What do we mean by global France? Is it the presence of Carrefour shopping centers in every Asian city on the Pacific Rim, the global circulation of products of LVMH under the watchful eye of its CEO, Bernard Arnauld, or the presence of Total’s oil rigs planted off the shores of the former colonies of Africa? France is often dismissed in the American media for opposing “globalization,” a synonym in the minds of many a Frenchman, such as the farmer activist, José Bové, of the Americanization of the planet. Globalization is generally equated with quasi-instant electronic communication as well as with the circulation of commodities and the borderless flow of finance. However, as a result of decolonization as well as economic globalization, a much increased flow, not only of money also but of bodies, circulates all over the world. How much does all this effluence emanate from France in our global age, and where does it go?
I will address that question by arguing that in France, as in most Western and non-Western countries, worldwide electronic and economic networks and resulting population movements have had a lasting impact on the nation-state, subjectivity, and citizenship, as well as on French and francophone literature and culture in general. A “French” literature and culture—a somewhat mythic concept—that expresses the “essence” and the “soul” of the nation has given way to American-style media culture, and to diverse and transnational cultures that are produced in and from France.
We could easily begin by showing that what for the last century and a half came to be called “French national culture” has always been “in the plural,” the product of many encounters and intersections. Migrations among provinces, countries, and kingdoms existed in the Middle Ages; the advent of oceanic travel pushed borders away from Europe; the Sun-King watched tragedies inspired by Greek sources, and the great French novelists and philosophes of the Enlightenment were in dialogue with English writers and philosophers familiar with the New World. Even before decolonization, established French presses published—albeit selectively—Caribbean, North African, and African writers who were, as the Algerian writer Rachid Boudjedra reminded his audience during a recent talk, heavily inspired by surrealism but also by American literature, especially William Faulkner.1
In the 1960s, after a century of long and often violent efforts by the bourgeoisie to produce a homogeneous French nation, a self-enclosed entity defined by the illusion of a unified and unifying culture based on the exclusion of others, a number of writers, artists and theorists—many of whom, like Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Tzvetan Todorov, came from outside France—founded or developed literary journals that focused on the poetics of texts rather than on national literature and literary history. Among these journals were Tel Quel, Poétique, and Littérature. Hélène Cixous, one of the driving forces of Poétique, declared that writers and theorists from around the globe were in proximity with each other across genres as well as spatial and temporal boundaries through their writerly treatment of similar dilemmas such as the articulation of life and death. To a mentally and physically polluted country with lingering memories of colonialism and Vichy, they preferred literary spaces of resistance and invention. Like “beacons,” in the words of Hélène Cixous, these writers communicated with one another and used their common vigilance to fight against social and political injustices.
Indeed, since World War II but especially since the 1960s, space became a critical concept at the very moment when these writers and theorists felt compressed under the impact of technologies and of what was still thought to be the disciplinary bourgeois state. They remain critical of the administrative state as well as of the term nation, with its connoted emphasis on an always phantasmatic homogeneity and unity. Sensing changes taking place, and without always being able to fully articulate them, these writers and thinkers focus on poetics but also on a return to the everyday, away from monumental history. They emphasize everyday spatial practices that undermine bureaucratic authority: they consider official national literatures to be the handmaidens of an all-encompassing rational thought in the service of the state that permeates life and ultimately immobilizes it in a state of rigor mortis. In the parlance of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “striated” spaces that have lost their flexibility need to be made “smooth” and, so too, microspaces ought to be opened in the state’s macrospaces to make possible other ways of thinking.2
Critical attention to everyday spatial practices that function without regard to state-imposed administrative networks and indirectly question modernist strategies of industrial society that fostered colonialism are the subject of Henri Lefebvre’s Critique de la vie quotidienne (1947; Critique of Everyday Life, 1991), Révolution urbaine (1970; Urban Revolution, 2003) as well as La production de l’espace (1974; The Production of Space, 1991) and of Michel de Certeau’s Arts de faire 1: L’invention du quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life, 1984). It is also the domain of Jean-Luc Godard, a poetic and political filmmaker who, indulging in theoretical (Lefebvre) and literary (Faulkner) allusions, explored in Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her, 1966) the effects on people following the imposition of a spatial order and the creation of the first grands ensemble, massive suburban apartment complexes in the outskirts of Paris, built to relocate French workers from insalubrious conditions and to repatriate the pieds-noirs, the French Algerians who left North Africa after 1962. Godard shot his film at the Cite des 4000 of La Courneuve not far from the Aubervilliers train station through which tourists now shuttle without stopping, on their way to and from Roissy airport. One memorable sequence features a male and a female, facing each other in profile, their heads not “covered with straw” à la T. S. Eliot, but zipped up in two travelers’ bags, one (blue) bearing the Pan-Am logo of the globe and the other (red) the bold letters of Trans-World Airlines. Through this image and others, Godard asks: When not only the state but also a growing media-culture imposes icons of the globe upon inherited literary and cultural values, how can one reinvent and make more habitable the city-spaces in which they are shown?
