ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the implications for contemporary literary theory of the transcultural intellectual history outlined in Chapter 1. Seeking to regulate signifying potencies within imaginative discourses implicitly acknowledges them to be affectively compelling and thus dangerously persuasive. By unfolding with a seemingly internal, “autonomous” impetus of its own, literary discourse acts upon those attending to it in ways that are “anarchic”—in the sense of not being governed by external rules. But the effect of autonomy in discourse is rooted in artists’ and audiences’ ethical sense. Discourse making us sensible of the impossibility for humans, embedded as we are in deep sociality, to disentangle significance from ethical sensibility is not merely unruly, but “an-archic” in the peculiar sense given the term by the twentieth-century philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. A space opens through interruptions in self-coherence and settled views, not just between selfish and sociable impulses, but also between moral sociality, in which in-group well-being is taken to be the measure of the good, and an ethical sense that puts that identification in question. Ethically disruptive effects of imaginative discourse, stressed in much recent literary theory, are here traced to bioculturally evolved affective dissonances integral to the sociality that verbal art addresses.
