Labyrinths of Exemplarity presents the first comprehensive, in-depth study of the problem of exemplarity—or how we move between the general and the particular in order to try to understand our world. The author's focus ranges from the most basic and fundamental issues of what examples are and where they come from to the complex key issues of how examples function in the discourses they inhabit and what this functioning tells us about the nature of examples or exemplarity itself. The problem is treated especially in connection to Rousseau and Aristotle, with reference to deconstruction (especially Derrida) and the range of Western metaphysics. Ultimately, a new theory of examples is offered, one not drawn from the assumptions made by earlier philosophers but rather from the usage and functioning of examples in philosophical discourse.

Exemplary Ambivalence in Late Nineteenth-Century Spanish America: Narrating Creole Subjectivity casts new light on the role of exemplary narrative in nineteenth-century Spanish America, highlighting the multiplicity of didactic writing and its dynamic relationship with readers as interpretive agents. Drawing on literary and historical models of creole heterogeneity, Austin’s study probes the unstable social and ethnic fictions of the creole elite as they portray themselves through the flawed canvas of exemplary discourse. Exemplary Ambivalence examines creole subjectivity through postcolonial and Latin American theoretical lenses to show that Spanish American creole subjects, always multiple, reveal their ideological ambivalence through exemplary narrative. This study examines a cross-section of canonical and lesser-known texts written toward the end of the nineteenth-century by authors across Spanish America, including Eugenio Cambaceres (Argentina), José Asunción Silva (Colombia), José Martí (Cuba), Clorinda Matto de Turner (Peru), and Juana Manuela Gorriti (Argentina). These texts range from realist and modernist novels to a cookbook of multiple authorship, and engage issues of nationalism, citizenship, gender, indigenous rights, and liberal ideologies within the historical context of Spanish America’s weakened democracies and modernizing economies at the end of the nineteenth-century. Austin’s research fills a critical gap within studies of the nineteenth-century in Spanish America as it explores the inconsistencies of exemplary texts and emphasizes the forms, sources, and implications of creole ideological and narrative multiplicity. By recognizing the inherent ambivalence of exemplary discourse, along with creole writing and reading subjectivities, Exemplary Ambivalence opens fresh perspectives on canonical texts while it also engages some of the non-canonical, hybrid, and fragmentary texts of nineteenth-century reading culture.

This book pursues a strand in the history of thought – ranging from codified statutes to looser social expectations – that uses particulars, more specifically examples, to produce norms. Much intellectual history takes ancient Greece as a point of departure. But the practice of exemplarity is historically rooted firmly in ancient Roman rhetoric, oratory, literature, and law – genres that also secured its transmission. Their pragmatic approach results in a conceptualization of politics, social organization, philosophy, and law that is derived from the concrete. It is commonly supposed that, with the shift from pre-modern to modern ways of thinking – as modern knowledge came to privilege abstraction over exempla, the general over the particular – exemplarity lost its way. This book reveals the limits of this understanding. Tracing the role of exemplarity from Rome through to its influence on the fields of literature, politics, philosophy, psychoanalysis and law, it shows how Roman exemplarity has subsisted, not only as a figure of thought, but also as an alternative way to organize and to transmit knowledge.

This book offers an original philosophical perspective on exemplarity. Inspired by Wittgenstein’s later work and Derrida’s theory of deconstruction, it argues that examples are not static entities but rather oscillate between singular and universal moments. There is a broad consensus that exemplary cases mediate between singular instances and universal concepts or norms. In the first part of the book, Mácha contends that there is a kind of différance between singular examples and general exemplars or paradigms. Every example is, in part, also an exemplar, and vice versa. Furthermore, he develops a paracomplete approach to the logic of exemplarity, which allows us to say of an exemplar of X neither that it is an X nor that it is not an X. This paradox is structurally isomorphic to Russell’s paradox and can be addressed in similar ways. In the second part of the book, Mácha presents four historical studies that exemplify the ideas developed in the first part. This part begins with Plato’s Forms, understood as standards/paradigms, before considering Kant’s theory of reflective judgment as a general epistemological account of exemplarity. This is then followed by analyses of Hegel’s conceptual moment of particularity and Kuhn’s concept of paradigm. The book concludes by discussing the speculative hypothesis that all our knowledge is based on paradigms, which, following the logic of exemplarity, are neither true nor false. The Philosophy of Exemplarity will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of language, logic, history of philosophy, and literary theory.

"The well-known mythographer Marina Warner has described the process of reading fairy tales and folktales as 'tasting the dragon's blood' - a magical and transformative process by which one's ears are opened to the voices of the past and of other worlds. Roman exempla, which constitute a national story-telling tradition, are very different in many ways from the dream-like fantasies of fairy-tales and other narrative folk traditions that have been the subject of Warner's studies. In (supposedly) true stories from history, battle-hardened warriors, noble maidens and honourable sons of the soil face impossible dangers, take terrible decisions and sacrifice their lives, their limbs and even their own children for the sake of justice, discipline and the Roman community. Yet for the ancient Romans too, hearing the blood-soaked stories of their ancestral heroes was an intimate and potent experience, and this 'taste of the hero's blood' had an intoxicating effect similar to the blood of Warner's dragon: evoking other worlds, shaping understanding of their own world"--

Based on over five years of ethnographic fieldwork in Syria, Exemplary Life focuses on the life of a Damascus woman, Myrna Nazzour, who serves as an aspirational figure in her community. Myrna is regarded by her followers as an exemplary figure, a living saint, and the messages, apparitions, stigmata, and oil that have marked Myrna since 1982 have corroborated her status as chosen by God. Exemplary Life probes the power of examples, the modelling of sainthood around Myrna’s figure, and the broader context for Syrian Christians in the changing landscape of the Middle East. The book highlights the social use of examples such as the ones inhabited by Myrna’s devout followers and how they reveal the broader structures of illustration, evidence, and persuasion in social and cultural settings. Andreas Bandak argues that the role of the example should incite us to investigate which trains of thought set local worlds in motion. In doing so, Exemplary Life presents a novel frame for examining how religion comes to matter to people and adds a critical dimension to current anthropological engagements with ethics and morality.

While rejecting a conception of literature as moral philosophy, or a device for imparting particular morals to the reader through exemplary characters and plots, Maryse Condé has displayed throughout her writing career a strong valorization of literature as ethical critique. This study examines her singular approach to literary commitment as a critical reworking of aesthetic models and modes of interpretation. Focusing on four dominant problematics in Condé’s work—history and globalization in La Belle Créole and Moi, Tituba sorcière...noire de Salem, intertextuality and reception in La migration des cœurs and Célanire cou-coupé, trauma and subjectivity in En attendant le bonheur and Desirada, community and ethics in Traversée de la mangrove and Histoire de la femme cannibale—this analysis proposes to elucidate how, and to what ends, Condé engages, and alters, approaches to reading, staging the problematic, yet pragmatic, need to read well. This hermeneutic imperative foregrounds the need to engage with texts, to cannibalize texts while recognizing their fundamental opacity and inexhaustibility, their resistance to the reader’s interpretive habits.