Lucile, poetry as a sovereign gesture

Abstract

This article proposes to recreate the drama (in the nietzschean sense of this term, that is, as opposed to representation) of the French Revolution, based on the play Danton’s Death (Büchner). The focus is on the cry “Long live the King!” which by Lucile Laridon Duplessis utters at the moment of being beheaded, and days after the beheading of her husband Camille Desmoulins. The invocation “Long live the King!” with which Georg Büchner’s work closes is taken up in texts by Paul Celan and Jacques Derrida. In this sense, the article explores the aporias of the micropolitics of subjectivity, with its tensions and contradictions. At the same time, the challenge seems to be to review the unity and homogeneity of the archive called the French Revolution, schooled and standardized in a dichotomous key, and mobilize it to reconsider the inheritance of that name. In this way, it is also possible to redefine what we understand by political and poetic sovereignty. The objective of this work is an attempt to capture and to map the narrative of that moment, where the French Revolution, threatens to become dogma, dictatorship, police government based on terror, that is, to become its Other, its opposite.