Abstract

The dissertation studies how Maurice Blanchot, Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, and Juan Jose Saer have dealt with the question of the other. The other is what exceeds every thetic position, every thematic reduction and overflows the order of signification. Faced with the question of the other, writing and criticism can provide neither an intellectual history of the concept of the other , nor a philosophy or theory, since the other is what exceeds comprehension . ;The question of the other is a question that, when posited, interrupts the "translation" of the singularity of the act of writing into cultural values or master signifiers. Fundamentally, the question of the other is the question of writing. Blanchot speaks of exigency, Beckett of obligation, Borges of relation, Saer of the "espesa selva de lo real." These writers share a common feature: they understand writing as an act traversed by a constitutive excess, which can be read as the result of a generalization of rhetoric, by a re-marking of the cognitive and aesthetic implications of rhetoric. I analyze this re-marking of rhetoric under the heading of the altering effect. This excess opens writing to an "ethical scene," if by "ethical" one understands a non-indifference to the other