RIPH 34_f6_73-102 10/27/04 9:02 AM Page 73

STARS AND CONSTELLATIONS:

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GADAMER AND DERRIDA

by

DONATELLA DI CESARE
Università “La Sapienza” di Roma

ABSTRACT
What is the difference between hermeneutics and deconstruction? This essay provides
an answer by following the guiding thread of understanding that was already brought to
the fore in Paris during the “improbable debate” between Gadamer and Derrida.
Maybe there was and still is a “dialogue” between the two most important currents
of continental philosophy, as Derrida suggests in his talk commemorating Gadamer at
Heidelberg in 2002. It is a dialogue that passes through poetry, and above all the
poems of Celan. In this way, the distance or the proximity between hermeneutics and
deconstruction rests in the meaning of understanding: the one beginning from the unin-
terrupted dialogue, the other from the difference of interruption. Through a phenomenology
of saying and of understanding, this essay asks at the same time how the differences
of deconstruction are the stars necessary for the constellation of hermeneutics, and how
the constellation is nevertheless necessary for every new star. It is perhaps the Schibboleth
of Celan that indicates the point of orientation.

1. Hermeneutics and Deconstruction: Which Difference?

The question concerning the difference between hermeneutics and
deconstruction, diffuse in contemporary debate, is legitimate insofar as
these philosophies emerge from a common terrain.1 Both have followed
the way opened by Heidegger’s philosophical turn. Both refer to another
philosopher whose presence, in both camps, is still rarely discussed,
namely, Hegel. Both, albeit in different ways, return to Greek philosophy
and continually compare themselves to it—a trait that is not obvious
in the contemporary panorama. The historical-philosophical proximity,
and therefore also the philosophical-theoretical, are reflected in the
themes they share. One need only think of the importance of art and,
above all, of literature and poetry.
The proximity is such that doubts have been put forward as to the
possibility of singling out two diverse positions behind the names
“hermeneutics” and “deconstruction.”2 Are we dealing with two labels

Research in Phenomenology, 34
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands 2004
RIPH 34_f6_73-102 10/27/04 9:02 AM Page 74

74   

for the same philosophical item? If this were the case, the comparison
would hardly make sense—and it certainly appears this way to an
external glance, for example, to that of analytic philosophy. But the
question is far more complex. These two principle streams of con-
temporary European philosophy, so close to each other as to be confused
for two aspects of the same project, represent diverging philosophical
options. Therefore they require a demonstration of their divergence
and a careful study of their difference and its importance. The same
protagonists, profiling the precise position of one in relation to the
other either by indicating their divergence or merely letting us catch
a glimpse of it, have in this way confirmed the legitimacy of, and at
the same time the need for, this comparison. But neither of the two
has taken this comparison to its end. Indeed, the dialogue failed from
the start. This interruption and the unclear difference notwithstanding,
or maybe precisely for this reason, this dialogue has animated con-
temporary philosophy. The question, raised from out of the American
context in the 1980s, remains current today: how hermeneutic is decon-
struction, and how deconstructive is hermeneutics?3

2. The Guiding Thread of Understanding

The comparison between hermeneutics and deconstruction remains rel-
evant today because of the question of understanding. Among the various
themes of the “improbable debate” sorted out by Forget after the Paris
meeting in April 1981, understanding offers a guiding thread that
reconstructs the debate in its more interesting aspects. This thread will
also allow us to raise the broader question of the relation between
hermeneutics and deconstruction. It is possible, however, that it is pre-
cisely understanding itself that sheds light on the more diverse, and
sometimes even opposed, ways that the “and” is interpreted.
At first, the question of understanding finds an extreme and in many
ways misleading formulation. Derrida extrapolates the words “good
will to understand” from the introductory lecture by Gadamer, words
that appear just one time.4 These are the precise words that provide
the impetus for the debate. Derrida attacks Gadamer, accusing hermeneu-
tics of being a “metaphysics of the will.”5 The accusation has been
repeated by others solely on the basis of these single words. And yet
no one explains the role that this willingness would carry out in philo-
sophical hermeneutics. Even worse, no one explains how understand-
RIPH 34_f6_73-102 10/27/04 9:02 AM Page 75

