Being-in-the-Text. The Ontological Possibility Underlying the Experience of Literature

Abstract

This article proposes an ontological reflection of the experience of literature within the framework of existential philosophy and in relation to one of the assumptions of the aesthetics of reception: the text comprises, in its very being, a virtuality that actively involves its receivers. Certainly, the possibility underlying this demarcation is the insurrection of existential philosophy with a Heideggerian tone, which frames the question of being in an analysis of Dasein. Such deployment, which is carried out mainly in Being and Time, will have in this reflection a turn towards Gadamer's concept of 'reading consciousness', closer to the aesthetics of reception and which, nevertheless, preserves the character of being-in-the-world in the mode of being-in-the-text. The objective is to delve into the very foundation of reception in the pairs work-world-receiver-being-in-the-world, thus favoring said experience as becoming-other. As a result, the text will move from a foundation of a phenomenological-existential nature with the nuances that this implies in the face of the assumptions of E. Husserl's  phenomenology, the horizon of the aesthetics of literary reception in a hermeneutical display that will qualify the existential be/being-in-the-world to the mode of being-in-the-text, which is an operation that integrates the opening of the world-text to an incessant search for being. In this fusion of horizons, the notions of 'horizon of expectations' and 'points of indeterminacy' will converge, because in that horizon of the receiving pole, existential indeterminacy opens up to the text as occupation and care of existence itself.