introduction

Part 1 Doors and Windows

1.
Behind the Glass Window: Stendhal and Balzac
2.
The Eyes of the Poor: Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, Maupassant
3.
What Peeping Eyes See: Proust's In Search of Lost Time
4.
A window facing the street: Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte

Part 2: The Threshold of Science

1.
The Secret of the Commodity: Marx's "Das Kapital"
2.
Adventures in Causality: A History of the Detective Novel

Part 3: The Shores of Reality

1.
The Unthinkable: The Novels of Joseph Conrad
2.
Landscapes of Documents: Sebald's Novels

Part 4: The Edge of Nothing and Everything

1.
Random Moments: The Novels of Virginia Woolf
2.
Two Tales of the Poor: William Faulkner's "Light in August"
3.
The Words of the Silent: William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury
4.
The Infinite Moment: The Novels of João Guimarães Hoxha

Acknowledgements
Translator's Note
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The politics of fiction according to Rancière
: A common world and a common story

Is Rancière a philosopher, a political scientist, an aesthetician, or a historian? A visit to a library reveals Rancière's books, not concentrated in one place, but scattered across various fields, including philosophy, social science, history, and art.
To that extent, Rancière writes texts that do not belong to philosophy, history, or literature.
He rejects both the traditional position of philosopher providing meaning and the position of historian describing historical facts, and instead writes across the boundaries between the disciplines of philosophy, history, and literature.
Rancière's thought, which controversially intervenes in the theoretical and practical situations of his time, crossing over politics and art, occupies a unique position in modern discourse.


As is well known, the first important turning point in his intellectual journey was his meeting with Louis Althusser.
However, after the May Revolution of 1968, he had a falling out with Althusser and eventually broke up with him.
Essentially, Althusser was a teacher who taught workers about exploitation and revolution, and this was the same logic that the workers' voice could not be conveyed without going through intellectuals.
Rancière questioned this division between intellectuals and the ignorant masses, and after breaking with Althusser, he spent about eight years examining various cases of intellectual equality in the archives of 19th-century workers and utopian socialists.
The fruit of this work is the national doctoral dissertation, “Night of the Proletariat” (1981).
He discovered that workers can speak for themselves, think for themselves, and dream of another world.
Rancière says that political subjects are not predetermined by a specific social status or position, but are created through a process of subjectification that allows them to make their own voices heard.

In this context, 『The Edge of Fiction』 is an important book that contains Rancière's unique ideas and writing strategies.
Just as he drew out the political subjectivity of those who have nothing through the concept of “the share of the shareless” in works such as “On the Edge of the Political” and “Discord,” this book unfolds his thoughts through an analysis of “insignificant beings” and “random moments.”
In this book, Rancière says that even the most insignificant human being is a subject with a deep soul, and that a random moment, a moment of fulfillment where the inactivity of dreaming harmonizes with the activity of the world, can “transform the simple misery of a life that is nothing into everything.”
“The random/insignificant moment is the force that explodes the time of the victors, even when the ‘victory’ of the dominant time, the time of the victors, is most certain.
“This force operates at the edge of nothingness, where the dominant time has pushed those outside of words, outside of time.” (p. 248)

Making 'nothing' into 'everything'.
The goal is to build a common world and a common story.
This is what Rancière calls the ‘politics of fiction.’
This is further elaborated upon by analyzing the novels of Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and João Guimarães Hoxha.
“In other words, through these sensual adventures, words become flesh and divert life from its destination, night disturbs the normal cycle of day and night, and the gaze through the window produces a division of the proletarian body.
Moreover, the statues damaged by these sensual adventures, the children infested with fleas, the acrobatics of the clowns create a new beauty, and the groping of the ignorant before the written symbols defines another intellectual life.
“What continues through all these adventures is the same investigation into the revolution that transforms nothing into everything.” (pp. 19-20)

The Birth of a New Fiction, a New Subject

Rancière derives the concept of rationality of fiction from Aristotle's Poetics.
The fictional rationality that Aristotle speaks of is composed of three elements: 1) a chain of cause and effect [causal temporality], 2) truthfulness [probability], and 3) reversal [sudden change].
This factor has had a major impact to this day.
However, Rancière points out that the number of actors here was limited.
As can be seen in Oedipus the King, the subjects of action in Aristotle's time were limited to a small number of acting humans, namely kings and nobles.
The vast majority of other humans were thought to be trapped in the shackles of labor or reproduction, doing the same thing over and over again, and thus could never be the subject of fiction.
“They make things, raise children, carry out orders, provide services, and repeat the next day what they did the day before.
In all of this, there are no expectations, no reversals of expectations, no mistakes to be made that could cause you to transition from one destiny to another.
Therefore, classical fictional rationality was related to a very small number of human beings and human activities.” (p. 9) For this reason, for Aristotle, truth was considered to be something that could be reached only by active human beings living in the world of light, which is action and event, rather than by passive human beings who remain in the world of darkness, which is repetition and reproduction.

Rancière points out that this Aristotelian principle has been overturned in modern times.
Social science, represented by Marx, followed Aristotle's principles and elevated the world of things and people that could be ignored, that is, ignored, to the world of truth.
Accordingly, the world of people and things that active humans did not need to know about or could ignore became the world of truth, the world that produces knowledge.
On the other hand, rather than expanding the scope of application of classical fictional rationality, modern literature discovered a new fictional rationality in those things that had remained on the margins, in the insignificant individuals capable of feeling the most intense and complex emotions.
The narrative structure opens up to the world of emotions and events experienced by insignificant beings, and the strategy is to “turn the simple misfortune of a life that is nothing into everything” through random moments.


