In this way the allegorical mode is inextricably and ambiguously in-tertwined with the symbolic one: the medieval mind is a divided one, rent by the conflict between confidence in an indisputable truth (re-peated by every word and every fact) and the feeling that words and facts must be continually reinterpreted in order to go further and further, beyond their acknowledged sense, since the whole universe is quasi liber scriptus digito Dei, but in this book aliud dicitur, aliud demonstratur.
Once again, as in the case of mysticism, the gathering of the commu-nity around the ever speaking voices of the Scriptures and of the world, has a function of social control. It does not matter what both the Book and the world say; it matters that they speak and that there is a center of elaboration of their speech. When people gather around a flag, it does not matter what exactly the flag symbolically means, since it can have multiple senses; what matters is that the flag undoubtedly means some-thing to them.
The power consists in possessing the key for the right in-terpretation or (which is the same) in being acknowledged by the com-munity as the one who possesses the key. Not only in the Middle Ages does every community (be it a church, a country, a political regime» a scientific school) in which the symbolic mode holds need an auctoritas (the Pope, the Big Brother, the Master). The auctoritas is indispensable. when there is not a code; where there is a code — as a system of prees-tablished rules —- there is no need for a central auctoritas, and the power is distributed through the nodes of organized competence. Either power eliminates the other one. Civilizations and cultural groups have to make a choice.
The medieval symbolic mode collapses when, with the theology of Aquinas, a code wins (the Summae are a sort of institutional code; they do not allow for a vague interpretation of the reality and of the Scrip-tures). Aquinas definitely destroys with cogent argumentations the medieval tendency to the allegorical and symbolic reading of the reality and reserves a strictly coded allegorical reading only for the facts narrated by the Old Testament.
The language of the Scriptures is purely literal: the Old Testament tells us about facts that, insofar as they have been predisposed by God in order to teach us, are to be interpreted allegorically. But these facts are only the facts narrated by the Old Testament. After the Incarnation the possibility of looking at facts as meaning something else no longer exists.
As far as language (be it poetic or scriptural) is concerned, every rhetorical strategy represents an instance of modus parabolicus, but this поп supergreditur modum litterale (Quodlibetales 8.6.16.obI, ad I). This means that, since there are rhetorical rules, tropes and allegories can be interpreted univocally as if they were literal expressions. Rhetoric is a natural language.
If the symbolic mode collapses, for a while, in Western throught, it, however, survives and grows in different directions in other forms of mysticism. A paramount example of a different symbolic mode is the Jewish mysticism of the Kabala, where the Book, which the Christian tradition tried desperately to anchor to a fixed allegorical reading, blows up, so to speak, in a really unlimited semiosis, even losing the linear consistency of its material expressive level.
4.4.4. The Kabalistic drift
Scholem (i960) says that Jewish mystics have always tried to project their own thought into the biblical texts; as a matter of fact, every un-expressible reading of a symbolic machinery depends on such a projec-tive attitude. In the reading of the Holy Text according to the symbolic mode, “letters and names are not conventional means of communica-tion. They are far more. Each one of them represents a concentration of energy and expresses a wealth of meaning which cannot be translated, or not fully at least, into human language” (1960; Eng. tr., p. 36). For the Kabalist, the fact that God expresses Himself, even though His utter-ances are beyond any human insight, is more important than any specific and coded meaning His words can convey.
The Zohar says that “in any word shine a thousand lights” (3.202a). The unlimitedness of the sense of a text is due to the free combinations of its signifiers, which in that text are linked together as they are only accidentally but which could be combined differently. In a manuscript of Rabbi Eli-yaku Kohen Ittamari of Smyrna, we read why the scrolls of the Torah, according to Rabbinic law, must be written without vowels and punctuation:
This is a reference to the state of the Torah as it existed in the sight of God before it was transmitted to the lower spheres. For He had before Him numerous letters that were not printed into words as is the case today, be-cause the actual arrangement of the words would depend on the way in which this lower world conducted itself. . . . The divine purpose will be revealed in the Torah at the coming of the Messiah, who will engulf death forever. . . . For the God will annul the present combination of letters that form the words of our present Torah and will compose the letters into other words, which will form new sentences, speaking of other things. (Scholem 1960; Eng. tr., pp. 74-75)
Thus, when a man utters the words of the Torah, he hever ceases to create spiritual potencies and new lights: “If therefore he spends the whole day reading just this one verse, he attains eternal beatitude, for at all times, indeed, in every moment, the composition [of the inner lin-guistic elements] changes in accordance with the names that flare up within him at this moment” (ibid., p. 76). Such a disposition to interro-gate a text according to a symbolic mode still rules many contemporary hermeneutic practices.
They can take two alternative (though pro-foundly connected at their source) routes. Language can be the place where things come authentically to begin: in Heidegger’s hermeneutics the word is not ‘sign’ (Zeichen) but ‘to show’ (Zeigen), and what is shown is the true voice of Being. In such a line of throught, texts can be inde-finitely questioned, but they do not speak only of themselves; they re-veal something else and something more.
On the other hand, there is a radically secularized hermeneutics where the text is no longer transparent and symptomatic, since it only speaks of its possibility of eliciting a semiosic ‘drift’. More than ‘auscultate’, the text must be (with a more radically Kabalistic option) deconstructed, until fracturing its own expressive texture. Thus the text does not speak any longer of its own ‘outside’; it does not even speak of itself; it speaks of our own experience in reading (deconstructively) it. There is no more a dialectics of here and there, of signans and signatum. Everything happens here — and the dialectics takes place, at most, as a further-and-further movement, from signans to signans.
Only in this way, even in epistemological frameworks devoid of a tra-ditional notion of truth, is it possible that the very act of reading provide a certain approach to what a text truly (even though never definitely) says. From this point of view, it is interesting to reread the fascinating discussion that took place between John Searle (unwillingly playing the role of the ‘literal’ man, who believed that the word copyright con-ventionally means that the excerpt of a given paper cannot be repro-duced without permission) and Jacques Derrida who, in a true kabalistic mood, from the unstable combination copyright draws infinite inferences on the instability and fragility of Searle’s language and on the decon-structibility of every linguistic utterance. Focused as a new and unfaith-ful Torah, the text of Searle allows Derrida to read in it something else, other than what his adversary believed it to mean, and by and through which he in fact has been meant:
The questioning initiated by the logic and the graphics of Sec does not stop at the security of the code, nor at its concept. I cannot pursue this problem too far, since that would only add new complications to a discussion that is already too slow, overdetermined, and overcoded in all respects. I shall simply observe that this line of questioning is opened in the first of See’s three parts, and to be exact by the following phrase: “The perhaps paradox-ical consequence of my here having recourse to iteration and to code: the disruption, in the last analysis, of the authority of the code as a finite system of rules, at the same time, the radical destruction of any context as the protocol of code” (p. 180).
The same direction, that of an iterability that can only be what it is in the impurity of its self-identity (repetition altering and alteration identifying), is charted by the following propositions: “As far as the internal semiotic context is concerned, the force of the rupture is no less important: by virtue of its essential iterability, a written syntagm can always be detached from the chain in which it is inserted or given without causing it to lose all possibility of functioning, if not all possibility of ‘communicat-ing’, precisely. One can perhaps come to recognize other possibilities in it by inscribing
