Introduction

1. Donald Polkinghorne, Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1988), is one of the more comprehensive works that have already pursued this narrative itinerary.

2. What I call the “implied subject” has important parallels to what, in literary theory, is called the “implied author.” The latter term is employed in two primary and interrelated senses: (1) to designate the status of the author that a text sets up for the reader in and through itself, and (2) to stress that what the text reveals about the “author” cannot be directly identified with the flesh-and-blood author. The term implied subject is intended to refer to the subject set up by our utterances, but which, in ordinary language usage at least, does not contain the distance evidenced in point 2. That is, behind our speaking or thinking there is not another (more real) subject or author.

3. I do not intend here a complete overthrow of our beliefs in the existence of selfhood and personal identity, for I do not doubt the importance of these concepts to our lives. The aim is rather to examine the ways in which our experience of selfhood and identity is in fact dependent on language and self-narration.

4. I take the notions of person and personal identity, unlike self and selfhood, to explicitly include embodiment, even if it is a fictional person. Later chapters expand on this distinction.

5. The foundationalist strains in our own age arise especially from the Cartesian stress on an indubitable self that, through the right method, may gain scientific knowledge of its own thoughts (cogitationes) and thereby of reality in general. Edmund Husserl continued this project into the twentieth century via his method of transcendental phenomenology. Foundationalism and metaphysics are, in contemporary thought, largely synonymous. This is perhaps understandable if we view metaphysics as speculative philosophy. Speculation proceeds by hypothesizing some principle on the basis of which the nature of the phenomenon under investigation can be explained and made understandable. This is fine as long as the principle is not reified into something given, something self-evident; its speculative nature should not be obscured. Speculative philosophy presents only a possibility for thought and understanding; it should not claim certitude. It is because of the hypothetical nature of “first principles” that there is today such a mistrust of metaphysics, for we are always able to ask, “Why this principle and not another?” This question of initial choices soon becomes a discussion of ideological positions and incommensurable world views. The problem one often encounters with metaphysical thought concerns its assumption to have reached a level of fundamental questions where metaphysical choices must be made. Too often, however, we find that other assumptions—about truth, about values, and about the nature of the human subject—have been made and various options excluded prior to the level of fundamental questions, and that this invalidates the metaphysical choices. Metaphysics should not (and perhaps cannot) be ruled out, but it should proceed only after careful consideration and description of human experience and practices.

6. See Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984): “I inherit from the past of my family, my city, my tribe, my nation, a variety of debts, inheritances, rightful expectations and obligations. These constitute the given of my life, my moral starting point” (p. 220). Carrying this over to the question of narrative, he continues: “the story of my life is always embedded in the story of those communities from which I derive my identity. . . . What I am, therefore, is in key part what I inherit, a specific past that is present to some degree in my present. I find myself part of a history and that is generally to say, . . . whether I recognize it or not, one of the bearers of a tradition” (p. 221).

7. As the psychologist Jerome Bruner has said in Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 67, “It can never be the case that there is a ‘self’ independent of one’s cultural-historical existence.” In this work Bruner develops a position similar to my own, adopting a “transactional” view of self in opposition to an egocentric or private one.

8. Of course, the amnesiac will not necessarily experience a diminished sense of existence. Indeed, in his desperate situation the fact of existence will probably be heightened by his not knowing what, or rather who, he exists as. It is the as that I take to be the important factor in human selfhood.

9. We can, of course, also become the implied subject of the narrative activity of others, in biographies, for example, or by identifying with a character in a novel. Death relegates us to the permanent status of implied subjects concerning which no new autobiographical utterances are forthcoming.

10. Stephen Crites, “The Narrative Quality of Experience” (Journal of the American Academy of Religion, vol. 39, 3, September 1971), pp. 291-305. My own work owes a great debt to this essay, for it served, early on, to bring into clear focus for me the profound relation between narration, experience, and the self. See also Stephen Crites, “Storytime: Recollecting the Past and Projecting the Future,” in Narrative Psychology, ed. Theodore Sarbin (New York: Praeger, 1986).

11. This is our concession to foundationalism, but it is not enough to ground a theory of truth as correspondence (to the prenarrative level) upon. I will return to this important topic in chap. 3.

12. Vincent Descombes, Objects of All Sorts: A Philosophical Grammar (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). All quotations are from pp. 4 and 5. It should be pointed out that while Descombes isolates these three trends in contemporary European philosophy, he is not totally in agreement with them as stated in the quotations I refer to. He finds each position ultimately to be inconsistent or obscure with respect to its central tenets.

13. Descombes is referring to Saussure’s important lectures Course in General Linguistics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966).

14. To see these stages as a “development” is to describe the way they were taken up into twentieth-century philosophy. Their actual genesis was fairly simultaneous, especially if we emphasize the pioneering works of Husserl, Dilthey, and Peirce.

15. For a discussion of this issue, see Paul Ricoeur, “The Question of the Subject: The Challenge of Semiology,” The Conflict of Interpretations (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974).

16. Leslie Dewart, Evolution and Consciousness: The Role of Speech in the Origin and Development of Human Nature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), offers an insightful analysis of human nature that is sympathetic to the Darwinian, or evolutionary, perspective. Dewart nevertheless claims that mere experience undergoes a qualitative change toward consciousness with the advent of speech and that a scientific approach is perniciously reductive if this factor is not adequately addressed.

17. Semiotics, or semiology, deriving from the Greek semion (sign), is essentially a science of signs and communication. As such, its range is understandably large.

18. As Roland Barthes has written, following Benveniste, “Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual. We never encounter a state where man is separated from language, which he then elaborates in order to ‘express’ what is happening within him: it is language which teaches the definition of man, not the contrary.” The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), p. 13.

