Alfandary, Isabelle <br/><br/>
Machine à suspens : Recantorium de Charles Bernstein 

 -  2010.<br/>							 
<br/><br/> 71 
<br/><br/> This paper aims at deconstructing the logic of Charles Bernstein’s discourse in Recantorium, a poetic performance delivered on the occasion of an academic conference. Bernstein takes up the rhetorical set form of the Puritan confession, borrowed from the American tradition, in order to undermine it and reveal its violence and vacuity. In Bernstein’s slightly dysfunctioning “machine célibataire,” what is suspended is the unpredictable outcome of a well ordered and highly determined process.