Contemporary French Poetry: Towards a Minor Poetics by Daisy Sainsbury (review)

Reviewed by: Contemporary French Poetry: Towards a Minor Poetics by Daisy Sainsbury Michael G. Kelly Contemporary French Poetry: Towards a Minor Poetics. By Daisy Sainsbury. (Research Monographs in French Studies, 65) Cambridge: Legenda. 2021. x+ 190 pp. £80. ISBN 978–1–78188–842–1. The conceptual construct and attendant theoretical discourse of 'minor literature' have been widely influential since their elaboration in a series of works by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, flowing from an initial development in Kafka: pour une littérature mineure (Paris: Minuit, 1975). Initially cohering around the situation of the speaking/literary subject within a given sociolinguistic and historical context (a generative context that focuses on iconic literary individualities such as Kafka, Beckett, and Ghérasim Luca, to mutually reinforcing effect), the territory of the 'minor' has widened subsequently to include generic practices and experimental postures in which 'minority' manifests as an aesthetic or compositional choice just as much as the outworking of a specific personal or social condition. Hence the pertinence of the question of a minor poetics—in which the lessons of the minor condition are revisited in the constant (and diverse) reinvestment of a minor position in relation to 'territorialized' social orders and, most particularly, in relation to the institutionality of the given language. It seems only logical that the evolution of the concept should see some of its most radical and powerful deployments in the 'poetic' field—not only because of the central concern in modern poetry with the institution of language per se, but given also the importance across a wide range of French poetic practices, in particular, of an accompanying theoretical or philosophical discourse (recalling a dominant trait of contemporary art practice). This reality and its careful, clear-headed analysis are what make Daisy Sainsbury's study a welcome addition to the critical discussions of both contemporary French poetry and comparative poetics. Tracing the diverse manifestations of a 'minor' poetics across multiple poetic practices is a challenging, possibly perilous, undertaking—as one arguably shared trait of such work is to strenuously resist extraneous reframing. In this respect, Sainsbury's choice of corpus is both ambitious and judicious. Proposing extended engagements with the œuvres of three (dare one say?) major figures of contemporary experimental poetic writing—Dominique Fourcade, Olivier Cadiot, and Christophe Tarkos—the study is meticulous in bringing out the complexity and flavour of each poet's reinvention of the 'minor' ethos. Fourcade's work is seen to flow from a problematic of the 'mother' tongue, in a distressing and productive 'misalignment' (p. 45) with the figure of the mother (representative here of 'the constrictive, authoritative force of language' (p. 46)). [End Page 273] Fourcade is also a practitioner of a cardinal feature of the minor (one of whom, Luca, is perhaps the most celebrated exponent)—that of 'balbutiement' or 'bégaiement', a poetic stuttering that suggestively inhabits the liminal terrain between consciousness and compulsion while undermining a received version of the poetic as linguistic mastery. This subversion of established divisions of speech and practice extends well beyond writing in Fourcade's case, into a multistranded artistic practice including 'poetry, art, music, film, and dance' (p. 63)—emphasizing, in the process, how a 'minor' approach can open out the range of artistic possibility for the creative subject, rather than manifesting as a set of refusals or blockages. Cadiot's practice, which Sainsbury observes to be '[of the three,] the most explicitly engaged with the philosophy of Deleuze' (p. 81), is comparably diverse and multistranded, albeit with its foundational moment in the linguistic collages evidenced in Art poétic' (1988). This is work in which a strong affective charge is generated through the juxtaposition of found utterances. The study recognizes the importance of the work of the American poet Charles Reznikoff both for Cadiot specifically and for the generation of poetic practitioners that came into view in the wake of Cadiot and Pierre Alferi's mid-1990s Revue de littérature générale. In this context, the question of a minor poetics can be seen to extend also to the position of the reader, and to the ways in which the circulation of affect, and...