Many texts and films of this period ask how to recover an existential territory—be it mental or physical—or, even more, how to open spaces that would defy an increasingly abstract system of signs born with the acceleration of technologies, engineered by the state and then by the ideology of “trans-world” consumerism. By way of their fictional and critical writings and films, Cixous, Lefebvre, Certeau, Godard, and others urge their readers and viewers to reappropriate space through language and new types of bodily practices. In La jeune née (1975; The Newly Born Woman, 1986), Cixous brackets a repressive and colonial-minded French state by espousing a series of combative texts foreign to the French national canon of (chauvinistic) “quality.” However, in a long dialogue with Catherine Clément at the end of the coauthored book, Cixous voices pessimism for the future in an era opening to marketing and consumerism:
There is, in a very generalized manner, a loss of voice in the world of writing, of literature, of creation. So that means that all the governments united, whether right or reformist, are saying: “You, if you still have eyes, shut them, and intellectuals of all countries, your mouths, and don’t start making analyses, and besides, it isn’t worth the trouble.” One sees the development of an international intrigue that is leading toward capitalist imbecilization in its most inhuman, most automatic, most formidable form. The selling out of all the countries, their handing themselves over the way France has done with the United States, is also done on condition of a complicitous silence.3
Slowly, there came a realization among these writers and critics that the bureaucratic state itself was transformed with the advent of American-style consumerism. Based on international finance, another type of economy restructured French society. It would reach an apogee under the impact of electronic technology and the global reach of the media, which Roland Barthes already demystified in some of his essays in Mythologies (1957; Mythologies 1972). What was perceived as the loss of “life” with the vanishing of traditional spaces and the emergence of a new social hierarchy are mockingly deplored in Jacques Tati’s films, among them Mon oncle (1958), which juxtaposes the lively scenes of the uncle with his friends at the local market and in the café where people sing and play music with the sterile existence of a family in the ultramodern house replete with the latest technological gadgets. In Playtime (1967), all that remains of traditional neighborhoods is a lone flower vendor who has become the object of photography by tourists in search of a lost everyday Paris. The city itself has mutated from a mass of five-story buildings under a steel-grey sky into a kaleidoscope of transparent glass buildings in which everyone is under electronic surveillance. The symbolic cityscapes from the Eiffel Tower to Montmartre are reduced to reflections in glass doors.
In her 1966 novel Les belles images, Simone de Beauvoir strongly denounces this new ordering of French society. An invasion of deceptive images about the ideality of the individual self threatens life itself. By way of the main protagonist, Laurence, a young advertisement specialist, Beauvoir shows not only how, through the ruse of advertisement, a new market culture tells everyone how to look and behave, but also how the prevalence of images, eradicating an existential dimension and a drive to life in people, turns them into zombies. Her husband, Jean-Charles, naively believes that technology will save the world. He is the epitome of the technocrat who is blind to the loss of existential dimensions. In his “tale of the sixties,” appropriately titled Les choses: Une histoire des années soixante (1965; Things: A Story of the Sixties, 1990) Georges Perec chose a different angle to explore the nascent society with its new rules for success. Jérôme and Sylvie, a couple of young market researchers, dream their lives away without taking the steps needed to achieve their ideal. They live in the bedazzling universe of advertisements and remain incapable of distinguishing illusion from reality. In general, an American-style consumerism, bathed in a growing culture of images, is felt to threaten the substance of what had been considered—perhaps because its imagination was anchored in black-and-white photographs of the pre-war years, of the kind seen in Marc Augé’s Paris des années 1930 (1998)—“traditional” French culture.
