Abstract
It is well known that Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jacques Derrida are associated with “hermeneutics” and “deconstruction,” respectively. Both of these terms they drew from Heidegger, so one could assume that for all their differences there are similarities between them also. That may have been what prompted Professor Gadamer to seek in the late seventies a friendly Auseinandersetzung with Derrida— which eventually took place April 25-27, 1981, at the Goethe Institute in Paris.1 Indeed, Manfred Frank, who was instrumental in arranging the 1981 symposium put forward in his paper at the same conference four areas of common ground between “Neostrukturalismus” and hermeneutics: First both are “after Hegel, after Heidegger, after Nietzsche,” and thus neither of them finds in absolute consciousness any escape from history and human finitude. Second, in neither of them is a transcendental value evoked to justify life; rather values emerge from an “infinitely perspectival interpretation.” Third, neither of them finds the epistemological subject to be the lord of his own being; rather “self-understanding,” as Gadamer calls it, comes about in a semiotic context of a world “into whose structure a certain interpretation of the meaning of being has already entered. Finally, both neostructuralism and hermeneutics are both philosophies of language in which language guides the onward march of ‘consciousness’.”2
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Notes
See Text und Interpretation,ed. Philippe Forget (Munich:Fink, 1984). The texts from this volume relating to the encounter between Gadamer and Derrida (plus three subsequent essays by Gadamer and fifteen essays of commentary) have been translated by Diane Michelfelder and Richard Palmer under the title Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989).
“Die Grenzen der Beherrschbarkeit der Sprache: Das Gespräch als Ort der Differenz von Neostrukturalismus und Hermeneutik,” in TI op.cit., pp. 181–82; trans. DD, op.cit., p.151.
See Martin Heidegger. Hegel’s Concept of Experience, trans. Kinley Dove (New York: Harper and Row, 1970).
See Derrida’s interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, 9 September 1983, a translation of which appeared in Derrida & Difference, ed. David Wood and Robert Bernasconi (Conventry, England: Parousia Press, 1985 [published in the U.S. by Northwestern University Press]), p. 115. Of Sartre he remarks in the same paragraph that he does “share the affection, almost kinship, which many feel for this man I never saw.”
Edited by Philippe Forget (Munich: Fink, 1984). The very brief encounter was at a symposium on “Text and Interpretation” at the Goethe Institute in Paris, April 25–27, 1981. Another symposium in which both Gadamer and Derrida presented papers took place at Heidelberg, in February, 1988, on the topic, “Heidegger et la politique.” See “Wenn es urn Heidegger geht, reicht der Horsaal nicht aus,” Die Welt,Feb. 2, 1988. In addition to its appearance under the title, “Letter to Dallmayr” in DD, this essay has appeared in German under the title “Dekonstruktion und Hermeneutik” in a commemorative volume for Otto Poggeler: Philosophie und Poesie: Otto Pliggeler zum 60. Geburtstag,edited by Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert (Stuttgart/ Bad-Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann/Qünther Holzboog, 1988), vol. 1, pp. 3–15.
See N. Oxenhandler, “The Man with Shoes of Wind: The Derrida-Gadamer Encounter,” DD pp. 264–68.
“Improbable Encounter,” Art Papers, special issue on Derrida/postmodernism, 10,1 (1986): pp. 36–39.
Indeed, later he says, “I cannot agree with Derrida, who would relate the hermeneutical experience, especially live conversation and dialogue, to the metaphysics of presence” (p. 95).
See his “Seeing Double: Destruktion and Deconstrucion,” in DD pp. 233–50, esp. p. 239, and also David F. Krell, “’Ashes ashes we all fall¡…: Encountering Nietzsche,” in DD pp. 222–32.
Cf. “Envoi,” Pysche: Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987), pp. 109–143, esp. 11743/trans. pp. 107–37, esp. pp. 114–37. English references will be to the Peter and Mary Ann Caws translation, “Sending: On Representation,” in Transforming the Hermeneutical Context, ed. Gayle Ormiston and Alan Schrift (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1990), hereinafter abbreviated THC.
Also presenting papers were such eminent figures as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Manfred Frank, Jean Greisch, Hans-Robert Jauß, Francois Laruelle, and Philippe Forget. The papers from the symposium were published in German translation under the title Text and Interpretation (Munich: Fink, 1984). The papers by Gadamer and Derrida, and Derrida’s response to Gadamer’s paper and Gadamer’s reply, along with three subsequent essays by Gadamer responding to Derrida, plus another fifteen essays by others commenting on the “GadamerDerrida encounter” were translated and published in DD in 1989 (see footnote 1).
Edited by John Sallis (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1987), hereinafter abbreviated DP and in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galilee), hereinafter P.
Date of Hitler’s bloody purge of the S.A. (Brown Shirts).
Derrida cites the German: “Der Mensch ‘hat’ nicht Hande, sondem die Hand hat das Wesen des Menschen inner’ which I would translate, with explanatory insertions, as follows: ”The [fully] human being does not ‘have’ hands [as an appendage to an essence of anther kind], but rather [since the hand depends on speech and “upsurges” from speech] the hand lies within the very essence or nature of being human“ (Parmenides in GA 54 [1982]: p. 118; DP p. 178.
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Palmer, R.E. (1994). Gadamer and Derrida as Interpreters of Heidegger: On Four Texts of Gadamer and Four Texts of Derrida. In: Stapleton, T.J. (eds) The Question of Hermeneutics. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 17. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1160-7_12
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