비평의 윤리성과 정치성 - 힐리스 밀러의 경우

Abstract

Hillis Miller was the most outspoken and polemical among the deconstructive critics. Though he started his career as phenomenological critic, he transformed himself into a self-acclaimed propagandist of deconstructive criticism from the moment he experienced the so-called linguistic turn. In order to advocate the cause of deconstruction and spread widely its influence, he provoked powerful critics into fights over critical hegemony by misreading their texts and employing polemical rhetoric attacking their theoretical positions. But once deconstructive criticism assumed hegemony in the realm of literary studies, he made another change of positions, form a polemic writer to an ethical writer. This paper is an attempt to explain the nature of his change of positions, based on the thrust of his Ethics of Reading. According to Miller, a critic can be ethical only insofar as he humbly submits himself to and strictly follows the imperative of language in his act of reading. But such a reading is impossible since we cannot read language as language, and it turns out that every reading, however rigorous it may be, is a misreading. The act of reading, though oriented toward a true reading, produces only a misreading. Then how does the critic become ethical? His misreading becomes ethical the moment he assumes a full responsibility for the result of his misreading as if it were a true reading. From this ethical point of view Miller's misreading, sometime blatant one as in the case of his reading of Abrams' text, can be justified ethically since he embraced, affirmed, and defended his misreading as if it were one legitimate reading. This paper ends with the argument that such a misreading posited as a true reading becomes a cornerstone of institutionalizing deconstructive criticism.