What Is Literature's Now?

Yes, it is still time to read literature and to write about it. In this essay, I consider the different moments of the literary experience and how diffracted "nows" lead us to nonrational and exceeding thought. If poetical oeuvres always come after other discourses (and not before them, as it is usually said), we need to reinspect the very notions of time and history through the prism of literature. In reading several discrete corpus (from the Francophone negritude movement to Aristotle and Ranciere, from John Ashberry to Ovid or Freud), I show how the literary responds to the disciplines (such as anthropology, history, psychoanalysis or criticism) in such a way that the very forms of our knowledge should be altered.