Abstract
Because we tend to accept the protean character of literary meanings as something given or natural, I want to ask what it is that urges us to make such assumptions about literary discourse, My phenomenological procedure would not be applauded by Jacqueline Derrida's edited Nietzsche, who holds that philosophical discourse is an inept tool with which to approach truth. But then, I believe that the notion of truth in its true/false sense, in the sense of truth by correspondence, truth of coherence, or even in Heidegger's sense of "unconcealment" has not played a very impressive part in the Humanities. Perhaps artistic speech and its deconstructionist relatives are particularly well suited to handle the questions of what Jurgen Habermas calls the realm of symbolic interaction or symbolic universe. On the other hand, to excise altogether the more formal discourses would simply be a castration in the sphere of interdisciplinary study of the kind that Derrida/Nietzsche says feminism inflicts on woman. Perhaps my attempt in this paper at positioning literary speech in relation to the speech of logic and other forms of discourse will be acceptable as a less painful operation.