For the Love of Democracy: On the Politics of Jacques Rancière’s History of Literature

The American academy has received French theorist Jacques Rancière’s corpus piecemeal as his books and essays from the 1980s and 1990s have slowly been translated into English over the past two decades. Mute Speech (La Parole muette, 1998) is the most recent, arriving nearly fifteen years after its original publication. It is Rancière’s thirteenth book, representing his most sustained engagement with the history of literature and art, and serves, in many ways, as a supplement to and a showpiece for his larger project to redefine aesthetics as a historically contingent system of forms that determines what presents itself to sense experience.¹ Against other philosophers of aesthetics who theorize art’s effects on sensibility, Rancière theorizes how art governs the sensible order, how it sets the parameters for what is visible, sayable, and doable, and how it determines the places, times, and forms of participation in a common world. Thus, for Rancière, aesthetics is intimately bound up with politics insofar as it distributes sensible ways of doing, making, and saying that, in turn and in part, structure and delimit political modes of doing, making, and saying.

Mute Speech deploys the concept of the distribution of the sensible (le partage du sensible) as a hermeneutic to reread the history of literature. Literature, in Rancière’s account, signifies neither the repertory of existing written works called literature nor the idea of a particular essence that makes these works worthy of being called “literary,” but rather “the historical mode of visbility of the works of art of writing” (ms, 32). The distribution of the sensible establishes a relationship between the visible and the sayable that sets the conditions under which literature can be perceived as literature, and determines the political realm of who has the right to speak and in what way.

The very first sentence of Mute Speech—“There are some questions we no longer dare to pose” (ms, 29)—marks the limits of the sayable in contemporary literary theory. After stating this prohibition unreservedly, Rancière paraphrases another French literary theorist, Gérard Genette, who names this limit: “One would have to have no fear of ridicule to call a book What is Literature?” (ms, 29). (Even Sartre, who wrote under the sign of this question, was not “foolish” enough to answer it.) Thus, from the outset, Rancière’s writing is fraught with and framed by invisible, mute taboos, and his relationship to literature is a strange form of attachment indeed. His first instinct when faced with the question “What is literature?” is to disavow the possibility of any transhistorical answer: Literature as such, as essence, does not exist. So much is clear. What ways to theorize literature remain on the horizon of possibility, for Rancière and other contemporary theorists, when the belief in a literary essence is lost? In a post-poststructuralist critical landscape, what forms can an answer to Sartre’s titular question take?

Any American literary theorist writing today has to answer to Fredric Jameson’s command, “Always historicize!”² Some version of this imperative looms large for Rancière. Since Rancière writes in the shadow of Foucault, it is perhaps not so surprising that, in his history of literature, he attends not so much to literature itself but to the discourses that theorize literature and specifically to the shift from an older concept of literature to what he calls “our” “modern” one. Much like Foucault, Rancière explicitly writes this genealogy in order to explain how “literature” as we know it came to be, how we arrived at the present configuration of the sensible. In the introductory essay to this translation of Mute Speech, Gabriel Rockhill celebrates the book for its new conceptualization of the modern, for subverting “modernist doxa” and affording a “new vista in the history of the arts and literature” that “breaks away in...