L’animalité en question (3) | Implications philosophiques

L’animalité en question (3) | Implications philosophiques

Review of Mute Speech

Review of Mute Speech:

POSING FOOLISH QUESTIONS: WHAT IS LITERATURE? A Review of Jacques Rancière's Mute Speech Jerilyn Sambrooke "There are some questions we dare no longer pose." Jacques Rancière, Mute Speech Jacques Rancière's bold challenge opens Mute Speech (1998), one of his most rigorous works on aesthetics, only just recently published in English (2011).  In this opening claim, Rancière echoes the famous, elusive question that Jean-Paul Sartre posed in 1949: what is literature?  Gérard Genette (1993) offers a contemporary comment on the question itself: "a foolish question does not require an answer; by the same token, true wisdom might consist in not asking it all" (cited in Rancière 29).  This formulation of "wisdom in the conditional mood" bothers Rancière: it derides questions even as it offers answers.  To challenge this "wisdom," he presses Sartre's original question in a new direction: why are we expected to have a vague, working definition of literature but yet simultaneously discouraged from investigating it...  Read More at The Church and Postmodern Culture blog:  http://theotherjournal.com/churchandpomo/2013/01/31/posing-foolish-questions-what-is-literature/