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tended to say at the moment he wrote it, i.e. abandoned it to its essential drift" (1972, Eng. tr., 182). |
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To affirm that a sign suffers the absence of its author and of its referent does not necessarily mean that it has no objective or literal linguistic meaning. But Derrida wants to establish a practice (which is philosophical more than critical) for challenging those texts that look as though dominated by the idea of a definite, final, and authorized meaning. He wants to challenge, more than the sense of a text, that metaphysics of presence both of an interpretation based on the idea of a final meaning. He wants to show the power of language and its ability to say more than it literally pretends to say. |
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Once the text has been deprived of a subjective intention behind it, its readers no longer have the duty, or the possibility, to remain faithful to such an absent intention. It is thus possible to conclude that language is caught in a play of multiple signifying games; that a text cannot incorporate an absolute univocal meaning; that there is no transcendental signified; that the signifier is never co-present with a signified which is continually deferred and delayed; and that every signifier is related to another signifier so that there is nothing outside the significant chain, which goes on ad infinitum. |
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I have used on purpose the expression "ad infinitum" because it reminds us of a similar expression used by Peirce to define the process of unlimited semiosis. Can we say that the infinite drift of deconstruction is a form of unlimited semiosis in Peirce's sense? Such a suspicion can be encouraged by the fact that Rorty (1982), dealing with deconstruction and other forms of so-called textualism, has labeled them instances of "pragmatism": |
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The intuitive realist thinks that there is such a thing as Philosophical Truth because he thinks that, deep down beneath all the texts, there is something which is not just one more text but that to which various texts are trying to be "adequate." The pragmatist does not think that there is anything like that. He does not even think that there is anything isolable as "the purposes which we construct vocabularies and cultures to fulfill" against which to test vocabularies and cultures. But he does think that in the process of playing vocabularies and cultures off against each other, we produce new and better ways of talking and actingno better by reference to a previous known standard, but just better in the sense that they come to seem clearly better than their predecessors. (1982:xxxvii) |
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The pragmatism of which Rorty speaks is not the pragmaticism of Peirce. Rorty knows that Peirce only invented the word pragmatism but |
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