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Article

English

ID: <

10.4000/ebc.7789

>

·

DOI: <

10.4000/ebc.7789

>

Where these data come from
Topodemocracy: Joseph O’Neill and the Spatial Sublime

Abstract

If democracy has always been or has required a space of sharing, a spatialized modality of being with others in a domain of commonality susceptible to accommodate the world’s singularities, then the question numerous twentieth-century thinkers, artists, and writers raise is how recent economic, political, and techno-cultural developments have been impacting the planet as scene of co-presence. As is well known, Jacques Rancière has been most vocal in stressing not only that the co-presence of self and other and the ‘distribution of the sensible’ following from it are a marker of actual democracy but that such ‘apportionments’ (The Politics of Aesthetics) also occur and can be ‘community-forming’ inside literature (The Lost Thread). Moreover, as he argues, configuring human togetherness is what poetry—and by extension literature overall—characteristically does. But this is also that which renders the literary political. For politics too has to do, in a fundamental way, with the social distribution and redistribution of space. The paper I am proposing pursues the crisis of this relational articulation of space—and by the same token the impasse of twenty-first century democracy—in Joseph O’Neill’s 2014 novel The Dog. His book sets up—‘arrange,’ ‘shape,’ and ‘fictionalize’ in the etymological sense of Lat. fingere, as Rancière would insist—a sublime spatial world order that promises to be cosmopolitan in a relational and participatory way. As I will show, this order is undercut, however, by the actual distribution of human presence across this space. The multitudes of the UAE, where The Dog is set, have access to certain locations and are, consequently, allowed to be with others according to an unethical code of social presence that O’Neill uncovers and critiques.

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