Baudelaire with Badiou

Abstract

In her recent book Uses of Literature, Rita Felski opposes “grand theory,” and the “autonomous, difficult art” it tends to favor, to “the heterogeneous, and politically variable, uses of literary texts in daily life.” Such a division poses an implicit challenge for reflection on the relationship of philosophy to literature. Taking a lead from Felski’s effort to “build better bridges” between the two, I would like to reflect specifically on the ways in which nineteenth-century French poetry and contemporary French philosophy enter into a dialectical relationship that helps us navigate between the Scylla of—overly?—hermetic philosophical approaches and the Charybdis of potentially unreflective “common sense” approaches. Felski seeks to demonstrate that both theoretical and commonsense approaches can be “powered by, and indebted to, many of the same motives and structures” (Felski 13). We may say the same of philosophy, in that it springs from basic questions about how life should be lived, yet seeks answers that refuse simplistic or too commonly held views in order to cast new light on lived experience, and even to change that experience through the very act of reflecting on it.

To love poetry is to love not being able to choose.

—Alain Badiou, Conditions 88

The clash between philosophy and literature does not need to be resolved. On the contrary, only if we think of it as permanent and new does it guarantee us that the sclerosis of words will not close over us like a sheet of ice.

—Pierre Macherey, The Object of Literature 2