      75

ing would ground itself in this willingness. In effect, hermeneutics has

never derived understanding from the willingness to understand. The
accuser does not do justice to the way hermeneutics argues the ques-
tion of understanding, but merely inherits a slogan and begins there.6
For that reason, the accusation seems opportunistic. This position can
be summed up simply: for hermeneutics, or perhaps one ought to say,
even for hermeneutics, understanding would be the appropriation of
the other. Deconstruction would place itself on the other side. But in
spite of the difficulties that Gadamer might still have with the lan-
guage of metaphysics, he writes clearly in Truth and Method: “when one
understands in general, one understands differently.”7 Moreover, Gadamer
takes up this position explicitly in subsequent essays and, in particu-
lar, in his dialogue with the poetry of Celan.8
Nevertheless, it is not important whether the accusation falls apart
or not. Much more important is how this accusation diverts the debate,
even, and indeed rightly, in regard to the questions posed by Derrida.
The most philosophically relevant of these questions is not that of “the
good will,” but rather that of the concept of “interruption.” Stopping
there without ever beginning, the accusation loses sight of the difference
between hermeneutics and deconstruction. This difference does not
depend on whether there is a good will to understand or not, but on
understanding itself and the way it begins from the unity of the inter-
rupted dialogue or from the difference of interruption. More than in the dis-
cussion of other themes, such as in the proverbial opposition between
dialogue and writing, the question of understanding attempts to throw
light on the distance, and also the proximity, between the two philoso-
phies—in understanding, one clearly delineates the unity at the heart
of hermeneutics and the difference at the heart of deconstruction.

3. “Interruption”, “Rupture”, and “Difference”:

The Stars of Deconstruction
When Gadamer presented his opening lecture in Paris entitled “Le
défi herméneutique” (“The Hermeneutic Challenge”), later published
under the title “Text and Interpretation,” he had in mind the decon-
struction of Derrida’s texts. And certainly that was also his aim.
Concentrating on the question of understanding, and how it is tied to
the pretext of hermeneutics’ universality, Gadamer’s essay briefly traces
the sources of philosophical hermeneutics up through the revival of
RIPH 34_f6_73-102 10/27/04 9:02 AM Page 76

76   

Greek dialectic that discerns in dialogue, particularly in its Socratic

form, the originary phenomenon of language and thus the locus par
excellence of hermeneutics.
The following day, Derrida responded with a lecture comprised of
three brief questions intended to hit hermeneutics as a whole, beyond
the theses forwarded by Gadamer. The three questions revolve around
one objective, as the title of Derrida’s talk suggests: “The Good Wills
to Power.”9 Behind the effort of hermeneutics to understand the other,
behind its “call to the good will,” and behind its aspiration towards
“consensus,” a “will to power” lies hidden, waiting to be unmasked.
Derrida sees the indication, the sign, and even the proof of an obso-
lete metaphysics in Gadamer’s recourse to the “good will to under-
stand.” The will to understand presents the traces of an ethical axiom
traceable to the “good will” of Kant.10 Does not the “good will to
understand,” axiomatic and unconditioned like Kant’s “good will,”
appear to be that “willing subjectivity,” ready, according to Heidegger’s
critique, to determine and dominate Being? And does not hermeneu-
tics thereby fall back into the “metaphysics of will”?
The “good will” seems to subject hermeneutics to a severe test, above
all where it comes into contact with the limit case of psychoanalysis
that is nevertheless paradigmatic of the avoiding or of the lessening of
the good will and, therefore, of the failure from the very beginning of
that “living dialogue.” For Derrida, psychoanalytic discourse explodes
the interpretative context suggested by Gadamer and in any case
requires a “discontinuous re-structuring” or even a “rupture.”11
Within the concept of “interruption” turns the third and final ques-
tion, the decisive question that is also more complex philosophically.
Derrida aims directly at Gadamer’s Verstehen, “understanding the other,”
“understanding one another.” One moves either from understanding
or from misunderstanding. One must ask, however, if the condition
for understanding, far from being its unlimited availability to dialogue
solicited by hermeneutics, and far from being the continuity of the
relation with the other, is not rather “the interruption, the rupture of
the rapport, a certain rapport of interruption, the suspending of all
mediation.”12
That which is delineated by this final question seems to be a genuine
alternative to hermeneutics. Nonmediation in the process of under-
standing, as rupture, interruption, absence or the suspension of every
mediation, not only comes to be accepted, but is given a favorable
welcome. The inexorable suspicion of deconstruction befalls this under-
RIPH 34_f6_73-102 10/27/04 9:02 AM Page 77

