Five French Critics Philippe Roger

Five French Critics
Author(s): Philippe Roger

Source: New Literary History, Vol. 44, No. 2, The French Issue: New Perspectives on
Readings from France (SPRING 2013), pp. 205-211
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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Five French Critics
Philippe Roger
grounds of the University of Virginia in the ever-busy hall of

When I met
Aldermanwith
Library,Rita
and sheFelski
asked me tosome months
write a short presen ago on the sunny
tation for a forthcoming issue of New Literary History hosting several
contemporary French critics and scholars of literature, I gave myself
no time to think twice, probably suspecting that any second thoughts
would have deterred me from such a venture. There was at least one
good reason to accept the invitation and to ignore the foreseeable
difficulties of the exercise. After more than fifteen years directing the
French journal Critique, founded in 1946 by Georges Bataille, I have
grown more and more convinced that journals—or revues—and more
particularly literary journals are probably the closest thing we have left to
what used to be the Republic of Letters. Had I been invited as a scholar
of French literature—which I also am on other days—to introduce this
anthology of French critical texts, I would most probably have declined
the honor as too perilous as well as undeserved. Coming from a fellow
editor, however, this was an offer I could hardly refuse.
To be honest, there was also an element of excitement in that hasty
decision. The special issue was still in its exploratory stage and the list
of potential French contributors very much tentative. We had a mutual
agreement that I would play no part in the process of selection. This
is how I signed up for five blind dates with French authors. But then I
have always liked blind dates—the expression, that is, ever since I first
met it with perplexity, at an early stage of my acquaintance with the
English language, in Nabokov's Pale Fire.
Now that the cards have been dealt, let us see our hand. I think it is
a pretty good one.
* * *
During the past decade, Marielle Macé has emerged a

new voice on the French theoretical scene—a voice th
been heard on several American campuses, from Colum
New Literary History, 2013, 44: 205-211
206 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
University and from Chicago

a new ability, typical of her g
lence and intellectual singulari
debate and international openn
her books as well as her articl
(she was a cofounder of the su
Her first book on the essay in
reference book on the topic. H
stylization of existence has be
nalists. I should also mention
Style!" (note the exclamation
a strong manifesto praising th
meaningfully—and stylishly. M
finds comfort in a close conta
Genette or Thomas Pavel are a
not her primary focus. She is
to "prose for thought" and th
experiences. While she enjoys
there is also ample evidence of
Delineating different "phases"
a bit artificial. Two major thr
writing. Her first published w
rapprochement of literary hist
of the 90s. Her recent publica
proach, without taking leave o
element in her intellectual pr
longest chapter in her recent
essay—is a fine illustration of
Dates indicate that Pierre Baya
than Marielle Macé. However,
tions as defined by demograp
ably, being born in 1954 has p
books. He is the author of som
by Editions de Minuit, which g
most of the early Derrida and
the era will be defined. It wou
any school or even trace an in
stands as one of the least "align
French scene. From nineteent
Stendhal) with an emphasis on
calculated nonchalance to imp
rism, and the many paradoxes
in delusively playful books wit
You Haven't Read is one of them.
INTRODUCTION 207
Bayard never lets his

respect for the authors
Wrong: Re-opening the
dares to reopen Sherlo
something "generation
his distaste for academic "seriousness" and his belief in a calculated
disorientation (of the reader) as the best compass by which to charte

his own critical journey. His essay on "anticipatory plagiarism" is a fi
example of elaborate counterfactual criticism. It would be as criminal
say more about it as to give away the dénouement of a novel by Agat
Christie. (No, it is not the butler.) Bayard's reader must be prepared
to rewrite him in just the same way he rewrites Sophocles or Agath
Christie. (No, he does not agree with Hercule Poirot on who real
killed Roger Ackroyd.)
Best known in the United States for his book French Theory: How Fou
cault, Derrida, Deleuze and Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the Unit
States, translated in 2008, François Cusset is a recognized specialist
French-American cultural exchanges or, to use an expression that h
acquired theoretical status, cultural "transfers" between the two natio
in the past four or five decades. A transatlantic intellectual himself—
directed the French Book Bureau in New York and he now teaches
American civilization at the University of Paris-Nan terre—Cusset offers
in the above mentioned book a brilliant analysis of transatlantic cross
fertilization through productive readings and misreadings. His piece for
NLH does not shy away from polemical accents, which may be found
refreshing in the present climate of subdued literary discussions. Politics,
or rather a politics of literature and even more specifically "a politics of
textual relativity," is indeed what he finds missing in the French field,
while it is visible and active "in most departments of literature throughout
the English-speaking world" (252). While the latter gives a decisive im
portance to reading and the readers, the former has constantly privileged
writing. The French academic project reflects "the very French fantasy
of a world in which everyone would write—and no one would read" and
"reading hardly exists at all within French literary theory because of a
spontaneous belief that writing lies beyond politics" (253).
Cusset's paper offers an array of historical and cultural reasons for
this great divide, most of them in perfect accordance with the Tocquevil
lian tradition opposing a French "aristocratic" culture to the American
democratic culture rooted in Puritanism—characterized, in Tocqueville's
eyes, by the valorization not only of the book, but of reading for all. One
might argue that dismissing the writer and empowering the reader is
also part of French modernist culture: long before the 60s, Paul Valéry
famously pronounced that "the author has no authorship" and that the
meaning of a work of art is given by its readers.1 However, Valéry was
referring to a rapidly disappeari

