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All the rest, most of the book, resists this reading. If, on the contrary I read the book according to the Christian medieval encyclopedia, it appears textually coherent in each of its parts. |
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Besides, no responsible deconstructionist has ever challenged such a position. J. Hillis Miller (1980:611) says that "the readings of deconstructive criticism are not the willful imposition by a subjectivity of a theory on the texts, but are coerced by the texts themselves." Elsewhere (1970:ix) he writes that "it is not true that . . . all readings are equally valid. Some readings are certainly wrong. . . . To reveal one aspect of a work of an author often means ignoring or shading other aspects. . . . Some approaches reach more deeply into the structure of the text than others." |
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7. The Falsifiability of Misinterpretations |
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We can thus accept a sort of Popper-like principle according to which if there are not rules that help to ascertain which interpretations are the "best ones," there is at least a rule for ascertaining which ones are "bad." This rule says that the internal coherence of a text must be taken as the parameter for its interpretations. But in order to do so, one needs, at least for a short time, a metalanguage which permits the comparison between a given text and its semantic or critical interpretations. Since any new interpretation enriches the text and the text consists in its objective Linear Text Manifestation plus the interpretations it received in the course of history, this metalanguage should also allow the comparison between a new interpretation and the old ones. |
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I understand that from the point of view of a radical deconstruction theory such an assumption can sound unpleasantly neopositivistic, and that every notion of deconstruction and drift challenges the very possibility of a metalanguage. But a metalanguage does not have to be different from (and more powerful than) ordinary language. The idea of interpretation requires that a "piece" of ordinary language be used as the "interpretant" (in the Peircean sense) of another "piece" of ordinary language. When one says that /man/ means "human male adult,'' one is interpreting ordinary language through ordinary language, and the second sign is the interpretant of the first one, as well as the first can become the interpretant of the second. The metalanguage of interpretation is not different from its object language. It is a portion of the same language, and in this sense to interpret is a function that every language performs when it speaks of itself. |
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It is not the case of asking if this can be done. We are doing it, every |
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