Abstract

This article attempts to tie two questions together: how to approach the process that constitutes multitudes into communities? And: what role can literary studies play in the age of Empire? To overcome the abstraction of these questions, the article closely follows the return of the word « consequence » in Diderot’s text, D’Alembert’s Dream. Through the wealth of echoes provided by a few quotes, the literary approach comes to be defined as a coring to light of the programs which engineer the reproduction of our social life. Depending on its effects , the encounter between a text and a brain can play a significant regulating role in the permanent process of constitution of multitudes into communities. The disarray in which literary critics and teachers alike find themselves today should lead to a redefinition of their activity which would put the multitudes in position to be the producers, rather than the receivers, of tomorrow ’s literarity