Abstract
In this introductory chapter, I develop the connection between cultural production, ethics, and the logics of individuation—the formation of a discrete mode of identity—as a necessary corrective to other ethical modes. To understand ethics as not only a mIndividuationode of reflection, but a rhetorical mode of inscribing meaning, I develop a reading of three notions derived from the work of Peter Hallward, Gilles Deleuze, and Alain Badiou: The Singular, the Specified, and the Specific. This is the theoretical frame for my book and I establish this in the next chapter, arguing for the necessity to reimagine textual criticism through the Hallwardian frame.
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Notes
- 1.
Walter Benjamin’s work on the Critique of Violence (1922) emerges, especially among supporters of a deconstructive mode of thinking, as a new way to identify the effects of representations of violence within the ethical field and the literary camp.
- 2.
This term is in broad use in poststructuralism to refer not only to the language generated by such a system, but also behaviors, and other systems of signifying practice that correlate with language proper. An archive of enunciations demarcates a field of enunciation.
- 3.
This is a process summarized in more neutral terms in Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy? (1996), but whose ethical dimensions are the core of Badiou’s project.
- 4.
The position of the writer (and by extension, the political orator) is of central importance in logics of the singular, as the immanence inaugurated by the discourse is only fully realizable through its central figure. Only one type of person has the power to innovate:
A singular conception of individuation recognises only one entity as fully individual (which does not exclude the potentially infinite multiplicity of modes of this individual) [Hallward] will refer to such an individual as ‘Creative’ as distinct from the ‘given’ or ‘created’ (always capitalised, for the sake of clarity). (Hallward 2)
Singular discourses, through the “Creative” individual, produce the conditions of possibility of difference through its plenitude as “Creative” entity. The “Creative” is, in the twentieth century, often political, exercising an ability to innovate and at the same time assert complete control. That position is neither paradoxical nor viciously circular, but rather a facet of that creative “individual’s” capacity to produce immanence itself. “The singular creates the medium of its own substantial existence. The singularity of a Creator-god provides the concept with its exemplary form” (ibid). Forming the autopoetic deity, singular discourses contain exclusionary “modes” that, as Hallward reminds us, are functionally infinite but totally immanent to their source. In this fashion, singular discourses unify expressive possibility around the coherence of a thought-form, name, image, or concept.
- 5.
In the case of Paraguay, the regime of Alfredo Stroessner predated the Cuban Revolution, but strongly opposed Communism and used this to consolidate his regime.
- 6.
Marguerite Feitlowitz’s seminal book A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture (1997) is the definitive work on the vocabulary the torturers used in media res to construct a peculiar singularity for their project.
- 7.
Laub and Felman’s text is perhaps the seminal text elaborating how active witnessing and the representational structures of psychoanalytic practice and literary investigation negotiate the testimony of the traumatized victim.
- 8.
For further information on these laws, please see Chap. 3 of Carlos Santiago Nino’s Radical Evil on Trial (1997).
- 9.
Enrique Dussel, Etica de la liberacion en la edad de la globalizacion y la exclusion (1998).
References
Critchley, Simon. Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. London: Verso, 2007. Print.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Print.
Dussel, Enrique. Etica de la liberacion en la edad de la globalizacion y la exclusion. Madrid: Trotta, 1998. Print.
Hallward, Peter. Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specific. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002. Print.
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Amador, C.M. (2016). Introduction: Reading Ethics and Logics of Individuation in the Southern Cone. In: Ethics and Literature in Chile, Argentina, and Paraguay, 1970-2000. Literatures of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54633-3_1
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