19. Cf. Charles Taylor, Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 7: “As for any hermeneutic explanation, interpretive plausibility is the ultimate criterion.” Much of Taylor’s introduction to his volume is instructive with respect to the nature of hermeneutic explanation in the human sciences.

1. Time and Memory

1. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Humanities Press, 1962), p. 432.

2. W. James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 574.

3. See Husserl’s 1905-10 lectures collected in The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964) for a thorough discussion of these and related matters.

4. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 69.

5. See H. Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Paul and Scott Palmer (New York: Humanities Press, 1970).

6. See Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), for a thorough and insightful discussion of Augustine’s investigation into temporality.

7. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 422.

8. To reiterate a point made in the introduction, I am offering here a descriptive and not a speculative account of the human subject. That human experience should be explained proceeding from a transcendental or founding subject seems to me an unnecessary hypothesis, though one that cannot be definitively refuted. It is my belief that whereas human experience contains a number of relatively abiding characteristics that can be described or otherwise indicated, metaphysical theories concerning how experience got to be as it is are, at least potentially, innumerable.

9. E. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorian Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), §37.

10. James, Principles of Psychology, p. 322.

11. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §32.

12. Ibid., §32.

13. Where “ego” refers to a pole of identity rather than to a substantial entity. Consciousness, for Husserl, may be considered from either of its two poles or moments: subject and object. But this is only a theoretical division, for consciousness necessarily consists in an intention on the part of a subject toward an object.

14. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 78, 72.

15. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 22.

16. In Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) Edward Casey, following Husserl, makes a similar distinction between “primary” and “secondary” remembering (see pp. 48-52). Primary remembering, says Casey, is the persistence of the immediate past (retention) in the present moment of consciousness, whereas secondary remembering is the recollection “of experiences that had lapsed from my consciousness after their initial occurrence” (p. 50). This latter form, says Casey, is what, in ordinary parlance, we generally mean by remembering. Casey’s work is highly illuminating in its descriptions of the many different ways in which recollection occurs in our daily lives. For a recent consideration of Husserl’s lectures on time consciousness, see Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pt. 4, sec. 1, §2. Ricoeur masterfully reveals both the value and the drawbacks of the phenomenological approach to time (via a confrontation with Kant’s analysis in the first critique). While Husserl’s descriptions are adequate to certain of our fundamental experiences with temporal objects and particularly with memorial events, they are not adequate to other dimensions of our temporal experience. As a corrective, Ricoeur proceeds to Heidegger, who reoriented the phenomenological analysis of time toward the future and its concomitant, expectation. But more than this, Heidegger deepens the analysis by disclosing a hermeneutical and broader historical dimension. From here, the stage is set for Ricoeur’s narratological contribution, which attempts to mediate the aporias that still remain after Heidegger’s incomplete Being and Time. Narrative will bridge the abyss between lived time and objective, or cosmic, time. “Human time,” concludes Ricoeur, “is nothing other than narrated time” (3:102). Our own itinerary will lead us to much the same conclusion as Ricoeur’s work, though via a somewhat different route and with a more pointed emphasis on the human subject.

17. J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (New York: Dover, 1959), vol. 1, p. 451.

18. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. M. Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968). There is, given the interweaving of imagination and memory, good argument for adopting the more Kantian terminology of reproductive versus productive imagination, thereby subsuming recollection under the more general heading of presentations. However, a systematic inquiry into these matters is not my purpose here. It is hoped that the reader’s own experience bears witness to my general distinctions.

19. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, vol. 1, pp. 449, 464. The implication of Locke’s view is that substance may change while identity persists. This of course places the onus on memory, the “storehouse of our ideas.”

20. Ibid., p. 448.

21. Ibid., pp. 444ff.

22. For Descartes, the “I think” presupposes the “I am,” whereas Locke reverses this relation.

23. Quoted in Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, vol. 1, p. 458, n. 1.

24. D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 252.

25. Ibid., pp. 261-63.

26. Ibid., p. 262.

27. This point relates back to our earlier discussion of images as tokens or representatives of the past. The recollected image of someone we know may well be interpreted in a variety of ways at various times and thus take on significantly different meanings and values. The same phenomenon is found in the case of a photograph (which is, in itself, unchanging) of some acquaintance.

28. James Olney, Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 44.

29. Marcel Proust, “Contre Saint-Beuve,” On Art and Literature, 1896-1919, trans. Sylvia Townsend Warner (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1984), p. 19.

30. Ibid., p. 17.

31. Ibid., p. 19.

32. M. Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 2, trans. Scott Moncrieff (New York: Random House, 1934), p. 1014.

33. G. Santayana, Scepticism and Animal Faith (New York: Dover, 1955), p. 158.

34. Ibid.

35. For Wilhelm Dilthey meaning is always the product of a backward reflection: “The category of meaning designates the relationship, inherent in life, of parts of a life to the whole. The connections are only established by memory, through which we can survey the past. Here meaning takes the form of comprehending life.” Dilthey: Selected Writings, ed. H. P. Rickman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 235. One can trace the same line of thought to the phenomenological sociology of Alfred Schutz: “Meaning does not lie in the experience. Rather, those experiences are meaningful which are grasped reflectively.” The Phenomenology of the Social World (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1967), p. 69.

36. Rudolf Bultmann, New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings, trans. S. M. Ogden (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), p. 136.

2. On Narrative

1. F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), p. 631.

2. Our progress through the various “stages” from childhood to old age is not without its forgetfulness of the aspirations and accomplishments of earlier stages. As Nietzsche has taught us, forgetfulness is a virtue where advancement is concerned.

3. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 186.

4. Maclntyre, After Virtue, p. 217.

5. D. Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).

6. Arendt, Human Condition, p. 192. The use of “always” is somewhat strong in Arendt’s remark. She presumably means may know better.

7. Ibid., p. 179.

8. Kate Hamburger had much to do with promoting this distinction. See The Logic of Literature, trans. M. J. Rose (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973).

