Et cetera: Steven Poole's non-fiction choice – reviews  The
Politics of Literature by Jacques Rancière; Art and Multitude by
Antonio Negri; The Idea of Communism edited by Costas Douzinas
and Slavoj Žižek  The Politics of Literature, by Jacques
Rancière, translated by Julie Rose (Polity, £17.99) "Literature
does politics simply by being literature," the French
philosopher Rancière announces in the introduction to this set
of essays. Madame Bovary is "an anti-kitsch manifesto" (and
Flaubert is "the only person in whose interests it is to kill
Emma"); Tolstoy attacks the idea that great men create history
("The science of history is the tautology of power," Rancière
concludes chewily); Borges attracts some sympathetic irony for
his allergy to the "French disease".  The "literary revolution",
as Rancière calls it, was to consider anything and everything a
subject for poetry, and the author regularly seduces himself,
and the reader, with visions: "Think of Balzac's windows"; or,
in Proust, "the azure edge of holy