Hermeneutic Device Research Articles

The Text beyond Itself: Romani Social Construction in Romanian Secret Police Files

Romanian State Secret Police (Securitate) files produced before 1989 can be accessed today through a lengthy process that requires official research authorization through a government office, the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives (Consiliul Național pentru Studierea Arhivelor Securității - CNSAS). The CNSAS General Document Fund includes large issue-related files under the umbrella of “The Gypsy Problem,” with thousands of pages of both national and county-level reports and recommendations. This paper teases out the granular documentary clues (spie, as Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg describes them) in some of the Securitate files to explore the way in which a pattern of documentary communication is built to frame Romani identity as idiosyncratically marginal, oriental, and parasitic. A particularly interesting aspect of the knowledge production imposed through these files is reflected by anecdotes that purportedly illustrate the character of the Roma. This study analyzes the relations of power built through hermeneutic devices and language choices which build “truth formulae” (Weir) that reify a particular view of Romani ethnicity, class, and gender. This archival (de)construction has implications for a long view of policy, political memory, and exclusionary societal attitudes today and in the future.

Eternal Return Hermeneutics in Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida

Abstract Nietzsche’s Eternal Return (ER) is interpreted in many ways, including by him. I present it as a hermeneutic device, a way of reading texts, especially those whose influence threatens one’s authorial autonomy and/or are later difficult to take ownership of due to philosophical growth. It returns past texts with new interpretations, similar to the way ER leads one to embrace one’s past without changing anything, which radically changes everything from a resented painful burden into a celebrated enhancement of freedom and power. I show how he could have derived the idea from Schopenhauer, his own embarrassing past, by performing the technique on Schopenhauer. The same attitude toward past texts of recreating them according to one’s present interests and concerns simultaneously releases one’s present texts for future readers to impose their readings onto them, just as Zarathustra tells his followers not to follow him. Heidegger takes the idea up in a far more nuanced account than he is usually given credit for and applies it, among other places, to the history of philosophy. All philosophers say the same as it keeps returning. Derrida then recreates this as iterability, the deconstruction of the no/change dichotomy that Nietzsche began.

Bringing a building into being: A Virtual Reality Application as a non-traditional research output

This article sets out from the digital reconstruction of a historic building and assesses and discusses the use of a Virtual Reality Application as a self-standing research output. Despite the recognized possibilities and the amount of research that goes into the creation of scientific virtual reconstructions, there is still a need for broadly accepted procedures to not only publish them but also incorporate them into the academic systems as research outputs in their own right. The empirical material – a digital reconstruction of a wooden stave church – is here explored as both a hermeneutic device in the research process and a research output. We argue that the use of technology such as virtual reality that can communicate presence is particularly important in research on embodied craft skills and sensory-based judgements to reduce the loss of information in translations between modes, medias and formats. However, to function and have an impact as a research output, new formats have to adapt to fundamental and broadly accepted conventions within academia which have been established by the text-on-paper formats and establish conventions that facilitate access, navigation and referencing.

Hope in the Age of Dystopia: The Ghost in the Machine in Øyvind Rimbereid's Solaris korrigert

Hope in the Age of Dystopia: The Ghost in the Machine in Øyvind Rimbereid's <i>Solaris korrigert</i>

Transferring Suspiria: Historicism and Philosophies of Psychoanalytic Transference

Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria (2018) aggressively foregrounds a term from the discourse of psychoanalysis, now a relic of twentieth-century philosophical and psychological thought, with which to negotiate a sequence of historical problems specific to its articulation as a remake (adaptation or reimagining) of a 1977 giallo by Dario Argento. The concept is “transference”. Transference traverses the whole semantic field of this film text, offering a hermeneutic device that, we will show, structures its conception and execution. This interpretative tool affords us a conceptual means with which to appreciate the decidedly querulous attitude that Guadagnino's remake assumes as regards its source text. Lodged in what can be described as an antagonism over the “spirit” of a film shot in 1977 is, we feel, a profound difference of opinion over the relationship between aesthetics and politics, and thus a contest over the very concept of a film's “spirit”. Argento's classic deliberately “spiritualizes” the political context of its creation, and particularly its setting during the German Autumn of 1977, in order to produce an oneiric fairy-tale nightmare about innocence abroad. The “spirit” of Suspiria is what must be sacrificed in the 2018 adaptation, in order to rescue its material basis from the amnesia of posterity. This is a film about its own historicism and about historicism in general, and what it costs to produce a “terrible beauty” out of the violence of terror. It is a materialist intervention in the culture of recycling, and offers, as a remake, a critical reading of a film apparently immune to the principle of a remake.

