Radical Future Pasts: Untimely Political Theory

10. The Politics of Literature

321 10 The Politics of Literature J. Peter Euben Every so often some political theorists sponsor roundtables on the relations between literature and politics.1 That they do so indicates a curiosity about such a relationship. That they do so cautiously or even defensively anticipates a professional hostility or indifference toward connecting the two subjects. Even those sympathetic to the literary interpretation of philosophical texts and the use of literature in political theory are wary that such an approach can only further isolate us from our colleagues. We are not political and empirical enough for political scientists and insufficiently normative and/ or analytical enough for other political theorists. It is not clear that our colleagues disparage literature tout court. It is just that literature is a different academic discipline or something done apart from serious academic work. No doubt reading great books or even not such great books makes a person better educated. But it is a delusion to think that such reading advances the cause of knowledge or the understanding of public life in anything other than an impressionistic and random way. How true all this is depends on what one takes the “politics of literature ” to be. Such politics could simply refer to the content or subject of a work, as with, for example, All the King’s Men or The Crucible. Or the phrase could suggest that there is something political about the mere inclusion of a literary work in a class in political science because the very presence of a poem, drama, short story, novel, epistle, autobiography, or letter challenges the reigning conception of the discipline as a set of historically validated practices and a field of objects of study that is both properly demarcated and rendered intelligible by those practices. In these terms, works of literature 322 J. Peter Euben are subversive not only because of the stories they tell, but because they tell a story. Stories are hard to compute and to consume because, as Walter Benjamin argued, they do not expend themselves at the moment of being told but reveal previously unrecognized depths of meaning with each retelling . Thus, they resist attempts to analyze the world in ways that capture and deaden its meaning.2 There is, finally, a third possibility: that literature is and must be political because our literary and political practices are overlapping, mutually constitutive, and homologous. I do not have much to say about the first meaning of the politics of literature because it is the least problematic. Most of our colleagues would find the presence of literary works in introductory courses unexceptional since untrained students need stories to grab their attention before they evolve into disciplinary maturity. But the consensus evaporates when political theorists argue that literature dramatizes the limits of conventional ideas of politics and conventional ideas of how to study it and in the process indicate how being practical, pragmatic, realistic, rigorous, precise, analytic, and factual can become a prescription for ignorance. Constitutive Suspicion and Poetic Invention Paradoxically, the linked methodological and political suspicion of literary approaches to the study of politics not only has a long history and distinguished pedigree but could even be considered constitutive of the enterprise of political theory itself. It is true that Thucydides, the anointed progenitor of realism and contemptuous critic of poetic embellishment, draws on the tragic tradition; that Socrates, upon facing death, turned to the writing of poetry as if that rather than philosophy were the proper response to Apollo’s answer to Chaerphon; and that Aristotle, whose surviving works lack literary flair, regarded poetry, ethics, and politics as continuous subjects. But Plato is a different story. Surely it is his animus against the poets in the Republic that has legitimated the political and philosophical suspicion of literature. As you recall, Plato insists that literature must either be banished from the ideal commonwealth or become the handmaiden of philosophy. Such a draconian solution is dictated by the power of poetry to distract us from virtue and knowledge. Poetry endorses corrupting or contradictory exemplars , encourages us to speak in many tongues rather than the one that is truly our own, and waylays the imagination, transforming it from a vehicle for the discovery of truth into an ersatz reality that distorts the truth. This The Politics of Literature 323 scathing indictment of the poet’s pretensions to be a moral educator and diviner of the truth underwrites Plato...