L’infini s’abouchant avec le fini : la poétique labyrinthique d’Henri Michaux

Abstract

This paper examines how the figure of the labyrinth helps us to grasp the particular writing of Henri Michaux. Based on a reading of Déplacements, dégagements, it will show how the aesthetic experience of wandering arises from compositional processes of the multiple. This double perspective, both poetic and aesthetic, allows us to grasp the specificity of labyrinthine wandering, which suggests the infinite within a structure that is however finite. It is not the absence of any signification, but the multiplication and proliferation of significant data, that produces wandering. Confronted with this multiplicity, the reader is not confined to a passive state of reception, but actively projects a trajectory in order to give meaning on all his perceptual details, even if this meaning remains unstable.