21 diacritics / winter 2007

THE LITERARY THING

PIERRE MACHEREY
Though deprived of the honor of appearing in Le grand Robert, the expression the liter-
ary thing, no doubt formed on the basis of the well-known precedent res publica, or the
public thing, has come into use today, perhaps decorated with quotation marks, which,
not without a certain dose of irony, crown the meaning of the phrase with a halo of mys-
tery, in perfect accord with the fuzzy semanticism of the word thing, in view, perhaps,
of emphasizing its incongruity. Recently, the expression has served as the title for one of
those works that libraries classify under the heading of comic book, a richly illustrated
volume presenting a rather cruel satire of the current mors of the tribe of literary folk (J.
P. Delhomme, La chose littraire), and whose images recall the shock felt by a certain
Lucien de Rubempr, discovering some time ago, upon arriving in Paris, the reality of
just this literary thing, and suffering the loss of a great number of illusions.
1
It would
be interesting to reconstitute the complete history of this formula, of which the following
are but a few key moments. It serves as the title of one of the last of Rmy de Gourmonts
wartime texts, written at a time when an interest in the thing was not self-evident, and
collected in 1916 in the book entitled Dans la tourmente. In 1929, Bernard Grasset took
it up again for the title of a work in which he presented lessons from his experience as a
publisher, treating the literary thing in the manner of a professional well informed of its
inner workings and hidden undersides. In 1933, Paul Valry responded to an inquiry into
the literary thing and the practical thing [Valry 273], which he interpreted as an inter-
rogation of the relation between literature and politics, referring the former to a plane of
pure ideas and the latter to a plane of action. In these few instances we see sketched the
constitutive polysemy of this formulas use, a polysemy that marks something in litera-
ture that is not self-evident, something problematic. In this sense, to speak of the literary
thing is to pose the question of literature, which is also to put literature in question, or
rather to put it to the question, submitting it to an interrogation that both comes to it from
outside and issues from its proper depths, a duality that, while tending to take the form of
an antinomy, ultimately appears as what might well constitute the heart of the matter.
To speak of the literary thing is, at frst glance, a profanation. Does it not risk
making literature into a thing, into some thing, by exposing it to the funereal ritual of
reifcation, stripping it of its inner being, of what irreplaceably constitutes its present,
personal identity? Alphonse Daudet will at least have had the stroke of genius to title
his novel Le petit chose
2
a name that, with striking economy, indicates that capacity
of capture proper to a collective institution such as a school to plunge into anonymity
those it interpellates as its subjects by calling out to them, Hey you! Little thing! [Eh!,
vous!, le petit chose!] And as a discipline of instruction or subject matter, itself ready
to be transformed from instrument of inculcation into a kind of merchandise, literature
This text was frst presented in Lyon at a conference organized by the UMR Lire of the CRNS
(Centre National de la Recherche Scientifque), May 1416, 2003, on the theme of Immaterial
Production.
I am indebted to Stphane Legrand, Robert Lehman, and Pierre Macherey for their help in
preparing this translation. Trans.
1. Lucien de Rubempr is the main character of Honor de Balzacs Les illusions perdues
(Lost Illusions) (183643). Trans.
2. Translated in 1899 by W. P. Trent as Little Whats-His-Name. Trans.
diacritics 37.4: 2130
22
could well be no more than this peculiar and in fact increasingly less consumable thing
intended for those little things [petits choses] with the view of fxing them, in turn,
in their common lot as things to be educated, raised, disciplined, even to be kept busy or
distracted, by means of or at the expense of literary things that have been relegated to the
status of discounted luxury products.
