Review of HOLQUIST, Michael, and KLIGER, Ilya. (2005). "Minding the Gap. Toward a Historical Poetics of Estrangement", in Poetics Today, 26:4, pp. 613-636.

Roman Jakobson's intellectual trajectory might be described as a shift between three theoretical positions that are radically incommensurable with each other, and whose incompatibility was forcibly omitted in the self-accounts that the author carried out in his later years but also occasionally earlier. There can be little doubt that our author had an extraordinary personal and intellectual destiny and participated successively in three of the most innovative and influential theoretical movements of the 20th century: Russian formalism, Czech functional structuralism and ""dogmatic"" structuralism (P. Sériot 1989). This is something well known but it tends to be overlooked when generalizing summaries of the whole of the author's intellectual contribution are made. It is quite possible that Jakobson himself is responsible for this, for the excessive identification of his entire output with his latest essentialist positions, due to a number of strategies of disfiguring self-description that he repeteadly put in place, mostly in his last years but occasionally also before. To some extent, Jakobson has come down to us as a convoluted historical enigma, largely one of his own concoctions, and which perhaps in the present moment has finally acquired legibility as such. In this brief review, we will try to point out Jakobson's internal heterogeneity and draw attention to the need to make explicit which Jakobson we are talking about in a specific text: Jakonson I, Jakobson II or Jakobson III, who —everything seems to indicate— have radically different poetological conceptions. The ultimate reason is that, although Jakobson III is in effect irretrievable for today, he is ""irredeemably part of the past"" (G. Bottiroli, 2019, 231), both Jakobson I and Jakobson II might have fundamental contributions to make in the current situation of studies, each of them differently, and they could indicate plausible ways of enriching ongoing disciplinary dialogues.

Indeed, overall assessments of Jakobson's theoretical production have tended to underplay the internal differences between his various periods, or at least not making these differences sufficiently explicit. In this way they obstruct a potential influx of enriching ideas for the current situation of literary studies. In this point we will try to briefly discuss a number of illustrative examples in which the conceptual differences between the three Jakobsons were overlooked, with the aim of drawing some preliminary conclusions about the author's reception in recent years.

Sergei Glebov explains that ""[Jakobson's] association with Opojaz was ephemeral and indirect"" (2016, 228). According to this scholar, from the very beginning of his career Jakobson was always interested in the ""search for the universal"": ""the search for the universal became the fundamental task, and for Jakobson this task morphed into a whole series of projects, from Futurism to Eurasianism and phonology"" (Id., 226). Catherine Depretto, in her article ""Roman Jakobson et le formalisme russe"" (2019), to a large extent agrees with this assesment: ""[Jakobson] reste opposé a une trop grande valorisation du contexte historico-litteraire et du rélativisme generalisé auquel aboutit en definitive Tynjanov dans son conception de l'évolution litteraire (...). Ce qui l'estimule, c'est la recherche des invariants, des structures profondes, de ce qui est permanent dans la varieté"" (2019, 98). In O. Hansen-Löve we also find the claim of an essential identity between the theses of Jakobson I and Jakobson III: ""The well-known work The New Russian Poetry (1921) was not only his first relevant research but also laid the foundations of a fundamental poetics that he would later expose in the article «Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry» and in other works of classical structuralism"" (2017, Internet). Tomaš Glanc, in a text dedicated to examining the article ""Dada"", published by Jakobson in February 1921, sets out to demonstrate that ""already in this early article"" we can discover numerous indications of the author's later ideas, and above all eurasianism. (According to Glanc's suspicious reading, although in this text Jakobson apparently defends the ideals of cosmopolitanism, staunch relativism, and transgression as the (negative) essence of artistic activity, in reality, under the surface we must discover a plea in favor of Slavic nationalism (""autonomy of Slavic culture and civilization""), the intrinsic regularity and teleology of historical evolution (the anti-Darwinian conception of ""nomological"" evolution, which is variously modulated in Jakobson II and Jakobson III), and the idea of poetic creation as the unveiling of essences: ""Both Khlebnikov and the Dadaists use words that are devoid of meaning. However, from Jakobson's point of view, in this case we are dealing with two opposite positions. The Russian Futurists with the help of dismantling (demontazh) reveal the very essence of language, while the Dadaists are concerned solely with absurd representations and with the absolutization of the dismantling process itself"" (2017, 215).

