What is prefiguring ? Genealogies in reverse

We started from the Foucauldian postulate that political fiction was the experience of a politics that did not yet exist, based on historical truth. But what, in this case, is prefigured? Against the literary belief in the predestination of works, we can assume that all authors invent their predecessors and establish genealogies in reverse. In the political order, from Alexander the Great to Napoleon, we can act to bring about what was written in advance: recourse to prefiguration is then supposed, Blumenberg argues, "to guarantee action the certainty of decision". This hypothesis is then tested on the basis of a number of ^13th-century sovereigns (from Saint Louis to Baybars), by examining the ability of powerful people to become, even during their own lifetime, characters in novels. Such reflection leads to an analysis of the paroxysmal derangement of power, based on the case of Nero. Medieval political thought also considered tyranny in the light of the Nero imaginary of grotesque cruelty.

Contents

• "How many times a woman's dress had thrown at him, with the evaporated breath of a gasoline, a whole reminder of erased events": Maupassant after and after Proust
• Fictionalizing fiction (Pierre Bayard, Le plagiat par anticipation, Paris, 2009)
• The invention of predecessors as a production between author and reader
• Reverse genealogies, against the literary belief in predestination
• "Recourse to prefiguration is supposed to guarantee action the certainty of decision" (Hans Blumenberg, Préfigurations)
• Acting to bring about what was written in advance: Alexander the Great, Frederick II, Napoleon
• Prefiguration and myth-making
• How do you become a character in a novel during your lifetime? The three lives of Sultan Baybars (Jacqueline Sublet)
• The character of the ayyar in the Roman de Baybars : alerting the sovereign, supporting a discourse of social satire
• Baybars and his mythological doubles (Anne-Marie Eddé)
• Solomonic royalty in France, Castile and Ethiopia
• When fiction becomes anticipation (Marc Bloch, "La vie d'outre-tombe du roi Salomon", 1925)
• Saint Louis is "our Josiah" (Jacques Le Goff): historical resemblance as the basis of a political narrative
• The King of Hungary and the ideal Hunnic society (Edina Bozoky): identification and prefiguration
• In search of the "grotesque cog in the machinery of power" (Michel Foucault)
• Historiopoetics of a paroxysmal derangement of power (Donatien Grau, Néron en Occident, Paris, 2015)
• The Nerorian Renaissance, romance literature and the "secret of empire" (Tacitus)
• How to read the prologue to La Pharsale? The ambiguities of ironic praise
• Qualis artifex pereo : redoubled theatricality
• Les faiz Neron le cruel homme in the 14th^century : a syncretism of detestation
• Thinking medieval tyranny through the Neronian imaginary of grotesque cruelty
• "O my heart, lose not thy nature, never let / Nero's soul enter into thy firm heart./ Let me be cruel, but not denatured" (Shakespeare, Hamlet, act III, scene II)
• Jerome Cardan'sEncomium Neronis as a "treatise on suspicion" (Alexander Roose)
• The rationality proper to the exercise of Nero's power: Sade, Histoire de Juliette : "Like Nero when he burned Rome, I want to be, harp in hand, on a balcony from which I will discover the flames that will devastate my homeland"