by John Lechte
Routledge 1994
Early structuralism
Gaston Bachelard:
'The space in which one looks, in which one examines is philosophically very different from the space in which one sees.' This is because the space in which one sees is always a represented space, and not a real space.
Mikhail Bakhtin:
Inspired by Einstein's theory of relativity, Bakhtin defines the chronotope as the 'íntrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships in literature.'
Georges Canguilhem:
[...] human being are 'normative' beings, not because they conform to norms, but because they are norm-creating beings, or open systems dependent on their environment. [...] Disease - the obstacle - is the necessary stimulus for the norm-making necessary for health.
Structuralism
Gérard Genette:
[...] to understand fully the way the language works we must account for the act of stating (énonciation) as well as the statement made (énoncé). In themselves, narrative utterances (énoncés) are often simple and transparent (e.g. Proust's 'For a long time I went to bed early', cited by Genette). Only when the narrative instance is taken into account can the full weight of an utterance's singular narrative meaning be appreciated.
Post-structuralist thought
Gilles Deleuze:
[S]ubject and object are metaphysical categories; they presuppose the notions of unity and identity. They are categories of a 'vertical' philosophy (like Hegel's). The singular aspect of all vertical philosophy is the separation in it of the truth of the concept from the reality to which it refers.
Jacques Derrida:
'I try to place myself at a certain point at which ... the thing signified is no longer easily separable from the signifier.'
Michel Foucault:
Madness here has its own form of reason and is seen as a general characteristic of human beings. Unreasonable reason, and reasonable unreason could exist side by side. [...] Discontinuity (between eras) thus predominates in the history of madness. [...] Knowledge is [...] linked to power, and the prison becomes a tool of knowledge.
Semiotics
Roland Barthes:
With ideology, what is said is crucial and it hides. With myth, how it says what it says is crucial, and it distorts. In fact, myth 'is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.'
Charles Sanders Peirce:
All thought [...] must necessarily be in signs.
Second generation feminism
Michèle Le Doeuff:
[The] effect [of images] is to close the text off from scrutinity - to make it self-contained [...] Through images, 'every philosophy can engage in a straightforward dogmatization [...]'
Post-marxism
Jürgen Habermas:
Understanding means participants reach agreement; agreement entails the íntersubjective recognition'of the other's utterance. In this process each participant will be drawn into reflecting upon their own position in the communicative process. For Habermas, this means that the structure of language is hermeneutic [...]
Modernity
James Joyce:
Plato in the Phaedrus, calls mnemonics defective memory without seeming to recognise that it would not be necessary if memory were not already defective. Mnemonics, therefore, is a confirmation of the arbitrary nature of the sign as proposed by Saussure.
[cf signatures vs type]
Bloom's walk is, in almost surrealistic fashion, a series of chance encounters. It is a walk of almost pure contingency. 'Almost' — because the text has to be written down. The insignificant, unpredictable detail has to be turned into a sign in order that it might the give up part of its ephemeral status and be communicated [...]