The Act of Interpretation - Fall 2007 - Prof. Steve Evans

Passages for Review

For each passage, (a) identify author and text; (b) situate relative to basic questions posed by the course and to other writers who touched upon similar problems, concepts, themes; and (c) note salient and/or distinctive stylistic features. In other words: Who is it? How do you know? Why does it matter?

Note: The following texts are listed on the syllabus but excluded from the final examination materials: Longinus (9-20), Jauss (10-25), Sartre (10-30), Bakhtin (11-06), Spivak and Haraway (12-06), Sedgwick and Butler (12-11). Regarding Iser: You are responsible for the selection in the Norton, but not for the remainder of The Act of Reading.

For a version of this page that reorders passages each time you load or refresh it, click here (many thanks to Maxwell Terry for the script that enables this).

(1)
Strict interpretation begins with misunderstanding and searches out a precise understanding.
            1. This results from its beginning with an assumption about what the meaning is that properly should only be discovered in the way the language and intention present it.
            2. Careless interpretation distinguishes only the [predetermined] sense from the manner of expression, which in fact depend on each other for their mutual identity, the determination of which is the minimum requirement for avoiding artless practice.

(2) 
And we won’t listen in a hostile frame of mind, because we’ll be the winners if poetry turns out to be beneficial as well as enjoyable.
‘Of course we will,’ he agreed.
‘And if it doesn’t, Glaucon, then we’ll do what a lover does when he thinks that a love affair he’s involved in is no good for him: he reluctantly detaches himself. Similarly, since we’ve been conditioned by our wonderful societies until we have a deep-seated love for this kind of poetry, we’ll be delighted if there proves nothing better and closer to the truth that it. As long as it is incapable of rebutting our allegations, however, then while we listen to poetry we’ll be chanting these allegations of ours to ourselves as a precautionary incantation against being caught once more by that childish and pervasive love.

(3)
For this self-consciousness has been fearful, not of this or that particular thing or just at odd moments, but its whole being has been seized with dread; for it has experienced the fear of death, the absolute Lord. In that experience, it has been quite unmanned, has trembled in every fibre of its being, and everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations. But this pure universal movement, the absolute melting-away of everything stable, is the simple, essential nature of self-consciousness, absolute negativity, pure being-for-self, which consequently is implicit in this consciousness. This moment of pure being-for-self is also explicit for the bondsman, for in the lord it exists for him as his object. Furthermore, his consciousness is not this dissolution of everything stable merely in principle; in his service he actually brings this about. Through his service he rids himself of his attachment to natural existence in every single detail; and gets rid of it by working on it.

(4)
The whole plea—for the dream was nothing else—reminded one vividly of the defense put forward by the man who was charged by one of his neighbors with having given him back a borrowed kettle in a damaged condition. The defendant asserted first, that he had given it back undamaged; secondly, that the kettle had a hole in it when he borrowed it; and thirdly, that he had never borrowed a kettle from his neighbor. So much the better: if only one of these three lines of defense were to be accepted as valid, the man would have to be acquitted.

(5) 
Yet that change was his deep, his secret wound which hurt him day and night, and as soon as he felt that his thoughts were straying a little too close to it, he would quickly guide them in another direction for fear of suffering too much. He would certainly say to himself in an abstract way: “There was a time when Odette loved me more,” but he would never look back at that time. Just as there was a bureau in his office which he took pains not to look at, which he made a detour to avoid as he came and went, because in one of its drawers he had locked away the chrysanthemum she had given him that first evening on which he had driven her home, and the letters in which she had said: “If you had forgotten your heart here too, I would not have let you take it back,” and “At whatever hour of the day or night you need me, send word and my life will be yours to command,” so too there was a place inside him which he never let his thoughts approach, forcing them if necessary to make the detour of a lengthy argument so that they would not have to pass in front of it: this was the place where his memory of the happy days resided.

