A Shared Strangeness

Abstract

The starting point for this study is the literary institution, both as a postulate of literature’s right to express everything and anything —not only that which fails to obey pre-existing criteria, but also that which exceeds representation— and, at the same time, an exercise in an imprisoning performativity. As the analysis unfolds, it bestows special relevance on the constitutive tension of the literary, which places it in a rupture with stabilizing forces, thus presenting itself as both an oscillation between silence and meaning and between singularization and universalization. The argumentation then continues to elucidate that this tension is essential to life “in common” and constitutes itself as its paradigm, unlimited movement of connections and separations, a condition of strangeness without which the world would end in totalitarianism.