Re: My problem, Dr Rovira ...

Sundeep Dougal wrote:

> Mea culpa. Just blame it on my hasty reading not being constrained by
> authorial intent -- and the insight is even more relevant now.

Yeah, yeah, I should have guessed someone would eventually come up with that
kind of a response given I did myself back in the day... :).

But even in this instance I don't need to appeal to my "intent" to make my
claim -- and such an appeal would be without much use.

It is indeed quite possible that I did in fact say something I didn't intend to
say, and you'd be in your rights to respond, "well, you may not have meant it
that way, but it sure sounded that way."

We've seen this happen in this very discussion: Scottie accused me in a recent
post of an unthinking condescension. If meaning is dependent upon my intent,
and I didn't intend to be condescending, how could he accuse me of being
condescending without being aware of it?

Scottie futher affirmed that I was more interested in paying attention to the
ideas of others than developing my own ideas. This thought, to be honest,
never entered my mind -- but no doubt Scottie can still reasonably go on
asserting this is in fact the case even though I'm not aware of it, especially
being a good Freudian and being aware of defense mechanisms and believing in
the subconsious mind. Again, though, can he do this and still assert that
authorial intent is the ground of meaning in my posts?

But rather than argue my intent vs. the acutal meaning of my words, don't you
think it'd be both more fair and productive to compare the ideas in my posts
with the ideas Foucault actually expressed? I still affirm the need for
historical research -- if the author is truly and completely dead, is this the
case? Would _any_ postmodernist make this claim?

Jim

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Received on Fri Oct 25 12:25:01 2002