1DECONSTRUCTION AND HERMENEUTICS:

DERRIDA AND GADAMER

by

Leon Surette

Deconstruction and Hermeneutics:Derrida and Gadamer1

It may just be an artifact of the Christian calendar, but

Western discourse seems to have been obsessed with the sense of

an ending for the entire century. An infrequently cited, but

nonetheless eloquent expression of such eschatological angst was

published in 1904, and came from the pen of perhaps the greatest

avatar of logocentrism in the social sciences, Max Weber, in the

conclusion to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The "cage" of

which he speaks is the capitalist imperative to amass wealth and

property:

No one knows who will live in this cage in the future,

or whether at the end of this tremendous development

entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a

great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither,

mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of

convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of

this cultural development, it might well be truly said:

“Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart;

this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of

civilization never before achieved” (182).

Who would expect such a condemnation of European civilization

from a pen so much ignored or vilified by voices reforming the

human sciences in the name of theory? If even Weber condemns the

logocentric civilization of Europe, who will defend it?

Much has happened politically, technologically,

economically, and philosophically since Weber expressed these

doubts. His critique was spoken from within what Heidegger calls

“metaphysics.” Some would now claim that we have surmounted,

overthrown, or simply outlived metaphysics and now inhabit

something called the “age of theory,” or the postmodern, that

which comes after the end of metaphysics.

Let us for the sake of argument suppose that the age of

theory began in 1968, a year of widespread overturnings in the

streets and institutions of Europe and America. Certainly Roland

Barthes thought he had witnessed the beginning of an end or the

end of a beginning when in 1971 he called for the creation of “a

new order of human relations” to be achieved by a fusion of what

he called “the two great epistemés of modernity, the materialistic

dialectic and the Freudian dialectic”2

We may take Barthe's call for a new order as a prophecy of

“the age of theory,” or the “postmodern,” which he expected to be

a synthesis of two putatively antithetical components of the

modern: Marxist objective materialism, and Freudian subjective

psychoanalytics. Traces of Marx and Freud are certainly

ubiquitous in postmodern texts, but even so the synthesis does

not seem to have taken the shape forecast by Barthes.3 Instead,

it is more revolutionary, more radical, more unprecedented, and

more exceptional than Barthes imagined.

Even before the upheavals of 1968, the new order of the

postmodern had declared itself at the famous Baltimore conference

of 1966 where Derrida read “Structure, Sign and Play in the

Discourse of the Human Sciences” (in French). He identified two

varieties of interpretation, one dying, the other waiting to be

born:

The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or

an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign, and

which lives the necessity of interpretation as an exile. The

other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms

play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of

man being the name of that being who, through the history of

metaphysics or of ontotheology -- in other words --

throughout his entire history -- has dreamed of full

presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end

of play (Derrida 1966).

For Derrida's audience in 1966, the oppositional positioning of

play and truth must have seemed safely within the horizon of

Structuralist relativism and anti-essentialism as expressed in

the discourses of Lévi-Strauss and Michel Foucault.4 Only when

Of Grammatology appeared in the following year (1967, translated

1976) did it become clear that the Saussurean “order of the sign”

itself had to be overcome as still infected with onto-theology

and “the metaphysics of the logos”:

... for modern linguistics, if the signifier is a trace, the

signified is a meaning thinkable in principle within the

full presence of an intuitive consciousness. ... It is at

the depth of this affirmation that the problem of

relationships between linguistics and semantics must be

posed. This reference to the meaning of a signified

thinkable and possible outside of all signifiers [the

“transcendental signified”] remains dependent on the onto-

theo-teleology that I have just evoked. It is thus the idea

of the sign that must be deconstructed through a meditation

upon writing which would merge, as it must, with the undoing

of onto-theology, faithfully repeating it in its totality and

making it insecure in its most assured evidences (73).

Of Grammatology's “meditation on writing” formulated a theory

distinct from all those that preceded it by “deconstructing” the

“idea of the sign” upon which structuralism had built its

edifice. In this way, Derrida reformulated Barthe’s reconcilable

opposition, or dialectic, between material externalities (Marx)

and internal psychological phenomena (Freud), into an

irreconcilable confrontation. The new antagonists are logocentric

systematics (Saussure) “which lives the necessity of

interpretation as an exile,” and a playful overturning

(Nietzsche) “which tries to pass beyond man and humanism.”

