Abstract
This year's lecture will be devoted to Paul Valéry, and initially to a rediscovered work : Valéry's lectures at the Collège de France (1937-1945). Valéry's chair was entitled " Poétique ", a word to be understood in its etymological sense (it is sometimes spelt Poïétique), i.e., the study of " faire " and the productions of the mind.
This lecture is the subject of our recent publication by Éditions Gallimard, in two volumes. As such, this year's lecture provides an insight into the workshop and laboratory of the literary researcher.
Valéry's lecture was attended by such prestigious audiences as Maurice Blanchot, E. M. Cioran, Michel Tournier, Yves Bonnefoy and Roland Barthes - to the extent that the lecture has become the stuff of legend. Until now, all we knew about it was the brochure (Valéry's program proposal at the time of his candidacy for the Collège de France) and the opening lecture. Specialists also knew about the journal Yggdrasil, which summarized Valéry's first year's lectures , as well as the short, abstract annual abstracts published by Valéry in the Collège de France yearbook. It was also known that the Bibliothèque nationale de France had a Valéry collection, containing the vast and disorganized file entitled " Poïétique " (2 500 feuillets), from which only a few researchers had drawn in a very targeted way.
The lecture was all the more legendary for having inspired, by its very name, the journal Poétique (in addition to its reference to Aristotle), whose first issue came out in 1970, and which was the first French journal of literary theory and analysis. The aura of Paul Valéry's lecture shows that he was a kind of inventor of modern literary theory in France.
The Cours de poétique was therefore a lost work, of which only glimpses remained. It is indeed the fate of a lecture to fade away after it has been delivered, while leaving varying traces in the minds of the public who attended it. Our experience of editing the notes taken by T. S. Eliot during Bergson's lessons in 1910-1911 had shown us the great variability of the individual testimonies left by listeners : the same lesson gives rise to notes with a more diverse content than one would a priori believe.
Only a few minutes recorded by Radio Paris during the lecture of March 15 1941 gave us an idea of Valéry's fading words. In its initial version, our edition was to be based on these scattered and incomplete elements, i.e. essentially on Paul Valéry's " avant-dire ", which he wrote at length for the first lectures of each year, particularly in the early years. Never published, these pre-written lessons seemed to be the best way to get an idea of the lecture's content, right up to a discovery to be discussed in the next lecture.
