ABSTRACT
I began the main part of this book with a self-reflexive gesture, with my attempt to describe the act of writing in the act of writing, as a minor example of possible inventiveness. Yet the terms in which I have described the inventive event, the just response to the singularity of the other in the act of bringing it into the field of the same, and the consequent alteration of the mental and emotional ground on which the subject and the culture stand, may make it sound like an extraordinarily arduous and rarely accomplished task. How can this sense of an exceptional event be squared with my claim that invention happens all the time-that countless works of art exhibit inventiveness, as do an even larger number of other events of writing, speaking, gesturing, and even thinking?
