Anne de Rugy & Muriel Prévot-Carpentier
Anne de Rugy: MCF en sociologie, LIPHA, Université Paris Est Créteil (anne.goullet-de-rugy@u-pec.fr ; ORCID: 0000-0003-4306-1420) ; Muriel Prévot-CarpentierMCF en ergonomie, C3U-Paragraphe, Université Paris 8 (murielprevot@univ-paris8. fr ; ORCID: 0009-0004-5603-5488).
Literary writings by workers, a philosophical laboratory?
Abstract: Based on a corpus of French literary texts published at the turn of the 21st century and stemming from the labor experience of their authors, this article focuses on the possible links between philosophy and literature. The diversity of literary forms used – poetic diary (Metz), prose narrative (Ponthus), narrative incorporating a factory diary (Levaray), novel (Baglin, Beinstingel) or thematic narrative (Bon) – shows that the documentary function of literature does not stop at autobiography or authenticated testimony. Fiction, like poetry, talks about work, and is a way of putting philosophical concepts such as exploitation, alienation, subordination and emancipation into images. But literature that puts work at the heart of the matter is also a call to philosophize and formalize a latent critique of a productivist economic order that has reduced work to a means. Through images, characters and situations, these texts, without being explicit political denunciations, question the political significance of everyday life at work and the small emancipations possible through activity. Without formalizing it, they suggest the possibility of a philosophical critique.
Keywords: Work; French Work Literature; Roman d’entreprise; Philosophy Through Literature; Criticism.