The title of this paper may suggest that its author makes assumptions concerning the existence of meanings as relatively stable empirical entities. Such an impression is in need of speedy correction. 'Meaning' here is merely a shorthand expression for 'processes of meaning making.' This shift from item to process has been a characteristic of the history of phenomenology from its early Husserlian noematic and mathematical bias towards an emphasis on noetic modifications.1 Though the latter are already present in Hussesrl's Ideas they were not permitted to play the role in his texts which, as Derrida points out in Speech and Phenomenon, they should have. Conversely, one could say about Derrida's work so far, that it has 'merely' replaced Husserl's noematic presence by his own noetic, or rhetorical, variety.2
What is indisputably the case, though, is that Derrida's arguments have become standard tools in the debate about the relative stability or instability of signification. There seem to be three major parties in this debate. The formal semanticians and their less rigorous followers who believe in the sanctity of literal meanings, those who reject signifieds and replace them by a forever unauthorized chain of signifiers, and the literary critic hostile to theorizing who confronts deconstruction with the question: 'So what's new? Haven't we known all along that literary texts have multiple meanings?'
Depending on which ideological position we hold in the institution of literature the 'know' of this question can be rewritten in many ways. As 'dread,' 'fear' or at least 'deny' at one end of the scale and as 'hope' or 'believe' on its opposite side. But the problematic of polysemy and multiple meaning is far from resolved, if 'resolution' is at all the way to approach the matter. The axiom of the plurality of meaning is the interpretation of literary texts, says Louis Marin at the beginning of 'On the Interpretation of Ordinary Language: a Parable of Pascal,' signifies that:
meaning is plural, that the possible, the latent, and the divergent enter into its very definition — not just into its speculative defi-
77 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
nition, but also into its concrete production, be it that of the writer or that of the reader, of the emitter or the receiver of the message at different moments of history and at different places in the world and in culture. A truly fundamental theory of interpretation must therefore find its impetus in the elaboration of a logic of the possible and the plural, a logic of diversity and divergence in which meaning is assignable not to a closed system of univocal signs, but in which it is produced and indicates its processes of production by the displacement of signi-fiers.3
But where would the diversity and divergence reside? How would these alternative meanings enter the standard 'definitions?' Or are they already there as a potential, waiting for a future act of Heideggerian unconcealment to come to the fore? But it is then a logic in the analytic sense which is already always locked into and the result of a process towards formal emptiness, if not vacuity?
Polysemy and plurality of meaning do not in themselves direct us towards a description of meaning charged with the states of affairs of the social life-world unless they also distance themselves from definitions of meaning which are identical with formal sense and exclude the possibility of the bending of propositional content by way of enunciation. For there is a radical difference between a theory of polysemy which merely acknowledges conceptual variants within the 'same' sign and one which sees concepts as more or less loose guidelines to be 'filled' differently by speech communities in concrete social situations.
Such a concrete situation would be, e.g., reading a poem in 1986 here in Australia, which was written by an Australian poet between 1934 and 1942. A brief excerpt will suffice to gesture towards the issues I am looking at in this paper.
He has them all, all the menagerie
Of race, the subtle stimulus of shapes:
Negresses in their first nubility
With the sad eyes and muzzles of young apes,
Vast Scandinavian divinities Superbly modelled, for all their cowlike air, The pale bread of their bellies magnificent rise From the blond triangle of pubic hair,
78 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
And slender girls with delicate golden shanks And elongated skulls from lost Peru ... The sensual emphasis of the Spaniard's flanks, And the callipygous haunches of the jew ... (from 'The Damnation of Byron')4
Of course we are dealing with Byron's sin, or perhaps the poetic speaker's, and not the poet's. But throughout A.D. Hope's work we confront the vulvar vision: 'ladylegs gape darkly as a cave, love-trap, pelvic gate, fronded arch, skirt round her waist, pants round her feet, glowing thighs,' or 'the white meat of women, prime and sleek;' as one of the poems has it, 'the classic painters butcher's shop.5
Yet different futures constitute different meanings. To one kind of reader the substitution of revamped, premodernist European stanzas, the misogynic and necrophylic for Australian poetic forms and concerns is a set of dubious if not offensive meanings. To the other A.D. Hope's is a 'monumentable' rather than lamentable achievement.
