Hermeticism

Abstract

The first two of the doctrines lying at the core of hermetic theorizing — the belief that language has reference only to itself and the denial of the possibility of determining the meaning of discourse — are still oddly but widely believed to be the indisputable consequences of Ferdinand de Saussure’s analysis of language. One suspects that many of those who have left the world influential modes of thought about any matter of importance would be astonished to know how many of what they thought to be perspicuous observations have been misunderstood or transmogrified. But Saussure would have more reason to be surprised than most, even though he might recognize that some of the blame falls to him. After all, he never put his insights into final form but left their transmission to the uncertain mercies of those who heard his lectures. Perhaps there is a significant difference between what Saussure would like to have published and the lecture notes edited and issued as the Cours Linguistique General; the Cours may be the mere shadow of what Saussure could have given to the world. But that shadow is in most respects a very definite one whose outline, one should think, could hardly be misinterpreted.

Shakespeare’s Bottom is the source of much recent literary theory. It was Bottom who led the attack on illusionist realism; it was he who advocated the self-subverting, self-referential text; and it was he who founded the praxis of deconstructionism. His ideas have been widely plagiarized on the continent (by Derrida, Todorov, Macherey, Barthes, Althusser and others), and it is a scandal of literary history that British and American popularizers of his radical doctrines have repeatedly ascribed them to his continental disciples instead of giving Bottom due credit.

Cedric Watts, “Bottom’s Children…,” 20.

Recent criticism has made much of a discovery that elementary logic ought long ago to have clarified. It has discovered that its subject matter — the work of art — is, if not identical with, at least enshrined in, texts, scores and other semi-permanent things. Most works of art (and all significant works of art) therefore have a power to outlast their creator, acquiring a penumbra of significance which he himself might never have been able to acknowledge or intend. Many thoughts have been inspired by that simple observation, and it is a small step in delirium, although a large one in logic, to the science of “grammatology,” which takes the written character of the literary object as primary, and insists that in the act of writing the author vanishes from the scene.

Roger Scruton, Public Text and Common Reader, 36.