This will bake your noodle. It certainly did mine. French scholar Jacques Derridas philosophy of deconstruction says a very interesting thing about authorial intent. “The effects or structure of a text are not reducible to its ‘truth’, to the intended meaning of its presumed author.” (Derrida, Otobiographies, quoted in Thiselton, New Horizons, p.111) Derrida doesn’t deny that an author of a text intends a particular meaning. But, whatever was originally intended cannot be the ‘fixed’ meaning of the particular text. Derrida believed we put far too much weight on the subjective intentions of the original author. There are many other societal and spiritual influences at work which affect how the original text is now understood and continues to be understood. It is as if once a text is finished, it is truly only beginning the roller coaster ride of its interpretive activity and conceptual evolution. It is as if the texts become the community property of all who thereafter engage them. These text-engagers form a corporate womb who suffer labor pangs as they continue to give multiple births to varied and vibrant meanings, meanings unknown and unconsidered by the original author. Derrida appears to mean that while authors continue to write with a specific intent and meaning, the moment the text is finished, other forces take over the text for better or worse. Like a maverick homing pigeon who never returns home, the text is flying to parts unknown without ever returning home to its author. The text joins the play of semiotics and signifiers and their reference become a function of what society and/or spirit decides they will mean. In this way, the meaning of texts transcends their originating author, ricocheting back onto him, ‘writing’ him in the ultimate paradox of inversion. What this dynamic potentially does to Scripture is mind blowing. Jewish exegesis, called by the acronym PARDES, employs this exact dynamic through drash, remez, and sod, all techniques employed by the reader to improve and alter the literal text. The early Church Fathers also utilized similar techniques in evolving more and more multiple meanings and improvement into the texts, techniques which would ultimately come to be known as the Quadriga. I like this idea.
Posted on: Wed, 10 Sep 2014 21:37:21 +0000
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