The limit experience (l’expérience-limite or, in Georges Bataille’s formulation, l’expérience intérieure) is the experience of reaching a firm limit and yet transgressing it. It is thus co-implicated from the outset with an experience of limitlessness. Twentieth-century thinkers in pursuit of the limit experience, such as Maurice Blanchot, have tended to locate something of it in poetry. While critics have identified numerous limit crossings or aporias in literature more broadly, a dedicated structural analysis of poetry’s own liminality has not been proposed. This thesis therefore expands the thinking of the limit experience beyond its presumed borders, bringing it into connection with close readings of poems to develop an understanding of on what grounds, if any, poetry is a privileged site for the limit experience. Using notions of experience, experiment, exemplarity, induction, and accumulation to frame its approach to the research question, this thesis offers a theoretical contribution to the study of modern French poetry, deconstruction, post-structuralism, liminality, and post-Heideggerian poetics. It clearly elucidates the figure of the limit and that of experience, drawing significantly on the thought of Jacques Derrida. It advances that the limit experiences identified by critics in the literary realm are interconnected, and that they form a differential matrix. Then, through the analysis of a corpus of poems by twentieth-century writers Jacques Dupin and Louis-René des Forêts—and incorporating an awareness of poetry’s fine details, its internal patterns and forms, including doubling, metaphor, rhyme, enjambment, parallelism, hyperbaton, typography, metonymy, and chiasmus—this study suggests that the experience of poetry takes the form of a compressed, vibrating network of mobile limit experiences. The thesis’s primary claim is that poetry’s exemplary status within the thinking of the limit experience may derive from its experimental, multiplicitous, and differential structure. In this way, the thesis provides a literary-theoretical explanation for why poetry in particular has become a privileged site for the limit experience
