The Dialectic Of Metaphor: An Anthropological Essay On Hermeneutics

The Ceremony Must be Found: After Humanism

“…The ceremonies therefore cannot be found for the doctors of philosophy to wed the Earth to the Moon, for Othello to remain wedded to Desdemona, for Bon to marry a "negro," since the group Subjects to which they belong are bonded by a system of meaning or semantic charter (Maranda, 1980) which determines the meaning of their meaning'5 on the basis of these oppositions (Derrida, 1976). For it is these behavior-orienting oppositions which, through the mediation of their connotative system of good/evil, induce stable and shared desiring/aversive endogenous waveshapes in the brain (Thatcher/John, 1977), and constitute the morphogenetic fantasy or mode of the cultural imagination through which the group Subjects are led to imagine themselves'6 as such a Group Subject: one which, internally mediated by these structural oppositions and their related imagery/figuration system, is defined by the fact that its members participate in the same mode of mimetic desire (Girard, 1965) and of aversion (Fanon, 1964).…”

“…Since the proscription is effected and kept in play by a governing mode of the cultural imagination induced by the rhetorical strategies of the Figuration-Work of its abduction schema or morphogenetic fantasy (Bateson, 1979), it is only the discipline of literary scholarship, whose normalizing role is ordered by this very schema, that possesses the rhetorical techne, inherited from the founding heresy of the Studia as well as from the long practice of working with the figurative logic of poetry and fiction, not only to take our governing modes of figuration and their feats of "semantic engineering" (Maranda, 1980) as the objects of inquiry, but also to reveal the laws of human behavior as that behavior is ordered by projected verbal-rhetorical schemas: the laws of human systems, whose structuring Order/Chaos oppositions are the human version of what Dawkins calls the universally applicable replicator units or systemic codes (Dawkins, 1983)45 which everywhere function to absolutize the modes of our always rhetorical "natures"; the natures whose bonding topoi determine how we think about Self/World.…”

“…modes of group integration. This demand implies that we must now consciously alter our mode of self-troping, together with the related orienting desire/aversion machinery of our orders of discourse and the related semantic charter (Maranda, 1980) or rhetor-neurophysiological program that constitutes our "world of mind." This is the price, in the face of the possibility of our extinction, of our selfrealization as a species.…”

“…Such an epistemological break would call for the kind of rereading of all texts and narrative representations of the past that could isolate and identify the feats/strategies of poetic and semantic engineering (Maranda, 1980) by which discontinuities were effected from one order of discourse to the other; by which an earlier and more particularistic conception of Life/Death and figuration of Desire/Aversion was re-figured into a new and more inclusive mode of "human nature," as one aesthetic-affective order based on an imagined mode of Sameness/Difference and its related "world of mind" (Creutzfeld, 1979) was configured, transumed/sublated into another.…”