Abstract

The dissertation is an attempt to portray an aspect of meaning which is counter to the identity and identifiability which has been the very mark of meaning for traditional epistemology. Aristotle's statement that "not to have one meaning is to have no meaning" sets up the problem: Can there be meaning which is "not one" and yet "not none"? The activity of interpretation offers a clue because it occurs where meaning does not appear as one meaning, indicating a play of difference there. Ricoeur's hermeneutics of the symbol begins to portray this differential structure, but his analysis reinstates meaning which is again one . Ricoeur's analysis of metaphor goes further in identifying the tensional structure of this phenomenon, but here too the ends of the account are turned to the integrity of meaning. ;Deconstruction is directed against this ideal, and Derrida shows how the structure of "difference" undermines the possibility of meaning as a pure, identical signified. But if meaning cannot be the identity it has been taken to be, it cannot be rejected entirely either. Thus, the dissertation transforms the problem by opening the interval between the traditional understanding of meaning and its strategic rejection by deconstruction. The effect of this is to open interpretation to the entire range of possibilities between the two by making the distinction itself a matter of degrees. Any interpretation must determine at each point to what extent and in what respects signified meaning is and is not distinguishable from the text of its signification. The dissertation does not determine what those choices should be, but it motivates a necessary degree of the deconstructive, of the philosophical, and even of their interdependence.