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(2012) Literature, ethics, and aesthetics, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
For Guattari it is aesthetics that provides an ethics that enables a "trans-gressive" machine in the form of subjectivity or singularization.1 The "aesthetic mode," for Guattari, is a way to ward off the alienation and fragmentation resulting from a postmodern world. "The devaluation of the meaning of life provokes the fragmentation of the self-image" (Guattari, 1995:12). Guattari attempts to "grasp [subjectivity] in the dimension of its processual creativity" (1995:13), the result is an ethico-aesthetics. His notion of a processual subjectivity is that in creating a subjectivity one is "geared" toward the future and not the past, that is, not " "ready-made" dimensions of subjectivity crystallized into structural complexes' (1995:7). What role does the literary function play in the subjectivity born of processual creativity? How does such a subjectivity unpack from, and fold back into, territory, community, society, and so on? What are its affects—in our prior use of the term, meaning a body that is the result of an action and that does not precede the action?
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Full citation:
Achilles, S. (2012). The literary function and society II: community and subjectification, in Literature, ethics, and aesthetics, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 111-135.
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