— ABSTRACT :

Jakobson is well known to the Western intellectual audience in many respects, among which the opposition metaphor / metonymy is one of the most famous. Even Lacan picked up this opposition, quoting Jakobson. The definition of the opposition between poetic language and prosaic language is supposed to have been illuminated by it, while Saussure is also invoked, thus bringing the guarantee of the opposition between syntagmatic and paradigmatic.
Yet, if we study Jakobson’s writings closely and carefully compare them, light turns rather into obscurity. Contradictions abound, criteria become unreliable and their application escapes any serious attempt. Now Jakobson, during his long career, constantly comes back to this opposition, under different names. Why this obsession?
By placing this omnipresent couple in its cultural context of 1920-1930s Russia, thanks to studying the Russian and German texts that formed the cultural and scientific background of the Russian intelligentsia in the Soviet Union as well as in emigration, we should uncover layers rarely considered if Jakobson is read in a structuralist, even Marxist, perspective.

Jakobson’s obsession for magical thinking, which he shares with Nikolaj Marr, will serve as a guideline to find some little-known sources of a knowledge (or discourse?) apparatus, which have little to do with structuralism as practiced by those French intellectuals of the 1970s, admirers of Jakobson. A comparative epistemology can thus help us get rid of clichés about the "Slavic soul", reveal a scientific discourse practice which is both near and far from us, and identify what, in our own Western world, depends on that « other ourselves ».