In the Separation of the Crisis

Abstract

A catchall no doubt, the notion of the post-modern currently allows a number of very different theoretical or philosophic positions to classify (and thus dispense with) heterogeneous intellectual projects whose sole common feature is that they clash with the expectations and presumptions of the positions in question. In spite of the categorical refusal on the part of Jacques Derrida to embrace postmodernity or identify his thought as post-modem, deconstruction is frequently viewed from such a perspective. Often it is even considered as defining the post-modern. But instead of rehashing the arguments which attempt to assimilate deconstruction to post-modernity, or of elaborating the reasons given by Derrida himself for definitively removing his thought from such a classification, I propose to examine Gianni Vattimo's thesis which holds that the fate of a consistent, rigorous, and philosophically valid notion of the post-modem depends upon the transformation and radicalization of hermeneutics. (And yet this gesture by which Vattimo reclaims post-modernity for a philosophical hermeneutics leads him at the same time to deny any association of deconstruction with post-modernity.) This surprising thesis warrants a debate for several reasons. Not only has Vattimo given incontestable philosophical rigor to the concept of the post-modem, but in connecting the idea of post-modernity to the future of he has also sketched a new conception of this philosophic discipline. Moreover, his thesis has the merit of transforming the interest and the stakes of the potential debate between post-modernity and deconstruction. The following pages will not, however, attempt to engage this debate in an explicit manner. Their sole purpose is to delimit as precisely as possible the nature of post-modern hermeneutics as proposed by Vattimo, as well as what distinguishes it from other current forms of hermeneutics. In this way, a future debate will be made possible. Such a debate could not take place without one's first taking into account the fact that hermeneutics in Vattimo's sense no longer shares the essential preoccupations of contemporary forms of and that, therefore, it is hardly, in itself, a hermeneutics. Hermeneutics, claims Vattimo, constitutes the koine of contemporary philosophical culture. If one were to name a tendency within contemporary thinking which could be considered as the current philosophical koine, comparable to that of Marxism in the 50s or structuralism in the 60s, one would probably have to recognize that, today, this role is being played by hermeneutics, he writes.' In thus underscoring its current expansion and fecundity (the reference is to the 80s), Vattimo is not of course claiming that the totality of contemporary Western thought is driven by hermeneutics. As examples of this tendency, Vattimo mentions thinkers whose works, clearly, are explicitly hermeneutical, such as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, and Luigi Pareyson, but also Jurgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Appel, who, according to him, have constantly reworked originally hermeneutic themes. But in order to show just how much the hermeneutic thematic is at the center of contemporary thought, Vattimo also brings up the work of Richard Rorty and, surprisingly enough, goes as far as to mention in the same context American deconstruction. Indeed, the radical reading that characterizes the famous Yale school is cited as proof of the diffusion of hermeneutics throughout contemporary literary theory. We can leave aside the precise reasons that lead Vattimo to assert an affinity between hermeneutics and American deconstruction. However, we must underscore that, while thus claiming a hermeneutic orientation in literary criticism, Vattimo recognizes that this particular direction assumed to have been taken by hermeneutics is equally marked by other influences (essentially that of Derrida).,,2yet this seems to suggest unequivocally that, for Vattimo, Derridian deconstruction---deconstruction in its proper sense-remains in the margins, if not at the exterior, of that philosophical koine that he sees as emerging more and more clearly. …