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My aim in what follows1 is simply to raise some questions about the possibility and the limits of interpretation. I am chiefly interested in the interpretation of texts and, above all, of texts in the history of philosophy, from which I shall mainly draw my examples. But I believe that my argument may have wider implications for the activity of textual interpretation, including the interpretation of literary texts, and perhaps also of texts in the wider sense in which paintings, for instance, can be read as texts. I mainly want to offer some reflections on this general theme, but as well as thinking about the issue itself I want to make some comments on where the great hermeneutic thinkers of recent decades—Jacques Derrida, Hans-Georg Gad-amer, Paul Ricoeur—may be said to have left us as we try to confront the question raised by my title.
It scarcely needs stressing that this past generation witnessed the emergence of a scepticism about textual interpretation so radical that we were left with the implication that its goal, as traditionally conceived, might simply have been misconceived. One leading target was what theorists of interpretation such as E.D. Hirsch had called validity in interpretation. According to this view, a valid interpretation is one that succeeds in recovering the meaning of a text, where its meaning (the meaning of what is said) is equated with the meaning intended by whoever wrote it2.
Traditionally, theories of hermeneutics had generally run along such lines. But the reason why it increasingly came to seem that these lines might be going nowhere was that, as it began to be urged, the yardstick of intentionality was simply not available. During the past generation, several strands of thought converged on this point, with the most sensational scepticism emerging from the early work of Jacques Derrida, especially in such texts as his Grammatology and Eperons, in which the very notion of interpretation was questioned in the name of the thesis that u