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the interchange is extremely apt to this study; Oakes (1988); Riffaterre (1990); Said (1975 and 1983); Ulmer (1985) has been of great help in defining my use of Derrida's thought, and Scholes (1989) has helped refine my critical evaluation of Derrida's reading practices. Only more recently did I come across Altieri (1990), in which "Canons and Differences" has been a helpful complement to my earlier reading. Harold Coward (1990) offers a useful broad context in which one may consider Indian thought in light of Derrida, though Derrida primarily as a holder of philosophical positions. |
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44. Mimamsa's firm exclusion of the author is stated and defended only within the articulation of a broader assertion of the textual location of dharma. See Clooney 1990b, Chapters 4 and 5. |
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45. See Clooney 1988, and Bilimoria 1988, pp. 164-234. |
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46. In accepting the Mimamsa view that Vedic texts should not be understood as authored works, Advaita entertains a denial of filiation and of the concomitant shortcuts and privileges that come with the appeal to the author. However, here too the Advaita is maintains a "realist" notion of reading, in which texts are not thought to be open to endless meanings, it discovers meaning through the identification and use of a set of intratextual rules of meaning. By these rules a text means without being replaced by that to which it refers; the rules allow the text to mean, without this meaning being given in advance or after the text. Barthes (1979) notes that the Text "overtakes" the authored work and "undermines" its authority, and so "deconstructs" controlled, linear reading: " . . . the work is caught up in a process of filiation. [That is,] three things are postulated here: a determination of the work by the outside world (by race, then by history), a consecution of works among themselves, and an allocation of the work to its author . . . The Text, on the other hand, is read without the father's signature.'' (1979, p. 78) The Text's meaning is not entirely determined by an external-world, nor by the relation of individually identified works with one another, nor by attention to a single author's mind. Though studies of the authorial intentions of Sankara cannot be dismissed as erroneous, they are also a distraction on the basis of which the problems and possibilities of the Text as a whole, in any of its stages (such as the Bhasya of Sankara) or in the complexity of those stages taken together (over several generations of commentary), are neglected in an eagerness to pry from the Text what its authors meant when they wrote what they wrote. This book therefore has studiously excluded every kind of lateral study which would introduce the data of Sankara's other commentaries and his noncommentarial Upadesasahasri. Though this may appear an error in judgment to some, it is a move I share with the UMS commentarial tradition itself, |
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