This Is Not a Character: Resemblance and Similitude in Etgar Keret's Suddenly, a Knock on the Door
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article is concerned with reading Etgar Keret’s Suddenly a Knock on the Door (2010) for the character. Shot through with postmodern skepticism about the concept of character, Keret’s stories are particularly well placed to net the contemporary sense of rupture between character and the affirmation of reality. Keret’s depiction of character is analyzed using Michel Foucault’s distinction between Resemblance and Similitude, introduced in his book This Is Not a Pipe. Building on Foucault’s distinction, I argue that Keret dismisses the old equivalence between resemblance and affirmation and brings pure similitudes and non-affirmative verbal statements into play, thereby creating the instability of character and a disoriented characterization. This principle manifests itself in a variety of techniques, in all of which the verbal objects, that are there seemingly representing character, even though they bear a resemblance to what we think is recognizable, are in fact misleading.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".