Abstract

This essay examines animality through an analysis of Les Chants de Maldoror, an obscure but influential nineteenth-century text by the Comte de Lautréamont. Drawing upon the work of Gaston Bachelard as well as the apophatic tradition in Christian mysticism, Les Chants de Maldoror can be read as a text that complicates the boundary between animality and spirituality, producing an “apophatic animality” that ultimately impacts the poetics of the text itself.