ABSTRACT
In La poesie francaise et le principe d'identite Yves Bonnefoy moves through a number of hypotheses in isolating what emerges as an essential trait of poetic practice in the French language. His essay, by the very terms from which it departs, moves the site of 'essence' in poetic work from within the discourse and intentions of the individual speaker to a quality of the French language itself. Bonnefoy's formal problem proceeds from a reflection on the specific properties of the human faculty of language. The materiality of the sign is, within that reflection, a property that can no longer be either simply proclaimed or loosely analogized in a referential landscape. The non-lieu translates an act of seeing in language that conjugates intellectuality and experience. The poetic non-lieu, momentarily transfigured as a vrai lieu, contains a linguistic spectacle of 'truth' as the ongoing promise of a truth to come.
