The advantage of this "passage in reviews" is that I can provide the data that presided over the birth of this article. As the bibliographic notice indicates, it is first a text composed for an oral intervention, at the international colloquium organized by the Belgian friends of Lautréamont, who then published it in the proceedings of this meeting. Here is therefore the program, followed by the table of contents of this issue of the Cahiers Lautréamont. I add an unpublished document: the complete record of the passages devoted to Lautréamont by Tristan Tzara in his complete works.

I. Program of the 7th Lautréamont Colloquium

Maldoror Literature
Liège/Brussels, October 4-6, 2004
Under the direction of Paul Aron, Jean-Pierre Bertrand and Pascal Durand
With the collaboration of Frans de Haes
Scientific Council: Michel Pierssens, Henri Scepi, Naruhiko Teramoto

If the site remains open, the study of the Ducassian text's sources has known, in recent years, considerable advances. The time has undoubtedly come today to move from upstream to downstream and to submit to intensive exploration the field of its reception, understood not only as the set of literary relays through which this "energumen" text has transited before being inscribed – but in what place, to what extent and with what effects? – in what is conventionally called modern poetry, but also understood as the sedimented set of theoretical and critical appropriations of which it has been the object since its first readings until today. A text, however deviant it may be, does not arise from nothing. A text, moreover, does not remain equal to itself, identical to itself, as it is received, relayed, reactivated, reactualized by great readers or great readings (which can, moreover, appear as weak readings in view of the complexity or lability that the text in question opposes to them). The object of the colloquium is to take the measure of these reading effects and the successive transformations that the Ducassian text has undergone or to which it has known how to resist for more than a century.

Program
October 4, 2004: University of Liège
9:20 am: Welcome of participants. Address by the Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters

1 - Beautiful as Maldoror
Psychoanalysis, linguistics, semanalysis, pragmatics, the rhetoric of reading or even literary sociology have in turn attempted to arraign the Ducassian text to account for it as much as to make it the banner of different paradigms struggling on the intellectual scene. It will not only be a question of drawing up the balance sheet of these theoretical appropriations. It will be much more a question of evaluating the capacity for resistance of The Songs of Maldoror and Poems to the double effect of reduction and radicalization exercised by such appropriations. In what places of the text, under what forms does this resistance operate? How does the impulsive dimension of the text exercise itself even in its deconstructive compulsion? To what extent does its properly poetic effectiveness remain below or beyond its power to dismantle literary illusions? Of what indestructible, indecipherable stuff is the "beauty" of this text made?
Session Chair: Pascal Durand
9:30 am: Jean-Pierre Goldenstein (France), "The Return of the Referent"
9:50 am: Philip G. Hadlock (USA), "Beauty and Monstrosity"
10:10 am: Yojiro Ishii (Japan), "Maldoror's Body"
Discussion
10:30 am: coffee break
Session Chair: Yojiro Ishii
11:00 am: Pascal Durand (Belgium), "The Text and its Grids"
11:20 am: Henri Scepi (France), "The Novelistic in The Songs of Maldoror"
11:40 am: Peter Nesselroth (Toronto), "Beautiful as Everything; or rather, as Anything"
Discussion
12:30 pm: lunch
Session Chair: Henri Scepi
2:00 pm: Constanze Baethge (Germany), "Tone and Diction: the Maldoror Discourse"
2:20 pm: Laurent Dubreuil (France), "A Hypnagogic Reading"
2:40 pm: Christophe Hanna (France), "The Literariness of the Songs"
Discussion
Session Chair: Jean-Pierre Goldenstein
3:30 pm: Jean-Luc Steinmetz (France), "Maldoror and his Incipits"
3:50 pm: Michel Pierssens (Quebec), "The Poems of the Future"
4:10 pm: Jean-Pierre Bertrand (Belgium), subject to be defined
Discussion
Evening: performance of Maldoror by Michel Fourgon
October 5, 2004: University of Liège

