Writing Without Power: Engagement and the Politics of Literature Today

In the following pages, I aim to address the relationship between politics and literature through a two-part analysis. In the first part, I intend to examine the concept of ‘politics’ usually assumed in discussions on literary engagement to clarify its limitations and weaknesses. I aim to develop the notion of the ‘politics of literature’ understood as a form of writing that becomes political precisely by striving to articulate an alternative conception of politics. Following Rancière, the latter is defined as the “distribution of the sensible”. From this perspective, we will define the ‘politic of literature’ as the set of writing practices through which literature creates the conditions to establish new distributions and articulations of the relationships between subjects and objects and new configurations of “the sayable and the visible”. To elucidate the meaning of these operations, reference will be made primarily to the example of Houellebecq, an author who exemplifies the political function of literature as understood in this chapter.