Qu'est-ce que la litterature pense?

(Literary Thinking)
It wouldn't be hard to say what literature knows. It knows the generic human subject. It knows its tailings, its weaknesses and, on the basis of that knowledge, transfonns the inevitability of resignation. Resignation to the fact that, as in one of the vei-y first examples of the
Bildun-^sromau, IVilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, the world never lives up

to the Idea; or, as in the earhest naturahst novels, by Zola, resignation 1 1 the face ot ignominious social conditions. In its lowest form, this 1 is knowledge of a sort of dismal moderation of the real, compared with the wild assertions of theoiy-and of philosophy, in particular. Literature knows inside out the workings of deceit, ungratefulness, selfishness and stupidity. Literature serves as a 'critique'; it is often praised for its aggressive or morose insights, or congratulated on its 'lucidity' when, like Celine, it aspires to make 'httle music' of our wretchedness. Even I-'roust, as hne a writer as he may be, spends a very long time, and a great many volumes, exploring the interminable web of degradation and vanity, cruelty and resentment, absurdity, smugness and murky, innermost sentiments, before finding salvation in the Second Coming of writing. Before discovering the only thing that matters-and which marks the transition from knowledge to thought: the victories of which humanity is capable. The 'supra-sensual hour' that James describes in connexion with the hero of Tlje Ambassadors, Beckett's 'blessed times of blue', in How It Is, the enchanted death of Prince Andrew in War and Peace, Julie's testament in The New Eloise, the peasants' procession around the wounded airmen in Malraux's Days of Hope.. . or Conrad's novel, entitled simply Victory. The idea that literature thinks, and that writers might be thinkers, as Natacha Michel argues in an essay on contemporary prose, can only mean that it opens up the realm of the particular: subde psychological insights, social differences and cultural specificities, to the field of knowledge. For that must mean, as we know from experience when a novel secures a victory in our own minds, that literature's effect takes place at the level of thought. What should the word 'thought' be taken to mean in this instance? First of all, that there is an encounter with a real, beyond the

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Parai^raph

fictional world, which is its triumph, and at the peril ot language, which is its Assumption. Beyond the fictional world, literature that thinks emerges in the cracks in the story {hifable). It has no interest in wrecking the story, in contradicting it or puUing it to pieces. It accepts the story and settles down in the spaces it leaves. I will turn briefly to my own work as a novelist. In Cahne bhc ici-bas (1998), I borrowed the form and characters for the story [fable), as well as the relation between story and History [le rapport de la petite
histoire a la grande Histoire), from Victor Hugo's novel, Les Miseraldes.

But I pulled apart the building blocks ofthe narrative, rearranged the spaces, and allowed my prose to explore areas outside its initial scope. I employed language in three distinct registers narrative, rhetoric and shorthand in the hope that a few grains of real would emerge from this clash of styles. In the essay to which I referred earlier, Natacha Michel proposes another method: that of allowing an 'other' language to take root in the language itself, with the reader witnessing the birth of a unique language. In any case, the complicity of fiction and language aims to mark the real with the seal of the unique, of the One, of that which has never taken place prior to this complicity (this work) and will never appear again. Literature thinks insomuch as it brands a real pursued by fiction with the symbolic scar ot the One. This gives nse to an essentially fmite quality common, in fact, to all artistic procedures encapsulated in the word \vork' (of art) {oeuvre). There is the 'unique language' ofthe writer; the binding of every work in the form of a Book, even if, as Mallamie preferred, it is in 'several volumes'; the double meaning ofthe word 'end': that signified by the word at the bottom ofthe last page, and that which the hterary enterprise is compelled to bring to any sequence, whether we like it or not, aiici, last but not least, the standard of perfection. A work ofliterature is such must, inchvisibly, be such that nothing in it can be changed. Each and every word of its prose is irreplaceable. In stark contrast to the infinite variety of experience (which is perfectly obvious), the work ot art or hterature is the difficult, unlikely production ofthe fmite. And it is precisely this production that constitutes thought. The maxim of art-thought is simple: to produce something finite (artificial) to rival the infinite (natural).