      77

standing and the “agreement” in dialogue to which Gadamer refers

by appealing to an experience that ought to be known to everyone.
Who would claim that we are experiencing agreement? Incidentally:
is this not a relapse into metaphysics, precisely where metaphysics had
always attempted to describe experience as such? Who would there-
fore say we have reached agreement? But above all: who says that
agreement would be preferable to disagreement, that continuity would
be preferable to rupture, understanding to nonunderstanding? Could
agreement be a disagreeable and also risky illusion against which it
defends itself ? And rather than reach accord and agreement, ought
not dialogue preserve the difference of opinions and respect the other
in its absolute alterity that escapes every exhaustive and complete
understanding? And finally, ought not dialogue safeguard disagreement,
interruption, and nonunderstanding? Deconstruction takes up the bur-
den of this impossibility of understanding.

4. The Prelude to Language and Tacit Assent:

The Constellation of Hermeneutics
Gadamer responds with a lecture entitled “And nevertheless: the power
of the good will.”13 By means of the classic argument against the skep-
tics, revised in a phenomenological key, Gadamer attempts to expose
the contradictions present in Derrida’s position: “I am finding it difficult
to understand these questions that have been addressed to me. But I
will make an effort. . . .”14 This effort, however, has nothing to do with
the epoch of metaphysics. Gadamer takes up what Plato in the Gorgias
calls eÈmene¤w ¶lenxoi.15 If there is a principle in hermeneutics, perhaps
this is it: “One must seek to understand the other, and that means
that one has to believe that one could be in the wrong.”16 But this is
not an ethical moment, because even “immoral beings try to under-
stand one another.”17 It is rather the phenomenological observation
that permits the passage from “originary knowledge” to a reflexive
knowledge of the speaker, or even, as with Hegel, from bekannt to
erkannt. That principle is thus the result of a reflection that is born
from the daily practice of speaking and understanding.
But why think that Derrida would not “agree” (zustimmt)?18 His ques-
tions bear witness to it. And thus Gadamer raises the question of agree-
ment. Even more than “consent,” Zustimmung means “assent.” The one
who speaks and continues to speak, inevitably in a determinate his-
torical language, gives his own assent to that which is “shared” (Mitgeteiltes)
RIPH 34_f6_73-102 10/27/04 9:02 AM Page 78

78   

and can thus be “reciprocally communicated” (Miteinandergeteiltes), prepar-

ing itself to attune its own voice (Stimme) to the voice of the other
speakers from the moment that they emit meaningful sounds. This is
the phenomenon that Derrida called “collocution.”19 Briefly, the speaker
of a language underwrites a sort of tacit pact with past, present, and
future speakers of that language, articulating its own self in meaning-
ful sounds, and therefore in words of that language that, before being
one’s own, always belong to others. One’s speaking is thus a “coming
to agreement” (Übereinkommen).20 The passage from implicit agreement
(Einverständnis) to that explicit in understanding (Verstehen) is extremely
complex and always destined to transform into disagreement because
of the individual difference in the work of speaking. These are not
false hopes. Beyond the apparent similarities, misunderstandings and
weak interpretations originate in the meanings of the words, and if
they can be loosened and dissolved in the meaning of the sentences,
they can therefore be rendered more acute, intense, and profound.
Thus it stands, for Gadamer, that in this “concord” with Derrida,
understanding does not happen without fractures, breaks, and inter-
ruptions (ein bruchloses Verstehen); and if the Bruch, the rupture, the break-
ing and interruption, were missing from understanding, they would be
taken for granted and obvious (selbstverständlich), never even constitut-
ing a problem.21
The difference between the two philosophers will not be found in
the rupture and the necessity of the rupture. Where then can it be found?
Hermeneutics cannot consider interruption to be fundamental and orig-
inary. Before interruption arrives the tacit assent that in language, or
better, in the speaking of a language, is the pre-lude that opens the
path to every successive play of agreement and disagreement. The pre-
lude to language exists because it was already spoken, dialogued, thereby
crossing together long paths on the way disclosed by language. It is
impossible to escape the prelude through which dialogue articulates
itself. Thus for hermeneutics the interruption, the breaking, inscribes
itself in the constellation of language. It is difference that tears the
unity apart. In this final part one must distinguish in nuce every “sol-
idarity among humans.”22 Here hermeneutics reveals its proximity to
the critique of ideology.23 But its greater distance beyond deconstruc-
tion appears in the way that it assumes interruption and takes on its
responsibility. Even where interruption appears more marked, as with
a poetic text, hermeneutics takes the hit, but does not reinforce it, so
as to not deepen the break.24 The Bruch, the interruption, signals the
RIPH 34_f6_73-102 10/27/04 9:02 AM Page 79

