French Literature Reviews - 2026

V. Novarina, L'Envers de l'esprit
Theatre and Performance

Valère Novarina, L'Envers de l'esprit

P.O.L.

coll. "Essais"

ISBN: 9782846823234

Publication date: 04/06/2009

Number of pages: 208 pages

Price: 15 euros

Publisher's presentation:

This book is structured more around scenes than chapters, as it seeks to approach something akin to the organic novel of thought. Each individual's thought can be conceived not only as the drama of a body, but as a dramatic body. What is the inner drama of thought that every human being carries deep within themselves until death? It is undoubtedly tied to respiration itself. This book is also a sequence of gestures—a mobilization born from touch. Nothing is ever proven except through the senses.
Highly rhymed, assonant, and fugue-like, the book aims to build something that blossoms forth (breaking out of confinement), demonstrating that space does not merely lie before us as a passive support—a floor or a stage—but rather opens up. The universe is given, just as the actor neither represents, nor plays, nor recites, but gives.
"The mind breathes" was one of the chapters in Lumières du corps. In L'Envers de l'esprit, it is suggested that the mind breathes because it turns inside out: and because it burns, much like our breathing which, every couple of minutes, briefly passes through death and is reborn.
Dogmas and systems only make sense if they are inverted, overturned, and breathed. For thinking is a drama. If there is a system in spiritual matters, it is a respiratory one. This is why words burn, and why the actor can be endlessly observed.

Valère Novarina occupies a singular position in contemporary French literature and theatre, where dramatic writing intersects deeply with philosophy, linguistics, and bodily performance. Rooted in avant-garde traditions that interrogate the limits of speech and representation, his work frequently examines how language relates to physical existence. Within this broader landscape of theatrical and essayistic experimentation, texts exploring the inner mechanics of thought and respiration reflect long-standing concerns regarding the breath of the actor and the sensory foundations of philosophy.

Readers interested in contemporary French essays, performance theory, and the intersections of philosophy with bodily experience may find this volume relevant to their inquiries.