Paradoxes de la nuit active : expansion et dissolution de la subjectivité chez Bachelard

Abstract

This article offers an analysis of the philosophical and poetic implications of the “active night” in Gaston Bachelard’s thought. By critically engaging with phenomenological and psychoanalytic frameworks, the study argues that night, in Bachelard, operates as an ontologically structuring force that redefines the conditions of emergence of poetic subjectivity. Through the figures of reverie, nocturnal matter, and the dissolution of the self, it examines how night functions as a liminal space between the erasure of consciousness and its imaginative reconfiguration. Conceived as a fifth cosmic element, Bachelard’s night articulates an irreducible tension between ontological annihilation and the poetic genesis of the self, revealing the impossibility of a fully constituted metaphysics of night while opening a heuristic field for a poetics of liminal subjectivity.