Qu'est-ce que la litterature pense?(Literary Thinking)

It wouldn't be hard to say what literature knows. It knows thegeneric human subject. It knows its tailings, its weaknesses and, onthe basis of that knowledge, transfonns the inevitability of resignation.Resignation to the fact that, as in one of the vei-y first examples of theBildun-^sromau, IVilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, the world never lives upto the Idea; or, as in the earhest naturahst novels, by Zola, resignation111 the face ot ignominious social conditions. In its lowest form, thisis knowledge of a sort of dismal moderation of the real, comparedwith 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 oftenpraised for its aggressive or morose insights, or congratulated on its'lucidity' when, like Celine, it aspires to make 'httle music' of ourwretchedness.

Even I-'roust, as hne a writer as he may be, spends a very longtime, and a great many volumes, exploring the interminable web ofdegradation and vanity, cruelty and resentment, absurdity, smugnessand murky, innermost sentiments, before finding salvation in theSecond Coming of writing. Before discovering the only thing thatmatters-—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 ofPrince Andrew in War and Peace, Julie's testament in The New Eloise,the peasants' procession around the wounded airmen in Malraux'sDays 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 onlymean that it opens up the realm of the particular: subde psychologicalinsights, social differences and cultural specificities, to the field ofknowledge. For that must mean, as we know from experience when anovel secures a victory in our own minds, that literature's effect takesplace 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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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 thecracks in the story {hifable). It has no interest in wrecking the story, incontradicting it or puUing it to pieces. It accepts the story and settlesdown 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), aswell as the relation between story and History [le rapport de la petitehistoire a la grande Histoire), from Victor Hugo's novel, Les Miseraldes.But I pulled apart the building blocks ofthe narrative, rearranged thespaces, and allowed my prose to explore areas outside its initial scope.I employed language in three distinct registers — narrative, rhetoricand shorthand — in the hope that a few grains of real would emergefrom this clash of styles.

In the essay to which I referred earlier, Natacha Michel proposesanother method: that of allowing an 'other' language to take rootin the language itself, with the reader witnessing the birth of aunique language.

In any case, the complicity of fiction and language aims to markthe real with the seal of the unique, of the One, of that which hasnever taken place prior to this complicity (this work) and will neverappear again.

Literature thinks insomuch as it brands a real pursued by fictionwith 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 ofevery work in the form of a Book, even if, as Mallamie preferred, itis in 'several volumes'; the double meaning ofthe word 'end': thatsignified by the word at the bottom ofthe last page, and that whichthe hterary enterprise is compelled to bring to any sequence, whetherwe like it or not, aiici, last but not least, the standard of perfection. Awork ofliterature is such — must, inchvisibly, be such — that nothingin it can be changed. Each and every word of its prose is irreplaceable.

In stark contrast to the infinite variety of experience (which isperfectly obvious), the work ot art or hterature is the difficult,unlikely production ofthe fmite. And it is precisely this productionthat 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, unlikepoetry, tends not to appear in the ranking of fine arts. In his analysis ofcategories of nineteenth-century aesthetics, Jacques Ranciere makessome striking observations on the genealogy of modern meanings ofthe word 'literature'. Not only does it fail to obtain the patronage ofany ofthe Muses of classicism, but it cuts across literary genres: clearly,'literature' cannot be confined to poetry, but neither is it restrictedto the novel, the story or the essay. It refers to the developmentof a sort of literary exception in the field of art. The concept ofthis exception gradually takes shape in Franco, from Baudelaire toBlanchot, with contributions from Flaubert and Proust, althoughLacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, in a book entitled, significantly, TheLiterary Absohitc, have shown that it origmated in Germany or, moreprecisely, Clennan romanticism. Writing is conferred absolute status bythe exception, which not only raises it above classical genres, but putsit entirely beyond the scope ofthe empirical world. Thus, literatureis an immanent reference to itself, a mark of its own self-sufficiency.It comprises Flaubert's prose, which, thanks to its style (a crucialoperator in literature), the author intended to exist in its own right,with no imaginary referent in the world. It might equally be one ofMallarmc's sonnets, which he described as 'a fact, a being, happeningby itself [fdit, ctaut, il a lieu tout scuf), or conceiving perfectly of itself

Of course, the advent of literature also corresponds to the emergenceof a hterary conscience, a conscience not exactly comparable to artisticjudgement, since it relates not to rules of taste but to the convictionofthe existence ofan entirely separate phenomenon: literature {Ic faitlitterciire), as compact and distinct as an Idea.

