Writing involves risks--the risk that one will be misunderstood,
the risk of being persecuted, the risks of being made a champion
for causes in which one does not believe, this risk of
inadvertently supporting a reader's prejudices, to name a few. In
trying to give expression to what is true, the writer must "clear a
passage within the agitated world of passions," an undertaking that
always to some extent fails: writers are never the master of their
own speech.
In "Writing: The Political Test, "France's leading political
philosopher, Claude Lefort, illuminates the process by which
writers negotiate difficult path to free themselves from the
ideological and contextual traps that would doom their attempts to
articulate a new vision. Lefort examines writers whose works
provide special insights into this problem of risk, both literary
artists and political philosophers. Among them are Salman Rushdie,
Sade, Tocqueville, m Machiavelli, Leo Strauss, Orwell, Kant,
Robespierre, Guizot, and Pierre Clastres. In Tocqueville, for
example, Lefort finds that the author's improvisatory and
open-ended expression represents the character of the democratic
experience. Orwell's work on totalitarianism shows up the
totalitarian subject's complicity in this political regime. And
Rushdie is remarkable for his solid attack on relativism. With the
character and fate of the political forms of modernity, democracy,
and totalitarianism a central theme, Lefort concludes with some
reflections on the collapse of the Soviet Union.
This intriguing and accessible exploration of literature's
political aspects and political philosophy's literary ones will be
welcomed by those who have been stymied by current efforts to
bridge these two fields. Taken together, the essays in this volume
also stand as an intellectual autobiography of Lefort, making it an
excellent introduction to his work for less experience students of
political theory or philosophy.
General
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