The critique of rationalized urban space and the celebration of cultural alternatives through inventive praxis ('arts de faire') developed by Michel de Certeau turn fascinated attention to the active agency of the city, its capacity for resistance, and its boundless vision-altering potential. Certeau's appraisal of the city's eruptive creativity can help us map the urban and suburban topographies of Jacques Réda's poetry and prose-writing from Les Ruines de Paris (1977) to Accidents de la Circulation (2001). A creative, passionate city-rummager, Réda explores the culture of unevenness and recalcitrance that surges against the sleek colonizations of modernity. As a poet and chronicler, Réda proposes his own, writerly resistance through myth, metaphor, humour, fantasy, colour-practice and the search for an urban sublime.

I begin with Réda's probing of debris and dereliction, his affinity with cussed marginality, his sense of the extraordinariness of the ordinary. Rubble and rubbish provide zones of resistance against colonization, pockets of oxygen against the stifling of individuality and marginality. I pay particular attention to Réda's evocation of human actions both in physical space and in the symbolic arena: artisanal recycling, empathy, cussedness, the privatization of space, illicit practices, identity-formation and writing. For the poet, as for the cultural historian, the potential of margins and mess extends beyond the physical tesserae of human lives, taking transformative desire to the brink of a poetic sublime. Submerged and (sometimes) subversive practices are the sign of a poetic consciousness at work on material both tangible and symbolic: altering, quoting, ripping, wounding, resisting, loving, gleaning, reclaiming, appraising, colouring, sifting, and fantasizing. In Réda, these activities, at once recuperative and transgressive, connect subject and surface, consciousness and its object, world and text, in mutually illuminating interaction.