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17 2. Rewriting the Other (of) Representation The intertextualist approaches of Bakhtin, Kristeva and Barthes afford us a new perspective on the realities and representational strategies or constituents at work in social-cultural discourses, newly envisaged as metaphorical glimpses of the processes of signifi ance and meaning pro- ductivity. Texts are not simply read, but negotiated interdiscursively in every semiotic performance; and so they reveal specularly, as if they were material marks of alterity, absence and intertextual connection, the scorned other or the dominant truth and its concerted (somewhat conse- crated) signifi er. In this sense, the consciousness of it somehow elicits our (literary, social or ethical) commitment to legitimising the spaces, values and fi gurations of alterity within empowered representation. The way to such transformation of our truth politics – the grounds where our personal or collective identity is decided – necessarily calls for rewriting the textual and symbolic function of most of the conceptual, epistemological and ideological categories we represent and live by; thus, “author,” “reader,” “subject,” “work,” “History,” “past” or “factu- ality,” among so many others, are reconsidered in terms of alterity and inter-semiosis, and so they render visible and active in discourse what remained silenced or simply erased in Western textuality. 2.1 Rewriting the Subject: Subject to/of Alterity 2.1.1 Encompassing Alterity: From the Death of the Author to Rewriting the Subject’s Ontology The advent of the intertextual debate in European criticism defi nitely broke with the modern conception of the subject, and validated other scholarly efforts in that ground-breaking direction...