112
C O N C E P T S
ed on something else, then it might indeed be conceivable, as traditional
accounts seem to do, to set aside signs or discourse so as to accede directly
to that other thing, whether it be thought, action, or reality itself. But this
is what is not possible. One level or stratum interacts with the other and
cannot be separated except provisionally or artificially. This is why the no
tion o f the text as woven o f different strands is superior to the geological
metaphor o f strata or levels: the text is not a series o f layers but the inter
weaving o f language with other threads o f experience. In one o f Derridas
early texts on Husserl, “Form and Meaning [le vouloir-dire]; A Note on
the Phenomenology o f Language,” where he notes Husserl’s own distrust
of the metaphor o f layers or strata, with which Husserl is nevertheless in
extricably implicated, Derrida writes;
The interweaving {Verwebun£) of language, of what is purely linguistic in lan
guage, with the other threads of experience, constitutes one fabric [un tissu]. . . .
If the stratum of the logos were simply founded, one could set it aside so as to let
the underlying substratum of non-expressive acts and contents appear beneath it.
But since this superstructure reacts in an essential and decisive way upon the Un-
terschicht (substratum), one is obliged, from the start of the description, to associ
ate the geological metaphor with a properly textual metaphor, for fabric or textile
means text. Verweben here means texere. The discursive refers to the non-discur-
sive, the linguistic “stratum” is intermixed with the pre-linguistic “stratum” ac
cording to the controlled system o f a sort of text?'"
The phenomenologist’s attempt to unravel the confusion and to found
speech on a ground o f perception or intuition and thus “ in the primordial
given presence o f the thing itself” leads not to the isolation of levels but
to the recognition o f interweaving, Verwebung, and thus to the conclusion
that “the texture o f the text is irreducible.”^^
Here, or in the concept o f “the general text,” a textuality that under
lies and makes possible particular texts, the focus is not interdisciplinary
inquiry; nevertheless, the idea o f a general textuality certainly encourages
thinking o f all cultural objects as texts and hence a measure o f interdisci
plinarity. Sometimes the claim is made that this idea o f text is an instance
o f literary studies seeking to extend its empire by seeing everything as a
26. Jacques Derrida, “Form and Meaning: A Note on the Phenomenolo
gy of Language,” in Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory o f
-, (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 111-12.
27. Ibid., 113.
text and that therefore what we have is not so much interdisciplinarity as
the imperialism o f literary studies. But the extension o f the idea o f text
has transformed literary studies as much as, if not more than, any o f the
other disciplines, so it is not the case, for instance, that other disciplines
have been assimilated to or had imposed on them, a traditional idea o f the
literary (That would, in any event, involve the idea o f l'œuvre rather than
texte.) And could one not maintain that insofar as the idea o f the text has
challenged positivistic models in anthropology and sociology or straight
forward representational models in history or art history, this is a major
intellectual advance in those disciplines rather than the imperialism of the
literary?
I
want to conclude by pursuing the interdisciplinary potential o f the
idea o f the text in Paul de Man’s
Allegories o f Reading. The second half o f
de Man’s book is devoted to Rousseau, and as we near the end, he under
takes a complex reading o f The Social Contract. Rousseau describes what
he calls the “double relation” in which an individual is engaged: “Each in
dividual . . . is committed in a double relationship, namely as member of
the sovereign authority with regard to individuals and as a member o f the
state with regard to the sovereign authority”— on the one hand, helping to
constitute the general will and thus part o f the sovereign authority o f the
state and on the other hand a member o f the community subject to the sov
ereign authority o f the state.^*^ “Indeed,” writes Rousseau, “each individual
can, as a man, have a private will contrary to or differing from the general
will he has as a citizen.
As part o f the general will, the citizen is alien
ated from the particular desires and interests that animate him or her as an
individual, and this double relationship extends throughout political life:
a piece o f land, for instance, may be considered part o f the state or private
property. The same estrangement that separates the citizen as contributor
to the sovereign authority o f the state from the citizen as individual sepa
rates political rights and laws, on the one hand, from political action and
history, on the other.
Working through Rousseau’s account o f these relations, de Man
28. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social, on Essai sur la forme de la ré
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