But it is not possible to say exactly where the two sets of meanings part company and where precisely the evaluative ingredient enters. For the systems of relevancies within which a speech community constitutes its meanings are tied to these meanings from the very start. This is why E.D. Hirsch's argument for the separation of meaning and significance holds superficially only. Nor is the distinction very useful which is popularly drawn between denotations and connotations — as against their philosophical counterparts. For where does the former cease and the latter begin? Would the 'literal' meaning of 'a haunch is a haunch is a haunch' without its aesthetic of the racial and sexual have fascinated Hope's Byron, the poetic speaker or Hope himself? And could one not conceive of a large enough and critical dictionary which listed such relevant meanings? Certainly, the curtailment of meaning at a certain 'neutral' point can be accomplished by authoritarian fiat only.
So the question still stands: how does significance enter into or partake of meaning? Can one demonstrate its workings by spreading the whole of language and writing between Derrida's two poles: the pictographic, where writing is still charged with the whole world, and the formal where the world has been removed, where the signifier is wholly effaced? Perhaps.
But first a detour. For it is useful to see how the limination of full meaning in favour of analyticity has developed during this century.
79 Aust. J.Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
And since the following will be anything but a neutral summary of the theory of meaning from Frege to Derrida, I might as well confess my bias at the start: I suggest that from the perspective of ordinary language and in particular from that of the constitution of literary texts the definitions of meaning since Frege have violated three principles. (l) They confuse two distinct kinds of sense, strictly formal sense which is ruled by definitions proper and 'ordinary sense' (for lack of a better term) which is more or less loosely governed by a chain of signifiers of unspecified length; (2) notwithstanding the distinctions between pure and descriptive semantics (Carnap), a theory of meaning and a theory of reference (Quine) or between semantics and pragmatics, they equate analytic or formal sense with meaning in general; and (3) they eliminate enunciation in its full social force from propositional content.
The main reason why language philosophy has taken the route it has is I suspect this. Once the possibility of full-scale formalization was noticed the description of everyday language was almost naturally positioned in the vicinity of mathematics. It is no accident that three powerful early theories of meaning, Frege's, Husserl's and Russell's were established by mathematicians. And in a number of the debates about meaning the 'weaker' examples from everyday speech had to be substituted by mathematical formulations when the going got rough. What the majority of the language philosophers failed to acknowledge is that their formal systems about language were the results of the very tools which they had derived from natural language through processes of reduction. It should not be surprising therefore that some of these theories look so formally elegant without being able to cope with much of what goes on in the discourse of the social life-world. My contention is that the description of natural and especially 'literary' language from the basis of univocal sense is a dubious undertaking. Had Frege and his successors to the present day paid any serious attention to the ludic variant of natural language, literary discourse, they could have avoided a number of errors and retained the excitement among philosophy and literature students which they have clearly lost.7
When Frege's 'Ueber Sinn and Bedeutung' was translated into English as 'Sense and Reference' a more radical separation of sense from referential meaning was achieved than Frege himself probably had in mind. For Frege saw the need for degrees of meaning construction rather than two clear-cut alternatives. 'One could be satisfied with the sense,' he says, 'if one wanted to go no further than the thought' and, in the same paper, 'the idea is wholly subjective; in between lies the sense which is indeed no longer subjective like the idea, but is
80 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
not yet the object itself.8 This is why Michael Dummett suggests, wrongly in my view, that Frege's notion of sense was not fully cleansed of the subjectivist explanation of meaning.9
Perhaps the most famous of Frege's strategies to explain the difference between Sinn and Bedeutung (referential meaning; note also that the German Bedeutung has to do with deuten or pointing) is his example of the morning and evening star. The trivially true statement 'the morning star is the morning star' hides the distinction, whereas the assertion 'the morning star is the evening star' demonstrates that sense-meaning and denotation are not identical.10
Bertrand Russell disputed this position in his ostensive theory of meaning by collapsing Frege's Sinn and Bedeutung into 'denotation.'11 A proposition, according to Russell, has a meaning when it denotes something. From this perspective it is a logical move for Russell to treat propositions very much like names which mean by describing a denoted entity. This theory was attacked by Russell's colleagues, as for instance Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Let us first discuss this point of the argument: that a word has no meaning if nothing corresponds to it. It is important to note that the word 'meaning' is being used illicitly if it is used to signify the thing that 'corresponds' to the word. That is to confound the meaning of a name with the bearer of the name. When Mr N N dies one says that the bearer of the name dies, not that the meaning dies. And it would be nonsensical to say that, for if the name ceased to have meaning it would make no sense to say 'Mr N N is dead.'12
But I think Wittgenstein's argument is far less convincing than generations of philosophy students have been led to believe. It is simply incorrect to assert that the death of the bearer of a name does not affect its meaning. In fact the event of a person's death becomes part of the name. For when we speak of John Donne, part of the 'definition' of the name 'includes' a reference to his death: there is no living John Donne who writes metaphysical verse. It is therefore not strictly possible to separate the meaning of a name from its bearer: they are part of one and the same text. There is no clear distinction between name and its bearer; rather, it is the length of this text by which we 'know' John Donne which differs from usage to usage.
