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PARTISAN REVIEW
Genette, Jacques Lacan, the revived Mikail Bakhtin. Dialogue is a
centerless, reversible structure, yet one that moves forward by a dy–
namic of reference and interpretation, as well as through metalingual
scrutiny of its own codes, and verification of its channels of communi–
cation .
It
is in the nature of discourse, Emile Benveniste suggests, that
"I " and "you" are interdependent, and reversible: he who says "I"
assumes the whole system of subjectivity coded in the language, then
hands it all over to the "you," who in his turn becomes
"I. "
There is no
permanent privilege in such a system, and no stability, but there is the
possibility of questionings and responses, of su·pplements and comple–
tions, and there is necessarily reciprocity and intersubjectivity. This is
not, I think, an impertinent model, nor an impotent one. It may
suggest one move toward realization of Proust's injunction, that we
become the readers of ourselves .
Edith Kurzweil
Both William Phillips and Denis Donoghue, so far, have
indicated that structuralism and poststructuralism, whatever else their
merits may be, might not be literary criticism. Denis Donoghue has
shown how structuralism has been superseded by philosophy; and he
has argued how Paul Ricoeur, who has moved beyond structuralism
with the help of semantics, might have incorporated it, successfully,
into his hermeneutics. But Ricoeur had argued against structuralism
before he concerned himself with linguistics. His real concern, all
along, had been with meaning, mostly linked to belief as it manifests
itself in everyday life, but inspired, ultimately, by belief in God. So at
least one reason why Ricoeur bothered with structuralism was due to
the fact that his hermeneutics, built upon a dialectics encompassing all
meaning systems, such as Marxism, socialism, and existentialism, had
to contend with it. The very prominence of structuralism, in its vanous
incarnations, forced Ricoeur to pay attention, and to make it part of his
hermeneutic system. I believe that Ricoeur did, to some extent, what we
are doing today: we are discussing an intellectual phenomenon that is
spreading like wildfire, or at least like a slow oil spill. And whatever its
merits, we cannot ignore it, because we have
to
estimate its achieve–
ments and live with its excitements.
As you all know, I am not a literary critic, but a sociologist-and I