Arguing along inherited Cartesian lines, in Le système des objets (1967; System of Objects, 2005), Jean Baudrillard observed that consumerism transforms symbolic bourgeois spaces, the repressive sides of which had been the object of intense feminist scrutiny. When, with market culture, “interiority” and “depth” thought to be the personal space and warm hearth of the individual self give way to exteriority, a certain freedom to invent space follows. A previously vertical order becomes more horizontal, though new hierarchies based on money quickly reappear. Baudrillard will declare later that with what he calls the new “global tendency” introduced by a consumer-style economy, a return to the everyday was a dead end at a time when the aim of capital was to eradicate symbolic spaces and to establish in their place more functional counterparts.4
The perceived collapse of existential territories was indeed symptomatic less of the refinement of state control than of another, then as yet unnamable condition of global consumerism. In retrospect, it can be said that the intellectual movements questioning the ethos of the French state in the 1960s coincided with this very transformation. With globalization, which might actually be qualified as a second globalization, the first being that of the transatlantic encounters in the sixteenth and seventeenth century—and without counting that of communism, which tried to impose the same language everywhere—France underwent the same transformations as most other Western industrialized countries. Formed by the revolution of 1789 and the colonial enterprise in the following century, the French state in the 1960s witnessed a weakening at the hands of transnational companies and what Jean-François Lyotard in his Political Writings (1993) called the arrival of “big money.” France was soon called upon to deal with this reconfiguration and to protect its own citizens against a loss of rights at the very same time that it was summoned to address another major shift taking place through massive migrations from the country’s ex-colonies as well as from Eastern Europe, Asia, and other parts of the world. With globalization, migration, and the constitution of the European Union, France began to change to the point where, today, critics in the line of Etienne Balibar ask whether France is still recognizable as a separate country, or whether it is simply a border against the Southern Hemisphere. Balibar even goes so far as to ask, provocatively, whether not only France but also Europe itself is still recognizable as a continent, or whether it, too, has simply become a border.5
In this new context of technological acceleration, economic globalization, extensive population movements, and the progressive withering and transformation of the nation-state, what happens to French literature and culture? Leaving aside for the time being the question of consumerism, the media, or technology and focusing more on the effects of population movements on culture, we can ascertain that the unraveling of an earlier French “state-thought,” as Paul Virilio put it, with its classical ideals (and embodied in many literary histories grounded in positivism), which began in the 1960s with a new focus on literary and cultural spaces, is now complete. A post-Enlightenment and postrevolutionary-style universalism that, paradoxically, had led to often repressive politics of assimilation is no longer possible. Neither is a humanism that asserts the existence of a universal human condition. A national culture that from the immediate postwar years to the 1960s had rather unquestioningly assimilated in its canon the likes of Beckett, Camus, Ionesco, and Sarraute—even Cixous and Derrida—has come under renewed scrutiny. Beckett is now celebrated as the “greatest Irish writer,” while Camus’s L’étranger has been criticized for its transparent treatment of “man’s condition” that is blind to a colonial setting estranging the action from an ambiguous homeland; Cixous and Derrida, quite late in their careers, rediscovered their Algerian roots through their difficult relation to French language and literature.6 Over the last few decades, these very writers and theorists have gradually shifted their focus away not only from universal human dilemmas, but also from pure poetics, toward the exploration and reelaboration of their transnational ties. These ties, more and more numerous, open the French nation-state and its culture to the outside. They also transform them from the inside. In fact, they undo the very possibility of a binary division between inside and outside with the advent of a networked world.
However, although a global world may seem borderless and—many writers and intellectuals (such as Jacques Derrida in Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort (1997; On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, 2001) dream of a cosmopolis to come, people are still defined—and will be for some time—in relation to a nation-state to which they belong or in which they reside, or would like to. These new dilemmas create new vectors and tensions within the country’s borders that inflect the production of culture. The notion of “community,” heretofore dismissed as a prerevolutionary phenomenon, recently reappeared in republican France. Communities help produce what is far from a once ingrained ideal of a homogeneous national culture, and even from that of a world-culture that the media purveys in its news and advertising. They consist of people of diverse ethnic, religious, or even national origins, who often have ties that reach far beyond French borders.
