Much of what I have said will be disallowed by defenders of a hermeneutics more conservative than mine; and, doubtless with scorn, by a flourishing radical party, which would not admit that its investigations are properly to be called hermeneutic, and which despises the very word “interpretation.” Yet we are all, on a broad enough view, concerned with the same problem. Some suppose that it is right to inquire strictly into the question of what the text originally meant. Others wish to discover what it originally means, a more charismatic quest. Some seek to liberate texts from all historical constraint by a process of “deconstruction,” others speak of foregoing the banal pleasures of continuity with the original sense for the sake of a joy more acute, if more dismaying, a jouissance that goes beyond the pleasure principle and arises from a quasi-sexual experience of loss and perversity. Yet all practice divination, however intermittently, erroneously, dishonestly, or disappointedly; most of all, disappointedly. For whether one thinks that one’s purpose is to re-cognize the original meaning, or to fall headlong into a text that is a treacherous network rather than a continuous and systematic sequence, one may be sure of one thing, and that is disappointment. It has sometimes been thought, and in my opinion rightly, that the world is also like that; or that we are like that in respect of the world. Yet we have ways of working through the world, and ways of explaining unfollowable texts. There are certain conditions which make the task more comfortable: more or less acquiescent in the authority of institutions, more or less happy that we have an acquired taste for fulfillments, for a state of affairs in which everything hangs together, we accept a measure of private intermittency in our interpretations — unless we are unhappy because such acquiescence is an acceptance of untruth, and prefer antinomianism and the unhappiness of an even more complete isolation. In any case, a sense of mystery is a different thing from an ability to interpret it, and the largest consolation is that without interpretation there would be no mystery. What must not be looked for is some obvious public success. To see, even to perceive, to hear, even to understand, is not the same thing as to explain or even the same thing as to have access. The desires of interpreters are good because without them the world and the text are tacitly declared to be impossible; perhaps they are, but we must live as if the case were otherwise.
– The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (1980), p. 126