'Travail d'abolition': Illness and Statelessness in Armen Lubin

This article explores the poetry of Chahnour Kerestedjian (1903–74), an Istanbul-born writer and member of the Armenian diaspora, who emigrated to France in 1922 following the Armenian Genocide, and in whose French-language poet-persona, Armen Lubin, the horizons of writer, invalid and stateless person come to intersect. Consigned by chronic tuberculosis of the bones to a lengthy cycle of sojourns in French hospitals and sanatoria, Lubin's poor health rendered him unfit for military service, thereby obstructing his attempts to secure naturalization in France. Eliciting an underlying connection between the medical and juridical domains in Lubin's poetry and prose, the article shows how this poet-patient produced a body of work which inflects the condition of statelessness with a lingering opacity and ironic deflation, and which does so in a language which figures, and deflects, those disciplinary logics of which the stateless individual finds himself the object.