2 - The Maldoror Effects
Machine to rewrite, to depose and to dismantle the engines of the literary thing, the Ducassian text has itself lent itself to reprises, rewritings, travesties, from Léon Bloy to Michel Houellebecq, from Tzara to Debord, from Henri Michaux to Le Clézio, among others. The map of this landscape remains to be established, as well as the effects and stakes of which these literary reappropriations have been bearers. What happens, both to the resumed text and to the one who resumes it, when such operations take place? With what effects – of meaning, of legitimacy? How does the position towards the Ducassian text constitute one of the stakes of contemporary literary production, one of its markers?
Session Chair: Jean-Pierre Bertrand
9:00 am: Alain Chevrier (France), "The Resistible Reception of Isidore Ducasse in Poet Anthologies"
9:20 am: Eric Walbecq (France), "Lautréamont in School Manuals"
9:40 am: Guy Laflèche (Quebec), "The Hispanism of The Songs of Maldoror"
10:00 am: Jean-Pierre Lassalle (France), "The Rewriting of the Songs in Térandros by G. Julliot de la Morandière"
Discussion
10:30 am: coffee break
Session Chair: Jean-Luc Steinmetz
11:00 am: Henri Béhar (France), "The Maldoror Effect in Tristan Tzara"
11:20 am: Leonor L. de Abreu (Belgium), "Ducasse-Péret, a Conjunction of Imaginaries"
11:40 am: Petr Kral (Czech Republic), "Lautréamont in Prague"
12:00 pm: Ricard Ripoll (France), "Lautréamont's Universe in Spanish and Catalan Culture"
Discussion
12:40 pm: lunch
Session Chair: Henri Béhar
2:00 pm: Naruhiko Teramoto (Japan), "Lautréamont-Ducasse and Le Clézio"
2:20 pm: Murielle Lucie Clément (Belgium), "Lautréamont and Houellebecq. A Meeting"
2:40 pm: Laurence Brogniez & Frédéric Claisse (Belgium), "Live at Bar Maldoror: the Magnetic Songs of Lautréamont"
3:00 pm: Jean-François Perrimond (France), "Debord Deferential towards Ducasse"
5:00 pm: departure for Brussels
8:00 pm: Dinner in Brussels. Address by Jean-Jacques Lefrère (France), "The Association of Past, Present and Future Friends of Isidore Ducasse (APPFID) and its History".

October 6, 2004: Brussels, Archives and Museum of Literature

3 - Maldoror in Belgium
Everyone knows how decisive was the taking charge of The Songs of Maldoror by Max Waller and the team of Young Belgium. However, the conditions and modalities of this Belgian relay have not yet been closely studied, nor the intermediary role played by Léon Bloy or even by Remy de Gourmont. The conclusive day of the colloquium intends to submit to analysis the forms that the first reception of the Ducassian text has taken and to evaluate to what extent this reception allows to shed new light not only on this text, but also on the Belgian literary field in formation and, beyond, its contemporary inflections.
Session Chair: Frans de Haes
9:00 am: René Fayt & Emile van Balberghe (Belgium), "Rozez, Waller, Bloy, Verhaeren and the Others: from the Cellar to the Cabin"
9:20 am: Nicolas Malais (France), "Remy de Gourmont and the Invention of Maldoror Literature"
9:40 am: Liliane Durand-Dessert (France), "Gerard van Bruane 1891-1964, the 'Maldoror Cabinet' and 'The Golden Paper Flower', a Ducassian Temple in Brussels"
Discussion
10:15 am: coffee break
Session Chair: Jean-Jacques Lefrère
10:30 am: Geneviève Michel (Belgium), "Lautréamont and Nougé"
10:50 am: David Vrydaghs (Belgium), "Henri Michaux: Invocation of Lautréamont"
11:10 am: Paul Aron (Belgium), Lautréamont and Vaneigem
Discussion
12:00 pm: lunch
2:30 pm: Round table of Belgian writers on Lautréamont (chaired by Jean-Pierre Verheggen)
5:00 pm: Synthesis and closing of the colloquium

II. Cahiers Lautréamont

2nd semester 2004, Issues LXXI and LXXII (Maldoror Literature, Proceedings of the seventh international colloquium on Lautréamont, Liège, October 4-5, 2004/Brussels, October 6, 2004)
ARON, Paul, BERTRAND, Jean-Pierre, DURAND, Pascal, "The Fields of Maldoror", pp. 9-11.
SOMVILLE, Pierre, "'Lautréamont'", pp. 13-14.

I. Beautiful as Maldoror
DURAND, Pascal, "The Text, its Grids and their Cranes", pp. 17-23. GOLDENSTEIN, Jean-Pierre, "The Return of the Referent or the Tomb of the Unknown Readable", pp. 25-37.
NESSELROTH, Peter, "Beautiful as Everything; or rather, as Anything", pp. 39-49.
HADLOCK, Philip, "Beauty and Monstrosity in The Songs of Maldoror", pp. 51-57.
ISHII, Yojiro, "Maldoror's Body", pp. 59-64.
LAFLÈCHE, Guy, "The Hispanism of The Songs of Maldoror", pp. 65-74.
DUBREUIL, Laurent, "Blanchot and the Spider: Haunting and Magnetism", pp. 75-84.
PIERSSENS, Michel, "The Poems of the Future", pp. 85-94.

