Pierre Macherey and the Literary Philosophy

The aim of this paper is to elucidate the problematic of literary philosophy which is central to the later literary theory of Pierre Macherey. The literary philosophy has not been widely recognized in comparison with his early theory of literary production. It deserves, however, more critical attention, in so far as it transforms the latter into more dynamic conception of literary (re) production. The literary philosophy is neither an attempt to extract the philosophical themes from the literary works (didactical scheme) nor to evaluate the literature as the holy place in which the Truth is to be revealed (hermeneutical scheme). Rather, it seeks to explicate the nature of the speculative power of literature which is unfolded through its forms, and to explain how this power can show the blindness of philosophy to itself. Macherey finds an examplary case of literary philosophy in Foucaults little known Raymond Roussel. The literary philosophy considers literary texts in terms of reproduction: literary texts as the subjectivity which is another name for the deconstructing, splitting, and unpredictable modifying power of literature and as the network of interconnections of the doubles that are both all the same and different between themselves which are inscribed in the process of the infinte repetitions. The literary thing, thus, is placed between the sublime and the shabbiness. It is the sublime as shabbiness