PREVIOUS
There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of play. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign, and which lives the necessity of interpretation as an exile. The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and the humanism, the name of man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology -- in other words, throughout his entire history -- has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play. The second interpretation of interpretation, to which Nietzsche pointed the way, does not seek in ethnography, as Lévi-Strauss does, the "inspiration of a new humanism" (again citing the "Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss").I've always loved that last sentence, with its echoes of Romantic excess, not to mention the pithiness of the, "I do not believe today there is any question of choosing," which precedes it. He could have been a writer of existential horror stories to match E.T.A. Hoffmann and Henry James. Maybe he was.
There are more than enough indications today to suggest we might perceive that these two interpretations of interpretation -- which are absolutely irreconcilable even if we live them simultaneously and reconcile them in an obscure economy -- together share the field which we call, in such problematic fashion, the social sciences.
For my part, although these two interpretations must acknowledge and accentuate their difference and define their irreducibility, I do not believe that today there is any question of choosing -- in the first place because here we are in a region (let us say, provisionally, a region of historicity) where the category of choice seems particularly trivial; and in the second, because we must first try to conceive of the common ground, and the différance of this irreducible difference. Here there is a kind of question, let us call it historical, whose conception, formation, gestation, and labor we are only catching a glimpse of today. I employ these words, I admit, with a glance toward the operations of childbearing -- but also with a glance toward those who, in a society from which I do not exclude myself, turn their eyes away when faced by the as yet unnamable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of of the nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity.
May the pleasures of anticipatory deferral continue in his afterlife, in the life that comes after the Theory with a capital "t" he came to represent, without ever asking to be a representative. The prospect of waiting with him in mind is certainly a lot more luminous than the prospect of waiting alone.
Mode: affected
Muse: Jacques Derrida - Scritti Politti - Songs to Remember
