From Concept to Analogy: an Investigation into Singularity

What would be ‘a man without qualities’? Obviously, we always resort to some properties to describe someone’s identity, and these attributes seem to feature someone’s character. Thanks to these qualities, we are able to recognize each individual, which appears as a gathering of properties. This concept of the identity, which eventually confounds the identity and the similarity, is the target of the satiric tone in Musil’s novel The Man without qualities. I will try to show how the satiric tone devaluates this ‘identity-similarity’ and how it also constitutes the starting point of an investigation of the singularity. The satiric tone manages to express the voice of the singularity and to turn from a general point of view to a peculiar one.I shall focus on the ethical dimension of this quest of identity, since the issue of the identity is particularly sharp in ethics. It seems that we need to know who we are to make up our mind and to know how to live. I shall present how satire is a key to a double passage. First, the satiric deflation reveals that the identity-similarity is neither believable nor respectable and that we need to think identity another way, in order to account for the singularity. Secondly, the satiric voice tackles the generality of the concept, which is unable to deal with peculiar situations or to express the Self. The passage from the concept to the analogy should help us improvise and find the right attitude or behavior in each given context.My hypothesis is that satire reveals the inadequacies and the limits of the identity- similarity and that it could be a plausible candidate to bring about an alternative concept of the identity, centered on the singularity. Moreover, satire could provide a kind of literary experiment which would be able to give ethical indications: the satiric tone in moral communication has the power to make us feel concern. From the reading of Musil’s novel, I shall suggest that satire, as an expression of the voice of the singularity, plays a precious role in moral communication, in so far as it conveys a non-conceptual analogical use of language.