Literary autonomy: an idol without which there would be no modern literature

Abstract

Is it possible to produce a reflection about
ideology after the exhaustion of the interpretative
resources imposed by the Philosophy of
Suspicion? This essay answers affirmatively to
the former question. One assumes here that
the two tasks that distinguish the philosophical
enterprise, building of Ideals and demolition
of Idols, cannot exist independently of
each other. The Ideal and Idols are the heads
and tails of the same concept. What I am
going to analyze here is a falsification, an inversion,
a distortion that makes possible the
practices linked to them. The inversion, falsification,
distortion that I am going to analyze
here is linked to the ideal of literary autonomy,
essential to the meaning of the modern
work of art. The task that I have proposed to
myself: to analyze a distortion that instead of
being an obstacle to a practice is essential to
its function, places me before the problem of
ideology in a very singular perspective. What
I assert here has the following consequences:
the idol, the distorted image of something,
plays an essential role in its best performance.
Between the many perspectives that one can
use to study the myth of literary autonomy I
privilege the one that studies the different gestures—
rhetorical, semantic, prosodic— that
a work of art uses to detach itself from what
comes before and outside it. In this essay, I explore
the relationship between the work of art
and what comes outside and before it during
the classic and the modern times.