Inventing Agency: Essays on the Literary and Philosophical Production of the Modern Subject

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Inventing Agency addresses some of the most central and pressing concerns in criticism, theory, and philosophy today. As new metaphysics of the realia of power and independently animated objects have replaced ancient conceptualizations of substance, being, and causation, the question of the subjectof the capability for just such conceptual change, for acting to any effect whatsoeverhas reemerged with fresh critical urgency. Writing on theories and fictions of the subject from Aristotle to Althusser and Fielding to Flaubert, the contributors to Inventing Agency explore the unprecedented productions of the subject as agentof cognition, aesthetic experience and judgment, imagination and representation, and moral and political actionthat together define the revolution in reflection that Kant called the Age of Critique. Informed by expertise in such interrelated fields as continental and analytic philosophy and literary history, Marxian and utopian theory, poetics and cultural criticism, moral theory and theory of sensibility, and feminist and disability studies, Inventing Agency addresses the invention of subjecthood by philosophical and literary conceptions of the specifically human capacities that continue to reveal the prospect of socialindividual and historicalagency in action. This collection on the productions of the subject is vital reading for anyone engaged in thinking about where the categories of contemporary theory come from, and where they might lead next.

Reviews

Brown compares these poets to a range of mostly Romantic writers and thinkers, with all the graceful erudition to which his readers have become accustomed. * The Year's Work in English Studies *
Inventing Agency, Essay on the Literary and Philosophical Production of the Modern Subject offers an admirable examination of the multiple ways the capacity to think and act, to reflect or negate have been both re-defined and questioned in the modern era. The authors gathered in this volume engage in a productive dialogue, focusing on distinctive works and critical perspectives. The question of agency is approached through a variety of texts that focus on aesthetics, philosophy, painting, narrative strategies and historical singularities. Knowledgeable and provocative, Inventing Agency goes far beyond the terms with which, from Descartes to Kant, the question of the authority and status of the subject have been framed, raising important questions regarding communicability and current forms of critical thought in its relationship to history. * Marie-Hlne Huet, M. Taylor Pyne Professor of French and Italian, Princeton University, USA *
This collection of essays proposes a provocative and original approach to the much debated nature of the subject with a simple yet far-reaching and creative move. Instead of describing or analyzing what the subject is, the essays consider what subjects do, in the world, in time, and in history. The 'inventing' of the subjects agency does not mean that the authors are discovering agency, but rather points to the underlying meaning of the word 'invention,' in that the authors uncover what theoretical approaches have overlooked: the subject as agent, as an actor who has been occulted by static, reductive, or deterministic theories. This dynamic approach does not result in a unified theory but yields multifaceted explorations of the subjects acts of speech in which agency works, carried out in close analyses of texts written by diverse philosophers and literary figures that include Descartes, Gournay, Diderot, Richardson, Flaubert, Aristotle, Fielding, Adam Smith, Hegel, and Kant. * Sylvie Romanowski, Professor Emerita of French, Northwestern University, USA *
Inventing Agency presents a set of innovative and probing essays focused on the question of the subject. Each offers a new perspective on the imbrication of literature and philosophy, investigating topics such as feeling and judgment, temporality and sexuality. The essays have a wide disciplinary range, bringing in art history, disability studies, and more general questions of literary studies such as narrative, poetics and performative language. Many of the essays pose the question of the (post)enlightenment subject anew, seeking openings in the legacies of Diderot, Kant and Hegel to open up possibilities of de-essentialized subjectivity. The volume is a serious and engaging contribution to the study of literature and philosophy and the interrelation between language and thinking. The book culminates in Claudia Brodskys magisterial essay on Kants notions of common sense, language and judgmenta preview of what promises to be a challenging and illuminating book to come. * Susan Bernstein, Professor of Comparative Literature, Brown University, USA *

Author Bio

Claudia Brodsky is Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, USA, and ancien directeur de programme of the Collge international de philosophie, Paris, France. Her previous publications include The Imposition of Form (1987), Lines of Thought (1996), In the Place of Language (2009), Why Philosophy, Intro., Ed. and Contributor, PMLA (2016), and, co-edited with Toni Morrison, Birth of a Nationhood (1997), as well as many articles on 17th through 20th-century philosophy and literature. Eloy LaBrada is an instructor in the Women's and Gender Studies Department at the University of Alberta, Canada, where he specializes in the philosophy of gender and sexuality, social ontology, analytic feminism, and the history of modern philosophy and literature. His articles have appeared in PMLA (2016) and JNT (2016).