Notes on
Derek
Attridge "Innovation, Literature, Ethics: Relating to the Other."
[PMLA 114 (1999): 20-31].
José Angel García Landa
Universidad de Zaragoza, 2003
Otherness
as that which transforms us when we innovate, “Otherness, that is, is produced
in an active or eventlike relation—we might call it a relating” (22); breaking
down the familiar as welcoming the other. Innovation transforms the self.
Private
creation vs public invention—a number of pragmatic issues lead from one to the
other. (Ignora que it may be creative for the individual but significant for
culture at large—already done).
Significance of private creation may register
much later:
“Hence
inventiveness is not an inherent property of an act or a created object: it can
only be retrospectively, and never certainly, assigned” (23)
“It is in
the acknowledgement of the other human being’s uniqueness and therefore of the
impossibility of finding general rules or schemata to account fully for him or
her that one can be said to encounter the other” (24). The response to this
otherness creatively changes us: “In this process the other is transformed from
other to same, but the same is not the same as it was before the encounter”
(24).
Reading as
“registering what is unique about the shaping of language, thought, and feeling
in a particular work” (25).
(Problem: maybe we’ll register what is unique for us. But what is unique is not
necessairly the main point of the
other’s action—JAGL).
“what I
affirm when I respond to the text in a way that does justice to its otherness
is not simply a particular argument or arrangement of words but the creativity
of the author or authors in bringing into existence that argument or those
words” (25).
(But the author’s otherness is not necessarily the reader’s
otherness. What was ‘the same’ for the author may be 'other' for the reader).
“a full
response to the otherness of the text includes an awareness of, a respect for,
and in a certain sense (...) a taking of responsibility for, the creativity of
its author” (25).
“we need to
consider the other as a relating: it is not the text ‘itself’ butr my singular
and active relation to the particular configuration of possibilities
represented by the text that is the site of alterity” (26).
“Hence the
need to repeat the work, as a temporal, sequential experience, if on wishes to
repeat the apprehension of its otherness (though exact repetition can neve
occur).” (27) (—cf. the notion that rereading enhances literariness)
Creativity
required in response to creative work:
“Only a new, unpredictable, singular,
creative act, as an inventive event in its turn, can do justice to a literary
work as literary work” (27)
Creation
involves risk (27; cf. Toolan también)— Risk and trust.
Responsibility
of the (critic): “As when I create a new artifact or mode of thought, my
obligation is to refashion what I think and what I am in order to take the
fullest possible account of—to respect, safeguard, and learn from—the otherness
and singularity of the other and to do so without any certainty about the
consequences of my act” (27-28).
Unpredictability
of ethical demands vs. specific obligations of moral demands. (28). Primacy of
interpersonal relations in using terms like responsibility and ethics.
Responsibility
for the other is at the heart of creativity (29)
(Vs Attridge: más enfasis en la
transitoriedad de muchos aspectos creativos, y también cuestionar la absoluta
novedad y ‘otherness’. Mas bien una
cuestión de posicionamiento: lo periférico se vuelve central).
“The
discourses at our disposal may provide a way of understanding virtually
everything about an innovative act—its psychic ingredients, its cultural
matrix, its etiology and technology—but they will leave unanswered one crucial
question, how does the new, the other, come into being when all we have is what
we have?” (30).
(Respuesta:
Through interaction. Absolutely new for
whom?).
Otherness
and novelty are irreducible to conceptual predictive knowledge, otherwise there also would
not be such thing as responsibility or ethics (30).
(A matter of retrospection—not
calculation, I would add).
—oOo—