(6)
Language can also be compared with a sheet of paper: thought is the front and sound the back; one cannot cut the front without cutting the back at the same time; likewise in language, one can neither divide sound from thought nor thought from sound; the division could be accomplished only abstractly, and the result would be either pure psychology or pure phonology.

(7)
A recognition [anagnorisis], as the word itself indicates, is a change from ignorance to knowledge, and so to either friendship or enmity, among people defined in relation to good fortune or misfortune. A recognition is finest when it happens at the same time as a reversal [peripeteia], as does the one in the Oedipus. There are indeed other [kinds of] recognition.... But the sort that most belongs to the plot [muthos], i.e. most belongs to the action, is that which we have mentioned: for such a recognition and reversal will contain pity and terror (tragedy is considered to be a representation of actions of this sort), and in addition misfortune and good fortune will come about in the case of such events.

(8)
Everything that has been said up to this point boils down to this: in language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system.

(9)
We would reflect on language itself, and on language only. Language itself is—language and nothing else besides. Language itself is language. The understanding that is schooled in logic; thinking of everything in terms of calculation and hence usually overbearing, calls this proposition an empty tautology. Merely to say the identical thing twice—language is language—how is that supposed to get us anywhere? But we do not want to get anywhere. We would like only, for once, to get to just where we are already.

Passages 10-26 were submitted by students (identified here by first and last initials) in advance of our 4 December session.

(10)
Now at this point one might protest, perhaps even with some alarm, that I seem to be suggesting that marrying is simply saying a few words, that just saying a few words is marrying. Well, that certainly is not the case. The words have to be said in the appropriate circumstances, and this is a matter that will come up again later. (ML)

(11)
If she was forcibly abducted and unlawfully violated and unjustly assaulted, it is clear that her abductor, her assaulter, engaged in crime; but she who was abducted and assaulted encountered misfortune.  Thus, the undertaking undertaken by the barbarian was barbarous in word and law and deed and deserves blame in word, loss of rights in law, and punishment in deed.  But she who was violated, from her country separated, from her friends isolated surely (eikotos) deserves compassion rather than slander.  For he did and she suffered terrible things.  It is right to pity her but hate him. (SB)

(12)
My hypothesis, if correct, would oblige us to recognize the fact that the primary function of written communication is to facilitate slavery. The use of writing for disinterested purposes, and as a source of intellectual and aesthetic pleasure, is a secondary result, and more often than not it may even be turned into a means of strengthening, justifying or concealing the other. (KB)

(13)
The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation – and which manufactures for the subject caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic – and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development. Thus, to break out of the circle of the Innenwelt into the Umwelt generates the inexhaustible quadrature of the ego’s verifications. (MC)

(14)
I have brought up all the six factors involved in verbal communication except the message itself.  The set (Einstellung) toward the message as such, focus on the message for its own sake, is the POETIC function of language. This function cannot be productively studied out of touch with the general problems of language, and, on the other hand, the scrutiny of language requires a thorough consideration of its poetic function.  Any attempt to reduce the sphere of the poetic function to poetry or to confine poetry to the poetic function would be a delusive oversimplification. The poetic function is not the sole function of verbal art but only its dominant, determining function, whereas in all other verbal activities it acts as a subsidiary accessory constituent. (JG)

(15)
Thus it is quite true that woman is other than man, and this alterity is directly felt in desire, the embrace, love; but the real relation is one of reciprocity; as such it gives rise to authentic drama. Through eroticism, love, friendship, and their alternatives, deception, hate, rivalry, the relation is a struggle between conscious beings each of whom wishes to be essential, it is the mutual recognition of free beings who confirm one another's freedom, it is the vague transition from aversion to participation. To pose Woman is to pose the absolute Other, without reciprocity, denying against all experience that she is a subject, a fellow human being. (KP)