Let us formulate this diffculty in more abstract terms: to speak of the literary thing
would be to raise the apparently intelligent question of what kind of thing literature is,
that is, to interrogate it as to its essence or quiddity, and by that very gesture, in view of
appropriating it all the better, to give up apprehending it in its being, which is not alto-
gether reducible to its essence. On second thought, this might amount to relinquishing the
prey for its shadow, and to giving up the actual and full reality of what is in question for a
mere substitute, a partial perspective extracted summarily from its reality and supposed to
count for it in its entirety, while in fact it is the product of this realitys disappearance and
negation. Assuming the status of a thing, and more precisely of the particular thing that it
is, literature, made to conform to the specifc contours of this summation of its identity,
seems deprived of what stirs most intimately within it, of what resonates with us, touches
us, and truly interests us: metamorphosed into an object of consumption and instrument
of inculcation, evaluated in terms of effcacy or prestige, literature seems to be without a
life of its own, and to have lost its place in the current of our lives, which stimulates the
course of its transformations. A literary theory that would content itself with responding
to the question of what kind of thing literature is would at the same time cast aside the
very pleasure of reading in which literature is more than a simple thing: in which it is an
actually living and emotion-provoking reality, a free, moving presence and not a fxed
image drawn up in conformity with this or that pregiven use.
Such suspicions are legitimate. But they must not blind us to the fact that, strictly
speaking, the reference to what would be a thing or of the order of a thing in literature,
to what would lead us to view literature as the literary thing, might be interpreted oth-
erwise. To present literature as a thing is at the same time to shroud it with the veil of
indecision that belongs to this term, and to food it with the nebulous vagary on which
sacred realties are founded, those realities that precisely only appear as veiled, sheltering
unnamed and unnamable mysteries that one approaches tremblingly. They dont realize
were bringing them the plague, Freud declared to Jung when they were about to convey
what Lacan called the Freudian thing to the frontiers of the New World [Lacan 116]
this horrible thing, das Ding, whose delayed revelation inspired fear and trembling. The
thing: is it not, in the frst place, Kants unknowable thing-in-itself, or the Thing itself,
die Sache selbst, of which Hegel writes, things whose indisputable existence only ap-
pears, or is only imposed, against a background of reservation and ignorance, which
seems to doom them to silence and render them defnitively unspeakable? In lieu of hav-
ing anything else to say about it, to speak of the literary thing [chose], of this funny stuff
[truc] or impossible what-do-you-call-it [machin] that we no longer really even know
how to teach, but of which we cannot quite rid ourselves either, would perhaps be the best
way to invest it with another dimension, one inaccessible by direct means, and to place
the thing in a space that would lend it a volume, a thickness, that is, an ability to carve
out reliefs, giving it a height and depth, and to cast shadows, projecting it before and be-
hind itself. This would reproduce the procedure characteristic of negative theologies that,
having stepped back from what is immediately given to the senses, reveal the presence
of an absence that is also the absence of a presence, one both available and distant, near
and far, whose very distance works through an inner experience set radically against a
background of rending and sacrifce. Bataille and Blanchot, we know, have not seen the
thing in any other way. It is clear, then, that to speak of literature as a thing, and as a
thing in its own right, thus unlike any other sort of thing, is at the same time to grant it
23 diacritics / winter 2007
a specifcity, even an autonomy, whether this be codifed according to material criteria,
of the same kind that govern our various social activities, or whether it be sanctifed in
reference to timeless and immaterial ideals; that is, whether it would take its place in the
world alongside the worlds other constitutive elements, or whether, holding itself back
from this world, it would mysteriously occupy certain margins inaccessible by ordinary
means.
The expression the literary thing would thus be interesting above all for its am-
bivalence and for the tension this ambivalence reveals, such as we cannot dispense with
when we broach the question of literature, which tends to appear simultaneously under
these two opposing aspects, diffcult not only to disentangle, but to determine precisely
which is its aspect of clarity and which its aspect of obscurity. Either we see the literary
thing as an object whose limits we defne by inscribing it in its proper place, from which
it is expected never to budge, an act that permits us to tame and master it by bringing it
within these bounds that fx and diminish it; or else we see it, truthfully no longer as a
thing whose living presence remains ensnared in the net that seizes and retains it, but, in
the absolute, as Thing, that great Thing whose very evocation awakens a continually new
surprise, pushing us to look for something in it that would be extreme and ultimately un-
graspable. Like Descartess man, it is indissociably body and soul, animated by a double
movement that pulls it down to the ground and draws it up to the sky without ever carry-
ing it defnitively in either direction, but that, each time, is called upon to renegotiate their
relation by establishing new equilibria.
