Common Presence

Common presence: these two words, translating a poem and an anthology by René Char, indicate what I would like to be able to think.

Char’s anthology Commune Présence, published in 1964, includes no records of the dates of the poems it collects in eight main clusters; there is no chronological ordering here. To what does its title refer? To an experience shared by poet and reader – to an experience of the poem that allows a presence to be shared. One cannot help but be reminded of Heraclitus, always an important presence in Char’s poetry, for whom the logos is said to be common. Common presence: does this refer to Char’s version of the logos which maintains itself beyond what we take to be opposites, but which Heraclitus tells us are always in struggle and interchange?

Char’s poems are shards, fragments. Each poem is comprised of autonomous phrases – one leaps from phrase to phrase. There is not harmony here – or if we are to use this word, it would in accordance with Heraclitus, for whom harmonia names a kind of accordance. Do we know what harmonia is? Do we know what this word meant to Heraclitus and how to read Char alongside Heraclitus in view of the stakes of this word harmonia? Thinking of the last few blogs, which were an attempt to understand the phrase ‘commune présence’, I would like argue that Char’s poetry returns us to the harmony-without-harmony of Heraclitus.

‘Harmony-without-harmony’: why this cumbersome and ridiculous phrase? Because the accordance between the fragment and the matter to be thought, to be indicated by the fragment is a harmony of strife, a struggling discord. Here it is a matter of attending to an event which Heidegger indicates when he writes of physis – of the coming-into-appearance of things as it is accompanied by a withdrawal; the process through which things are given such that they come to stand even as this determination is accompanied by an indetermination. Ah, but it’s more complex than that – for are determination and indetermination not given in the event that physis names?