Politics & Power Quote by Philippe Sollers

Sollers tweaks a famous line about war to make a colder point: literature is not a refuge from power, it is one of power's favorite disguises. By riffing on Clausewitz ("war is the continuation of politics by other means"), he borrows the authority of strategy and turns the writer into a tactician. The wit is in the reversal. If war is politics made loud, writing is politics made plausible: a quieter instrument that can outlast a regime, slip across borders, and lodge itself in a reader's private life where slogans can’t easily follow.

The intent isn’t to reduce novels to propaganda; it’s to puncture the comfortable fantasy of artistic innocence. Sollers came up through the high-theory, postwar French scene - Tel Quel, the debates around Marxism, structuralism, May ’68, and the era’s constant suspicion that language itself is ideological. In that milieu, "style" isn’t just aesthetic preference; it’s a method of organizing perception, deciding what counts as real, and who gets to speak.

The subtext is slightly accusatory: if you write as if politics is something that happens elsewhere, you’re still doing politics - you’re just endorsing the default arrangement. Every narrative choice is a governance choice: which characters are granted interiority, which violence is normalized, which desires are framed as natural. Sollers’s line lands because it refuses the reader a neutral seat. It implies that the page is another battlefield, only the casualties are attention, memory, and legitimacy.