The Literary Function and the Cartographic Turn: Performative Philosophy

Abstract

The cartographic raises the problem of thinking that is configured as a line drawn between subject and object, as well as temporally as opposed to spatially. Thinking that does not engage cartographically is unable to become an empiricism; it reduces thinking to the Same, to the One, and at that point thinking becomes self-fulfilling. For example, at a recent symposium on writing and trauma, a line was popularly drawn between Silence (the subject) and Trauma (the object). The silence, however, is self-fulfilling because the thinking of the trauma is in the subject rather than everywhere around it, in the relationship of the territory to the earth. This chapter explores the literary function in relation to the cartographic. It resituates and reconfigures literary theory on an axis different from that of the subject and the object. Here, the literary and its performative function work as a metatheory as the literary function is thought through various moments in post-structural theory, criticism, and philosophy, including an engagement with work of Bruno Bosteels, Gregory Ulmer, Michel de Certeau, and Michel Foucault. In mapping the literary function across a series of contemporary theoretical and philosophical acts, the poetics and rhetoric of the literary are changed and broadened. What is at stake here is not a mere recapture of territory belonging to the book, arguably lost to the literary since the postmodern cultural-critical turn, but a foray into the literary function within the cartographic turn.