Gendered Spaces in Contemporary Irish Poetry

of Paul Kleeís art and art theory, Jean-FranÁois Lyotard argues via the
work and diaries of Klee, that the lines of language and representation
can be tamed but they are also haunted by a primal excess: ëEcriture
presque directe du fantasme [Ö est] dÈlire du processus primaire,
capable de faire violence ‡ toute Ècriture de la reprÈsentation [Ö]í.^20
Hence: ëMonde possible, líoeuvre ne perd pas son allure de venu
díailleurs, malgrÈ sa rÈalitÈ. La creativitÈ excËde la crÈature.í^21 In this
way, the unseen haunts the seen.
In his review of Discours, Figure (1971) from 1984, Peter Dews
notes Lyotardís suggestion that the mark of the Western intellectual
tradition has been its occlusion of the world of the senses. Lyotard
opposes the ëprimary position of the symbolicí with the effect that the
non-rational, non-linguistic, non-Enlightened and non-sensical are
thereby prioritized. Dews translates the opening of Lyotardís text:

This book protests: that the given is not a text, that there is within it a density,

or rather a constitutive difference, which is not read, but to be seen: and that

this difference, and the immobile mobility which reveals it, is what is

continually forgotten in the process of signification.^22

And so ëthe speaker is torn away from that of which he speaks, or this
is torn away from him, and he continues to hold it at a distance in
speaking, as the object of his discourse, in a ìvisionî.í^23 As Dews
explains, throughout Discours, Figure this awareness of the
ëunsuppressible gapí between the sensuous and the intelligible is
expressed in terms of a contrast between ëthe lineí and the ëletterí,
between a graphic and a figural space.^24 Lyotard draws on Maurice
Merleau-Pontyís Le Visible et Líinvisible (1981), to argue that:

20 Jean-François Lyotard, Discours, Figure (Paris: Éditions Klincksieck, 1971,
1985), p.225. My translation: ‘The almost direct transcription of fantasy [is ...]
the delirium of a primal process, capable of doing violence to all writing and
representation.’
21 Ibid., p.233. My translation: ëAs a possible world, the work does not lose its
look of being from elsewhere, despite its reality. Creativity exceeds the creator.í
22 Ibid., p.9. Cf. Peter Dews, ëThe Letter and the Line: Discourse and its Other in
Lyotardí, Diacritics, Fall 1984, Vol.14, No.3, pp.40ñ9.
23 Lyotard, Discours, Figure, p.118. Trans. Dews, p.42.
24 Ibid., pp.42, 129. Trans. Dews, pp.42ñ3.