[...]p outside the “flux of participation.”

...................................

[Thomas Keenan]

reading: that which happens when we cannot apply the rules --> experience of responsibility =/= moment of security or cognitive certainty

rhetorical reading

who speaks, writes, and reads? not simply humans

“how can we have any chance of finding a way to say what we don't know how to say if we don't pay attention to the silence of the other inside us?”

literature, is then understood as the experience of risk, chance, the undecidable =/= pathos of resolution


(in Western ethical, political, and literary traditions:) responsibility: a matter of articulating what is known with what is done =/= (Keenan:) *responsibility*: an asymmetry or an interruption between the orders of cognition and action

fable --> an exemplary *allegory of decision* (~~> installing or restoring subjectivity)
fables open abyssal aporias:
•to teach ‘singularity’ it offers ‘comparison’
•to underline ‘independence’ it resorts to ‘necessity’

[(the experience of) aporia =?=> morality, politics, responsibility =/= when the path is given]--> Germany is moving towards the removing of aporia [<-- a general panic popular in sci-fi]
(the very condition of possibility of) *responsibility*: a certain experience of the possibility of the impossible ~ aporia }==> the impossible invention --> *responsibility must be an invention*
[-Germany's notion of law: like any idea of law, are not by themselves motivators for morality or immorality, it is really upon (human) culture to do that.]


fable ==> possibility of another kind of reading --> exposure to something that breaks with the regimes of meaning and sense


politics of difficulty

...to fall back on the conceptual priority of the subject, agency, or identity as the grounds --✕--> we have politics because we have no ground

(Keenan suggests) “deconstruction” is not offered here as an antiauthoritarian discourse, an attack on grounds, but as an attempt to think about this removal as the condition of any (political) action }~= democracy


(according to fables) responsibility begins in the bad example (--> the concept of conflict ~=> the ethics and politics of responsibility)

the classical subject --(the passage through the bad example)--> installed in its stance of responsibility and the safety of identity

“What is at stake in the fable is, more than anything else, the interpretation and practice of responsibility-our exposure to calls, others, and the names with which we are constituted and which put us in question.” (Keenan)

...practical effectivity of literature


•(for Annabel Patterson:) fable accomplishes a speculative Aufhebung : “[...]the role of metaphor is to mediate between human consciousness and human survival, [and here] the mind recognizes rock bottom, the irreducibly material, by rejoining the animals, one of whom is the human body”
•(for Louis Marin:) fable: uncertain model of praxis
•(for Hegel: Aesop was a “misshapen humpbacked slave” and his) fable = witty, witzig =/= spirit, depth, insight, vision, poetry, philosophy
•(for Lacoue-Labarthe:) fable: a name for the mutual implication and asymmetrical interference of literature with philosophy --> the suspension of the self-evidence of the categories “literature” and “philosophy” in order to use each to put the identity of the other into question. [to think the world as fable. Is it possible?]
•(for Keenan:) fable superimposes the relation of an address to the other in its singularity and in its anonymity (responsibility for the other) onto the traditional predicament of an articulation between the order of knowledge or cognition and that of action, ethico-political or otherwise --> *responsibility in Western philosophical tradition: an address to an other*


...the rhetorical event of a comparison

#[the theater of example]

the threat of example's excess

fables of responsibility ==securing==> *the morality of the subject who means* (who can they finally be submitted to the logic of an *evaluative destination*)

(Derrida's) mode of enunciation and the literary vehicle entrusted with its exemplification :
*[...]it is sufficient to introduce, into the fold of speech acts, a few wolves of the type (“undecidability” or “unconscious”) for the shepherd to lose track of his sheep: one is no longer certain where to find the identity of the “speaker” or the “hearer,” ... where to find the identity of an intention.*
--?--> wolf in sheep's clothing [--> also the problem/fantasy of the “integration” project (as the space of ethics and politics)~~>(“Appearances are deceptive” ==> exclusion of the parasite + identification of subjects as the task of responsibility); -what would mean for the German shepherd to lose track of his sheeps? (to go from) the fable of *the oriented sheepfold* --to--> the fable of *losing count*]
-the vexed relation between sheep and wolf, slave and master


(my work is all about: can we please look at) some *other* “interior of the system”
(system never has only one interior [=/= conspiracy: system's singular interiority])


•literature's (ir)responsibility to philosophy
•art's (ir)responsibility to journalism


