“From Charlemagne to the Title of the King”: Political novel between estrangement and recognition

Starting from a critical reflection on certain elements of Rita Felski’s polemic with the “hermeneutics of suspicion”, the article focuses on what may appear to be a binary opposition between the concepts of estrangement and recognition. It aims to show that what appears from another perspective as the mutual exclusivity of these two concepts and their associated theoretical traditions gives room for their co-implication in a dialectical relationship and that such a relationship has an intrinsically political dimension. Subsequently, it is argued that the described dialectic of estrangement and recognition can provide a suitable basis for revisiting discussions on the politics of literature – inextricably linked to these concepts from the beginning – and consequently even help in the search for a viable concept of the political novel.