Negativity and Literature
November, 2007
This paper was first given at the “Undisciplined Knowledge? Franco-American Interdisciplinarity in the Humanities” Conference, a French Studies event held on March 2-3, 2007 at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. A French version of this text appeared in the issue of Labyrinthe entitled La fin des disciplines? (Laurent Dubreuil ed.; Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose; 2007).
Maintaining a distinction between the literary and Literature, this paper asks the provocative questions: Do we need a specific discipline of literary studies? Why could not the study of the literary be absorbed interdisciplinarily into some broader discipline or dispersed among several? In response, the paper defines the study of Literature as the study of negativities and argues that as such it is necessary to the university as a place of criticism in a time of totalitarian threat. As fiction, Literature lies, but unreliably and thus presents the most intricately woven system of lies. The paper explores this system in Rousseau, Baudelaire, Proust, Freud, and Derrida and reveals the rule of the auto-immune reaction, by which a person or a democracy attempting to protect itself may bring about its own demise. The study of literature reveals this danger, and the paper concludes that the study of fiction is necessary as fictions are more and more successfully exploited by totalitarian forces.
Negativity and Literature (Size: 73 KB)
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