intertext

The conflict of interpretations, fo use Paul Ricoeur's ferm,

foday haunfs both philosophy and all forms of aesfhefic
crificism. On fhe mosf elemenfary of levels, fhe conflicf is befween "trust" and "suspicion," although fhe quesfion to be
answered is, frusf and suspicion of whaf? Of fhe ofher person's motives? Of fhe verbal or visuai languages involved in
communicafion? Of the very nature of human communicafion ifself? Posfmodern hermeneufics, exemplified in HansGeorg Gadamer, has fried fo argue fhaf by becoming aware
of fhe piffalls and dilemmas involved in fhe encounfer wifh
work of arf, we can achieve a degree of "shared horizon"
wifhin which meaningful undersfanding becomes possible.
Posfsfrucfuralisf philosophers and critics, suspicious of fhe
ferms of "horizon," "hisfory," and "mufualify" wifh which fhe
hermeneufics of frusf addresses fhem, are more insisfenf fhaf
"good will" is af boffom "good will fo power," fo use Derrida's
piquanf variafion of Niefzsche's verbal formula,
Gadamer claims, in Truth and Method \ha^ "fhe experience
of encounfering a work of arf opens up a world." (Richard
Palmer's paraphrase, p. 167 of fhe book cifed below.) Derrida,
for whom fhe work of arf by no means opens up any deferminable "world," energefically dispufes such conclusions.
In fhe exchange abouf which Richard Palmer writes, Derrida's humane and humorous fwisf on Niefzsche's phrase
allows Gadamer fo reforf fhaf Derrida's deconsfrucfive efforfs
sfill evidence fhe real "good will" which validafes
hermeneufics rafher fhan deconsfrucfion. The indecisive oufcome of fhis debafe befween fwo masfers opposing viewpoinfs suggesfs fhaf fhe issue of whaf we can frusf and how
much we can frusf if, a quesfion unhappily inherifed from
Niefzsche, will remain a permanenf ifem on fhe agendas of
posfmodern arf and science alike.
If is because of fhe fundamenfal issues underiying fhe 1981
Gadamer-Derrida debafe fhaf Art Papers asi<ed Richard
Palmer, whose Hermeneutics (Norfhwesfern Universify Press,
1969) was fhe firsf major American freafmenf of Gadamer,
fo summarize fhe franscripfs prinfed in fhe German volume
Text und Interpretation. Readers inferesfed in Palmer's own
quesf for a posfmodern mefhod of undersfanding or revisioning beyond fhe disconfenfs of modernify may wish fo
consulf his informai "Exposfulafions on fhe Posfmodern Turn"
in Krisis *2 ($7 from fhe Infernafional Circle for Research in
Philosophy, 1421 Branard St., Houston, TX 77006) or his 1975
Journal of Religion essay "Toward a Posfmodern Inferprefive
Self-Awareness."

Improbable
Encounter:
Gadamer
and Derrida
Richard A, Palmer

mprobable as it was, the encounter did take place. A

colloquium at the Goethe Institute in Paris in late April
'81 brought together for the first time Hans-Georg
Gdamer and Jacques Derrida: the most articulate
representatives of the mc^t important movements in
European philosophy since 1960hermeneutics and poststructuralism. The debate focussed on, and in part exemplified,
the nature and limits of conversation. The physical encounter
only confirmed the difficulties in real conversation between the
two sides, as the announced topic, Nietzsche, became a point
of contention for their respective interpretive strategies,
Derrida's questions and Gadamer's response were concerned
to show that the other's thought, while trying to overcome
metaphysics, really is still trapped in it
Fortunately for us who were not present there remains a
"trace" of the conference: Text und Interpretation.^ The volume
contains Gadamer and Derrida's papers, their questions and
responses, and other papers by French and German scholars
working with hermeneutics and poststructuralist thought^

I. Gadamer Addresses Derrida

Gadamer's paper, simply titled " Text und Interpretation, "

begins with a sort of apologia pro vita sua, or perhaps an apologia
pro hermenutica sua. Looking back at the age of 81, he recalls his
starting point of a critique of the idealism and methodologism
of the '20 s, and his turn to platonic and Hegelian dialectic and
Heidegger's analysis of existential understanding, out of which

