Sul partito preso, ovvero la valorizzazione del medesimo

[Machine translation] In the essay “Formalism et Langage Poétique” published in the summer of 1976 in Comparative Literature and included as a chapter of Mimologiques. Voyage en Cratilie, published by Seuil in the same year, Gérard Genette examines some key concepts of Russian formalism on poetic language, with particular regard to the positions of Roman Jakobson. In these pages, Genette confronts and deconstructs the Jakobsonian notion of poetic function, showing its theoretical ambivalence in an unstable balance between linguistic conventionalism and insistent references to the motivation of the sign, with a decisive predominance of the latter. Also worthy of attention is the use, albeit sparse, of voices such as axiology, value, enhancement. In fact, Genette's speech will stop here, who will certainly not show that he is encroaching into territories alien to literary theory, history and criticism, and yet he will express perplexities and questions that plumb in depth - but with discreet philosophical nonchalance - not only the ethical and ideological scope of the events of twentieth-century poetics but also the intricate and robust roots and inflorescences of the enhancement of the same, of the trend, that is, recurring over the centuries in reflection, literary, rhetorical, linguistic — and in the history of thought tout court — to cancel the distance between sign and object, between form and reality, of the desire to crush the relationship into a confusing indistinct identity.