But doesn't this Ideal separation, obtained through stylistic densityalone, require the Idea to be fully self-conscious? In other words,if literature is a form of thought, mustn't it be the thought ofthat thought? We know about Mallarme's revelation, or the crucialexperience that inspires his poetr}': 'My thought has thought itself,and I am but a corpse'. This means that the poem as absolute requiresIt to be the thought ofthe thought that it is and that the author shouldbe excluded, since the author merely imagines the basic Idea, leavingit to deploy the various facets of its self-reflection: 'since the Masterwent to draw tears from the Styx'.

But if hterature's role is to allow fulfilment ofthe Idea as thoughtof thought, the author's task must not only be to marry his or herstyle with the initial production ofthe basic Idea, but also to ensure.

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explain, and stage the comnig-into-bcing of the Idea as thought.Thus, literature is always accompanied by successive Manifestos of itsbecoming-absolute. The age ot hterature is also the age of literarymanifestos, combining a diagnosis of the time (from Mallarme's 'Crisisof Verse' to Natacha Michel's 'second modernity', not forgettingBreton's prophecy ('Beauty shall be convulsive or shall not be atall')) and a preferred procednre (hermeticism, self-reflexive writing,metaphor...) which, at any one time, contains the essence of theliterary phenomenon.

We can therefore make the following assertion: that what hteraturethinks is both a real marked in language with the seal of the One, andthe conditions governing the way that real is marked. The thoughtprocess of writing is the conjunction, under the fmite sign of the One,of the autonomous forces of language and the immanent occurrenceof 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 isworth organizing into thought so that it can be encountered beyondthe fictional world?

With regard to language: what takes place in the language, whichmight be equivalent to tlic real that-which-has-taken-place?

Literature can be represented as a graph with two axes, neither ofwhich is literary per se.

The first axis corresponds to the real as that-which-has-taken-place, or the non-empirical essence of all reality. Although it is leftout of any ordinary story or prefabricated narrative, this is the real ofwhich literature must speak. I do not believe, as Blanchot sometimessuggests, that this is the original silence with which all languagedraws strength from the infinite. The point is to open up to therealm ot thought the singularity of whatever takes place outside thatrealm. Literature is a direct contradiction of Wittgenstein's axiom('Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent'), since itsfirst, essentially non-literary, axis is the imperative to speak of theunspeakable of that-which-has-taken-place.

The second axis is language, as a flexible resource with infinitepower, by all means, but not, in this case, employed for what it iscapable of saying, rather exploited mercilessly for what it has not yetsaid, or what it has always been reluctant or unable to say. Writersare 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 agraph along these two axes. It can be drawn as follows:

Evei-y point along the graph can be called a 'sentence' {phrase). Eachsentence indexes a real to a break in language. The active movementthat joins two sentences together (with other sentences) can be called'phrasing' {j.-)]trase). The laws that govern phrasing, which only becomediscernible afterwards, can be called the 'style'.

The tnily remarkable thing is that the graph of the literary' act isalways 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 suchpoints exist, then the literary act constitutes a failure: the infinitedissemination 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 sodoing, puts an end to that innocence. For the perverse aspect of thedouble point is that literary desire is always, at least at some point,knowledge of its own form; a kind of calculated self-interest inflictedupon innocence.

It asserts that thought is also thought of thought, turning its ownthinking, at least in places, into a closed area, and a glimpse of thegap between inside and outside. The literary act commemorates itsjourney with a monument.

Lastly, It shows the same real point twice, making it impossible todiscern from that point the beginning of the movement and the pointthat is ultimately reached. Like Proust's madeleine, the real pointbecomes an absolute, in which it is impossible to distinguish originfrom destination. It escapes situation in time. It is, in the literary workitself, the scar of its eternity.

In tact, this point is what we encounter in a work of literature, farbeyond what we read there. It is the hterary act itself, transmitted, andsubmitted, to us (for in this case transmission and submission are oneand the same). It fulfils the pre-Socratic maxim: 'It is all one to mewhere I begin; for I will come back again there'. This double point isthe synibohc seal of the One, the real of the real, which is also, to useJames's lovely expression, 'the figure in the carpet'. It was to him thatthe Romantics gave the most appropriate, and extravagant, of names:the literary absolute, which belongs to all eternal writing.

ALAIN BADIOU

(Translated by Alistair Clarke)