Reading Literature and the Political Ecology of Gestures in the Age of Semiocapitalism

International audienceGestures are central to our aesthetic experiences. This is not only true of choreography, theater, and music, but of literature as well. In the following pages, I will (somewhat presumptuously) attempt to reframe our perception of the last three hundred years of literary history by considering the experience of reading literature as a form of gestural impregnation. Within the broad context of what is now frequently referred to as " media archeology, " reading tales, short stories, novels, or plays appears as a complex form of immersion in fictional universes, leading the immersed subject to develop specific relational gestures—in a very similar manner to the way in which a Wii player is led to execute certain bodily gestures when interacting with the machine. I will first suggest that the type of relational gestures inculcated through literature over the past centuries should be analyzed in close connection with the development of political economy. I will then attempt to show how literary studies, as well as the humanities at large, deserve to be reframed in order to accommodate the softness of interpretive gestures against the hardness of machine protocols. In a brief last section, I will sketch some of the ways in which literary interpretation can inspire claims for new human rights within a broad political ecology of gestures. Because my argument is (ridiculously) wide and far-reaching, I will only be able to sketch it within the limits of this article—hence its rather dogmatic style, which will assert a series of quasidogmatic theses. In an issue devoted to the theme of reading, I will leave it to the reader to connect the dots—hoping that the resulting figure will be more convincing than the skeleton presented here only in its most massive features