So what does a writer do? Rancière says this in his chapter analyzing Sebald's novels:
“The task is to create life out of the dead, to create something new out of the old, to create art out of industrial materials, to create history out of trivial events and almost erased traces.
In short, it is to challenge and redeem the activity of destruction.” Furthermore, the writer is someone who “creates another image of time, that is, the time of coexistence, the time of equality, the time of expressivity between moments, which is opposed to the time of continuity and destruction” (p. 196).


What is the new fiction that Rancière speaks of? It is “the production of a common sense that connects without subordinating or destroying” (p. 240).
That is, it takes insignificant lives and random moments beyond the limits that classical fiction presupposes.
“The new fiction does not offer solutions to cure the disabled.
But the new fiction stops the domination of those who send disabled people to camps.
“The new fiction holds them in the present by infinitely delaying the time of the evidence that supports sending them to a place where they will be trapped through the time of writing” (p. 247).

A story of moving through doors and windows, over thresholds, onto shores, and finally to the edge.

"The Edge of Fiction" passes through the "doors and windows" (Part 1), the dividing line between the nobility and the commoners, and the "threshold" of science (Part 2) where the rationality of narrative and the rationality of science meet, and stays at the "shore" of reality (Part 3) that delves into the imagination and temporality of the writer, before moving on to the "edge" of nothing and everything (Part 4), which delves into the community depicted by fiction and the humanity promised by fiction.
This book, consisting of four parts, unfolds through analysis of the work.
In Part 1, “Doors and Windows,” literary works that emerged after the French Revolution, which ushered in the era of democracy, are analyzed using the metaphor of “windows.”
The 'window' signifies the barrier that separated the nobility and the commoners, and it was only in this era that the door was opened.
For Stendhal, the window was a passage through which the nobility and the common people met, based on the similarity of transparent souls. However, in Balzac's novel, the window once again blocks the view between inside and outside the window, and becomes an 'opaque' obstacle that divides the nobility and the common people.
Through the poetry of Baudelaire and the novels of Hugo and Maupassant, we examine the 'eyes of the poor' that hide the dizzying depths of the soul, and through the gaze of the voyeur in Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time', we examine the 'truth of lies', that is, the way to reach knowledge.
Through Rilke's 'The Notebooks of Malte', we explore the meaning of the poet relearning how to look outside the window facing the street.

For Rancière, both social science and literature are forms that make the common world we live in perceptible and thinkable according to the logic of fiction.
From this very perspective, in Part 2, “The Threshold of Science,” Chapter 1, “The Secret of the Commodity,” Marx’s “Das Kapital” is analyzed, and in Chapter 2, “The Adventure of Causality,” detective novels are analyzed.
First, Rancière illuminates the nature of science as tragedy and Marx's unique dramaturgy that organizes the antagonism between science and history.
In 『Capital』, the logic of tragedy, which is the hostility and opposition between the characters and the reversal of the situation, is at work.
Furthermore, the “hidden” in the exchange of commodities, the “revealed” in the reality of the factory, and the “infernal narrative” written about the bodies working in the factory give Capital a “unique narrative structure.”
Rancière says that Marx's dramaturgy reveals the dark world of production and the reproduction of life, and opens up a future of humanity without hierarchy to those who understand the laws of history.
Chapter 2 traces the evolution of detective fiction and examines how, in the process of evolution, detective fiction has sought to reject “ordinary characters, repetitive time, and insignificant events.”

Part 3, “On the Shores of Reality,” features Joseph Conrad and W.
In analyzing G. Sebald's novel, the relationship between the real and the imaginary is addressed.
In particular, Chapter 2, “Landscape of Documents,” focuses on Sebald’s fiction and draws a model for a new fiction.
By horizontally connecting, through repeated digressions, things that happened, could have happened, or might happen at a specific moment, in a specific place with things that happened, could have happened, or might happen at the same moment, in a different place, or things that happened, could have happened, or might have happened at the same moment, in the same place, in a different place, Sebald creates a new fiction by weaving an endlessly expanding 'space of coexistence' that potentially includes all other real and imaginary spaces and times.

Part 4, “The Edge of Nothing and Everything,” analyzes the novels of Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and João Guimarães Hoxha to examine how the politics of fiction take on new shapes and forms, are transformed, and are expanded.
Chapter 1, “Random Moments,” shows how Virginia Woolf’s novels open up a new world of common sense.
Any moment is an element that constitutes the space-time of coexistence, and is also a ‘moment of disturbance’ in itself.
It is a moment when those who live within the world of time and meaning of events and those who live outside of this time and world meet.
By depicting this very moment, the moment when the common sense or order of forms is disintegrating, Wolf foreshadows the coming common life, the new world of common sense.


Chapter 3, "The Words of the Silent," shows how Benji, the idiot from William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, turns nothing into everything.
Just as Benjamin spoke of the suspension, unfolding, return, and collision of time against the time of the victors, Faulkner's fiction elevates nothing to everything by compressing and expanding time, fragmenting and mixing it.
Chapter 4, “The Infinite Moment,” explores how João Guimarães Hoxha’s fiction creates infinite moments beyond the temporality of classical fiction.
João Guimarães Hoxha's novels show that the political subject of fiction is anyone, anyone who reads life as a story and creates a story as life in the cycle created by life and story.