Reading Rancière: Literature at the Limit of World Literature

TLDR: The authors argued that the conditions of reading everyday life, and hence the new literariness, could emerge only under the strict orders laid down through these new disciplines like Orientalism and, behind them, by the coercive structures of colonial governance.

Abstract: This essay critically interrogates Jacques Ranciere’s claim that the modern idea of literature found its own being when it became conscious of the “democratic petrification” of literariness in the early decades of the nineteenth century. I make two related points vis-a-vis Ranciere’s argument: first, I demonstrate that he insufficiently imagines the knowledge paradigms informing this allegedly democratic petrification of literature and ignores vital shifts in history; and second, I argue that because of this initial poverty of imagination, Ranciere fails to address the most crucial impediment to the regime’s reliance on reading as a “universal” strategy—i.e., colonial history and racial difference. While the metropolitan culture yields its innermost secrets to the hermeneutic eye of everyday literariness, the colonial other, shrouded in racial alterity, remains mysterious, illegible, and even invisible. Instead, I show through close readings of Honore de Balzac’s novel La Peau de chagrin (1831), which also functions as the central text for Ranciere’s theory, that the conditions of reading everyday life, and hence the new literariness, could emerge only under the strict orders laid down through these new disciplines like Orientalism and, behind them, by the coercive structures of colonial governance. My wager is that the new condition of readability was distributed beyond any one culture or one nation. Hence, the proper context for the emergence of the new idea of literature could only be described as early discussions and reflections on that typically supranational concept of the nineteenth century—i.e., world literature.