The Price of Originality

Abstract

Can a system form a structure that is absolutely new without structural importation from external domains or reuse of the structure it already contains? Parmenides, as a theorist of the strictly absolute, sets the foundational paradox. Absolute novelty seems logically impossible, because whatever is original must either be absolutely non-originated and therefore not constructed, or structured by prior or relative conditions and therefore not original. Most subsequent accounts of originality and novelty (from Galileo through Harold Bloom, Jacques Derrida, and Alain Badiou) effectively confirm this impossibility. The Price of Originality argues that a textual system can form, solely from its own resources, a configuration not structurated by the system’s own structural order, while remaining entirely immanent to it. Through analysis of Wulf ond Eadwacer, Victor Hugo’s “Demain, dès l’aube,” and Edmund Spenser’s “Epithalamion,” the project identifies structures not ordered by the constitutive structure of the sites that exhibit them. Each site has a constitutive order. Each order exhibits a structure that does not structurally presuppose that constitutive order. The exhibited structure is immanent to and coextensive with that order. Each site’s constitutive order exhibits a pattern for which it cannot serve as the structural precedent despite the exhibited structure being coextensive and immanent to the constitutive order. Such a structure is not in excess of the constitutive order, because there is no structural position outside of that order from which to license comparison between inner and outer. Structurally speaking, the constitutive order and exhibited structure occupy the same exact textual site. The exhibited structure is, in structural terms, strictly new because it does not structurally presuppose the constitutive order that forms it. The Price of Originality thus challenges the tacit assumption that a system’s structural order determines all the configurations immanent to it. The project demonstrates that a form of absolute structural originality is possible without negating, exiting, or extending the very system that seems to preclude it.