From The Heart Of The Void

A Conversation with Annie Le Brun

- Karl Pollin-Dubois

From the publication of Sur le Champ (1967) to De qui n’a pas de prix (2019), Annie Le Brun’s books invite us to confront an uncompromising thought process that places at the heart of the sensible experience the relationship that each of us has with the question of disaster, without necessarily daring to admit it. Her books resemble a pull factor, an intangible space of desertion, in the sense that they allow us to maintain a healthy distance from all our cultural automatisms, our presupposed affiliations, and finally from the academic rumblings of thought. But reading Annie Le Brun (b. 1942, Rennes) also means learning to connect, beyond any form of preformatted literary history, the basic foundation of poetic savagery and imagination that refracts, in the form of anamorphosis, the works of Sade, Aimé Césaire, Leonora Carrington, Radovan Ivšić, Victor Hugo, or Raymond Roussel. Discovering Annie Le Brun’s work means ultimately giving oneself the chance to listen to an original critical voice, which, in the constant energy it deploys to face the chaos of the world, sketches out a challenge of meaning, allowing everyone to stand up against all odds. Our meeting in Oklahoma City centered on the theme of disaster.

Karl Pollin-Dubois: The motif of catastrophe is a predominant subject within the poetic reflection that you have carried out since the 1980s on our concrete world, by drawing on literature, philosophy, and the visual arts. Early on in your essay Perspective dépravée (1991), you write that “thought would be linked to the feeling of catastrophe at the deepest level of ourselves.” In order to initiate this conversation, could you perhaps readdress this intrinsic link that, for you, ties together catastrophe and the practice of thought?