Writing Terror (Sorbonne-Nouvelle, Paris), call for papers
Jean Paulhan André Breton Maurice Blanchot
Fabula, Antoine Poisson, 4 mars 2023
Writing Terror, 20th-21st centuries, Call for Papers
Conference on January 22 and 23, 2024
Although he was one of its fervent critics, Paulhan is responsible for establishing the notion of "Terror" in literary theory in a lasting way, in its historical and political sense. By entitling the first and only written part of Les Fleurs de Tarbes "La Terreur dans les Lettres," he effectively sets up a homology between the revolutionary state of exception of 1793-1794 and the modern regime of literature, rejecting rhetorical legislation in the name of a permanent revolution of language.
If the formulation is new, Paulhan nevertheless draws on the older criticism of detractors of Romanticism who, from the 1830s onward, accused Hugo and the young Romantics of carrying out a literary "93" by declaring "war on rhetoric" ("Reponse a un acte d’accusation," 1856). Hugo turns this criticism around: not only does he embrace the full legacy of the French Revolution by redefining Terror as a necessary stage in the teleology of Progress, but he also asserts the necessity of a terrorist poetics, or poetic Terror, able to dismantle the classical edifice of genre and style hierarchies. For the poet who exclaims "I am that Danton! I am that Robespierre!," this is not merely metaphor but a true politics of literature: the Romantic revolution must be the continuation and completion of social Revolution, "1789 as much as 1793" (William Shakespeare, 1864).
It is nevertheless in the 20th century that Terror becomes a true aesthetic category, sometimes promoted by artisans of radical poetic and political revolution, sometimes denounced by critics of a tyranny of originality and literary innovation. On one side, Dada and the Surrealists, first of all, replay the decrees of Fructidor. Breton declares: "It would not be a bad thing to restore for the mind the laws of Terror" ("Caracteres de l’evolution moderne," 1922). The link between revolution in Letters and the complete transformation of existence, dreamed of by the avant-gardes, is made under the aegis of Robespierre, Saint-Just "the Divine executioner," and 93, whose radical action provides the model of a destructive experience of the limits of morality (death, sexuality, absence of God), logical thought, and ordinary language subject to conventions. Bataille, and still more Blanchot ("La litterature et le droit a la mort," 1949), perfectly summarize the situation: literature is eminently political and revolutionary precisely because it is Terror through letters, a pure event of free creation grounded in the putting to death of the world by language.
Yet on the other side, Paulhan denounces this linguistic purity as misology and as an impossible construction of communicational space. Likewise, after the war, Sartre as well as Camus regret having "grown up in Terror" and call for an end to the incommunicable. Literature must reconnect with humanity wounded by the other terror, that of the Reich and Collaboration; and it is therefore no surprise that in that generation Camus first gave his Oran novel the title La Terreur. During the second half of the 20th century, it would fall to the Nouveau Roman and later Tel Quel to propose a conciliatory solution between the terrorist logic of the literary avant-garde and the project of a human community, before the fall of the USSR and the collapse of teleological narratives invalidated conventional revolutionary folklore.
Still, Terror survives today as a "living metaphor," within writings engaged in 21st-century struggles. Thus, the political claims of feminism and postcolonialism take place first of all in representation and language. Likewise, within modern poetics, the defense of an "illegibility" of contemporary poetry (Vinclair, Prise de vers, 2019) seems a direct inheritance of what was once called "Terror in Letters."
This conference aims to reassess the category of Terror forged by Paulhan and to measure its relevance for understanding relations between poetics and politics in 20th- and 21st-century literature. We will examine the place and role of "terrorist folklore" in the poetico-political projects of 20th-century avant-gardes (the surrealists, who invoke figures of Terror, or Peguy wanting to "redo 93," among others). Does this iconography find resonances in contemporary literature? Or at least, can we conceive a literary memory of Terror, whose form varies in recent history, from Anatole France's Les Dieux ont soif to Eric Vuillard's 14 juillet? We will also question the conditions under which an aesthetic can appear terrorizing. Is it a matter of limit-motifs (death, sexuality, absolutes, fascism)? Or formal choices that undo conventions of meaning production? Or modes of action claimed both in the creation of works and their reception (feminist terror, decolonial terror, etc.)?
More generally, this conference seeks to better delineate the conception of Terror as literature's political horizon, and thereby perhaps to move beyond a persistent reading that still opposes terrorist poetry and democratic novel.
See calendar and submission conditions in the original article, which also provides an interesting indicative bibliography.