EDITH KURZWEIL
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ysis or use literature to resolve their problems. Obviously talent has
something to do with it.
JK:
I don't really know. But my family, early on, pushed me into a
cultural milieu. Literature was important to us, so we couldn't imag–
ine - particularly in Eastern countries where religion was banned
and political issues became dogmatic - that children could grow up
without art and literature. They always were a part of me. But you
are asking why more literary people don't go into psychoanalysis. I
think that literary criticism, after formalism, and particularly after
structuralism, got too abstract. This is interesting, because when
you try to describe more precisely how literary form functions, when
you get to the eternal logic of texts and get into abstractions, you
often tend to lose its human aspects - its importance to the reader
and writer. In other words, we cannot see the inner dynamics, the
inner motivations, or the results of reading
on
somebody who reads .
That is why I think psychoanalysis may be a viable extension of for–
malistic studies, so that these studies don't reach a sort of impasse.
EK:
Does this mean that you do not support the popularity of French
deconstruction among American literary academics, for whom it has
become somewhat rigid, and that their pursuits are too formalistic
for you?
JK:
Yes. I have the impression that Americans have picked up French
theoretical development only partially and that it has become a sort
of monopoly. It goes beyond the essentials of symbolic forms, some–
times quite dogmatically: even its most enthusiastic French propo–
nents are less dogmatic than the Americans.
EK:
That's exactly my impression .
JK:
For instance, when we say that we try to analyze metaphysical
presuppositions, and when we question the notions of "meaning," or
"form ," as well as the dichotomy between meaning and form - we
know that we cannot
entirely
get away from these metaphysical state–
ments. We assume that there always is a sort of dialectic between the
metaphysical postulates and something else, and this dialectic enables
us to consider such fields as ethics and history. In America, the so–
called deconstructionists think that, because ethics and history belong
to metaphysics and because metaphysics is criticized by Heidegger
or his French followers, ethics and history no longer exist. I have
been amazed when lecturing at American universities, for instance,
when trying to understand Mallarme's formal involvement at the end
of the nineteenth century in relation to French history, to religion,
the state arts, the bourgeois parties - somebody in the audience al-