Because Russell tied meaning to denotation he did not believe that the meanings of natural languages could ever be fully defined.
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The meaning of a word is not absolutely definite: there is always a greater or less degree of vagueness. The meaning is an area, like a target: it may have a bull's eye, but the outlying parts of the target are still more or less within the meaning, in a gradually diminishing degree as we travel further from the bull's eye.13
But at the same time Russell insisted that one could and should rewrite 'ordinary' language in such a way that some of its more bothersome deictic features, called 'egocentric particulars,' are eliminated:
One of the aims of both science and common sense is to replace the shifting subjectivity of egocentric particulars by neutral public terms. 'I' is replaced by my name, 'here' by latitude and longitude, and 'now' by date.
Russell here contradicts his more liberal statements about word meanings and, more importantly, overlooks that in the discourse of the social life-world and more obviously in its ludic variant, literary speech, it is not only discourse markers but every single linguistic item including prepositions and other function words which carry the modal shadow of their utterance situation. Any theory that fails to address this ingredient of language cannot hope to get close to describing its fundamental opacities.
In 1950 P.F. Strawson resumed Frege's and Russell's discussions by distinguishing between a sentence and an expression, their use, and their utterance. Strawson's solution to Frege's separation of Sinn and Bedeutung and Russell's merger of the two concepts in a denotation is to draw a strict distinction between a sense meaning and acts which we perform with expressions and sentences. Such acts are, for example, to draw a reference or referring, mentioning, or ascribing. 15 Contrary to what Strawson has to say about the language of fiction, this tripartition into an expression, its use and its utterance can be readily translated into what we do when we perform literary discourse; the iteration of a text requires the notion of a sentence and expression as a kind of object, its use suggests our intersubjective participation in discourse formations and in particular generic rules, while Strawson's utterance could account for the intersubjective-subjective speech event and our imposition of a specific prosodic contour. Further, Strawson's 'rules of referring' as distinct from 'rules of ascribing' allow us to distinguish between nominal identifications of the kind of' Call me Ishmael,' or 'Corde, who led the life of an executive' as quasi-referential acts, with the rest of the text providing information which we realize as ascriptive performance.
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Perhaps the most attractive of Strawson's concepts for the description of everyday and literary discourse is what he says about 'context.' By context he means 'at least, the time, the place, the situation, the identity of the speaker, the subjects which form the immediate focus of interest, and the personal histories of both speaker and those he is addressing.16 With this view Strawson was well ahead of the theories of his time and it is a pity, from the perspective of a description of socio-culturally saturated language, that he did not pursue this direction further. For if he had, he could not have remained content with the view that fictional uses of language are to be regarded as 'spurious.' Nor could he have defended a weakened verification thesis according to which 'to give the meaning of a sentence is to give general directions for its use in making true or false assertions.'17 Serious considerations of the acts which we habitually perform when we constitute, i.e. read, literary texts would have been in conflict with the mechanism of truth versus falsity.
