In January 2024, a small volume with a deliberately provocative title was published in France: Contre la littérature politique[1] – against political literature. The title, which suggests yet another attack on littérature engagée or message-oriented literature, is remarkable not only because it features contributions by a number of French authors known for the critical power of their texts, their radicalism, and/or their commitment,[2] but also because the book was published by one of the most left-wing publishers on the French literary scene, La fabrique éditions. It is not surprising, therefore, that the contributors do not target political literature as a whole, but a certain kind of political literature, a certain way in which texts that they consider innocuous are labelled political. They criticize the depoliticization of literature at a time when its political significance is being elevated and call for a rethinking of the relationship between literature and politics, renewing the tensions between these two components rather than taking their interrelationship for granted.
Repair the world
The book’s cover claims that the word “politics” is omnipresent in contemporary literature, “perhaps to such an extent that its meaning is diffused and its scope attenuated.” Indeed, asserting its political significance seems to justify literary activity, the “usefulness” of which has been vigorously contested by the political authorities in France since the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy (2007–2012) and the subsequent neoliberal policies.[3] This led to a certain anxiety in the literary field that sought to justify its existence by claiming a necessary socio-political mission; namely, that literature contributes to the common good.
In this respect, Jacques Rancière’s definition of the politics of literature seems particularly relevant – and indeed useful. By separating the politics of literature from “the politics of writers and their commitments,” but also from “the modes of representation of the political issues and struggles of their times,” he asserts that literature practices politics by overturning the configuration of the given, and by creating a new “distribution of the sensible.”[4] With this expression, Rancière refers to the configuration of places and the position to which each person or group is assigned within a hierarchically structured common space: Who occupies the center and who is relegated to the margins? Literature, through its ability to disrupt the established distribution of the sensible and the hierarchies of subjects worthy of attention, reaches the heart of politics as Rancière understands it, “mak[ing] visible what had no business being seen, mak[ing] understood as discourse what was once only heard as noise” and shifting “a body from the place assigned to it.”[5]
Literature directs attention to subjects and objects that are often excluded from the public discourse. It represents people who are not (or no longer) politically represented within the usual democratic processes. It redefines what is important and what isn’t. And, by introducing the voice of the voiceless into the public arena, literature sometimes aims to not only break the political and medial silence surrounding certain groups and individuals, but to “repair the world.”[6] The title chosen by academic Alexandre Gefen to describe “French Literature in the 21st Century” sums up the (good) intentions of this kind of reparative literature:
“The beginning of the twenty-first century has seen the emergence of a notion of writing and reading I would describe as ‘therapeutic’ – of a literature that heals, that cares for, that helps, or at least that ‘does good.’ It appears to me that, in our democracies lacking in major collective hermeneutical or spiritual frameworks, literary narrative holds the promise of considering the singular, of making sense of pluralized identities, of reweaving geographies through the formation of communities: these programs are not so much emancipatory as reparative.”[7]
It is precisely this association of reparative literature with the adjective “political” and the equation of politics with the laudable goal of reparation that the authors of Contre la littérature politique challenge. They spot a double redefinition: literature is no longer primarily defined as a linguistic operation with an aesthetic goal, but as a social and transitive act of consolation; politics is no longer understood as a collective project of emancipation, but as an awareness of otherness with the aim to appease, coexist, and reconcile.
“Beaucoup d’intentions, peu de crimes” (many intentions, few crimes)[8]
The idea that literature fulfills a political function mainly by ensuring the representation of the marginalized and thereby achieving a redistribution of attention must be questioned from both a literary and a political point of view.
First, is it enough to want to see the least visible, to hear the voiceless, in order to actually see or hear them? Is it enough to open one’s eyes or to go out into the “field”?[9] Such an approach would lead to a misunderstanding of the deeper causes of social invisibility. The subaltern is inaudible not primarily because they lack a voice, but due to economic, material, and symbolic configurations that prevent them from being heard.[10] Second, what form should the representation of the invisible take? By what syntactic, lexical, or linguistic means? By mobilizing which specific emotions? The narrative form is not neutral; it reformulates experiences and inscribes them into certain frames. What are these frames? Finally, can we really assume that the literary representation of the marginalized leads to better political representation? Does representation (Darstellung) necessarily lead to mandate (Vertretung) and political recognition? To deliberately confuse the two meanings of the term “representation” is to postulate that injustices in the distribution of attention, or injustices as such, could be solved by simply becoming aware of their existence. However, if we look at the number of works that have dealt with such representations for decades, works that are read and (by their own admission) even appreciated by political leaders, and if we then look at the policies pursued by these same leaders, there seems to be no logical progression from exposure to awareness and to more equitable policies.[11] The profound injustice in the distribution of attention, and, by extension, of wealth, cannot be explained with ignorance, but by looking at structures that are maintained in full knowledge of the facts.
