The author evokes some hypotheses on the question of the negative way as a structural data in relation to the process of Beckettian writing (the critical position with respect to language; the practice of dispossession; disfigurement) by taking up elements of his books published by Classiques Garnier in 2019: La parole trouée. Beckett, Tardieu, Novarina, and Les Voies négatives de l’écriture dans le théâtre moderne et contemporain.

In Novarina’s work, the word establishes a “lyrical gesture” : it calls. Since the appearance of what is called constitutes the drama itself, we can consider the lyricism as communication between the subject and the object as the process of creation. This creative gesture is doubly negative. First of all, the writer does not exist anymore in the creation process accomplished with the spectators. Secondly, Novarinian fiction is defined by its negative qualities : informal and timeless, it develops a negative view that opens behind the language.

Antonin Artaud’s « Théâtre de la cruauté » consists in the extreme display of the conflictive nature of the world. The Catalan poet Josep Palau i Fabre highlighted the poetic and negative dimensions of Artaud’s project and insisted on its failure, addressing its impossible objectivation and its similarity with alchemy. The article aims to identify the central elements of Palau’s interpretation, annihilation and debirth, and to assess their inscription in an experimental poetics proposal inspired by alchemy.

The Ultimate Paintings, a series of abstractions made by Ad Reinhardt during the 1960s, are coupled with writings with obvious affinities to the apophatic formulas of the commentaries of the Upanishads (the philosophical conclusions of the Vedas) known as the “nondual Vedānta” (Advaita Vedānta). The abstractions themselves refer to the model of the yantra, the geometrical diagram into which Brahmanic iconography is supposed to subside. In this instance, the apophasis defeats the attempt to signify through painting and language what constitutes itself in painting and language.

From the series Event of the Night in 1972 to Neige in 2003, via Gouttes d'eau (1979-2013), the painter Kim Tschang Yeul has developed a poetics of formlessness in which negation, emptiness and absence direct the creative process. The Korean plastic artist offers through the materiality of the work a meditation on the fluence of worlds and forms. The drop of water expresses the precariousness of things, but also evokes a beyond of representation whose richness is as great as its restraint. Water is the metaphor of the void without which the full cannot unfold; it introduces the practice of non-action, which does not consist in doing nothing but in letting the supporting factors at work in the form happen. The creative process abstains from any intentional action, to let the invisible power of the tao act.

Klossowski, who had originally started as a religious seeker of truth in his younger years, will – after his « reversal » – feel himself invested with the role of a « heretic » struggling with the libidinous search for truth. Even as the creator of a perverted metaphysics, he remains a seeker of the revelation of being, now in the role of the divine « adversary » who, thrown back on himself, tends to imitate a religious mystic. The divine is replaced by the whispers of the demon, which Klossowski experiences as « la complicité d'une force "démonique" » in the creation of his artworks. The Diana myth becomes a parable for the act of artistic creation. Sexuality, understood as the primordial ground of creative force that shapes the signe unique, the phantasm, shifts metaphysics to « phantasmaphysics » (Foucault), in which the mystery of the divine is exposed as a delusion (Wahnbild).

Written on the sidelines of a new translation of Sodom and Gomorrah into Polish, the article evokes the problem that the translator had in finding the equivalent of the term inverti. This problem serves as a pretext to speak, on the one hand, of homosexuality in Proust, on the other, of language as the subject of the novel. In this context, the role of Albertine and the etymological tirades of professor Brichot are studied in particular. The author also highlights the testamentary character of this part of the Proustian cycle.