36

ART PAPERS

he evolved his themes of human understanding limited by

history and by its ownfinitenature. Without saying so directly,
Gadamer points to the difference between his placement in
history (bom in 1900, classically educated) and his experience
of philosophical issues and that of Derrida, who was bom in
1929 and belongs to a quite different generafion. Gadamer
summed up what he has tried to do as follows: " I have ever
sought to argue for finitude [ or " unfinishabity"] of all experience of meaning, and out of the Heideggerian insight into
the central significance of human finitude to draw conclusions
for hermeneufics," (p, 27) This milder version of Nietzsche's
perspectivism seems an effort to suggest a common ground
with Derrida.
" Under these circumstances " Gadamer goes on to say, " the
(recent) encounter with the French scene has been a real
challenge to me. In particular, Derrida has shown that the later
Heidegger never really broke with the logocentrism of metaphysics. As soon as he asks about the essence of truth or the
meaning of being, he is speaking the language of metaphysics
which sees meaning as something out there which can be found
out"(p, 27) There, Gadamer says, Nietzsche seems to be
more radical, since meaning is not found " out there" but is
something forcibly created by the will to power. According to
the interpretafion, only then is the grip of metaphysics really
broken. But says Gadamer,

this carrying forward by Derrida of Heideggerian

insightSy understanding itself as a radicalization of
those insights finds that it must if it is to be consistent
completely throw out Heidegger's own Nietzschecritique, Nietzsche is viewed ( from this new standpoint) not as the extreme of forgetfulness of Being
which has culminated in concepts of value and effectivenessy but the true overcoming of metaphysics, in
which Heidegger remains entrapped as he directs his
inquiry toward the meaning of being as toward some
kind of disclosable logos.(p. 27)
Gadamer remarks that this reading of Heidegger should not
blind us to the fact that Heidegger's project was to overcome
metaphysics the later Heidegger turned to poetry to escape
the language of metaphysics,
Gadamer goes on to concede that in his encounter with
Derrida's more radical Heidegger interpretation, he became
aware that his own effort to " translate" Heidegger remained
within the romantic tradition of the Geisteswissenschaften (" humanities" ed, ) and its humanistic heritage. " But " he asserts
in his own defense, "precisely over againsf this prevailing
tradition of'historicism' I have tried to take a critical stand"
Gadamer goes on to concede that perhaps Heidegger's radical
critique of Husserl's phenomenological neo-Kantianism put
him in a position to recognize in Nietzsche the extreme endpoint of what he called the "oblivion of Being." But Gadamer
points out
this is an external criticism which does not fall back
behind Nietzsche but goes beyond him. What I miss in
French thinking is a grasp of the tentative, questioning
nature of Nietzsche's thinking. Only by ignoring this
can it maintain that the experience of Being behind
metaphysics which Heidegger is concerned to disclose, is somehow surpassed by Nietzsche's extremism
in radicality....(p. 28)
Gadamer deals with language in the model of dialogue, for
dialogue has the possibility of breaking out of the static forms of
scientific thinking, and forces us to deal with the otherness of
the other, to communicate, to consider language "a bridge that
communicates with the other and over the flowing stream of
otherness" rather than" a box.,. limited by our self- transactions
and walled away from ever really communicafing and expressing ourselves, "(p, 31)
Gadamer discusses the meaning of the words" interpretation"
and "text" The perspective one requires in order to deal with
texts and their interpretation goes vastly beyond linguistics and
grammar. The latter are concerned with general rules and
structure of communication but not with what is actually said
For hermeneutics however, it is the understanding of the
individual utterance that is important Knowing the functioning
of language is only a precondition for text interpretatioa just as
it is a precondition of understanding that you can actually hear
the person who is speaking or make out what is written on a
page.(p. 36)
Gadamer asks: "How do texts stand in relation to language?
What is it that can go via language into texts? What is agreement
between speakers, and what does it mean that something like a
text can be held in common, that it can be one and the same text
for both? "( p. 31 ) Among the conditions Gadamer finds necessary for conversation about texts is mutual good will on the
part of partners in the conversation. It is this thesis that Derrida
takes issue with in his response to Gadamer.
n. Derrida's Three Questions