To speak of the literary thing is thus to confront this dilemma, with the suspicion that
we might have to renounce resolving it, and that what we call literature is in reality two
things at once, between which we have not fnished going uncertainly back and forth. The
thing: that muddy and potentially nauseous substance we have to wade around in if we
want to apprehend it, but also a pure and ethereal reality that eludes every grasp and folds
in on itself in impenetrable mystery.
Let us return to this ambivalence constitutive of the literary thing, this time more particu-
larly on the basis of an exemplary discussion.
In a text that has been abundantly commented upon, Proust reproaches Sainte-Beuve
for not having grasped what is peculiar to inspiration or the activity of writing, and what
marks it off totally from the occupations of other men [Proust 14]. In short, Sainte-
Beuve would have passed over what constitutes the authentic reality and specifcity of
the literary thing; he who had once proclaimed himself the adversary of all industrial
literature would have banalized it, diluted it in the triviality of the quotidian, or rather of
the weekly Lundis and its journalistic beauties, sensitive to sudden shifts in the mood of
the moment and, above all, attached to the necessity of making daily rounds at the market
and taking inventory of new stock: in this way, he would have kept only the most ephem-
eral aspects of the thing, the external and trivial aspects that are fodder for small talk, and
thus would have given literature over to the gnawing critique of passing time, that time
that one loses and never regains. Sainte-Beuve, according to Proust, is superfcial: he
has mistaken the appearance for the thing, of which he has only skimmed the very sur-
face, that surface visible in secondhand accounts, nothing but the prattle of gossips that
makes up the bulk of what we call news. Thus, Proust writes again, it is very clear that,
if every nineteenth-century book had been burnt except the Lundis, and that it was from
the Lundis that we had to get an idea of the ranking of nineteenth-century writers, Stend-
hal would seem inferior to Charles de Bernard, Vinet, Mol, Mme de Verdelin, Ramond,
Snac de Meilhan, Vicq dAzyr and a good many others, and somewhat indistinct, truth
to tell, between Alton She and Jacquemont [14]. And if Sainte-Beuve had missed only
24
Stendhal, of whom he was unaware because he had eyes only for Beyle, whom he knew
personally,
3
we could pardon him for it if we had to; but we know that he also passed over
Balzac, Nerval, Baudelaire, and Flaubert, not to mention Hugo, whom he knew only all
too well through Adle,
4
which is quite a lot for someone who thought himself a great
connoisseur of literature, an infallible expert of living works grasped at the very time of
their writing.
Following this apparently devastating diagnosis, we would be inclined to pose the
following question: is the literary thing the sum total of Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval, Baude-
laire, Flaubert, Hugoall those greats that Sainte-Beuve was unable to distinguish and
that he drowned instead in the mass of lesser writers who captured his attention and his
journalistic kindness, writers he had the weakness to shower with praise because they
gave him fodder for his gossip column, he who was listening at the doors of literature
and taking away nothing but scraps? Or rather, is it not, or is it not also, this umbrous or
minor literature that makes up the ordinary and continuous weft of literary production, a
confused din of background noise that is covered over by the high-sounding worship of
literary heroes, once these are recognized, following a complex process that is no doubt
more than just a matter of journalism? And what allows us to ratify this recognition as
defnitive, thereby condemning to obscurity a whole set of forgotten, neglected, little-
known names and inferior hacks, without which there would perhaps be no literature
at all? It is not out of the question to think that the great names today might become the
lesser ones of tomorrow, and vice versa, at least as far as some are concerned; and this
reversal, if it is not solely a question of fashion, might be a matter of justice, delivered
with the passing of time that reconfgures reputations by submitting fame to the test of a
kind of desert crossing, where it risks being lost forever, and by submitting disregarded
writers, who have sometimes had the misfortune of being ahead of their time and misun-
derstood by their contemporaries, to an unanticipated and unforeseeable resurrection.
