Böcker i Screaming-serien

The aim of this book is to show that precisely in the indeterminacy of literature we can find the possibility of ethics and it will start with the examination of a work that clearly has a paradoxical nature - Sreten Ugri¿i¿'s Infinitive. The paradox of Infinitive consists in the fact that it is a monograph, but a monograph about a non-existent book. The examination of the paradox on which Infinitive is based will be associated with Maurice Blanchot's analysis of the (im)possibility of literature from his essays "Orpheus's Gaze" and "Encountering the Imaginary." This study will claim that two most important features of the (im)possibility of literature are: the passage from je to il and the temporal paradox of the time of time's absence. These two features are interconnected: a loss of personality (and the inability to subsume the work of art under terms of decision and intention) leads to a strange realm that is governed by the time of time's absence. This is the realm of imaginary or a place where, to paraphrase Blanchot, language becomes its own image. Through the analysis of specific literary works (Infinitive, Marbot: A Biography and The Lost Estate) this book will try to describe the most important paradoxes of literature. In its final part, through a dialogue between Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas, two theses will be formulated: first, the passage from je to il will be associated with the impossibility of death and close reading of Blanchot's reworking of Levinas's concepts will open a perspective according to which art is capable of offering the experience of fundamental alterity; second, the time of time's absence will be described as the temporality of artwork, but also as the temporality of the other.

« … It has taken me years to admit - perhaps only to myself - that I don't care about writing something important, something significant. That my only hope, wish - dream even - is to write something beautiful … » (139) This book attempts to open the dossier of fidelity; and, in particular, attend to the question of the relationship between fidelity and its object, to the question of: must there be an object to fidelity? For, if one is faithful to something or someone, is one responding to the what, the characteristics of the thing, the person; or the who, the person, thing, as such? Which is not to say that what and who are necessarily distinguishable, separable, to begin with. However, if we open the possibility that the who is always already beyond us - outside of knowability, if even only slightly - this suggests that it is the spectre, the potential unknowability, that haunts all relationality. Thus, even if there is an object to one's fidelity - for, without which one cannot even begin to speak of fidelity, speak of relationality - this might well be an objectless object or, at least, an object that remains veiled from us. In order to explore this relationship - in which one cannot even be sure if there is a relationality; for, without the object, the nature, if one can call it that, of the relation is speculative - the text takes the form of an exploratory fiction. Where it attempts to bear witness to the possibility of fidelity - keeping in mind that fiction is both the limit to, and condition of, testimony - whilst quite possibly only testifying to the possibility of being able to testify. Nothing more.