Literature, Ethics, and Decolonization in Postwar France: The Politics of Disengagement by Daniel Just (review)

Literature, Ethics, and Decolonization in Postwar France: The Politics of Disengagement analyzes the political and ethical implications of a particular literary style, characterized by “the aesthetics of blankness” and a narrative strategy of “exhaustion,” “weakness,” and “slowness,” that Daniel Just attributes to Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Albert Camus, and Marguerite Duras. Just’s main argument is built upon two axes, the first of which is an analysis of the historical and political setting in France. The second, larger axis comprises a theoretical exploration of language’s indeterminate nature, the relationship between literary forms and politically charged times, and the prevalent view in the mid-1950s that a strong, stable, centered self was the kernel of communicating meaning and that work was the existential mode of relating to others. Just’s historical and theoretical analyses center on Jean Paul Sartre’s changing convictions. He develops his argument in the context of Sartre’s initial emphasis on committed literature in his seminal 1947 essay “What is Literature?” and in his later singular commitment to political action, and rejection of literary writing as work.

The theoretical ramifications of Barthes’s Writing Degree Zero, along with Blanchot’s, Camus’s, and Duras’s literary styles, appear “disengaged” in comparison to Sartre’s “committed literature.” Examining the literary responses to Sartre by Barthes, Blanchot, and Camus, Just focuses on the political and intellectual setting of mid-1950s France in the midst of the Algerian War and the role of the French state in the international arena. He also notes the remnants of WWII and the political turmoil of the May 1968 events in France in Duras’s Hiroshima Mon Amour and Destroy, She Said, respectively. At times drawing on works by Stéphane Mallarmé, Georges Bataille, Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Rancière, and Jacques Derrida, Just’s analysis is based on specific criticisms concerning the dichotomy between “literary intransitivity” and “direct political engagement.” Seen from these critical perspectives, Just unhinges the implied associations of disengaged literature from apathetic isolation, slow narrative style from laziness, and the weakness and austerity in novelistic communication from political escapism.

This book’s contribution to literary criticism is two-fold. First, it offers a meticulous reading of these authors’ works in an attempt to analyze both the stylistic and thematic elements and the writer’s political and ethical responsibilities. Second, Just problematizes particular dimensions of disengaged literature in order to emphasize its critically affirmative tendency in ethical terms and its difference in aesthetically defined politics at a time of political turmoil. In Just’s analytical framework, there is an intrinsic bond between the political and ethical. Yet, theoretical arguments fall short in substantiating the claims on ethics and aesthetics. From passing references, one gets the impression that all claims concerning the ethical implications of disengaged literature are based on an operative definition of ethics as the relationship with self and (the absolute otherness of) the other (as evil). The main argument tends to be too eager to draw an ethical unanimity and a forced aesthetic codification among the authors in question.

The organization of chapters and the selection of certain texts over others raise some questions. While each author is covered under two separate chapters, in Chapter 1, Barthes’s theory of exhausted literature stands alone, leaving a crucial question unattended: To what extent is the literary style of Barthes’s autobiographical and travel notes compatible with the other authors’ styles? The sole reference to Writing Degree Zero along with Barthes’s other works on photography and film seems to be instrumental in limiting the theoretical debate not only to Barthes’ disagreement with Sartre, but also to his independent stance in relation to Marxists and Structuralists at the time. Just’s emphasis on historicity, which in one instance is presented as an unfortunate coincidence with the publication of Beckett’s Trilogy novels (35), however, fails to acknowledge Barthes’s independence as an author in his own right as Mourning Diary, Empire of...