Abstract

The aim of this proposal is to promote a theoretical-critical debate in the field of literary studies, with a focus on discussing the importance of paradox as a mode of thought and representation/construction of the world, an alternative to the hegemonic epistemologies associated with Western instrumental reason. Considering, like G. Deleuze, that the whole of grammar and the whole of the syllogism is a way of maintaining the subordination of conjunctions to the verb to be, one of the intellectual challenges we face today is to think of “being” simultaneously in terms of identity and becoming, a term with a genealogy that goes from Heraclitus via Bergson to Deleuze and which has been revived as a way of avoiding immobilizing essentializations. We find, in modes as diverse as those we call here “marrano thinking”, “Yoruba Esu Thinking”, and in Amerindian cosmologies, an exoneration of the individual from the weight and obligation of a coherent, disciplining, hegemonic and homogenizing unity. These modes reveal a cardinal ontological paradox: one according to which the self becomes itself only by becoming other. In turn, these “non-Western” cosmologies subvert the linearity of time by reimagining the present, the past and the future as a whole organized according to more subtle and complex laws than the Western conception of historical time. Increasingly present on the contemporary artistic and literature scene, these cosmologies are particularly rich sources of paradoxical figures, constituting an urgent epistemological intervention in the liminal situation of a world in the throes of catastrophe, marked by waves of extinction and desertification.

Keywords:
paradox; becoming; “non-Western” cosmologies