ABSTRACTS

A Curious Chronology: Littérature-monde and the End of Engagement

Nick Nesbitt
(University of Aberdeen)

Is it a coincidence that the manifesto dates the emergence of a post-francophone ‘littérature-monde’ to 1976-77, precisely at the moment the nouveaux philosophes began the systematic and still-ongoing liquidation of the legacy of May ’68? Is it a coincidence that this manifesto systematically erases any and all reference to the founding project of modern literature to disturb and refashion the symbolic register and to intervene in an intolerable and unjust existence? ‘Pour une literature-monde’ seeks to articulate a perfectly smooth, global and totalized space of literature for literature’s sake, where the prix Goncourt is the arbiter of our existence, and all political projects have been relegated to the dustbin of history. Does anyone still believe we are living through the end of ideology? Have we vanquished global colonialism in Fort de France, to say nothing of Haiti and the Congo? If literature is to constitute something more than an ode to Being, if it can still hope amount to an event that shatters a hole in the soporific weave of the tout-monde, we must remain faithful to the founding call of our field inquiry (whatever name we choose to give it): ‘Assez de ce scandale!’




If we wish to move beyond the very real neocolonialism of ‘la francophonie,’ should we not say instead that the emergence of a 'Litterature-monde' coincides with the enunciation of a critical, engaged, and dissident cultural politics ('Ce désir nouveau de retrouver les voies du monde, [est] concomitant [...] de l'effervescence des mouvements anti-totalitaires, à l'Ouest comme à l'Est)'? In, for example, the 1977 publication of a novel such as Le mât de cocagne? A literature that refuses the illusions of state-based power to articulate instead the claims of a truth that is no reinscription of the way of the world, but instead a reindexification of our transcendental ontologies: the destruction of the tout-monde?



Nick Nesbitt

University of Aberdeen