miller eseu scris

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In this essay Miller defines what he takes to be deconstruction; it is a definition -- a word

whose oscillating implications one can get lost in for some time -- and a defense. What I want

to do is fairly simple, because I am not sure that everyone in late November will read the

essay with great attention or detail. I would like to hit some of the main points, in a roughkind of way.

Miller begins by taking the idea that deconstruction is plainly and simply parasitical on the

obvious or univocal reading. By now you will be becoming astute enough to realize that a

univocal reading is impossible -- it is a vocalization of a vocalization. If the poem has a voice,

it is articulated before, and one rearticulates it, reads it with one's own voice, one has a

reading which cannot properly be univocal, because it is a voice of a voice: and of course all

of the words are spoken before, are voiced in various discourses, and all contextual and

intertextual references are voices of voices; a univocal reading would have no imaginative,

social or intellectual articulation, and so in fact could not mean at all. Obvious is from ob via,

'in the way'.

But that is not what Miller looks at: he wants to track down the innerness of the senses that

the negative and positive of things are inherent in each other, and that meaning is of its nature

opening out and implying (from plier, "to fold"). He starts with the idea of the parasite, which

of course requires a host -- in fact, no host without a parasite, no parasite without a host. He

moves into the etymological complexities of each of the words. It turns out that a parasite was

originally a guest; host has a more complex derivation, reflected in its different meanings

today: it meant a stranger and a guest, someone with whom one has reciprocal duties of

hospitality; also a stranger, an enemy; and of course the holy Host. What Miller wants to get

to is that each of the words has a reciprocal antithetical meaning built in, that the words have

intertwining meanings in their etymology, and that the relation between them is both

antithetical and necessary. He moves to the most malevolent of parasites, the virus, the re-

programming, with its root gramme, as in grammar; is deconstruction a virus? But it is

possible that it is metaphysics, the location of the univocal, that is the virus: are humans

programmed to read Plato? If they are not, is Plato re-programming them, as it were? He then

remarks that what he has done is show you a deconstructive reading , and provides us with the

first "definition" of deconstruction:

This equivocal richness, my discussion of 'parasite' implies, resides in part in the fact that

there is no conceptual expression without figure, and no intertwining of concept and figure

without an implied narrative, in this case the story ofthe alien guest in the home.Deconstruction is an investigation of what is implied by this inherence in one another of

figure, concept, and narrative.

In the next paragraph he cites a "law": that language is not an instrument or tool in man's

hands, a submissive means of thinking. Language rather thinks man and his 'world', including

poems, if he will allow it to do so. There is another law implicit in the parenthesis of his next

sentence: what thought is not figurative? The root of idea is the word for image. To imagine is

to image. All figures are not what they figure. Univocality is impossible. Everything always

means something else. (As we know, in the structuralist/semiotic tradition no sign can be

identical to its referent, there is always a space, a difference.)

Miller's message at the end of this section is that every reading has a deconstructive as well as

an obvious reading. This is inherent in the very logic of signs, the very operation of language,the way thought is constructed. As Miller writes,
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and even inconceivable). Interpretation is not an achieved point but a ceaseless movement,

and this movement is deconstruction:

The tension between dialectic and undecidability is another way in which this form of

criticism remains open, in the ceaseless movement of an "in place of" without resting place.

The word "deconstruction" is in one way a good one to name this movement. The word, like

other words in "de," "decrepitude," for example, or "denotation," describes a paradoxicalaction [the para-doxical is both outside and along side of the doxic, the officially true] which

is negative and positive at once....It is a paralysis of thought in the face of what cannot be

thought rationally: analysis, paralysis; solution, dissolution; composition, decomposition;

mantling, dismantling; canny, uncanny....Deconstructive criticism moves back and forth

between the poles of these pairs, proving in its own activity, for example, that ther is no

deconstruction which is not at the same time constructive, affirmative.

Deconstruction, Miller seems to be concluding, opens us to the power and the complexities of

language, thought, tradition, influence, meaning, to the ambiguities and paradoxes which

really constitute what we once mistook for a unified field theory of human knowledge, by

providing a form, a way of prceeding, which acknowledges the deep mysteries of meaningand which allows us to free ourselves from the tyrannies of univocal reading.

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