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

(between the partners), or a general restructuring of

the context even to the concept of what is context
itself? I am not referring here to any psychological
doctrine in peirficular but to the quesHon of what
characterizes the possibility of a psychoanalysis of a
psychoanalytically interested interpretafion. Such an
interpretation would indeed perhaps stand closer to
interpretation in the style of Nietzsche than that other
tradition from Schleiermacher to Gadamer, (p, 57)
Derrida had deep reservations about rooting one's reflections in "the life-context of living dialogue." This was one of
Gadamer's decisive points says Derrida, yet in Derrida's view
this goes back to a context- related coherence that explicitly or
not has the form of a system,
Derrida relates this problem of coherence and contextrelatedness to Gadamer's remarks on the definition of literary
texts. Recalling a quesfion about the closedness of a corpus, he
asks: " What is context in this regard and strictly speaking what
is the enlarging of context? Continually progressing expansion?
Or is it not rather a discontinuous restructuring? This was
especially problematic for me in everything Gadamer said
about the definifion of literary, poefic or ironic texts." (p.
57)
The third question had to do with good will, and with making
"understanding" "understanding the other," and "understanding each other" the conditions of interpretation. Again,
Derrida quesdons whether understanding is really a process of
continually unfolding relatedness which seems to be the view
of hermeneuticsy whether it takes understanding or misunderstanding as its starting-point Rather, he suggests isn't the
condition of understanding a break of relatedness, even a break
as relationship, a cancelling of all mediation? Furthermore, the
appeal to "the experience we all have of X" which Gadamer
emphasizes, is not to be some kind of metaphysics of experience. Yet metaphysics is often thought of in terms of the selfpresentation of experience. "For my part" says Derrida, "I am
not sure that we even have this experience at all that Professor
Gadamer has in mind namely that in dialogue harmony
(agreement understanding) and success-confirming agreement take place."(p. 58)
Derrida then asks: "Does there not indeed come into view
in the web of these questions and remarks, which I leave here in
their improvised and ellipfical form, another way of thinking
'text'?"(p. 58)
in. Gadamer Replies

Gadamer's reply, titled " Nevertheless: The Power of Good

Will " displays the dialogical good will to which he refers in his
paper and for which he is well known. He opens by regretting
that his remarks on text and interpretatioa which had Derrida's
position in mind when they were framed did not achieve their
goal of provoking a discussion of the issues they raised. Rather,
Derrida chose to bring in the Kanfian conception of good will
and to try to relate his remarks to the" epoch of metaphysics."
Gadamer reiterates that" good will" in dialogue has nothing to
do with the KanHan metaphysics of will but refers to the
Socratic principle that one strengthens the arguments of one's
dialogical partner rather than weakens them if one is to achieve
understanding. "Such a procedure seems to me essential for
every understanding. This is a simple consideration and has
nothing to do with an' appeal' least of all does it have anything
to do with an ethics. Even unmoral beings take the trouble to
understand each other. I cannot believe that Derrida, in truth,
does not agree with me about this. Whoever opens his mouth
wants to be understood otherwise we would not write and
speak.... Derrida directs quesHons to me and must assume that I
am disposed to understand them,"p. 59)
Gadamer says that he certainly has not been understood if
Derrida thinks he would extend the classical forms of understanding into psychoanalytic hermeneutics. " My goal has been
the very opposite, to show that psychoanalyHc interpretation
goes,.. toward understanding not what one intends to say but
tiiat which one does not want to say or even admit to oneself. "
(pp. 59-60) "Even in my view this procedure is a breach, a
rupture and not a method that wishes to understand the
other."
Gadamer further says he would be the last to deny that one
can approach expressions with a quite different intention from
that of making an agreement in understanding possible, "My
question was precisel)^ When and why does one make such a
breach? " He has wanted to make this clear, he says because
Ricoeur's pairing of the "hermeneutics of suspicion" with the
"hermeneutics of what is intended" makes it appear that these
are simply two methods, side by side, of reaching the same
January/February

37

kind of understanding. This is emphatically not the case.

