L’Empire de la littérature: penser l’indiscipline francophone avec Laurent Dubreuil ed. by Anthony Mangeon (review)

This edited volume collects presentations from two recent colloquia on the work of Laurent Dubreuil, held in May 2012 (Montpellier) and April 2013 (École normale supérieure, Lyon). The volume is divided into three sections, the first of which (‘Parcours critiques’) consists of five chapters that serve to introduce and survey Dubreuil’s work, including transcriptions of discussions and round tables with Dubreuil, Anthony Mangeon, and others. Other pieces discuss such topics as literary thought and history, and philology and critique. A second section then more directly addresses Dubreuil’s Empire du langage (Paris: Hermann, 2008) and what one might term its critique of (post)colonial discourse. Viviane Azariane discusses the language politics of French colonial administration and military organizations, and how these regimes were effectively troped by writers such as Bakary Diallo and Lamine Senghor; Maxime Del Fiol investigates similar textual strategies in Ahmadou Kourouma’s Monnè, outrage et défis (1990); Cédric Chauvin brings certain of Dubreuil’s ideas regarding literary ‘possession’ and animism to bear upon Patrick Chamoiseau’s Les Neuf Consciences du malfini (2009); Céline Sin explores in turn the implications of Dubreuil’s theory of literary possession for writings on Haiti (Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Daren, Mimerose Beaubrun) in which textual production becomes a phenomenological unfolding of both knowledge and possession. Finally, the volume’s third section collects a number of recent, unpublished pieces by Dubreuil: a short piece on literary critique and professional ‘specialization’; a rich and interesting piece on ‘Anachronisme et événement’, which addresses postcolonial and contemporary (French) theory, ranging widely across these fields of thought to touch on everything from Chakrabarty to Derrida and Badiou, Haiti and Heidegger, to linger on the problematic conjuncture of historicity and the universal in recent critical theory. The volume then concludes with the transcription of another panel discussion with Dubreuil, focusing on recent critical theory from Derrida to Badiou, and its relation with the French literary field. The volume constitutes a rich investigation of Dubreuil’s manifold thought, addressing the contemporary conjuncture of (French) critical theory and francophone postcolonial literature. If at times the transcriptions of multiple round-table discussions veer into the arcania of Franco-American academic and journal politics, and the (non-)place of postcolonial studies therein, the volume nonetheless constitutes a rich and rewarding study of this important contemporary figure of francophone postcolonial literary studies.