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DOI: 10.7330/9780874219364.c007 7 D e c o n s t r u c t i v e Rh e to r i c In the world of deconstructive rhetoric, a text is not a mirror held up to nature, as it was in the ontological tradition; it’s a mirror held up to other mirrors. Discourse is a house of such mirrors, texts facing other texts, words reflecting and refracting other words. Terry Eagleton illustrates the nature of language from the vantage point of deconstructive rhetoric by pointing to the peculiar character of the dictionary as a closed, self-referential network of endlessly interrelating signifiers and signifieds (Eagleton 1983, 128). When we want to know the definition of a word, we don’t rummage around in “the world” for a suitable experiential reference. Instead, we turn to the dictionary, where, upon looking up the word, we encounter nothing but other words. When we seek information about these words, we find still more words, some of them looping back to the first word, others extending the network of signification outward to additional possibilities of meaning—synonyms, antonyms , homonyms, homophones, analogues, archaisms, synecdoches, metonymies, metaphors, etymological predecessors, alternate forms, variable usages, a glittering array of signs each, always, directing us somewhere else, never stopping at itself as the sign behind all signs, the transcendental sign. The network only continues to expand as we pursue the meanings of sentences, paragraphs, essays, books, collections of books, alternative discourses (literature, science, law), and multiple languages . The process of signifying has no starting point, no termination, no textual boundaries, and most important, no exit from the network of significations that sprawls from any and every point. There is always and only more language, endlessly commenting on itself, explaining itself only to itself. In a memorable postmodern short story, John Barth (1969) likens this endless reflexivity to being “lost in the funhouse.” The story’s teenage protagonist, Ambrose, wanders amidst the mirrors of an amusement park funhouse, which is located in a larger funhouse called Ocean City, Maryland, which is located in the funhouse of World War II America, each place a hall of mirrors, reflecting and refracting its own 164   C. H. Knoblauch misshapen images, each contributing to Ambrose’s fractured impressions of yet another funhouse—himself. Of course there is no Ambrose really, for he and his mirrors, his places, are all effects of language, fictions in the encompassing story of “Lost in the Funhouse,” which, as its own narrator laments, refuses to follow the form of a “conventional dramatic narrative,” with a predictable rising/falling plot line, and so creates , enfolds, and loses Ambrose along the path of a disjointed action in search of its denouement. The principal theme of the deconstructive story about the meaning of meaning, its ground of meaningfulness, is the intertextuality of discourse . To understand the concept, consider the intertextuality of the current chapter, where I intend, momentarily, to undertake the composing of a text, in English, that is based on the reading of another text, first written in French, named (by its English translator) Of Grammatology, on which the signature, Jacques Derrida, is inscribed. “Derrida’s” text has itself composed readings of still others, all translated (hence rewritten) from French to English by writers other than those already mentioned, and these texts are named Essay on the Origin of Languages, General Course in Linguistics, and Tristes Tropiques, on which the signatures Rousseau, Saussure, and Lévi-Strauss are inscribed respectively. “I” am about to write, then, “my” reading of a written reading of several other written readings, composed by multiple writers in two languages. Furthermore, “my” reading of “Derrida” is filtered through, or influenced by, “my” readings of many other texts besides, some of which have also read Derrida in pursuing their motives, needs, or desires, and all of which “I” have read, perversely as it were, in a way that satisfies me in pursuing mine. Derrida has filtered his readings in the same perversely motivated ways, while Rousseau, Saussure, and Lévi-Strauss have done so also. Meanwhile, I speak conventionally of “I,” but my “I” is of no more determinate significance than the other “I”s in this verbal funhouse, merely a pronominal reference to the signature on the cover of the current text. That text conventionally “belongs” to me, as the copyright page insists without a trace of irony, but it “really” belongs only to the English language (as do “I”), since, plainly...

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