Time and private languages: Jacques Roubaud and his interlocutors

My dissertation focuses on poetry and autobiography, as two different relations of language to private-memory-images and photography. I anchor my analysis in Roubaud's work, torn between, on the one hand, a Projet de poesie (prior to 1978) and on the other hand, an autobiographical narrative and several volumes of poetry written on the ruins of his earlier "Project" (beginning in 1980 and continuing to the present). The latter---both the narrative and the poetry---takes shape in a dialogue with the photographic work of his dead wife.; I show that what is at stake in this dialectic of the renunciation of the past in order to return to the present is the definition a mnemonic identity by means of a literary practice. I have arrived at this concept after detailed analyses of two volumes of poetry and six volumes of autobiographical prose. I foreground two other traditions to which these texts continually refer: medieval Japanese court poetics and poetry as well as Wittgenstein's private language argument and analytic philosophy. I document what is not directly expressed in Roubaud's work, namely how deeply and originally these traditions touch upon each other on the ground of their relationship to privacy and time.; I argue that Roubaud proposes an original conception of subjectivity, which is deeply anchored in a literate community. I equate his poetic practice with a search for a mnemonic identity of naming, in which a poet---a composer and reader of poems from the past---becomes contemporary with all other poets who use the same words to name their private memory-images. Wittgenstein's examples in his Philosophical Investigations are revealing in this context. He shows that the verbal memory, which underlies any language use today, is reduced to short sentences embedded in different forms of everyday life. In contrast, the medieval Japanese poet lived with the memory of long poetic sequences, revealing a strong training in his sensibility and perceptive skills. Thus, by appropriating the Japanese practice of poetic memory, Roubaud's response to Wittgenstein is the enrichment of the everyday instance through the poetic idiom.; In contrast to the identity of naming, I interpret his autobiographical technique as a mnemonic identity of image, in which the writer destroys his private-memory-images by converting them into pictions (rigid and fictive pictures). His prose writing comes from acts of remembering_(souvenir) in which private memory-images are converted into photograph-like images by descriptive and narrative protocols. Images are retained because they are depicted differently by various language games that give them different meanings.; These mnemonic identities are opposed to an identity of being, which the reader usually expects from a lyrical or autobiographical text. The identity of being relies on the presupposition of an inner citadel (Hadot) of the writing subject, which belongs only to himself and therefore defines him. This is still the identity used in the majority of works analyzed by Rabate as the literature of exhaustion. In the rhetoric of self-portrait, the writer is not fooled by this interiority, but he manifests his lucidity at the cost of eliminating time from his work (Beaujour). I show that Roubaud, the Japanese poet and Wittgenstein refute in their work both the fallacy of interiority as well as the fallacy of the a-temporality of language. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...