ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the seemingly traditional question "what is literature?" It considers "literature" to be a given notion, or a given reality. The chapter briefly looks at the structure of Qu'est-ce que la littérature? as it may indicate how the problem was paradigmatically raised by Jean-Paul Sartre – who was equally a philosopher and a writer. What is most important here is that every iteration of the word is ideological: at every given moment "literature" is a word used in the framework of a certain structure of power in order to serve or to question that very structure of power. The core element of Platonism is that it produces a coherent – or relatively coherent – vision of the world, the universe, and the human being. Plato builds a system, which he knows to be a construct; Aristotle identifies patterns, and organizes them around an overall schema of the sublunary world.