9. Cf. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), p. xi: “Plot as I conceive it is the design and intention of narrative, what shapes a story and gives it a certain direction or intent of meaning. We might think of plot as the logic or perhaps the syntax of a certain kind of discourse, one that develops its propositions only through temporal sequence and progression.”

10. Cf. ibid. “Narrative is one of the large categories or systems of understanding that we use in our negotiations with reality, specifically, in the case of narrative, with the problem of temporality: man’s time-boundedness, his consciousness of existence within the limits of mortality.” For a detailed examination of the history and nature of narrative, see Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968).

11. Cf. Scholes and Kellogg: “By narrative we mean all those literary works which are distinguished by two characteristics: the presence of a story and a storyteller. A drama is a story without a story-teller” (Nature of Narrative, p. 4). This general distinction is that between telling and showing, which received its classical formulation in the separation of diegesis from mimesis (Plato). Narrators, however, may be covert or overt, and this can sometimes obscure the above distinction. Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 33-34), expands narrative to include the covert and dramatic: “[Narrator] should mean only the someone—person or presence—actually telling the story to an audience, no matter how minimally evoked his voice or the audience’s listening ear. A narrative that does not give the sense of this presence, one that has gone to noticeable lengths to efface it, may reasonably be called ‘nonnarrated’ or ‘unnarrated.’ (The seeming paradox is only terminological. It is merely short for ‘a narrative that is not explicitly told’ or ‘that avoids the appearance of being told.’) Thus there is no reason for positing some third category of narrative (like ‘dramatic’ or ‘objective’ or the like) since that is essentially ‘non-narrated’ narrative.”

12. In literature this threefold relation of author, narrator, character is immediately problematized because of the separation of the real author and narrator. In texts we cannot identify the narrator either with the real author or with what is called the implied author. The latter is derived from considering the text in all its attributes and not simply from those pertaining to the narrator. See Chatman, Story and Discourse, chap. 4.

13. David Carr offers convincing arguments for this position in Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). Beginning, as we have, from a Husserlian basis, he maintains that the beginning-middle-end structure is common to most of our experiences, even at the level of basic and nonverbal actions. The work is a polemic against those (especially philosophers of history) who maintain that narrative structure is imported from art to life and that life initially does not share this structure.

14. Maclntyre, After Virtue, p. 214.

15. Robert Champigny, The Ontology of Narrative: An Analysis (The Hague: Mouton, 1972), p. 29, makes important conceptual distinctions between acts and events: “Acts belong to experience; events are conceived. Events are reflections of acts in a temporal field.” Acts, for Champigny, are ontologically primary in that they are the experiential underpinning for both conception and personhood. If I am right, they serve a similar role to that of Kantian intuitions, which without concepts are blind. On the question of the subject, Champigny claims that “acts are not activities of someone or something. They are ‘substantial’; they are not attributes or accidents of substances. Acts, qualities, are felt. The question ‘Felt by whom?’ would be inappropriate on this level” (p. 31). We temporalize experience and its significance in conceiving it, and in doing so we also and necessarily personify ourselves and locate ourselves as historical subjects. There is much in Champigny’s work that fits amiably with our present enterprise.

16. Paul Ricoeur, “On Interpretation,” in Philosophy in France Today, ed. A. Montefiore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 178.

17. Ibid., p. 178.

18. Paul Ricoeur, “History as Narrative and Practice” (Philosophy Today, Fall 1985), p. 214.

19. Ibid., p. 213.

20. L. Mink, “History and Fiction as Modes of Comprehension” (New Literary History, vol. 1, 1969-70), p. 557.

21. Maclntyre, After Virtue, p. 212.

22. Barbara Hardy, “Towards a Poetics of Fiction: 3. An Approach through Narrative” (Novel, vol. 2, no. 1, Fall 1968), p. 5.

23. Ricoeur, “On Interpretation,” p. 181.

24. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, p. 74.

25. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 3.

26. Carr, Time, Narrative, and History, p. 99.

27. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, p. 74.

28. See ibid., p. 75.

29. For a useful guide to the work, see David Pellauer, “Time and Narrative and Theological Reflection” (Philosophy Today, Fall 1987).

30. Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer: “Understanding is always an interpretation, and hence interpretation is the explicit form of understanding.” Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), p. 274.

31. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, p. 41.

32. Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation (New York: Cambridge University Press), p. 294.

33. C. Taylor, “Self-Interpreting Animals,” Human Agency and Language. Further references to this work will be entered in the text as SA.

34. R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), adopts a similar view with respect to emotions and language: “the expression of emotion is not, as it were, a dress made to fit an emotion already existing, but is an activity without which the experience of that emotion cannot exist. Take away the language, and you take away what it expressed; there is nothing left but crude feeling at the merely psychic level” (p. 244). Collingwood’s account is particularly useful for understanding the nature of unexpressed emotions and the effect on them of linguistic (and other) expression.

35. Cf. Gadamer: “Being that can be understood is language.” Truth and Method, p. 432. This enigmatic statement is not intended to equate being with language, it simply claims that our understanding invariably occurs in language (construed broadly).

36. It is this trace that is retraced in memorial intentionality, refigured in remembering. Remembering is thus a reenactment.

37. See Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, p. 75.

38. C. Taylor, “The Significance of Significance: The Case of Cognitive Psychology,” in The Need for Interpretation: Contemporary Conceptions of the Philosopher’s Task, ed. S. Mitchell and M. Rosen (London: Humanities Press, 1983), p. 146.

39. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, p. 75.

40. Ibid. This need for atonement is especially important in Ricoeur’s work.

41. G. Santayana, Scepticism and Animal Faith (New York: Dover, 1955), pp. 158f, 252, and 257.

42. Arendt, Human Condition, p. 193.

43. Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, trans. M. Frings and R. Funk (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 385.

