Literature and Philosophy: Rancière and the Distribution of the Sense

Abstract

If politics consists in reopening the order of the places attributed to beings and ideas, doing philosophy with literature by undoing the distribution of fields and disciplines is a political act. While erasing the boundaries between disciplinary fields, Jacques Rancière seems, however, to forget a basic difference in his reading practice: he transforms philosophical works into the fragment of a univocal avenue of thought whose citation could summarize its sense, but is unable to take into account the plurality of identifications evoked by literature. This may be considered as one of the political means which Rancière attributes to literature. The literary work does not only display a complex subjectivation and a complex narration of causality, as Rancière has argued, but it is also characterized by a process of disidentification. This disidentification applies not only to characters and readers, but also to the literary work itself. In this case, it is pertinent to trace a distinction between philosophical “rigor” evoked in Le maître ignorant and the potentialization of a literary work open to infinite readings. The fact that literature is a space of political contradiction implies that its reading suspends not only our senses, as is implied in the “distribution of the sensible”, but also the final attribution of sense to make room for a radical alterity which resists the identification of the literary work as a subject. In this sense, the literary work is a paradigm of political singularity.