Crafting research communication in building history

This research is presented through an interactive application. A virtual reconstruction based on the remains from a medieval stave church is used as a case study to re-establish the historic building as a tangible place and assemblage. Augmented by virtual reality, the research focuses on the sensuous aspects of the stave church as a whole—where architecture, artefacts, light, and materials interact—through the movements of approaching, entering, and dwelling. The research output is a virtual reconstruction, or a virtual diorama, that “re-members” the stave church elements and re-contextualises contemporaneous religious artefacts that have been dismembered and diffused in various exhibitions and deposits. The contribution in this research is methodological, seeking to test and provide a case to discuss how non-traditional research outcome can be crafted to elicit the sensuous aspects of research and still attend to the rigor of science. We seek to methodologise the digital artefact as a research output but also as a means for testing hypothesis and observing the effects when enacting the environment. The connection to the craft sciences concerns both the empirical material, the wooden stave church as a crafted object, and the exploration of an interactive application as a research output or hermeneutic device in the research process.

An Existential Counseling Case Study: Navigating Several Critical Moments With a Professional Football Player

The current article presents a reflective case study following an applied service delivery experience with a 21-year-old professional footballer. The primary aim of the intervention was to support the client while facing several critical moments (breakdown in relationships, identity, and contract negotiations). This support involved creating a confidential space for her to discuss her values, beliefs, and identity while considering some of the tensions and dilemmas experienced while considering her future. Throughout this process, the first author adopted an existential counseling approach to practice and utilized the Four Dimensions of Existence and Emotional Compass as hermeneutic devices to analyze the client’s presenting challenges. The working relationship lasted for 3 months and spanned eight online sessions. Reflections on practitioner individuation and the value of adopting an existential approach to service delivery are provided.

Go Trampling on Vairocana’s Head! Role and Functions of Irony in the Blue Cliff Record

Since the wide corpus of Chan 禪 literature includes a significant number and a consistent variety of ironic features such as puns, wordplay, extravagant acts, and so forth, a clarification of the role and functions of irony is especially relevant to this framework. The idea of the present essay is that irony works in Chan Buddhism as a functional strategy purposely employed in textual compositions and oral communication. Analysing the Blue Cliff Record (Biyan Lu 碧巖錄), one of the most influential and significant texts in the history of East Asian Buddhism, I individuated three functions of irony that clarify its role in the wider context of Chan rhetoric. Specifically, these functions consist in performing a rhetoric of self-desecration, inducing amusement, and instilling doubt. Upon defining the notion of irony, the current essay expounds on these functions with reference to the text, then the role of irony in the Blue Cliff Record is finally identified as a hermeneutic device.

Annotation and Commentary in the Modernist Edition: A Critique

Annotation and commentary have been little considered in discussions about scholarly editing, despite being some of the most used segments of the scholarly edition. What treatments do exist mostly focus on practical aspects about the quality and style of annotation. This essay analyses some of the theoretical assumptions that underlie annotational practices with specific reference to the editing of modernist works. It puts into question, first of all, some common perceptions about annotation, which is sometimes viewed as interfering with the readerly experience, to address the matter of the reader: what kind of reader are annotations for? Because annotations are a contextual and hermeneutic device to bridge the gap between the literary work that has come to us from the past and the reader's present, not all readers are served by a single style of annotation. Conversely, to accept this hermeneutic value also means that annotation is never neutral or objective; while editorial practices tend to avoid open interpretive annotation, annotations nonetheless direct the process of reading and interpretation. Annotation thus participates in the sense-making process and, like all other editorial interventions, it represents an act of mediation.

