Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala: Hermeneutic communism: from Heidegger to Marx

Abstract

This is a book about the political agenda of philosophical hermeneutics. Or, to put it even in a more lapidary formulation: This is a book about the politics of hermeneutics. It is an open-ended text, with many entrances and one definite exodus—hermeneutic communism. The authors have no illusions about the destiny of political communism in the twenty-first century. Being witnesses of the decline of communism after the fall of the Berlin wall, they know very well that neoliberal capitalistic democracies have managed to reduce communism to a residue of the past (p. 109). But with Derrida they believe that the ghost of communism never dies, it remains always to come and to come back. In its ‘‘spectral form,’’ precisely communism becomes an objective necessity today because of ‘‘the discharge of capitalism’’. According to the authors, to say that communism is functioning as a specter is tantamount to claiming that it is not a political program that offers a rational strategy for unfettered development, but ‘‘a movement that embraces the programmatic cause of de-growth as the only way to save the human species (p. 121).’’ The recent South American comeback of spectral communism in the form of communist policies and ‘‘social missions for community projects’’ set up without violating democratic electoral procedures is the authors’ main source of inspiration. The book is dedicated to Castro, Chavez, Lula, and Morales. For Vattimo and Zabala, both the fall of the Berlin wall and the current crisis of capitalism are aspects of the general dissolution of metaphysics (p. 114). Soviet communism and contemporary capitalism are diversities of policies founded on the objective truth of history. Since philosophical hermeneutics debunks historical objectivism (as teleology, eschatology, or progressive cumulativism) and unmasks the manipulative power of all policies based on the idea that there is objective truth in history, this hermeneutics function as a critique of ideology. But it can do something much more important. The authors believe, strangely enough, that