In this paper three canonical studies of the scientific revolution are subjected to narratological analysis. Underlying this analysis is the assumption that in any single product of historical writing it is possible to distinguish, for analytical purposes, between three levels of reference: the object of the text — the events; the representation of the events — the narrative; and the text in which a story is represented by means of narrative. Through texts one learns about historical events (the object of the text), but also about the process of producing the texts (the narrative). Techniques of representation are means of production of texts that represent, in addition to the events, also the producer and his or her authority. The distinction made for any specific text allows the reader to play the two levels against each other in order to create a space within which historical writing should be criticized. Such criticism may draw attention to the difficulty of controlling the meaning of historical stories, and to the need to analyze narrative structures in order to appreciate the ideological changes of historical texts.

This paper contains two main sections. In the first I suggest a mechanism of interpretation, based on a distinction between two aspects of meaning, analyzed using two kinds of rhetorical-poetical constructions: tropes to explore the linguistic relations—metaphors, metonyms, synecdoches, etc.—that endow terms with content, and topics to account for the structuring function of key expressions, which enables the recognition and adjudication of phrases, arguments, texts, genres, etc. In the second section I substantiate my claims by demonstrating how new light is shed on Galileo Galilei's neglected and obscure De Motu if these two aspects of the meaning of its central theoretical terms are taken into consideration; interpreted through this approach it is revealed as a text revolutionary in its ideas, while the communicative efficacy of its continuous use of the traditional terminology is unveiled.

In this paper I show that in its original setting Boyle's New Experiments was not only rhetorical but also ideological. By employing a Lacanian theory of the subject, I show that this text not only disguised various “real contradictions“ in the fabric of Restoration society but also acted as a site for certain textual practices that played a role in the constitution of a new form of subjectivity for scientists. I also address the philosophical question of whether the ideological and rhetorical nature of scientific texts impugns the status of their theoretical claims as paradigms of knowledge and rational belief.

In the first part of this paper, issues concerning an “epistemology of time” are raised. The Derridean theme of the historial movement of a trace is connected to Prigogine's notion of an operator-time. It is suggested that both conceptions can be used to characterize the dynamics of experimental systems in contemporary science. It is argued that such systems have, to speak with Hacking, “a life of their own” and that this is precisely the reason for their inherent unpredictability.

In the second part, a case from the history of virology and cytomorphology is presented. The movement of a particular experimental system is followed in its peculiar tension between deferring and becoming different—i.e., between the persistence of a problem and the vagaries of its successive transformations. They are rendered possible by novel technical implementations, but they are not determined in any meaningful sense on a mere technological level.

In conclusion, a point is made for a deconstructive approach to the history of science.

This article focuses on the dialectic of metapsychology and hermeneutics in psychoanalysis. By combining the causal language of the former with the inten tional terminology of the latter, Freud's discourse continuously transgresses the narrowly conceived boundaries of scientific disciplines and places its stakes in both the humanities and the natural sciences. The argument is made that attempts to reduce psychoanalytic theory to either causal explanation or interpretation of meaning turn it into a closed thought system and rob it of its vitality. It is argued, moreover, that although Freud understood himself to be a scientist, by eschewing the dichotomous reductionism characteristic of both his orthodox followers and critics who tried and still try to turn psychoanalysis into either a natural-science- like discipline or a hermeneutics, Freud demonstrated that his self-understanding was far more sophisticated than admitted by either of these two groups. This argument is supported by a detailed discussion of Freud's epistemological pre mises, his conception of science and reality, and especially, the place he allocated to metapsychology in his interdisciplinary science. It is claimed that metapsy chology served Freud as a double-edged sword, both enabling creative and metaphorical thought about the mind's hidden reality and revealing the necessary incompleteness of hermeneutics. The article concludes with the claim that psy choanalysis needs metapsychology in order to pursue this dual task.

Against the idea that modern historiography developed in the eighteenth century as a completely new way of looking at the past, this paper argues that modern historical science borrowed its sense of experience from seventeenth-century memoirs. However, seventeenth-century rnemorialists made very different as sumptions than modern historians about the relations between time, memory, and history. One consequence of their introduction of lived subjectivity into the depiction of the past was a debate in early eighteenth-century France about the relations between history and fiction, some arguing that fiction is a better way of grasping the subjective truth of the past. These debates about the relations between history and memory and between history and fiction have resurfaced recently. The historical moods that are one context for paradigm shifts share common motifs, such as a sense of defeat, of distance between the present and the immediate past, and a need for consolation through the elaboration of a new mode of experiencing the past.

During the last two decades the debate on the use and abuse of narrative in historiography has taken a new form: ideological instead of methodological. According to poststructuralist critics, the representation of past events and processes in the form of a coherent story turns history into mythology, which is (or serves) conservative ideology. This is so because the fabrication of organic continuity and unity between the past and the present (as well as the future) of society depicts its most fundamental laws and institutions as divine-natural rather than human creations and thereby renders them impervious to any rational or historical refutation. The main aim of this essay is to reclaim some credibility for narrative history against its critics, both ancient and modern, and on both methodological and ideological grounds, by reappraising the role of myth in the constitution of all norms and forms of life. Setting out from the observation that the narratives and other symbolic interpretations of historical reality in which the people believe are as real as the conditions and events in which they actually live, the author calls upon historians not to eliminate, but to illuminate, myths in history, by showing their extension or configuration of historical reality.

The paper offers a reconstruction of one aspect of Bakhtin's philosophy, focusing on a deep-seated ambivalence that has been largely overlooked in studies based on his late works. Bakhtin's early work, 1920–23, is set within a distinctly metaphysical framework, an outlook that seems diametrically opposite to what has become known as the Bakhtinian conception of culture. That ideological rift is manifest in the different treatment of Dostoevsky's works (and, by extension, the different attitude to the secularization of Western culture) in these two phases.

Extrapolating Bakhtin's perspective onto Dostoevsky's work, the paper briefly outlines a theory of modernism as a “crisis of authority,” with particular emphasis on the role of closure — i.e., retrospective framing, both literary and existential — in the absence of metaphysical grounding.

Finally, the paper offers a comment on Bakhtin's wholesale assimilation into the postmodernist canon, in an attempt to problematize it and to reformulate some relevant and persistent questions on the significance of narrativity in human existence.