44. See Paul Ricoeur, “The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality” (Man and World, vol. 12, no. 2, 1979, pp. 123-41.

45. Taylor, Human Agency and Language, p. 34.

46. Ibid., p. 103.

47. See ibid., chap. 1, “What is Human Agency?” Further references to this work will be added to the text as Agency.

48. Maclntyre, After Virtue, p. 221.

49. C. Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).

50. Ibid., p. 27.

51. Ibid., p. 47.

52. Cf. ibid., p. 514.

53. Stanley Hauerwas and David Burrell, “From System to Story: An Alternative Pattern for Rationality in Ethics,” in Stanley Hauerwas, Truthfulness and Tragedy: Further Investigations in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977). Page references will be added to the text preceded by the initials HB.

54. In Time and Narrative, Ricoeur stresses the value of narrative as an ethical force. Fictional literature provides the reader with examples of imaginative variations on ways of living a life and these are rarely, if ever, ethically neutral: “reading becomes a provocation to be and to act differently” (3:249).

55. See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

56. See Maclntyre, After Virtue, p. 222.

57. See H. White, in W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., On Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 14.

58. On this theme, see Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 140ff.

59. This is Hegel’s problem at the beginning of the Phenomenology of Spirit.

60. E. Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1971), p. 227.

61. See, for example, Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981). All of Foucault’s work operates within the paradigm of what has been called the “death of the author.”

3. The Subject

1. Cf. Benveniste on Aristotle’s categories: “Now it seems to us—and we shall try to show—that these distinctions are primarily categories of language and that, in fact, Aristotle, reasoning in the absolute, is simply identifying certain fundamental categories of the language in which he thought.” Problems in General Linguistics (PGL), p. 57.

2. An interesting case in point is autism. The autistic child, for example, has no grasp of language and none of the understanding that goes with it. The behavior associated with this lack is a certain self-absorption that cuts most social ties. As one writer has said, “The capacity for language, for talking, accompanies a capacity to care about whether anyone talks to you; autistic children don’t care.” Vicki Hearn, Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name (New York: Knopf, 1986), p. 251. Such children seem to live in a world where reliance on others occurs only for their material and bodily needs. Much of the time autistic children are quite happily absorbed in sensory phenomena. Lack of language leaves these children at what might be called an animal level, a level that lacks the social and cultural dimensions of the language user. Whereas we may attempt to integrate them into our world, there is little or no reciprocity on the part of autistic children. Even to think of an autistic person as having a world similar to the language user’s is begging the question. Language not only operates on the perceptually given, imbuing it with a meaning it would otherwise lack, but also goes a long way toward constituting what we mean by being a self, a person. As Hearn writes, “ ‘Why learn language?’ is identical to the question ‘Why be human (what we mean by human) at all?’ In most cases, our humanity is in place before we can ask the question, because most of us learn language so quickly and easily that we are already in and of the problem; autism is not a problem.” (p. 252) The example of autistic children is a good illustration of what Benveniste is expressing in his distinction between the sensory-motor and the representative functions.

3. Cf. Husserl: “Everything has its name, or is nameable in the broadest sense, i.e., linguistically expressible.” In Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, trans. John Leavey (New York: Nicolas Hayes, 1978), p. 162.

4. Benveniste also adds the following important line: “We can never get back to man separated from language and we shall never see him inventing it” (PGL, p. 224).

5. See Benveniste, PGL, chap. 21.

6. See Calvin Schrag, Communicative Practice and the Space of Subjectivity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 124.

7. See ibid., pp. 122ff., for a useful interpretation of this quotation from Benveniste.

8. Helen Keller, The World I Live In (New York: Century, 1908), pp. 113, 117, and 160.

9. F de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), pp. 111-12. The contention that language prefigures thought and that questions of real-world reference are to be omitted from a structuralist account of meaning has been discounted by various commentators. Saussure’s statement that “language is a system of independent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others” (p. 114) is treated by Michael Devitt and Kim Sterelny as both “surprising” and “objectionable.” Language and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), p. 213). For example, in the structuralist claim that “brown” functions and is meaningful only in relation to other color words, Devitt and Sterelny see only a problematic rejection of reference, for “part of the meaning of ‘brown’ is given by the fact that it refers to brown things” (p. 213). But clearly this circular statement has problems of its own, and only momentarily puts off the question concerning those real-world entities that we call “brown” things. See their chap. 13 for a discussion of these issues.

10. In the case of animals, structure is generated through the exigencies of their lives; they must behave in certain fixed and ordered patterns if they are to survive. In Keller’s case, one can imagine that such thoroughgoing purposes were lacking in her life.

11. One important implication of our account of the subject is that personhood is dependent on expression, and more particularly on the predication of the implied subject of utterances to the site of their production (the body). The person is, as I have said, an embodied subject. This position implies that preverbal children and certain individuals with serious language disorders, such as Helen Keller, are not, strictly speaking, persons. I think this is correct, especially if we consider the social responsibility that accrues to persons. However, this does not mean such individuals are therefore to be treated like animals and perhaps disposed of as one might dispose of an animal. Children are on their way to becoming persons, and this future must be respected. In the case of Keller, and many others like her, the possibility for self-conscious expression should not be ruled out, even if this requires the learning of special sign languages. At the other extreme, persons who have lost their means of expression (through brain damage, seizure, etc.) may indeed no longer have any self-awareness and little possibility of regaining it. In the latter case a certain retrospective respect for the person is understandable; it recognizes the possibility of a reprieve of the disability.

12. There are some interesting parallels here to the famous Turing test of artificial intelligence. See A. M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” in D. Hofstadter and D. Dennett, The Mind’s I (New York: Bantam, 1982).