It is perhaps not surprising that the least useful definitions of meaning have been produced by theories of verification. As a result of their insistence on the flip-flop opposition of 'either/or' there cannot be 'a gradual transition between meaning and nonsense,' for 'tertium non datur.18 Indeed, the reduction of language to these two categories declares illegitimate any question concerning the modal complexities of workaday speech or their ludic exploitation in the literary text.
But the propositional bias is present also in the analogy of language with chess. In its loose form it is certainly useful, pointing out as it does the fact that natural languages are governed by rules and that thev allow themselves to be transformed into elaborate grammars. Saussure,19 Wittgenstein,20 and Ryle 21 have used it in this sense. However, the general validity of the chess analogy is qualified in a number of ways. Chess is purely propositional; it requires no acts of referring or ascribing; it is a closed system; the moves of chess are all fully quantifiable and ruled by definitions proper; the 'definitions' of the chess moves permit us to play chess in the same way again and again and they are fully sharable. Ordinary language, by contrast, is hermeneutic, i.e. it relies on negotiation, on question and answer, and its dynamic does not entirely yield to formalization. On the other hand, in its full social performance, socio-culturally saturated language holds, as Habermas has argued, a fundamental emancipatory potential.
Even speech act theory, which made a seminal start by adding illocution and perlocution to locution and so promised to break the narrow frame of propositional content, never quite escaped its gra-
82 Aust, J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
vitational pull. Austin did not permit illocution to become part of meaning itself; it remained a force outside the act of meaning constitution. And in the more mechanical version of John R. Searle, speech act theory turned altogether away from the so-called 'parasitic' forms of speech to the detriment of theory coming to grips with what actually goes on all the time in ordinary discourse, as Derrida suggests in Limited Inc abc.22
The gradual weakening of the supremacy of positivist language philosophy coincides with (or is partly brought about by) a pressure of the concerns of the social life-world to be reincorporated into the definition of meaning. Russell's attempt to eliminate enunciation stands in opposition to John L. Austin's introduction of illocutionary force, though the latter took pains not to subjectivize that strategy. The reduction of meaning to pure verifiable or falsifiable sense in the theories of Moritz Schlick is denied by the late Wittgenstein and his quasi-semiotic position on language use on the one hand, and on the other, by the introduction of utterance frames in the work of Straw-son and Grice.
But no language theorist of this tradition has questioned conceptuality and analyticity themselves as radically as does Derrida. Consider his suggestion that 'the effacement of the signifier led by degrees to the alphabet.'
It is therefore the history of knowledge — of philosophy — which, tending to multiply books, pushes toward formalization, abbreviation, algebra. By the same movement, separating itself from the origin, the signifier is hollowed and desacralized, 'demotized,' and universalized. The history of writing, like the history of science, would circulate between the two epochs of universal writing, between two simplicities, between two forms of transparence and univocity: an absolute pictography doubling the totality of the natural entity in an unrestrained consumption of signifiers, and an absolute formal graphie reducing the signifying expense to almost nothing. There would be no history of writing and of knowledge — one might simply say no history at all — except between these two poles. And if history is not thinkable except between these two limits, one cannot disqualify the mythologies of universal script — pictographv or algebra — without suspecting the concept of history itself.23
Analyticity is at once the final goal of philosophy and the total 'depoetization' of language. 'Philosophy speaks prose, less in excluding the poet from the city than in writing.'24 And in so effacing the signifier philosophy aims to capture ultimate presence.
84 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
Against the background of the polarity of the pictograph and analyticity metaphor and geometry occupy opposing positions. Gearing into Rousseau's explanation of metaphor Derrida makes this observation:
Before it allows itself to be caught by verbal signs, metaphor is the relation between signifier and signified within the order of ideas and things, according to what links the idea with that of which it is the idea, that is to say, of which it is already the representative sign. Then, the literal or proper meaning will be the relationship of the idea to the affect that it expresses.25
But this relationship between idea and affect does not exist outside language. Language always/already mediates what we tend to assume to be an immediate presence. So that
All language will substitute itself for that living self-presence of the proper, which, as language, already supplanted things in themselves. Language adds itself to presence and supplants it, defers it within the indestructible desire to re-join it.26
But it is in analyticity and the space of geometry that writing has become fully economical. 'The space of geometric objectivity is an object or an ideal signified produced at the moment of writing. Before it, there is no homogoeneous space, submitted to one and the same type of technique and economy. Before it, space orders itself wholly for the habitation and inscription in itself of the body "proper".'27
If analyticity as the complete effacement of the signifier cannot restore the presence of being 'signified in its brilliance and glory'28 it has already achieved (and will go on extending its control) the suspension under special conditions, of the need to defer and so temporalize its signs. For the propositional contents of its operations with or without formal modal qualifiers behave synchronically, i e. as if spatial difference was sufficient and the diachrony of their frames (Carnap's theory of meaning, Euclidean geometry) did not affect their sense-determining operations.
