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Popular Culture Review
exact French meaning. However, the most commonly heard translation is “There
is nothing outside the text,” which adds the word “nothing” to the original quote:
we are therefore already constructing deconstruction in the English language for
our own personal use.
From the point of view of its content, this quote purports the same
confusion as it does from that of its English translation, for it implies negating
the existence of a possible context; any given interpretation is part of a greater
Text and does nothing more than participate to the general displacement of
meaning. This particular conception of language and interpretation,
notwithstanding its inner contradictions, is particularly well-served by Derrida’s
fancy, highly conceptual language, which purposely multiplies its possible
interpretations. Glas or La Carte postale, for instance, are to be considered as
works of what we could call intellectual or conceptual poetry,10 and are
obviously not intended to produce any type of clear message or meaning, except
that there are no such things as a clear message or meaning. Since the position of
the literary or cultural critic has to be external to the text she or he is studying,
this statement simply eliminates any possibility of interpretation. As a direct
consequence, post-modem theorists, from De Man to Culler11have insisted upon
the impossibility of truly distinguishing Criticism from Literature, refusing to
define either of them, and Theory has insidiously replaced its own object of
study.
The Purloined Corpus
This perverse substitution, which entails the erasure of the actual literary
text behind Theory, is perfectly illustrated by the case of Poe’s “The Purloined
Letter”: in his Seminaire, Jacques Lacan proposed a psychoanalytical reading of
Poe’s short story, which motivated a deconstructive reading by Jacques Derrida
in the second part of La Carte postale, which in turn became the object of a
feminist inquiry by Barbara Johnson. None of these three inquiries deal with
Poe’s text: Lacan is mostly interested in validating his theories through the
analysis of selected cultural artifacts, Derrida in analyzing Lacan’s text, and
Johnson in examining Derrida’s reading of Lacan’s interpretation; as to “The
Purloined Letter,” it has indeed totally vanished.
The intentional confusion between creative and critical writing, reflected in
Paul de Man’s assertion that the difference between Literature and Criticism is
“delusive,” shows here all its consequences: a literary approach considered as a
creative process itself annihilates both literature and theoretical writing by
denying the existence of their essential differences. If we accept the merger of
the object of study with the study itself, any literary essay then becomes
susceptible to be read as literature, and each reading in turn offers a vast array of
possible interpretations which will lead to a variety of new readings and so on.
The near desperate search for rhetorical obscurity and stylistic feats at all costs,
especially that of meaning, which pervades most post-modem criticism, can be
seen as an attempt to turn a literary essay into a piece of literature,
notwithstanding that without literature there would be no literary criticism, a