(COL)LATERAL DAMAGES: LITERATURE AS A SPEECH ACT?

Abstract

As Juan Carlos Rodríguez points out in his most recent book (Para una teoría de la literatura (40 años de historia), Marcial Pons, Madrid-Barcelona- Buenos Aires-São Paulo, 443 págs.) dominant ideology secretes the notion of ‘object of study’ as having a series of sides, that is, those structuring the autonomous reality of the object, and thus the subject’s need to consider it from multiple perspectives. This single, overarching epistemology is, of course, rooted in the positivist/phenomenological problematic. And so is our present attempt to give an account of the historicity of both the debate and its object - namely, the fact that the subjective/ objective logic is indeed secreted from a historical conjuncture (the 19^th and 20^th century) in which the literal (i.e. non-allegorical) reading of the world has been finally established. Indeed, this unconscious (and radically new) logic appears within the ‘first bourgeois social formations’ of the 14^th and 15^th centuries. In this sense, the meaning of terms like those of ‘secularization’ and ‘laicism’ needs clarification, for what the latter is really transcribing is the need to suture the new secular contradiction: the transcendental/empirical dialectic - a normativity which is all-pervasive in the contemporary arts, where it secretes its own sanctioning notion: the idea of ‘authenticity’. Therefore, forcing ‘speech act’ theory (Austin and Searle) into describing/explaining the literary phenomena is just another attempt at giving an empirical account of that which in the secular world is experienced as the most transcendental -and supposedly free- mode of expression.