Abstract

Jean Paul's novel The Life of Fibel, Author of the Bienrodische Fibel places itself in a specifi c relation to literacy by identifying the alphabet and the spelling-book as a matrix of its own production. Thus, the text refers itself and its sense-effects back to the arbitrariness of its elements and their combinatorics. Moreover, at the margins of the book, it feigns to be abandoned to the contingency of its preliteral physis which is suppressed by sense, authority, authorship and control of the work.