The Object of Literature (review)

Publisher’s Note

Literature, Pierre Macherey insists, is always thinking about something. The Object of Literature, Macherey’s first volume to appear in English since The Theory of Literary Production (1978), returns again and again to the question of how to recover literature’s speculative objects of thought. From the first page, we learn that there are serious risks associated with constructing what Macherey terms a “literary philosophy”; efforts to posit literature and philosophy as each other’s Ungedacht only reify the discourses they seek to negotiate. Derrida’s notion that philosophy has covered up the “fabulous [read literary] scene” that produced it ends up, according to this account, accomplishing the same net effect as a more traditional hermeneutic approach, one that treats the literary text as harboring a philosophical secret only waiting to be unveiled. Both the Derridean and so-called “hermeneutic” methods view the problem in terms of “localization”; literature and philosophy are treated as “territories to be delineated, annexed, protected and defended” (230). Macherey opts for an approach ruled by a focus on “production”; this means paying attention to the “operational aspect which produces real works, which makes concrete the network within which literature and philosophy merge and mutually transform one another” (230). Although Macherey repeatedly counsels for this dynamic, rather than static approach, it is in fact the threat of hermeneutics that haunts this collection of essays in ways which make the text that much more thought-provoking.

Readers of Macherey’s Theory of Literary Production will no doubt recognize the emphasis on the so-called “productive” elements of the text. The author of the literary object, engaged in the bricolage of writing, assembles raw materials whose ultimate significations always overflow the bounds of intention. This is what criticism must admit and capitalize upon; the text, scarred by the social relations of its moment, also marks the intersection and transformation of circulating philosophemes. This is the point argued in one of the most delightful passages of the book:

Literary writings exude thought in the same way that the liver produces bile; it is like an oozing secretion, a flow, or an emanation. All these terms evoke a continual and gradual process which takes place insidiously at the level of a microscopic chemistry within the subtle parts of the textual organization and the cellular network that makes it up. The slowly accumulated, speculative sap is stored and concentrated in inaccessible reservoirs of signification and therefore remains unnoticed for long periods; it is then disgorged, overflowing with intentions and surplus thoughts which make its manifestations excessive, even abusive. The alternating pattern of retention and discharge means that literary philosophy is always either in excess of or inadequate to its expression, which never adopts the regular form of a measured and reasoned argument whose effusions are tightly controlled.

(232)

This elaborate description of the “flow” of speculative thought reminds the reader that all along, Macherey has been quite careful not to let the conduit of his own reading permit the sap to petrify. But at the level of the essay, it’s often difficult to prevent running into walls of amber; Delphine and Corinne refer us to Kant, Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome reworks the terrain of Spinoza, Queneau and Bataille can’t get Hegel out of their minds. Despite the insistence that the speculations produced by literature are indeed authentic and that these speculations often, and in potentially transformative ways, refer to blind spots in the fabric of philosophy, one wonders how far from the field of “traditional hermeneutics” Macherey has actually ventured.

It is really at the level of the entire collection that these considerations begin to prove truly interesting. The essays track developments along three more or less “thematic” axes; organized in groups of three, each section refers to a single strand in a larger narrative. De Staël, Sand, and Queneau take us along “roads to history,” Hugo, Bataille, and Céline lure us “into the depths,” and Sade, Flaubert, and Foucault teach us...