In non-formal languages things are different. Here, Derrida's insistence on difference in its spatial and temporal senses, on the temporalization of the sign29 is at the heart of his discussion of signification; it is the master wrench in his demolition job on presence, summed up in the concluding metaphor of Speech and Phenomenon. 'Rising towards the sun of presence, it is the way of Icarus.30 His is not the way of Icarus, Derrida is more akin to Dedalus whose son never arrives — disseminated into the sea.
85 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
Yet the strategy of diachronizing synchronic concepts is not new. Leaving the Greeks aside, it is Hegel's Aufhebung in its three senses (cancellation, preservation, elevation) which temporalizes Aristotelian logic. Without this temporal dimension Hegel could not explain the dynamics of History as partly alienated Geist nor put forward the idea of History's ascent towards its dissolution in the ultimate 'mental. 'Even if Hegel's chain of Aufhebungen towards Geist are the most uncompromising expression of a transcendental signified, his temporalization of the synchronic structures of analyticity still stands as a critical principle.
But there are two other theorists of meaning who have contributed to the notion of deferment of meaning: Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey. In 'What Prasgmatism Is' (1905) Peirce suggests that propositions are re-performed in the future as second-order propositions or logical interpretants:
427. The rational meaning of every propositiion lies in the future. How so? The meaning of a proposition is itself a proposition. Indeed, it is no other than the very proposition of which it is the meaning: it is a translation of it. But of the myriads of forms into which a proposition may be translated, what is that one which is to be called its very meaning? It is, according to the pragmaticist, that form in which the proposition becomes applicable to human conduct, not in these or those special circumstances, nor when one entertains this or that special design, but that form which is more directly applicable to self-control under every situation, and to every purpose.. This is why he locates the meaning in future time.31
Peirce sets up a chain of propositions into the future, so that whenever a reader/speaker performs a text, the original acts as a not entirely sufficient guiding system to be fulfilled by the logical interpretants chosen for the occasion: this process constitutes meaning. What seems to me to be missing is the possibility of interpretants other than strictly logical ones to impinge on and so alter the future meanings of the statements of everyday speech and the literary text.
In Experience and Nature (1925) John Dewey speaks of meaning as a 'shared consequence.' In the process of meaning making 'we attribute meaning to the speaker as his intent,' and when we do so we take for granted another person who is to share in the execution of the intent, and also something, independent of the persons concerned, through which the intent is to be realized:' he concludes that 'persons and things must alike serve as means in a common shared consequence.' This ongoing 'community of partaking' Dewey calls meaning.32
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But Dewey's idea of the temporalization of meaning remains problematic because of the absence of any explanation of 'sharing' in 'share in the execution of the intent and 'a common shared consequence.' What is needed here — as well as in other theories of meaning — is the distinction between numerical (or quantifiable) identity and qualitative identity. While it seems that any signifier in analyticity can be handled by the first kind of identification, the second kind is required for a large number of operations of everyday discourse and is essential for the constitution by the reader of the literary text. Such forms of predication are collapsed into a never ending chain of significations by Derrida.
Derrida's critique is probably the most secularly probing analysis of the various onto-theologies underpinning philosophical and humanistic constructions. And if we accept his demythologization of the opposition of signifier/signified and its subsummation under the notion of sign, we are bound to reject likewise the hierarchies which are a consequence of Lacan's and Jameson's/Althusser's triads.
