ABSTRACT
In one sense invention is extraordinary, in that it is a moment that resists explanation in terms of the rules that govern the ordinary. It is always a miracle. There is a strict sense in which the inventive event, for all its everydayness, is impossible: the irruption of the other into the same does not, and cannot, sit comfortably within any of the explanatory frameworks by which we characterize the possible. The ethics of invention makes impossible demands. Yet responsible inventions occur every day, not just in spite of this multiple impossibility but also in a sense because of it. One way of affirming the singularity of literature, then, is to say that the literary occupies, in the practices and understandings of Western culture, the place of the other. If it were possible to have a purely conceptual knowledge of the other as singular other, to predict or produce its arrival, neither otherness nor inventiveness would exist.
