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Some years ago Derrida wrote me a letter to inform me that he and other people were establishing in Paris the Collège International de Philosophie and to ask me for a letter of support. I bet Derrida was assuming that (i) I had to assume that he was telling the truth; (ii) I had to read his program as a univocal discourse as far as both the actual situation and his project were concerned; (iii) my signature requested at the end of my letter would have been taken more seriously than Derrida's at the end of "Signature, évenement, contexte." Naturally, according to my Erwartungshorizon, Derrida's letter could have assumed for me many other additional meanings, even the most contradictory ones, and could have elicited many additional inferences about its "intended meaning"; nevertheless, any additional inference ought to be based on its first layer of allegedly literal meaning. |
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In Grammatology Derrida reminds his readers of the necessary function of all the instruments of traditional criticism: "Without this recognition and this respect, critical production will risk developing in any direction at alland authorize itself to say almost anything. But this indispensable guard-rail has always only protected, it has never opened a reading" (Eng. tr., 158). I feel sympathetic with the project of opening readings, but I also feel the fundamental duty of protecting them in order to open them, since I consider it risky to open a text before having duly protected it. |
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Thus, returning to Reagan's story, my conclusion is that, in order to extrapolate from it any possible sense, one is first of all obliged to recognize that it had a literal sense, namely, that on a given day a man said p and that p, according to the English code, means what it intuitively means. |
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4. Two Levels of Interpretation |
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Before going ahead with the problem of interpretation we must first settle a terminological question. We must distinguish between semantic and critical interpretation (or, if one prefers, between semiosic and semiotic interpretation). |
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Semantic interpretation is the result of the process by which an addressee, facing a Linear Text Manifestation, fills it up with a given meaning. Every response-oriented approach deals first of all with this type of interpretation, which is a natural semiosic phenomenon. |
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Critical interpretation is, on the contrary, a metalinguistic activitya semiotic approachwhich aims at describing and explaining for which formal reasons a given text produces a given response (and in this sense it can also assume the form of an aesthetic analysis). |
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