(16)
...it is not their real conditions of existence, their real world, that “men” “represent to themselves” in ideology, but above all it is their relation to those conditions of existence which is represented to them there.  It is this relation which is at the centre of every ideological, i.e. imaginary, representation of the real world. (JH)

(17)
On the other hand, take a book, and you will find it offering, opening itself.  It is this openness of the book which I find so moving.  A book is not shut in by its contours, is not walled-up as in a fortress.  It asks nothing better than to exist outside itself, or to let you exist in it.  In short, the extraordinary fact in the case of a book is the falling away of the barriers between you and it.  You are inside it; it is inside you; there is no longer either outside or inside. (KD)

(18)
I mean the term lesbian continuum to include a range—through each woman's life and throughout history—of woman-identified experience, not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desires genital sexual experience with another woman. (JP)

(19)
Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile.  To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.  Such a conception suits criticism very well, the later then allotting itself the important task of discovering the Author (or its hypostases: society, history, psyche, liberty) beneath the work: when the author has been found, the text is “explained”—victory to the critic. (BG)

(20)
Every concept comes into being by making equivalent that which is nonequivalent.  Just as it is certain that no leaf is ever exactly the same as any other leaf, it is equally certain that the concept ‘leaf’ is formed by dropping these individual differences arbitrarily, by forgetting those features which differentiate one thing from another… (DS)

(21)
The adoption of the required attitude of mind towards ideas that seem to emerge 'of their own free will' and the abandonment of the critical function that is normally in operation against them seem to be hard of achievement for some people. The 'involuntary thoughts' are liable to release a most violent resistance, which seeks to prevent their emergence. (JS)
           
(22)
And I saw again the current which took the boat and the undergraduate and the dead leaves; and the taxi took the man and the woman, I thought, seeing them come together across the street and the current swept them away, I thought, hearing far off the roar of London's traffic, into that tremendous stream. (MT)

(23)
If art is wanting, the flight from blame leads to fault.  The poorest smith near the School of Aemilius will reproduce nails and mimic soft hair in bronze, though he has no luck with the over-all effect of his work, because he won't know how to
organize the whole.  If I were anxious to put anything together, I would as soon be tha man as I would live with a mis-shapen nose when my black eyes and black hair had made me a beauty.
         You writers must choose material equal to your powers.  Consider long what your shoulders will bear and what they will refuse.  The man who chooses his subject with full control will no be abandoned bu eloquence of lucidity of arrangement. (LH)

(24)
And there was also one day when she said to me: ‘You know, you can call me Gilberte, I’m going to call you by your first name anyway. It’s too tiresome otherwise.’ Yet for awhile she went on simply calling me vous and when I pointed this out to her, she smiled, and composing, constructing a sentence like the ones in grammar books of foreign languages whose only aim is to make us use a new word, she ended it with my given name. And remembering later what I had felt then, I could distinguish within it the impression that I had been held for a moment in her mouth, I myself, naked, without any of the social terms and conditions that also belonged… (WH)

(25)
The fight against illiteracy is therefore connected with an increase in governmental authority over the citizens. Everyone must be able to read, so that the government can say: Ignorance of the law is no excuse. (KR)

(26)
There is no human activity from which every form of intellectual participation can be excluded: homo faber cannot be separated from  homo sapiens. Each Man, finally, outside his professional activity, carries on some form of intellectual activity, that is, he is a "philosopher", an artist, a man of taste, he participates in a particular conception of the world, has a conscious line of moral conduct, and therefore contributes to sustain a conception of the world or to modify it, that is, to bring into being new modes of thought. (AS)

Questions 27 to 57 complete the submissions from students for the 4 December session.

