Dr. Walid Ibrahim Al-Qassab

Proponents of deconstruction theory and proponents of reading and reception theory in general adopt a very dangerous idea, which is the idea of (non-neutrality of reading) based on the premise that the reader – as they say – is not just a consumer or recipient of the text, but a producer who reshapes the text, or say writes it if you will. It is the reader-writer who interrogates the text, and extracts the meanings latent in it, which are infinite meanings, especially after this innovation denied the existence of any center for the text. This text became – in Barthes' words – "cannot mean anything, and it is not that subject to which criticism should adhere, but rather a space in which criticism can play and frolic." This play that Barthes talks about is the play of the reader-critic for whom the text no longer exists except through him.

The reader – in this strange and dangerous innovation – does not only perform the process of summoning the "absent" from the "present," i.e., summoning the absent "signified" from the present "signifier," based on the circulating concept that knowing the "signifier" is determined by language conventions and methods of use, but the reader among them intervenes – with his thought, belief, and taste – in interrogating the text, so it mixes in the literary work, or – if you will – with the author's intentionality, and this text es beyond neutrality, and becomes subject to various readings and readers.(1),

This reader – for the proponents of deconstruction and reception – is more important than the text itself and any circumstances related to it, and more important than the author, language, and its cognitive significance. He is the sole sovereign, and there is no sovereign above him.

From the perspective of rejecting every previous reading and underestimating it, every reader has come to seek the invention of a new reading that contradicts the familiar. Therefore, the text becomes politicized for the reader or – as Jacques Derrida sees – "linked to a type of political practice and an attempt to expose the logic that preserves the power of a specific system of thought and the power of a complete system of political structures and social institutions" (2). Deconstruction and reception reading is a practice carried out by the reader who is the sovereign, as the time of the dominance of the literary work – as the American critic Paul de Man, one of the poles of deconstruction, sees – has ended decisively (3) – meaning the "authority of the text" called for by structuralism, and the matter has become for the reader who now has the right – based on this broad authority given to him – to make the text say what he wishes, to interrogate it as he wants, and to imbue it with his visions, perceptions, and ideology as he desires.

Deconstructive reading is therefore a reading in which integrity and objectivity are absent, in which neutrality is absent because it does not depend on the text and the meanings its language carries, but depends on a reader who reads the text from a certain perspective, and it is then an unreliable and unrecognized reading for all the interpretation or hermeneutics it produces.

This idea in turn leads to the second idea, which is that every reading is a misreading (Miss Reading), and it is truly so as long as it is not based on objective foundations, and as long as the foundation on which every interpretation is based – which is trust in the relationship between the signifier and the signified – is non-existent or at least doubtful.

Every reading then – no matter what type it is – is an acknowledged but non-final reading, meaning it is a respected and disrespected reading, accepted and rejected, allowed and excluded.

All of the above leads – automatically – to doubting any truth that any text can say, and the rule "no text can say anything specific" becomes dominant.

This is what the Palestinian-American critic – Edward Said – pointed out, mentioning that the deconstructive critic works on demolishing the consensus on the significance of texts, and shaking confidence in them, to cast doubt on this system, and open the way for multiple meanings, so texts become a field of divergences not agreements, a field of difference not agreement, and a field for exploding meanings not restricting and defining them" (4).

Yes, reading is an effective dialogue between the reader and the text, but it is a dialogue that should start from the text. The text is a material, tangible world that has its existence and entity, its system, words, and structures that are controlled by the rules and laws of language. It is not true what Raman Selden says that "meaning in the text never formulates itself, but rather the reader must be present in the textual material in order to produce meaning" (5).

It is also not true that the text does not exist except through the reader. The text exists, was produced, and its matter ended, and the reader is its recipient. We cannot say about a device that it does not exist until it is used.

Strange is the saying of one of the critics: there is no value in a reading that tells us what the text has already said, and if the text has said its word, this settles every word after that, and woe to this reading that may tell us a word that has actually been said, and settles into the text itself. If it did that, this would be chatter and flabbiness that the text makes us dispense with (6), or the saying of one of them "it should not..."