Abstract
The few passages where Martin Heidegger stressed the “futural”1 possibility of hermeneutics should be read not only as another indication that his understanding of hermeneutics is more radical, anarchic, and progressive than Hans-Georg Gadamer’s but also as directly concerned with Being’s event. Since the publication in 1989 of Contributions to Philosophy (a text whose thesis had already been circulating), philosophers from different traditions have begun to acknowledge the onto-logical nature of the event either deconstructively (Jacques Derrida), analytically (Donald Davidson), or mathematically (Alain Badiou), but few have related it to hermeneutics.2 Although Gadamer’s conservative hermeneutics emphasized the event of interpretation,3 it did not engage in the ontological features of the event, features that are bound, as we will see, with the anarchic nature of hermeneutics.
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Notes
Although Heidegger only once mentions the futural possibility of hernie-neutics (“The possibility of access to history is grounded in the possibility according to which any specific present understands how to be futural This is the first principle of all hermeneutics. It says something about the Being of Dasein, which is historicity itself”. (M. Heidegger, The Concept of Time, trans. W. McNeill. London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992, 20))
J. Derrida, “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event”, Critical Inquiry 33:2 (2007): 441–61.
D. Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980, 2001.
A. Badiou, Being and Event, trans. O. Feltham. New York: Continuum, 2005.
See Pol Vandevelde, The Task of the Interpreter: Text, Meaning, and Negotiation. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005, 15–62, chapter 2
G. Vattimo, “The Political Outcome of Herrneneutics”, in J. Malpas and S. Zabala, eds. Consequences of Hermeneutics: Fifty Years After Gadamer’s Truth and Method. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010, 286.
J. Searle, Freedom and Neurobiology. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, 32.
H. Marcuse, Heideggerian Marxism, eds. R. Wolin and J. Abromeit. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005, 158.
G. Vattimo, Dialogue with Nietzsche, trans. W. McCuaig. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008, 130.
M. Heidegger, Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity, trans. J. van Buren. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999, 14.
M. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000, 97.
M. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art”, 1936, in J. Young and K. Haynes, eds. and trans. Off the Beaten Track. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 37.
W. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”, 1939, in H. Eiland and M.W. Jennings eds. Selected Writings: 1938–1940, vol. 4. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003, 392.
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© 2014 Santiago Zabala
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Zabala, S. (2014). Being at Large: The Only Emergency Is the Lack of Events. In: Marder, M., Zabala, S. (eds) Being Shaken: Ontology and the Event. Palgrave Studies in Postmetaphysical Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137333735_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137333735_7
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