What Do We Do with Words? Framing What Is at Stake in Dealing with Literature

Abstract

In this chapter we investigate how the tensions between literature and philosophy have been grounded on a fundamental dichotomy conceiving literature and philosophy as two different discontinuous intellectual enterprises. We argue that the main difference is not to be found between philosophy and literature but, on the one hand, literature, and, on the other, all theoretical discourses defining themselves as ‘philosophy’ or ‘literary theory’—and not as ‘literature’, and that, if there is something to be acknowledged as peculiar of literature, it is its capacity (1) to stage everything that philosophers and theorists have to explain; and (2) to escape any act of definition and of categorisation.