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seems to me that if you concede that that is the way in which
structuralism most clearly reveals itself, then all I need is the word
"act" and the word "gesture," and, as a moralist, I think I'm pretty
well home. Or, if he concedes that the subject is to be discussed in
terms of acts and gestures, then I think we can have some useful
combat there. Now, again, I noticed he used the phrase "the ethical
context. " I think ethical is a bit extreme. I didn't propose any ethical
question. A moral question, yes, in the sense in which perhaps
Lionel Trilling used the word "morals" in relation
to
manners and
the normal. But is seems to me indisputable that structuralism is not
philosophically neutral. It is no more philosophically neutral than
it is politically neutral. And if structuralism on the whole has found
it very easy to imply, and indeed to engineer a politics, it seems to me
tha tit's a very swift step un til it engineers and deploys a philosophy,
and perhaps even a much-hated metaphysics.
As to the last part of his comment, in regard to dialogue, I not
only welcome that passage, but, in fact I welcome it because I've just
finished a book about dialogue. With some embarrassment, I must
confess it's called
Dialogue of One,
but that is primarily because I
choose that passage in Donne's poem "The Ecstasy" where that
phrase comes from, "dialogue of one,"
to
meditate some of the
embarrassments involved in dialogue as such-the notion of mono–
logue, dialogue, soliloquy, and so on.
PETER BROOKS: I don't mean to say that structuralism is without
implicit ideology. I said it had that; it has lots of them. I don 't think
that it is philosophically innocent, but that it's philosophically
naive. I don't think that most people who did the interesting
structuralist work were trained as philosophers or qualify as philoso–
phers, and I think trying to extract their implicit philosophy is not
the most useful way to go about trying to understand what struc–
turalism is. That's why I talked about gestures, and I don ' t think acts
was my word, but activity. It's a kind of mental and critical activity
which, it seems to me, characterizes structuralism. Now, this is to
confess that the work of structuralists that I find in teresting is the
work done by people like Barthes, Todorov and Genette, and that
some of Foucault's wilder speculations on the end of man strike me
as trivial, because that is precisely what Foucault is doing when he
carries on about the end of man: trying
to
turn structuralism into a
philosophy, and the results are, I think, simply trivial. And there we
might be in agreement.
RUDI CARDONA: To open up the discussion, and maybe to join this
