Jean Jacques Lecercle

In this article, I will argue that, far from trying to prove or actualize Stephen's exceptional status, Joyce's narrative in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man focuses instead on the process which this character undergoes, his intimate and complex drive to “except himself” from those around him, and the challenges which he faces in his endeavour. Through this progression, Joyce delineates a specific dialectics between the individuals and the powers that surround them, which ties in with his conceptions of literary authority as a whole. Against the worshippers of the Artist and the Author as a demiurgic character, he offers up a figure of elusiveness, always caught in a productive dialectics between the desire for transcendence and the irreducible multiplicity of common experience.

"Combined Development, Not Digital Divide" won the 2012 James L. Kinneavy Award for being the most outstanding article published in JAC. In this article, I argue that theorists should write about the uneven and combined development of social-linguistic production because, in so doing, they will advance beyond the false problem of the digital divide, and into the Marxist realm of social-linguistic combined development and emergent theory.

The novels of James Joyce echo with voices of authority. From Father Arnall’s sermon overwhelming the narration in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to the exhaustive catechism in the “Ithaca” episode of Ulysses, rhetoric and narrative devices direct the reader’s attention, framing scenes and questions which they seem to answer unfailingly. This has led some critics to construe a Joycean author-figure, like Lee Oser’s “mature Stephen,” directly interpellating the reader. However, upon closer inspection, this model reveals its permeability. Though they seem omniscient, the narrative voices leave parts of the world of Ulysses outside of their ken: for instance, when they depict Bloom standing in front of his door, having forgotten his key, he uses a “subterfuge” to enter, passing through a hitherto unmentioned window. Likewise, intertexts, wordplays and untold emotions teem at the margins, multiplying the possibilities for new interpretations, and highlighting the limits of explicit narrative directions. Within the Daedalian maze of Ulysses, authorial figures reveal the ambivalence of their interpellations. For instance, in the turmoil of Dublin’s night-town, Elijah’s prophecies dissolve in the laughter of a casino-croupier calling “faites vos jeux,” which resounds as an invitation to play with summons and authorities. Rather than accepting the addresses, I will argue that Joycean narratives, through laughter, ambivalence and undecidability, invite us to “counter-interpellate” them, in the words of Jean-Jacques Lecercle, that is to adopt other roles than that of addressee, and reshape their meaning. Following Jean-Michel Rabaté, I will focus on one such potential role for the readers: that of post-boys and girls, deciphering addresses as we roam through the text. Instead of being caught in the web of authoritative discourses, we can re-contextualize them, uncover their origins and subvert their trajectory. As such, though the rhetoric of the novel may be already written, we may choose how – and where! – to take it.

Jean-Jacques Lecercle‟s Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature is an exploration of the thought of French philosophers Alain Badiou (1937- present) and Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) from the perspective of their engagements with literature. In terms of its systematic treatment this book is the first of its kind, ambitious in both content and scope. Given its comprehensive nature, however, a full explication is beyond that allowed by the format of a review. I would like simply to summarize its major points, as well as what I perceive to be some of its shortcomings.

Lecercle‟s introduction begins as follows: “Tell me which literary texts you read and how you read them and I shall tell you what kind of philosopher you are and how important your philosophical contribution is” (1). One would expect Lecercle to proceed by examining the literary works Badiou and Deleuze read, the ways they do so, and assessing the importance of their philosophical contributions on this basis, as well as further arguing for and supporting this claim. He does not. Instead he makes three more claims: 1. Badiou and Deleuze are the two most important contemporary philosophers. 2. They form a unity, a unity in opposition, a “non-relation” that he describes in chapter one as one of “disjunctive synthesis.” 3. The best way to enter this non-relation is through their readings of literature since, first, literature plays a crucial role in their respective philosophies and, second, the ways their texts are written is important. Lecercle proposes treating Badiou and Deleuze as poets, examining how their texts work.

L’esthétique du jeu dans les Alice de Lewis Carroll propose de relire Les Aventures d’Alice au pays des merveilles et De l’autre côté du miroir, deux classiques de la littérature britannique du XIXe siècle, au prisme du jeu. L’analyse des jeux et jouets, jeux de mots et de langage, jeux narratifs et intertextuels, que propose Virginie Iché met en évidence la tension fondatrice entre liberté et règles qui caractérise les Alice, et, au delà, le processus de subjectivation qui traverse ces œuvres. Il s’avère ainsi que la démultiplication de dispositifs ludiques permet paradoxalement et à la fois de circonscrire l’activité du lecteur en lui proposant un modèle contraignant et de l’amener à se constituer en sujet-jouant qui contre-interpelle le texte carrollien. Les Alice constituent à ce titre un exemple prototypique de littérature ludique, qui non seulement place le jeu au cœur de son principe d’écriture, mais entraîne un lecteur capable de le recevoir. Dès lors, cet ouvrage vient aussi expliquer l’étonnante plasticité de l’œuvre carrollienne, sa vivacité et sa capacité à susciter toujours plus d’interprétations-interpellations 150 ans après sa première publication.

