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What is Heterology?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Ian Buchanan
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Heterology is Michel de Certeau’s great unfinished project. Begun while still in the U.S., it was put on hold so he could complete his work on mysticism,—and regrettably—never resumed. This work holds such great promise that the thought of continuing his project, of somehow bringing it to fruition, has long been a fancy of mine. But besides the obvious difficulty of creating what is practically a new epistemology, there is the more immediate difficulty of establishing just what heterology is meant to be. Since Certeau died before he could formulate either a specific thesis, or a particular method, we have no certain way of knowing what he actually meant by the term, or indeed intended it to mean. So until now the fancy has remained idle. However, it now occurs to me that it may be possible to construct a workable impression of what heterology is by determining what it decidedly is not.

While it is true that we do not really know what heterology is meant to stand for, there is one thing, at least, of which we can be certain and that is what Certeau did not want this book “we will never ready” to be. It is quite clear from his existing work that he wanted to steer what at the time of his death was then emerging as cultural studies away from what might be called, to coin a phrase, ‘interpretative semiotics’. He objected to ‘interpretative semiotics’ not because its result is more allegory than analysis, but because it presumes that the state of affairs called culture is, through being composed of ‘symbols’, a purely relative, or else quid pro quo, structure, without any substantive base.

Type
Original Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 77 , Issue 909 , November 1996 , pp. 483 - 493
Copyright
Copyright © 1996 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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