Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

ON DIALOGUE

ON DIALOGUE COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 448 is not the voice, but the face. In many respects Nikulin’s attempt to propose a new ontology of dialogue remains silently locked within the prison of metaphysical language. Proposing “voice” as the primal manifestation of selfhood (73), he ignores the need to account for the rules that make the voice comprehensible (i.e., distinct from mere noise) and also for the presence of the pre-linguistic surplus (the eidema), which authenticates the voice even as it remains unvoiced. A similar criticism can be made of Nikulin’s treatment of time. Claiming that dialogue belongs to an “eternal now,” he simply rejects “historicity” without providing any account of how dialogue helps to constitute human temporality. The paradox that plagues Nikulin’s project from the start is that it tirelessly hankers after a precise definition of a concept that it wants to preserve as indefinable. Nikulin attributes many adjectives to dialogue: it is oral, open-ended, and spontaneous. What sticks in the mind, however, are Nikulin’s negative determinations, which accumulate in long sequences reminiscent of the Russian philosopher Aleksei Losev (see his Dialectics of Myth [London: Routledge, 2003]). Nikulin protects the precious gem of “dialogue” from contact with anything specific or http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Comparative Literature Duke University Press

Loading next page...
 
/lp/duke-university-press/on-dialogue-3Iy0WR3Ral

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 2009 by University of Oregon
ISSN
0010-4124
eISSN
1945-8517
DOI
10.1215/00104124-2009-026
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 448 is not the voice, but the face. In many respects Nikulin’s attempt to propose a new ontology of dialogue remains silently locked within the prison of metaphysical language. Proposing “voice” as the primal manifestation of selfhood (73), he ignores the need to account for the rules that make the voice comprehensible (i.e., distinct from mere noise) and also for the presence of the pre-linguistic surplus (the eidema), which authenticates the voice even as it remains unvoiced. A similar criticism can be made of Nikulin’s treatment of time. Claiming that dialogue belongs to an “eternal now,” he simply rejects “historicity” without providing any account of how dialogue helps to constitute human temporality. The paradox that plagues Nikulin’s project from the start is that it tirelessly hankers after a precise definition of a concept that it wants to preserve as indefinable. Nikulin attributes many adjectives to dialogue: it is oral, open-ended, and spontaneous. What sticks in the mind, however, are Nikulin’s negative determinations, which accumulate in long sequences reminiscent of the Russian philosopher Aleksei Losev (see his Dialectics of Myth [London: Routledge, 2003]). Nikulin protects the precious gem of “dialogue” from contact with anything specific or

Journal

Comparative LiteratureDuke University Press

Published: Jan 1, 2009

There are no references for this article.