Abstract
If we take up the thread of reflection on libraries, the question is this : how do we give presence to the library ? How can we materialize the forces that move it, how can we make visible the textual spaces that the library houses ? For the common man, a library is a space, a repository of books, and that's all it is : a silent place, a dead place in a way. There can be beautiful places where books are stored : the Bibliothèque nationale de France, for example, the Salle Labrouste in the former Bibliothèque nationale, the reading room of the British Museum, that of Trinity College, Dublin, or the Tianjin Library in China. The list of prestige libraries seems to have grown rapidly in recent decades. There's something of a paradox in this development : the more books become dematerialized, the further civilization moves away from traditional book culture, the greater the need to make the places where books are stored spectacular. The beauty of these places fascinates even those who are most resistant to reading ; it materializes the power of the ruler and the breadth of knowledge of readers ; architecture here is the sign of the unification of power and knowledge, the sign of the fact that power sits on knowledge. So how can we materialize the real forces at work in the library, the currents that underlie it ? To do so, we need a particular way of looking at the virtual dimension of the library, that of a reader-writer.
The last lecture, precisely, addressed a poem that does justice to the vast expanses of each volume making up the library, Keats's poem, " On First Looking into Chapman's Homer ". According to Frank Raymond Leavis, when we comment on a text, we are commenting on a mental reality. Translation thus makes intersubjectivity possible, the meeting of minds : between the mind of the author, the mind of the reader and the mind of the translator. Keats' poem is fairly representative of a certain idealism : the world exists only through the prism of subjectivity. The poem alludes to astronomer William Herschel's discovery, on April 26 1781, of a new planet : Uranus. This was the first time a new planet had been discovered since antiquity. Unlike Heredia's poem, Keats's new star is not the punch line of the poem ; the punch line of the poem is the ocean, the stupefaction of infinity.
For the French-speaking reader, there is a linguistic interference at the end of the poem due to the resonance of " Darién ". Keats's poem thus echoes Pascal's Pensées, but also evokes a poem delivered by Mallarmé at the seventh banquet of the magazine La Plume , on February 8 1893, the poem entitled " Salut " : here, the poem temporarily breaks up the din of the banquet and imposes the fragile law of its order and rhythm. The pure event here is the poem itself, not the new star.
