ABSTRACT
What about the role of subjectivity in the language-act? Phenomenology links language not only to the objective referent in the world, but also to the subjectivity which is speaking. The phenomenologist Serge Doubrovsky explains it most succinctly: “Whenever something is said, someone must be saying it.” Or if we use Ricoeur’s formulation, “the display of a world and the positioning of an ego are symmetrical and reciprocal.” Though Ricoeur, pressured by the opposition of the structuralists, has a more complex definition of the self-world relation than did the generation of phenomenologists preceding him, the basic formula of Merleau-Ponty still applies: for the phenomenologist, meaning (in and through language) arises from the action, or more precisely the interaction, between self and world. Meaning is densest and richest in literary discourse. This is so because literary language can best “embody” (a favorite metaphor of Merleau-Ponty) non-conceptual as well as conceptual intentionality. Intentionality is by its very nature unique to the Lebenswelt of the individual speaker, since each person’s self-world relations are unique. It is through the intentionality unique to any given author, and present in the language of that author, that he is present in his literary work. In fact, language does not only embody intentionality—language is an extension of the author’s intentional field. Language becomes a vital theater of exchange through which the author interacts with world.
