The Limits of the Literary

(The tone is serious, full of self-confidence, as though the author were an author, as though he had a body of work, even a coherent body of work)

I have always attempted to grasp the literary—that absolutely specific thing that so many theories in the past attempted to define definitively—at its limits: in the Vers de circonstance of a Mallarmé, in the unpublished infinity of the Cahiers of a Valéry, in the worldly notes of a Proust, in the love letters of a Kafka, in the social games of the Surrealists, in the urban explorations of the situationists, or else in the interventions of a Debord in May ’68. At its limits—where boundaries are blurry, where the literary crosses over into [End Page 21] life, and becomes action (my point of view has always been absolutely pragmatic), there where inversely, life is transformed into text, where it is decreed by the poetic. To grasp it, not in order to defend or sacralize it (à la Blanchot), but simply to show that it exists, and in order to recognize it as such. This has the advantage of allowing one to not believe in it; the literary is not meant to be taken literally.