CALL FOR PAPERS: Politics of Literature

Guest editor:  Isabelle Galichon and Kim Sang Ong-Van-Cung, Université Bordeaux Montaigne

Submissions until September 15, 2023

In the foreword to Politics of Literature, Jacques Rancière made it clear that, by this expression, he did not mean to consider writers' commitments to the social and political struggles of their time, or the way in which they represent social structures, political movements or diverse identities. In so doing, he was moving away from Sartre's conception of literature as commitment. From now on, it is not a question of considering that politics constitutes that "background of struggle and confrontation within which, from the nineteenth century onwards, the literary thing develops" (Benoit Denis, Littérature et engagement de Pascal à Sartre). Rancière also moves away from Lukács's Marxist conception of the modern novel as the expression or representation of the contradictions of society, and hence of identities, in cultural studies. Rather, 'the politics of literature' implies that literature is political as literature. "The expression 'politics of literature' presupposes a specific link between politics as a form of collective practice and literature as a historically determined regime of the art of writing".

In this special issue, we would like to clarify what is at stake in the politics of literature, as Rancière envisages it, through the distribution of the sensible. More generally, however, we want to look at the various ways in which philosophers have approached literature from the political field, questioning literary practices from two angles: "what is literature?" and "what is politics?". We are also interested in a statement like Lyotard's "it is the task of a literature, a philosophy, perhaps a politics, to bear witness to differences by finding idioms for them". And the Foucauldian articulation of the question is also at the heart of our questioning. In 1977, Michel Foucault, in "The Life of Infamous Men", defined as early as the seventeenth century as "an ethic immanent in the literary discourse of the West (...) to flush out the most nocturnal and everyday part of existence". Literature would be the production of legends of the ordinary at the crossroads of disciplinary powers and biopolitics.

Literature has been considered in relation to the question of moral knowledge (Nussbaum, Cora Diamond), as an expression of moral dilemmas. With the question of the politics of literature, we question literature as knowledge, but as a practice at the heart of the very possibility of politics. We propose to take a fresh look at the relevance of this notion of the politics of literature by giving it a plural form, and to explore the politics of literature with Rancière, Lyotard, Foucault and Deleuze.