Literature, Politics and Literariness: Staging of the War of Writings: A Reading around Jacques Rancière’s Proposal

Abstract

At present, the Rancerian aesthetic conception has become one of the most relevant contributions to the reflection of art and, especially, literature. Nevertheless, the perplexity resulting from the reading of his writings, both for its novelty and depth, evidences a certain familiarity with the currents of contemporary political and aesthetic thought, as well as a certain proximity with the theoretical-critical proposals on literature of two of the greatest scholars in the English language: Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson. Such confluences could be considered strange if we consider the epistemological and political distancing from Marxism carried out by Jacques Rancière; however, this familiarity is justified if we take into account that the two theorists mentioned above carry out a critical and enriched reading of it, based on post-structuralism, with special emphasis on politics as a structuring aspect of the literary fact. In this same sense, it is interesting to unravel the conception of literariness put forward by the French philosopher and its relationship with politics as a crisis of the representative regime that results in the takeover of those without a part in fiction and that takes the form of a regime of expression constituted by the effect of tension of what he calls the war of writings (between the representative regime and the aesthetic regime) conceived as the displacement of a prescriptive poetics to a historical poetics.