II. Maldoror Effects
MALAIS, Nicolas, "Remy de Gourmont and the Invention of Maldoror Literature", pp. 97-104.
CHEVRIER, Alain, "The Resistible Reception of Isidore Ducasse in Anthologies", pp. 105-121.
WALBECQ, Éric, "Lautréamont in Dictionaries and Encyclopedias", pp. 123-130.
BÉHAR, Henri, "The Maldoror Effect in Tristan Tzara", pp. 131-137.
LASSALLE, Jean-Pierre, "The Rewriting of The Songs of Maldoror in Térandros by Gabriel Julliot de La Morandière", pp. 139-149. LOURENÇO DE ABREU, Leonor, "Ducasse-Péret, a Dynamic Intertext", pp. 151-161.
KRAL, Petr, "Lautréamont in Prague", pp. 163-167.
RIPOLL, Ricard, "Lautréamont's Universe in Spanish and Catalan Literature", pp. 169-182.
PERRIMOND, Jean-François, "Debord Deferential towards Ducasse", pp. 183-190.
TERAMOTO, Naruhiko, "Lautréamont-Ducasse and Le Clézio. Metamorphosis as 'Material Ecstasy'", pp. 191-201.
CLÉMENT, Murielle Lucie, "Lautréamont, Houellebecq: a Meeting", pp. 203-211.
BROGNIEZ, Laurence, CLAISSE, Frédéric, "Live at Bar Maldoror: the Magnetic Songs of Lautréamont", pp. 213-233.

III. Maldoror in Belgium
VAN BALBERGHE, Émile, "Rozez, Wittmann, Waller, Bloy, Verhaeren and the Others: from the Cellar to the Cabin", pp. 237-252.
DURAND-DESSERT, Liliane, "Gérard van Bruaene, the Maldoror Cabinet and the Golden Paper Flower", pp. 253-260.
MICHEL, Geneviève, "Nougé and Lautréamont: The 'Case' of the Green Disk", pp. 261-274.
VRYDAGHS, David, "Henri Michaux: Invocation of Lautréamont", pp. 275-284. ARON, Paul, "Ducasse in Memory(ies)", pp. 285-291.
FOURGON, Michel, "Go See for Yourselves, if You Don't Want to Believe Me (chronicles of a musical experience in the company of Isidore Ducasse)", pp. 293-301.

IV. Interventions
VANEIGEM, Raoul, "Isidore Ducasse in the Light of Day", pp. 305-306. LEFRÈRE, Jean-Jacques, "The AAPPFID and the Ducassians of Yesterday and Today", pp. 307-330.
"Presentation of Authors", pp. 331-333.

III. Supplement: Lautréamont in Tzara's Complete Works

I. Is it not enough to say: Rimbaud + Lautréamont + Jarry: the purest and most complex expression of French art? I do not believe that we succeed in putting the most cosmic-diverse writers in a drawer. Their richness, whose place is among the great apparitions and events of nature, cosmic diversity, supreme power to express the inexplicable simultaneously, without previous logical discussion, by severe and intuitive necessity, puts them above classifications and formulas. (OC I, 412)