For there is no necessitv for either Lacan to stipulate a 'Real' over and above the Imaginary and Symbolic33 nor Frederic Jameson, following Althusser, to insist on an invisible Historv, 'the absent, necessary cause' of all textualization.34 What is it, we should ask, that urges Lacan to look for a transcendental Real when all he needs for his explanation of the transition from primary narcissism and the pre-mirror stage to the social symbolic order is just that textual order within which we operate and from which we can stipulate a precursor stage? If the order accessible to us is textual/symbolic, then the stipulation of an outside is precisely one of the products of this text: a theo-ontology.
Likewise, but more seriously because it is post-Derridaen, Jameson's desire for something beyond the texts which society produces is a near Hegelian fiction of an absent prime mover, inaccessible to us except in textual form. The 'Real' reveals itself as 'narrativization in the political unconscious.' What is projected here is a transcendental 'Necessity' which informs 'why what happened had to happen the way it did.35 But what kind of argument is this which links the chain of signification causally to a determining agent? In this Jameson predates the early Husserl whose double noematic presence of evidence and self-evidence, 'autoaffection' in Derrida's term, makes the more modest claim of the certitude not of some 'Real' but of acts of consciousness.
But if Derrida rids his own writing of the certitudes of absent causes and the noemata of consciousness, does he not (and is he not
87 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
bound to) retain the noetic presence of his own sprawling and self-consciously sign-sponging rhetoric?36 And if so, how does this affect the initial question as to where and how the plurality of meaning attaches to the sign? Part of an answer is Derrida's practice of generating texts which belie his critique of auto-affection: Derrida's signi-fiers about Spinoza, Nietzsche, Heidegger or Hegel give themselves to him in such a wav that thev allow him to transform them into a new foundation of discursivity.37
But the location of meaning in an ever-expanding text still leaves the question unanswered whether such signification is a strictly conceptual structure or requires some form of qualitative specification (e.g. acts of concretization). We do know that Derrida has not rejected 'meaning intention,' vouloir dier, but merely of its claim to origi-nary legitimation.38 And yet I believe that he has taken a number of steps which make it difficult for him to write his case against the totalitarian demands of analyticity on the one hand and still allow for any orientation in the relativities of our historical co-ordinates on the other.
1. Derrida does not have to equate signifieds with presence to argue against metaphysical convictions. The more careful step from a stable or reliable signified to an unstable, unreliable and momentary one is sufficient to make his point against the early Husserl and the whole of Western metaphysics and still leave meaning-
constituting operations intact. A chain of signifiers without even fleeting signifieds denies the possibility of alternative textual decisions and their consequences.
2. Derrida's foregrounding of writing as against speech, of articulation and the privileging of consonants over vowels, the chain of signifiers over the event of the signified, the system over instantiation constitute a double contradiction in his work.
(a) It weakens his assault on logocentricity, for it is in the instantiation of speech that analyticity can be distinguished from non-formal signification. The ironic speech act does not affect the propositional contents of algebra. On the other hand, it is through intonation, prosodic contour, the modals of utterance that the uncharted potential of the expressions of ordinary discourse are activated. It is precisely the imposition of the historical modals of current theoretical interests which produce meanings so obviously opposed to earlier readings.
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(b) The fact that Derrida plays down instantiation makes it difficult for him to come to terms with the description of a text as not merely a text but also as an historical event. Without some notion of 'eventilization' (Foucault) even a tentative orientation within the relativities of the text of historical coordinates is denied us. Derrida's is a nice philocophical game, but social actors do not behave like this. Perhaps Derrida is right, and if he is, the concept of History itself even in its most relativistic forms is a metaphysical illusion. Nevertheless, Foucault's change of tack from the high abstraction of the Archaeology of Knowledge to a level of greater specificity in his
more recent work is probably born of a similar discomfort with radical textualization.
In conclusion I return to my initial question: how then does the plurality of meaning partake of or enter into signification?
Not through the trace itself, the hymen, supplement, pharmakon themselves, but through instantiations of speech events which revive or repress a trace, shift, tilt, privilege or deny possible interpretations.
Iterability or inscribability are nothing without an utterance event. Inscribability stands to the event of inscription as langue does to parole. And without the latter there would be no need to stipulate the former.
After all, isn't Derrida a rhetorical event before 'it' is a system of writing?
