| Summary: | This essay is a meditation on the tropic nature of 'adulterous text.' I argue that insofar as all texts are in language, no text can be faithful in any rigorous sense that takes into account the ineluctably pluralistic nature of language as defined since at least Wilhelm von Humboldt. The argument takes the form of a tour through attacks made since the early nineteenth century on monistic theories culminating in Saussure and Chomsky. My conclusion: In life loyalty in marriage is a good thing; in language, faithfulness in a text can never be more than a metaphor-by definition a figure of speech, not, as Kant would say, the thing itself.
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