The Silent Revolution

Passage d l'envers Jacques Rancikre's circuitous response to the question "what is literature?" in the introduction to La Parole muette is in many ways indicative of the historical methodology operative in his most recent work on art and politics. The concept of literature, he claims, is at once absolutely self evident and radically undetermined. Rather than invoking this paradox as a Heideggerian justification for investigating the essential question of our age, Rancikre uses it as a vehicle for analyzing the intellectual constructs at work in the various attempts to isolate the nature of literature. The empirical approach, for example, accepts the selfevidence of the historical conventions that establish a well-circumscribed catalogue of literary works. This positivistic attitude is countered by a theoretical definition that posits the existence of a literary essence irreducible to the simple bibliographical delimitations inherent in textual classification. Instead of searching for a passage between the Scylla of positivism and the Charybdis of speculation, Rancibre is interested in the historical conditions that render such a choice possible. In other words, he refuses to give a straightforward answer to the question "what is literature?" in order to resituate the question itself in its historical context and examine the various factors that determine possible responses. One of the guiding presuppositions at work in the attempt to define literature is that aesthetic history can and should be divided between works of art and the philosophic reflection on the nature of aesthetics. In order to thwart this erroneous assumption, Rancibre painstakingly demonstrates that these domains are in fact coextensive and that it is impossible to separate theoretical claims from artistic practice. In the introduction to La Parole muette, he provides a brief analysis of this relationship in terms of the dispute between John Searle and Gdrard Genette. On the one hand, he agrees with Genette's claim that the literary status of a play like Britannicus is not simply due to the pleasure it produces and that literature cannot be reduced to Searle's notion of arbitrary aesthetic judgment. However, he refuses to accept Genette's counter-claim that Britannicus is a literary work because of its specific genre. According to Rancidre, such a conclusion would have been incomprehensible for Racine's contemporaries. Britannicus was strictly