‘A literary animal’: Rancière, Derrida, and the Literature of Democracy
2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 15; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/13534640902982850
ISSN1460-700X
Autores Tópico(s)Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Jacques Derrida, Passions (Paris: Galilée, 1993), pp.64-65. ‘Passions: An Oblique Offering’, trans. David Wood, in On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p.28 (translation modified). 2 Jacques Derrida, ‘Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism’, trans. Simon Critchley, in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Routledge, 1996), p.80. 3 ‘“This Strange Institution Called Literature”: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, in Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), pp.33-75 (p.36). 4 Jacques Derrida, ‘Strange Institution’, p.37. 5 Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law’, in Acts of Literature, pp.181-220. 6 Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London: Athlone, 1993), p.175-285 (p.275). La dissémination (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972), p.223 (translation modified). 7 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, L'absolu littéraire: Théorie de la littérature du romantisme allemand (Paris: Seuil/Poétique, 1978). The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: SUNY, 1988). 8 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. and intro. Gabriel Rockhill (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), p.49. The rejection of the ‘science of the hidden’ is an indication of Rancière's break with a certain Althusserianism. See also Rancière, Les noms de l'histoire: Essai de poétique du savoir (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1992), p.108. The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge, trans. Hassan Melehy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p.52. 9 Jacques Rancière, Le philosophe et ses pauvres (Paris: Fayard, 1983). The Philosopher and His Poor, ed. and intro. Andrew Parker, trans. John Drury, Corinne Oster and Andrew Parker (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2004). 10 Jacques Rancière, La mésentente: Politique et Philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1995), p.61. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p.37. 11 Jacques Rancière, Les noms de l'histoire, p.108. The Names of History, p.52. 12 Jacques Rancière, Les noms de l'histoire, p.107. The Names of History, p.51. This passage includes a footnote to The Literary Absolute in Rancière's text. 13 ‘Dissenting Words: A conversation with Jacques Rancière’ (interview with Davide Panagia), Diacritics, 30: 2 (2000), pp.113-26 (p.115). 14 See my ‘Jacques Rancière's Aesthetic Communities’, Paragraph, 28.1 (2005), pp.77-95 (Special issue, Jacques Rancière: Aesthetics, Politics, Philosophy, ed. Mark Robson). 15 Jacques Rancière, Le maître ignorant: Cinq leçons sur l'émancipation intellectuelle (Paris: Fayard, 1987), p.124. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), p.73. For a discussion of this question of equality that sets aside issues of writing or literature, see Todd May, The Political Thought of Jacques Rancière: Creating Equality (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008). While Nick Hewlett does make a brief reference to Rancière's ‘linguistic games’ – ‘and links him to Derrida’ – his suggestion that for both thinkers it is a matter of ‘punning and wordplay’ seriously underestimates what is at stake for both writers. See Badiou, Balibar, Rancière: Rethinking Emancipation (London and New York: Continuum, 2008), p.100. 16 On some of the consequences of this position, see Peter Hallward, ‘Jacques Rancière and the Subversion of Mastery’, Paragraph, 28.1 (2005), pp.26-45, and my ‘Impractical Criticism’, in English: The Condition of the Subject, ed. Philip W. Martin (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp.168-79. 17 See La Mésentente, p.29. Disagreement, p.10. 18 Peter Hallward, ‘Staging Equality: On Rancière's Theatrocracy’, New Left Review, 37 (Jan-Feb 2006), pp. 109-29 (p.111). It is no accident that the recent collection of Rancière's work with Les Révoltes logiques appeared under the title Les Scènes du peuple (Lyon: Horlieu, 2003). 19 The problem is anticipated is Derrida's reading of Plato in ‘The Double Session’, in Dissemination, p.190. 20 I had sketched the outline of this connection prior to the appearance of Rancière's own essay situating his thought in relation to that of Derrida, ‘Does Democracy Mean Something?’, in Adieu Derrida, ed. Costas Douzinas (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp.84-100. Rancière tells us: ‘I had no opportunity to discuss philosophical matters with him, since the time when he was my teacher – very long ago’ (p.84). The teaching referred to was the equivalent of an undergraduate survey course (I am grateful to W. J. T. Mitchell for confirming this). There is not the space here to take Rancière's essay fully into account, but the focus on literature that I am pursuing is not directly addressed. 21 Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, p.177. The French text makes clear the sense of necessity or demand that ‘wants’ implies here, La dissémination, p.219. There is not the space here to pursue the echo in ENTRE (between) of ANTRE (cave), with all its platonic resonances, for this discussion of the relation between fiction and truth. 22 The term appears at several points in Derrida's late work. See Foi et Savoir, suivi de Le Siècle et le Pardon (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2000), pp.9-100 (p.21). ‘Faith and Knowledge: the Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone’, trans. Samuel Weber, in Religion, ed. Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), pp.1-78 (p.11). See Weber's important footnote on the consequences of translating the French mondialatinisation with this term. On the political stakes of inheritance in Derrida, see Geoffrey Bennington, Interrupting Derrida (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp.18-33. 23 Jacques Derrida, Voyous: Deux essais sur la raison (Paris: Galilée, 2003), p.49. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pasacle-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), pp.26-27. On this strategy, see Derrida's ‘Et Cetera... (and so on, und so weiter, and so forth, et ainsi de suite, und so überall, etc.)’, in Jacques Derrida, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet and Ginette Michaud (Paris: Éditions de l'Herne, 2004), pp.21-34. Translated with the same title in Deconstructions: A User's Guide, ed. Nicholas Royle (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp.282-305. 24 Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature?, trans. Bernard Frechtman (London: Methuen, 1978). See Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Commitment’, in Notes to Literature, vol. 2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp.76-94. 25 Jacques Rancière, ‘The Politics of Literature’, SubStance, 103 (2004), pp.10-24 (p.12). French text later published as the title essay in Politique de la littérature (Paris: Galilée, 2007), pp.11-40. 26 Jacques Rancière has elaborated this notion of the distribution (or partage, a sharing and a sharing out) of the sensible in several texts, most obviously The Politics of Aesthetics. 27 Jacques Rancière, ‘The Politics of Literature’, p.14. 28 Such a sense of production might raise the matter of techné and of the relation between this distribution and the technical forms that this distribution takes. In an extended version of this essay, I intend to pursue this issue, beginning from the questions posed to Rancière by Stiegler about what he calls (following Crépon) ‘technologies of participation’ in his ‘Français, encore un effort’, in Marc Crépon and Bernard Stiegler, De la démocratie participative: Fondements et limites (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2007), pp.61-116. 29 J.L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975) and ‘Performative Utterances’, in Philosophical Papers, ed. J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock, 3rd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp.233-52. For Derrida's engagement with Austin, see primarily Limited Inc, ed. Gerald Graff (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988). For a persuasive account of Rancière's sense of the politics of performative speech, see Andrew Parker, ‘Impossible Speech Acts’, in The Politics of Deconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Other of Philosophy, ed. Martin McQuillan (London: Pluto, 2007), p.66-77. 30 We might think about this structure through Derrida's insistence on the ‘destinerrancy’ of a form of writing such as the postcard; see Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Freud to Socrates and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 31 Jacques Rancière, ‘The Politics of Literature’, p.14. 32 Jacques Rancière, The Names of History, p.52. 33 Jacques Rancière, Disagreement, p.30. 34 Jacques Rancière identifies this as the primary mode of reading a writer such as Mallarmé, whose perceived ‘obscurity’ prompts readers to find the extraordinary beneath the ordinary and the ordinary beneath the extraordinary, the spiritual message beneath the visible image, and the body behind thoughts and words. See Jacques Rancière, Mallarmé: La politique de la sirène (Paris: Hachette, 1996), p.8. 35 Rancière comments, à propos of Rimbaud, ‘Literature had become a powerful machine of self-interpretation and self-poeticization of life, converting any scrap of everyday life into a sign of history and any sign of history into a poetical element’ (‘The Politics of Literature’, p.23). Rancière also critiques Sartre's reading of Mallarmé in ‘L'Intrus. Politique de Mallarmé’, in Politique de la littérature, pp.93-112. 36 We might, nonetheless, indicate a starting point: ‘Perhaps, then, there is always more than one kind of mimesis; and perhaps it is in the strange mirror that reflects but also displaces and distorts one mimesis into the other, as though it were itself destined to mime or mask itself, that history – the history of literature – is lodged, along with the whole of its interpretation’. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, p.191. See also Jacques Rancière, Mallarmé, pp.88-98. 37 Jacques Rancière, ‘Literary Misunderstanding’, trans. Mary Stevens, Paragraph, 28.2 (2005), pp.91-103 (p.96). See also Rancière, Mallarmé (p.33) and the discussion of Proust in ‘Why Emma Bovary Had to be Killed’, Critical Inquiry, 34 (Winter 2008), pp.233-48. These respectively appear as ‘Le malentendu littéraire’ and ‘La mise à mort d'Emma Bovary: Littérature, démocratie et médecine’, in Politique de la littérature, pp.41-55 and 59-83. 38 Jacques Rancière, ‘Literary Misunderstanding’, p.96. 39 Jacques Rancière, ‘Literary Misunderstanding’, p.98. 40 Jacques Rancière, La haine de la démocratie (Paris: La Fabrique, 2005), p.15. Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran (London and New York: Verso, 2007), p.8. 41 Jacques Derrida, ‘Mallarmé’, trans. Christine Roulston, in Acts of Literature, pp.111-26 (p.115). Rancière stresses this at several points in Mallarmé, e.g. p.51.
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