The Object of Literature

254 Pages·1995·14.101 MB·English

by  Pierre Macherey, Michael Sprinker

This book by Pierre Macherey is his firsr dealing with literature and theory since his
seminal A Theory of Uterary Production. Continuing the projed of AHhusserian theory,
Macherey engages in a series of close exegeses of classical texts in French literature
and philosophy, from the late eighteenth century down to the 1.970S, that explore the
historically variable but thematically similar ways in which literary texts represent
philosophical topai in an unrnediated manner, Macherey shows the conceptual
sophistication and broad intelledual influence - that literary art has displayed in the
modem period. At once a theoretical meditation of great originality and a historical
work of scrupulous scholarship, The Object of Uferafure will entrench Pierre Macherey' s
already considerable reputation as one of the most significant contemporary
theoreticians of literature.

Liferafure, Culture, Theory 1.4
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The object of Hterature
Literature, Culture, Theory 14
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General editors
RICHARD MACKSEY, The Johns Hopkins Universify
and MICHAEL SPRINKER, Sfafe University of New York af SEony Brook
The Cambridge Literature, Culture, Theory series is dedicated to theoretical studies in
the human sciences that have literature and culture as their object of enquiry.
Acknowledging the contemporary expansion of cultural studies and the redefinitions
of literature that this has entailed, the series includes not only original works of literary
theory but also monographs and essay collections on topics and seminal figures from
the long history of theoretical speculation on the arts and human communication
generally. The ccmcept of theory embraced in the series is broad, including not only
the classical disciplines of poe tics and rhetoric, but also those of aesthetics, linguistics,
psychoanalysis, semiotics, and other cognate sciences that have infleded the
systematic study of literature during the past half century.
Series titles already published include:
Retum to Freud: Jacques Lacan's dislocation of psychoanalysis
SAMUEL WEBER
(translated [rom the German by Michael Levine)
The subject of modemity
ANTHONY J. CAS CAR DI
Onomatopoetics: theory of language and literature
JOSEPH GRAHAM
Parody: ancient, modem, and post-modem
MARGARET A. ROSE
The poetics of personification
'JAMES PÂXSON
Possibl~worlds in literary l-heory
RUTH RONEN
Critical conditions:
postmqdetnity and the question of foundations
"HORACE L. FAIR LAMB
Int;ocll;;ldion to liteféiry he,rmeneutics
p,ÉTER SZONDI
(translated [rom the German by Martha Woodmansee)
Anti-mimesis from Plato to Hitchcock
TOM COHEN
Mikhail Bakhtin:
between phenomenology and Marxism
MICHAEL F. BERNARD-DONALS
Theories of mimesis
ARNE MELBERG
Poetry, space, landscape: toward a new theory
CHRIS FITTER
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PIERRE MACHEREY
University of Lille-III
T ranslated from the French by David Macey
CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, CB2 1RP
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA
10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia
Originally published in French as A quoi pense la littérafure by Presses Universitaires de France
1990 and © Presses Universitaires de France
First published in English by Cambridge University Press 1995 as The object of liferafure
English translation © Cambridge University Press 1995
Printed in Great Britain at the University Press, Cambridge
A cafalogue record for fhis book is available from fhe British Library
Library of Congress cafaloguing in publicafion dafa
Macherey, Pierre
[A quoi pense la littérature? English]
The object of literature / Pierre Macherey.
p. cm. - (Literature, culture, theory: 14)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0 521 41955 7 (hardback)
ISBN 0 521 47678 x (paperback)
1. French literature - History and criticism - Theory, etc. 2. Literature - Philosophy. L
Title. II. Series.
p045·M313 1995
84o.g--dc20 94-15012 CIP
ISBN 0 521 41955 7 hardback
ISBN 0 521 47678 x paperback
TAG
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Foreword by Michael Sprinker page ix
Bibliographical note xiv
1. What is literature thinking about? 1
PART 1 ROADS TO HISTORY II
2. A cosmopolitan imaginary: the literary thought of Mme
de Staël 13
3. George Sand's Spiridion; a pantheist novel 38
4. The Hegelian musings of Raymond Queneau 57
PART li INTO THE DEPTHS
5. On Victor Hugo: figures of the man from below
6. Georges Bataille: materialism inverted 112
7. A rhetoric of abysses: Céline' s magic metro 132
PART III ALL MUST PASS AWAY 145
8. Sade and the order of disorder
9. Flaubert' s non-realism
10. Foucault reads Roussel: literature as philosophy 211
11. Towards a literary philosophy 228
Index 239
vii

