Scalar play: the poetics of bodily entanglement in the work of Marie-Claire Bancquart

Journal article

This article investigates how the late French poet Marie-Claire Bancquart plays with different scales of perception in her work, shifting between microscopic and macroscopic visions, between evocations of geological time, human time, and nanoseconds. It examines how her poetry uses shifts in scale to expose the liveliness of material substances and the processes of becoming that they pursue in and through the human body. Analysing how Bancquart uses scalar play to jolt her reader into a new awareness of the body, I explore how she encourages us to perceive our bodily existence, not from the outside but the inside, as we emerge from the entanglements that occur between diverse material and immaterial processes.

Drawing parallels between Bancquart’s poetry and the works of Donna Haraway, Jane Bennett, and Astrida Neimanis, this study argues that Bancquart’s scalar play anticipates certain key features of their nonanthropocentric thought. It proposes that her poetry is prescient in the way that it trains us to become aware of the partiality of the human perspective and encourages us to attend to and to speculate about the material life of the human body, especially the activities that are blocked or filtered out by our own humanscaled perception.

Authors: McLaughlin, E

• Publication status: Accepted
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Liverpool University Press
• Journal: French Studies
• Publication date: 2027-04-01
• Acceptance date: 2025-11-04
• EISSN: 1468-2931
• ISSN: 0016-1128
• Language: English