This raises the question of the political reach of a literature that redistributes the sensible by focusing on individual scale and empathy, while ignoring the causes that actively marginalize and render invisible certain groups and individuals. By engaging in a non-confrontational redefinition of the political and by suggesting that marginalization can be resolved through representation, which would in turn require a degree of reparation and consolation, what the author Sandra Lucbert derisively calls “la-littérature-politique”[12] would definitively depoliticize the very social issues it seeks to explain.
Contre la littérature politique does not oppose the politics of literature in Rancière’s understanding, but its potential “weak interpretation.” It is not enough to give a voice to the unheard in order to write political literature or to make literature political.
“Faire politiquement de la littérature / pas de la littérature politique” (make literature politically / not political literature)[13]
In her contribution, Leslie Kaplan calls for “making literature politically / not political literature.”[14] This turns the articulation between literature and politics into an act that is never given as such but must always be performed anew. The political dimension of literature lies less in the choice of certain topics than in the way it is practised. Literature, then, becomes a means of disturbance and disquiet (which need not be agonizing) that actively and effectively disturbs what is presented as self-evident and unchangeable. In this way, everything can be politicized, i.e. questioned, including the purchase of a tomato plant and the narrative therein. The narrator of Nathalie Quintane’s Tomates (2010) struggles to choose between unusual tomato seeds and plants with more certain results, wondering how she can properly serve herself and her convictions:
“The prospect of nothing to come or of stunted tomatoes prevailed: I did not buy seeds from Kokopelli, but plants from Jardiland, thus arranging a transition between a life without my own tomatoes and a life with rare tomatoes. I am well aware that this kind of precision is amusing, but the word Tomato should not take precedence over the others and their seriousness. The problem of choosing between a non-industrial seed and a plant derived from an industrial seed is akin to the dilemma of the activist who wonders whether to stay in the Socialist Party or leave it out of loyalty to a beloved past, and it hurts.”[15]
This is a far cry from justifying literature with its ability to compensate for the shortcomings of representative democracy. Quintane openly questions the political efficacy of her own practice and refuses to enter the predetermined terrain of a fixed definition of what political (literature) means. She represents no one but herself and is faced with a dilemma that, while not tragic, is nonetheless important: which tomatoes should she pick? Eventually,
“the tomatoes, which in the meantime had become my tomatoes, were growing, that is to say, their stems, after the suckers had been removed, had widened and grown all the way down, and from the flowers little balls had sprouted, little peas that were getting rounder by the day, their skin shiny and firm. […] It is certain that this does not make a community, much less a couple, but a kind of art, the art of touching, of feeling, of grasping, of circumventing, of sensitive intellection.”[16]
The art form promoted here pays attention to contours and materials, processes and choices according to the principle of trial and error, while being firmly rooted in the sensitive world. It does not aim to depict the “real world,” but to make it the object/subject of a (far-fetched) questioning, or to give it the disturbance of attention and astonishment. The text does not necessarily reveal the magic of the world or the extraordinary dimension of the most ordinary gestures. It merely invites us to take a different look at it.
The other contributions to Contre la littérature politique also take this approach. Not only are they remarkably heterogenous, they also overwhelmingly reject the essay form and refuse to offer theories that question and subsequently redefine what is called political literature. Without a preface or epilogue providing a theoretical understanding of the issues at stake, each contribution explores what is practically raised by reflecting on the two terms in combination. We have not learned what a “real,” “authentic” political literature should look like when we close the book, but it does present us with a range of possibilities. This way of practising literature does not hope to fulfill an important mission and reveal a part of reality that has remained invisible to an indifferent world. It acknowledges the fact that literature “is undoubtedly not much and yet not nothing,” “[n]either demiurgic, nor heroic, nor rigorously worthless”—just like choosing a tomato plant. As Sandra Lucbert writes:
“To say that literature can work on politics is not to say that its texts can raise the world by their power alone. […] The uprising of the world is a collective work: literature takes its place in it. Neither prodigious nor null. But it should at least take its place.”[17]
Not believing in telluric powers of revelation and not hoping that it can change the world, literature can potentially offer a different perspective, a perspective situated closely to the ground and to the tomatoes growing from it.
Romance literary scholar Aurore Peyroles works at the ZfL on the project “The Cartography of the Political Novel in Europe.” This contribution is an abridged and adapted version of her article “Against Political Literature: What’s Next?,” in: Open Library of Humanities 11.1 (2025).
[1] Pierre Alferi, Leslie Kaplan, Nathalie Quintane, Tanguy Viel, Antoine Volodine and Louisa Yousfi: Contre la littérature politique, Paris 2024.
[2] Nathalie Quintane makes serendipitous and sharp remarks on so-called “political literature”; Louisa Yousfi rewrites extracts from the Iliad in her powerful “Chant pour des armes splendides”; Pierre Alferi dismantles the self-appointed celebrities of French intellectual life in sharp missives; Leslie Kaplan mixes observations and collected words in poetic fragments, insisting on how literature opens up a distance from the dominant languages; Tanguy Viel dreams of a literature that reconciles individual poetry and collective utopia; and, finally, Antoine Volodine invents a “moral tale” that features a character who is expected to give a speech to an audience but ends up only repeating “propagandist nonsense.”
