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Smith's uni-directionality neglects the metalinguistic possibilities of verbal semiosis.  Questions about the boundaries of a text can be elicited from subjects demonstrating both their know-how in reading and their ignorance.  The handling of a text, especially in metalinguistic matters, does not always stem from knowledge.  Theories of the text cannot be based solely on the communicative function of verbal sign systems.  Theory aiming to deconstruct dichotomies cannot afford to expunge the interpretive function.  Theory making must account for interstitial spaces.

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In Flax, Bordo and Smith some form of interiority operates:  an epistemic subject is inserted into a mode (Smith), the intensity of infant phases is interiorized and repressed (Flax), it is in participation that non-Cartesian subjects are immersed in a world (Bordo).  Something is in the subject or the subject is in something.  Mediation slips out of the picture.  A thematics of release scored for a pas de deux choreographs all movement as motion away from or towards the other.  Liberation discourses, however, can also imagine repositionings between other others, in a choreography of an esprit de corps.

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Although still performing with dyads, Paul Ricoeur theorizes what passes between the hermeneutical players.  For him the aim of interpretation is not to recover access to the mind of an author or the historical context of an original audience.  Its aim is the disclosure of modes of being-in-the-world, the revelation of possibilities.

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Ricoeur characterizes understanding as an act that makes the other, the world projected by a text, one's own.  This is appropriation:

To understand is not to project oneself into the text;  it is to receive an enlarged self from the apprehension of proposed worlds which are the genuine object of interpretation. ("Appropriation" 87)

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The enlargement of self is an increase in potential.  Reading gives power.  However, the acquisition is not without cost.  The acquiring of an "enlarged self" is accomplished by an exchange.  Something or rather some part of the reading subject is lost:

The reader is rather broadened in his capacity to project himself by receiving a new mode of being from the text itself.  Thus appropriation ceases to appear as a kind of possession, as a way of taking hold of...It implies, instead, a moment of dispossession of the narcissistic ego.  [...] It is the text with its universal power of unveiling, which gives a self to the ego. (97)

This is a hermeneutics of compulsion.  The text gives.  It does not simply present or offer.  The unveiling by the text of a self or a structure of being cannot be equated with a reader's acceptance of that self (n10).  Display does not equal the conclusion of barter.  At least this is so if one considers the interaction as occuring in a market economy.  However, for Ricoeur interpretation culminates in appropriation.  It must.  An imperative is lodged in the indicative.  The description is a prescription.  Here, there is no sales pitch.  The very structure of Ricoeurian textual interaction is shaped by the social obligations of a gift exchange economy.

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Economic formulations such as "Reading is an appropriation-divesture" (95) recur often in the essay but belie the unidirectional movement:  readers give before they get.  In Ricoeur's discourse there is a strong correlation between dispossession and emancipation.  A text "can procure new readers for itself" (96) since in Ricoeur's terms it escapes from the authorial situation and its original audience.  All evangelism is elided.  It is not a reader or readers who bring readers to a text.  A text, once released into the world, attracts.  Such textual autonomy is required to cement Ricoeur's analogy between self and text.

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In proverbial (something lost, something gained) double entry bookkeeping, Ricoeur tabulates a net gain for every admission into a textual economy.  Loss of author, gain of readers.  Loss of ego, gain of self.  What lends his argument credence is the disposition.  First, gain is accounted from a text-based perspective;  then, that of a reading subject.  As text receives so too the reader.  The analogy remains implicit.  If Ricoeur were to question the parallels constructed between subject and text, the universal unveiling power of text would be in need of much particularization.

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For the link between revelation and appropriation to be operative the reading subject must be susceptible to the game of exchange and accumulation.  This type of subject is found implanted in specific narratives.  Ricoeur assigns such a reader two tasks: growing up and finding a home.  These are the stories respectively of a Freudian and of a Christian subject.  Their stories are found in a previous Ricoeur collection, The Conflict of Interpretations.

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What has become in the essay on appropriation a vocabulary of Self, in these earlier writings was one of consciousness.  In these essays, the hermeneutical player is set the task not of dispossession of the ego but mastery of the libido of the ego.  Mastery evokes maturity and so Ricoeur expresses the opinion that the question of consciousness seems to "be bound to the other question of how a man leaves his childhood behind and becomes an adult" ("Consciousness and the Unconscious" 109).  Ricoeur's hesitancy is telling.  In the French version (Conflit 110), the phrases "sortir de l'enfance" and "être en proie à l'enfance" evoke perhaps more strongly the design of a release from infancy.  It is a pursuit-and-escape narrative or a story of temptation overcome that he presents.  But Ricoeur hedges.  He does not unequivocally link this narrative to the question of consciousness.

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The tentative tone signals his resistance or ambivalence.  At the very moment of advocating acceptance, submission to the unveiling power of a text, Ricoeur is challenging the temporal orientation of psychoanalytic discourse.  Ricoeur reverses the analyst's question.  As the translator, Willis Domingo, stresses, it is the analyst "who shows man subject to his childhood" ("Consciousness and the Unconscious" 109).  If Ricoeur's resistance itself is reversible, it is not a prospect envisaged explicitly.

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In Ricoeur's account there is no realm of freedom outside the child-adult pair.  For him sublation is inapplicable to the child-adult dialectic, adulthood remains an incomplete project.  If Ricoeur were to entertain the negation of a negation, an identity not child and not adult, the division of age would not be internal to the subject of enunciation but a function of the enunciating subject.  This location would expose the child-adult pair to greater reflexivity.  For example, there is a discursive position free from either end of the telling of a life story.  The listener so-positioned of such a tale would not, except by accepting a discourse's invitation, identify with either child or adult.

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