You are a Written Sentence. Four Notes on Literature and Misery in Light of J. Rancière

Abstract

This paper explores the proximity suggested by Jacques Rancière in some of his texts between the spectrality of literature's quasi-bodies and the possibility of embracing the suspended existence of those whose nonassignable differences are neutralized in a consensual order through the assignation of a miserable identity. Having in mind the possibilities of thinking such relationship that can be traced in four literary fragments, it shows how the interval of de-identification that is opened in literary writing, that in which literariness appears as the capacity of rearranging the coordinates of visibility and intelligibility that define a given partition of the sensible, can be understood as one of the sites in which political subjetivation might potentially take place.