Saying Saying: Performative Language in Autrement qu'être
Institution: | Miami University |
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Department: | French |
Degree: | MA |
Year: | 2012 |
Keywords: | Literature; ethics; saying; dire; interruption; non-lieu; Levinas; poetics; Celan |
Record ID: | 1951045 |
Full text PDF: | http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1344048769 |
This paper examines the performative nature of Emmanuel Levinas's Autrement qu'être as a means of understanding the relationship between ethics and language. Through a close reading of the text, it seeks the ethical not in the mere words on the page, but in their very escape from the fixedness of the text, primarily in the way Levinas links the word Dire to an ethics of movement and transcendence. Jacques Derrida's analysis of Levinas's paradoxical language is used to show the ways in which Autrement qu'être allows fissures to develop in its own language, as Totalité et Infini, a prior iteration of Levinas's language theory, did not do. These fissures, ruptures and interruptions in the Saying, the Dire of the text, are the place and the non-lieu of poetic language in Autrement qu'être. Levinas's essay on poet Paul Celan, written after Autrement qu'être, provides a counterpoint to the poetic interruptions present in Levinas's own text, and suggests that Autrement qu'être itself, a text saying saying, and not the said, performs a poetic ethics.