ABSTRACT
From a new materialist perspective, literature is never mute but always a part of the voice of the world, its physicality impresses our memory and sculpts our emotions. For a materialist thinker, the moment of collapse is always a moment of immanence, that is to say the attack and the destruction of a form of transcendence. Consequently, language, as any “thing” else, is material. Language cannot be a label glued on a thing: Language matters, language is “mattering” as Karen Barad argues, its materiality performs reality as a constituent part of it. Literature is also a domain in which moments of immanence can be produced. Minor literature refuses the domination of any Code, any supposed Norm of Understanding; hence the infringements of the grammatical, syntactical, rules. Gustave Flaubert expresses very well the way literature tends to sever itself from the world and constitutes an independent reality, “just as the earth, suspended in the void.”
