Voilà le peuple

Abstract

Abstract Why does it matter that we try to think through, together, as entrammeled with one another, the act and work of reading and “the political”? What is at stake in the question of textuality in the current context of crises and turns-away (from theorization, from critique) that have come to characterize the humanities as the forms and institutions of higher education find themselves increasingly subsumed by the logics and imperatives of neoliberalism? The present article proposes to think through and tarry with this problem by taking as a case study of sorts the reaction of a certain number of literary and cultural studies scholars in the field of nineteenth-century French and Francophone studies to a recent (or perhaps an ongoing) event in the United States and its relation to the mise-en-scène of a revolutionary event in Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale, arguing ultimately that, in dark and disorienting times, literature—which perhaps does nothing so well as help us to grapple with the ways in which the past and the present, and thus any possible futurity, are mutually entrammeled with one another—may help us get certain ideas, if not infallibly right, a little less wrong where possible, where they may matter most.