(27)
Are intellectuals an autonomous and independent social group, or does every social group have its own particular specialized category of intellectuals?  The problem is a complex one, because of the variety of forms assumed to date by the real historical process of formation of the different categories of intellectuals. (BG)

(28)
A book is not shut in by its contours, is not walled-up as in a fortress. It asks nothing better than to exist outside itself, or to let you exist in it. In short, the extraordinary fact in the case of a book is the falling away of the barriers between you and it. You are inside it; it is inside you; there is no longer either outside or inside. (KB)

(29)
All men are intellectuals, one could therefore say: but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals. (JP)

(30)
All these consequences are contained in the definition that the worker is related to the product of his labour as to an alien object. For on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful the alien objective world becomes which he creates over-against himself, the poorer he himself – his inner world – becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself. The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater this activity, the greater is the worker's lack of objects. Whatever the product of his labour is, he is not. Therefore the greater this product, the less is he himself. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power of its own confronting him; it means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien. (JS)

(31)
Although we distinguish six basic aspects of language, we could, however, hardly find verbal messages that would fulfill only one faction.  The diversity lies not in a monopoly of some one of these several functions but in a different hierarchical order of functions.  The verbal structure of a message depends primarily on the predominant function.  But even though a set toward the referent, on orientation toward the context--briefly, the so-called REFERENTIAL, “denotative,” “cognitive” function--is the leading task of numerous messages, the accessory participation of the other functions in such messages must be taken into account by the observant. (SB)

(32)
As a means for the preservation of the individual, the intellect shows its greatest strengths in dissimilation, since this is the means to preserve those weaker, less robust individuals who, by nature,  are denied horns or the sharpfangs of a beast of prey with which to wage the struggle of existence.  This art of dissimulation reaches its peak in humankind, where deception, flattery, lying and cheating, speaking behind the backs of others, keeping up appearances, living in borrowed finery, waring masks, the drapery of convention, play-acting for the benefit of other and oneself—in short, the  constant fluttering of human beings around the one flame of vanity is so much the rule and the law that there is virturally nothing which defies undersrand so much as the fact than an honest and pure drive towards truth  ashould ever have emerged in them. (LH)

(33)
Communication in literature, then, is a process set in motion and regulated, not by a given code, but by a mutually restrictive and magnifying interaction between the explicit and the implicit, between revelation and concealment.  What is concealed spurs the reader into action, but this action is also controlled by is revealed; the explicit in its turn is transformed when the implicit has been brought to light.  Whenever the reader bridges the gaps, communication begins.  The gaps function as a kind of pivot on which the whole text-reader relationship resolves. (SB)

(34)
Do good poems come by nature or by art? This is a common question. For my part, I don’t see what study can do without a rich vein of talent, nor what good can come of untrained genius. They need each other’s help and work together in friendship. (WH)

(35)
Everyone must be able to read, so that the government can say: Ignorance of the law is no excuse. (KP)

(36)
For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty. (KP)

(37)
Imagine a painter who wanted to combine a horse’s neck with a human head, and then clothe a miscellaneous collection of limbs with various kinds of feathers, so that what started out at the top as a beautiful woman ended in a hideously ugly fish. If you were invited, as friends, to the private view, could you help laughing?  Let me tell you, my Piso friends, a book whose different features are made up at random like a sick man’s dreams, with no unified form to have a head or tail, is exactly like that picture. (KD)

(38)
In short only because man forgets himself as a subject, and indeed as an artistically creative subject, does he live with some degree of peace, security, and consistency; if he could escape for just a moment from the prison walls of this faith, it would mean the end of his ‘consciousness of self.’ He even has to make an effort to admit to himself that insects or birds perceive a quite different world from that of human beings, and that the question as to which of these two perceptions of the world is more correct is quite meaningless, since this would require them to be measured by the criterion of the correct perception, i.e. by a non-existent criterion. (MC)

(39)
Now and again an Emily Bronte or a Robert Burns blazes out and proves its presence. But certainly it never got itself on to paper. When, however, one read of a witch being ducked, or a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. (MC)

(40)
Now, the views that others have of me cannot be called “pure” perception; they are the result of interpretation. And this need for interpretation arises from the structure of interpersonal experience. We have experience of one another insofar as we know one another’s conduct; but we have no experience of how others experience us. (ML)

