Yves DepelsenaireEloge de Marcel Broodthaers

“With the plastic arts, I could only engage in enemy territory”, said Marcel Broodthaers. What is the meaning of this commitment? What is at stake in the struggle that led him to the painful decision to abandon the field of poetic writing? His multiform work thwarts interpretation. Several threads are woven into it, according to an original logic that this Praise unfolds. The essential references are Mallarmé, whom he considers “the inventor of modern space”, Magritte, to whom he credits a “tightening of the notion of the subject” and Lacan, for whom “truth has the structure of fiction”. A poetics of the object and the absence of an object is deduced, as well as an ironic practice of the equivocations of communication. The figure of a brilliant artist emerges, and we have not finished discovering him.