566
PARTISAN REVIEW
structuralism, Freudianism , etc.) that claim to subsume all others;
but it can be unfixed if we recognize that that imposition is a power
play, and that the attempt to translate all codes into a master-vocab–
ulary inevitably leaves an excess or surplus that resists translation.
H ence the naivete with which deconstructionists charge those who
think tha t what a text means can be an object of disinteres ted
debate. On the contrary, a tex t is a battleground on which contend–
ing interpretive systems ("textual strategies") struggle for power.
The most withe ring scorn of tex tual leftists (and of nonpoliti cal cele–
brants of the will to power like Harold Bloom) is rese rved for those
who still maintain that disinterested argument is a t least in principle
possible in critical controversy. Such a claim is equivalent to a
Pentagon general's claiming that weapons research is disinteres ted
knowledge .
One thing that can be said for this he rmeneuti cs o f power, as we
might call it , is that up to a po int it accurately describes a state of
fact , namely, the clash of inte rpretive sys tems tha t marks not onl y
the human ist ic disciplines but the global confli ct o f ideologies as
well. In thi s clash , each interpre tive sys tem seeks to assimilate its
compet itors while resisting bein g subsumed by them. Secondly, the
hermeneutics of power has gene ra ted inquiries into the soc ial deter–
minants and consequences of our interp re ti ve practi ces, which prob–
ably would not have been begun without its stimulus. Seeing a text
not as a sta ti c object but as a battlefield on whi ch confli cting systems
fi ght for primacy opens new contex ts a nd relation s whi ch conven–
tional scholarshi p has barely touched . One needn 't be a deconstruc–
tionist to be aware that the meanin g o f a ny tex t is not absolute but
depends on the kinds of ques ti ons we decide to put to it , a nd that the
kind s of questions we decide to put to it a re limited , if not st ri ctly
determined , by cultural predi sposition s. Anybody rev iew in g the his–
tory of interpre ta ti on of canoni cal authors a nd tex ts, whether in the
biblical o r the literary tradition, find s more than suffi cient multipli–
city of interpre tations to make him doubt the identity o f those texts.
If
we compa re the
Hamlet
of Dr. Johnson with those of Cole ridge,
Wilson Kni ght , Jan K ott , andJacques Lacan , we a re led to wonder
whe the r any common
Hamlet
can be said to li e "behind" such vastly
different readings . It seems we mu st settle for a plurality of
Hamlets,
each written a nd rewritten acco rdin g to the interpre tive predisposi–
ti ons of the epochs that produ ced them. It' s tempting, then , to view
our current inte rpretati ons of
Hamlet
(themselves remark ably hetero-