Through these communities the very concept of the nation-state, bearing a renewed emphasis on subjects and citizens, is being further reassessed.7 Consequences are manifold: on one hand, the country’s borders, more porous than ever, enable easy passage for money and for certain people from the European Union and from elsewhere. On the other hand, new visible and invisible borders are erected inside the country in the form of racism and economic discrimination. In the French “state” as it is defined by republican and administrative language, a sudden obsession with things “national” comes forward at the very moment when the term “nation” transmogrifies under the impact of migration. In addition, since 2001, outer borders are becoming tighter again amidst threats and phantasms of terrorism.
Of importance for many writers and theorists is an active decoupling of the nation (and the ideal of blood and soil) from the state (human and citizens’ rights) and a transformation of the latter so that it reflects the changes taking place. Between the new communities, with their increasingly numerous transnational links, that make up the contemporary French state, no simple continuity is discernible. In 1985, Michel de Certeau, echoed more recently by Etienne Balibar, made it clear in a couple of essays on ethnic encounters published posthumously in English in a volume entitled The Capture of Speech (1997), that some codes such as fashion, food, and music travel easily.8 Their mobility has led to a hybridization of cultures, although, as Certeau cautioned, the latter is often but a thinly disguised “hybrid monism,” that is, a unified, dominant, discourse exploited by the media that only simulates diversity. Other codes, however, especially those pertaining to symbolic issues such as sexuality or gender, marriage, life, and death are more resistant: in spite of their erosion through media culture, these issues bear unconscious residues that have not entirely disappeared. They are at the very core of much contemporary literature, theory, and film produced in and from France.
Writers from these various communities residing in France may have recourse to French in order to criticize repressive aspects of their own culture; for example, Rachid Boudjedra’s La répudiation (1969; The Repudiation, 1995) or more recently, Nina Bouraoui’s La voyeuse interdite (1991; Forbidden Vision, 1998) deal critically with questions of sexuality, women, and gender in Muslim communities. More numerous are those who, from their communities in France, residing as French citizens from Algeria or Senegal rather than from Provence or Burgundy, write about problems confronting French society. Balibar calls these voices “France’s alterity.” It is, perhaps, not so much a question of “alterity,” a term that is too binary for a networked world that puts in questions such a division, but of a culture produced in the contemporary state of France that is more and more splintered from the idea of nation. France today consists of various communities. It is the writers’ responsibility to produce fictions that are active translations and ongoing negotiations between them.
In his studies of “classical” France, Michel Foucault sensitized his readers in the 1960s and 1970s to the power of “taxonomy.” While texts written in the French idiom in other countries of the world—often those of France’s ex-colonies, from the Maghreb or sub-Saharan Africa—can be classified as Francophone texts, although even this appellation has been contested recently, for example, in the much-discussed manifesto on “Littérature-monde,” those produced in France are by definition part of the country’s culture.9 An attempt to classify them separately marks a form of voluntary or involuntary exclusion. To separate texts written from “other” communities within France as “francophone”—as it is often done in American curricula—is to refuse to acknowledge that French “national” culture as it had been envisioned in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has de facto ceased to exist. In other words, literature produced by these communities cannot be treated as distinct from a “French literature and culture.” Rather, we are faced with a reconfigured and reassessed “French” literature and culture produced in France from different communities by a plurality of voices. These voices may or may not be in dialogue with others outside the country or have transnational ties. They are hybrid, but also plural and of diverse tenor. They are, in any case, far from homogeneous.10
In such a climate it is no longer possible to heed a single dominant voice such as that of Jean-Paul Sartre, who may have well been the last heroic and indeed “universal” French intellectual. In the global and multipolar world, what Bruno Latour derides repeatedly as “cargo dreams of transcendence,” and that conservative thinkers like Luc Ferry in Une vie réussie (2002; What Is the Good Life? 2005) are so intent on reviving, are no longer possible.11 A new universalism focuses less on the metaphysical problems experienced by all of humanity (among them Sartre’s and Camus’s ideas of transcendence) than on the existence of conflicting, even competing, universalities in the French state, in the European Union, and in world-space. Even if problems today are similar around the world, geography, history, and geopolitical contexts give them a particular profile, and an angle on culture or cultures that are both local and transnational.
