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SubStance 33.1 (2004) 54-76



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The Silent Revolution

Gabriel Rockhill
Paris Center for Critical Studies


Passage à l'envers

Jacques Rancière's circuitous response to the question "what is literature?" in the introduction to La Parole muette is in many ways indicative of the historical methodology operative in his most recent work on art and politics. The concept of literature, he claims, is at once absolutely self evident and radically undetermined. Rather than invoking this paradox as a Heideggerian justification for investigating the essential question of our age, Rancière uses it as a vehicle for analyzing the intellectual constructs at work in the various attempts to isolate the nature of literature. The empirical approach, for example, accepts the self-evidence of the historical conventions that establish a well-circumscribed catalogue of literary works. This positivistic attitude is countered by a theoretical definition that posits the existence of a literary essence irreducible to the simple bibliographical delimitations inherent in textual classification. Instead of searching for a passage between the Scylla of positivism and the Charybdis of speculation, Rancière is interested in the historical conditions that render such a choice possible. In other words, he refuses to give a straightforward answer to the question "what is literature?" in order to resituate the question itself in its historical context and examine the various factors that determine possible responses.

One of the guiding presuppositions at work in the attempt to define literature is that aesthetic history can and should be divided between works of art and the philosophic reflection on the nature of aesthetics. In order to thwart this erroneous assumption, Rancière painstakingly demonstrates that these domains are in fact coextensive and that it is impossible to separate theoretical claims from artistic practice. In the introduction to La Parole muette, he provides a brief analysis of this relationship in terms of the dispute between John Searle and Gérard Genette. On the one hand, he agrees with Genette's claim that the literary status of a play like Britannicus is not simply due to the pleasure it produces and that literature cannot be reduced to Searle's notion of arbitrary aesthetic judgment. However, he refuses to accept Genette's counter-claim that Britannicus is a literary work because of its specific genre. According to Rancière, such a conclusion would have been incomprehensible for Racine's contemporaries. Britannicus was strictly [End Page 54] speaking a tragedy, and it was therefore classified as poetry and not literature. In fact, the term "literature" referred to a particular form of knowledge and was not used as a subdivision of written works in the same way that it is today. Thus, if Genette considers Britannicus to be a literary work, it is only due to the status retrospectively conferred upon it by the Romantic Age, i.e. by a new idea of art and literature. For Rancière, the concept of art is always embedded in a regime of perception that determines what is visible as art or literature in a specific context. Ideas are not autonomous reflections on pre-existing empirical content; they are part of the historical configuration in which artistic practices appear. The mistake that Genette makes—the same could be said mutatis mutandis of Searle—consists in applying a contemporary concept of literature to a work of the Classical Age as if the historical trajectory of ideas could be separated from the historicity of literary forms.

In spite of appearances, Rancière is not simply reiterating the importance of the hermeneutic distance separating classical tragedy from modern times. While it is true that he brazenly discredits universal definitions of literature by situating them in their historical context, his own methodology aims neither at the fusion of horizons nor at the conclusion that insurmountable epistemic limits forever divide the past. On the contrary, he analyzes the ambiguous status of literature in contemporary discourse in order to elucidate the artistic and conceptual constructs that determine the space of possible statements regarding the nature of literary works. If literature is for him neither a conventional category of classification nor the...

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