ABSTRACT
This paper addresses the politics of the relations between texts in situations where one text offers a commentary on another. This is not to valorize a particular binary. Being a commentary and being an object of commentary are not essential properties of texts. However, at any given ‘empirical’ instant-in any event, if you like-it is possible to look at these relations in general between an object-text and the text which offers a commentary upon it (whatever their own intertextual lineages). We tried to start with what may be termed the ‘internal’ politics of this set of relations, but the opposition with ‘external’ politics proved difficult to sustain. We were obliged almost right away to take other things into account: drawing our attention away from the inside(s) of texts and towards the conditions of their circulation, providing an alternative to the confined politics of text-commentary relations.