13. J. Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 86-87.

14. War provides an interesting example of negation and alienation in their ethical dimensions. As a morally responsible person one cannot kill another subject, another person. The “enemy” must be objectified, must not be allowed to speak; they must be regarded under a category of thingness, or at least as “them.” Only he who is immoral can annihilate without guilt what is clearly constituted as another person, as “you.” This latter situation provides a definition of evil. Alienation is already on the way to this condition. It is interesting to note in this respect that the category of the “third person” does not function like “I” and “you,” for it passes outside the discourse to an “objective” reference. As Benveniste observes, “Certain languages show that the ‘third person’ is indeed literally a ‘non-person’” (“The Nature of Pronouns,” in Problems of General Linguistics).

15. Our usual application of the person concept is in fact fairly flexible, including babies, malformed individuals, people with artificial limbs, and such like.

16. This process usually occurs with animals only if we first personify their gestures, that is, see them as expressive of a certain subjectivity and as analogous to our speech.

17. James, Principles of Psychology, pp. 288, 323.

18. See Husserl, Investigation 1 in Logical Investigations, vol. 1, trans. J. N. Findlay (New York: Humanities Press, 1970). The Bedeutung-Sinn dichotomy is more pronounced in Husserl’s Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (New York: Collier Books, 1975); see section 124. Bedeutung is there reserved for linguistic or ideal meaning.

19. Husserl, Logical Investigations, p. 269.

20. It is important to note that in the Logical Investigations Husserl separates the “content,” or meaning, from the “object” referred to; see pp. 290f.

21. See ibid., p. 327.

22. This break of meaning from its authorial intention, original audience, and original context are themes common to hermeneutics, and may be found throughout the writings of both Gadamer and Ricoeur.

23. J. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 317.

24. J. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, trans. David Allison (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 115.

25. Derrida’s important essay “Signature, Event, Context” aims at these conclusions primarily by considering the indeterminate nature of context, the situation out of which utterances are to be interpreted. This is not to deny meaning itself, for linguistic or written signs must by definition be meaningful; it is to deny that an “intended meaning” cannot be univocally encoded in language. This is the basis of Derrida’s notion of “dissemination,” which he maintains is different from the more hermeneutic assumption of polysemia. The latter, according to Derrida, still has traces of an origin that a traditional hermeneutic investigation aims to disclose or recover, while dissemination avoids such an origin. This is, however, more a critique of traditional nineteenth-century than of contemporary hermeneutics.

26. Husserl, Ideas, §124. See also Husserl, “The Origin of Geometry”: “Thus men as men, fellow men, world . . . and, on the other hand, language, are inseparably intertwined. . . .” In Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, p. 162.

27. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, p. 85, footnote. Constitution is at the very heart of Husserl’s phenomenology, going hand in hand with the notion of intentionality.

28. Husserl, Logical Investigations, pp. 279-80.

29. See Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, p. 58.

30. See Husserl, Logical Investigations, p. 275.

31. See Husserl, Ideas, §124.

32. This is very much like the way some of us read to ourselves. Because one thinks one must know already, one does not actually attempt to express oneself fully to oneself; it is deemed superfluous. Language in fact tolerates quite a degree of misuse; one need not say everything and one need not state it in correct grammatical form for a certain point to get across. This is a way of reformulating Husserl’s position.

33. See Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p. 318.

34. Although I think there are numerous important philosophical implications to this separation of ideality from meaning, it would take us too far from our primary topic to pursue them here.

35. This translation paradigm is one way of interpreting Gadamer’s notion of the “fusion of horizons,” which always involves this important claim: “one understands differently if one understands at all” (Truth and Method, p. 264).

36. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 401.

37. A. Lingis, “The Signs of Consciousness” (Substance, vol. 13, no. 1, 1984). Here Lingis is following Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, p. 76.

38. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, p. 79.

39. Cf. Derrida: “Speech and the consciousness of speech—that is to say consciousness simply as self-presence—are the phenomenon of an auto-affection lived as the suppression of ‘differance.’ That phenomenon, that lived reduction of the opacity of the signifier, are the origin of what is called presence.” Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 166. Presence is thus the overlooking or suppression of the mediating signifier, or, which is the same thing, the erasing of a primordial difference or otherness. (Magritte’s paintings often point to this overlooking: Ceci n’est pas une pipe, for example.) This self-presence is thus fundamentally alienated, in much the same way as a child’s identity is gained in and through an other (e.g., the mother) or as Narcissus discovers himself in a reflection.

40. If expression indeed creates being, then this desire is also the desire to be and to be known. Sartre was close to this position when he described consciousness as nothingness, as a form of vacancy that must act in order to be.

41. One might wish to add to the Cartesian cogito the fact that I not merely am but am also “here” and “now,” thus giving an initial affirmation of being spatiotemporally located. The further explanation of such relative locations, as Hegel stressed in the beginning of the Phenomenology, would still have to be determined. The answer we have been pursuing lies in narrative emplotment. Already in the Heideggerian notion of being-in-the-world we find an overcoming of the Cartesian dualism and a recognition of the inextricable situatedness of the subject.

42. There are also physical-biological answers, which are not of direct interest here on account of their reductive nature.

43. M. Merleau-Ponty, “The Child’s Relations with Others,” trans. William Cobb, in The Primacy of Perception, ed. James Edie (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1971), p. 151.

44. For the account that follows, see Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,” Ecrits.

45. The “real” is not what we tend to mean by “reality,” for this is primarily a symbolic product. As an aside, Lacan does allow the female subject a closer relationship to the real than the male, with a respective loss of the symbolic. See Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 186.

46. Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” Ecrits, p. 68. This position of Lacan’s was derived primarily from Lévi-Strauss’s ideas on the prepersonal nature of symbolic social structures.

47. This distinction is evidenced in the way Proust, for example, (re)captures himself in the textual identity of the character Marcel.

48. I am here summarizing Lacan’s exposition in Ecrits, pp. 1-6. Also see Merleau-Ponty, “The Child’s Relations with Others,” p. 125.