In response to Derrida's charge that his appeals to experience, to living dialogue, and to what we all recognize, are
freighted with metaphysical assumptions* Gadamer suggests
that what he has in mind is something like what Derrida called
collocution, in Speech and Phenomena, a joint set of conventions

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

38

ART PAPERS

Derrida's " Good WiU to Power (II) "

The subtitle of Derrida's paper, which seems to have been its

only title in the original French version, is" Interpreting Signatures ( Nietzsche^ Heidegger). " Here we have a familiar theme
in Derrida, the signature, applied to Heidegger's Nietzsche
interpretation. It continues the trajectory which can be seen in
the recently translated The Ear ofthe Other in which it is the ear of
the other that receives the text and attaches the signature:^
The most important thing about the ear's difference... is
that the signature becomes effective performed and
performing not at the moment it apparently takes
place, but only later, when ears will have managed to
receive the message. In some way the signature will
take place on the addressee's side....(pp. 50-51)
What is interesting is the interplay between metaphors of
hearing, voice, and writing (the signature). One "hears" a
signature. One hears a voice: "The gesture consists in hearing,
while we speak and as acutely as possible, Nietzsche's voice. "
The philosopher of criture, of the critique of phonocentric
views of language, has come a long way.
In other respects, Derrida seems to be venturing on the
Gadamerian turf of the positive transmission of the culture
through interpreting texts. But the reception of those texts has a
Nietzschean cast of active interpretatioa One must"produce"
the signature interpretation is a political gesture. Historically
and politically, says Derrida, " it is we who have been entrusted
with the responsibility of the signature of the other's text which
we have inherited." The signature is not only a word or a
proper name at the end of a text but the operation as a whole,
the text as a whole, the whole of active interpretation which has
left a trace or remainder. It is in this respect that we have a
political responsibility. "( pp. 51-52)
Given this understanding of the reading of signatures, one
can understand Derrida's choice of the theme " interpreting
signatures" to suggest his alternative approach to text interpretation. In this case, however, what is at issue is the ear of
Heidegger as if perceives Nietzsche's signature. Heidegger's
hearing, Derrida suggests^ is already metaphysically conditioned
by a totalizing gesture that is typified in his one-word title
Nietzsche. Derrida proposes two questions: one centers around
the name of Nietzsche and the other around totality.
First Derrida raises the issue of what is referred to by the
name of " Nietzsche. " Can " Nietzsche" be a unity, as Heidegger's analysis presupposes? "But" says Derrida,
Who has ever said that a person bears a single
name? Certainly not Nietzsche. And likewise, who
has said or decided that there is something like a
Western metaphysics^ something which would be
capable of being gathered up under this name and this
name only? What is it the uniqueness of a name,
the assembled unity of Westem metaphysics? Is it any
more or less than the craving or desire ( dots of ellipses
substitute for this word in Heidegger's Nietzsche
citation! ) for a proper name, for a single, unique name
and a thinkable genealogy? (p. 72)
It is just this totalizing that Derrida identifies with metaphysics and finds that Heidegger practices throughout his
Nietzsche interpretation. In fact he finds Heidegger over and
over again trying through his interpretation to "rescue"
Nietzsche at any cost from ambiguity. It is Heidegger, not
Nietzsche, who is the last metaphysician! It is Heidegger who
demands that the many-sided Nietzsche be a thinker who

thinks one thought and Heidegger's following of a basic

assumption of metaphysics causes him to interpret Nietzsche as
he does Metaphysics assumes "that to think and say must
mean to think and say something that would be a single matter
and a single matter....It is the legein of this logos, indeed, the
gathering of this logic, that the Nietzsches ( plural) have put in
question." (p. 73)
Heidegger's Nietzsche- interpretation, says Derridti, rescues
Nietzsche by embalming him as a metaphysician albeit the
last metaphysician. Derrida concludes his analysis of the first
question with an amusing image (an indirect allusion to TTIMS
Spake Zarathustra). He refers to Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche
as

