At first sight, Marie-Francoise Plissart's photographic works, her early first photonovels as well as her more recent documentary or autonomous production, seems to obey the logic of formal research and formal organization. Her approach, analogous to some extent to the notion of constrained writing, does not leave room for the formless. However, the redefinition of the formless as a shortcut of all these elements that escape from the impact of the constraint, suggests that photography is a medium that is obliged to negotiate the permanent tension between form and formless. The example of Plissart's work, in which this tension is blatant, enables a new reading of the theory of constrained writing, as illustrated for instance in the debate between Ponge and Valery.

Going from Form to Formlessness suggests a process of deconstruction. But another form appears. Only the shift can be observed. I shall try to elucidate such a phenomenon, based on two examples.
A character, a narrator or an author suddenly experiences a moment of confusion which leads him to stare blankly at the world. Descriptions, inventories, lists appear on the page. Objects take the upper hand-but also fall apart and vanish. Language becomes a concrete object of contem­plation. The process of writing goes in reverse. Face to face with "the inextri­cable incoherence of the world", a new universe is systematically rebuilt: a "structure', a "model", a "user's manual".

From a study of the Oulipo archives and the way they were set up by their various curators (F. Le Lionnais, M. Benabou, P. Fournel), the essay aims to confront on the one hand, the concept of the disparate, beloved by Le Lionnais and a fundamental element in Oulipo's thinking, and on the other, the notion of formlessness, asking whether the archives might be the only possible place for formlessness in this group, known for its exploration of form. Formlessness can be understood as "mise en abîrme", or taking shape, because the archives contain traces - hitherto unknown ­ of the different processes, by which new constraints and structures for literature were elaborated collectively. But it can also be understood as "unfinished", as illustrated in the Oulipo archives by the many incomplete projects (texts, suggestions for constraints) which allow us to get a glimpse of a potential Oulipo.

This essay of poetic morphology and literary history analyzes a type of new verse, the metrics of which is based on the number of the words, such as it has just been exemplified in two long contemporary poems: Holderlin in the Mirador (2004) and Plouk Town (2007). This verse can be considered as « formless» with regard to the counted and rimed syllabic verse. The routes having ended in this type of verse, both among the northern poets and within the Oulipian group, are reconstituted. Beyond the morpho­logical nature of the verse, the link between the chosen shape and the referent of these poems is evoked : suffering, violence, ugliness, waste, « formlessness » ­ transfigured by art and humor.

The study focuses on the anagrams of Michelle Grangaud, a member of the group Oulipo. The analysis of two anagrams reveals a fundamental paradox: does the anagram allow the poet's voice to express itself? Jean Starobinski's study of Saussures anagrams serves to reveal the anagram's origins. In fact, Saussure unearths what he calls poetic "intent" and "custom." According to Starobinski and Saussure, the anagram reflects the combinatory art: of poetic language. From another theoretical angle, Jean Baudrillard believes that the anagram guarantees "the destruction of linguistic laws." Grangaud's anagrams fall right in the middle of these theoretical positions. However, Grangaud does admit to experiencing a "loss of identity" because the anagrammatic form leads to "non-intentional discourse." Could non-intentional discourse be a form of lyricism?

Edouard Levé, at first a painter then a photographer and a writer, worked at the edge of art and literature. His use of formal constraints owe as much to literary practices as to procedural practices in the Fine Arts. Our study focuses on Edouard Levé's specific position at the juncture of these fields. Generally acknowledged as artistic, his work is considered to include writing. Nevertheless, his texts, however much the result of an artistic practice, also stand on their own. To the extent that it is perceived, Levé's concerted work on "form" is of relevance to reception studies. We are arguing that it can displace the reception in itself.

