Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy (review)

Richard A. Cohen

Philosophy and Literature, Volume 6, Numbers 1 and 2, Fall 1982, pp. 223-224
(Review)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/phl.1982.0013

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/418877/summary

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The general thrust of this work can be seen to formulate an important appraisal of the
research programs dominating these approaches. Like Gadamer's critic, Emilio Betti, or
Derrida's critics, Paul Ricoeur or John Searle, Seung claims that "the overriding impor-
tance of reference and its presumed objectivity" (p. 236) has been lost. Hermeneutics lost
sight of justification and objectivity through a subjectification and contextualization of
interpretative acts, while structuralism and methodologies emphasizing the formal con-
straints on interpretation jettisoned any presumption of reference. The reduction of sub-
jective effects makes all interpretations blind, entrapped within the formal grids of which
they are the functions. The reduction of all statements to interpretative, historical con-
texts, dissolves all claim to truth, including its own. While the paths were quite different,
the results were the same: relativism, blind contextualism, irrationalism.
Seung believes that a return to something like Husserl's notion of intentionality can
provide the foundations for an adequate account of interpretative practices . Such a posi-
tion recognizes that all thoughts, all interpretative acts are referential (either to real or
irreal objects) and that such references have logical-objective import that is not reducible
to historical or personal-psychological contexts. The only question that remains outstand-
ing for such a recognition is whether a return to the Platonism of late-nineteenth century
writers such as Frege or Husserl, whose notions of objectivity and rationality were con-
structed around attempts to avoid the Charybdis of relativism, thus avoiding the pitfalls of
historicism and psychologism, can effectively remain the final models for our practices.
Seung does state that a poststructuralist writer like Derrida, for instance, who combines
elements of both of these traditions, presents a-"reaction" that is in some sense "necessary"
and even "a healthy antidote to naive scientific optimism" (p. xii), though he still finds
Derrida's results logically untenable. Yet it may still need to be asked whedier, like their
analytic counterparts (e.g., Wittgenstein or Kuhn), thinkers such as Heidegger,
Gadamer, or Derrida have come upon problems which, despite the often cloudy character
of their discussion, must force a radical revision of the classical Cartesian view of inten-
tionality or the objectivity of Platonic notions of "truths-in-themselves." Without revision,
such notions may provide the Scylla for an overly Fregean or Husserlian response to the
excesses and deficiencies of structuralism and hermeneutics.

Colgate UniversityStephen H. Watson

Saving the Text: Literature/'Derrida/'Philosophy, by Geoffrey H.

Hartman; xxvi & 184 pp. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1981, $12.95.

Saving the Text by Geoffrey Hartman is primarily "about" Glas by Jacques Derrida. Glas
is primarily "about" Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and the novels of Jean Genet. I am
using the term "about" guardedly because both books are about the writing of texts as
much as anything else. I do not mean they are about the relation of author to book; rather
they are about books as texts, as textuality, as internally structured labyrinths of signs.
We are adrift on the seas of contemporary French literary criticism, which is brilliant to
224Philosophy and Literature

be sure, but with the brilliance of the sun's glittering reflection shimmering on waves,
blinding the eyes.
Derrida does not permit the solace of received meanings; he does not permit the secu-
rity of truth; he does not even permit the comfort of a book. Stability is a false
friend — "Equivocation is illimitable." Now it is true, I think, that outside the relatively
limited set of phrases that get us through everyday social life, the communication of more
personal and less ordinary meanings can be a daunting task. It is often difficult to grasp
people's meanings, whether speaking with or reading them. Notwithstanding, one is
rarely in the solitary position of the protagonist of Ionesco's Rhinoceros; we make do.
Hermeneutics is the serious, academic response to this same difficulty. Deconstruction,
on the other hand, Derrida's "method," insists that meaning must be freed from any firm
relation to the signified. Reading must now play as hard as the swift play of meaning,
spinning in the whirlwind of plural absences, marching to the drumbeat of Nietzsche's
"mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms." Anything less self-
conscious would be naive. Derrida must even surpass journalism in the fleetingness of
relevance — hence the pages of Glas are each divided into two printed columns, hence it
lacks a beginning or an end, hence the modernist sensationalism of its puns and jokes.
Of course, what has happened, as happens often enough in the history of philosophy, is
a partial truth — interpretive multiplicity — has been blown into a radical doctrine. Enter
Hartman. Without aggressive disagreement or parricidal deconstruction, Hartman
thoughtfully, elegantly and — appropriately — playfully, bares the underpinnings of Der-
rida's enterprise. By means of illuminating analyses he tames some of Glas' excesses,
making sense without sacrificing his own enthusiasm. In addition to his nuanced explana-
tions, he also artfully joins Derrida to that host of figures the sum of whose creative
labyrinths constitutes our cultural heritage. Were I to fault Hartman for anything it
would be when he overindulges in the game from which he in fact takes distance. One
senses a second order intellectual decadence in the following: "If, then, the page fractures
itself with blank spaces and inserts, it is because God created the world not by the logos
but by a slip of the tongue. There is no single, unifying logos: there is, at most, divine
parapraxis imitated alike by medieval jongleur and modern grammatologist" (p. 7) — a
Gemara on a Mishnah, sans Torah.
Hartman's book, however, is far from letting it all hang out. It is meticulously crafted.
It is careful, cautious and cultured. The dropped stitches among its pearls are of the kind
designed to titillate the sensibilities of the very literati Derrida is doing in. The final
chapter is critical and deserves careful attention. Hartman leaves the delightful play of
signifiers to take up the "moral and mimetic impact" of language (p. 121). He rightfully
recognizes the inability of the Derridian discourse to account for the pathos and power of
artworks. "The interpreter," Hartman reminds us, "has also to understand the wound in
the word" (p. xxii).

Pennsylvania State UniversityRichard A. Cohen

Worthington Scranton Campus