this ambiguous life-saving act, in the course of which

one stretches out the net for the tightrope- walker...
only insofar as one has made sure that the unmasked
tightrope- walker, protected by the unity of his name,
which in turn will be sealed by the unity of metaphysics, will not be taking any risks. In other words:
he was dead before he landed in the net.(p. 74)
Derrida deals with the issue of totality much more briefly,
and again he finds Heidegger making Nietzsche metaphysical
this time wrongly making him into a thinker of totality. Derrida
cleverly takes two citations Heidegger uses in his analysis and
says, "it appears to me that in its inner meaning, Nietzsche's
thesis ( 'eyeryffti^ has already been transposed into life and so
departs from it' ) frustrates and cuts across the whole of
Heidegger's principle.For, says Derrida, "is it not precisely
life- death that gives the value of totality its absolute priority? "
( p. 76 ) Yet the quotation asserts the need to derive everything
from life.
After all says Derrida, it was Nietzsche who went beyond
every ontological determination when he proposed that we
think being from life and not life from being.(p. 76) Agaia it
seems that Heidegger rather than Nietzsche is the last metaphyscian, that Nietzsche is suggesting a postmetaphysical
standpoint in the very quotation Heidegger is citing.
VI. Some Remarks
While this brief discussion can in no way do justice to the
richness of Derrida's paper, perhaps it has given a few indications of his approach to texts. Ironically, his strategy is more
exegetical and in that sense" hermeneutical " than Gadamer's.
It relies much more than does Gadamer's presentation on the
interpretation of texts, is the interpretation of certain very
specific texts. In Gadamer's paper, in fact one finds few direct
exegeses of specific lines of texts and more engagement in the
theory of dialogue, of text of interpretation. Derrida's paper,
although certainly an example of deconstructioa is"hermeneufical" in the broader sense the interpretation of texts as a
method and strategy of philosophical reflection.
Manfred Frank, in his introduction to the debate as presented
in the Revue Internationale de Philosophie, notes (p. 329 ) that for

all their differences, hermeneutics and poststructuralism do

have a good deal in common. Both take the" linguisfic turn" as a
theoretical basis for philosophical reflecfion; both feel obliged
to inventory the fundamental crisis in modem thought since
Hegel. Consequently, both deny that the formation of sense
can be culminated in some kind of absolute spirit or some
nontemporal self- presence; both are philosophies of the finite
world. Both, although in quite different fashions, build on the
diagnoses offered by Heidegger and Nietzsche of "occidental
rationality." Andfinally,as Frank notes, both structuralism and
hermeneufic philosophy accord a primordial significance to the

