“Mon désir est là sur quoi je tire”

Essay on the Wound, Creation, and the Indexicality of the Shot

Abstract

This visual essay takes as its starting point Guillaume Apollinaire’s experience in the trenches of Main de Massiges during the First World War. Immersed in the violence and fragmentation wrought by the conflict, the poet poetically registers the tension between destruction and creation in “Désir” (Calligrammes, 1918), where the act of becoming-media emerges as a vital impulse — “Mon désir est là sur quoi je tire.”

The maps of Main de Massiges, graphically reworked throughout the essay, serve as surfaces for the inscription of desire. Beyond trauma and memory, it is the line, the cut, and the superimposition of text and image that predominate, re-enacting the encounter between images of war logistics and the introspection of poetic invention. The shot, understood both as a material operation (projectile, cut, explosion) and as a symbolic one (projection, desire, poetic gesture), creates holes that are not mere marks of destruction but ontological spaces of creation and potentiality.

The gesture of shooting is conceived visually as an act of both division and creation, as both the limit and the power of modern media. Engaging with the notion of medial operativity, the visual cartography presented here — through maps, lines, and poetic fragments — seeks in the hole — whether trench, wound, or absence — both the index and the infrastructure: not of absence, but of openness to the possible. In his analysis of the impoverished and fragmented experience of modernity in Erfahrung und Armut during the Great War of 1914–18, Walter Benjamin finds in the void left by the shot of modern technique a new meaning for another mediation between subject, world, and language. Let new weapons be invented, then, without fear or hope (Deleuze).