Derrida first disposes of the “old linguistics of the word”

(that is, Heidegger's notion that language is “the house of

Being”5) through a deconstruction founded on Saussurean

linguistics, and then deconstructs Saussurean linguistics in turn

by invoking Heidegger's “incessant meditation” upon the question

of being. According to Derrida, the latter “contributes, quite as

much as the most contemporary linguistics, to the dislocation of

the unity of the sense of being, that is, in the last instance,

the unity of the word.”6

In the 1966 talk Derrida identified his antagonist as

“humanism,” characterized as a “dream of full presence,” which

can be thought of as seeking “a meaning ... thinkable within the

full presence of an intuitive consciousness” (Derrida 1976, 22).

The antagonists are two theories of interpretation: one

“saddened, negative, nostalgic, guilty;” the other a “joyous

affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of

becoming” (Derrida 1978, 292). What we have hear is not

argumentation, but empty rhetoric.

He notes the uneasy co-existence of these antagonists in the

bosom of the “social sciences” despite their “absolute

irreconcilability.”7 An irreconcilability that perhaps accounts

for the extraordinary eschatological gesture with which he

concludes the essay, and which disingenuously disclaims any

partiality for either of these interpretations of interpretation:

For my part, although these two interpretations must

acknowledge and accentuate their difference and define their

irreducibility, I do not believe that today there is any

question of choosing . . . Here there is a kind of question,

let us still call it historical, whose conception, formation,

gestation, and labour we are only catching a glimpse of today.

I employ those words with a glance ... toward those who, in

a society from which I do not exclude myself, turn their

eyes away when faced by the as yet unnamable which is

proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary

whenever a birth is in the offing, only under species of the

nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying

form of monstrosity (Derrida 1978 293).

There are many who believe that Derrida's “infant and

terrifying form of monstrosity” is only too apparent some 27

years [now in 2005, 49 years] after his prophecy. Certainly few

would deny that two (at least) irreconcilabilities share the

field of the social sciences – taking the social sciences to

include what in North America are called the humanities. However,

Derrida's prophetic powers failed him to some extent, for the

struggle has not been between structuralist decipherings and

deconstructive play, as he envisaged. Structuralism quickly

capitulated to its deconstructtive opponent. Nonetheless, a

resistance has survived within the human sciences, coalescing

around the discourse of Hans-Georg Gadamer, another, and elder,

disciple of Heidegger.

Gadamer's discourse stands apart from French existentialist

and structuralist thought, and is alien to the discourses of Marx

and Freud, so ubiquitous in post war French discourse. Instead of

being poststructural, it is post-hermeneutic, or as Gadamer

himself denominates his thought, “philosophical hermeneutics.”

Where Derrida reads Heidegger with Saussurean, Marxist, and

Freudian spectacles, Gadamer reads him with Schleiermachean,

Hegelian, and Protestant spectacles. The oppositional sharing of

a common philosophical tradition between these two was evident

enough to prompt Philippe Forget to organize a meeting in April

of 1981 in which the “figureheads of two conflicting currents in

Western philosophical thinking,” as he called them, could

“confront each other head on” (Michelfelder 129). In the event,

as Forget himself acknowledges, the encounter upheld denial

instead of challenge.

Gadamer’s address to the conference, entitled “Text and

Interpretation,” attempted a reconciliation between those

interpretations of interpretation that Derrida had declared

“irreconcilable” 15 years earlier. The title itself suggests that

he understood the division to be between a linguistically founded

conception of “text” and his own dialogical understanding of

“interpretation.” He poses the question regards as fundamental:

“What is linguisticality? Is it a bridge or a barrier?” “In the

framework of this general formulation of the question,” he

observes, “the concept of the text presents a special sort of

challenge.” In a phrase that turns out to be dripping in

dramatic irony, he adds, “This is something that unites and

perhaps even divides me from my French colleagues” (Michelfelder

27).

Gadamer believed that he and Derrida shared common ground in

that they both stood apart from Saussurean structuralism, – “the

linguistic interpretation of the world” (Michelfelder 28) – and

epistemology. But he thought they agreed on “Heidegger's

fundamental critique of the concept of consciousness” which lends

a certain primacy to the “linguisticality” of our

experience of the world. Over against the illusion of

self-consciousness as well as the naïveté of a positive

concept of facts, the midworld of language has proven

itself to be the true dimension of that which is given.

(Michelfelder 29)

In a conciliatory gesture, he concedes that his “confrontation

with the French continuation of Heidegger's thought” has made him

conscious of “how deeply rooted” he is “in the romantic tradition

of the humanities and its humanistic heritage” (Michelfelder 24).

