ABSTRACT
As with the analysis of the constitution of meant objects by knower and non-knower, the paradigm of language offers a more fruitful opening than does the paradigm of consciousness for the professional knower to understand the non-knower ‘s stories. What type of opening would retrieve the embodied meanings of the non-knower and, indeed, of the professional knower? Further, if the concealed embodied meanings of both professional knower and non-knower were unconcealed, could the knower still attribute “authority” to his or her configuration of signs as can the knower of a modern legal discourse? To begin with, would authority remain in the ghost-like foundation or grounding of the juridical official’s trace of authoritative signs? I shall respond to these issues by examining Mikhail Bakhtin’s sense of a dialogic relation as he retrieves such relations in Dostoevsky’s novels. I shall then ask whether one can still talk of auctoritas in a dialogic relationship in the same sense as I associated it with the trace of signs to the absent foundation of legal reasoning.
