"I've always had a taste for the prosaic, the banal, the insignificant," says Belgian writer Jean-Philippe Toussaint. Among the many ways of looking at prosaic writing from a semiotic point of view – within the framework of writing genres, from a connotative perspective, from a socio-semiotic and sociolectal point of view, etc. –, we will try to find the most appropriate. The aim here is to gain a better understanding of the aesthesic significance of what constitutes an aesthetic judgement at the most sensitive level. This will be based on the concept of epokhe, which, as we know, is at the heart of the phenomenological approach. We will examine its properties – starting with the suspension of the modal habits attached to perceptions – which define the conditions for a 'bare' grasp of things, and thus constitute the core of a poetic gaze. After analysing a few examples of the poïetic in artistic creations (painting, poetry – F. Ponge for instance), we will define prosaicism as non-epokhe, or even anti-epokhe: the judgement of prosaicism concerns a subject or an object marked by an uncritical assumption of perceptual habits, by adherence to the screen of the sensible, by referential certainties, by a functional grasp of the world anchored in habitus. We will illustrate this hypothesis by investigating both discourses and everyday objects, and we will explore it in greater depth by looking at design as a shared cultural attempt to escape the prosaic.