49. The syncretic stage is also continued, both in the experience of one’s bodily unity and in certain forms of sympathetic identification with others.

50. The influence of Hegel on Lacan’s dialectic of self and other should be clear here.

51. Merleau-Ponty, “The Child’s Relations with Others,” pp. 118-19; this was written eleven years after Lacan’s address, to which Merleau-Ponty refers.

52. A point we have especially learned from the later work of Heidegger.

53. Schutz, Phenomenology of the Social World; see esp. chap. 2. A chronicle, such as the Annals of Saint Gall (see Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity,” in On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 7, tends to list a calendar of events that exhibit little in the way of emplotment, reports of the weather being placed on equal footing with the death of a king. The chronicle, while selective, leaves one wondering about the historical import of the events recorded.

54. The hermeneutic epistemological stance that I have outlined does not, of course, preclude our rejecting interpretations because of a straightforward misrepresentation of the “facts.” Interpretation that aims at truth must begin from an adequate grasp of the spatial and temporal details of the course of events to be understood, much as textual interpretation must account for and begin from what is actually given in the text—which will include certain words and phrases with sedimented and accepted meanings.

55. Julia Kristeva, “The Speaking Subject,” in On Signs, ed. Marshall Blonsky (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 217. Cf. Heidegger on anxiety in “What is Metaphysics”: “Anxiety robs us of speech. Because beings as a whole slip away, so that just the nothing crowds round, in the face of anxiety all utterance of the ‘is’ falls silent.” Basic Writings, ed. David Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 103. In other words, anxiety, for Heidegger, severs the threads of intentionality that allow us a lived-through familiarity and complacency with the world; in so doing it opens the possibility for resignification. However, Heidegger’s interests are more ontological (concerning Dasein’s authenticity) than explicitly psychological.

56. Language used against tradition is a major theme in Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).

57. On the relation between displacement-condensation and metonymy-metaphor, see R. Coward and J. Ellis, Language and Materialism: Developments in Semiology and the Theory of the Subject (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), chap. 6.

58. This epistemologically creative dimension of poetic discourse was pursued to great effect by Gaston Bachelard in his postscientific works. See esp. his Poetics of Space.

59. See, for example, Freud’s “The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming” of 1908 and Christopher Caudwell, Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry (New York: International Publishers, 1977). Art, however, may have a spirit of playfulness that is lacking in its psychological counterpart.

60. Lacan, “Sign, Symbol, Imaginary,” in On Signs, p. 209. The repressed in this case is nothing other than an example of what we have called the prenarrative level.

61. J. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1981), p. 20.

62. See Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (Penguin Books, 1974), lecture 11.

63. Lacan, Ecrits, p. 88. The hermeneutical dimension of Lacan’s approach is brought out well in the following statement by Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (New York: Verso, 1987), p. 66: “the effectivity of the past, like that of any present event in the subject’s life, is determined by the manner of its interpretation: it is the way in which we understand our past, for Lacan, which determines how it determines us.”

64. A process similar to that described here was seen in an earlier chapter to occur in relation to unexpressed emotions. Repression is the censoring of such emotions from conscious conceptual recognition or interpretation.

65. Lacan, Ecrits, p. 169.

66. R. Schafer, Language and Insight (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 6. Cf. Lacan, Ecrits p. 52: “What we teach the subject to recognize as his unconscious is his history—that is to say, we help him to perfect the present historization of the facts that have already determined a certain number of the historical ‘turning points’ in his existence.” See also Paul Ricoeur, “The Question of Proof in Freud’s Psychoanalytical Writings,” Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, p. 273: “Psychoanalytical reports are kinds of biographies and autobiographies whose literary history is a part of the long tradition emerging from the epic tradition of the Greeks, the Celts and the Germans.”

67. Schafer, Language and Insight, p. 31.

68. Ibid.

69. Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), pp. 110-11. The parallel with Schafer’s position becomes evident from the following: “We have, each of us a life-story, an inner narrative—whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives. It might be said that each of us constructs and lives, a ‘narrative,’ and that this narrative is us, our identities. . . . Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us—through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. . . . To be ourselves we must have ourselves—possess, if need be repossess, our life-stories.”

70. Cf. Ricoeur, “The Question of Proof,” p. 253: “But what is it to remember? It is not just to recall certain isolated events, but to become capable of forming meaningful sequences and ordered connections. In short, it is to be able to constitute one’s own existence in the form of a story where a memory as such is only a fragment of the story.”

71. I shall not consider in any detail the precise models and mechanisms of mind that Freud offered in explanation of the processes that we are considering in this section. Such models and their terminology have a somewhat inconsistent history in Freud’s thought. The processes at our present level of discussion are not only well documented in fields other than psychoanalysis (especially other forms of psychological therapy and literature), but are also applicable to much of our everyday lives.

72. See Donald Spence, Narrative Truth and Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpretation in Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1984), chap. 6. The case history is not itself one or more of these stories, but rather plots the development of certain of them during the analytic sessions.

73. Spence, Narrative Truth, p. 288.

74. Ibid., p. 175.

75. Ibid., p. 31.

76. C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p. 3.

77. L. von Ranke, ed., Sämtliche Werke (Leipzig, 1867-90), bd. 33, viff.

78. Paul Veyne, Writing History: Essay on Epistemology, trans. M. Moore-Rinvolucri (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1984), pp. 71-72.

79. As B. Croce said, “Where there is no narrative, there is no history.” (Quoted in Hayden White, “The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory,” History and Theory, no. 1, 1984, p. 3.) Frederick Olafson, in his thorough treatment of historical narrative in The Dialectic of Action: A Philosophical Interpretation of History and the Humanities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), argues fairly convincingly that the proper object of historical investigation, human action, is invariably understood within a teleological setting (the teleology being internal to the history and defined in terms of the ends set by the agents involved) and that a narrative description is the most adequate in this domain. See esp. chaps. 3 and 4.

