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[Position de thèse] How to do politics with words?

Mathieu Farizier: How to do politics with words? “Revolutionary” poetry in contemporary France

Thèse en anglais préparée sous la direction d’Emily McLaughlin et Ian MacLachlan, Université d’Oxford

Soutenue le 29 novembre 2024

Jury :

Justine Huppe, Chargée de Cours (Maîtresse de conférences), Université de Liège

Nikolaj Lübecker, Professeur, Université d’Oxford

***

Short Abstract

This thesis investigates how, by acting on their readers in different ways, contemporary French poetic texts may be socially effective in undermining capital. It does so to highlight some of the ways in which forms of discursive propaganda can be used in the present moment. It focuses mainly on three authors, Christophe Tarkos, Nathalie Quintane and A.C. Hello. These poets are used as case studies within a broader contemporary poetic trend which, since the 1990s, consists in politicizing the forms, content and reception of poetic practice. The thesis situates these poets in opposition to the “neo-lyrical” and essentialist trends of the poetic field, after the “death” of political avant-gardism and within the socio-political mutations that occurred since the failure of 1968. It analyses the effects of their works in a way that is indistinguishable from the onset and aggravation of neoliberal capitalism, and from the social struggles that inform how we can use these poets today. Each chapter seeks to derive a sense of aesthetic-political possibilities from the ways in which the baffling, playful and inconsistent reading experiences they prompt may affect their readers’ relations to contemporary capitalist realities. With reference to neoliberal thinkers, to the “immense capitalist cosmos” of contemporary France and to Macron’s prose, Tarkos’s “L’Argent” and “oui” are argued to bring the neoliberal conceit to such a maximalist degree of aesthetic perfection as to dispose us to relate to it as to a delirious poetic fantasy. Quintane’s practice is seen to entice her readers to participate in an inconsistent revolutionary game which is as collectively necessary as it is individually self-destructive. Lastly, the gruesome horror of A.C. Hello’s writings is argued to unfold like a terror attack, an act of “terrorism” (Bockstette: 2009) that impedes our physical abilities to cope with our own ordinary wage-working existence.

Long Abstract

This thesis grapples with the questions: how could “poetic” texts cause some harm to capital? How can this obviously naïve and idealistic ambition still have some validity despite the increasingly fascistic tendencies of contemporary capital that undercut the possibility for such an action? In response, this thesis’s three chaptershighlight possible ways in which the political effectiveness of literary texts can be conceived to unfold in the contemporary French context. This work analyses contemporary texts from writers who have participated in re-politicizing the French poetic production since the 1990s. It highlights the relevant socio-political and ideological context which, since the 1970s’ neoliberal onslaught on human lives worldwide and the seeming disappearance of social conflict, has shaped both the production of these texts and the possibility to read them politically today. In order to account for this context, I rely on sociological and anthropological works, critical and aesthetic theories, as well as on the social and political struggles which have been emerging since the mid-1990s. In addition, the thesis builds on the inputs of literary critics like Antoine Hummel and Justine Huppe. In particular, it draws from the “de-specialised” approach to poetry which Hummel has theorised through Tarkos and Quintane, and from the materialist and sociologically-informed appraisal of literary performativity for which Huppe advocates. It follows the basic tenets of reader-response approaches and builds its textual analyses according to the “horizons of expectations” (Jauss: 1970) of contemporary readers. Each chapter grounds the claims that it makes in the social terrain where the texts operate. In order to account for this contemporary context in a way that makes these poems useful, it relies not just on sociological facts but also on the political struggles which are aiming to redefine the distinction between what is, what should be and what should not be allowed to be, between what is “intolérable” and what could be desired instead (Huët: 2021).