Qu'est-cc que la littcraturc pciiH'? 37

I used the words 'work of art or literature', but what does 'literature' actually mean? Literature is a singular cotifiguration which, unlike poetry, tends not to appear in the ranking of fine arts. In his analysis of categories of nineteenth-century aesthetics, Jacques Ranciere makes some striking observations on the genealogy of modern meanings of the word 'literature'. Not only does it fail to obtain the patronage of any ofthe Muses of classicism, but it cuts across literary genres: clearly, 'literature' cannot be confined to poetry, but neither is it restricted to the novel, the story or the essay. It refers to the development of a sort of literary exception in the field of art. The concept of this exception gradually takes shape in Franco, from Baudelaire to Blanchot, with contributions from Flaubert and Proust, although Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, in a book entitled, significantly, The Literary Absohitc, have shown that it origmated in Germany or, more precisely, Clennan romanticism. Writing is conferred absolute status by the exception, which not only raises it above classical genres, but puts it entirely beyond the scope ofthe empirical world. Thus, literature is an immanent reference to itself, a mark of its own self-sufficiency. It comprises Flaubert's prose, which, thanks to its style (a crucial operator in literature), the author intended to exist in its own right, with no imaginary referent in the world. It might equally be one of Mallarmc's sonnets, which he described as 'a fact, a being, happening by itself [fdit, ctaut, il a lieu tout scuf), or conceiving perfectly of itself Of course, the advent of literature also corresponds to the emergence of a hterary conscience, a conscience not exactly comparable to artistic judgement, since it relates not to rules of taste but to the conviction ofthe existence ofan entirely separate phenomenon: literature {Ic fait litterciire), as compact and distinct as an Idea. But doesn't this Ideal separation, obtained through stylistic density alone, require the Idea to be fully self-conscious? In other words, if literature is a form of thought, mustn't it be the thought of that thought? We know about Mallarme's revelation, or the crucial experience that inspires his poetr}': 'My thought has thought itself, and I am but a corpse'. This means that the poem as absolute requires It to be the thought ofthe thought that it is and that the author should be excluded, since the author merely imagines the basic Idea, leaving it to deploy the various facets of its self-reflection: 'since the Master went to draw tears from the Styx'. But if hterature's role is to allow fulfilment ofthe Idea as thought of thought, the author's task must not only be to marry his or her style with the initial production ofthe basic Idea, but also to ensure.

38 explain, and stage the comnig-into-bcing of the Idea as thought. Thus, literature is always accompanied by successive Manifestos of its becoming-absolute. The age ot hterature is also the age of literary manifestos, combining a diagnosis of the time (from Mallarme's 'Crisis of Verse' to Natacha Michel's 'second modernity', not forgetting Breton's prophecy ('Beauty shall be convulsive or shall not be at all')) and a preferred procednre (hermeticism, self-reflexive writing, metaphor...) which, at any one time, contains the essence of the literary phenomenon. We can therefore make the following assertion: that what hterature thinks is both a real marked in language with the seal of the One, and the conditions governing the way that real is marked. The thought process of writing is the conjunction, under the fmite sign of the One, of the autonomous forces of language and the immanent occurrence of a real. There are two questions to be asked ahout literature: With regard to the real: what takes place, which is not from the empirical world, which is 'anywhere outside the world', and which is worth organizing into thought so that it can be encountered beyond the fictional world? With regard to language: what takes place in the language, which might be equivalent to tlic real that-which-has-taken-place? Literature can be represented as a graph with two axes, neither of which is literary per se. The first axis corresponds to the real as that-which-has-takenplace, or the non-empirical essence of all reality. Although it is left out of any ordinary story or prefabricated narrative, this is the real of which literature must speak. I do not believe, as Blanchot sometimes suggests, that this is the original silence with which all language draws strength from the infinite. The point is to open up to the realm ot thought the singularity of whatever takes place outside that realm. Literature is a direct contradiction of Wittgenstein's axiom ('Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent'), since its first, essentially non-literary, axis is the imperative to speak of the unspeakable of that-which-has-taken-place. The second axis is language, as a flexible resource with infinite power, by all means, but not, in this case, employed for what it is capable of saying, rather exploited mercilessly for what it has not yet said, or what it has always been reluctant or unable to say. Writers are the torturers ot language; they extract confessions and even, perhaps and therein conies the danger lies.

Qu 'est-ce que la litterature petise?

39

The literary act sometimes called 'writing' is like plotting a graph along these two axes. It can be drawn as follows:

Evei-y point along the graph can be called a 'sentence' {phrase). Each sentence indexes a real to a break in language. The active movement that joins two sentences together (with other sentences) can be called 'phrasing' {j.-)]trase). The laws that govern phrasing, which only become discernible afterwards, can be called the 'style'. The tnily remarkable thing is that the graph of the literary' act is always closed in places: a closed area (or areas) exist(s), because certain

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points are always drawn twice, becoming double points. If no such points exist, then the literary act constitutes a failure: the infinite dissemination of its linear emptiness; the total absence of the real; boring prose and conventional style. The double point means three things. It repeats language, at a particular point in its own expression. Let's say that it produces knowledge of its creative innocence and, in so doing, puts an end to that innocence. For the perverse aspect of the double point is that literary desire is always, at least at some point, knowledge of its own form; a kind of calculated self-interest inflicted upon innocence. It asserts that thought is also thought of thought, turning its own thinking, at least in places, into a closed area, and a glimpse of the gap between inside and outside. The literary act commemorates its journey with a monument. Lastly, It shows the same real point twice, making it impossible to discern from that point the beginning of the movement and the point that is ultimately reached. Like Proust's madeleine, the real point becomes an absolute, in which it is impossible to distinguish origin from destination. It escapes situation in time. It is, in the literary work itself, the scar of its eternity. In tact, this point is what we encounter in a work of literature, far beyond what we read there. It is the hterary act itself, transmitted, and submitted, to us (for in this case transmission and submission are one and the same). It fulfils the pre-Socratic maxim: 'It is all one to me where I begin; for I will come back again there'. This double point is the synibohc seal of the One, the real of the real, which is also, to use James's lovely expression, 'the figure in the carpet'. It was to him that the Romantics gave the most appropriate, and extravagant, of names: the literary absolute, which belongs to all eternal writing. ALAIN BADIOU (Translated by Alistair Clarke)