Living Among Things: The Intersubjective Turn in Francis Ponge’s Le Parti pris des choses

Often known as “the poet of things,” the 20th-century French poet Francis Ponge (1899–1988) gives voice to mute things in his prose poem collection Le Parti pris des choses (1942). This article reexamines Le Parti through a brief critical history—from phenomenology and textualism to recent new materialist readings—to argue that “objectification” in Ponge functions not as reduction, but as a condition for inter-subjective happenings. Focusing on “inter-subjects” in Ponge’s thing-poems, this article reframes the word-object binary as the ongoing action and condition of language, manifesting as ex-pression: a porous, outward-reaching medium shaped from within by nonhuman things.