Interpretive questions, at the most fundamental level, are questions of propriety, not questions of truth, understood as a correspondence between language and the reality to which it refers, and not questions of validity, understood as the conceptual coherence of terms within a logical hierarchy. The disappearance of the notion of propriety from contemporary literary theory is traceable to two distinct but closely related historical phenomena: the development of aesthetics and the rise of "scientific hermeneutics." These two concerns merge in our century to produce "intrinsic" or what I call "ascetic" interpretation. Both aesthetic disinterestedness and phenomenological reduction methodologically distance the reader from the text, which is thereafter considered a literary art object--a structure subject to "scientific" scrutiny and "aesthetic" judgment. Deconstruction of structural methodology demonstrates that intrinsic, constructive interpretations always ultimately rest upon desires contemporaneous with the reader's world and thus can never approach the presence upon which the text was originally founded. However, since deconstruction is an internal critique, accepting the assumptions of structural method and deriving their logical consequences, it cannot itself provide criteria for proper reading. The necessary conditions for interpretive propriety become evident through a consideration of the limiting case of "radically novel" works--works whose founding motivations are not available through the reader's world. Reading metaphor (which by definition is linguistically incoherent) institutes a shift of attention from spatial form to temporal emphasis. Subsequent analysis shows that the reader's ability to perform this shift presupposes his prior involvement with the concerns that generate the text itself. In turn, this implies that linguistic difference is founded upon situation deference. Deference, understood as the unity behind the two-fold movement of differance--difference and deferment--is founded upon what Heidegger calls care. It subsequently becomes clear that what is actually read in reading literature becomes completely covered over by every sort of theoretical or aesthetic reduction. At best any theory of criticism or interpretation can justify itself, therefore, only by making radically explicit its institution of method.