            The crux of this thesis is to determine how the baffling relations that arise between the texts and their readers can affect the ways in which these readers relate to their own lives, to the capitalist context in which they live and to the prospects of collectively organising against it. In other words, it seeks to highlight possible forms of literary propaganda. It seeks to account for ways in which these texts can be politically “performative” under the conditions in which they are read, and given the reading experiences they prompt. The notion of “performative”, first defined by Austin, has been used in free and creative ways by many social theorists and critics. It has never ceased to pose epistemological problems, however, namely in literary studies. This notion enables us to attend to the ways in which discourses can be consequential and to the social conditions in which this can be the case. It points to the undecidability and indistinguishability between the description of a situation, which is either true or false, and the fact of acting within it, which makes the distinction between truth and falsity less relevant than the action they perform (“illocutionary”) and the effects it causes (“perlocutionary”). Building on this indistinguishability between action and description (between “performative” and “constative”) that sits as the heart of the concept, this thesis argues that “performative” lenses are particularly relevant to conceive of the ways in which the literary intersects the political. The “revolutionary” intention of seeing drastic political changes similarly draws on the difficulty of distinguishing between stating and acting. It has the intention to be “performative”. Like the “performative”, “revolutionary” practices are also “circular” or “tautological” (Garo: 2011). They consist in collectively acting as though the conditions that we wish to create were already in place (despite the awareness that they are not) because these conditions are in fact necessary if these actions are to be effective. “Revolutionary” practices rest on the belief that to politically act in such ways increases the likeliness that these actions can be effective. Thus, in order to account for the performative political effects of its corpus, this work builds on this indistinguishability that characterises both “revolutionary” practices and the performativity of language. Indeed, these notions are similarly caught up between the statement of an intention – the risk that it poses to remain purely declaratory – and the fact that such a statement can also be or become the action that realises it. While it acknowledges that these effects are a virtuality which may or may not occur, it aims to contribute to making them more likely to occur by reading them as if they did and by highlighting some ways in which they can. By considering that my poets’ aesthetic and political forms effectively train readers to embrace practices of “revolutionary” self-delusion, the thesis aims to shed light on such a dynamic. I analyse the ways in which such a process can unfold on the emotional, affective and cognitive levels and within the political context of today. While this work recognises that, when it comes to poetic texts, performative political effects are always uncertain and very limited (Huppe: 2023), and that “revolutionary” intentions are partly delusional, it aims to foster the possibility for them to cause the effects it describes by convincingly accounting for some ways in which they do. In other words, it proposes politicized readings of politicizing texts.

          To that end, each chapter highlights the different “tricks” through which Tarkos’, Quintane’s and A.C. Hello’s texts foster a politicizing experience, albeit in minimal and perplexing ways. I show that the configurations ofsocial experiences that result from reading them have a potential to affect the ways in which we relate to the ordinary world, and our dispositions to act within it. The point is not only to bring these writers to the attention of English-speaking French studies, where they are underrepresented, but also to defend a literary approach that engages with political ambitions in ways that are inconsistent, playful but nonetheless resolute. If the poets of my corpus are often said to tackle writing and politics in “literalist” and “idiotic” ways, the strange merit that this thesis might be seen to possess is that

it takes their literalist idiocy seriously, turning it into a research method. This thesis contends that a possible way for these texts to function as political-aesthetic propaganda is through an inconsistent amalgam of antagonistic actions, namely “play” and coercion. I show how all three authors impose particularly horrible, unpleasant or absurd experiences of reality on their readers. But simultaneously, by showing that these experiences are simultaneously playful, idiotic or fun, I argue that they prompt antagonistic affects in us that can make us less prone to “tolérer l’intolérable” (Huët: 2021). Each chapterfocuses on a few of these writers’ texts which I hold to be representative of their practices. Tarkos, as a self-defined “poète révolutionnaire”, is shown to perform a revolution of a weird kind. His texts make us experience the neoliberal reality as a world that is not only absolute, beautiful and inexorable, but even capable of forcing the revolutionary theories and practices of Marxian and anarchist thinkers into the active service of capital. In addition, when compared to other neoliberal writers such as Lippman, von Mises, Becker, Hayek or Macron, a close-reading of “oui” shows how the antithesis between “human freedom” (Hayek: 1976) and capitalist coercion which is at the heart of the neoliberal project (Stiegler: 2019) is seamlessly resolved when we read his texts. But if this seems like a powerful counter-revolutionary tour de force, I argue that in contrast to the ways in which readers may feel regarding actually existing capitalism, his texts have a potential to summon politics back in a negative mode, and cause a negative retro-action. I suggest that by impressing the idiotically poetic nature of neoliberal theories and practices, reading Tarkos can prompt us to relate to the neoliberal world as to an absurd poetic joke that it is.

