Hermeneutics and the Performative Turn; The Unfruitfulness of a Complementary Characterisation

Abstract

After a long dominance of hermeneutics, in the last three decades aesthetics has been strongly influenced by the performative turn, which placed at the centre of theoretical analysis performative aspects of art, supposedly ignored by the hermeneutical approach. Accordingly, the aesthetics of performativity has been sometimes presented (Walburga Hulk) as opposed to hermeneutics. Not all the representatives of the performative turn adopted such extreme positions. However, even those authors (Erika Fischer-Lichte, Hans Ullrich Gumbrecht) who did not oppose hermeneutics to the performative turn, leaned towards characterising hermeneutics as an artwork-centred, interpretation-focused and therefore performativity-incompetent (unable to take performative aspects of art into account) aesthetic paradigm. This paper intends to radically question such a characterisation by showing how Hans-Georg Gadamer, in his main work Truth and Method, displays a hermeneutical system which, in spite of putting the notions of artwork and interpretation at the core of the analysis, is able to take into account performative aspects of art.