(41)
Of course the consequence of this is that the artistic production of metaphor, with which every sensation begins within us, already presupposes those forms, and is thus executed in them; only from the stability of these original forms can one explain how it is possible for an edifice of concepts to be constituted in its turn from the metaphors themselves. For this conceptual edifice is an imitation of the relations of time, space, and number on the foundations of metaphor. (MT)

(42)
One of the most important characteristics of any group that is developing towards dominance is its struggle to assimilate and to conquer “ideologically” the traditional intellectuals, but this assimilation and conquest is made quicker and more efficacious the more the group in question succeeds in simultaneously elaborating its own organic intellectuals. (KD)

(43)
One remark in passing: When semiology becomes organized as a science, the question will arise whether or not it properly includes modes of expression based on completely natural signs, such as the pantomime.  Supposing that the new science welcomes them, its main concern will still be the whole group of systems grounded on the arbitrariness of the sign. (BG)

(44)
Patriarchal society, for example, being centered upon the conservation of the patrimony, implies necessarily, along with those who own and transmit wealth, the existence of men and women who take property away from its owners and put it into circulation. (MT)

(44bis)
That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh.  We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. (DS)

(45)
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary reconstruction of  society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. (WH)

(46)
The intellectuals are the dominant groups’s “deputies” exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony and political government. These comprise: ¶1. The “spontaneous” consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group; this consent is “historically”  caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production. ¶ 2. The apparatus of state coercive power which “legally” enforces discipline on those groups who do not “consent” either actively or passively.  This apparatus is, however, constituted for the whole of society in anticipation of moments of crisis of command and direction when spontaneous consent has failed. (JG)

(47)
The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation-and which manufactures for the subject...the succession of phantasies...and...to the assumption of the armour of an alienation identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject's entire mental development. (JH)

(48)
They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen’s day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. (KR)

(49)
Thus a book is not only a book, it is the means by which an author actually preserves his ideas, his feelings, his modes of dreaming and living. It is his means of saving his identity from death. (KR)

(50)
Thus it is quite true that woman is other than man...the relation is a struggle between conscious beings each of whom wishes to be essential, it is the mutual recognition of free beings who confirm one another's freedom, it is the vague transition from aversion to participation.  To pose Woman is to pose the absolute Other, without reciprocity, denying against all experience that she is a subject, a fellow human being. (JH)

(51)
To see that persuasion, when added to speech, indeed molds the mind as it wishes, one must first study the arguments of astronomers, who replace opinion with opinion: displacing one but implanting another, they make incredible, invisible matters apparent to the eyes of opinion.  Second, compulsory debates with words, where a single speech to a large crowd pleases and persuades because written with skill (techne), not spoken with truth.  Third, contests of philosophical arguments, where it is shown that speed of thought also makes it easy to change a conviction based on  opinion. (JG)

(52)
Truth, too, is only desired by human beings in a similarly limited sense. They desire the pleasant, life-preserving consequences of truth; they are indifferent to pure knowledge if it has no consequences, but they are actually hostile towards truths which may be harmful and destructive. (KB)

(53)
We are all women, you assure me?  Then I may tell you that the very next words I read were these—“Chloe liked Olivia…”  Do not start.  Do not blush.  Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen.  Sometimes women do like women.  ¶ “Chloe liked Olivia,” I read.  And then it struck me how immense a change was there.  Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature.  Cleopatra did not like Octavia.  And how completely Antony and Cleopatra would have been altered had she done so! (DS)

