The Socio-political Lives of Persistent Figures

This chapter works with the concept of “pre-posterous history”: an approach to the past that considers the relationship of past and present as mutual, instead of linear. The figures of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quijote, and classical mythology’s Cassandra—who was given a new life in Christa Wolf’s novel from the 1980s—are taken in this chapter as instances of such a mutuality between past and present, as well as of the merging of intellectual and artistic work. Jean-François Lyotard’s notion of “figure” is used to bring literary and visual/material figurations into each other’s orbit, leading to a “re-figuring” of the long-term inherited cultural production that shows its relevance for contemporary reality.