Eric Adamo (McMaster University)
The guiding thread of this panel develops around a curious remark by Jacques Rancière that would seem to amend a classically Aristotelian thesis: “man is a political animal because he is a literary animal,” the fundamental condition of which is the “excess of words” constitutive of the human animal’s politicalness. Literature (or poetry) has long been placed in close proximity to politics, as we find in Plato’s Republic, where philosophy and literature—and, more generally, philosophy and politics—turn out to be perennial adversaries.
That matters of literature bear upon the question of politics has featured in continental French thought for quite some time, considered in terms of the milieu of différance and event in Jacques Derrida; le partage du sensible and dissensus in Jacques Rancière; and the unpresentable and testimony to le différend in Jean-François Lyotard, among others. More recently, Geoffrey Bennington has taken up the question of the unreadable as that condition that keeps reading open to the event of alterity.
What is at stake, then, in the complex relationship between literature and politics? How does literature bear witness to, or otherwise reconfigure, who counts as a speaking being, what is recognized as speech, and/or what falls out of discursive legibility as mere noise, excess, or silence? And how might mis-reading, mis-translation, and mis-understanding contribute to the politics of literature?
This panel invites reflection on the figures, scenes, and events of textuality that respond to these and related questions. All critical approaches are welcome for this in-person panel.