Comment on a quitté le réel et comment on y est revenu ?

In this article, we consider anew the idea of the “return to the real” that characterizes a wide range of contemporary literary works. To move away from the primacy accorded to the “real” and challenge a conception where the real is thought to be a graspable object of knowledge, we first reexamine the dualism between transitivity and intransitivity that is presented to us by the nature of languages relationship to the real. Following these observations, we register certain perplexities raised by the notions of “field” and “investigation” that come with the “return to the real,” and suggest instead a more open approach to this question, largely inspired by pragmatism (Dewey, Wittgenstein, Rorty).