If writers and theorists of the 1960s first wrote against state-sanctioned spatial compression by mobilizing literary spaces (espaces littéraires) or by using tactics to prevent the disappearance of everyday spaces under what they perceived to be technologies in the service of the state, those writing at the cusp of the twenty-first century shift their emphasis to engage in an urgent elaboration of what Balibar calls un nouvel espace, a new space, both mental and physical, in which borders are undone and new articulations created among communities and even countries. In an ongoing effort to translate cultural specificities, always with a remainder, these writers actively engage in the construction of new spaces not only in France but also in Europe and in the world at large. Unlike their Anglo-Saxon counterparts that are more prone to mediation, writers from migrant communities in France have inherited a long-standing republican militant tradition that they are turning to productive ends.
We can ask at this point whether traditional cultural means, such as literature and film, are even capable of dealing with problems of a magnitude that face France and the world today. Current social, economic, and political dilemmas that cannot be separated from globalization are quite different not only from those Sartre had outlined, but also from those that preoccupied the founders of Tel Quel, Poétique and Littérature who undid national literature in the service of bureaucratic machinery (including that of the university, the site of intense interrogation and of active political ferment) by means of international poetics or even identification with those who sought to combat the state by way of spatial practices. Today, from their communities, contemporary writers are dealing with social and political problems that are the result of decolonization and economic globalization, and no less with consumer culture and increasingly the fortunes of literature and culture in the context of electronic communication. It may be symptomatic that no poet or literary figure in French has emerged in the early years of the millennium to lead the charge of an intellectual brigade, as had either the great existentialists in the 1940s or the avant-garde and the poststructuralist elite of the 1960s and 1970s. Writers and intellectuals have been miniaturized, as Bruno Latour puts it jokingly.12 Their books are made available on easily reproducible compact disks. In a global context where center and periphery are obsolete points of reference, they circulate in networks that may or may not intersect with one another. Cultural activity gets dispersed in smaller units. How to reappropriate vanishing existential territories becomes less important than how to live and move diversely in these multiple networks. Less prone to hold on to universal belletristic ideals, these new spaces are more directly politicized. They aim creative energies toward a reshaping of inner and outer borders, whether mental or concrete under mounting global pressures.
For this purpose, it can be said that genres themselves have been hybridized. Faced with acceleration through technologies and commercialization of much literature and film, with the production of media intellectuals and writers, the critical essay of limited circulation, often in dialogue form, has taken on renewed importance as have written or filmic documentaries and a certain militant theater that deals with current political issues. Commentaries and theories of shorter half-life replace the more ambitious—and from its onset, always already unfinished—novelistic project of Sartre’s Les chemins de la liberté (The Roads to Freedom, 1945–49) but also those of the avant-garde literature and “high theory” of the 1970s. Contemporary critical essays of ephemeral and temporary facture ask, in Balibar’s terms, “burning questions” in new and complex ways. They are written from what the philosopher calls lieux de fiction (sites of fiction). They are not only literary intentions but also constructions based on knowledge and experience that include an unconscious. They produce a real that always contains a fictional dimension.
At stake in these essays is the construction of common spaces. Written by those who live or have lived in France, they include Félix Guattari’s Les trois écologies (1989; The Three Ecologies, 2000); Gilles Deleuze’s Pourparlers (1990; Negotiations, 1995); Jacques Derrida’s On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (2001); and Bruno Latour’s essay, written in English, The War of the Worlds: What About Peace (2002). All these writers and theorists produce their “fictional spaces” that concern problems of the nation-state, subjectivity, citizenship, the media, and marketing, as well as what it means to exist in a multipolar national and world-space and how to live along a cutting political edge. Others, such as Azouz Begag’s L’immigré et sa ville (1984; The Immigrant and His City), Ecarts d’identité (1990; Identity Gaps), and Quartiers sensibles (1994; Sensitive Neighborhoods), are written from immigrant communities. Refusing racist reductions of ethnicity, Begag fights to give voice to individual immigrants and to bring their experience of the city and the country to the eyes and ears of a sympathetic public. Still other texts are by political refugees and exiles from the former colonies, emigrants writing about their host country or their own country and its cultures from afar. Assia Djébar, an Algerian writer writing in French who now resides in the United States, weaves different writerly voices in her narrative webbings such as Le blanc de l’Algérie (1995; The Algerian White, 2002) in order to denounce current social and political injustices in Algeria and negotiate new, less violent ways of being in common. All these writers express similar cultural problems from different angles; and by way of their critical negotiations, they create an ever-changing “French” culture.
