The Politics of Literature

I will start by explaining what my title means—and first of all what it does not mean. The politics of literature is not the politics of its writers. It does not deal with their personal commitment to the social and political issues and struggles of their times. Nor does it deal with the modes of representation of political events or the social structure and the social struggles in their books. The syntagma "politics of literature" means that literature "does" politics as literature—that there is a specific link between politics as a definite way of doing and literature as a definite practice of writing.

To make sense of this statement, I will first briefly spell out the idea of politics that is involved in it. Politics is commonly viewed as the practice of power or the embodiment of collective wills and interests and the enactment of collective ideas. Now, such enactments or embodiments imply that you are taken into account as subjects sharing in a common world, making statements and not simply noise, discussing things located in a common world and not in your own fantasy. What really deserves the name of politics is the cluster of perceptions and practices that shape this common world. Politics is first of all a way of framing, among sensory data, a specific sphere of experience. It is a partition of the sensible, of the visible and the sayable, which allows (or does not allow) some specific data to appear; which allows or does not allow some specific subjects to designate them and speak about them. It is a specific intertwining of ways of being, ways of doing and ways of speaking.

The politics of literature thus means that literature as literature is involved in this partition of the visible and the sayable, in this intertwining of being, doing and saying that frames a polemical common world.

Now the point is: what is meant by "literature as literature"? Surprisingly, few among the political or social commentators of literature have paid attention to literature's own historicity. We know, however, that classifying the art of writing under the notion of "literature" is not old. We can trace it back to approximately the beginning of the nineteenth century. But critics have not often deduced any consequence from this. Some of them have tried desperately to connect literature (taken as the a-historical name of the art of writing in general) with politics conceived as a historical set of forces, events and issues. Others have tried to give a specific content to the notion of literature. Unfortunately this was done on a very weak basis, by referring literature's modernity to the search for an intransitive language. On this basis, the connection was initially flawed. Either there was no way of binding together literary intransitivity and political action, with "art for art's sake" opposed to political commitment, or one had to assume a quite obscure relationship between literary intransitivity (conceived of as the materialistic primacy of the signifier) and the materialistic rationality of revolutionary politics. Sartre proposed a kind of gentleman's agreement, by opposing the intransitivity of poetry to the transitivity of prose writing. Poets, he assumed, used words as things, and had no commitment to the political use of communicative speech. Prose writers, by contrast, used words as tools of communication and were automatically committed to the framing of a common world. But the distinction proved to be inconsistent. After having attributed the opposition to the very distinction of two states of language, Sartre had to explain why prose writers like Flaubert used words in the same "intransitive" way as did poets. And he had to pursue endlessly the reason for this, both in the sad realities of class struggle in the 1850s and in the neurosis of the young Gustave Flaubert. In other words, he had to pursue outside of literature a political commitment of literature, which he had first purported to ground on its own linguistic specificity. It is not a...