II. NOTE ON THE COUNT OF LAUTRÉAMONT OR THE CRY

We now know that Lautréamont will be the Rimbaud of today's poetry. The dictatorship of the spirit, presentation without concern for improvement and consideration is the affirmation of intensity, directs all preoccupations towards the noble, precise, sumptuous force, alone worthy of interest, destruction.
Mal d'or or of pain.
Mal d'or gold has broken death.
His madness was not beautiful, that's why it still lives.
Who dares to fight a reality because it is served in the form of reproach?
SEE: necessity of a cerebral trigger.
Those whose uncertainty spreads in pretensions and pride rises in the form of cerebral saliva, those for whom marshes and excrements have determined the rule of philosophical pity, will one day or another see the immeasurable curse tear their dirty and weak muscles. The Count of Lautréamont has surpassed the point of tangency that separates creation and madness. For him creation is already mediocrity. On the other side is the inarticulable solemnity. The boundaries of wisdom are unexplored. Ecstasy devours them without hierarchy and without cruelty. The pain that freezes the meninges, crushes the crystal of his blood, leads on a strange canal of pathetic regrets the disorder of the linings of old boats, old coats. Imaginary or exaggerated, pain drinks silence, accompanies the superacute force that constantly attempts to resolve itself in the fairy and universal delirium tremens. The freedom of his faculties, which nothing binds, which he turns in all directions and especially towards himself, the force to lower himself, to demolish, to cling to all defects, with a sincerity much too intimate to interest us, are the highest human attitude because, transformed into actions, they should lead to the annihilation of this strange mixture of bones, flour and vegetation: humanity. The spirit of this negative man, ready at every moment to let himself be killed by the carousel of the wind and trampled by the rain of meteors, surpasses the sweetish hysteria of Jesus and other tireless windmills, installed in the sumptuous apartments of history. Don't love if you want to die quietly. Mal d'or or of pain.
Mal d'or gold has broken death
by its brilliance and the music of the zephyr frogs. (OC I, 414)

III. The work of the Count of Lautréamont, which I do not wish to vulgarize here, suffered from the malicious praises of Rémy de Gourmont and Léon Bloy who, with their air of superiority, classified it among literary curiosities and declared that its author was mad. Those who know The Songs of Maldoror know however that nothing counts beside this marvelous anti-human epic. On all tones, of the illuminated assassin, of the annoying petty bourgeois, of the prophet conscious of his ridiculous position, with this grandeur that admits and employs the good and the bad, Lautréamont has formulated the most considerable accusation against the human species. You know well that this species is distinguished from others only by the mania of writing and reading books. (OC I, 418)

IV. From the second issue, Littérature seems to have recovered. More and more its will for renewal will assert itself by becoming more precise. Preceded by a note by André Breton, the "Preface to the Poems" of the Count of Lautréamont, copied from the unique copy of the National Library, is published for the first time in Littérature. Lautréamont now takes, in the gallery of great precursors, the place of first importance that he has kept since. The influence of the author of The Songs of Maldoror will extend far beyond the boundaries that Verlaine formerly assigned to him in his Cursed Poets. (OC V, 524)

V. Interview by Roger Vitrac:
— But Rimbaud?... Lautréamont?...
— Spontaneity, in Rimbaud is, in my opinion, very minimal. His poetry is that of an aesthete limited by artistic formulas. As for Lautréamont, he seems to have had a certain sense of relativity. But the intellectual bias spoils it a bit for me. (OC I, 624)

VI. Picasso and Poetry
Since Baudelaire, who recognized their contradictory existence, modern poetry, through Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Apollinaire and the Surrealists, applies itself to reducing the antinomy between dream and action. (OC ?? 385)

VII. Essay on the Situation of Poetry. (1931)
If Baudelaire's sensitivity turned towards the real foreshadows the appearance of Lautréamont in the evolution of poetry and for the capital role he plays there, the figure of the latter takes for us who have linked our lives to his work, in the light of all the revelations that, successively each of us owes to him, an importance that it is not easy to analyze coldly. Does not this fabulous and yet familiar being, for whom poetry seems to have overcome the stage of mental activity to become truly a dictatorship of the spirit, surpass any critical method? His work functions as a lever in the evolution that is taking shape, for, much better than Hugo, he demonstrates that through a kind of verbal magic or incantatory verbalism, reason is capable of disorientation and logic of dissolution. (OC V, 12)
But already before and more explicitly than in Lautréamont who, between the Songs and the Preface, only allows us to see in time a too short path although very differentiated, we could in Rimbaud's work traverse a reduced and mimetic reproduction of poetry as a whole, from the means of expression to the activity of the spirit and this not only within the limits of his era but surpassing it and prefiguring, by the abandonment of poetry, the destiny of poetry as the future will have to envisage it from the angle of the change of quality into quantity. (ibid., OC V, 14)
Just as work in a socialized state is no longer what we today represent as such, just as the proletarian, no longer being the exploited, loses the meaning we accord to him, can we predict that poetry, which will lose even its name, in pursuing its historical becoming, will be transformed into a collective mental activity following the law of the nodal line of measure relations and that under this form Lautréamont's proposition by all, not by one" will become a reality? (ibid., OC V, 22)
the historical role of surrealism. It consists in defining the meaning of leisure in future society, in giving content to laziness by preparing on scientific bases the realization of the immense possibilities contained in Lautréamont's phrase: poetry will be made by all, not by one". (ibid., OC V, 28)

