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Nicholas Davey, Critical Excess: Overreading in Derrida, Deleuze, Levinas, Žižek and Cavell, Screen, Volume 53, Issue 2, Summer 2012, Pages 180–182, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjs015
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Despite its title, excessive this book is not. Colin Davis offers a tightly constructed critical elucidation of the problem of surplus meaning within hermeneutics. He provides an admirably slim introduction to the hermeneutical tactics and stratagems of Heidegger and Gadamer, Derrida, Deleuze, Levinas, Žižek and Cavell, as well as presenting at the end of the book a set of guidelines on how the issue of excess meaning might be safely navigated within matters of critical application. If the axiom ‘in the beginning was the word’ is accepted, then hermeneutics must also have been with us an equally long time since it recognizes that meaning is indeed obscure, not immediately accessible, and possibly also multiple and ambiguous. This volume turns on the question of whether the ambiguity of the word represents a state of fallenness or one of grace. Closet Platonists (Davis is not one of them) judge the multiplication of meaning as indicative of a fall from original meaning; on the other hand, there are those for whom the ambiguity of the word is original. Once the conjunction ‘and the word was with God’ is removed from the equation, then uncertainty and obscurity emerge as coexistent with our linguistic beginnings. Davis's sympathies lie with those ‘overreaders’ who value ambiguity as the original state of grace – as a stimulus, that is, for the generation of further meaning. For this group, efforts to fix, codify and institutionalize meaning are the devil's work of corrupting the spontaneous creative disruptiveness of language. If it is to remain ‘true’ to the original ambiguity of the word, hermeneutics should not read (seek to clarify a meaning) but overread (endeavour to generate multiple unanticipated meanings). The principal preoccupation of Davis's Critical Excess is the possibility, the thrill, perhaps the danger, of overreading. At what point, he asks, does a reading of a text become overreading (p. xii)? Is overreading wrong because it distorts what is actually in the work, or virtuous because it restores the productive ambiguity of meaning?
