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sarily "weak" pragmatists, because they do not try to reduce a text to any univocal semantic reading. |
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Second, I suspect that many "strong" pragmatists are not pragmatists at allat least in Rorty's sensebecause the "misreader" employs a text in order to know something which stands outside the text and that is in some way more "real" than the text itself, namely, the unconscious mechanism of la chaine signifiante. In any case, even though a pragmatist, certainly the misreader is not a "textualist." Probably misreaders think, as Rorty assumes, that there is nothing but texts; however, they are interested in every possible text except the one they are reading. As a matter of fact, "strong'' pragmatists are concerned only with the infinite semantic readings of the text they are beating, but I suspect that they are scarcely interested in the way it works. |
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5. Interpretation and Use |
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I can accept the distinction proposed by Rorty as a convenient opposition between interpreting (critically) and merely using a text. To critically interpret a text means to read it in order to discover, along with our reactions to it, something about its nature. To use a text means to start from it in order to get something else, even accepting the risk of misinterpreting it from the semantic point of view. If I tear out the pages of my Bible to wrap my pipe tobacco in them, I am using this Bible, but it would be daring to call me a textualisteven though I am, if not a strong pragmatist, certainly a very pragmatic person. If I get sexual enjoyment from a pornographic book, I am not using it, because in order to elaborate my sexual fantasies I had to semantically interpret its sentences. On the contrary, iflet us supposeI look into the Elements of Euclid to infer that their author was a scotophiliac, obsessed with abstract images, then I am using it because I renounce interpreting its definitions and theorems semantically. |
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The quasi-psychoanalytic reading that Derrida makes of Poe's The Purloined Letter in "Le facteur de la verité" (1980) represents a good critical interpretation of that story. Derrida insists that he is not analyzing the unconscious of the author but rather the unconscious of the text. He is interpreting because he respects the intentio operis. |
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When he draws an interpretation from the fact that the letter is found in a paper holder hanging from a nail under the center of a fireplace, Derrida first takes "literally" the possible world designed by the narration as well as the sense of the words used by Poe to stage this |
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