---

Dogmatic approaches interpret literary texts in definitive ways. However, literary texts do lose their supposed absolute and final meanings when approached from a poststructuralist perspective. Consequently, it is possible to have multiple readings of a text from different perspectives. Drawing on Derridean deconstruction of binary oppositions, this paper studies a miniature painting by Sultan Mohammad Naqqash based on Hafez’s poetry. Hafez’s divan is always open to various interpretations between spiritual and worldly approaches. Contrary to the classical interpretations in which a definitive meaning is sought after, “Heavenly and Earthly Inebriation” painting by Sultan Mohammad deconstructs this opposition and presents a new reading of the poem. Based on an analytic-historical method, we argue that this painting creates a new hermeneutic world by geometric composition, colors, and characterization. The painting, we conclude, maintains the poetic ambiguity of Hafez’s poetry. Accordingly, we can say that there is no final meaning in this painting because the spectators simultaneously experience both poles of this opposition and, as a result, for them there is no absolute interpretation.  

---

While the study of the concept of transcendental signified is at the core of philosophical studies; its strengths are often applied in linguistics and literature. The present paper examines Walter Benjamin's linguistic approach to the subject of transcendental signified in Kafka's The Castle. Because of its high capacity for learning and discovering a sequence of transcendental signified in its key elements, this novel was selected. Martin Heidegger, and especially his successor Jacques Derrida, tried to use the concept of transcendental signified to criticize the tradition of metaphysical thinking. However, the aim of this research is to use content analysis to explore how such a method is present in Walter Benjamin's thoughts and his popular principle of three layers of language, without specifically using the word transcendental signified. The same level of meaning development that is both feasible and unlikely is found at the third level of language, which Benjamin refers to as the "arena of nonsense." In Kafka's The Castle, Benjamin's argument, which is associated with Derrida's rejection of the existence of transcendental signified, has been put to practical use. Finally, the paper concludes that the relationship between explicitness and ambiguity in the three key elements of a story, namely the character "K," " Castle," and also the job of “Surveyor," reveal the impossibility of transcendental signified, and represent the third level of Benjamin’s language.