ABSTRACT
Philippe Jaccottet life-work similarly charts his endeavors (and failures) to create in himself a readiness for—a receptivity to—those unpredictable, fleeting instants in which an ailleurs or "elsewhere" becomes perceptible and, as he puts it, is "linked to" the blossom or cloud or mountain peak before his eyes. Although a propensity to self-doubt sometimes engenders a pessimistic materialism whose only horizon is death and annihilation (his writings obsessively return to these themes), he is simultaneously troubled by persistent "positive" intimations that there is "something between things / like the space between the linden and the bay-tree, in the garden". Nonetheless, it is useful to think of Jaccottet as an ancient Greek empiricist who also aspires to be a seer. Sense perceptions are accordingly received like omens whose messages can be grasped only beyond language. Like Rilke, Jaccottet's desire to focus on the simplest thing-in-itself implies an extraordinary struggle between objectivity and subjectivity.