80. White, “The Question of Narrative,” p. 2. As White says in Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 92, “Historians may not like to think of their works as translations of fact into fictions; but this is one of the effects of their works.”

81. Quoted in White, “The Question of Narrative,” p. 3, n. 4.

82. White, Tropics of Discourse, p. 94. White’s final claim is interesting, for it points to what I have called the prenarrative level. If narrative style is “immanent in” the language in which we describe events (prior to explicit historical analysis and emplotment), and if we view language not simply as a tool but as disclosive of the world, then the world of human actions will invariably appear in a narrative structure.

83. As Arthur Danto states the matter in Narration and Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. xv, “since we plainly have no access to the world apart from our ways of thinking and talking about it, we scarcely, even in restricting ourselves to thought and talk, can avoid saying things about the world.”

84. R. Barthes, “The Discourse of History,” Rustle of Language, p. 127.

85. R. Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), pp. 123-24. See Hayden White’s account of this passage in “The Question of Narrative,” p. 14.

86. Barthes, “The Discourse of History,” p. 16.

87. Veyne, Writing History, p. x.

88. Cf. Veyne: “Then what are the facts worthy of rousing the interest of the historian? All depends on the plot chosen; in itself, a fact is not interesting or uninteresting . . . the fact is nothing without its plot.” Writing History, p. 33.

89. “With this chapter we reach the goal that has never ceased to guide the progress of our investigation, namely, the actual refiguration of time, now become human time through the interweaving of history and fiction” (Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3:180). Also: “the interweaving of history and fiction in the refiguration of time rests, in the final analysis, upon this reciprocal overlapping, the quasi-historical moment of fiction changing places with the quasi-fictive moment of history” (3:192).

90. Paul Veyne does make the claim that whereas literature, which is fictional, must generate interest by developing exciting or aesthetically pleasing plots and characters, history need simply relate the “truth,” for in that an event actually happened (even though it may be boring) it carries an intrinsic interest value for the general reader. See Writing History, p. 11. It must be admitted that there is some truth in this view, but it will not stand without certain provisos. One could, as a historical exercise, seek to discover what Emerson generally had for lunch on weekends and the precise manner of its preparation, or describe in detail what route he took on his morning walks. These would be historical “facts,” but they would hardly hold the average reader’s interest for long. Facts, as Veyne does go on to say, are nothing without the plot within which they take on significance. Irrelevant details have therefore little interest even though they may be correct. A second point to be noted is that literature is not exactly devoid of mimetic character. Though fiction might deal with imaginary characters and plots, there is still a mimetic relation operating that insists these fictional worlds be possible worlds, and as we know, the possible always stands in a dialectic with the actual. Fiction is perhaps more “factual” than Veyne is prepared to admit.

91. Both Gadamer and Habermas, for example, have rejected this claim of disinterestedness to be a profitable (and even possible) means of acquiring understanding and knowledge.

92. White, Tropics of Discourse, p. 99.

93. Further references to this work (Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations, trans. L. J. Lafleur [New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1960]), will be added to the text.

94. Cf. Husserl: “Between the meanings of consciousness and reality yawns a veritable abyss” (Ideas, §49).

95. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), p. 246.

96. Husserl’s phenomenology, while owing much to Descartes’s method, in fact sought to remain between, and therefore outside, the two metaphysical options of res cogitans and res extensa by stressing “intentionality,” though not always with success. Phenomenologically speaking, perception, for example, is in essence nothing but a presentation to a subject, and there is no thing in itself except as a derived theoretical construct.

97. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 400. Cf. Dalia Judovitz: “Reading philosophy no longer suffices to become a philosopher: rather, one has to become an epistemologist first, for the guarantee of certain knowledge takes precedence over historical knowledge itself. Moreover, this conception of philosophy in purely epistemological terms excludes from the domain of history that which belongs to its own history as a system of thought; it precludes the history of its own thought in order to found the evidence of its truth.” “Autobiographical Discourse and Critical Praxis in Descartes” (Philosophy and Literature, vol. 5, 1981), p. 100. Montaigne, for example, works in the other direction, a reflection on history disclosing general and often contradictory characteristics of an always situated subject. More recently, the work of Michel Foucault stresses the way the self is generated through various technologies that serve to circumscribe and valorize the self and its functions. It is not that we come to know the self through our theorizing; rather we produce it through the practice of theory.

98. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 402.

99. Merleau-Ponty posits the existence of what he calls a “tacit cogito” preceding the spoken one, but his formulation seems to undermine itself when he admits that “The tacit cogito is a cogito only when it has found expression for itself” (Phenomenology of Perception, p. 404). This tacit cogito would appear to be parallel to what I have called subjectivity (one’s sense of possible expression), which is perhaps synonymous with our sense of existence.

100. Cf. Jean Piaget, Genetic Epistemology, trans. Eleanor Duckworth (New York: Norton, 1971), pp. 45-46: “Language is certainly not the exclusive means of representation [of action]. It is only one aspect of the very general function that Head has called the symbolic function. I prefer to use the linguists’ term: the semiotic function. . . . In addition to language the semiotic function includes gestures, either idiosyncratic or, as is the case of the deaf and dumb language, systematized. It includes deferred imitation. ... It includes drawing, painting, modelling. It includes mental imagery. . . . Language is but one among these many aspects of the semiotic function, even though it is in most instances the most important.”

101. In The Raw and the Cooked, trans. J. and D. Weightman (London: Cape, 1970), Lévi-Strauss took the structures of the social world back, in Kantian fashion, to an architecture of the mind. This form of reduction leads to a transcendentalism which supports the synchronic or atemporal analyses that Levi-Strauss preferred, but this view is perhaps at odds with many of his essential insights into the symbolic and its functioning in differential relations.

