M.H. ABRAMS
569
standard, or accepted meanings of a text or passage (called by biblical
exegetes " the literal meaning"). (2) He replaces, or at least supple–
ments, these standard meanings by new meanings. (3) He mediates
between these two systems of signification by setting up a transforma–
tional calculus whi ch serves to convert the old meanings into his new
meanings. We can, I think, discern a parallel procedure in our current
Newreaders. In considering their proposals, I shall as k the following
ques tions. What sort of things does each Newreader undertake to do
with texts? By what transformational devices does he manage to do
these things? And then there is the general question: What is there
about the way language functions that enables a Newreader to accom–
plish the surprising things h e does with texts?
The
Science
of
Nescience:
Jacques Derrida
How is one to make entry into the theory of Jacques Derrida, the
most elusive, equivocal, and studiously noncommittal of philosophi–
cal writers? I shall try to break through with a crashing generalization:
As a philosopher of language, Derrida is an absolutist without abso–
lutes.
Derrida proposes that both the Western use of language and
philosophies of language are " logocentric"; that they are logocentric
because essentially " phonocentric" (that is, giving priority and privi–
lege to speech over writing); and that language is thereby permeated,
expli citly and impli citly, by what, in a phrase from Heidegger, he calls
" the metaphysics of presence." By " presence" -or in alternative terms,
a " transcendental signified" or "ultimate referent" -he designates
what I call an absolute; that is, a foundation outside the play of
language itself which is immediately and simply present to us as
something ultimate, terminal , self-certifying, and thus adequate to
"center" the structure of the linguisti c system and to guarantee the
determinate meaning of an utterance within that system. The positing
of some form of presen ce, it is suggested, is the expression of a desire–
whi ch is the motivating desire of metaphysics-to es tablish a concep–
tual rep lacement for th e certainty about language and meaning pro–
vided by the myth in
Genesis
of language as originated and guaranteed
by a divine, hen ce a bsolute, authority, or else by the theological view
that language is certifi ed by the omnipresence of the Logos. In a
remarkable series of readings of diverse texts, philosophical and
literary, Derrida subtly uncovers th e presupposition that there is an
absolute foundation for language, and displays the internal paradoxes
and self-contradictions that are attendant upon such a presupposition.