To listen to Proust, and to listen to nothing but what he says, the literary thing is the
spirit of the thing that renders it like no other, and whose radicality is crystallized in the
rare and diffcult creative act, that which, once everything else has been sacrifced to it,
and only on Sundays and holidays, lets something be understood, something suddenly
come knocking as if at the window, at whose stature we have to place ourselves if we
want to retain its message. To follow Sainte-Beuve and the ordinary avenues of criticism,
which electively prize common mediocrity, the literary thing is what is inseparable from
the labor carried out at ground level, whose disparate truths meted out from the course of
working days are ultimately anonymous because they are frst and foremost made from
intersecting trajectories, each in itself perhaps appearing insignifcant or interrupted, but
whose tangle feeds the humus, the nourishing earth from which the fecund pressure of
invention must emerge, which in any case cannot come from nothing, or spring miracu-
lously out of the air. This is why Sainte-Beuve meant to be attentive, moreover, not only
to the great masters of literature, toward whom he perhaps harbored a sentiment, or rather
a resentment, of rivalry and unsatisfed desire, which ultimately does not concern us, but
to those he calls writers who do not dream of being so, those who are only authors by
accident [30], and who are not, from his point of view, any less actively part of literary
life: Chateaubriand, yes, but not without his group, that is, the Guinguens, the Fon-
tanes, the Chnedolls, whom we no longer read today, while, in a manner that is perhaps
not what he himself expected or would have wished for, we still read Chateaubriand; yet
without that now-indistinct mass he would not have existed or been able to carry on his
own work as a writer of genius. Thus a hidden, but certainly not unimportant, aspect of
3. Stendhal was the pen name of Marie-Henri Beyle. Trans.
4. Macherey alludes to Sainte-Beuves affair with Hugos spouse Adle. Trans.
25 diacritics / winter 2007
the literary thing is brought to light: the complex web it weaves in the obscure secrecy
of its unknown works. On the one hand, breathable in its most concentrated forms, is the
rarefed air of its summits, and on the other, dispersed in the shadows that mix successes
with failures, are the often derisory products of a daily labor, carried out in the absence of
any clearly assignable perspective, and seemingly without consequence.
Now these two options, which everything would seem to pit against one another, are
no doubt true at the same time. We thus have to hold on to both sides of the story, and
come to consider the literary thing both in its heights and its depths, its sublime palaces
and its squalid cottages, its strokes of light and its shadowy masses, its individual quali-
ties and its collective being, where characteristic traits and personalities are grounded.
As Sainte-Beuve himself maintains in the opening lecture of his course given in Lige
in 1848 on Chateaubriand and His Literary Group, while trying to characterize the
productions of the spirit as the expression of a time and an order of society, we unknow-
ingly fail to grasp what does not belong to the transient life, what clings to the immortal
and sacred fame, to the genius of letters [30]. The expression of a time and an order of
society: that is, all of that matter that clings to history and its necessities; the genius of
letters: that is, the immaterial spirit that gathers its momentum from this history, travers-
ing it as it frees itself.
Here, again, we are summoned to take charge of an irreducible duality. The literary
thing is Janus-faced: one face looks ahead toward a demandin this regard we might
speak of an ideal comprehended by that activity we designate as literaryand the other
turns back, bearing the mark of all the constraints that such an activity can not shirk if
it hopes to answer, at least in part, to this demand. The literary thing is the diffcult
cohabitation of these two faces which seem to exclude one another, and yet which are in-
separable, all the mystery of the thing located, in the end, in their inseparability and their
tension.
In these conditions, where does the literary thing fnd its place? Following the above,
we will answer: in a literary feld [champ littraire] objectively confgured in
Bourdieuian fashion, and/or in a space of literature [espace littraire] as envisioned
by Blanchots haunted regard.
At frst glance, these two means of assigning a site to the literary thing are perfectly
antithetical and mutually exclusive. Bourdieus primary concern was to recontextualize
and reterritorialize the labor of the writer by recovering, within this feld, the writers real
position, one that an aesthetic vertigo offers aristocratically to shield from view, bury-
ing his conditions in abstruse considerations by means of which it dissimulates his true
nature: such an idealization is, moreover, and from a tactical perspective, the privileged
gesture to which literary activity generally appeals in order to confrm its legitimacy. For
Blanchot, however, the space of literature is this place without place, land of exile and
perpetual wandering, where nothing comes to an end and we fnd only paths bifurcating
to infnity and roads leading nowhere, all of which, if we respect the particular nature of
the place, prevents us from fxing any stable position, accepted and recognized once and
for all, and assessable in terms of success; for this place is rather the abyss into which
one throws oneself at the risk of ruin, under the extreme forms of madness and death.