[3] The question of the usefulness of literature and literary studies has been raised with particular urgency in France in 2006, when Nicolas Sarkozy, then Minister of the Interior, criticized the inclusion of Madame de Lafayette’s Princesse de Clèves (1678) in the syllabus of an administrative exam. Not only did Madame de Lafayette’s novel sell very well as a result, but many academics and writers came to the defence of literature in the name of its “usefulness,” especially in social terms. Cf. the overview of reactions in literary studies by Annick Louis: Sans objet. Pour une épistémologie de la discipline littéraire, Paris 2021.
[4] Jacques Rancière: “The Politics of Literature,” in: SubStance 33 (2004), p. 10–24.
[5] Jacques Rancière: Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (translated by Julie Rose), Minneapolis 1999, p. 30.
[6] Alexandre Gefen: Repair the World. French Literature in the 21st Century (translated by Tegan Raleigh), Berlin/Boston 2024.
[7] Ibid., p. 1. While Gefen only mentions Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick once, referring to her important essay Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2002), he takes up the notion of the “reparative turn” (ibid., p. 85) to make it a feature of “the bibliotherapeutic dream” (ibid., p. 83) he exposes. By contrasting reparation with emancipation, he creates an opposition that Kosofsky Sedgwick might not have endorsed.
[8] This is the title of Quintane’s contribution to Contre la littérature politique.
[9] Terrain has become a central concept in contemporary literary studies. Dominique Viart proposes the category of field literatures (littératures de terrain) to describe works that “borrow some of their practices from the social sciences: surveys, excavations in archives, interviews, in-situ research, [and] initiate a new kind of relationship with the social sciences, based on what the latter call ‘fieldwork’, whose difficulties they narrate and report rather than deliver or fictionalise” (Dominique Viart: “Les littératures de terrain,” in: Revue critique de fixxion française contemporaine 18 (2019), my translations).
[10] See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s seminal essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in: Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.): Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, London 1988, p. 271–313.
[11] Advisers to the presidential palace have revealed that Emmanuel Macron has read the book Qui a tué mon père (2018) by Édouard Louis. Louis, who lists those he blames for the damage done to his father’s body, namely all those in political power who have implemented reforms that affect the lives of the most disadvantaged, reacted very strongly to this revelation on Twitter: “Emmanuel Macron, my book is against what you are and what you do. Do not try to use me to disguise the violence you embody and practice. I write to shame you. I write to give weapons to those who fight against you” (my translation).
[12] Sandra Lucbert: Défaire voir. Littérature et politique, Paris 2024, p. 18.
[13] Leslie Kaplan: “Donnez-moi un mot, juste un mot,” in: Contre la littérature politique, p. 108.
[14] Kaplan paraphrases Jean-Luc Godard inviting “to make cinema politically, not political cinema” in an interview published in Les Lettres françaises, 19 April 1992, p. 20.
[15] Nathalie Quintane: Tomates, Paris 2014, p. 17, my translation: “La perspective de ne rien voir venir, ou du rachitique, l’a emporté: je n’ai pas acheté de graines à Kokopelli mais des plants à Jardiland, ménageant ainsi une transition entre une vie sans tomates personnelles et une vie avec tomates rares. Je sais bien que ce type de précision amuse, pourtant le mot Tomate ne doit pas l’emporter sur les autres et leur gravité. Transposé, le problème du choix entre une graine non industrielle et un plan issu d’une graine industrielle équivaut au dilemme du militant se demandant s’il reste au Parti socialiste par fidélité pour un passé doux ou s’il le quitte, et cela le violente.”
[16] Ibid., p. 96: “les tomates, devenues entre-temps mes tomates, poussaient, c’est-à-dire que leur tige, surgeons ôtés, s’était dilatée et munie d’un duvet tout du long, et qu’aux fleurs de petites boules avaient crû, petits pois plus ronds de jour en jour, peau brillante et bien tendue. […] C’est sûr que cela ne forme pas une communauté, encore moins un couple, mais une sorte d’art, l’art du toucher, du tâter, du cerner, du circonvenir, de l’intellection sensible.”
[17] Sandra Lucbert: Défaire voir, p. 36, my translation: “Maintenir que la littérature peut travailler le politique n’implique nullement que ses textes pourraient soulever le monde par leurs seuls pouvoirs. […] Le soulèvement du monde est une œuvre collective : la littérature y prend sa place. Ni prodigieuse, ni nulle. Mais que du moins elle la prenne.”
VORGESCHLAGENE ZITIERWEISE: Aurore Peyroles: For or Against Political Literature. A French Controversy, in: ZfL Blog, 2.4.2025, [https://www.zflprojekte.de/zfl-blog/2025/04/02/aurore-peyroles-for-or-against-political-literature-a-french-controversy/].
DOI: https://doi.org/10.13151/zfl-blog/20250402-01
