| Agonie// ((Agony//) and //Il n’y a plus de chemin// (//There’s no more road//) by Jacques Brault depict homeless individuals who have chosen to leave social life behind, who “live partly in another world”, who “aren’t quite with it anymore”, to use the author’s words. Preferring distance, silence and retreat to engaged discourse, they shed light on the inadequacies of a cultural transmission which, far from being grounded in certainties, reveals itself to be profoundly aporetic in the modern era. What heritages do these two texts offer, if not detachment, displacement, distance and anachronism, which, in any case, can be neither taught nor learned? What conception of modern coexistence do they describe? To answer these questions, the present article proposes to examine the figures of anachronism that give way to a singular conception of the transmission of knowledge and affects, a conception shared between an impossible legacy and a deliquescent speech.\\ | Agonie// (//Agony//) and //Il n’y a plus de chemin// (//There’s no more road//) by Jacques Brault depict homeless individuals who have chosen to leave social life behind, who “live partly in another world”, who “aren’t quite with it anymore”, to use the author’s words. Preferring distance, silence and retreat to engaged discourse, they shed light on the inadequacies of a cultural transmission which, far from being grounded in certainties, reveals itself to be profoundly aporetic in the modern era. What heritages do these two texts offer, if not detachment, displacement, distance and anachronism, which, in any case, can be neither taught nor learned? What conception of modern coexistence do they describe? To answer these questions, the present article proposes to examine the figures of anachronism that give way to a singular conception of the transmission of knowledge and affects, a conception shared between an impossible legacy and a deliquescent speech.\\ |