The Dominique Fourcade's poem, Xbo, entirely self-referential, works to manifest itself in "la langue xbo", magnetized by "l'insens", and treated like a body with which the writer maintains an erotic relationship. For him it's about finding a primitive connection between the world and language, whose source lies in the childhood experience of the happy joining of the body of the world and the body of words; the first being incarnated in the second, but not yet eclipsed by the film of the symbolic. The methods of this poetic rise from an effort to cleanse the language of the prevailing parasitic forms. So much so that the poem, freed from all bonds, develops itself by the pure work of the signifier, and sets itself on the path to the "hard core of language [which] is meaningless".

Renaud Camus is the author of a considerable oeuvre wherein the question of form and formless plays a key role. In his novels as well as in his essays, his "how to" or the numerous volumes of his unique diary on one side, and in those vast textual conglomerations that are the Eglogues as a book or Vaisseaux brûlés as a creation for internet on the other, the subtlety in formal research, the elegance of the poetical inspiration and the graciousness of the language pervade those works entirely.
Within this framework we propose to consider more in detail the description of landscape as it is perfectly exemplary for the way Camus imposes his estheticization on reality as well as in his realizations as a photographer. We will try to extend further this analysis to give some indications on the general poetics of the author.

This essay examines the tension between two conceptions of poetic formalism - formal experimentation on the one hand, attachment to established forms on the other- through two currents of American poetry: Language Poetry and New Formalism. Against the predominance of free verse, the New Formalists advocate a return to traditional meters. For the Language poets, form is convention or artifice; their exploitation of the materiality of language is tied to an anti-narrative strategy, and to a poetics not of the formless, but of deformation. The formalism of Oulipo proposes new structures and constraints while appropriating existing rules and conventions. The American reception of Oulipo reveals the ambiguous relationship of poetic form to innovation, tradition, and politics. There emerges a critique of the forms of the literary group at the dawn of the 21 st century.

The wide variety of artistic practices is inversely proportional to the number of theories of aesthetics that allegedly accompany them. Form must be reconsidered in light of a philosophical tradition, in the light of the history of Formalism, and above all, in the lighr of our pluralistic situation, in which the problematics of form are of secondary importance, and are at times evaded or even deliberately cast aside. Here, in reaction to this obliteration of form, is a reaffirmation of the importance of form: from an historical, perceptual, and semantic point of view. It is an attempt to take up form from a non-Aristotelian perspective (a given matter is a given form), and to take into consideration the issues raised by recent works. The perception of form will always be dependent on the approach taken and is inevitably subject to aesthetic and artistic judgments.

These reflections on literary aesthetics follow up on my latest book devoted to Jacques Jouet (L'OEuvre ronde, Lambert-Lucas, 2007). Two novels will be examined in particular: Fins (1999) and Trois Pontes (2008). Jouet ranks among the most active Oulipians to apply the non repetition principle of constraints. Form is for him the true - if not the only ­ conveyor of meaning.
What is "aesthetics" if not personal judgment? The perspective proposed in this paper is not too distant from what Jean-Pierre Richard used to call a "thematic approach". It appears that the combination of a thematic and a formalist reading increases interpretative freedom.

During the twentieth century, very many photographers have resorted to various kinds of constraint. Photography seems to be a process which - doubtlessly more then others - requires of the operator a touch of "passivity". Now constraint, once it has been assumed, tends to increase this "passivity" of the photographer, for he cannot afterwards alter the rule he has decided upon at the start. Exacting proceedings has been chosen by conceptual artists, and also more recently by some photographers who are concerned by the close observation of landscape. Constraint is not endured, but arranged by the operators as a way to explore reality.

Up until the beginning of the Twentieth Century; the form of the novel has coincided with narrative form, that is, narrative order, which is perhaps the only constraint the novel was forced to obey to. Much experimentation carried on by modernism revolves precisely around the erosion of narrative, it is explicitly meant against narrative form, in order to free the novel from its rule. This is why modernism occurs in the name of formal values and under the sign of the formless at the same time. With this essay I concentrate on some of the issues raised by this only apparent aporia: the implosion of all temporal cohesion in Faulkner, the processes of geometrization and algebrization elaborated by the Nouveau Roman.