Manifestly, these two means of situating the literary thing by referring it to either a space
or a feld appear irreconcilable, and present themselves as the terms of an inescapable
dilemma. Between the two, one must, as the expression goes, choose ones camp, either
planting ones feet on the sure terrain of science, such as the sociologist claims to repre-
sent, or else escaping to the clouds of metaphysics, where, in the absence of all gravity,
the Poems reign is absolute. It is nevertheless worth the trouble to look more closely to
26
determine whether the problem is well posed in these terms, and whether the set of alter-
natives it proposes can really not be got beyond.
Resolutely iconoclastic, and conducted with the aggressiveness of a pugilist who
wants to shower his adversary with a maximum number of blows, Bourdieus enter-
prisewhich attempts above all to demystify the literary thing, yet not to banalize it,
since it proposes to the contrary to make its originality all the more apparentexposes
the literary to a radical test, by which the latter does not gain its autonomy except by
delivering itself over body and soul to the risks and ravages of heteronomy. By refusing
literature the privileges of exceptionality and autoreferentiality, to which it ordinarily
has recourse in order to evade all efforts of genuine explication and to preserve its secret
which, in the fnal analysis, is the condition of its distinction, Bourdieus project thus
raises the following question: can we know literary labor through something that is really
specifc to it? Or rather, what is there to know in this labor; what would be knowable in
it, or liable to enter into the order of the known and thereby the order of the objective
real, determinable by precise historical markers? To respond to this question, we must,
according to Bourdieu, return to the factual relation between this labor and its environ-
ment, thus proceed to its participation in the social life from which it was only artifcially
extracted. What distinguishes the sociology of literature initiated by Bourdieu is that
it successfully avoids a reductionist perspective of the thing which, in systematically
ignoring the mediations through which it comes to be instituted as the particular thing
that it is, tends to refer it mechanically back to a global social determinism from which
the former would issue directly as its effect, or, as one says, its refection: for Bourdieu,
literatures participation in social life takes place, in effect, through the institution of a
distinct feld, where the various possible ways of appropriating the truth of the literary
thing, of making something out of the thing by objectivizing it in a recognized work,
in a form that might be postponed following a logic proper to this system, confront and
compete with one another. This constitutes the genuine contribution by which Bourdieu
has continued to stimulate the study of literature by furnishing it with a new object, one
rarely glimpsed before him, revealing the very particular procedures by means of which
the writer achieves a kind of social integration through exception, that is, through compe-
tition at once with specialists from other social felds, such as those of religion or politics,
and with specialists of his own feld, with whom he contends for the privilege of best
representing the values defned therein, values that can claim the absolute and exclusive
right of being obtained through great struggle, in a climate of insecurity that guarantees
the felds mobility and plasticity.
We may recognize this contribution, but the limits inscribing it remain to be seen. A
feld is what gives place to situations, to positions defning one another in mutual opposi-
tion within a system of perpetually reorganizable relations. Here Bourdieu advances the
notion of a point of view, around which is articulated all of his proposed analysis of
literature: the point of view is thus understood as occupying a place within a set of rela-
tions rather than being affrmed solely in reference to itself as if it depended on nothing
but an irrepressible internal inspiration, impossible to channel or localize, and which in
the end is no more than a pious wish, inserted into the unfolding of an incantatory ritual
whose motivations are actually completely prosaic and self-interested. Now this point of
view, which is above all a point in a feld coexisting in tension with other points of view,
since we do not see how it could be defned in isolation, constitutes a place for the writers
labor; with his completed work [oeuvre], and by means of the preferences he displays in
order to draw attention to himself, the writer objectivizes his ostensible right to possess
the place he occupies within this feld. Understood in this way, what does the work in
question say? Above all, it announces the position that, with more or less felicity, the
writer claims within his feld, and for which the work serves as a sort of mark or symbol,
27 diacritics / winter 2007
in the form of a sign of belonging, like a stamp that guarantees fdelity to an original. This
is why, in the end, the truth of the literary thing is what refers to the proper mode of the
felds structuration, it remaining understood that there is nothing static or fxed about
this feld, since it is in a process of constant reconfguration, and every signifcant new
work announces a redistribution of positions taken up by the powers in confict and a re-
negotiation of the conditions of settling such conficts, a redistribution and renegotiation
that inevitably engender other forms of confict, giving the history of this feld its proper
matter, and marking it with disputes between generations, schools, genres, styles, and
so forth. What is ultimately at stake in the literary thing is thus the dispute: a perpetual
polemic among writers, specialists, and professionals of the thing, within this feld where
accounts are settled with blows of talent and creativity, since the capacity of inventing the
new is the condition of making and keeping a place within a feld thus constituted, or in
the course of being constituted.
