The Ostensive and the Emp(h)atic

The critical method developed by Jacques Derrida requires a new attitude to ostensiveness: it is understood not as a quality of argument, but as a way of arranging heterogeneous utterances by placing human beings before their own history. This allows us to overcome the inconsistencies in our conception of how humans construct their own and others’ histories, and how the means of speech always lag this constituting. The article argues that Russian formalism, which demonstrates numerous parallels with Husserl’s phenomenology, preceded Derrida’s project of building a non-contradictory theory of ostensibility. Tynyanov, with his interest in biographies, theater and the visual properties of the written text, through a series of complex arguments and an overcoming the unspoken in the usual concepts of expressiveness was able to create an idea of man, who is both a producer and a consumer of art, a character of emphatic statements, which reveals the extensive potential of culture. The contradictions and shortcomings in metaphors and schemes, through which Tynyanov describes the art of past eras, are surmounted in his own literary work, which transfers the antinomy of subject and story from the realm of supposition into the realm of ostensive acceptance. Taking into account these particular ideas helps us to clarify the concept of time as part of Tynyanov’s study of visual techniques in the poetic text and the fluctuating characteristics of linguistic meaning

Antinomy · Art · Epistemology · Explication · Literature · Ostensive definition · Parallels · Realm · Discourse Analysis and Cultural Communication · History · Language, Communication, and Linguistic Studies · Philosophy · Russian Literature and Bakhtin Studies