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10 | 2010
Penser la fiction

Thinking about fiction
Edited by Claudio Majolino

From Plato’s invented myths to the philosophical fables of Leibniz; from Husserl’s Land of the Centaurs to Putnam’s Twin Earth; from the Hobbesian account of the state of nature to the little novels that dot the beautiful pages of Being and Nothingness—there are many examples of what one might call the discreet yet inevitable character of philosophical fictions. Alternately employed to illustrate philosophical theses in a particularly salient way, to construct arguments ad absurdum, to create paradoxes or furnish counterexamples, or even to test and build frameworks for using new concepts, fiction appears to be omnipresent. It seems above all to be inscribed in philosophical discourse—enshrined in heuristic devices or argumentative models that have forever been recognized as both legitimate and efficient. And sometimes (as in Husserl’s case, as studied by P. Cassou-Noguès) it does more than this: it becomes a mode of givenness in its own right—the mode of givenness of the possible.

But the philosopher knows full well that fiction also lives other lives, autonomously, outside of philosophy—lives where it is subject to other constraints and produces other effects. Obviously there is literary fiction: a laboratory of the possible, to be sure, where mimesis rules supreme, but also (as F. Lavocat’s study shows) of the impossible, where one speaks of things that don’t exist and sometimes even of things that could never in any way exist. The movement is far from being unilateral. If philosophy thinks to parasitize fiction, literature knows to render fiction its due.

Then there is ordinary fiction: that of criticism, discourse, and experience. Neither employed in the framework of philosophical discourse, nor created by a text writer’s language effects, fiction in this case is nothing but the object of reference, mental or linguistic, for a whole range of ordinary practices and experiences. What does one speak of when one speaks of Sherlock Holmes? Is it Emma Bovary that I imagine when, closing my eyes, I think I see a young woman with white skin and long black hair, dying on a bed? What makes not only the literary critic’s statements true, but those of the naive critics we all become when we speak of Sherlock Holmes or Emma Bovary, thinking we refer not to real individuals but to “fictional characters”?

Whether a psychological-intentional or semantic-linguistic framework, fictions in this new life are what we find at the other end of our words and thoughts, of our affects and our acts of imagination. “Fictions” is thus the name we give to such characters of whom we can say, without contradiction (although at the cost of a certain number of restrictions, as explored in A. Thomasson’s article) that they don’t exist, but that they are, in a certain way, indeed something. Hence the importance of traditional studies devoted to fictions from the point of view of intentional and semantic reference, sustained but also radically called into question by the contributions of J. Woods/J. Isenberg and M. Fontaine/S. Rahman.

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