Poetic Revolutionaries [antikvár]

The fetishised coupling: poetics and revolution We have to amplify this struggle, also give it its avant-garde writing, rapid, allusive, a deeper historical insight into those attempts whereby for a century our society has learned to call itself into question, to interrogate its outside, its logic, its languages, its past. If played out on these three linked sites May 1968 will never end, not in France, nor anywhere else, ever.1 These words are from Philippe Sollers, co-founder of the avant-garde revue Tel Quel,2 whose mission it became to formulate a theorisation of that fetishised coupling: poetics and revolution. To pave the way for a new social order, they wanted to deconstruct mythic inscriptions of the stable, unitary, masterful subject inherited from the enlightenment and to find new articulations between psychoanalysis and Marxism, between subjectivity and social agency. As Laurent Jenny argues in his study, de suis la révolution: histoire d'une métaphore3 [I am Revolution: History of a Metaphor], the conceptual articulation of revolt, revolution, and even terror, with avant-garde literary movements has dominated the continental European cultural scene at least since early romanticism at the cusp of the 19th century. But exactly how textual innovation can be articulated with effective