Rimbaud, un textualisme en acte

Understood in the sense of the disappearance of the author and the crisis of representation, textualism is a theory of which Mallarmé is considered to be the initiator. Speaking of a poetic textualism or “en acte” (in action), the article studies this idea in Arthur Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations. Rather than considering the criticism of the author as a derivative of the deconstruction of the subject, we analyze the writer’s disappearance through its representations in “Vies III” and “Enfance V.” “Promontoire” and “Enfance II” are used to examine the semantization of two grammatical categories of designation, proper names and deictics. The aim is not to find new models to the 1960s and 1970s era of “la théorie du texte,” but to suggest that textualism is constitutive of Modernist poetry. (In French)