Crisis as a plague on organisation: Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to enrich the understanding of current models of organisational response to crises and offer additional perspectives on some of these models. It is also intended to confirm the value of fiction as a truth-seeking and hermeneutic device for enriching the imagination.Design/methodology/approachThe study uses Daniel Defoe’s 1722 novel A Journal of the Plague Year to draw parallels between his portrayal of the London Great Plague of 1665 and the management of modern-day crises. Defoe uses London’s ordeal of the Great Plague to advise those subjected to future crises. Through his representation of plague-ridden streets, Defoe shows stakeholders acting in ways described in current crisis management literature.FindingsThe authors note how the management of the Plague crisis was unsuccessful and they challenge the very idea of managing a true crisis. The authors are able to illustrate and offer refinements to the Pearson and Clair (1998) and Janes (2010) models of crisis management as well as confirming the value of their constructs across a lapse of centuries.Research limitations/implicationsAlthough it is an examination of a single novel, the findings suggest value in conceptualising organisational crises in innovative and more imaginative ways.Originality/valueIt confirms the heuristic value of using fiction to understand organisational change and adds value to current models.

La aporía de la muerte: comunicación entre vivos y muertos

El propósito del artículo consiste en una aproximación a la construcción social de la muerte desde algunos aportes de quien instalara la deconstrucción como estrategia de escritura y análisis, Jacques Derrida. El objetivo central no consiste en recorrer exhaustivamente la obra del autor (exhaustividad que iría en contra de su propuesta ontológica), sino más bien en tomar algunas categorías analíticas y ponerlas al servicio de la comunicación entre vivos y muertos. La estrategia teórico-metodológica se sostiene en un diseño de investigación cualitativa basado en el análisis de relatos desde un marco biográfico interpretativo. Se parte de relatos de entrevistas que narran experiencias personales de algún tipo de comunicación con personas fallecidas o de reflexiones acerca de la creencia en torno a la posibilidad de este contacto, para problematizar el registro comunicacional vida/muerte y dar cuenta de la operatividad de la lógica derridiana. El trabajo se enmarca en un proceso de investigación que rastrea los principales supuestos que modelan el sentido social de la muerte, cuyos resultados preliminares ponen en evidencia la necesidad de trascender los binarismos y las dicotomías para alojar la contradicción y lo paradójico en torno a la vida y la muerte. La conclusión, y de ahí el aporte de este enfoque que aboga por el devenir espectral, radica en que la polarización vida/muerte aporta elementos sustanciales para retomar la reflexión en torno a la comunicación entendida como dispositivo hermenéutico. Es decir, la muerte se constituye en metáfora para pensar la comunicación.

Agency Accountability: Management of Expectations or Answerability to Mandate?

European agencies are subject to many kinds of control mechanisms and analysts worry that they often suffer from an ‘accountability overload’. This paper argues that such diagnoses are typically set without any explicit demarcation criterion for identifying accountability practices and separating them from mere instruments of political control. The paper argues that the concept of an accountability practice cannot be reduced the ‘management of expectations’. Rather, it should be restricted to procedures that track the mandate of the agency. This requires defence of the idea that there is such a thing as a coherent mandate as opposed to a mere heap of conflicting standards. The concept of a ‘multi-directional mandate’ is therefore introduced as a hermeneutical device for thinking about the coherence of different kinds of considerations. It is argued that neither account-givers nor account-holders can treat different aspects of the mandate in isolation; there is no accountability without sensitivity to the intertwinement of the different dimensions.

