He Who Inherits, Interprets: 14 Theses

Abstract

He Who Inherits, Interprets:14 Theses Gerhard Richter (bio) [End Page 474] I He who inherits, interprets. One can even go one step further and aver: The inheritor stands before an enigma that, like an especially difficult and refractory text, resists the endowment of meaning. He who inherits in the emphatic sense, that is, he who is able to open up to the moment of a radical inheriting, will not be able to cease to interpret, and every true interpretation, for its part, is inseparable from the concept and experience of inheriting—an interpretive questioning of the perpetually shifting meanings of what is handed down. [End Page 475] II That which is to be inherited issues the demand for a never-ending hermeneutic engagement with it—its sense, its meaning, and, not least of all, its idiosyncratic patterns of interpretation, its each-time-unique theory of reading. If inheritance is not viewed as a presuppositionless appropriation—as the taking-possession of a content that already has been seen through and understood, merely awaiting its transfer into the sphere of what already exists, and has been thought through, in what is one's own—then the uncanny, even ghostly trace that is inscribed in it may emerge in its full distinctness. [End Page 476] III An intellectual inheritance is not to be equated with a kind of conservative tending of tradition, whereby this or that imagined community passes on its cultural capital with the aim of founding or preserving an identity whose meaning remains stable and unaffected by the act of transmission. [End Page 477] IV By the same token, an intellectual inheritance is not to be reduced to the idea that what is at stake is merely a kind of intellectual counterpart to the phenomenon of handing down material assets, that is, an inheritance that also reproduces a certain form of political economy. Instead, genuine inheriting always also grasps the tradition that it receives as an irreducible question mark, an unexpected challenge, and an enigmatic provocation. [End Page 478] V In keeping with the enigmatic character of an inheritance, the act of inheriting always also takes place under the sign of leave-taking, loss, change, and often the mourning that results from it. As the legacy of someone who is deceased, a transmission by someone who already has taken leave and now, after his departure or death, participates, through his estate as if with a ghostly hand—possibly by means of a testamentary last will—in guiding the destinies of those who are left behind, the inheritance that remains to be thought tacitly provokes an intensification of that which may have appeared to the heir, already during the time when the testator was still alive and in spite of any possible intimacy with the absent one, as something rather enigmatic, irresolvable, and inexplicable. [End Page 479] VI The heir receives the remains that constitute an inheritance like a language that, despite being endowed, as it were, with its own structure and grammar, nevertheless must be acquired laboriously. Actual inheriting takes place in language and is transmitted as language. That which there is to be inherited is always the other language and the language of the other, a language that does not cease to be different by virtue of learning it or endeavoring to learn it. [End Page 480] VII That which comes to pass as an inheritance reveals itself to the heir neither exclusively nor indisputably in the form of a welcomed enrichment or wished-for gift that is placed at the heir's disposal in a free and sovereign manner. After all, every inheritance encompasses not only a responsibility vis-à-vis the testamentary wishes of the bequeather but also comprises a concept of orphaning, even when the circumstances of a specific act of inheritance do not revolve around one's own family, one's own parents, grandparents, or particular relatives. The history of the German word "Erbe" (heir, inheritance) itself points to this connection; no inheritance without leave-taking, mourning, and an actual or figurative orphaning. [End Page 481] VIII An inheritance is always also to be thought as the orphaned labor of an unexpected haunting, as a funeral...