Is 'postpoetry' still poetry? Jean-Marie Gleize's dispositif-writing

Jean-Marie Gleize (b. 1946) is among the most influential theoreticians of contemporary experimental French poetry. He calls postpoésie attempts to write poetry as if from the outside, leaving behind lyrical verse, prose poetics, and all forms of essentialism. In the 1990s he developed and applied in his own writing concepts of littéralité and nudité that aimed at quietening down figures, expressivity and subjectivity to let the workings of language and discourse surface as more objective and potent poetic enigmas. Since the early 2000s, Gleize has melded these twin terms into the umbrella notion of the dispositif. The essay explains the dispositif in three phases. First, it outlines its four axes: Foucault's eponymous concept; the cinema apparatus; composition (dispositio); and Modernist collage-montage techniques. Second, it indicates its genealogy in Francis Ponge and Denis Roche, as well as younger contemporary theoreticians Olivier Cadiot, Pierre Alferi and Christophe Hanna. Finally, it suggests how dispositif-writing operates in Gleize's own oeuvre as a prose sublation of poetry. The concluding section points out the remarkable correspondences between Gleize's postpoésie and Jean-Luc Nancy's postphenomenology, heralding perhaps a renewal of exchanges between philosophy and poetry.