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In memory of Jean Starobinski
The work becomes person only if I cause it
to live as one. My reading must breathe life
into the work so as to endow it with presence
and appearances of personality. I must bring
the work back to life in order to love it; I
must make it speak in order to respond to it
… One might say the work always begins as
'our dearly departed' awaiting resurrection
through us, or if not resurrection then at
least the most vivid evocation.
--Starobinski, "The Critical Relation"
This essay, devoted to a master of close reading and of the interpretation of signs and symptoms—textual and medical—was born in a classroom at Johns Hopkins University.1 It was born, furthermore, in the very place that shaped the vocation and the intellectual trajectory of a young, highly gifted literary scholar and medical student from Geneva. In the mid-1950s, accompanying his wife Jaqueline who was in training at Hopkins Hospital, Jean Starobinski followed medical rounds while polishing his doctoral thesis on Jean-Jacques Rousseau and taking part in the intellectual creative spirit that marked those Hopkins years. This was a time when many ideas about the creative potential of cross-disciplinary exchanges were first seeded, a time that found its echo when visitors (many from Paris) convened with the local intelligentsia a decade later at Hopkins at an international symposium. In the chronicle of American intellectual life, this 1966 conference, "The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man," marked the birth of "theory."
In this initial gathering, local faculty, scholars representing highly diversified fields, and guest speakers from Europe had convened for presentations and conversations that prompted a radical rethinking of longstanding enlightenment ideals and values. Embedded in the cultural and intellectual crisis of a Europe torn apart by two wars, the conference also prompted a radical rethinking of values attached to learning and culture in academia; "human sciences" and the humanities were at the forefront. The proceedings for the 1966 conference were later collected under the heading of Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato's The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism; the Sciences of Man (1972), thus inviting a connection between the original event and the twentieth-century epistemic and philosophic revolution brought about...