Book Title: Sambodhi 1989 Vol 16
Author(s): Ramesh S Betai, Yajneshwar S Shastri
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

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Page 125
________________ 116 that in a philosophical text a metaphor is written in white ink and not in black ink and in a sense metaphysics is thus a white mythology but at the same time he also shows that this does not mean that there is nothing in philosophy except metaphor because the concept of metaphor itself is a philosophical product and requires to be analysed with precision. Abrams has shown that Derrida's strategy is of deliberate double reading.33 In reading, we find the passages 'lisible and understandable. Reading, construes the meaning but Reading, goes on to disseminate the meanings already construed. Thus, readingis provisional and strategic. Abrams finds that, for Derrida, "determinate reading always leaves an inescapable and ungovernable 'excess' or surplus of signification" and this is because the writer cannot dominate absolutely the language and logic shared by him with others. Unknown to the writer, the text ungovernably goes on to say something which requires deeper deconstructive readings. Such deeper rcadings, says Abrams, reveal equivocations, rhetoricity and the logic of hiearchichal oppositions at work in the texts inspite of the authors. Reading, however does not cancel the earlier readings but reinscribes them as effects of differential play of language. Thus the meaning of the text has first to be construed in order that it can then be "disseminated into an undecidability". The new 'text generated by reading. itself becomes a victim of dissemination and self-deconstruction, According to Abrams then, construal and deconstruction i.e., double reading and double interpretation is Derrida's strategy without finality.30 It would be wrong to say that for Derrida, there are neither authors nor texts nor meanings. It would be a mistake to think that all the standard readings and the range of their interpretations are false according to Derrida. In this sense Derrida is neither a sceptic, nor a nihilist, nor a logical positivist. Derrida would agree that Radhakrishnan was the real author of Indian Philosophy and that we can in a standard sense read the relevant passages from his texts and arrive at a general consensus of determinate meaning but reading, would deconstruct the meaning construed by reading, and that is the point of Derridean readings. Radhakrishnan employed construal and reconstruction whereas Derrida employed "construal and" deconstruction". In Radhakrishnan, the standard meaning is construed and is then linked to the context of modern times. It is not dislocated or reinscribed as it is done by Derrida. Radhakrishnan's "double readings are different from Derrida's double readings because Derrida identifies a common pattern of aporias and paradoxes in the inajor texts of Western philosophy and at a metalevel explains how the underlying logocentrism and phonocentrism shape the

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