Xanthus the philosopher decides to buy a slave, goes with his students to the slave market, and encounters the disfigured Phrygian Aesop (recently granted the power of speech after assisting a priestess of Isis and hence become too difficult for his previous master to handle). Their first exchange is exemplary, as the philosopher interrogates the slave in order to determine whether “he knows anything,” receives equivocal replies, and finishes by asking, “Do you want me to buy you?”
(Life of Aesop)


thinking fable as language : ‘Fabula’ (narration or account), derived as it is from the Latin root ‘fari’ (to speak) and linked to the Greek ‘phanai’ (to speak or to say), finally implies nothing other than language as such

Mythos and logos, the one is not more true (or more false, deceptive, fictive, etc.) than the other


(to open to the) alterity of an ungoverned figuration


hero: the adventure of an identification that can only occur in the comparison that a fable demands

Horace's dictum: “with a change of names, the fable is told about you” (a trans-subjective movement, a tropological system =/= metaphor or metonymy, )


(for Nietzsche) responsibility: the ability to make and keep one's promises = being (able to be) held accountable (not simply by another but) already in advance by and for oneself : to answer to oneself in the place of the other
•Nietzsche's fable of morality: lamb & bird of prey (“eagle is evil ==> lambs are good”)--> [the fable enacts the victory:] the lambs triumph in gaining the ability (and then the right) to hold the birds of prey responsible for doing what they do, for being what they are --claim--> the strong man is fee to be weak, the bird of prey free to be a lamb ==gain==> the right to make the bird of prey accountable for being a bird of prey
◦morality: a fabulous narrative about language and how it gets turned (with animals playing its roles) into an ethical and epistemological system --> the medium of the exploitation (*putting to use or the abuse of a linguistic possibility*)
◦the interpretation or institution of the birds as subjeets (choosing, willing
agents) depends on a fiction, a fable: the doer is merely a fiction added to the deed
==Nietzsche==>
•*responsibility: an exploitation of a verbal possibility*
•*fable: turning the merely grammatical subject into the fiction of the acting* <== zoomorphism (=/= anthropomorphism)


fable of the eagle and the raven
the story of the raven that, having once watched with envy as an eagle snatched a lamb from the flock and carried it off, later attempts a similar feat. But a raven is not an eagle, and his claws get stuck in the fleece of a wether (not a lamb): his prey becomes his trap. He is captured by the shepherd, his wings are broken and taken from him, and he is given to the shepherd's children as a plaything
•identity check
•the bird begins the fable without (knowing) its name
•establishment of the raven as an (ir)responsible agent, one that can be called to respond for itself <-- an “I” has a name and a choice about its action, because it could have done otherwise
•raven's errancy consists precisely in wandering away from its name <-- in the past =/= now (now I know well that i am a rauen) we can act responsibly
•act in accord with the fate prescribed for you by your name --> restore the proper name ==> establishment of the responsible agent
•critical system of “error --> correction --> I = name” ==fix==> the link between the order of cognition (whether false supposition or true knowledge) & that of action (take a lamb / as
the eagle did)
•don't compare yourself with what you are not --> reader is you are asked to compare yourself with the raven (follow its example)
}--> fable of responsibility = a story about language and its danger (raven may be like an eagle, but it is not an eagle) --> “know your name + do what it say” --> *responsibility: the response to the name by which one is called* --> the idea that *supposing & knowing* belong to one and the same homogeneous system*

(the art of) supposition: disguise, false knowledge (guess, surmise, premise)
--or--> ungovernable and unrecoverable force of *positing* (position or imposition)

(generation of the pure name in fable of the eagle and the raven:)
non-symmetrical movement from nameless bird --to--> birdless name (a wingless not-eagle)


why fables are important? <-- others and their traces are always working within us already, in a space and time that cannot be reduced to that of consciousness (or self-presence)
•profound linguistic or rhetorical complexity of the call and response

the raven resounds (it does not just start talking) <-- it starts with the others: eagle, wether, shepherd

Lacoue­ Labarthe --> identification (the self-becoming of the Self) has always been thought as a matter of examples (+ their appropriation) --raven--> (paradoxical impera­tive) “imitate me in order to be what you are”

wolf in sheep's clothing (Aesop's “A Case of Mistaken Identity”)
a wolf thought that by disguising himself he could get plenty to eat. Putting on a sheep­ skin to trick the shepherd, he joined the flock at grass without being discovered. At nightfall the shepherd shut him with the sheep in the fold and made fast all round by blocking the entrance. Then, feeling hungry, he picked up his knife and slaughtered an animal for his supper. It happened to be the wolf.
-->  a character that does not belong to one can involve one in serious trouble



[*]fable: (name of the) *literary thing* that aime to *teach responsibility* --Keenan-->  self-understanding of the free subject (<--fable--we are exposed to something in language that troubles the possibility of that understanding)

