Democracy, Law and the Modernist Avant-Gardes: Writing in the State of Exception

Sascha Bru fundamentally revises our understanding of modernism's cultural and political history. Bringing together a wide range of European experimental writers and a detailed analysis of Italian futurist F.T. Marinetti, German Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck, and Belgian expressionist Paul van Ostaijen, he situates these writers within their exceptional democratic context and demonstrates how the modernist avant-garde, during the First World War and the upheavals that followed, became caught up in a series of "states of exception."

In these conditions, legal democratic institutions were bracketed and set aside and "literature" as an autonomous realm was temporarily suspended. Faced with extreme forms of politicization, avant-gardists throughout Europe tried to safeguard literature's autonomy in a variety of ways. These included turning politics and law into genuinely artistic materials and producing a repertoire of alternatives to existent frameworks of democracy. Against assertions that avant-garde's anti-art gestures were meant to overcome art's autonomy and approximate the condition of politics, Bru shows that European avant-gardists may well have been staunch defenders of art's sovereignty in modern times.