Alter Ego

Abstract

I repeat, for the sake of convenience, my simplified, and naive version of Jakobson’s diagram: The first concept I need is the concept of actor. When this diagram is embodied in actual dialogue or literary exchange, it involves the real presence of concrete subjects, Greimas’s actors, endowed with material existence. Edward Lear, you and I, but also the text of the sonnet printed on the page are actors in this sense. But the text, although material (contrary to language and the encyclopaedia, which only exist in the limbo of Popper’s third world — the world of concepts and ideas as opposed to the first world of objects and the second world of thoughts) and individual, is not endowed with intention: it is object or patient rather than subject or agent, for the time being at least. The concept of actor, therefore, according to tradition, ascribes a privileged place to author and reader according to the analogy between speech act and interpretation that informs my guiding metaphor. To take this privileged position into account, we might be tempted to modify the initial diagram to a slight extent: