The Possibility of a Phenomenology of the Text: From and Against Postmodernism

Abstract

It is a common theme in Postmodernism that a “text” or a “discourse” creates its own object, that, as Derrida says, “there is no outside of the text” or that “everything is interpretation”. Usually, Postmodernist thinkers call upon German Romanticism, especially in the person of Friedrich Schlegel, upon his role in the delineation of our modern concept of literature and also his influence on philosophy and literary criticism. In using the concept of allegory, as opposed to symbol, and in applying these concepts to the theory of literature, it is widely accepted that Schlegel brings to its end a conception of literature based on the mimesis, i.e. on the transitivity of signs referring to the external world. Schlegel is credited with the claim, by and large, that literature is no longer or not only allegorical, but essentially “symbolic”: literature has no transitivity and refers only to itself. That means that, the concept of “literature” signifies a production - and no longer a condition of scholars or a quality of educated people - it also means its own theory, i.e. that literature has reflection upon itself. Literature presents itself in producing its own theory. One can quote Fragment 115 of the Lyceum, a year before the foundation of the Athenaeum review by the Schlegels, which enunciates the program of this review: “All art must becom science and all science must become art; poetry and philosophy must be united”.1