Doing Literature without Thinking: Paralogical Devices and the Literary Field

Abstract

"the devices of “the art of mania” that I have analyzed in romantic and surrealist texts figure as islands of paralogism in the discourse of the literary field. This demands that literary actors, the media, and institutions produce, distribute, and consume singularities of imaginative texts, evocations of the unspeakable, and the elusiveness of poetic signification by implanting them in chains of conceptions, acts, and texts that - operating rationally and with a great deal of thinking - constantly produce and reproduce the meanings of everything that seems to be created without or beside thinking."