He, thereby explicitly dons the mantle of that “other

interpretation of interpretation” Derrida called “humanism.”

But no reconciliation of the irreconcilable occurred in that

1981 meeting, nor has it advanced much since. It might be thought

that Gadamer was naïve or foolish to suppose that a dialogue

could have taken place, for precisely the point of Derrida's

continuation of Heidegger is that there are no subjectivities, no

“intuitive consciousnesses,” which could enter into dialogue.

Hence Gadamer’s wish to ground interpretation on “good will”

earned him a sharp rebuff from Derrida.

Good will, Gadamer argued should prevail in all efforts at

understanding. He offered a description of the hermeneutic task

that he must have thought was friendly to Derrida's Nietzschean

principle of play. The task, he says, is to find

a common language. But the common language is never a fixed

given. Between speaking beings it is a language-at-play, one

that must first warm itself up so that understanding can

begin, especially at the point where different points of

view seem irreconcilably opposed. The possibility of

reaching an agreement between reasonable beings can never be

denied. ... The adult learning a foreign language and the

child first learning to speak signify not just an

appropriation of the means of producing an understanding.

Rather, this kind of learning by appropriation depicts a

kind of pre-schematization of possible experience and its

first acquisition. Growing into a language is a mode of

gaining knowledge of the world. (Michelfelder 180-1)

Despite a superficial friendliness, from a deconstructive

perspective there are two unacceptable heresies in these remarks.

One is the heresy of positing a consciousnesses which may possess

“points of view.” The other is the heresy that language is “a

mode of gaining knowledge of the world.”

Derrida rejects what Gadamer “said to us last evening about

‘good will,’ about an appeal to good will, and to the absolute

commitment to the desire for consensus in understanding.” He

asked, coyly: “Does not this way of speaking in its very

necessity, belong to a particular epoch, namely, that of a

metaphysics of the will?” (Michelfelder 52-3). Gadamer was

flabbergasted: “I absolutely cannot see that this effort [to

understand another person] would have anything to do with “‘the

epoch of metaphysics’ -- or, for that matter, with the Kantian

concept of good will” (Michelfelder 55).

Some years later Gadamer acknowledged that the notion of

“self understanding” perhaps raised some hackles in Derrida.

Writing to Fred Dallmayr Gadamer admits that his understanding of

“self-understanding” has affinities with Protestant theology:

“Self-understanding” is perhaps a misleading term that I

have used and in which I found a natural connection with

modern protestant theology and also with Heidegger’s own

linguistic tradition. However that may be, this word

actually does not refer at all to the unshakable certainty

of self-consciousness. Rather, Selbstverständnis has a pietistic

undertone suggesting precisely that one cannot succeed in

understanding oneself and that this foundering of one’s

self-under-standing and self-certainty should lead one to

the path of faith. Mutatis mutandis this applies to the

hermeneutical usage of this same term. For who we are is

something unfulfillable, an ever new undertaking and an ever

new defeat. Anyone who wishes to understand his or her being

is confronted by the simple unintelligibility of death. But

again I would like to ask [of Derrida]: is this really “the

way of metaphysics?” Is this logo-centrism? (Michelfelder

97)

This question was put to Dallmayr, but we may easily imagine

what Derrida’s answer would be – one in line with Nietzsche's

contempt for “good will”:

the great generalization, “everything has its price; all

things can be paid for” – the oldest and naïvest moral canon

of justice, the beginning of all “goodnatured-ness,” all

“fairness, all “good will,” all objectivity on earth.

Justice on this elementary level is the good will among

parties of approximately equal power to come to terms with

one another, to reach an “understanding” by means of a

settlement – and to compel parties of lesser power to reach a

settlement among themselves. (Nietzsche Ss 9).

It may well be that it is Nietzsche's interpretation of

understanding and “good will” that underpins Derrida’s curt, even

rude, dismissal of Gadamer’s overtures to mutual understanding.

Deconstruction displaces understanding, but does not replace it. It

need not do so, because understanding is a property of

consciousness, of Selbstverständnis, which is the way of metaphysics

– if metaphysics is understood as the positing of an “intuitive

consciousness” which could “have,” “possess,” or “exchange” an

understanding.8

However justified Gadamer may have been in feeling that

Derrida wilfully refused to understand him, he concedes in the

letter to Dallmayr that “one may ... catch a scent of the

metaphysics of presence in my own work, because I continue to

speak the language of metaphysics – and is that not the language

of dialectic?” He defends this putative “scent,” admitting a

breach between himself and his teacher, Heidegger. He has not, he

says, “been able to follow,” Heidegger when he “or anybody

else ... speak[s] of the ‘language of metaphysics,’ the ‘right

language of philosophy,’ or the like. Language, for me,” Gadamer

continues, “is always simply that which we speak with others and

to others” (Michelfelder 98-101). Of course, it is just this

inter-subjective communication that Derrida identifies with onto-

theology and will not countenance.