In the article ""Minding the Gap. Toward a Historical Poetics of Estrangement"", Michael Holquist and Ilya Kliger conduct a brilliant and detailed study dedicated to the reconsideration of the concept of estrangement as a universal anthropological condition, theorized among many others by Kant at the very beginning of aesthetics in the modern sense of the discipline. In this study, they take into consideration the treatment given to this notion by various authors, including Roman Jakobson and also Viktor Shklovsky. Despite the general lucidity of this research, in the pages devoted to Jakobson we again conclude that the author's internal heterogeneity has not been taken into consideration. On the one hand, the elaboration of estrangement in Jakobson I is not addressed, and on the other hand, the authors conflate into one the elaborations of Jakobson II and Jakobson III. Thus, Holquist and Kliger base their reading on the texts ""What is poetry?"", from 1934, which belongs to Jakobson's functional structuralist period, and ""Quest for the Essence of Language"", from 1966, which belongs to the last theoretical period of the author. In the first text, estrangement is defined as a certain antinomy and contradiction (non-coincidence) that sets in motion the mobility of signs and prevents reality from stopping. In the second text, estrangement is identified with the well-known principle of the projection of the equivalence principle from the axis of selection to the axis of combination, and entails a deepening of the link between sound and meaning and a ""detemporalization"" of the poem. In this way, Jakobson's definition becomes contradictory, it implies two phases that seem to be perceived as mutually overlapping:

With this in mind, we can begin to make sense of the repercussion of Jakobsonian poetic estrangement. Pointing to the non-coincidence of sign an object involves recognizing the unavailability of immediate access to the world, the kind of unavailability bemoaned by the first readers of Kant. But the next step (...) carries with it the possibility of yielding to the temptation of the sort expressed very clearly by Kleist. The poem as a kind of atemporal thing threatens to give content to the merely formal, to impart materiality to the transcendental, thus re-uniting the domains previously proclaimed as divided. In a manner quite different, in fact symmetrically opposite, to Shklovsky's estrangement, Jakobson's poetry seems to be shadowed by the Romantic fantasy of the selfovercoming of estrangement (M. Holquist and I. Kliger 2005, 632-633).

It could be said that the authors incur here in a ""detemporalization"" similar to the one they point out in Jakobson: the two successive definitions of poetry, which are incompatible with each other, are rather presented as simultaneous, and consequently the dimensions considered of language and reality are defined at the same time as inaccessible to each other and reconciled. The reason seems to be that a misleading assumption of Jakobson´s theoretical unity has been too hastily taken for granted. In conclusion, in a whole series of contemporary assessments of Jakobson, carried out by quite different from each other scholars, we find a common feature of the subordination of the theoretical approaches of Jakobson I and Jakobson II to those of Jakobson III. This subordination corresponds to the self-descriptions made by Jakobson III on numerous occasions during his last decades of work, and perhaps in particular in the interview he gave to Krystina Pomorska in 1980 under the title ""My favorite topics"": ""the issue of invariants in the midst of variation has been the dominant theme and methodological resource underlying my research work"" (1992, 21). Jakobson III's self-mystifications have created a historical enigma that is difficult to unravel and that in this work we do not intend to solve at all, but rather to merely point out its existence .

If we turn to the texts written by Jakobson I in the late 1910s and early 1920s, we will find and unwavering commitment with the principles of nihilism, relativism, and iconoclasm characteristic of all the members of Opojaz. If Shklovsky wrote ""art is ironic and destructive, it makes the world come alive"" (2021, 151) and Tynyanov, a few years later, ""any essentialist definition of literariness is swept away by the fact of evolution"" (2018, 170), Jakobson I likewise championed that the task of art was ""to destroy and annihilate all cultural relics"" (2012 [1919], 99), that the characteristic feature of the present era was ""the overcoming of statics, the discarding of the absolute"" (1987 [1919], 31) and that the new literary science must proclaim the end of the sacred value routinely accorded to art: ""The first result of establishing a scientific view of artistic expression, that is, the laying bare of the device, is the cry «the old art is dead» or «art is dead» (...). Let us be frank: poetry and painting occupy in our consciousness an excessively high position only because of tradition"" (1987 [1921], 38 -39). As a matter of fact, there are reasonable grounds to suggest that the main characteristic of Jakobson I during these years is a greater extremism and exaltation of hyperhistoricist positions, along with a more detailed and nuanced reasoning concerning the relative value of all cultural values, and how this epochal transformation was differently refracted in each cultural and scientific sphere. In these texts the author sets out obsessively to destroy any kind of apparent permanence and vindicate the rights of an excessive incessant variability. After a careful consideration of the materials available, we find constant evidence that Jakobson I´s involvement with Opojaz was profound and direct, and his relationship with Jakobson III minimal and conflicting. Jakobson, I wrote in constant dialogue with the other members of the formal school, employed the same analytical tools, worked on the development of the same intuitions, and many a time offered conceptual and terminological innovations that allowed to overcome the limitations of the first period and were taken up again during the twenties by such authors as Eikhenbaum and Tynyanov. The urgent reintegration of Jakobson I in the canonical corpus of formalism will serve to outline the essential character of the school as a ""specific variant of radical modernism"" (Oushakine 2016, 37).

Cristian Cámara Outes

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