Passions du réel (sur Philippe Vasset, Olivia Rosenthal et Thomas Clerc)

Abstract

For the last few decades in France, the “call of the real” (Philippe Forest) has presented itself to many writers as nothing less than an ethical imperative. Indeed, texts belonging to referential or “factual” literature have multiplied to such an extent that commentators – echoing Husserl’s famous exhortation – have talked about a “return to the real” (Dominique Viart), as if literature, in its rejection of fiction, was vowing to immerse itself anew in the world. This article focuses on three recent and notable examples: Philippe Vasset’s Un livre blanc (2007), Thomas Clerc’s Paris, musee du XXIe siecle (2007), and Olivia Rosenthal’s Viande froide (2008). If an effort to explore, track and inventory a precarious real lies at the core of these texts (precarious because it is often nearly invisible, inaudible or already fading away), they also display formal strategies that attempt to capture something singular, strange or in excess, in short everything that in the “real” resists or challenges representation.