Abstract

“Signature Event Context” offers a critique of previous theories of communication, a critique of previous theories of communication, a critique that seems to open the way toward a new and freer notion of reading. My response to this view will be to point out that the proffered freedom is quite illusory, partly because off certain problems in the theory itself but especially because there is no path open from that theory to any practice, a point that is merely underscored by Derrida’s own practice in response to being read by Searle.Derrida’s argument in “Sec” can be summarized in the following way: A written text can survive the absence of its author, the absence of its addressee, the absence of its object, the absence of its context, the absence of its code—and still be read. The argument also includes the stipulation that, as argued more fully elsewhere but briefly here as well, what is true of writing is also true of all other forms of communication: that they are all marked, fundamentally, by the difference that constitutes arche-writing and is so palpable in actual written texts.My summary is, I hope, at least tolerably fair and accurate. I believe that this summary of “Sec”’s argument also describes, in however compressed a form, what many American teachers and critics think they have learned from Derrida: namely, that reading can be freed from responsibility to anything prior to the act of reading, and, specifically, from those things named in the summary. As Derrida puts it himself: “writing is read, and ‘in the last analysis’ does not give rise to a hermeneutic deciphering, to the decoding of a meaning or truth” . 2. Richard Rorty, “The Higher Nominalism in a Nutshell: A Reply to Henry Staten,” Critical Inquiry 12 : 464. Robert Scholes is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities at Brown University, where he directs the Center for Modern Culture and Media. His last book was Textual Power. His next, with Nancy R. Comley and Gregory L. Ulmer, will be a text book called Text Book