ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the act of interpretation as it is described in the tetralogy. It is a great irony that the clearest and most succinct account of Bloom's concept of miseading is to be found in his least-read book, Kabbalah and criticism, in which the most important influence on Harold Bloom's theories concerning interpretation, the gnostic tradition, is addressed. The logic behind the sequence in relation to the study of 'the revisionary impulse', since the following, Kabbalah and criticism, sets out to study this source in detail. This in fact is what Bloom terms the basic principle of antithetical interpretation. In this later essay Bloom takes on a spectre in his writing which has been present since the beginning of the tetralogy, the ghostly presence of Jacques Derrida's 'scene of writing'.
