Exordium

Abstract

Departing from Giorgio Agamben’s “The End of the Poem,” the introduction distinguishes “inception” from a series of related but not synonymous terms: origin, birth, and beginning. Recalling what R. Murray Schafer calls “onset distortion” in music, inception marks the text’s (and the life’s) vexed relation to its outside; inception, for this book, marks an asynchronicity within beginnings, textual and existential, where foundation diverges from mere starting out. The literary work, because it can neither comprise its inception nor externalize it in an authorizing exteriority, must in some sense posit itself. This fundamental, non-trivial self-reflexivity the book links to potentiality and to a striving for literary language to communicate itself, beyond any particular content of communication. In brief discussions of texts by Agamben, Arendt, Augustine, Benveniste, Frank Kermode, Roland Barthes, J Hillis Miller, Nabokov, and others, the introduction attempts to spell out its understanding of the relation of potentiality to inception and to trace some of its consequences for understandings of the relation between art and life. In so doing, it also distinguishes the book’s project from other possible approaches (empirical, practical, narratological) to the question of beginning.