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Jacques Rancière At first sight there is something wrong with my title. When you announce that you will give the reason why a person was killed, you take for granted that he or she was killed, that his or her death was a murder. In this case however there exists strong textual evidence against the alleged fact. Even those who have never read Madame Bovary know at least one thing: nobody killed Emma, she committed suicide. Those who have read it know that, after absorbing the poison, she took care to write, “No one is guilty.…” Therefore the right question apparently reads as follows: Why did Emma Bovary commit suicide? The answer to that “right” question is well known: she killed herself because she could not pay her debts. She was indebted because of her extramarital love affairs. And she had love affairs because of the discrepancy between the life she had dreamed of, out of the romances she had read as a schoolgirl in a convent, and the life she had to live as the wife of a poor stubborn doctor in a murky, provincial, small town. In short, her suicide happened to be the last consequence of a chain of causes that reached back to a first mistake: as she had too much imagination, she had mistaken literature for life. Needless to say, it is easy to reach further back and invoke deeper social reasons: inappropriate education, social alienation, male domination, and so on. This is supposed to amount to a political account for the suicide. Jacques Rancière is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris—VIII (St. Denis). Critical Inquiry Volume 34, Number 2, Winter© 2008 by The University of Chicago.
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