Horst Ruthrof teaches at Murdoch University
Notes
1. For the early Husserl see (1969) Ideas. General Introduction to Phe
nomenology (London: George Allen and Unwin; for the later posi
tion cf. (1984) Erfahrung und Urteil, Hamburg: Classen.
2. (1973) Speech and Phenomena, Evanston: Northwestern University
Press.
3. 'On the Interpretation of Ordinary Language: a Parable of
Pascal' in (1979) Textual Strategies, ed. by J.V. Harari, London:
Methuen, pp.239-259; 239.
89 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
4. The Damnation of Byron,' in Collected Poems 1930-1970,
Sydney: Angus and Robertson, p.4.
5. The 'vulvar' Hope is a very different construction from that of
the respectable Hope e.g. in the recent Oxford Anthology.
6. Cf. (1971) Validity in Interpretation, New Haven: Yale University
Press, esp. pp.61ff. and (1976) The Aims of Interpretation, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
7. This argument is pursued at some length in Pandora vs/and
Occam: A n Essay in Language and Literature (in preparation).
8. Frege, Gottlob, (1966) 'On Sense and Reference,' in Translations
from the Philosophical Works of Gottlob Frege, ed. by Peter Geach
and Max Black, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp.62, 60.
9. Dummett, Michael (1981) The Interpretation of Frege's Philosophy,
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, pp.l08f.
10. 'On Sense and Reference,' p.56ff.
11. Russell, Bertrand (1973) 'On Denoting,' Mind (1905); quoted
here from Essays in Analysis, ed. by Douglas Lackey, New York:
George Braziller, pp.103-119.
12. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, (1953) Philosophical Investigations, New
York: MacMillan, Part I, 40.
13. Russell, Bertrand, (1921) The Analysis of Mind, New York: Mac
Millan, pp.l97f.
14. Russell, Bertrand, (1948) Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits,
New York: Simon and Schuster, p.85.
15. Strawson, P.F., (1950) 'On Referring,' Mind, 59, 326.
16. Ibid., 336.
17. Strawson, P.F., 'Intention and Convention in Speech Acts,'
11964) The Philosophical Review, 73 (1964), 327.
18. Schlick, Moritz, (1936) 'Meaning and Verification,' The Philo
sophical Review, 45, 339-368; 352.
90 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
19. de Saussure, Ferdinand, (1974) Course in General Linguistics,
trans, by Wade Baskin, London: Fontana, pp.61, 102f.
20. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, Part I, 31.
21. The Theory of Meaning,' in (1957) British Philosophy in the Mid-
Century, ed. by C.A. Mace, London: George Allen and Unwin,
pp.239-264;256.
22. (1977) Glyph, 2, pp.162-245.
23. Derrida, Jacques, (1978) Of Gramma to logy, trans, by Gayatri Cha-
kravorty Spivak, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
p.285.
24. Ibid., p.287.
25. Ibid., p.275.
26. Ibid., p.280.
27.Ibid., p.288.
28. Ibid.,p.286.
29. 'Diffarence,' in (1974) Speech and Phenomena, Evanston: North
western University Press, pp.129-160.
30. Speech and Phenomena, p. 104.
31. Peirce, Charles, Sanders, (1974) 'What Pragmatism Is,' in Collect-
ed Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vol. 5, ed. by Charles Hartsh-
orne and Paul Weiss, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, pp.272-292; 284.
32. Dewey, John, (1958), Experience and Nature, New York: Dover
Publications, p.185.
33. Lacan, Jacques, (1978) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoa
nalysis, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, New York: W.W. Norton,
pp.6; 89; also translator's note, pp.279f; see also (1966) Ecrits,
Paris: Editions du Seuil, pp.11, 25, 69, 463f.
34. Jameson, Frederic, (1982) The Political Unconscious, Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, p.35.
91 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
35. Ibid., p.101.
36. Derrida, Jacques, (1982) Jacques Derrida, 'Signsponge V and
'Signsponge 2,' Oxford Literary Review, 5, 97-112.
37. Cf. Michel Foucault's, notion of 'founders of discursivity' in
'What is an Author?' in Textual Strategies, pp. 141-160; 154.
38. Derrida, Jacques, (1977) 'Limited Inc abc,' Glyph, p.249.
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