What Is Neostructuralism? (review)

430Philosophy and Literature poetry of the dialogues—or to their narrative and thematic weight (chapters 38-^41 are die theophany, chapters 2—37 form the dialogues). More crucially, WUcox contends diat the fundamental Hebraic idea ofcovenant is unimportant in the Book ofJob. His reading of the theophany makes die notion absurd. ButJob is not merely bitter (a psychological state WUcox condemns as counter to die Nietzschean ideal oflife-affirming acceptance), he is outraged. Like Abraham above Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen.l9:23-33) and Moses on Mt. Sinai (Ex.32:7-14),Job calls God to account fora violation ofHis side ofthe covenant; whedier Job and his friends are Hebrews is moot, for Job's inclusion in the Hebrew canon makes die covenant ideal implicit. God's reply is perhaps protesting too much, but His rhetorical mysteries are nonetiieless a reply—and Job's integrity is reaffirmed by die divine restoration of his famUy and wealth. WUcox's reading of the theophany as a return to natural religion denies the very elements that make this poem a compeUing drama, for it slights the human, aU-too-human concern forjustice, the compassion for suffering, and die ethical outrage that rank the Book ofJob among literature's most compeUing tributes to the persistence and questioning of the moral spirit. University of WashingtonMichael Yogev What Is Neostrticturalism?, by Manfred Frank; translated by Sabine WUke and Richard T. Gray; xvi & 482 pp. Minneapolis : University ofMinnesota Press, 1989, $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper. Manfred Frank has written on ScheUing, Schleiermacher, and recent issues in hermeneutics including the Gadamer-Derrida and Habermas-Lyotard "debates ." His What Is Neostructuralism? draws heavUy on his earlier work, especiaUy Das Problem 'Zeit' in der deutschen Romantik (1972), which de-simplified theories of die subject in die Romantic tradition. In other words, the effects of a constitutive exteriority or "realm of the ungrounded" in die subject narrated by a Fichte or ScheUing predude, for Manfred Frank, any reflexive dosure. The Ulusion of a "present" subject only helps critics who need to uphold a conflict between French critiques of die subject and hermeneutics. More specificaUy for Frank: "Neostructuralism does not seem to be aware of the theory of die prereflective cogito, so diat die phenomenon of subjectivity shrinks to the entirely different phenomenon ofself-cognition" (p. 198). It remains to be seen whedier Frank's reading of protodeconstructive strains in ScheUing can sustain Reviews43 1 its daims in light ofDerrida's recent (and not unpredictable) criticism of ScheUing 's "supplementary logic of theocentrism." Frank's twenty-seven lectures on such figures as Saussure, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze, and Lyotard, broadlyconcerned widi die problems ofhistory, language, and subjectivity, are guided by a pedagogical rhetoric. This rhetoric gives die German tradition credit for many of die advances daimed by French neostructuralism, and yet argues for a certain intensified subjectivity as a crucial component ofthe critical enterprise. Sometimes Frank's redistribution ofcredit (debt?) is worthwhUe, e.g., when he links Herder's critique of Kant's ignorance of a Unguistic a priori with Derrida's reading of Husserl. Frank is predictable when he says die characters created by Tieck and Hoffmann are precursors of Deleuze's "schizo" type. Such aUusions make his German audience feel at home in strange seas of diought. But the hegemonic impulse, which Frank himself exposes in simplified readings of the subject, needs to be checked in his own attempt to make sense ofFrench theory in terms ofGerman authorship. The danger here is not a hidden nationalism so much as the return of the Same for the sake of making sense of something for one's students. Frank would disagree with me over what I take to be his overly harsh and puritanical rebuke of the recent work of Deleuze and Guattari; but surely his own critical assumptions would not be undermined if, in introducing his students to "schizoanalysis ," Frank invoked the writings not only of Tieck and Hoffmann but of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Malcolm Lowry, as Deleuze did in Logique du sens and later in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaux. It is to Frank's credit, however, that he turns to works such as Logique du sens to...