Such is also the recent attempt of what we can call “docu-fictions.” We can think of François Maspéro and Anaik Frantz, a writer and a photographer, who, in their documentary fiction, Roissy-Express (1990; Roissy Express: A Journey in the Suburbs of Paris, 1994), try to give a voice and a face to the many humans making up the heterogeneous communities that compose France today by stopping at the various train stations between Paris and Roissy, such as Aubervilliers. Like Certeau’s practitioners of everyday life, while Maspéro and Frantz walk, talk, and let others speak and even write their poems. The distance between these “docu-fictions” and the filmic and textual narratives of the 1960s can be seen when juxtaposing Godard’s Two or Three Things, magisterial in retrospect, with a little-known documentary film by Jean-Patrick Lebel, Notes pour Débussy, Lettre ouverte à Jean-Luc Godard (1994; Notes for Debussy, Open Letter to Jean-Luc Godard). Lebel—who appeared in Godard’s 1966 film as Bouvard, a Flaubertian character mindlessly reciting titles of piles of videos—challenges what he perceives as the Swiss filmmaker’s univocality in his filming of the grands-ensemble. In his own fictionalized documentary, Lebel revisits the same building, ironically bearing a name from classical culture, the Débussy of the 4000 in La Courneuve.
Contrary to Godard, in a style that is more than cinema vérité or simple witnessing, Lebel invites the inhabitants of different communities from the housing estates to produce their own narratives. By enabling the telling of their stories and the inventing of new ones, Lebel helps the residents engage in an act of resistance and of creation. Residents participate through word and deed in the construction of a new French space, the nouvel espace that Etienne Balibar and others argue for in their writings, which the collective creation of a colored wall mosaic at the end of the film makes clear. The pieces of the mosaic are like pixels of digital photography that, contrary to its analog counterpart that reproduces a preexisting real, make possible an ongoing composing and recomposing of images.13 With a proliferation and interweaving of voices with no outside, critics, filmmakers, and writers put themselves on stage. They become one voice among many. They are no longer interpreters of an object but mediators. They pull in, but they do not push back.14
We could include here other fictionalized documentaries, such as Mathieu Kassovitz’s film La haine (Hate, 1995), which uses people from a neighborhood in an effort to give voice and a face to its inhabitants. Kassovitz’s published script that led to the film, entitled Jusqu’ici tout va bien (Until Now, Everything Is All Right, 1995) contains photographs by Gilles Favier. The photographer, however, does not reproduce the images of the film. By choosing different images, he in turn invents “a new documentary fiction that questions the double reality of life in the banlieue and the making of a film.”15 Speaking about the photographs taken during the shooting of the film, Favier adds that the photographs have no captions. They invent in the space of the book yet another fiction in dialogue with that of the film itself. The documentary aspect is also used by Abdellatif Kechiche’s L’esquive (Games of Love and Chance, 2003), a film that resurrects a classic play of the ancien régime, Marivaux’s Le jeu de l’amour et du hasard (The Game of Love and Chance, 1730), which gains new significance when performed by young adolescents in the banlieue. Even more so, one could include Laurent Cantet’s Entre les murs (The Class, 2007) in which a heterogeneous class from the banlieue produces its own film. Entre les murs won the Palme d’Or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, and the whole class was on hand to receive the prize along with the director.
