Fish's reader response critique is composed of two interdependent ideas: first, that the meaning of texts is shaped by the reading experience itself, and second, that these meanings cannot be judged correct or incorrect, but simply belonging to one or another "interpretive community". The first idea can be identified as the executive aspect of Reader Response Criticism because it analyzes the act of reading, while the second idea is the epistemological aspect of the theory because it limits the knowledge we can acquire about a text to the merely relative. Studied independently, each aspect of Reader Response Theory offers strong arguments in itself that counter the formalist position of the New Critics. But as we will see, the application of Fish's theory as a whole creates distinct interpretive communities that can be judged by their relative truth values, which leads to a contradiction: if an interpretive community is closer to the "truth" than a On the other hand, then either the executive theory is wrong because an objective text exists, or the concept of interpretive community is irrelevant because we can express value judgments on a particular interpretation. In any case, logic dictates that Fish's theory is internally consistent, and as shown below, this is simply not the case. We will show how Fish's theory defeats itself by applying it to a curious fragment of Marguerite Yourcenar's Mémoires d'Hadrien, a long, imagined meditation of the dying Roman emperor Hadrian. In the original French, Yourcenar writes, La chair elle-même, cet instrument de muscles, de sang, et d'épiderme, ce rouge nuage dont l'âme est l'éclair. It is possible to provide a word-for-word translation version without loss of specificity:The fl...... middle of the paper ......through a simple misunderstanding extracts something like an incorrect meaning from a text. We thus find ourselves faced with Fish's "disappearing" text, something separate from the reader. Second, we used different interpretations of a text to synthetically create two antagonistic interpretive communities that we could judge absolutely. The feasibility of this judgment refutes Fish's argument that literary criticism should limit itself to creating and grouping interpretations, but not judging them. Indeed, we have demonstrated that the tools of executive Reader Response Criticism allow us to judge the interpretive communities created by the epistemological theory of Reader Response. We have not shown that any aspect of the theory is impractical, but we have found that reader response theory is an incoherent whole, incapable of accommodating its excessive components..