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 fi nd 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 fi eld 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-ensc & egrave;ne of a revolutionary event in Flaubert's ' s L'& Eacute;ducation ' & Eacute;ducation sentimentale, , arguing ultimately that, in dark and disorienting times, literature-which - 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 - may help us get certain ideas, if not infallibly right, a little less wrong where possible, where they may matter most.

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.

DépartsEntretien avec Jacques Rancière Robert St. Clair, Seth Whidden, and Jacques Rancière points de départ RSC & SW: Diriez-vous qu'il existe un rapport entre vos premiers travaux dans le domaine de la philosophie du politique, dans lesquels vous vous appliquez à penser, à théoriser et à documenter ce que l'on pourrait appeler des « scènes d'égalité », et la place qu'a pu occuper l'histoire de la Commune de Paris pour les penseurs de votre génération ? (Ici nous pensons autant au travail de documentation et de théorisation des «archives grises» de la parole ouvrière au 19e siècle associé avec la revue que vous avez aidé à cofonder, Les Révoltes logiques, qu'à votre Nuit des prolétaires, lequel ouvrage, malgré son emphase ostensiblement portée sur la «culture ouvrière» des années 1830–1840, se lit comme une sorte de généalogie culturelle des sources de 1871.) J.R.: Je n'ai pas spécifiquement pensé à la Commune lorsque j'ai écrit, en 1996, mes Dix Thèses sur la politique. Mais il est clair que la Commune appartenait de plein droit pour moi à l'histoire de l'émancipation ouvrière telle que je me suis efforcé de la repenser comme affirmation positive de la capacité de penser et de construire un monde commun appartenant à ceux qu'on voulait reléguer dans l'univers du travail—en y ajoutant éventuellement la lutte. C'est à partir de ce travail sur l'émancipation que j'ai élaboré ma propre vision de la politique comme affirmation de la puissance des incomptés. 1968, cela avait d'abord été, pour les gens de ma génération, la rupture avec la tradition du marxisme autoritaire qu'incarnait chez nous le Parti Communiste. À l'époque, c'était la Révolution culturelle chinoise, avec son insistance sur la fin de la séparation entre travail intellectuel et travail manuel, qui nous servait de contre-modèle. Quand il est apparu que la réalité chinoise était assez loin de ce que nous y avions projeté, les exemples empruntés à [End Page 162] la tradition ouvrière européenne—associations ouvrières, Commune, syndicalisme révolutionnaire, mouvement anarchiste espagnol—sont revenus sur le devant de la scène, surtout au moment où, en 1973, les ouvriers en grève de l'usine d'horlogerie de Lip ont pris possession de leur usine et l'ont fait marcher pour leur propre compte. À partir de là, j'ai essayé de penser une grande continuité depuis les associations ouvrières des années 1830 jusqu'à la prise de possession par les ouvriers de Lip de leur instrument de travail. Ce faisant, j'avais tendance à suivre une idée elle-même ancrée dans la pensée ouvrière du 19e siècle, qui opposait la vérité du social au mensonge de la politique. Plus tard j'ai été amené à remettre cette vision en cause en pensant la politique en termes de rupture avec une identité sociale. Et, dans La Mésentente et les Dix Thèses sur la politique, j'ai fait de la politique la réfutation en acte de l'opposition entre le social et le politique. RSC & SW: Quelle place occupait la mémoire de la Commune de Paris dans l'imaginaire politique, théorique et culturel dans la foulée de Mai 68?Servait-elle de modèle, de point de repère ou de référence, d'horizon utopien, ou bien étaitelle plutôt absente du champ discursif politique et intellectuel dans l'après-mai, au moment où s'est effectuée une rupture plutôt importante au sein d'un courant dominant du marxisme français, sinon européen? J.R.: La Commune était très présente à l'époque. Tout au long du siècle, son souvenir avait été entretenu par la tradition communiste officielle qui y voyait une anticipation de la Révolution de 1917 à laquelle avait malheureusement manqué la science marxiste. Mais maintenant, pour la génération de 1968, elle se mettait à incarner la révolution authentiquement ouvrière et antiautoritaire, oppos...