Iconographies and Pathosformeln of Pain in Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas: A Pathway through Plates 5, 6, 41, 41a, 42, 53, 56 and 58

Considering the human expressive need of representing pathos "from helpless melancholy to murderous cannibalism", Aby Warburg defined the hermeneutic device of Pathosformeln as "gestures to the superlative degree" that appear fixed in artefacts by means of figurative formulae since the earliest times, and as imprints ("engrams") that can be 'reactivated' by artists in various periods. We find a systematic consideration of these iconographic formulae in Warburg's last, unfinished work, the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (1929). The Atlas is, in fact, a collection of expressions of human dynamism, enclosed within a labyrinth of images that spreads from antiquity to the contemporary age. This paper aims to offer a reading of the different forms of iconography of pain that can be found in the Atlas: from the "ancient pre-coined expressions" of suffering in Plates 5 and 6, to the "re-emergence of the Dionysian pathos of destruction" in Plates 41 and 41a - especially through the figure of Laocoön. Finally, in Plate 42 we follow the "energetic and semantic inversion of the pathos of suffering": the frenzied despair of Mary Magdalene as "Maenad under the Cross", and the theme of melancholy and meditation, which from the "Theater of Death" continues towards the figure of the intellectual genius, "son of Saturn", in Plates 53, 56 and 58.

Literary Criticism as Quadratic Position-Taking in Cultural Production: Symbolic and Pragmatic Implications. The Pirandello-Tilgher Case

This study aims to elucidate the key characteristics of the critical text from both a symbolic and a pragmatic viewpoint. My perspective combines the Bourdieusian notion of literary field with a development of Genette’s theories on the nature of paratext. On the one hand, critical texts should be considered, from a pragmatic viewpoint, as a quadratic position-taking: i.e., as a position-taking focused on another position-taking, which coincides with the literary text. On the other hand, critical texts can be regarded as part of the paratext, and, precisely, as a special allographic epitext that cannot be reduced to the author’s will. Hence, this material and interactional position-taking has crucial semantic consequences, being embodied in five hermeneutic devices, i.e.: selection, interpretative description, comparison, framing and explicit valorization. By providing a specific slant on the literary text, the critical text triggers assessment dynamics and sometimes paves the way to several forms of mutual interaction between authors and critics. To illustrate my point, I explore the relationship between the famous dramatist Luigi Pirandello and one of his most important critics, Adriano Tilgher, a philosopher and an intellectual under whose influence Pirandello reshaped his self-interpretation. First, I analyse their mutual exchange by taking into account their crossing trajectories within the complex and stratified field of cultural production of 1910-20s Italy. Then, I explore Tilgher’s critical reviews and papers on Pirandello’s works with a view to identifying his use of the five hermeneutical devices discussed above. In the conclusions, I highlight the importance of this double bind between author and critic, which had a huge impact on both the assessment dynamics and the creative outcomes of their careers.

Los méritos del constitucionalismo global

El constitucionalismo global es una agenda que identifica y defiende la aplicación de principios constitucionalistas en la esfera jurídica internacional. La constitucionalización global supone la aparición gradual de unas características constitucionalistas en el derecho internacional. Las críticas del constitucionalismo global tienden a dudar de la realidad empírica de la constitucionalización, lo que lleva a preguntarse por el valor analítico del constitucionalismo como aproximación académica y a preocuparse por que el discurso pueda ser normativamente peligroso al ser anti pluralista, por crear artificialmente una falsa legitimidad y por prometer unos fines políticos surreales. El presente artículo aborda estas objeciones. Se argumenta que la constitucionalización global podría compensar los déficits constitucionalistas a nivel nacional por la globalización inducida; que una lectura constitucionalista del derecho internacional podría servir como una herramienta hermenéutica, y que el vocabulario constitucionalista destapa los déficits de legitimidad del derecho internacional ofreciendo soluciones. El constitucionalismo global tiene entonces un verdadero y necesario potencial crítico y responsabilizador.

