French Literature Reviews - 2026

Th. Vercruysse, La Cartographie poétique
Literary Theory, Linguistics and Stylistics

Bibliographic reference: Th. Vercruysse, La Cartographie poétique, Droz, 2014. EAN13: 9782600017770.

Under the title “poetic cartography”, this book sets out to examine a conception of creative work shared by writers, essayists, and poets, as well as painters, philosophers, and scientists. Such creation eludes deductive reasoning and programmatic thought, asserting itself instead as unpredictability and an inductive force capable of unfolding through rhythms, tracings, or conceptual linkages. This essay thus offers a critique of analytical thought, seeking to identify its impasses and obstacles while promoting an open dialectic—one in which the creative subject encounters a world that colors them, in the very act of mapping it. Striving to capture the resources of the mind in action, this so-called cartography moves beyond a mental topography (which is inherently reductive) to embrace, much like Valéry, the triad of “Body-Mind-World” and translate its intersections. The figure of this cartographic subject is ideally the dancer, the embodiment of a subjectivity renewed by ecstasy.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Part One
FORECLOSURE AND FORMALISM:
ANALYTICAL CARTOGRAPHY

Chapter I. Method as Speculative Procedure: The Risk of Reification
Valéry’s Appropriation of Descartes’s Mathesis Universalis
From Raymond Lull’s Ars Magna to Leibniz’s Lingua Generalis
From Hilbert’s Formalism to the Turing Machine
Valéry’s Narcissuses: From Specularity to Normopathy
“Thought” as the Loss of “Thinking” in Michaux

Chapter II. From Scopic Power to the Desire for Integration
Valéry’s Model of Laplacean Determinism and the Moi – Redivivus
Gladiator: The Will to Possession
From Cadastral Concern to Segalen’s Inheritance of the Atman

Chapter III. Organism and Symmetry
The “Degrees of Symmetry” in Leonardo and Teste
Poe’s Consistency
Folds and Symmetries in Mallarmé
From the Reflex Model to “Agitated Symmetry” in Valéry

Part Two
THE FRAGMENTATIONS OF THE EDIFICE

Chapter I. The Caesura of the Speculative
The Kantian Cogito: “I” is an Empty Shell
Hölderlin’s Unhappy Consciousness
The Valéryan Counter-Cogito: Self-Variance
Valéry and Artaud: Figures of Convulsive Thought

Chapter II. Principles of Cruelty and Defiguration: “Driving the Subjectiles to Extremes”, Deforming Figures
Valéry’s Dark Eye
Invading Boundaries, Dissolving Limits: Toward a Philosophy of Force in Artaud and Valéry
Diagrammatic Labor: The Forgotten Power of the Sign
Axiomatization and Encroachment
“Dislocating the Figure”

Chapter III. Heteropoetics and the “Play” of Determinism
Mallarmé: Chance versus Necessity
Breaking the Circle of the Same: The Emergence of the Other in Valéry
Escaping Coordinates: Michaux’s Clinamen, Segalen’s “Boreal Antipode”

Part Three
POETIC CARTOGRAPHY:
THE AVATARS OF POIĒSIS

Chapter I. Valéry’s Aesthetics of Dance
Dance: A Transcendental Art?
Dance Beyond the Stage: Valéry’s “Philosophy” of Dance
From “On Dance” to “Aesthetic Infinity”
The Intensity of Dance: A “General Poetry of Human Actions”
A Spacetime Without an Outside

Chapter II. The Space of Ecstasy: The Contribution of Straus’s Aesthetics to Understanding Valéry’s Poiēsis
Smooth Space and Striated Space
Sound and Originary Space
Aisthēsis and Poiēsis
Merleau-Ponty and Valéry: Expression or Feeling
Aesthetics as Progressive Unveiling: From Hegel to Klee, Straus, and Valéry
Aesthetics, Epistemology, and Poetics (Straus, Mach, Valéry, and Michaux)

Chapter III. Mapping the Informe in Georges Bataille: The Sign as Symptom in Documents
The Notion of Expenditure as an Inclination Toward Process
Aspects of Bataille’s Poetics of the Informe in Documents

Chapter IV. The Tracing of the Hieroglyph: Mallarmé’s Dancer
Mallarmé and the Ritual of the Idea
Ballet over Theater or Music

Conclusion
Bibliography of Works and Articles Consulted
Index

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An article on this work can be read on the nonfiction.fr website:

The volume investigates a conception of creative work shared by writers, essayists, poets, painters, philosophers, and scientists. It sets out to examine how such creation eludes deductive reasoning and programmatic thought, asserting itself instead as unpredictability and an inductive force capable of unfolding through rhythms, tracings, or conceptual linkages. In doing so, the study offers a critique of analytical thought, seeking to identify its impasses and obstacles while promoting an open dialectic in which the creative subject encounters a world that colors them, in the very act of mapping it.

Striving to capture the resources of the mind in action, this cartography moves beyond a mental topography to embrace the triad of Body-Mind-World and translate its intersections, with the dancer serving as the ideal figure of a subjectivity renewed by ecstasy. Readers interested in the intersections of literature, philosophy, and aesthetics across various intellectual traditions may find this study relevant to their inquiries into creative process and representation.

“Thinking Morphogenesis: Literature, Science, Dance”, by J. Jeusette.