A fuerza de puntos. La experiencia como puntuación (The force of periods. Experience as punctuation)

Punctuation, it is known, has a long history, from account books of the scribes of Ancient Egypt to recent smileys. Paying great attention to the art of punctuation in its classical and contemporary forms, this book would nevertheless like to open up a wider field: that of stigmatology (from the Greek stigmê: “point”), which analyses the effects of punctuation wherever they appear. In the story and in the autobiographical production we find a subject that is nothing more than the counterpoint of a series of punctuations, as psychoanalysis and literature, from Tristram Shandy to Lacan, passing through Chekhov’s extraordinary novel, The Exclamation Mark. In order to describe these punctuation effects, an attempt is finally made to construct — with Hegel, Nietzsche, and some others — a concept of punctuation attentive to the rhythm and pulsation of the phrasing, as well as to the political scopes inherent in any point force.