Abstract
The paper argues for a metonymic concept of community; that is, to conceive of community not in terms of metaphor (which presumes a third, and thus establishes a criterion of exclusion), but as metonymic ‘contingency in space’. In order to do so, it resorts to the myth theory of Lévi-Strauss, which, highly influenced by Hegelian dialectics, excludes just such a possibility by taking the metonymic aspect of story-telling through his structural conception of myth. More recent theories of community, such as those of Maurice Blanchot, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy and Judith Butler, all implicity point toward an alternative conception of community in which contingency, as well as contiguity in space, play a major role. That is, literature - much more so than any dialectico-philosophical approach - is able to preserve a tropologically metonymic concept of community that avoids the exclusionary mechanisms of our traditionally metaphoric notions of community; and myth, as a world-wide of story-telling and sense-making, plays an important role in this process of conceptualization.
Presenters
Claviez ThomasProfessor for Literary Theory, English Department, University of Bern, Switzerland, Bern (de), Switzerland
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Community, Ethics, Myth, Storytelling, Metonmy, Metaphor, Mutliculturalism