MICHAEL SPRINKER
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Foreword
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An English-speaking audience may be pardoned for wondering what
ever became of Pierre Macherey. AErer the translation in the mid-
1970S of his youthful Pour une théorie de la production littéraire, little of
his work appeared in English. A few articles in coterie joumals like The
Minnesota Review, Diacritics, and Sub-stance, but no other books. The
same audience might also, with this new translation before them, take
away the impression that Macherey' s work has primarily been in
literature aIl along, even if the author is quite clearly identified here as
a philosophy teacher at the University of Lille. Yet those who have
followed the trajedory of Althusserianism --an ambiguous desig
nation whose use here l shall attempt to justify later on - know only
that Macherey was one of the contributors to the original Lire 'le
Capital' (1965), but that he has written much more in philosophy than
in literature. Even a brief listing of sorne of his major writings in French
discloses the true focus of his worle since the mid-1960s: Hegel ou
Spinoza (1979); with Jean-Pierre Lefebvre, Hegel et la société (1984);
Comte, la philosophie et les sciences (1989); Avec Spinoza (1992).
Macherey was trained in, and has in fad principally written about,
philosophy, both the classical tradition and its reverberations in
modern France (he has published notable essays on Lacan, Foucault,
Deleuze and Canguilhem).
And yet, as the present collection, composed of essays written
during the 1980s, illustrates, Macherey' s early interest in literature as
a site for theoretical investigation has scarcely waned. The Object of
Literature retums to the question posed, but scarcely answered, by A
Theory of Literary Production: what is the object to be studied, analysed,
explained in a yet-to-be constructed science of literature? In an
influential essay on Macherey' s earlier writings, Terry Eagleton
summarized the original Machereyan project in literature thus:
For Macherey, the literary object is determinate, and 50 can be the object of
rational study. It is the effect of a specifie labour, the product of a writer who
ix
Foreword
does not fabricate the materials with which he works ... Those materials are
not neutral, and so spontaneously assimilable to a unit y imposed upon them
by the writer; they preserve, rather, a specifie weight and autonomy of their
own ... The necessity of the rext - which is precisely what renders it readable,
yields us a determinate object of analysis - inheres ... in the fact that the text
produces itself - unfolds and activa tes its multiple lines of meaning without
conformity to 'intention', pre-given normative model or external reality. The
task of criticism is to discover in each text the laws of that self-production, or
(what amounts to the same thing) the conditions of a work's possibility ... 1
This Macherey has often been charged (by among others Eagleton
himself) with being a formalist,2 while in a somewhat later incarnation,
he is said to have succumbed to the opposite errors of functionalism
and reductionism.3 Doubtless, both sets of indidments will re-surface
in response to the present volume. Warrant for each can be found. For
example, the formalist Macherey appears virtually without adornment
in the following passage from the essay on Céline:
We must abandon the attempt to look behind literature' s statements for the
other discourse of which it is the distorted and deformed expression, and
which constitutes its authentic meaning. For if literature does deal with truth,
the t"ruth in question has no value other th an that conferred upon it by
literature. It is the truth of its style. Literature establishes a real stylistics of
depth rather than a metaphysics, and stylistics is in it-self a partial substitute
for philosophy. (p. 132 below)
Or consider the following lapidary observation from the program
matic essay that brings the book to a close: In the final instance, aIl
J
literary texts have as their object --and this seems to be their real
philosophy the non-adhesion of language to language to lan
JI Il -
guage, the gap that constantly divides what we say from what we say
about it and what we think about it' (p. 234 below). From Roman
Jackobson to Roland Barthes, the specificity of literary language has
been the mark of that literariness' which Macherey has elsewhere
J
1 Terry Eagleton, 'Macherey and Marxist Literary Theory', The Minnesota Review
(FaIl1975); rpt. in Eagleton, Against the Grain: Selected Essays (London: Verso,
1986), pp. 11, 13.
2 See ibid., p. 18; and also Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ide%gy (London: NLB,
1976), pp. 83-4·
3 See Eagleton, 'Macherey and Marxist Literary Theory', p. 20. Eagleton bases this
interpretation on two articles: Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey, 'On
Literature as an ldeological Forrn', originally published in French as the
introduction to Renée Balibar, Le Français fictifs (Paris: Hachette, 1974); and
Macherey, 'On Reflection', Sub-stance 15 (1976), 6-20.
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