Long before the abortive attempt at reconciliation with

Derrida, Gadamer had set out his disagreement with Heidegger even

more sharply in response to comments on Truth and Method that Leo

Strauss sent to him (in a letter of February 1961). Strauss noted

that Truth and Method had a chapter on Dilthey but none on Nietzsche

(Strauss - Gadamer 5). “You are entirely right,” Gadamer

replied, “when you speak of a transposition of Heidegger into an

academic medium, Dilthey instead of Nietzsche” (8). And he

continues:

Perhaps the tendency of my book will become clearer to you

if I add: I have advocated against Heidegger for decades,

that also his “bound” or “leap” back behind metaphysics is

alone made possible through this itself (= historically

operative consciousness!). What I believe to have understood

through Heidegger (and what I can testify to from my

protestant background) is, above all, that philosophy must

learn to do without the idea of an infinite intellect. I

have attempted to draw up a corresponding hermeneutics. But

I can only do that, in that I – much against Heidegger'’

intentions – make visible in such a hermeneutic consciousness

in the end everything that I see (10).

The two interpretations of interpretation are

irreconcilable, then because Derrida and deconstruction maintain

that the Nietzschean and Heideggerian “‘bound’ or ‘leap’ back

behind metaphysics" can be achieved only by renouncing self-

consciousness. This renunciation in turn is imaginable only as some

sort of via negativa or “apophatic”9 denial of the very possibility

of knowledge – or at least of finite knowledge. The charge of

being unable “to do without the idea of an infinite intellect” is

unsurprising when levelled against Heidegger. But it is startling

to think of Derrida as suffering from the same nostalgia.

But what other interpretation can one place on Derrida’s

well known flirtation with negative theology? Take, for example,

his lengthy “refusal to speak” in “How to Avoid Speaking:

Denials.” His loquacious “silence” might easily be construed as

grounded on a kind of Rabbinic or even Hasidic piety – a piety in

which to speak of the infinite intellect is tantamount to

uttering the Tetragrammaton. After nearly fifty pages of speaking

about apophatic movements in Christianity, Derrida concludes by

saying that he will not speak

of negativity or of apophatic movements in, for example, the

Jewish or Islamic traditions. To leave this immense place

empty, and above all that which can connect such a name of

God with the name of the Place, to remain thus on the

threshold – was this not the most consistent possible

apophasis? Concerning that about which one cannot speak,

isn't it best to remain silent? I let you answer this

question. It is always entrusted to the other. (Coward 122).

What can motivate this refusal to speak if it is not the sanctity

of the infinite?

It would be too much to suggest that the irreconcilable

conflict between humanism and deconstruction is a conflict

between Protestant and Rabbinic piety, between incarnation and

transcendence, between intimacy and remoteness, between dialogue

and kerygma, or between the spirit and the law. Nonetheless if we

imagine Protestant Christianity as the rock, Scylla, and Hasidic

Judaism as the whirlpool, Charybdis, we will cease to be

surprised at the failure of these “figureheads of two conflicting

currents in Western philosophical thinking” – as Forget called

them – to negotiate a path through to the calm, open sea of

agreement.

LIST OF WORKS CONSULTED

Coward, Harold & Toby Fosy. Derrida and Negative Theology. Albany: State University of New York Press 1992.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP 1976.

----------------. Writing and Difference. Trans. Allan Bass. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1978.Descombes, Vincent. Modern French Philosophy. Trans. L. Scott-Fox &

J.M. Harding. Cambridge: Cambridge UP 1979.Gadamer, Hans-Georg. “The Expressive Power of Language.” Trans.

Bruce Krajewski. PMLA 107 (March 1992) 345-52.-------------------. Philosophical Apprenticeships. Trans. Robert R.

Sullivan. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press 1985.-------------------. Truth and Method. Trans. Garrett Barden & John

Cumming. New York: Continuum 1975.------------------- and Leo Strauss. “Correspondence Concerning

Wahrheit und Methode” Independent Journal of Philosophy 2 (1978) 5-12.

