Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction: Rancière and Literature
- SECTION I Coordinates
- SECTION II Realisms
- 6 The Novelist and Her Poor: Nineteenth-Century Character Dynamics
- 7 ‘Broiled in Hell-fire’: Melville, Rancière and the Heresy of Literarity
- 8 Why Maggie Tulliver Had To Be Killed
- 9 The Meaning in the Detail: Literature and the Detritus of the Nineteenth Century in Jacques Rancière and Walter Benjamin
- SECTION III Contemporaneities
- Index
9 - The Meaning in the Detail: Literature and the Detritus of the Nineteenth Century in Jacques Rancière and Walter Benjamin
from SECTION II - Realisms
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 September 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction: Rancière and Literature
- SECTION I Coordinates
- SECTION II Realisms
- 6 The Novelist and Her Poor: Nineteenth-Century Character Dynamics
- 7 ‘Broiled in Hell-fire’: Melville, Rancière and the Heresy of Literarity
- 8 Why Maggie Tulliver Had To Be Killed
- 9 The Meaning in the Detail: Literature and the Detritus of the Nineteenth Century in Jacques Rancière and Walter Benjamin
- SECTION III Contemporaneities
- Index
Summary
Notwithstanding the critical remarks Jacques Rancière occasionally makes about Walter Benjamin, a number of commentators have pointed to parallels between the two thinkers. In general, these parallels focus on their evidently shared sceptical attitude to the approaches of the social sciences (Rancière) or historicism (Benjamin) to history. Kristin Ross, for instance, argues that Benjamin and Rancière share the motivation ‘to blast […] “a unique experience of the past” out of the “continuum of history” for the purpose of wresting meaning from the past for the present’. Similarly, Hayden White writes that in his book The Names of History ‘Rancière takes up arms on behalf of Walter Benjamin's idea that the story of the victors must be balanced, even supplanted, by the story of the vanquished, the abject and the downcast of history.’
It is true that each thinker pursues an approach to ‘the past’ which aims to rescue the possibilities of past revolutionary energies. The premise of the approach is that historicist practices of truth strip the past of its actuality in the present. For Benjamin, the counter term to the closure of history in ‘the past’ is theology, whereas for Rancière it is the literary, itself understood as the disavowed part of the practice of historical writing. In each case the supposedly insignificant refuse of the nineteenth century is called upon to support the position. Benjamin credits the nineteenth century's refuse with epistemological significance for history. Rancière, on the other hand, draws attention to the logic that governs the way such refuse can claim a noticeable position. He argues that the focus on refuse is one facet of the general interest in hitherto unimportant social, natural and institutional details in nineteenth-century literature. According to him, this literary ‘ aesthetic revolution’ underpins and precedes the ‘social revolution’. The distinction between these positions is telling.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Rancière and Literature , pp. 183 - 204Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016