The process of putting oneself on stage, of speaking with and of letting others speak as well as a renewed emphasis on translation and negotiations, also leads to the resurgence of a certain militant theater. Often communally created, with a plurality of voices, this collective theater replaces the classical stage with another space that frequently includes the public. Hélène Cixous impugns ancient but current social injustices in France in La ville parjure (1995; The Perjured City, 2004), a play based on the scandal of tainted blood in which HIV-infected blood was used in transfusions to hemophiliacs. In Tambours sur la digue (1999; Drums on the Dam, 2004), she focuses on ecological problems—of nature and habitability—that loom large in Asia with the impending flooding of the Three Gorges of the Yangtze River in China and other rivers in Vietnam and Korea. At the limit, we could also include Julia Kristeva’s Thérèse, mon amour (2008; Teresa, My Love), a baroque 750-page “tale” of Teresa of Avila that travels across centuries and genres, written at the intersection of biography, autobiography, epistolary exchanges, philosophy, theatrical dialogue, musical annotations of opera, and photographs of sculptures and paintings. The fictionalized history consists of a braiding of multiple voices with no return to a world outside of itself.
These writers, filmmakers, theorists, and philosophers address dilemmas that are local as well as transnational and even global. They cannot be subsumed under the banner of an earlier universal humanism or of a national republic of letters. They recognize that the world consists of different, even conflicting, universalities that all make up, and redefine contemporary “French culture.” Distinct from francité, this new “Frenchness,” if still we want to call it that, is based on contingencies and on ongoing transformations rather than on timeless values.
Aware of elaborating new ways of “being in common” in a densely populated country and world, these writers and artists are working in and from different networks. Bending genres and crossing disciplines, they reevaluate and reelaborate the tradition of French universalism. In addition to the movements of people, they are keenly aware of the encroachment of economic globalization with the power of the media, and of what becomes of the world implemented by electronic technologies. Far-reaching consequences affect the nation-state, along with traditional notions of politics and culture. Today, as Jacques Derrida and many others have argued, humans leave the world of print culture for that of information and electronic technologies. In an interview with Paul Virilio, Friedrich Kittler responds to his French interlocutor, who laments “the death of humankind” with the advent of teletechnologies, by pointing out quite simply and tersely that it is not so much the death of humans as of culture and of politics “as we know them.”16
What, in such a climate, will remain not only of national literature but of literature tout court? Whither literature—a term coined in 1802 by Madame de Staël—when we change our rapport with the age of print culture? What will remain of film, a medium of the twentieth century, in the twenty-first century? Will they simply be classified in the annals of a blogosphere and a myriad number of Facebooks and YouTubes? What of theory? To put it in a less extreme way, in the parlance of Deleuze and Guattari, can literature and film continue to resist and create, to occupy the street rather than as, in the age of state-thought, hold the fort? For our purposes, the question can be rephrased: can a reassessed French “literature” and culture continue to open spaces from which to rephrase “burning questions” or, simply, to think otherwise? Jacques Rancière, a writer always keen on meditating on the relation between politics and aesthetics and on establishing la part des sans-part (the portion of the portionless), ponders the question in relation to art. In a March 2007 interview in Artforum, he asks, “What art can do?” We can adapt his question by changing Sartre’s earlier “Qu’est-ce que la littérature?” (What is literature?) to “Que peut la littérature?” (What can literature do?) What is its power, its puissance? With the advent of media culture and the digital age, can we still continue to believe in the power of literature—and not only in literature as fantasy?
We have seen how the scope of French literature has been extended to include various and diverse cultural “fictions.” We can mobilize for our purposes, with Amartya Sen as quoted by Balibar, to say that these new writerly, filmic, or theoretical “fictions” open new spaces by expanding the readers’ and viewers’ capacity as subjects and as citizens. We can also go back to a question we had raised earlier: in an age ruled by technology and globalization, are these fictions simply little white pebbles in a deep sea of technology, as Certeau put it a few decades ago? In answer, let us turn once more Gilles Deleuze, who insists on the necessity and importance of opening vacuoles or microspaces in the everyday that will enable us to think otherwise. It is not a question of going back to a vanishing everyday of yesteryear or of seeking refuge in rarefied literary spaces as in the 1960s, but rather of inventing other ways of being in common from today’s conditions: conditions that include large cities, migrant populations, and technologies that demarcate generations of populations from one another.
We can invoke, too, Hélène Cixous, who reshaped Beckett’s dying words in her book Le voisin de zéro: Sam Beckett (2007; The Neighbor of Zero: Sam Beckett). When asked what he had learned from life, the writer whom Deleuze called “the greatest Irish poet,” answered: “Precious little.” This is, perhaps, what remains of literature, film, and theory: precious little. It may be little, but it is precious. It is still capable of opening spaces and of enabling travel, as well as translation and negotiation between communities, more and more, with the help of technologies, in an effort to create common national, European, and world spaces. It neither legitimates a national culture, nor does it signify universal, transcendental values.17 Rather, it calls into question (as Jacques Rancière would have it in a slightly different context), “divisions and boundaries, high culture and popular culture, representation and the unrepresentable, the modern and the postmodern, to point to the configurations of possibilities, a perception of the multiple alterations and displacements that make up forms of political subjectivization and artistic invention.”18 Literature, theory, and film, if we want to keep these distinctions, undo the boundaries defining heretofore certain practices. In their own fashion, they do away with earlier aesthetic constraints and make possible the opening of passages and the creation of new meanings that are far from the reductive constructions of the dominant media as well as from the earlier disciplinary boundaries and homogenizing effects of national languages and literatures.
Like other fields, such as anthropology and sociology, literature is being hybridized. It comes in smaller texts or casings and in magnetic or digital coding, and rarely as pure works of art or writing. It comes often in mixed genres, or as ephemera: critical essays, documentaries, and CD-ROMs or web projects.19 It circulates along electronic networks. Produced by heterogeneous groups of writers, theorists, and filmmakers from France, from its ex-colonies, and from other European or other countries, “French literature” is received less as a national product than as an array of novel productions. These hybrid forms explode a former narrowly defined national meaning. They open new spaces for novel connections and thus, in their own ways, realize things “French” that have now become truly global.
Notes
1. Rachid Boudjedra, lecture delivered in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, April 2007.
2. Throughout their work, but especially in A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari distinguish between “smooth spaces,” that is, spaces such as the sea in which a maximum of tracings can be made in all directions and “striated spaces” that have lost their flexibility and their possibility for creative resistance. The two spaces never exist in a pure state. Capitalism also smoothes space, such as a city space, by making it homogeneous with the help of media and advertisment.
3. Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, “Exchange,” in The Newly Born Woman, 160.
4. Jean Baudrillard, “L’Amérique ou la pensée de l’espace,” in Citoyenneté et urbanité, 156.
5. Etienne Balibar, Droit de cité, 6.
6. Gilles Deleuze, “The Greatest Irish Writer,” in Essays Critical and Clinical. For a reevaluation of Camus, see Lawrence Kritzman, ed., Camus 2000.
7. For a discussion of the relation between the subject and the citizen, see Eduardo Cardona, Jean-Luc Nancy, et al. Who Comes After the Subject?
8. Balibar, Droit de cité; Michel de Certeau, The Capture of Speech, 160.
9. “Pour une ‘littérature-monde’ en français, Le manifeste de quarante-quatre écrivains en faveur d’une langue française qui serait ‘libérée de son pacte exclusif avec la nation’” (Le Monde, March 16, 2007).
10. The status of culture in overseas departments, especially Guadeloupe, Martinique, and French Guiana, technically part of France and the European Union, is similar though not identical to that in metropolitan France. See chapter 28 in this volume.
11. Bruno Latour, Paris, ville invisible; Luc Ferry, Une vie réussie.
13. The image created with the pixels is that of a tennis player hitting a ball out of the court and into the sky. We may recall that several top French tennis players are descendents of immigrants who, for the most part, grew up in the banlieue (Yannick Noah, Gaël Monfils, and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, among others). The scene might also be an answer to Godard, who, in his film, Soigne ta droite (Keep Up Your Right, 1985), declares repeatedly and nostalgically that tennis has lost its sophisticated appeal.
14. Patricia Zimmermann, “Eco-Publics,” From Earth Art to Eco Art, Cornell University, October 17–18, 2008.
15. Christian Caujolle, “Postface,” in Mathieu Kassovitz and Gilles Favier, Jusqu’ici tout va bien, 194.
16. Paul Virilio and Friedrich Kittler in John Armitage, ed., Virilio Live.
17. Luc Ferry in What Is the Good Life? appeals to a world culture based on timeless, transcendental values in an effort to eliminate what is the very core of much contemporary French literature, that is, its vibrant politics.
18. Jacques Rancière, “Interview with Fulvia Carnevale,” 6.
