Illuminations by Rimbaud: from renounce of meaning to the silence of the work

Abstract

Few are the poets that in the history of modern poetry incarnated with such passion the adventure of saying and the urgency of silence as did Rimbaud. By bringing language to the limit of its own break, Rimbaud eventually just highlights the fragility of the poetic word in face of the oppressing logic of the real, of the order of a world governed by technic and based on the myths of reason, progress and science. Thus, despite the contradictions about the chronological place that occupy Illuminations in the work of Rimbaud (would they be before or after the A Season in Hell?), what is at stake is to understand that they, from the blatant irony of the title, stage not only a radical break with meaning, with the very possibility of signification, that is, of communicating whatever is desired through the path of the poetic, especially the modern world, but also the moment when the scripture begins to silence, the decisive step towards the end of the work, the eloquent resignation of the subject to continue, in the words of Hölderlin, to inhabit the world poetically.