102. It no longer seems correct to say that “man” speaks, as though language were a mere instrument at the mercy of our wills, but it seems similarly incorrect to say simply that “language” speaks (a move instigated by Mallarme and Heidegger), unless we can somehow feed human subjects back into “language.” Both approaches have something important to say about our embeddedness in language. It can be seen that I have been supporting a middle view: I indeed speak, but I am only insofar as I do. The various works of Michel Foucault illustrate this point. His general method is to trace the workings of power (or “technologies”) that serve to define man via the exclusions they inaugurate. This exclusion occurs through various dominant discourses about the state, sexuality, madness, etc. The result of Foucault’s work is not the eradication of the subject (as is sometimes supposed) but an historical or genealogical investigation into the ways we come to define and hence delimit ourselves in our discourse and practices. See Foucault’s Vermont lecture, “Technologies of the Self,” in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar With Michel Foucault, ed. L. H. Martin, H. Gutman, and P. H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988).

103. Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Image, Music, Text, pp. 145, 147. Further references to this work will be added to the text preceded by IMT.

104. Which is not to say that emotions (and affectivity generally) have no cognitive value, for they are intimately linked to our understanding. Moods, as Heidegger has shown, cast a certain meaning over the world, disclose it in new ways.

105. R. Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1984).

106. M. Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 137.

107. Ibid., p. 138.

108. Barthes, Roland Barthes, p. 143. Barthes also offers an interesting quotation from Diderot: “Everything has happened in us because we are ourselves, always ourselves, and never one minute the same” (p. 144). This important theme of identity in difference is one I have already discussed.

109. Ibid., p. 60.

110. I am especially indebted to Kaja Silverman, Subject of Semiotics, for this model. See her chap. 5.

111. Certain computer mailings could be exempted from the normal category of authorship.

112. See Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, chap. 3.

113. See Ricoeur’s use of the term relinquishment in part 2 of Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences.

114. Cf. Wolfgang Iser, “The Reading Process,” in Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, ed. Jane Tompkins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), p. 67: “In thinking the thoughts of another, his [the reader’s] own individuality temporarily recedes into the background, since it is supplanted by these alien thoughts. . . . As we read, there occurs an artificial division of our personality, because we take as a theme for ourselves something that we are not.”

115. Part of the ploy of much contemporary literature (especially what is called self-conscious fiction or metafiction) is to bring to the fore this manipulatory moment by frustrating the reader’s normal identifications. This break can be made, for example, by explicitly parading the text’s textual and written nature, much as a film shot may pan back to reveal the film crew and equipment.

116. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). I am using “state of mind” in a less technical sense than Heidegger’s Befindlichkeit, and more in line with the standard meaning of the phrase in English.

117. These characteristics of the embodied subject have both temporary and more permanent aspects. That is, many of our states are fairly ephemeral, while others serve as one’s underlying and relatively abiding habitus.

118. Subjectivity (the possibility of expression) is also allied to proprioception (the sensory awareness of our body that serves as a basis for action) on the purely bodily level.

119. See Roman Jakobson, “Shifters, Verbal Categories, and the Russian Verb,” Word and Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1971).

120. Roy Schafer draws a similar conclusion from a psychoanalytic viewpoint: “Personal development may be characterized as change in the questions it is urgent or essential to answer. As a project in personal development, personal analysis changes the leading questions that one addresses to the tale of one’s life and the lives of important others” (in On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell, p. 31).

121. Taylor, Human Agency and Language, Philosophical Papers I, p. 75.

Conclusion

1. Bruce Wilshire, Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 227, states that “One is one’s ‘roles’ but not just one’s ‘roles,’ for one is also an unobjectifiable consciousness of ‘roles’ actual and possible—even roles as yet unimagined.” In contrast to my exposition, Wilshire emphasizes the importance of prethematic role playing (based in mimetic social behaviour on the part of a body-self) for his view of self and does not, in my mind, place enough emphasis on the linguistic and narrative aspects prefiguring and refiguring our consciousness of such roles.

2. Being as, which is fundamental to a hermeneutic ontology, also has interesting mimetic connotations. We view ourselves not only as someone but also as like someone. For example, we view our life story as being tragic, perhaps like Hamlet’s or Othello’s. We use such models (or archetypes) more or less consciously when we tell our own story.

3. Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art, trans. George Grabowicz (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973); see chap. 10.

4. The “ethical” argument of existentialists such as Sartre that all role identifications of the human subject are forms of “inauthenticity,” forms of denying one’s freedom, seems on our account to fly in the face of fact. At most one can say that certain representations of an individual are insufficient with respect to that individual’s diversity, possibilities, and history.

5. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 402. Merleau-Ponty continues: “the speaking subject plunges into speech without imagining the words he is about to utter. . . . The word ‘sleet,’ when it is known to me, is not an object which I recognize through any identificatory synthesis, but a certain use made of my phonatory equipment, a certain modulation of my body as a being-in-the-world” (p. 403).

6. I do not imply by the word dematerialize any metaphysical option for what is called in philosophy “materialism.”

7. A useful critique of the mind-body problem can be found in G. B. Madison, “The Hermeneutics of (Inter)subjectivity, or: The Mind/Body Problem Deconstructed,” Man and World, vol. 21, 1988, pp. 3-33.

8. In this respect, sleep without dreams is surely a temporary extinguishing of the self.

9. This shift can be easily mapped onto my earlier distinction of the experiencing versus the narrating self. My position parallels that of G. H. Mead in Mind, Self and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist, ed. Charles Morris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 142: “I know of no other form of behavior than the linguistic in which the individual is an object to himself, and, as far as I can see, the individual is not a self in the reflective sense unless he is an object to himself.”

10. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 392.

11. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Vintage Books, 1973).