英文摘要 |
Philip Roth’s “Eli, the Fanatic” explores the conflict between communal identity and individual difference. In the short story, a community of assimilated Jews in a New York suburb forces a group of newly arrived Hasidic immigrants to give up their traditional religious costumes, for fear that the newcomers’ sartorial difference will threaten communal harmony. Reading the story in light of Gilles Deleuze and F?lix Guattari’s concepts of the “abstract machine of faciality” and the “probe-head,” as well as Alain Badiou’s theory of “the generic truth,” this paper argues that a community that is established through the mechanism of faciality propagates identity and reduces differences; in contrast, if the community is constituted through “the truth procedure,” the differences among its members should be recognized yet traversed. In “Eli, the Fanatic,” the conflict between the normalizing mechanism of faciality and the individualizing operation of the probe-head reaches a deadlock that can only be resolved in the generic procedure of truth. |