          Focusing on Quintane,chapter 2 shows how reading Formage is a participatory exercise in self-contradiction. It is pathetic and farcical, fatalistic and interventionist, frantically idiotic and earnestly committed. It is narrative, immersive and life-like while being artificial and disruptive. It is a medley and a caricature of avant-gardist, post-structuralist and other “far-Left” critical and aesthetic theories which it turns into darkly comical and self-destructive practices. I argue that it frames every conceivable form of emancipatory agency as a “double-bind” in the sense of Gregory Bateson: a no-win conjunction of mutually clashing injunctions that offer no possibility of an exit, and which characterise a schizophrenic situation. But if emancipatory practices are derided as powerless to disrupt the determinacy of capitalist structures, and if the text ridicules its own pledges for literary-political performativity, I suggest that it does cultivate a sense of “revolutionary” agency in its readers nonetheless. I argue that it does so by turning both the reading experience and its own revolutionary attempts into a self-defeating and idiotic kind of game. This game makes us engage with the narrator’s revolutionary prospects with as much playfulness as that which marks our own attempt to make sense of this erratic book.  I contend that Formage, like many of Quintane’s playful and idiotic works,acts in indeterminate ways to serve a determinate end: it prompts readers to pursue the end of capital through “play” in the same serious virtuality as that through which we would play a game, albeit a self-defeating one. Indeed, “play” is a mode of experience that endows its participants with a degree of “agency” (Malaby: 2009), if only conventionally and if enough players are gathered. To play is to cultivate a sense of indeterminacy between an objective, a set of constraints and the means which are available to reach it. I contend that Quintane compels us to “play” a revolutionary game in darkly comical ways. She does so by acting as though we could have decisive agency within it and while showing us that life under capital is a game that we have already lost anyway.

          Lastly, chapter 3 shows that A.C. Hello’s Koma Kapital acts in similarly inconsistent ways, but with the particularity of being immoral, horrible and also “terroristic”. It does so by dragging its unsuspecting readers into what first seems like a slightly surreal, upsetting and cataclysmic narrative, but one which still remains fictional and external to us. And yet, we gradually end up being unable to distinguish the book’s subject-matter from our own experiences of ordinary capital; of the neocolonial imperialist core, wage-labour, alienation and its attending psychoses. I borrow from film criticism of the horror genre, particularly Adam Hart’s “sensational address”, to show that Koma Kapital is waging an attack against our physical and psychological wellbeing. Gradually, as it becomes increasingly easy for us to fill the book’s narrative defects with intimate world experiences, the horror and abjection that mark our relation to the book is re-channelled towards the relation that we have with our lives in distressing and degrading ways. I call this immoral process “destructive re-familiarisation”. I argue that reading such a book prevents us to put up with the everyday world, that it terrorises our bodies away from the very mechanisms through which we were still able to cope with life under capital.

