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Abstract

Perspective, Damisch argues, is neither a language nor a code. Nevertheless, perspective has some things in common with language and especially with the phenomenon linguistics has termed deixis. In language, indicators of deixis are the personal pronouns (‘I’ and ‘you’) as well as the demonstrators, adverbs and adjectives that organize the spatial and temporal relationships around the subject. This ‘I’ and ‘you’, ‘here’ and ‘there’, are empty forms which each speaker, in the exercise of discourse, appropriates to him- or herself and with which he or she relates to his or her person. Similarly, Damisch argues, perspective ‘institutes and constitutes itself under the auspices of a point, a factor analogous to the “subject” or “person” in language, always posited in relation to a “here” or “there”, accruing all the possibilities for movement from one position to another this entails’ (Damisch, 1995, p. 53).