« L’éclatant succès de l’entreprise de Virginie Iché […] est que, partant d’une analyse minutieuse du texte carrollien, elle nous propose […] une théorie de la littérature comme mise en scène du processus par lequel les individus, fictionnels ou empiriques – tous les individus, dit Althusser – deviennent des sujets. » Jean-Jacques Lecercle

From Michel Picard’s La lecture comme jeu to Umberto Eco’s model of the “game of chess”, reading has often been compared to a kind of game. Games serve as a useful template of interaction, highlighting both the exterior set of rules governing an activity, and the agency that these rules leave to the individual. Yet games are also a constitutive human activity, with myriads of variants, from the free play of children to the gambler’s thrill to the highly ritualized sets of actions and reactions seen in martial arts or chess. This article proposes to review classical and contemporary theories of reading based on their specific use of the metaphor of reading as a game. It first presents the structuralist and phenomenological approaches, which tend to define reading as a performance based on pre-established rules, like a game of chess. It then delves into theories that instead choose to highlight the incalculable aspect of every new reading, the possibility for the reader to go off the beaten path. These tend to see reading more as a game of chance than a game of chess. This does not mean, however, that they construe reading as licentious: gambles involve stakes. Theories like Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s Marxist pragmatics are most specific in explaining what the reader is actually committing to. The stance we take, our interaction with texts as “interpellations”, are part and parcel of our lives as social and political beings. They are the products of a certain context, but they may in turn influence or call into question the very structures that make them possible. This is why this article suggests reading be examined through the notion of agonistics. Taking up the ancient Greek word “agôn”, which implies that games are forms of trial made to reveal something of the player’s nature, the agonistics of reading posits that reading must not be seen as an isolated phenomenon. On the contrary, the challenge that texts pose, to confront them or to accept them, is fundamental in the construction of our identity as readers and as human beings. This dialectics of self-revelation and self-construction, through the interaction with texts, is the often unspoken yet decisive game that every reader plays.

In Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf exposes a bleak and chilling vision of the police. Bulge, an actor disguised as a policeman, presents his work as a ‘whole-time, white man’s job’ supervising the toil and suffering of the oppressed. The violence of this statement begs the question: what was Woolf’s own attitude towards the police? In this respect, it is possible to find a certain continuity in her fiction. Although they mainly appear as banal, sometimes reassuring, background presences, policemen are also keepers of the social order. Their actions are shown to buttress ideological forces, especially those of patriarchy and Empire. However, this paper argues that Woolf’s understanding of the role of the police in relation with these powers evolved throughout her works – from a mere analogy in Jacob’s Room, to a much more concrete system of rituals and interpellations, resembling those theorised by Louis Althusser and Jean-Jacques Lecercle. Furthermore, this change in style accompanied a change in stance: as she realised the extent of ideological power on individuals, Woolf’s notion of resistance also shifted, from a focus on wandering and personal evasion to a more communal and political approach, which crystallised in a form of artistic ‘counterinterpellation’.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock offre à son lecteur une forme de défi pragmatique : comprendre qui, ou ce qui, parle. Car derrière le foisonnement de marques indiquant des prises de parole autoritaires, The Love Song décrit un personnage effectivement incapable d'assumer l'acte de parler. Prufrock veut s'exprimer, atteindre une interlocutrice par la force des mots. Mais il se heurte à la peur d'une « contre-interpellation » (“The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase”). Confronté à l'incompréhension, à la possibilité d'être caricaturé (“how his arms and legs are thin!”) ou réduit à l'absurde (“Almost, at times, the Fool”), il semble paralysé. Et pourtant sa voix résonne dans l'espace du poème.
Incapable de se risquer à prononcer une seule parole, Prufrock choisit d'en faire jouer plusieurs, de les animer dans l'espace du non-dit et de l'hypothétique. Les incises, les digressions, les élans soudains qui dans l'énonciation seraient signes de faiblesse deviennent alors les ressorts d'un jeu poétique résolument moderne. Ils redéfinissent en particulier la situation de réception du poème : à la parole proférée et autoritaire de la poésie classique, The Love Song oppose une parole élusive, un jeu de pistes face auquel la lecture doit se construire par ses propres choix. La parole poétique est narrativisée, départie de son aura d'inspiration météorique et ramenée à la prolifération muette d'où elle surgit vraiment.