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6 | 2006
Science et littérature

Science and literature

It is tempting to oppose science and literature, insofar as they arise a priori from incomparable—even incompatible—aims and procedures. In this way science would correspond with a search for the truth, proceeding through the deductive rigor of demonstration or the very controlled elaboration of experimental protocols for theory-verification. Literature, by contrast, would trace back to the free deployment of imaginary spaces produced by a stylistic elaboration of reality, with no other assignable end than the formal beauty of pure textual constructions and the pleasure they can evoke in the reader.

Rather than seek to reinforce this abstract opposition (which undoubtedly stems from a historical and institutional construction) the present issue endeavors to put literary and scientific practices into direct confrontation—not with a view to confounding them by annulling their specificities, but with a view to revealing their necessary interaction. It is no more the case that scientific discourses are elaborated independently of rhetorical and poetic models (to which, however, they cannot be reduced) than it is the case that literary texts are written in total isolation from the theoretical and practical concerns of science and its specific aim of truth. Based on the work of Fernand Hallyn, Pierre Macherey insists on the importance of studying the “rhetorical structures of science” which—by associating an epistemological approach with a poetic approach to truth-production—will allow for a profound renewal in our understanding of scientific work.

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