Now, understood in this way, the sociology of literature is ultimately a sociology of
writers, of their group habitus, and of the more or less symbolic values to which these
habituses are bound: within the limits it sets for itself and does not cease putting under
construction, the literary feld is that very profane territory where, following a diffcult
process of confrontation, the writer comes to be crowned and consecrated. This way of
seeing the literary thing ends up favoring the author, even if the latter has ceased to be
seen in terms of his subjective creativity, and as a very particular type of social agent
is identifed with an authorial strategy that does not function entirely on the plane of
consciousness, and in any case supposes a collective background that exceeds the scope
of such a plane, but against which the writer absolutely must defne himself if he is to
have some chance of being recognized as autonomous. Of Flaubert, Bourdieu writes of
the work by which he creates himself as a creator [93]: and we understand that he
represents literary activity as being entirely on the side of the production of the writer,
a production that supposes a complex process leading up to the writers achievement of
his artistic identity, which he obtains by isolating a certain number of choices within the
network of possible choices that, at a given moment, constitute the literary feld in which
he is positioned. On the subject of this network of possible choices, Bourdieu writes, in
a phrase that captures the spirit of his entire enterprise fairly well: in the manner of a
language or a musical instrument, [it] is offered to each writer, like an infnite universe of
possible combinations locked in a potential state within the fnite system of constraints
[100]. The writer distinguishes himself by selectively cultivating one of these possibili-
ties, making it pass into the real by incorporating it into the form of his work. The literary
thing is nothing other than this quest for distinction, for which the realization of the work
is a privileged means, but in no way an end in itself.
Now, by assigning to the literary thing a place that he calls the space of literature,
Blanchot liberates literature from the limits within which the closure of a feld in the
Bourdieuian sense would confne it, and opens it wide to the horizon, restoring a pre-
eminent role to the work, and at the same time devalorizing the position of the author,
who ceases to dominate the foreground. As Blanchot never tires of repeating, it is the
poem that makes the poet, and not the other way around. And by highlighting the values
particular to the poem, that is, particular to the work, Blanchots approach re-equips the
literary thing with a consistency of which sociological assaults had partly deprived it: it
becomes possible, once again, to take the work truly seriously for itself.
Of course, one might deplore the ceremonial tone, laden with religiosity, that ac-
companies this sort of declaration, it is the poem that makes the poet, tenable only on
condition of selecting out, within the muddled array that the literary thing constitutes,
that which maintains elective affnities with lifes tragic elements, that is, everything that
underscores its exceptional and vertiginous dangerousness: Mallarm, his dice throw, his
28
desperately empty rooms, his nocturnal shipwrecks,
5
but purged of his modish affecta-
tions, of his fan-fapping
6
and his postal addresses;
7
Hlderlin, Rilke, Kafka, possibly
Breton, but not Heine, Gautier, nor Queneau, with their bittersweet moods, their negligent
ways, their calculated abandon, their clever winks of the eye. The space of literature,
continuously confronted with the morbid values of anxiety, bows to no law but that of
sublimity, and tolerates no casualness in this regardand above all no talk of a joie de
vivre, with its vulgar temptations, its fantastic lures! In this way the space of literature is
rendered practically inaccessible, all the while being deployed on a plane of total imma-
nence, as if it belonged to this world, if not somewhere in the world, at least not to another
world. By linking the literary thing to the extreme pole of excellence, where the high
price of coming in contact with it involves putting ones life at stake, we submit it to a
principle of rarefaction that cuts to the heart of its disorderly and spontaneous productions
and keeps only what is supposed to be the very best, in a continuous atmosphere of price
distribution, which, even while adorning it with the most noble of disguises, reproduces
in its own way, even caricatures, the competition among writers eager to establish their
careers that Bourdieu describes. And a Literary war being declared in the absence of pos-
sible consensus over literatures fnal ends, we will prefer, as long as we are at it, to keep
abreast of such a war from day to day in its advances and retreats, mistrusting the echo ef-
fects of a propaganda that dresses it up in grandiose, trenchant declarations that, whether
they predict victory or announce catastrophe, veil and distort the reality of events.