(54)
What does it matter thenceforth if the actions, and the emotions, of this new order of creatures seem to us true, since we have made them ours, since it is within their control, as we feverishly turn the pages of the book, the rapidity of our breathing and the intensity of our gaze. And once the novelist has put us in that state, in which, as in all purely internal states, every emotion is multiplied tenfold, in which his book will disturb us as might a dream but a dream more lucid than those we have while sleeping and whose memory will last longer, then see how he provokes in us within one hour all possible happinesses and all possible unhappinesses just a few of which we would spend years of our lives coming to know and the most intense of which would never be revealed to us because the slowness with which they occur prevents us from perceiving them (thus our heart changes, in life, and it is the worst pain; but we know it only through reading, through our imagination: in reality it changes, as certain natural phenomena occur, slowly enough so that, if we are able to observe successively each of its different states, in return we are spared the actual sensation of change). (JS)

(55)
What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation, and decoration, and which, after they have been in use for a long time, strike a people as firmly established, canonical, and binding; truths are illusions of which we have forgotten they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour, coins which, having lost their stamp, are now regarded as metal and no longer coins. (JP)

(56)
When I read as I ought, i.e., without mental reservation, without any desire to preserve my independence of judgement,  and with the total commitment required of any reader my comprehension becomes intuitive and any feeling proposed to me is immediately assumes by me.  In other words, the kind of comprehension  in question here is not a movement from the unknown to the known, from the strange to the familiar, from the outside to the inside.  It might rather be called a phenomenon by which mental objects rise up from the depths of consciousness into the light of recognition. (LH)

(57)
Yet we still do not know where the drive for truth comes from, for so far we have only heard about the obligation to be truthful which society imposes in order to exist, i.e. the obligation to lie in accordance with firmly established convention, to lie en masse and in a style that is binding for all. Now, it is true that human beings forget that this is how things are; thus they lie unconsciously in the way we have described, and in accordance with centuries-old habits—and precisely because of this unconsciousness, precisely because of this forgetting, they arrive at the feeling of truth. (ML)

(58)
Having stood up to fight for a sexless society, we now find ourselves entrapped in the familiar deadlock of ‘woman is wonderful.’ Simone de Beauvoir underlined particularly the false consciousness which consists of selecting among the features of the myth (that women are different from men) those which look good and using them as a definition for women. What the concept ‘woman is wonderful’ accomplishes is that it retains for defining women the best features (best according to whom?) which oppression has granted us, and it does not radically question the categories ‘man’ and ‘woman,’ which are political categories and not natural givens.’ It puts us in a position of fighting within the class ‘women’ not as other classes do, for the disappearance of our class, but for the defense of ‘woman’ and its reenforcement.

(59)
In some things, a tolerable mediocrity is properly allowed. A mediocre lawyer or advocate is a long way from the distinction of Messalla and doesn’t know as much as Aulus Cascellius, but he has his value. But neither men nor gods nor shop-fronts allow a poet to be mediocre. Just as music out of tune or thick ointment or Sardinian honey with your poppy gives offence at a  nice dinner, because the meal could go on without them, so poetry, which was created and discovered for a pleasure of the mind, sinks right to the bottom the moment it declines a little from the top. The man who doesn’t know how to play keeps away from the sporting gear in the park. The man who’s never been taught ball or discus or hoop keeps quiet, so that the packed spectators can’t get a free laugh. But the man who doesn’t know how to make verses still has a go. Why shouldn’t he? He’s free, and of free birth, he’s assessed at an equestrian property rate, and he’s not got a fault in the world.

(60)
Ironies abound. A stressed system goes awry; its comunication processes break down; it fails to recognize the difference between self and other. human babies with baboon hearts evoke national ethical perplexity—for animal-rights activists at least as much as for guardians of human purity. Gay men, Haitian immigrants, and intravenous drug users are the ‘privileged’ victims of an awful immune-system disease that marks (inscribes on the body) confusion of boundaries and moral pollution.

(61)
Kept on the fringes of the world, woman cannot be objectively defined through this world, and her mystery conceals nothing but emptiness. ¶ Furthermore, like all the oppressed, woman deliberately dissembles hers objective actuality; the slave, the servant, the indigent, all who depend upon the caprices of a master, have learned to turn toward him a changeless smile or an enigmatic impassivity; their real sentiments, their actual behavior, are carefully hidden.