his notes on reading and writin
ment. As for Cusset himself, he
of those two opposite attitudes,
two cultures, than in their histo
slow, belated, reluctant admissio
the notion of "interpretative co
cost of such a reluctance. Cusset
be that France is paying the toll
and for too long under the guise o
the so-called crisis of literature
and necessary turning of the tab
Jean-Marie àchaetter does more than doubt the commonplace or
"literature in crisis": he bluntly denies it, if bluntness can be associated
with the analytic accuracy he demonstrates in his essay. His unambiguous
rebuttal of a supposed crisis of literature has a special appeal, coming
from one of France's recognized specialists in the cognitive capacities
and social status of art and literature. Schaeffer's published œuvre is
impressive in its sheer volume and even more so in its scope. Three of
his numerous books have been translated into English and their tides—
Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger, Why Fiction ?
and Beyond Speculation: Art and Aesthetics without Myths—hint at the wide
spectrum of his interests. For Schaeffer, the contemporary lamentation
about the decline of letters is not only tiring, it is clearly false. Filling
classrooms or editorial rooms with tales of the decline and demise of
literary culture may be fashionably chic. Nevertheless, the sole consid
eration of the constant growth of a world readership should suffice to
disprove this notion of a vanishing literary culture.
Schaeffer is of course aware that the quantitative argument will not
persuade the doomsayers, who find little virtue in numbers. For most,
if not all of them, it is the quality of the Reader which for centuries
has guaranteed the sustainability of Literature. Without such a Reader,
Literature is doomed and can only vainly "try to survive the conditions
of literature," as Valéry, again, noted a century ago.2 Schaeffer, while ac
knowledging that literature is facing a new situation linked to the modern
permeability of "high culture and vernacular culture," is adamant in his
rebuttal of the elitist, pessimistic lament (268). Those who shed tears
for the so-called crisis of literature, he argues, are really crying for the
loss of an institutionalized and idealized Literature with a capital L, a
Literature shaped by the "separatist model" dominant in literary studies
since the nineteenth century. In order to dissipate this confusion, the
first step would be to adopt what he calls a more "charitable" definition
INTRODUCTION 209
of literature as a categ
relationship to them.
Although clearly criti
concerned, in his own
different direction.
feminist, postcolonial
stituting their own "f
yore, end up reaffirmi
appeal as possible ans
unsolved the epistem
Once the distinction
tion and promotion o
cognitive function of
become possible, if no
of cultural relativism
descriptive approach
legitimate target of i
blueprint for signific
ing the longer cognit
(and even longer in t
the importance of an
delayed by the pedagog
synthesis. Slow is goo
his advocacy of "slow
wishing it could beco
answers in his own
cal approach as a "lon
ultimately desocializin
"cultural function" of
the importance taken
his or her individuality
and among us," as "a si
in all societies" (282).
Gestures are at the core of the final essay, written by Wes Citton:
"Reading Literature and the Political Ecology of Gestures in the Age
of Semiocapitalism." But in spite of an occasional reference to Macé's
description of literature as "conducting our conduct," there is little in
common between Macé's concept of "stylization of life" and the analysis
developed by the Geneva-born philosopher and literary scholar. Closer
to him, at least in terms of a political critique of the uses of literature,
would be François Cusset, who prefaced Lire, interpréter, actualiser: Pourquoi
les études littéraires ? (2007), probably Citton's best-known book, along
with L'avenir des humanités (201

resides in his attempt to mesh ei
(with a particular interest for th
philosophy) and theoretical or s
with the most contemporary sta
Combining a post-Spinozist emp
of globalization as domination, C
importance of "reading"—underli
accessible to ever larger segmen
a sweeping indictment against l
"have trained us to be the ethic
in Citton's narrative, literature
spring for dissent. Quite the co
as an institution—at least in France—has most of the time sided with
power and social domination" and "at each given period, readers have
been inculcated into socializing gestures, rather than subversive ones,"
Citton writes (288). Suggesting a direct causal correlation between the
rise of the novel in the eighteenth century and the rise of political
economy, he sees literature as an accomplice in the implementation of
new forms of control: "novels are to be counted among the main cul
prits for the production of the modern homo oeconomicus" since "from
Marivaux to Stendhal, through Rousseau and Goethe, the novel simul
taneously analyzed, categorized, colonized, and shaped our relational
gestures" (289). Citton thus refers to the "colonization" of "most of our
life forms" by "literary (and, later, cinematic) immersive gestures" (290).
The metaphoric logic of the argument is made clear with the repeated
vocabulary of colonization.
This is not, however, the last word of the story, and Citton ultimately
pleads for a reappropriation of the humanities as welcomed softeners
of "our protocols of interaction" (299). Cittons's conclusion calls for
three literary human rights: the "rights to opacity, to equivocation, to
reformulation" (305)—his own contribution to a welcome "slowing"
of the literature to come? Which should also remind us of Baudelaire,
complaining that two important rights had been "forgotten" in the
Declaration of the Rights of Man : "the right to contradict oneself and
the right to take a leave"3—which I will now exert.
Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique/

École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
University of Virginia
Editor of Critique
INTRODUCTION 211
NOTES
1 "Pas d'autorité de l'auteur." Paul Valéry, "Au sujet du Cimetière marin," Œuvres, ed
Hytier (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), 1:1507.
2 Valéry, Cahiers, ed.J. Robinson (Paris, Gallimard, 1974), 2:1183.
3 "Le droit de se contredire et le droit de s'en aller1' (italics in original). Charles Ba
laire, "Études sur Poe," Œurnes complètes, ed. C. Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 2:30

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Five French Critics

Author(s): Philippe Roger

grounds of the University of Virginia in the ever-busy hall of

During the past decade, Marielle Macé has emerged a

New Literary History, 2013, 44: 205-211

University and from Chicago

Bayard never lets his

disorientation (of the reader) as the best compass by which to charte

referring to a rapidly disappeari

with L'avenir des humanités (201

Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique/

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