Alterocupar-SE: Obliquation and transitionality in literary experience

Abstract

This article aims at developing the notion of obliquation, as well as understanding why literary experience seems to be its place of privilege, by means of a double, albeit conjoined, movement. First, it is a matter of thinking of obliquation, through a transversal reading of the theory of enunciation, as a fundamental condition of reflexivity. Therefore, if in his course on The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Foucault proposes an “analytics of the forms of reflexivity, inasmuch as it is the forms of reflexivity that constitute the subject as such,” in our opinion, such an exercise still needs to be complemented by an ontology of the modes of obliquation, including the literary experience analyzed here. Second, elevating the oblique to a paroxysm, we will try to argue, making free use of the concept of transitional objects, that obliquity precedes and even enables the occupation of one's own place, i.e., that there is an ontological privilege of fiction, of othering, over one's own subjectivity.