« …Mais, au contraire, seulement une – arabesque ». Autour d’un motif d’Étienne Souriau

Taking the arabesque as  referent, the article proposes to investigate its meaning in its various meanings, starting with the musical and then continuing with the artistic and literary, in order to highlight how, especially in the literary sphere, Souriau proposes, through this figure, to examine the conditions of possibility of the interweaving of phonetic, semantic and morphological inventions that sustantiate language, but that nevertheless can never reach the threshold of saying. And which indeed seems to testify to how there is always something that remains hidden in language: an intuitive presence, an image that arrives suddenly.