Planning the Plan: Around Works by
Édouard Levé
Thierry Tremblay
(University of Malta)
Abstract:
Drawing on Aristotle’s concepts of energeia, dunamis, and ergon, this article attempts
to articulate a typology of the different works described in Édouard Levé’s Œuvres
(2002 (French); 2014 (English)). This is carried out in the context of post-literary
literature, i.e. following an aesthetics driven by the dismantling of ‘qualities’,
understood as ‘accidents’, of literature’s essence (literature’s definition). It studies
how Levé’s work, and particularly his opus magnum Œuvres (Works), displays a series
of short descriptive texts that intend to remain in their potentiality, while, at the
same time, actualising this very potentiality (a potentiality ‘in act’, by an operation
triggered in the reader’s imagination). The question is therefore less the nature of
fiction or ‘what makes literature literature’ than ‘how does literature actualise its
negation’.
Keywords: Potentiality, literariness, representation, description, aesthetics, Levé.
CounterText 5.1 (2019): 19–32
DOI: 10.3366/count.2019.0149
© Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/count
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