Mots-clés : Poésie contemporaine ; capitalisme ; Tarkos ; Quintane ; A.C. Hello ; Politique ; Affects ; Marx ; French Theory ; Gregory Bateson ; film d’horreur ; vies ordinaires 

Table of contents

General Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………………….. 10

I. “Questions for Poets”……………………………………………………………………………………………… 11

“They”: who, how, what?…………………………………………………………………………………… 14

Puzzling forms. Committed or whimsical, or both………………………………………………… 20

          A performative quest for the performative……………………………………………………………. 23

Performative ambitions and the presence-absence of social unrest. “La poésie seule ne peut rien” 28

Problems in these writers’ academic reception: French Theory, “aesthetic subversion”, and the disappearance of social conflict………………………………………………………………………….. 32

II. Poetry and critique vs. capital since the 1970s: “revolutions” and quotation marks……….. 35

          From a failed “revolution” to the next: triumphant capital after 1968………………………. 39

          “des événements latents, ou en cours”…………………………………………………………………. 43

Chapter 1. “Un petit entraînement physique, pour l’acceptation du monde”. Christophe Tarkos and the puzzling resurgence of “revolutionary” poetry under neoliberalism…………………………. 49

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 49

I. L’Argent’s radical un-critique of capitalism……………………………………………………………….. 57

          Capital’s contradictions against Marx: money’s “infiltration”…………………………………. 58

          The morality of capital, anything you like i.e., money/not money…………………………… 60

          The wrong sort of virus, “poetic beauty” and “concatenation”……………………………….. 63

II. To perfect the neoliberal plan: the trick of reconciling freedom with determinacy…………. 67

          The neoliberal project or, the free adaptation of humankind to revolutionary capital…. 67

“Oui”. Being = accepting, identity = change, freedom = determination, neoliberalism made consistent  71

III. What to do with these texts? Laughter, retro-action and the spectre of politics…………….. 76

          Where do we go from here?……………………………………………………………………………….. 76

          Scratching the itch of depoliticization………………………………………………………………….. 78

          Tarkos and the neoliberal joke: poetic retro-action………………………………………………… 80

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 82

Chapter 2. “Quels sont les moyens de rendre plus politique un texte qui ne l’est pas assez ?” Nathalie Quintane’s “revolution” as an avant-gardist farce, a game and a double-bind……………… 86

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 86

Frustrated and frustrating reading. Attaquer de biais, attaquer de front……………………………. 93

Formage’s baffling avant-gardist pledges, literary performativity as a self-defeating parody 96

Revolutionary pledges in the absence of revolutionary conditions: Roger and the reproduction of social reproduction……………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 99

A Batesonian “double-bind”. What for?……………………………………………………………………… 103

Gamifying the revolutionary plight. “Play”, indeterminate means to a determinate end, the end of capital          106

The tragicomic game of escaping capital’s double-binds………………………………………………. 108

Self-delusion, performative idiocy and coercive means………………………………………………… 114

Post-Marxist emancipation on a hamster wheel: French Theory as a self-destructive farce.. 118

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 123

Chapter 3. A.C. Hello’s Poetic Terrorism. “Moi la violence”, Nauseating What It Feels Like To Live Under Capital………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 128

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 128

I. From an expected narrative to mindless confusion……………………………………………………. 135

          What on earth is happening?……………………………………………………………………………. 135

          Traumatic disjunctions: from confusion to somethingworse………………………………… 139

II. Horror, abjection, terrorism…………………………………………………………………………………… 143

          The insidious build-up towards physical involvement………………………………………….. 143

          Reading Koma Kapital like a horror film…………………………………………………………… 147

III. Horror, terror, the everyday…………………………………………………………………………………. 154

          A trap. The delayed “conscientisation” of ordinary horror……………………………………. 154

My life, my job, my manager in and as Koma Kapital. Ordinary suffering and corporate terror      157

          Destructive re-familiarisation, and a laugh…………………………………………………………. 161

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 164

General Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………………….. 168

Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 176

Primary Corpus……………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 176

Secondary Corpus……………………………………………………………………………………………………. 178

Literary criticism…………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 180

Critical works: social sciences, philosophy, history, journalism…………………………………….. 185


OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Laure Michel (19 avril 2025). [Position de thèse] How to do politics with words? Poemata. Consulté le 12 avril 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/13s10


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