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intertextuality whereby a subject-vortex engages with an object-abyss
in infinite regressions of deferred significations.
At the end of his essay "Structure, Sign and Play," Derrida hazards
his most sustained endeavor in the vain attempt to put names to "the as
yet unnameable which cannot announce itself except ... under the
formless form, mute, infant, and terrifying, of monstrosity." The
annunciation is of "a world of signs without error, without truth,
without origin, which is offered to an active interpretation," in which
one "plays without security" in a game of "absolute chance, surrender–
ing oneself to
genetic
indeterminancy, the
seminal
chanciness of the
trace. " Derrida suggests that we at least try
to
overcome our age-old
nostalgia for security, with its hopeless dream of an absolute ground in
" full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and end of the
play," and to assume instead toward this prophecy of deconstruction
triumphant the nonchalance of the
Ubermensch,
"the Nietzschean
affirmation,
the joyous affirmation of the freeplay of the world."
If
one
cannot share the joy, one can at leas t acknowledge the vertigo effected
by Derrida's vision, yet take some reassurance in the thought that, even
in a sign-world of absolute indeterminacy, it will presumably still be
possible
to
achieve the "effect" of telling a hawk from a handsaw, or
the "effect," should the need arise, of identifying and warning a
companion against an onrushing autobus.
Reading Between the Words: Stanley Fish
Of the deconstructive " interpretation of interpretation" Derrida
remarks that it "attempts to pass beyond man and humanism." Stanley
Fish represents his theory of reading as a ringing defense against "the
dehumanization of meaning" in the "formalism" of current linguistics
and stylistics, as well as in structuralist criticism, which raises " the
implied antihumanism of other formalist ideologies to a principle."
Such theory " is distinguished by what it does away with, and what it
does away with are human beings." Fish himself undertakes
to
explain
meaning by referen ce
to
" the specifically human activity of reading,"
proposing as his humanistic " point of departure the interpretive
activity (experience) by virtue of which meanings occur." His model
for interpretation is that of a reader who confronts the marks on a page
and generates meanings by his informed responses to it. In the
traditional humanisti c view, it will be recalled, there is an author who
records what he undertakes to signify, as well as a reader who under–
takes to understand what the author has signified. In terms of this
paradigm, Fish's rehumanization of reading is only a half-humanism,
