ABSTRACT
The value of writing resides in its increasing resistance to the question of value. This resistance has elicited a number of different responses. However the form they usually take invariably involves that specific attempt to redeem value that necessitates its having been reworked by investments stemming from a variety of sources all of which are, in the end, inimical to the essential heterogeneity of the literary text.1 The attempt to reassert value is thought to be essential in order to avoid the problems raised by the relationship between heterogeneity and evaluation. It is of course a futile attempt. It is also unnecessary. There is no reason why these problems need give rise either to a celebration of kitsch or to an unending and proliferating relativism. If the interpolation of conventional ethical and moral positions (guided by truth) into the literary text is no longer a viable move within interpretation, how then is evaluating possible? Any attempt to answer this question can only begin after it has been recognized that a redemption of value must be predicated upon the actuality of a revaluation of value itself. Revaluation, here, concerns the move from homogeneity to heterogeneity. The temporality of the move is complex. It does not involve progression but rather the temporality at work within the psychoanalytic conception of Nachträglichkeit. It is the original site that comes to be reworked. (Its being the ‘original’ is thereby put in question.)
The first move to be made in the revaluation of value involves dwelling on the complex interplay between tradition, repetition and the plural. The tradition within which value-both aesthetic and moral-is situated is repeated in and as the dominant tradition within the history of thought. Fundamental both to tradition and to what makes the repetition of tradition possible is the articulation of these different conceptions of value within the terms set by the conceptions of unity that figure within them. Unity here is, at the very least, twofold. On
the one hand the intentional logic2 of any theory of value assumes the essential unity of that theory. On the other hand it constructs the object of interpretation in terms of what can be described as its self-image. Here the construction involves the construal of the object of interpretation in terms of the essential homogeneity assumed by the intentional logic of the mode of interpretation. The homogeneity of the object of interpretation is therefore a consequence of its having been thus determined by the intentional logic of the mode of interpretation. The assumption of homogeneity constructs the relationship between object and interpretation in terms of an ontological homology. The distinction between object and interpretation is thereby bridged. The ontological homology does not restrict the range of interpretations except in so far as interpretation must assume the twofold conception of homogeneity.
