wonder) how all this relates to the question we are considering here, the question concerning some original defect in some truth. I shall tell you in due course. Right now I want you to consider another "questioning" sort of quotation. Here it comes: "Here the 'godless' becomes the 'blameless'; the man whose 'conduct' is an 'eloquent sermon' makes the 'professional preachers' seem odds-on favorites to be 'narrow-minded and bigoted'" (Regan 223). In another context (once again, I shall invoke The Scarlet Letter) we encounter passages such as this one: "thus, the scarlet letter had the effect of the cross on a nun's bosom. It imparted to the wearer a kind of sacredness which enabled her to walk securely amid all peril" (157). What begins to loom large here (and is, consequently, writ large here, too) is something in the nature of a paradox (para + doxa = aside/beside itself + opinion). To spell this out more clearly, I might say as follows: from two radically unrelated con/texts we seem to be getting the message that the good are really bad whereas the bad are really good. No comment. That's a lie (I mean the "no comment" above, of course). The truth is that perhaps the truth itself is always already a lie. This does not work vice versa. In other words, lies are not therefore truths, except of course the ones that let you know that that's what they are from the beginning (works of fiction, for example - which would make "works of fact" [factually "true" works] really lies, which is [and I kid you not, in a sense] what they really are. So there). Here's cryptic proof for this (nothing is too good for Uncle Steve's students): Culler exclaims, explaining a point in Derrida, that "[m]eaning is context-bound, but context is boundless" (123). This leads Culler to consider that "structural openness of context" which is "essential to all disciplines; the scientist discovers that factors previously disregarded are relevant to the behavior of cert...
