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thereby occulting texts, the practice of intrinsic criticism should resemble a re¤tted, Gadamerian hermeneutics that strives toward an authentic interpretation by recognizing and utilizing the pre-understanding (historical contingencies, including modes of interpretation among the scholarly community) to make sense of a text’s meaning in the present. More recent explications of Gadamerian approaches to interpretation , such as Steven Mailloux’s explication of “rhetorical hermeneutics ,” do seek to incorporate institutional histories (e.g., the indelible mark of New Criticism on interpretive practice) as a means to articulate the many social forces that contribute to textual meaning, past and present—all in hopes of producing a more “authentic” or true reading. As Mailloux puts it, “rhetorical hermeneutics proposes to set aside the problem of explanation interpretation in terms of the characteristics of readers and the elements of texts and focus instead on the rhetorical dynamics among interpreters within speci¤c cultural settings. In such a hermeneutics, theory soon turns into rhetorical history. . . . Thus rhetorical hermeneutics describes the ebb and ®ow of the cultural conversation and rejects foundationalist attempts to ground knowledge, interpretation, and reading outside of the rhetorical context of history.”71 By setting aside “the elements of texts” Mailloux does not mean textual structures but rather the articulation of textual structures as absolute and determined by textual limits (at its most basic, the four sides of a page), since pre-understandings always color the interpretation of those structures in a particular, material, historical moment. One should also note, however, that rhetorical hermeneutics locates an authentic reading in institutional histories— controversy over interpretations—not in terms of watershed moments in material history. It is also signi¤cant that Mailloux is concerned with the interpretation of ¤ction. Within U.S. rhetorical studies, however, intrinsic criticism has elided the important ontological distinction between the “non¤ction” texts of its domain and the ¤ctional status of literary texts. Unlike literary criticism, much rhetorical criticism has staked its disciplinary claim on the notion that rhetorical production, by de¤nition, is a practical art that is embedded within a particular context, that is inclusive of particular individuals, and that addresses some immediate exigency. Literary texts, by contrast, announce their own ¤ctionality in their necessarily symbolic or allegorical formulations, forgoing attempts to represent reality in accord with some logic of coherence, correspondence , or accuracy. For literary theorist Paul de Man, literature is a superior cultural form because it recognizes the impossibility of reconciling the recalcitrance and immutability of the natural world with 100 / chapter 4 human desire—in other words, literature rests comfortably within a rhetorical understanding of the contingency of representation, indeed , of “truth.” That a synthesis is not possible, says de Man, is premised on a nothingness or lack that literature is tirelessly and “persistent [ly] naming.” “In the same manner that the poetic lyric originates in moments of tranquility, in the absence of actual emotions, and then proceeds to invent ¤ctional emotions to create the illusion of recollection, the work of ¤ction invents ¤ctional subjects to create the illusion of the reality of others. But the ¤ction is not a myth, for it knows and names itself as ¤ction.”72 Such a knowing acceptance of the impossibility of unmediated truth is an acceptance of a fundamental negativity of experience (an inability to satiate desire) and an embrace of the ¤gural, which for de Man is an embrace and celebration of the rhetorical.73 This notion is similar to an occult poetics, one that is premised on the paradoxical notion of the describability of ineffability . One could easily substitute the ineffable for the void that de Man¤nds literature continually naming in therapeutic gestures. To wit: just as literature ceaselessly continues to name the void, so also do occultists tirelessly attempt to describe truths that are forever beyond human comprehension in language. In its artistic failures, Crowley’s The Book of the Law demonstrates the frustrations that result from rejecting the contingency of the ¤gural while holding onto a transcendent , translinguistic truth. Crowley’s inability to let go of a translinguistic truth, to succumb to a rhetorical view of language that sees language as constitutive of reality, creates a considerable tension in all his writings. In light of de Man’s understanding of “the void,” a Lacanian “lack” that literature very consciously attempts to “name” in its many ¤ctions, one might say that Crowley renders this negativity of de Man’s description into a positivity, a transcendental signi¤ed that guarantees his writings in...

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