"The poem, as always, precedes our progress. But perhaps our progress made the poem possible, by one of those roundabout ways spawned by the wiles of history. In any case, we have indeed arrived at that expanse that no longer speaks to us, lies mute, and where the wanderer, if always possessed by the same cry, no longer has anything to ‘say’ but the ‘lie’ of an image. He no longer seeks a place in which to become lost, for he is lost everywhere. The task of isolating, from a particular life, the form of that experience that remains mystic, leads us to renew our inquiry on the status of the body, which is lacking here. We must then move through mystics once more, no longer exploring the language it invents but the ‘body’ that speaks therein: the social (or political) body, the lived (erotic and/or pathological) body, the scriptural body (like a biblical tattoo), the narrative body (a tale of passion), the poetic body (the ‘glorious body’)."