"Figura Naturae": Religion, Nature, and the Self in Miguel Torga's "Diário"

Abstract: In Torga's Diário, the discourse of theology sometimes curiously intersects with the record of apparently personal experience. This is particularly evident in the references to nature. Operating as a hermeneutic device, these instances of discourse interference provide a model of reading that seems to question, or even suspend, the supposed referentiality of the genre. The provocation of the Diário, moreover, lies not only in the notorious reinvestment of Christian beliefs, which turn into an idiosyncratic worship of nature, but in the implied configuring of the diaristic “I” by means of a perversion of christological and exegetical patterns. This unprecedented and rather outré self-fashioning of a 20th-century author’s persona, however, is ingeniously camouflaged with the pervasive topoi of identity crisis inherent in the genre and, therefore, has often passed unnoticed so far.

Utopian Moments: Reading Utopian Texts

Utopian Moments: Reading Utopian Texts

A column of one’s own: putting women on the pages of the RAPI Journal, 1977–1982

ABSTRACTBetween 1977 and 1982, the Royal Australian Planning Institute (RAPI) Journal, the forebear of Australian Planner, featured a column dedicated to women and planning. The column, entitled Marion, sought to raise awareness, exchange information and stimulate discussion about issues relating to women and planning. The column highlighted discriminatory employment and planning practices including the absence of women in senior planning positions. It also considered issues associated with planning for women and the impact of planning on women’s lives, particularly from an intersectional and international perspective. A clear link was made between the need for women in planning at all levels to undertake planning for and with women. Grounded in the gains made by the feminist movement, the column championed the unique needs of women in urban design and planning but situated these within the broader social challenges experienced by women around their lack of access to power, resources, education and decision-making. In this article, we use Virginia Woolf’s feminist text, A Room of One’s Own, as a hermeneutical device for reviewing the Marion column, reflecting on the place of women in the pages of the journal of the RAPI Journal and in the planning profession, and documenting its legacy.

Theological imagination as hermeneutical device: Exploring the hermeneutical contribution of an imaginal engagement with the text

In the past, biblical scholarship has neglected the hermeneutical contribution that an imaginal engagement with the text may make. The author’s aim in this article was to develop theological imagination as a hermeneutical device. This was done by briefly considering the concurrence in the hermeneutic contributions of three interpreters of biblical texts, with specific regard to their understanding of biblical imagination. These were Walter Brueggemann, Paul Ricoeur and Ignatius of Loyola. Their hermeneutical contributions concur in their understanding of a biblically informed imagination, and it is specifically this aspect of the concurrence of their thought that was explored. An illustration from Proverbs 14:27, which draws on the metaphor and biblical motif of the fountain or source of life, was put forward to demonstrate how the concurrence in the contributions of these biblical interpreters may influence an imaginal engagement with the text.Keywords: Old Testament; Proverbs; Hermeneutics; The fear of the Lord/Yahweh; Walter Brueggemann; Paul Ricoeur; Ignatius of Loyola; Imaginal engagement

Alice’s Adventures, Abductive Reasoning and the Logic of Islamic Law

How does a Muslim jurist think the law and how, accordingly, he judges a fact? Using Alice in Wonderland as hermeneutical device to explore the logic of fiqh, this article identifies a divergence between Western and Islamic legal thinking in the application of abduction as key form of inference in the law of Islam. In particular, looking at the fact/law relation in symbolic terms, the article highlights how, while a dichotomy between fact and law characterizes Western legal thinking, fiqh upholds a connection between the “real” and the “right” (ḥaqq), where the effort (ijtihād) in understanding sharī‘ah postulates the actualization of the “rule” (ḥukm) in God’s creation. Thus, if sharī‘ahpre-scribes the Law, not only is the rule discovered through the sources (uṣūl), but the right has to be justified through a verdict de-scribing the fact, for the law to be validly stated for the given situation. In this sense, abduction as explanatory “hypothesis” (Peirce) and “inference to the best explanation” (Harman) of sharī‘ah provides an account for the probabilistic nature of fiqh, its ramification (furū‘) through verdicts, as well as for the epistemic and narrative function of the tradition as core aspects of the logic of Islamic law. At the same time, doubts can be raised about the compatibility between this logic and the deductive logic of modern state law, as a sub-product of Western legal thinking.