Inhuman speakers

This dissertation seeks to combine two ideas about the role of literature in society: the idea that literature somehow encodes, resists, reproduces, or administers domination; and the idea that the literary text approaches the reader as the autonomous representative of its author--as an entity, in other words, with many of the traits and possibilities normally ascribed to persons. The question is posed whether it is possible for texts to reject their readers, as a bad alternative to the possibility of dominating or submitting to them; and it is hypothesized that many literary works, specifically those labeled modernist, do in fact employ a number of strategies for keeping their readers from them. In doing so, however, they also sacrifice the possibility of recognition, understood in a loosely Hegelian sense as free reconciliation, or as the ethical face-to-face (Buber and Levinas). If the reciprocal violence of literary criticism proves such sacrifices to have been insufficient for freedom, the distinctive pathos of certain projects of literary modernism might then be said to proceed from the way in which recognition appears in them as a thing irrevocably renounced. Systematic analysis is eschewed in favor of a discontinuous series of hyperbolic "theory-fictions" (Baudrillard's term) into which modernist writings enter as personae, so to speak, onto the changing set of a play. Central among these theory-fictions are four "stations of failed recognition": varied modes of writing or stratagems in and by which the possibility of a face-to-face between reader and author is evaded, frustrated, thwarted, cancelled, or denied. A fifth theory-fiction is recognition itself--defined, as I have said, in a utopian sense as the socially unrealizable moment of relation that transcends or surpasses domination and submission, humanity and inhumanity. Closely related to these five theory-fictions is what I call the fiction of the "inhuman speaker"--a daemonic consciousness or entity (perhaps a technological object or subject) that is produced wherever recognition is exchanged for cognition (thinking as technique).