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dilemma can one ask whether what is found is (i) what the text says by virtue of its textual coherence and of an original underlying signification system or (ii) what the addressees found in it by virtue of their own systems of expectations.
Such a debate is of paramount importance, but its terms only partially overlap the opposition generation/interpretation. One can describe a text as generated according to certain rules without assuming that its author followed them intentionally and consciously. One can adopt a hermeneutic viewpoint leaving unprejudiced whether the interpretation must find what the author meant or what Being says through languagein the second case, leaving unprejudiced whether the voice of Being is influenced by the drives of the addressee or not. If one crosses the opposition generation/interpretation with the trichotomy of intentions, one can get six different potential theories and critical methods.
Facing the possibility, displayed by a text, of eliciting infinite or indefinite interpretations, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance reacted with two different hermeneutic options. Medieval interpreters looked for a plurality of senses without refusing a sort of identity principle (a text cannot support contradictory interpretations), whereas the symbolists of the Renaissance, following the idea of the coincidentia oppositorum, defined the ideal text as that which allows the most contradictory readings.
Moreover, the adoption of the Renaissance model generates a secondary contradiction, since a hermetico-symbolic reading can search for in the text either (i) the infinity of senses planned by the author or (ii) the infinity of senses that the author ignored. Naturally the option (ii) generates a further choice, namely, whether these unforeseen senses are discovered because of the intentio operis or despite it, forced into the text by an arbitrary decision of the reader. Even if one says, as Valery did, that "il n'y a pas de vrai sens d'un texte," one has not yet decided on which of the three intentions the infinity of interpretations depends.
Medieval and Renaissance Kabbalists maintained that the Torah was open to infinite interpretations because it could be rewritten in infinite ways by combining its letters, but such an infinity of readings (as well as of writings)certainly dependent on the initiative of the readerwas nonetheless planned by the divine Author.
To privilege the initiative of the reader does not necessarily mean to guarantee the infinity of readings. If one privileges the initiative of the reader, one must also consider the possibility of an active reader who decides to read a text univocally: it is a privilege of fundamentalists to read the Bible according to a single literal sense.

 
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