aesthetic phenomenon in particular to literature and literary

criticism for" only the aesthetic seems to safegaurd the value
of linguistic engagement in the wake of the loss of absolute
truth in the Hegelian sense" (p. 330). One may also add that
they both recognize a similar canon of foundational thinkers:
Plato, Hegel Nietzsche, Husserl Heidegger. Both pay little
attention to Sartre and Merleau- Ponty.
Yet whatever their commonalities, hermeneutics and poststructuralism have clear differences, and much energy will
undoubtedly be expended in the near future on clarifying the
contrasts between them. (See, for example, Hermeneutics and
Deconstruction, eds Hugh Silverman and Don Ihde [ Albany:
SUNY press, 1985].) It is clear that Derrida identifies hermeneufics with a fairly traditional approach to interpretation.
Perhaps a reference by Derrida to hermeneufics from The Ear of
the Other will suggest the difference. In " Otobiographiesi, "
Derrida says(p. 32) : "Our interpretations will not be readings
of a hermeneutic or exegefic sort but rather polifical interventions in the political rewriting of the text and its destinafioa "
What Derrida has in mind appears to be close to what Nietzsche
called "active interpretafion."
In any case, the" improbable debate" took place. Gadamer's
polished, smooth and carefully elaborated text provides us with
a retrospective picture of half a century of work in philosophy.
This contrasts with Derrida's modest sets of " questions" which
one is perpetually offered tantalizing promises of future analyses.
But behind the contrast in style lurks a deeper contrast between
a mode of interpretafion that seeks agreement in dialogue, and
a Nietzschean "active interpretafion" that seeks "the polifical
rewrifing of the text and its destinafion. "
References
' ed Philippe Forget (Stuttgart FinK 1984). A much shorter version containing the first part of
Gadamer's paper, Derrida's response and Gadamer's reply, but without Derrida's paper, is available in
French in the Revue International de Philosophie(1964, 38me anne, N. 15), pp 329-47). An
English translation ot Gadamer's paper by Dennis Schmidt will eventually appear in an anthology from
SNY press, ed. Brice Wachterhauser. Derrida's paper, co-translated by Richard Palmer and Diane
Michelfelder, will appear later in 1986 in the journal Philosophy and Literature.
' "Anti-Hermes," by Francois Laruelle goes into the claims for the universality made by hermeneutics and asks' what they presuppose. Says Laruelle, in hermeneutics it is the autonomy (not the
autarchy) of the signilier which is Ihe very condition for the possibility of the constitution of sense. But
this seems to suggest the universality of logocentric thinking, says Laruelle. How universal is such
universality? he asks. Laruelle argues that Derrida integrates the" signifier" into his work with the text
while hermeneutics excludes it; nevertheless, this is only an external, empirical difference between two
positions which, together, assume a pregiven circular structure of truth. Laruelle, lorhisparL proposes
what he terms a "truly universal hermeneutics" based on a unitary, yet at the same time postmetaphysical, logic.
The question of the claim to universality made by Gadamer's hermeneutics becomes a major theme
running through the volume. In his essay, "Der Streit der Universalitten (The Struggle between
Universalities)," Jean Greisch further discusses the theme of universality, arguing that Gadamer's
concept of hermeneutical universality presupposes the universality of reason, and as such tends to tall
back into logocentrism. The editor, Philippe Forget, contributes a piece entitled "Aus der Seele
Geschrie(b)en: Zur Problematik des Schreibens(criture) in Goethes Werther(Written from the Soul:
On the problem of Writing(e'criture) in Goethe's Werther)." Forget argues that the power of a work lies
not in its universal emotional appeal for each successive generation, but in its force as trail-blazer as
battering ram thus his opening caption, " Novel as Trailblazer and Battering Ram" in the case of
Werther, the work is claimed to be"writteryscreamed from the soul."
The tinal essay in the volume, " Die Grenzen der Beherrschbarkeit der Sprache: Das Gesprach als Drt
der Differenz von NeoStrukturalismus und Hermeneutik(The Lirriits of the Masterability of Language:
Dialogue as Point of Difference between Neostructuralism and Hermeneutics)" by Manfred Frank
raises the issue ol universality in relation to the question of the universality and scope of dialogue in
hermeneutics, especially since dialogue plays little role in poststructuralism. Of all the participants,
Frank is perhaps best equipped to deal with the possible dialogue between hermeneutics and
" Neostructuralism" from a standpoint tully knowledgeable of both sides As Frank notes at the outset of
. his essay, there seems to be an epistemological gap between the two sides, and neither side really
troubles itself to attain an adequate knowledge of fhe other.
' See also Nietzsches Ofobiographie oder Politik des Eigennamens: Die Lehre Nietzsches, OltenFreiburg'Breisgau, Band 1,1980 ; also in French as Otobiographies: L'enseignement de Nietzsche et la .
Politique du nom Propre, Paris: Galilee, 1984. L oreille del autre (t^ontreal: VIb Editeur, 1982) was
translated as The Ear of the Other Otobiography, Transference, Translatioa ed. Christie V. McDonald,
New York: Schocken Books, 1985.

Richard Palmer is professor of philosophy at MacMurray College in

Jacksonville, Illinois.

January/February

39

Copyright of Art Papers is the property of Art Papers and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple
sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print,
download, or email articles for individual use.