The institutionalized circle of collective misrecognition, which is the basis of belief in the value of an ideological discourse, is established only when the structure of the field of production and circulation of this discourse is such that the negation it effects (by saying what it says only in a form which suggests that it is not saying it) is brought together with interpreters who are able, as it were, to misrecognize again the negated message: in other words, the circle is established only when what is denied by the form is 're-misrecognized', that is, known and recognized in the form, and only in the form, in which it is realized by denying itself. In short, a discourse of denial calls for a formal (or formalist) reading which recognizes and reproduces the initial denial, instead of denying it in order to discover what it denies. The symbolic violence that any ideological discourse implies, in so far as it based on misrecognition which calls for re-misrecognition. is only operative inasmuch as it is able to make its addressees treat it the way it demands to be treated, namely, with all due respect, observing the proper formalities required by its formal properties. Ideological production is all the more successful W’hen it is able to put in the wrong anyone who attempts to reduce it to its objective truth. The ability to accuse the science of ideology of being ideological is a specific characteristic of the dominant ideology: uttering the hidden truth of a discourse is scandalous because it says something which was ‘the last thing to be said’.
The most sophisticated symbolic strategies can never produce completely the conditions of their own success and would be doomed to failure if they could not count on the active complicity of a whole body of individuals who defend orthodoxy and orchestrate - by
amplifying it - the initial condemnation of reductive readings/0
Heidegger need only assert that ‘philosophy is essentially untimely because it is one of the few things that can never find an immediate echo in the present1/1 or. as he suggests in his introduction to Nietzsche, that *it belongs to the essence of every genuine philosophy that its contemporaries invariably misunderstand it'42 * variations on the theme of the ‘accursed philosopher' which are particularly colourful in his account -for all the commentators immediately to follow* suit/5 ll is the fate of all philosophical thought, once it has achieved a certain degree of strength and rigour, to be misunderstood by the contemporaries it challenges. To classify as an apostle of pathos, an advocate of nihilism and an opponent of logic and of science, a philosopher whose unique and constant concern has been the problem of truth, is one of the strangest travesties of which a frivolous age is guilty/44 ‘His thought appears as something alien to out times and everything contemporary/45
Thus the ’Letter on humanism/ most striking and most quoted of all the interventions aimed at strategically manipulating the relation between overt and latent systems, and thereby manipulating the public image of the work, has functioned as a kind of pastoral letter, an infinite source of commentaries enabling the simple evangelists of Being to reproduce for themselves the precautions inscribed in each of the master's warnings and thus to stand on the right side of the barrier between the sacred and the profane, between the initiated and the lay person As the waves of dissemination progress, expanding in ever-widening circles from authorized interpretations and inspired commentaries to scholarly theses, introductory' studies and finally textbooks, as one slides down the scale of interpretations, matched by the decline in the loftiness of the phrasing or paraphrasing, the exoteric discourse tends increasingly to return to basic truths; but, as in cmanationist philosophies, this dissemination is accompanied by a loss of value, if not of substance, and the ’trivialized' and vulgarized’ discourse carries the mark of its degradation, thus adding even more to the value of the original or founding discourse.
The relations which are established between the work of a great interpreter and the interpretations or over-interpretations it solicits. or between the self-interpretations aimed at correcting and preventing misinformed or malicious interpretations and legitimizing authorized ones, resemble perfectly - apart from their lack of a sense of humour - those which, since Duchamp, have developed between the artist and the group of his interpreters: in both cases, the production anticipates the interpretation, and. in the double-guessing game played by its interpreters, invites over-interpretation, while still
