[...] 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[...]