Let us dare to say it: Blanchot is tiring, exhausting even, and almost wearisome,
characteristics he fully assumes, moreover, as he has never pretended to please or reas-
sure. And at the same time he is inescapable, for his affrmation of the primordial value of
the work is the condition under which reading, in an essentially active dimension and not
only a receptive and consequently passive one, is integrated into the reality of the literary
thing, instead of constituting its incidental and precarious accompaniment. For Bourdieu,
who angrily pursues and condemns those who pretend to interpret works of literature
without taking the trouble to reconstitute the point of view their authors assumed in
order to produce them, all the effects of signifcation that would normally be attributed
to the work must be related to this point of view of which the former is, as he says, the
expression, expression strategically devised by the author in accordance with the battle
plan he has adopted, being driven by motivations that are nevertheless not entirely under
his control. By taking up this perspective, Bourdieu makes it impossible to understand in
what way the work, with a view to its actually being read and not merely consulted in the
manner of a document, must, at least in part, escape its author, and be prone to reinvest-
ment in another perspective, which is that of its reader: for the one and only rule Bourdieu
prescribes for reading, denying it all right to free inventiveness, is that of being faithful,
faithful to the spirit of the work as it is defned, once and for all, by the factual point of
view of its author, this latter being resituated in the conditions in which he really labored,
and all other approaches rejected as recurrent projections that distort reality.
Blanchot, to the contrary, permits us to re-pose the problem of reading in a new
perspective, one whose radicality is surprising and incontestably shocking. Of the work,
5. Igitur and Un coup de ds jamais nabolira le hasard (Dice Thrown Never Will An-
nul Chance), for example, are major touchstones for Blanchot, especially in The Space of Litera-
ture, The Book to Come, and The Infnite Conversation. Trans.
6. Mallarm wrote a number of poems about ladys fans, some of which he inscribed on actual
fans. Trans.
7. In his personal correspondence, Mallarm addressed (and mailed) a number of envelopes
in verse, noting a similarity between the format of the envelope and the shape of the quatrain.
These verses are collected in Vers de circonstance (Occasional Verses) as Les loisirs de la poste
(Leisures of the Post). Trans.
29 diacritics / winter 2007
Blanchot declares that it must [be], and nothing more [220], from which he immedi-
ately derives the consequence that the work of art does not refer immediately back to the
person who presumably made it [221], which is a way of rehearsing Mallarms thesis:
Impersonifed, the volume, to the degree that one parts with it as author, solicits the
approach of no reader. As such, be it known, between human accessories it takes place
all alone: done, being [qtd. in Blanchot 222]. This gives leave in advance to theories of
reception and to their horizons of waiting: the work, megalith at the edge of an abyss,
thing without name, uninhabited monument, is virgin to all address; it is not a useful
message addressed to a chosen addressee, a message that carries with it the key to its de-
ciphering. This is why it goes back to the reader to invest it with his unruly and untimely
presence, and to commit himself therein body and soul, at his own risk and at his own
cost, assuming full responsibility for his engagement, and hastening or precipitating the
work, which is the only possible way of dragging it out of its profound reserve: the
reader is he by whom the work is spoken anew. Not respoken in an interminable repeti-
tion, but maintained in its decisiveness as a new, an initial word [226], which at the same
time opens up the possibility to speak it each time as new [227]. And there, in the end,
we fnd the ultimate truth of the thing: its capacity to be recognized as new, in the fg-
ure of a resolutely primary literature that so much lichen accumulated from the thousand
and one secondary literatureseven tertiary, and why not quaternary literaturesseeks
in vain to cover over and drain of its inalterable substance. To read, really read, is to
rediscover, by fashioning oneself as its creator, the primordial savor of the work in its
inalterable newness, as if, surging instantaneously from nothingness, the work were to be
completely reinvented every time someone came to be interested in it. And this is why, as
Borges declares in the course of an interview, every time a book is read or reread, then
something happens to the book [qtd. in Burgin 22]. Taken in this sense, reading is of the
order of the event.
