Por supuesto que la individualidad, la identidad del sujeto, desde la aparición de la obra de Ferdinand de Saussure y de Jacques Lacan ha sido entendida de muy diversa manera de como aquí la presento. Así describe el efecto de sus teorías Marina Brownlee: «Rather than being a stable, coherent totality, the individual, for Lacan, is constituted by an unavoidable division and contradiction between the subject of an utterance (the self which speaks, and which is only represented there in a fragmetd way). As a result, subjectivity is located in the egap created by this division, and it is constituted by a matrix of subject-positions which may be in conflict with one another, indeed, even radically contradictory of one another». En «Elusive Subjectivity in María de Zayas», Journal of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, 6.2, 1994, p. 163.

Así lo dice con su magistral toque Michael Riffaterre: «On one side, you have the universe, all its parts, all the view points for looking at it. On the other side, facing the infinity of objects you have literature, which alone is pure representation, which alone among all discourses can contain and emulate everything else, including there other discourse», «On the Complementary of Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies», en Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, editado por Charles Bernheimer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995), p. 73.