapter scrutinizes how they develop a mobile and relational conception of ontology, conceiving of it as an open-ended and ongoing performance.

This chapter analyses Bonnefoy’s experimentation with sound in Les Planches courbes, published in 2001. Offering a close reading of the eleven-poem sequence ‘La Voix lointaine’, it investigates how Bonnefoy uses the motif of listening to a distant voice to present self-presence as a space of resonance. It examines how the poet critiques visual tropes that present subjectivity as a scene of self-reflection and instead uses the rhythms of poetic voicing to explore how consciousness emerges from the reverberations between linguistic, sensual, and material forces. Analysing how Bonnefoy and Nancy both present resonance as an originary dynamic, this chapter investigates how they both use this larger conception of resonance to explore how human subjectivity emerges from an endlessly mobile and relational physical world.