ABSTRACT
In literary theory, discussion of Wittgenstein and Stanley Fish often occurs in the same breath, and it is often said that Fish is “Wittgensteinian” in his views. I think this statement is a good indication of Wittgenstein’s “unavailability” (to borrow a term of Stanley Cavell’s)1 in some regions of literary theory. Fish is preoccupied with a question concerning the basis of our entitlement, in various domains of discourse, to notions of correctness and objectivity in judgment. Literary criticism and the law supply his main examples. In virtue of what, he asks, is one reading of a literary text or one application of a legal rule correct, and not another? Fish’s answer – “the authority of interpretive communities” – bears an obvious resemblance to a thesis Wittgenstein is supposed to put forward in Kripke’s much-disputed reading of him. For Fish, as for Kripke’s Wittgenstein, “interpretation” appears as a general condition of the possibility of anything meaning anything.