The literary thing is also all of this, at least it would have to be, however much the
sociologists analysis might argue otherwise. This latter will not fail to accuse the theses
advanced above of being arbitrary: if the literary thing is handed over to an indefnitely
open apprehension that, under the pretext of preserving the effect of surprise by means
of which the works primordial quality is validated, brushes aside all consideration of
factual data, which it sees only as useless constraint, does this not expose it to abusive
recuperations promulgated under the sole authority of the right to say absolutely anything
with impunity? To which a true reader, conscious of the necessities of his task, will re-
spond that a reading free from constraint is also, in its dizzying extremes, the most, and
not the least, demanding: it is accomplished only under close watch, in an atmosphere of
enthusiasm and concern, and refuses all facility; only at this price does it gain the kind of
legitimacy that really belongs to it.
To conclude this paper, which, it goes without saying, does not pretend to have the fnal
word on the thing but at the very most to stammer out some initial words, I will propose
some very brief considerations surrounding the notion of literary production. Upon
refection, and with hindsight, we will be more sensitive than we were at frst to the
diversity of meanings encompassed by this expression, which evokes the production of
literature while playing on the duality of the genitive construction that can be taken in
the objective or subjective sense. Literary production is certainly, in the frst place, what
objectively explains how such a thing as literature can or could have been produced,
which requires that the ensemble of the material, historical, and social conditions of this
production of literature be taken into account. But it is also, indissociably, what literature
itself produces, that is, the ensemble of effects and productions, and above all of produc-
30
tions of meaning that, as such, it is potentially bearing, and which cannot be mechani-
cally deduced from causes to which one must refer its productions in the frst sense of the
expression. Not only is the literary thing produced, but we must also say that it produces,
that it is productive, that is, that it has a fecundity proper to it that is ultimately inexhaust-
ible, to which the interminable cycle of its reproductions bears witness, a cycle to which
no explication, no exegesis, can come to put a fnal stop: because without this, it would
not be worth one hour of trouble. That is why we have to work both at discovering it, as
a terrain that preexists its exploration, and at inventing it, as a problem that must be re-
posed each time at new costs, without assurances and without guarantees.
We thus come back to the idea that had been advanced earlier: the literary thing is
that multifaced reality, a material and immaterial production, both sides of which we have
to embrace, even if this occasionally obliges us to acrobatic contortions. Perfect oxymo-
ron, poetry and prose, it provokes the same interrogation, fnally, as the Thyrsus from
Baudelaires Prose Poems, which Baudelaire recognized was just as much a mere stick
as a priestly emblem: Straight line and arabesque, intention and expression, frmness
of the will, sinuosity of the word, unity of the aim, variety in the means, an all-powerful
and indivisible amalgam of genius, what analyst would have the odious courage to divide
and separate you? [8485]. We might say as much of the literary thing.
Translated by Audrey Wasser
WORKS CITeD
Baudelaire, Charles. The Thyrsus. The Prose Poems and La Fanfarlo. Trans. Rose-
mary Lloyd. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.
Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: U of Nebraska
P, 1982.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Trans.
Susan emanuel. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995.
Burgin, Richard. Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges. New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1969.
Delhomme, J. P. La chose littraire. Paris: Denol, 2002.
Lacan, Jacques. The Freudian Thing. crits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New
York: Norton, 1977.
Proust, Marcel. Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays. Trans. John Sturrock. New York:
Penguin, 1988.
Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin. Chateaubriand et son groupe littraire sous lEmpire.
Nouvelle dition. Vol. 1. Paris: Michel Lvy, 1872.
Valry, Paul. La chose littraire et la chose pratique. Translated as Literature and Poli-
tics: Answer to an Inquiry. Collected Works. Ed. Jackson Matthews. Trans. Denise
Folliot and Jackson Matthews. Vol. 10. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1975.
Coral Ridge Towers (Mom Dyeing Eyebrows), 1969
Black-and-white photograph
Courtesy of Salon 94, New York