The Style of (Post-) Liberal Desire: Bouvard et Pécuchet

This reading of Bouvard et Pécuchet examines Flaubert's attempt to conjure the threat of indifferentiation, and to rejoin the ideal of motus animi continuus, by setting his text in motion, by enacting the quest for culture as a desiderative movement that is both of and it the text. It shows how the novel beoth implies and subverts a constellation of traditional liberal values – particularly those of freedom, culture, and individual distinction. But this textualization of liberal desire also lays the ground-work for a "post-liberal" textuality, by which I intend all those forms of écriture that demand to be read as the writing of "desire itself." (PTS)