Sean Burke The Death and Return of the Author : Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida.

us, we return to 'Signature, Event, Context', we find something quite different:
Rather than oppose citation or iteration to the non-iteration of an event, one ought to construct a
differential typology of forms of iter-ation, assuming that such a project is tenable and can result
in an exhaustive program . . . In such a typology, the category of intention will not disappear; it
will have its place, but from that place it will no longer be able to govern the entire scene and
system of utterance.37
As is abundantly clear, this is not at all the same thing as disputing the actuality or necessity of
intention; rather, what is put in question is the absolutely determinative hegemony of intention
over the communicative act. Intention is to be recognised, and respected, but on condition that
we accept that its structures will not be fully and ideally homogeneous with what is said or written,
that it is not always and everywhere completely adequate to the communicative act. There will be
times at which crevices appear in its hold, at which language resists, or wanders away from the
speaker's determinate meaning. Consequently, though the dominion of intention over the textual
process is to be rigorously refused, intention itself is not thereby cancelled but rather lodged
within a broader signifying process. Intention is within signification, and as a powerful and
necessary agency, but it does not command this space in the manner of an organising telos, or
transcendental subjectivity. That Searle should so misread Derrida on this issue is perhaps
explicable in terms of the common mistake by which the denial of absolute authority to a category
is confused with that category's total evacuation.
Of course another explanation might be that Searle was not sufficiently familiar with Derrida's
work, for this medial position on intention also coincides at the most apparent level with the
practice of many of the deconstructive readings. In the Grammatology, for instance, it is written:
Rousseau's discourse lets itself be constrained by a complexity which always has the form of the
supplement of or from the origin.
His declared intention is not annulled by this but rather inscribed within a system which it no
longer dominates. (243)
Indeed, even at the stage of the most preliminary acquaintance with Derrida's work, it is clear that
intention is not opposed in the classic New Critical manner of asserting that it is irrelevant and
unknowable. Quite the reverse: if authorial intentions are to be deconstructed it must be accepted
that they are cardinally relevant and recognisable. The deconstructor must assume that he or she
has the clearest conception of what the author wanted to say if the work of deconstruction is to
get underway. The model of intention culled from the text must be especially confident and
sharply defined since the critic undertakes not only to reconstitute the intentional forces within the
text, but also to assign their proper limits. It is only in terms of this reconstruction that the
deconstructor can begin to separate that which belongs to authorial design from that which
eludes or unsettles its prescriptions. Accordingly, deconstructive procedure takes the form of
following the line of authorial intention up to the point at which it encountered resistance within the
text itself: from this position the resistance can then be turned back against the author to show
that his text differs from itself, that what he wished to say does not dominate what the text says,
but is rather inscribed within (or in more radical cases, engulfed by) the larger signifying structure.
Again the Grammatology states this with perfect transparency:
the writer writes in a language and in a logic whose proper system, laws, and life his discourse by
definition cannot dominate absolutely. He uses them only by letting himself, after a fashion and
up to a point, be governed by the system. And the reading must always aim at a certain
relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not
command of the patterns of the language that he uses. (158)
The text is thereby stratified into declarative and descriptive layers, 38 the former relating to what
the author wanted to say and the latter to that which escapes intention, a division which might be
expressed in other critical languages, mutatis mutandis, as that between the constative and
performative, the manifest and the latent, or in contemporary parlance as the difference between
the programmatic intention (what the author set out to say) and the operative intention (what his
text ends up saying).39 This stratification then in turn relates to the critical text itself which is
necessarily divided into explicative and deconstructive phases, whereby authorial intention is first
reconstructed and then deconstructed via that which has escaped its jurisdiction. 40
Derrida thus recommends an interesting compromise between intentionalist and anti-intentionalist
views, since he neither identifies intention with the entirety of textual effects (as do many neo-