Abstract: In À rebours, Huysmans inaugurates a poetics of the fissure: while the “nervous disease” was still reserved for neurologists at the time when the author wrote, its lack of nosographic precision caused it to spill over into fictional space in multiple signs that resemble the externalization of an internal illness, a crack that appears all the more phantasmatic in that it is constantly moving, from body to psyche to soul. Breakdown then becomes the symbolic moment of an ontological and spiritual lack.