      79

beginning of confrontation and dialogue—not its end. This fracture

will never heal, and nonunderstanding will never be eliminated. Here
hermeneutics and deconstruction converge. But by knowing that and
trying it out every time within the limits of dialogue, indeed precisely
because of this, hermeneutics prepares itself for that which could carry
it to a full understanding between two infinites and destines itself to
an infinite dialogue—beginning from interruption.25
Gadamer assumes this position even in his confrontation with Derrida.
In an essay from some years after the meeting in Paris, Gadamer
writes: “Whoever wants me to take deconstruction to heart and insists
on difference stands at the beginning of a dialogue, not at its end.”26

5. What Does “Wants to Say” 27 Want to Say?

On the Forgetfulness of Language
But what does it mean in hermeneutics “to want to understand” [voler
comprendere]? Wanting to understand returns to wanting to and in this
reciprocal return takes on a value that cannot be traced back to a
subjective “will.” In wanting to understand, as in wanting to, there is no
intentionality on the part of a subject of any such “wanting.” This is
because in language the intentionality, in the sense of a premeditated
reflection, is absent. The speaker speaks in an irreflexive mode. It is
the phenomenon of Sprachvergessenheit, of the forgetting of language.
“Speaking is the action most profoundly forgetful of itself.”28 The
irreflexivity characterizes the attitude of the speaker and distinguishes
him, for example, from the reflexive and thus forced and artificial atti-
tude of the linguist who reflects and meditates on language. There is
an “essential self-forgetfullness that belongs to language.”29 A pheno-
menology of the word, spoken and written, ought therefore to con-
sider this irreflexivity and indeed take motivation from the forgetfulness
of language that permits every movement in language. In order for
this movement to be easy, it must forget language; if it does not forget
it, it no longer functions easily and stops itself, as with a baby learning
its mother tongue and with an adult learning a foreign language—but
also like the poet who cannot find the “perfect word.” These limit-
cases are eloquent precisely because they demonstrate an intentionality
facing language that is missing in everyday speech. But this does not
mean that in this latter case there is not an intending [intendere].
But the intending in everyday speech is the intending of the one
who stands within the word by no longer being turned toward the
RIPH 34_f6_73-102 10/27/04 9:02 AM Page 80

80   

word, but rather towards that which the word intends, that which the
word signifies, and that which the word wants to say [vuol dire].30 It is
nevertheless the word that wants to say, that means. Only in a meta-
linguistic insertion does one stop to ask: “what do you mean?” But it
is precisely the pause—of the questions, of the response: “I want to
say . . .”—that articulates the reflexive moment in the irreflexive flux
of speaking, that refers the intention to the speaking subject. That hap-
pens because this latter, in the everydayness of speech, gives itself over
to the word and to that which the word wants to say. One can then
ask, through an unexpected but perhaps not completely unpredictable
move, what is meant here by “giving oneself over”?31

