ABSTRACT
Interpretation is the dominant mode of commentary in a culture within which value is expressed in terms of an abstract, universal, and in itself substance-free standard: the coin, the Phallus, the father, the Logos. By interpretation I mean virtually all of our methods of formal response to texts by which the text is taken to mean something, by which meaning is extractable from a text and presentable, even if incompletely and not exactly, in paraphrase. Even the most extremely antiparaphrastic of western interpretative methods, for instance the poem-interpretation of the New Critics, still is infinitely more paraphrastic than midrash, which simply refuses to take even the text as verbal icon, preferring almost to read each word, and sometimes each letter, and sometimes the shape of the letter or even its serifs, as a virtual icon in itself. One way to bring this point home would be to insist that even according to those who would argue that “a poem must not mean but be,” the poem remains at least partially translatable. With the modes of linguistic operation that are characteristic of early midrash in place, the text is simply untranslatable (something on the order of the untranslatability of Finnegan’s Wake). Too many of the features upon which midrash founds its meanings are simply artifacts of the materiality of the language in its Hebrew concreteness. Midrash is the dominant mode of commentary in a signifying economy without the “universal equivalent.” Famous by now is the moment in talmudic legend when God himself seeks to intervene in midrashic interpretation and is informed that he has no status whatsoever since the
majority of the sages disagree with his interpretation. In commentary, at any rate, for the Rabbis, even the deity is not the measure of all things.
