Abstract
Writer Pascal Quignard offers Collège de France audiences a two-part reflection. Firstly, he offers a brief history of the " defense de l'oublié ", a novelty with its roots in the French Revolution and its development over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, with the emergence of the social sciences, which were attentive to folklore, the archaeology of language and their attention to lost languages (Indo-European studies), or psychoanalysis, which was attentive to the " pertes " of consciousness. The second part of Pascal Quignard's talk is devoted to a poetic reflection on his own relationship with loss and forgetting. He evokes his relationship with his brother, as well as his friendship with the musician Jordi Savall, who did much to bring back the lost music of Sainte-Colombe, the genius musician of the 17th century, at the center of the novel Tous les matins du monde, whose compositions Jordi Savall himself played for Alain Corneau's film adaptation of the novel. The work of editing lost or forgotten texts is at the heart of Pascal Quignard's approach, and in this seminar he develops a poetic theory of literature as " art du cryptage ".
