The fetishised coupling: poetics and revolution

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We have to amplify this struggle, also give it its avant-garde writing, rapid, allusive, a deeper historical insight into those attempts whereby for a century our society has learned to call itself into question, to interrogate its outside, its logic, its languages, its past. If played out on these three linked sites May 1968 will never end, not in France, nor anywhere else, ever.1 2These words are from Philippe Sollers, co-founder of avant-garde revue Tel Quel? whose mission it became to formulate a theorisation of that fetishised coupling: poetics and revolution. To pave way for a new social order, they wanted to deconstruct mythic inscriptions of stable, unitary, masterful subject inherited from enlightenment and to find new articulations between psychoanalysis and Marxism, between subjectivity and social agency. As Laurent Jenny argues in his study, Je suis la revolution: histoire d'une metaphore3 [I am Revolution: History of a Metaphor], conceptual articulation of revolt, revolution, and even terror, with avant-garde literary movements has dominated continental European cultural scene at least since early romanticism at cusp of 19th century. But exactly how textual innovation can be articulated with effective socio-political critique, let alone transformation, is another matter. This is question driving Poetic revolutionaries.I appreciate distinction that Ross Chambers makes between opposition and resistance,4 aligning force of latter with potential violence of revolution. The oppositional, he argues, is achieved through complex work of irony, in fold, as it were, of reading, whereby subject is always already other, and reader in turn othered through mise en abyme which textual play offers of implicit power relations in staged narrative. In a subtle and rich meditation on a range of texts from neo-classical La Fontaine, writing ironically to absolute power, to contemporary narratives of suicide and dictation, Chambers invites us to read referential performance of narrativity, with its play of power, seduction and authority, as ironised by destablising work of textuality. Here I will be positing that further ironising and macroand micro-shattering effects of intertextual play within text open out a space which might go from ironising room for maneuver, with shifts of desire which this effects in reader, to a more forceful and potentially subversive critique of host culture. As readers in turn speak and write their othered desire back to culture at large, might not this incrementally lead to radical shifts in desiring collectivity?What kind of critical purchase and subversive impact can textual practice have then on contemporary socio-political culture? To revive now, in retreat of Time of Theory,5 project of a subversive poetics might look at best romantic, if not plain anachronistic and nostalgic. Rising to wager of revolutionising literature and transforming society, as cultural historian and theorist Danielle Marx-Scouras6 7 8 puts it, under the aegis of Tel Quel, some of most provocative reflection on literature, art, and society was published in late 1960s and early 1970s, including key interventions by Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gerard Genette, Julia Kristeva, Bernard-Henri Levy, Marcelin Pleynet, Philippe Sollers, and Tzvetan Todorov. These names suggest an intensive confluence of lines of thought: from theorisation of gift and sacrifice in Malinowski and Mauss via Bataille, to revisitations of Nietzsche by Foucault and of Hegel and Husserl by Derrida, through Bakhtin's dialogism critically reworked in Kristeva's concept of intertextuality, and critical reappraisal and dissemination of key works of Russian formalism via Tzvetan Todorov. One of most exciting aspects of Tel Quel's work in 1960s and early 1970s was its refusal to hierarchise relation between textual theory and practice. …