(62)
Men of wit are so astounded by the existence of women rivals that they cannot judge them with either an adversary’s generosity or a protector’s indulgence. This is a new kind of combat, in which men follow the laws of neither kindness nor honor.

(63)
Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer! We might perhaps have most of Othello, and a good deal of Antony; but no Caesar, no Brutus, no Hamlet, no Lear, no Jacques [from As You Like It]—literature would be incredibly impoverished, as indeed literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women. Married against their will, kept in one room, and to one occupation, how could a dramatist given a full or interesting or truthful account of them? ¶ Love was the only possible interpreter. The poet was forced to be passionate or bitter, unless indeed he chose to ‘hate women,’ which meant more often than not that he was unattractive to them.

(64)
The best evidence for this account is Tynnichus of Chalcis, who never made a poem anyone would think worth mentioning, except for the praise-song everyone sings, almost the most beautiful lyric poem there is, and simply, as he says himself, ‘an invention of the Muses.’ In this more than anything, then, I think the god is showing us, so that we should be in no doubt about it, that these beautiful poems are not human, not even from human beings, but are divine and from gods; that poets are nothing but representatives of the gods, possessed by whoever possesses them To show that, the god deliberately sang the most beautiful lyric poem through the most worthless poet.

(65)
The ideologeme is an amphibious formation, whose essential structural characteristic may be described as its possibility to manifest itself either as a pseudoidea—a conceptual or belief system, an abstract value, an opinion or prejudice—or as a protonarrative, a kind of ultimate class fantasy about the ‘collective characters’ which are the classes in opposition. This dualty means that the basic requirement for the full description of the ideologeme is already given in advance: as a construct it must be susceptible to both a conceptual description and narrative manifestation all at once.

(66)
The reader fills in the blank in the text, thereby bringin about a referential field; the blank arising in turn out of the referential field is filled in by way of the them-and-background structure; and the vacancy arising from juxtaposed themes and backgrounds is occupied by the reader’s standpoint, from which the various reciprocal transformations lead to the emergence of the aesthetic object. The structural qualitities outlined make the blank shift, so that the changing positions of the empty space mark out a definite need for determination, which the constitutive activity of the reader is to fulfill.

(67)
These performative utterances are not true or false, then. But they do suffer from certain disabilities of their own. They can fail to come off in special ways, and that is what I want to consider next. The various ways in which a performative utterance may be unsatisfactory we call, for the sake of a name, the infelicities; and an infelicity arises—that is to say, the utterance is unhappy—if certain rules, transparently simple rules, are broken.

(68)
A former actor of Stanislavskij's Moscow Theater told me how at his audition he was asked by the famous director to make forty different messages from the phrase Segodnja vecerom (This evening), by diversifying its expressive tint. He made a list of some forty emotional situations, then emitted the given phrase in accordance with each of these situations, which his audience had to recognize only from the changes of the sound shape of the same two words.

(69)
I shall then suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all) or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing, ‘Hey, you there!”

(70)
All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

(71)
Representation is natural to human beings from childhood. They differ from the other animals in this: man tends most towards representation and learns his first lessons through representation.

(72)
Discourse that possesses an author’s name is not to be immediately consumed and forgotten; neither is it accorded the momentary attention given to ordinary, fleeting words. Rather, its status and its manner of reception are regulated by the culture in which it circulates.

(73)
[S]upposing I suggested that Star Wars was a nostalgia film. What could I mean? I presume we can agree that this is not a historical film about our own intergalactic past.

(74)
Compulsory heterosexuality simplifies the task of the procurer and pimp in world-wide prostitution rings and “eros centers,” while, in the privacy of the home, it leads the daughter to “accept” incest/rape by her father, the mother to deny that it is happening, the battered wife to stay on with her abusive husband.

(75)