Michelfelder, Diane P. & Richard E. Palmer. Dialogue & Deconstruction:

The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter. Albany: SUNY Press 1989.Nietzsche, Friedrich. Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. Vintage Books 1969.Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press 1979

--------------. Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989.Silverman, Hugh J. ed. Gadamer and Hermeneutics. New York: Routledge1991.Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. Talcott

Parsons. New York Charles Scribner's Sons 1958.Weinsheimer, Joel. Philosophical Hermeneutics and Literary Theory. New

Haven: Yale U.P. 1991.

1. Paper delivered to The Human Sciences in the Age of TheoryConference, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, April 2,1993 under the title “What is Theory,” and at the American Societyfor Aesthetics Conference, Santa Barbara, CA Oct. 1993 as“Deconstruction and Hermeneutics.”2. Roland Barthes, in Tel Quel 47 (Autumn 1971) 16. Quoted byDescombes p. 172. See also Derrida's critique of Barthe's structurallinguistics in Of Grammatology 51-2.3 . And also forcast by Herbert Marcuse, sixteen years ealier in

Eros and Civilization (1955).4. For Foucault see L'Archéologie du Savoir 41: "Fair apparaître dans sapureté l'espace oû se déploient les événements discursifs, ce n'estpas entreprendre de le rétablir dans un isolement que rien ne sauraitsurmonter; ce n'est pas le refermer sur lui-même; c'est se rendrelibre pour décrire en lui et hors de lui des jeux de relations."(Author's translation: "To make the space in which discursive eventsdeploy themselves in all of its purity, is not to undertake the re-establishment of an isolation which nothing can overcome; it is notto close [discourse] in upon itself; it is to free the play ofrelationships in itself and outside itself for description.") Theseremarks were published in 1969.

Lévi-Strauss’s views need no specification for Derrida himselfhas copiously articulated his relation to them. In addition to hisremarks in “Structure, Sign, and Play” see especially Part II,“Nature, Culture, Writing” in Of Grammatology (1967).5. Of course, Heidegger’s theory of language is deeplyidiosyncratic and totally incompatible – not only with Saussure – butalso with Jakobson, and main-stream Anglo-American language theories,whether positivistic, Chomskian or Speech Act.6. Of Grammatology, p. 22. cf also p. 21: “On the one hand, if modernlinguistics remains completely enclosed within a classicalconceptuality, if especially it naively uses the word being and allthat it presupposes, that which, within this linguistics,deconstructs the unity of the word in general can no longer accordingto the model of the Heideggerian question, as it functions powerfullyfrom the very opening of Being and Time, be circumscribed as onticscience or regional ontology. In as much as the question of beingunites indissolubly with the precomprehension of the word being,without being reduced to it, the linguistics that works for thedeconstruction of the constituted unity of that word has only, infact or in principle, to have the question of being posed in order to

define its field and the order of its dependence."On the next page, Derrida turns the tables, and deconstructs

Heidegger with Saussure : “Because it is indeed the question of beingthat Heidegger asks metaphysics. And with it the question of truth,of sense, of the logos. The incessant meditation upon that questiondoes not restore confidence. On the contrary, it dislodges theconfidence at its own depth, which, being a matter of the meaning ofbeing, is more difficult than is often believed. In examining thestate just before all determinations of being, destroying thesecurities of onto-theology, such a meditation contributes, quite asmuch as the most contemporary linguistics, to the dislocation of theunity of the sense of being, that is, in the last instance, the unityof the word” (22).

Notice his vague reference to “linguistics,” when it isprecisely just how his view of language differs from prevailing onesthat is at issue. As noted in note # 5, there were severalincompatible theories of language current as he wrote, but headdresses only Heidegger, Saussurea and “the most contemporarylinguistics” whatever they might be. .

7. "There are more than enough indications today to suggest wemight perceive that these two interpretations of interpretation --which are absolutely irreconcilable even if we live themsimultaneously and reconcile them in an obscure economy -- togethershare the field which we call, in such a problematic fashion, thesocial sciences" ( Michelfelder 293).8. I am, of course, aware that I employ the term, “understanding”as if it had a useful sense while discussing the proposition that ithas none. One could avoid the manifest inconsistency bycircumlocution or the judicious use of equivalent terms, but suchequivocation would only render the problem latent. It is better toleave it manifest as a tacit comment on the intractability ofDerrida's position when expressed in language. That intractability,however, need not be construed as discrediting the proposition thatunderstanding never occurs.9. “Apophasis” is the rhetorical device of mentioning something bysaying it will not be mentioned., or of introducing an opinion orview only to denounce it. It is, of course, Derrida’s favouritetrope.