The Commune, "Today" Robert St. Clair Rouge œillet…Aujourd'hui, va fleurir dans l'ombreDes noires et tristes prisons.Va fleurir près du captif sombreEt dis-lui bien… que par le temps rapideTout appartient à l'avenir… —Louise Michel Tout ça n'empêche pasNicolasQue la Commune n'est pas morte! —Eugène Pottier Let us begin this special issue of Nineteenth-Century French Studies with two proclamations from opposite sides of the barricade, contradictory in the fullest sense of the term, and which bookend the events that transpired in Paris in the spring of 1871. The first can be found on the front page of Le Cri du peuple, the revolutionary journal founded by Jules Vallès in February of 1871. The second, attributed to an especially reviled figure of political history for the European left, Patrice de MacMahon,1 is culled from a military proclamation posted up and addressed to the "inhabitants" of Paris at the end of May, as though in a ghoulish kind of retort to the posters proclaiming the Commune's existence which had blossomed on walls throughout the city exactly three months earlier. [End Page 151] Shortly after the Comité central announced the creation of the Commune to the citizens of Paris—Citoyens, Aujourd'hui […] Paris saluait, acclamait sa révolution; Paris ouvrait à une page blanche le livre de l'histoire et y inscrivit son nom puissant…—2 Vallès would write the following in the headline chronicle of his journal on 28 and 30 March 1871, commemorating the events of the previous four days and looking forward to the new historic day which had appeared to dawn in the revolutionary city: Quelle journée! […] Ô grand Paris! […] Embrasse-moi, camarade, qui as, comme moi, les cheveux gris! Et toi, marmot, qui joues aux billes derrière les barricades, viens que je t'embrasse aussi! Le 18 mars te l'a sauvé belle, gamin! Tu pouvais, comme nous, grandir dans le brouillard, patauger dans la boue, rouler dans le sang, crever de faim […]. C'est fini! […] Fils des désespérés, tu seras un homme libre. […] C'est aujourd'hui la fête nuptiale de l'idée et de la République. La Commune est proclamée.3 On 28 March—… par un clair soleil rappelant l'aube du 18 mars… pas de discours, un immense cri, un seul, Vive la Commune!—the newly elected members of the Paris Commune took seat in the Hôtel de Ville de Paris, symbolic site of revolutionary triumph par excellence in Paris since the 1830 revolution which finally confided the ancien régime to the proverbial dustbin of history, its stately renaissant frame now coiffed with un immense drapeau rouge as the Commune held its first session.4 On 28 May, however, one would find the following terse statement, plastered throughout the city in whose streets the Commune came to its infamously vicious close, drowned in its own blood by the forces of "order": Habitants de Paris: … Aujourd'hui, la lutte est terminée. L'ordre, le travail, la sécurité vont renaître.5 The question that provided the impetus for the present volume marking the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune was, in appearance, a relatively simple one. It could even be understood as having to do with what we make not only of the deictics in these declarations—that conflicting set of aujourd'hui, the one heralding the hope of collective emancipation and the realization of a principle of 'equaliberty' (Balibar), the other appealing to the authority of "law and order" and the brutal "taking back" of cities overrun by a phantasmagoric mob of "ensauvagés" (Macron)—6 but also what we make of the implicit kinds of futures that they conjure up or, as the case may be, conjure away. [End Page 152] Aujourd'hui le livre de l'histoire est ouvert … C'est aujourd'hui la fête nuptiale de l'idée et de la République … Aujourd'hui, la lutte est terminée… More precisely, the question that has guided this volume from conception to culmination is the following: what kind of ideas...

AbstractAs early as 1924, Paul Valéry suggested that we might think of Baudelaire as not only the poet of the modern world but also one of the key figures in a world literature of modernity. This chapter, on the one hand, seeks to outline the problematics and ambivalence of the question of modernity for Baudelaire and, on the other, proposes to think of poetic form as the core site where the modern world occurs or is produced in Baudelaire's work. It is at the level of poetic form that Baudelaire's work perhaps most fully engages with its world and historical situation.

What kind of claims can ecocriticism open up for thinking about the nineteenth-century lyric as an epideictic literary mode, that is, as a form of writing, a dimension of language, informed less by the logics or categories of mimesis than by a concern, broadly speaking, for 'what matters'? In addition to the sorts of properly poetic and historic genealogies that bind Baudelaire to a younger, though nearly contemporary, poet like Arthur Rimbaud, an ecopoetic thread may also be charted out between the two poets, particularly if we understand the ecocritical as an approach to poetry concerned with scrutinizing how certain spaces, subjects or ideas count as natural to begin with.

Bodies abound in Rimbaud’s poetry in a way that is nearly unprecedented in the nineteenth-century poetic canon: lazy, creative, rule-breaking bodies, queer bodies, marginalized and impoverished bodies, revolting and revolutionary, historical bodies. The question that this book seeks to answer is: what does this sheer, corporeal density mean for reading Rimbaud? What kind of sense are we to make of this omnipresence of the body in the Rimbaldian corpus from the earliest poems celebrating the simple delight of running away from wherever one is and stretching one’s legs out under a table, to the ultimate flight away from poetry itself? In response, it argues that the body appears—often literally—as a kind of gap, breach, or aperture through which Rimbaud’s poems enter into contact with history and a larger body of other texts. Simply put, the body is privileged “lyrical material” for Rimbaud: a figure for human beings in their exposed, finite creatureliness and in their unpredictable agency and interconnectedness. Its presence in the early work allows us not only to contemplate what a strange, sensuous thing it is to be embodied, to be both singular and part of a collective, it also allows the poet to diagnose, and the reader to perceive, a set of seemingly intractable, real socio-economic, political, and symbolic problems. Rimbaud’s bodies are, in other words, utopian bodies: sites where the historical and the lyrical, the ideal and the material, do not so much cancel each other out as become caught up in one another.

Research Article| January 01 2017 Hiding Spots in the Chambers of the Heart Robert St. Clair Robert St. Clair Dartmouth College Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Romanic Review (2017) 108 (1-4): 45–48. https://doi.org/10.1215/26885220-108.1-4.45 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Robert St. Clair; Hiding Spots in the Chambers of the Heart. Romanic Review 1 January 2017; 108 (1-4): 45–48. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/26885220-108.1-4.45 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsRomanic Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2017 by the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Originally prepared for oral delivery at a conference session on the author's study of Baudelaire as a city poet, the paper explores related academic genres involving academic judgment before giving an autobiographical account of the author's reading of Baudelaire, which was mediated by the experience of the AIDS epidemic in Ronald Reagan's United States as Baudelaire's Parisian experience had been mediated by the Second Empire. Thus is suggested a theory of the ongoing readability of literary texts as that readability is mediated by the successive events of changing human history. (RC)