Ontology of Voice: Georg Trakl, Louis-Philippe Corbeil, and the Ethics of Poetic Silence

Abstract

What happens when voice speaks from the edge of being, when poetic language touches the silence it can no longer master? This article takes up that question by exploring the ontology of poetic voice in conditions of fragmentation, fatigue, and marginality. Through a comparative analysis of Louis-Philippe Corbeil’s Journal de bord du Gamin des Ténèbres and Georg Trakl’s shadow-haunted poems, the study investigates how voice persists, not as fullness, but as a resonance shaped by absence. Drawing on philosophical works by Nancy, Blanchot, and Meschonnic, the article proposes that voice in these poetic worlds is not merely expressive, but ontological: it becomes the last form of presence when meaning collapses. Both Corbeil and Trakl offer lyric voices that drift toward silence, yet resist disappearance by forging a poetics of withdrawal and ethical tension. Methodologically, the study combines hermeneutic close reading with a transhistorical dialogue between modern and contemporary texts from marginal traditions. The results reveal a shared aesthetic of dissidence, one that finds in the dislocated voice a fragile, enduring gesture of being. This approach contributes to broader debates in poetics, phenomenology, and literary ontology by reimagining poetic voice not as mastery of language, but as survival through fracture.