[in my lecture performances with] fable [I aim to] offer an allegory-of unreading, of reading without limits and without guarantees --> freedom

governmental concepts:
•subject
•agency
•will
•choice
•freedom
•rights
}--deconstruction-->  limitation of ethico-political responsibilities

for Keenan: **question of respon­sibility = question of freedom**

the free community of rational beings cannot simply be (regulatively) invoked

calculable & programmable law

responsibility: (names the predicament in which) *coincide the necessity/inevitability of action & the failure of law*

•politics (and ethics) --name--> the urgency and necessity of a response
•responsibility (and freedom) --name--> the impossibility of response with guarantee

           ethical =/= actual
                |                   |
impossibility =/=  totality of what is

***impossible =/= not-possible***
--Derrida--> the impossible occurs at every moment (that belong to the effort of reading)

“have we not acquired the right to say everything?” (Sade)

who reads, and how, a text addressed to no one?
what status does it have?


[Lode Lauwaert]
for Blanchot Sade (libertine aristocrat novelist) was the writer par excellence
we should think about Sade in explicitly revolutionary terms [Sade's work ~= Robespierre's Reign of Terror]
•Sade's ideal of society is a reactive reality (it takes form specifically in reaction to something external) --> undertaken endlessly efforts against modes of social organization that are based on an stable internal point of reference
in Sade:
1. selfishness has an ontological (not a moral) meaning : ‘the essence of man = negation of the value of the other's existence’ (+ a destruction of the positive meaning other people have in normal life) =/= being-for-the-other
2. characters with theocentric universe (who deliver extended theological discussions)
3. blasphemous passages (negation of God's existence) --> Sade’s specific philosophy of nature (reference to nature is enough for a proper understanding of reality)
4. *every type of destruction always ultimately serves nature* --> nature (by virtue of her desire for optimum production) is forced to destroy her products continuously [--then--> how to annihilates nature?] --(essence of Sade's world)--> **radical negation**

each individual negation involves affirmation (of the other, humanity, God, nature) --Blanchot--> (Sade's oeuvre =) a movement of radical negation that is nothing but its *negative power* (it never affirms something)

Sade = permanent resistance + radical negation (of the other)

“nothing resembles the virtue as a great crime.”
(Blanchot > Sade)

Blanchot's interpretation of the Terror + French Revolution (<== Hegel)
revolution --> freedom (formerly situated in a divine sphere) operates from a purely immanent perspective
the idea of efficacy of the freedom --> destroys what is given radically --✕--> old regimes
--(understood absolutely)--> Saint-Just and Robespierre demanded that the new French citizens lived out their pure freedom in a radical way

break free from:
•(highly personal) pleasures
•(highly personal) affairs
•

Blanchot + Sade --> *one cannot use one's freedom to establish a new political order*
freedom not contaminated by a particular creation --> Reign of Terror = (a horrible state of) “between” the overthrow of the old & the establishment of the new regime
(~~> contemporary Iran's political state's endless resistance)
•endless resistance =/= enduring constitution (~= institution)
•negation =/= affirmation

Sade's three different forms of inconvenience:
1. cruel tableaux vivants --> emotional inconvenience
2. contradictory unreasonableness (for example “religion should be abolished  ==> a republican man to be a good husband and father” + “family should be destroyed, all women belong to all men”) --> intellectual inconvenience
3. (grotesque goal of) Sade aims at describing the whole of reality (seeking to say the last word about reality, *to say everything*) --Blanchot--> *the fury of writing* or *the revolt of writing* (Sade = abundant prolific excessive writer, *writing in an exuberant way* [while in prison for 32 years]) --> anesthetic inconvenience

Blanchot's Sade = ideal writer
•we should not understand Sade's oeuvre in an intellectual way (there is no message or insight)
◦disappearance of meaning in the materiality of language -->{death of content ==Saussure==> ‘the signifier'}--> reading Sade = accessing the rough meaningless materiality of language itself
•we should not understood Sade's content as a reflection of an authentic self (un moi profond) --> Sade as a person disappears into the background
◦we should not understood his writing as an instrument he uses to express content --> ‘language = an independent reality’ (=/= Sade as a master of language)

(Hegel and) Sartre --> literary works must be engaged and should express the author's involvement with reality
(for Sartre:) writer: someone who thinks about the
current course of the world and who wants to change the world with his literature
--> “language = a loaded gun” (literature should be understood by reference to the message)
=/= Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean Ricardou, Eugène Ionesco
=/= Sade > Blanchot: writing need to bring the reader in touchwith the materiality and the autonomy of language


we never read just once

logos: the word that names and relates properly --> great truths are told in the light of day and di[...]