Hidden Signs? Postcritique to Solomon Marcus’s Final Article

Abstract

Solomon Marcus’ final article “Hidden signs” (2016) is no coherent story but gives the sketchy outlines of his lecture notes. Marcus call needs a further explanation to his intellectual background. Marcus advanced mathematical poetics interacting between the “natural” form of literature and the “artificial” scientific fields, to be epitomized by mathematical or statistical rules. Literature and the sciences share the use of linguistic signs and symbols, but French structuralism refused to recognize the transdisciplinary relations of literature with sciences. Thus Marcus’ mathematical poetics can be set against Barthes’ negative contention by agreeing and disagreeing with the “subversive” structuralists (Lévy-Strauss and Calvino). By positioning the idea of mythical and playful interactions of science with literary phenomena, Marcus positioned this tentative hypothesis to accept the revolutionary understanding of his thoughts. The grounds of Marcus’ debate accept the understanding of his revolutionary thoughts, but the postcritical response advances the intellectual conditions and political implications of Marcus’ scholarship, which caused him to abandon the method of structuralism and embark on the semiotic expansion of the dynamism of Peirce and Derrida.