Improbable Encounter: Gadamer and Derrida: Intertext
Improbable Encounter: Gadamer and Derrida: Intertext
Improbable Encounter: Gadamer and Derrida: Intertext
Improbable
Encounter:
Gadamer
and Derrida
Richard A, Palmer
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ART PAPERS
Derrida's response to Gadamer's paper carries the provocative title: "Good Will to Power (I) " and the subtitle, "Three
Questions for Hans- Georg Gadamer, " Thefirstquestion has to
do with Gadamer's appeal to good will and the "absolute
obligation to strive for agreement in understanding. " " Does not
such a way of speaking.,. belong to a bygone epoch, that of the
[Kantian] metaphysics of will?"p. 57)
The second question is directed to the issue of how Gadamer
proposes (according to Derrida's understanding of the previous evening's lecture) to integrate a psychoanalytic hermeneutics with his axiom about good will:
What does "good will" mean in a psychoanalysis?
Or even merely in a discourse which is something like
psychoanalytic interchange? Will a simple expansion
of the interpretive context suffice there as professor
Gadamer seems to have in mind? Is there not on the
contrary, as I would prefer to say, necessarily a chasm
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that makes communication possible. To make such an assumption is not to assume either a metaphysical conception of truth,
nor a metaphysics of presence. On the contrary, "this is no
metaphysics but simply names the presupposition which every
partner in a dialogue must make even Derrida if he
wishes to direct questions to me, "
As to ruptures in understanding Gadamer does not deny
them; the solidarities that make dialogue possible do not suffice
to make conclusive agreement possible. Rather, one is always
coming up against the limits of dialogue, or the experience of
talking past one another. Nevertheless, the possibility of
agreement in understanding is something that " all human
solidarity, the very existence of society, " presupposes,
Gadamer reiterates his view of the literary "text" as endless
provocation to understanding, and understanding as an infinite
task. " Every reading that seeks to understand is only a step on a
path that has no end One who treads this path knows that he
will never be done with the text "(p. 61) The text strikes its
reader and the reader takes up the task of understanding. This
is not a matter of just agreeing with one's already existent
preunderstanding but finding that understanding challenged
and transformed. In this, Gadamer concludes, he may not be so
far from Derrida as one might think.
rv. Some Remarks On the Debate
Gadamer has at least replied to Derrida's questions. To that
extent, the debate did take place. One is able to see in the two
thinkers two quite contrasting styles and positions Gadamer is
to some extent on the defensive in having a positive position
with regard to dialogical understanding as the foundation for
hermeneutics. But he also makes the best of his position by
what one may call the movement of encompassing of universalizing, of making assertions one finds it hard to deny. This
clever move puts Derrida on the defensive against being
engulfed one might say, by universality.
On the other hand, Derrida has the advantage of a Heideggerian and Nietzschean radicality, an oppositional mode of
thinking that feeds on the suspicion that Gadamer's appeals to
consensus thinking and to common experience do not really do
the job. For instance, they do not seem to account for the
striking character of works of art The experience of separation,
strangeness, and challenge from works of art (as well as the
works of"thinkers"), which Heidegger conveys so well in his
later work, does not seem to find adequate theoretical explanation or grounding in a convention- based, consensus- oriented
description of the understanding process even if one accepts^
as Derrida does not the horizon of appeals to " experience. "
On the other hand, it is hard not to score a point for Gadamer
when he finds in both Nietzsche and Derrida a certain selfrefuting perspectivism. It may be a matter of which contradiction
one wants the experience of art contradicting the description
of conventional preunderstanding in Gadamer, or a denial of
even pragmatic truth-claims in Derrida that traps one into
asserting that one does not really expect to communicate.
Furthermore, Derrida's identification of Gadamer's" good will"
with Kantian will, and thus with a metaphysics of will seems to
be far- fetched, as even editor Philippe Forget suggests. Derrida
is satisfied, in his response, to be suggestive: lurking behind
my remarks and questions, he says, is another and quite
different view of the text
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ART PAPERS
January/February
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