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To defend the rights of interpretation against the mere use of a text does not mean that texts must never be used. We are using texts every day and we need to do so, for many respectable reasons. It is only important to distinguish use from interpretation. A critical reader could also say why certain texts have been used in a certain way, finding in their structure the reasons for their use or misuse. In this sense a sociological analysis of the free uses of texts can support a further interpretation of them. |
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In any case, use and interpretation are abstract theoretical possibilities. Every empirical reading is always an unpredictable mixture of both. It can happen that a play started as use ends by producing a fruitful new interpretationor vice versa. Sometimes to use texts means to free them from previous interpretations, to discover new aspects of them, to realize that before they had been illicitly interpreted, to find out a new and more explicative intentio operis, that too many uncontrolled intentions of the readers (perhaps disguised as a faithful quest for the intention of the author) had polluted and obscured. |
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There is also a pretextual reading, performed not in order to interpret the text but to show how much language can produce unlimited semiosis. Such a pretextual reading has a philosophical function: "Deconstruction does not consist in moving from one concept to another, but in reversing and displacing a conceptual order as well as the non-conceptual order with which it is articulated" (Derrida 1972: Eng. tr., 195). |
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I think that there is a difference between such a philosophical practice and the decision to take it as a model for literary criticism and for a new trend in textual interpretation. In some of these cases texts are used rather than interpreted. But I confess that it is frequently very hard to distinguish between use and interpretation. Some of the chapters of this book deal with such a problem, trying to check with concrete examples whether there are, and to what extent, limits of interpretation. |
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1. In the framework of analytic philosophy, the first and still fundamental appeal for an encyclopedia-oriented approach came from Quine 1951 ("Two Dogmas of Empiricism"). |
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