VIII. Surrealism and the Post-War.
Outside the revolutionary ideological tradition, there exists among today's poets a specifically poetic revolutionary tradition. I want to speak of the one that draws its source from the innovators, the poets, their almost heroic spirit in the face of bourgeois conformisms and which, through Nerval, Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Jarry, Saint-Pol-Roux and Apollinaire, unites the different tendencies going from the marvelous to humor, in a vision of the world that, even today, poetry could not disown. Any valid acquisition in the domain of the spirit must be denied and assimilated at the same time. The pure and simple return to outdated forms is a denial of the law of progression and must be considered as reactionary. (OC V, 63)
The absurd becomes a poetic value, like pain and love. It is only by deepening the absurdity of the world that a new clarity appears, infinitely more brilliant than that which, given at first glance, does not resist rigorous criticism. Lautréamont, Mallarmé and Saint-Pol-Roux teach us that we must toil long to achieve this clarity, consciousness. This is not learned. It is up to each one to discover it in the depths of his being, with all the risks that this adventure entails, in spheres where danger is great. Such was for Gérard de Nerval, at the confines of madness, the lesson of his search for an absolute. Such is the price of reason, emerging from the tunnel where it finds its reward in wisdom and light. (ibid., OC V, 64) Our horror of the bourgeois and the forms in which he clothed his ideological security in a world he wanted frozen, immutable and definitive, was not strictly speaking an invention of Dada. Baudelaire, Lautréamont and Rimbaud had already expressed it; Gérard de Nerval had built at the antipodes of the bourgeoisie his particular world, in which he sank after having reached the very limits of the most universal knowledge; Mallarmé, Verlaine, Jarry, Saint-Pol-Roux and Apollinaire had shown us the way. But our impertinence perhaps went even further. (ibid., OC V, 66)
Dada, which had broken not only with the traditional succession of schools, but also with the most apparently indisputable values in the established scale of values, prolongs the uninterrupted lineage of schools and poets and, along this marvelous chain, finds itself linked to Mallarmé, to Rimbaud, to Lautréamont, further still to Baudelaire and to Victor Hugo, marking the continuity of the spirit of revolt in French poetry, of this poetry that places itself on the terrain of concrete life, at the very center of preoccupations which, the more they are localized, take on a meaning of universality. (ibid., OC V, 68)
Pursuing the indications contained in Rimbaud's Letter of the Seer, Surrealism has explored regions which, until the humanization of poetry already begun by Dada, were reserved only for a caste of initiates. We find there the meaning of Lautréamont's prophetic teaching "poetry must be made by all, not by one". Indeed, poetry is everywhere, it is, in a latent state, spread over the surface of things and beings. It is found in the novel, in painting, in the street, in the love of postcards, in love in short and business, in the child and the alienated. Poetry is above all, before becoming a poem, a feeling, a quality of things, a condition of existence. (ibid., OC V, 70)

IX. The Bousingos as a Social Phenomenon.
From Borel's lycanthrope poet to Verlaine's cursed poet, the ambivalent path of impossible love and total hatred unites Baudelaire to Corbière, Lautréamont to Rimbaud, Verlaine to Mallarmé. A tradition of behavior, a new code of the poet's honor henceforth comes into play in the history of poetry. (OC V, 112)

X. The Actuality of Villon
Cursed poet, certainly, Villon was in the manner of Verlaine, of Baudelaire, of Rimbaud, of Lautréamont, his companions of suffering, revolt and misery. (OC V, 121)

XI. Corbière
Without misrecognizing their differences, it is to that of Lautréamont that the dialectical approach of his contemporary Corbière seems to me to be most intimately related. The movements of adherence to common feeling and its refusal, of love of man and repulsion towards him, resolve themselves by glorifying the anonymous forces of nature--the sea or the ocean, more particularly,--comforting compensation to their representation of sullied justice. Although this solution does not imply in their minds flight from reality, it is indeed a question of flight and it is in this that both Lautréamont and Corbière are tributaries of Romanticism in the process of being surpassed. If Lautréamont reacted in a romantic manner against Romanticism, in his Preface to the Poems, by taking a polemical position towards desolation and sadness in favor of the good, without however disengaging from the actuality of his action the eminently modern character of the surrounding reality, Corbière, for his part, immediately placed himself in the lineage of Baudelaire under the lighting of the constantly renewed present, at the avant-garde of idol breakers, and daring innovators. (OC V, 131)
Pierre Reverdy and Poetic Consciousness