The Potentiality of Copy: A Reading of Gustave Flaubert’s Poetics Through the Philosophy of Giorgio Agamben

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyse the poetics of Gustave Flaubert from the point of view of Giorgio Agamben’s concept of potentiality. In this regard, it can be said that the novels of Flaubert make of the philosophical problem of potentiality (as developed by Agamben in such articles as «The power of thought» or Bartleby or on contingence) a basic dimension of the literary construction. This is true in a thematic level (for instance, the multiplication of life forms in La Tentation de Saint Antoine) but also in a formal level (the use of conditional mode as a grammatical device to express potentiality). Paradoxically, it is by means of Bouvard and Pécuchet’s copy that potentiality finds its most distinctive form in Flaubert’s work