Parfois il faut reculer pour mieux sauter. Whenever we use the words ‘avant-garde’ and ‘politics’, or ‘democracy’ for that matter, in a single sentence, there follows a rustle, a murmur, the sense of a problem. Few aspects of the modernist avant-garde have not, after all, been called political, and with good reason apparently. Intellectual debate during the first decades of the foregoing century in Europe often exemplifies uneasiness over marking the boundaries between literature and politics, the latter then understood as a distinct social realm with a form of behaviour and concern of its own. As a result ‘politics’ is frequently defined as a process of making claims and decisions within (human and textual) groups, handing us down a vast library of volumes and essays entitled ‘The Politics and Poetics of Such-and-Such’, which often manage to avoid discussing the link to practical politics altogether. It is precisely with practical democratic politics that I am concerned, however. So a call for critical distance is in order. Or, as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy contend, there is in the end little to be gained from adopting ‘the “everything is political” which near enough universally dominates today’. This makes ‘the political unapparent (it has the obviousness of an “it goes without saying”). Thus understood nowhere do even the least of specifically political questions (corresponding to transformations of the world) have the chance to emerge.’