French's 'ne explétif' in English?


●Source: p 249, Zizek's Ontology ..., by Adrian Johnston


●●Source: p 65, L'Odyssé d'Homère: tr. en français, Volume 2, translated by Dugas Montbel



● Bruce Fink helpfully compares the French ne explétif [hereafter abbreviated as NE] to certain employments of the English word but
(as in, for example, "I can 't help but think that... " or "I cannot deny but that . .. ")
Fink contends that the French ne and the English but are each means of expressing an attitude of ambivalence toward the meaningful content of the sentence uttered (an attitude coloring the position of the subject of enunciation) without, for all that, disrupting or repudiating ♦ the literal meaning of the sentence per se as the sense established in the form of an utterance.29 Philippe Van Haute claims that the occurrence of the NE makes for the difference between, in its absence, the "impersonal" phenomenon of a simple assertive sentence in which the subject of enunciation 's intention-to-signify coincides with (or collapses/fades into) the thus-established position of the subject of the utterance, and, in its presence, the "personal" phenomenon of indicating, through the ne, an affectively inflected distance between the speaker (i.e., enunciation) and the significance of what the speaker spoke (i.e., utterance).30 ♦ The signifier ne or but marks, within the uttered sentence, the enunciator's unease with what he or she uttered.



Although I didn't understand the long sentences surrounded by ♦ , I include the above should it help anyone. Negatives still trouble me, but I cancel the double negatives in Fink's comparisons:



1. I can[not] help but think that... " = 1.1. I think that
2. I cannot deny but that = 2.1. I deny that



Q1. In 1.1 and 2.1, there's nothing negative. So where can the French adverb « ne » possibly lie?


I exemplify a verb requiring the NE with redouter (which I arbitrarily chose):



●●Si vous tardez en vous armant contre ce rocher, je redoute que, s'élancant de nouveau, Scylla
n' engloutisse autant de vos compagnons qu'elle a de têtes.


My translation: 3. ...I dread that, soaring up again, Scylla swallows as many of your companions as she has heads.



Q2. In 3, I never used Fink's double negation? So what does he mean?




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