Between-Je, between-Il and between-Autres, the memory: Louis-René Des Forêts

Abstract

A stubbornness runs quietly through all Louis-René Des Forêts’s works: a stubborn purpose of wandering through paths of subjectivity by means of a writing that can only be inscribed by the voice, and by the memory for sounds, odors and rumors. Everything there is written as a (dis)organized mass of “figures of chance fading slowly, various sort of traces, fleeting lines of life, false reflections, and dubious signs that language, seeking a hearth, has inscribed as through fraud and from the exterior[…]”(Ostinato. DES FOREST, 1997, p.15). In Des Forêts’s work tenuous borders between the reality of a subject writing himself and his phantasmagoria make it impossible to effectively distinguish between fable and “truth of a fable”. In fact, memory is a kind of dementia, as one of his titles indicates, built up – not without some suspicion of unwanted “rhetorical rapture” – on sequencing memories one upon the other, resonating indefinitely through a poetic prose with an air of incompleteness. A prose to come, a writing of subjectivity, or simply a self-writing . Among je, il and autres, what seems finally insinuated is the memory of what remains and, above all, ultimately, the (written) memory of death which does nothing but prowl every autography.