6. Speaking and Understanding. Giving over to the Game

The affinity between language and game is the point of convergence
between Gadamer and Wittgenstein.32 One who gives oneself over to
play, and does so seriously, separates oneself from oneself and forgets
oneself. This loss of possession of one’s self is nevertheless lived as an
elevation. One who plays, subjecting oneself to the game, gives one-
self over to the very subjectivity that he now must abandon. By giv-
ing oneself over to the game, one also recovers from the Western mal-
ady of subjectivism. Thus the “giving over” evokes here the Verwindung
of Heidegger. The game is then that movement that mines from the
depths, unhinges, and sets into play the metaphysics of subjectivity.
What is true for the game is also true for language. Not inciden-
tally, within philosophy language has pointed out the way to return
from metaphysics. In the language game every subjectivity and tran-
scendental intentionality of the speaker is dismissed. To speak and to
understand, the movements of dialogue, are “structurally similar” to
that of the game.33 Gadamer finds this affinity in its medial character.34
Already apparent in art, this character sheds light on the active yet
nonetheless passive process of the linguistic game, medial precisely as
the form of the median in Greek indicates an activity in which the
subject is implicated in such a way as to transgress into passivity. As
the title of one of Gadamer’s works attests, understanding is a game—it
is a medial game.35 To understand is to be at play: one gives oneself
over to the game and is set into play by the game.
Here one notes Gadamer’s distance from a metaphysics of the sub-
jective will. The passage through the game and in a sense closer to
RIPH 34_f6_73-102 10/27/04 9:02 AM Page 81

      81

Wittgenstein than to Heidegger, through the linguistic game, presents

the possibility of giving over to and recovering from metaphysics—or
at least that promotes such a possibility. More than of a “subjective
will” (Wille) one ought to speak then of a “non will” (Unwille) of sub-
jectivity, of a renunciation of subjective identity, of a sought after dis-
solution of the achieved ipseity that is no longer the subject of this
willing because it gives itself over to the word that wants to say, to
that which the word wants to say.

7. Derrida, Husserl, the “Wanting-to-Say”

[vouloir-dire], and the Exile of Saying
More than a wanting to say, the speaker engages in a letting the word
say that which it wants to say. But is this not therefore also a form
of domination, even if it is that of the word? Are there not still evi-
dent traces of a metaphysics of will in the wanting to say of the word?
Could not this return to the wanting to say be a relapse into meta-
physics? In whose name, on whose behalf, by whose will after all does
one speak? Should not one rather decide for the word that “does not
want to say anything?”
In order to respond to these questions, it is worth following Derrida’s
critique of Husserl and his distinction between indication and expres-
sion. In contrast to indication, expression intends, or rather means,
wants to say [vuol dire]. Derrida proposes to translate Bedeuten with
“vouloir-dire,” used indifferently for the speaking subject whose self-
expression means or wants to say [vuol dire] and also for an expres-
sion that means or wants to say [vuol dire].36 But expression, the exit
beyond itself of a meaning that one finds inside, the hypermetaphys-
ical aspiration of Western metaphysics, finds its foundation in the sub-
ject that animates it. Expression is decisive, conscious, willing and inten-
tional exteriorization; indeed it exists only due to the intention of the
subject. This intentionality, concerned that it remain “pure” through
its intention of remaining separate from the involuntary effectuality of
the indication, makes everything the same with the will that points to
saying-itself [dir-si ], that wants-to-say-itself while retaining the presence
to itself.37 Here is the telos of language: the wanting to say of the will-
ing and intentional consciousness. But can this telos be achieved?
Evidently no, if the “lived,” the “inner,” of someone cannot be present
to the other immediately and originarily, but only as it is mediately
RIPH 34_f6_73-102 10/27/04 9:02 AM Page 82

82   

indicated by signs. “The relation to the other as non-presence is there-

fore the impurity of expression.”38 This irreducible and definitive limit
signals even the defeat of intentional communication.
The saying of this originary “wanting-to-say,” intentional and pure,
does not arrive at a destination. At this point we ask, with Derrida,
is there an “other” saying? But this other saying cannot be that of the
word that “does not mean anything.” The word is a non-word because
of this, indeed it is not the word. The alternative is no longer not want-
ing (any more) to say. At the most, it is to accept saying in the way
in which the word says, allowing for the saying of the word, replacing
one’s own wanting to say with the wanting to say of the word. That
involves accepting the error of intention and of destination, its errancy
without origin and without return. Thus, the exit is in fact an exile.
But it is only in this exile, in this infinite return of the word, that one
can still say, that one can still want to say. The true wanting to say,
however, giving itself over to the wanting to say of the errant word,
gives itself over to the wanting to say of others, or better, gives way
to the saying of others, joins with this saying of the other that can
perhaps be the “other” saying.

8. “Wanting to Understand” and the Condition of Speaking

The “wanting” of wanting to understand is, for the reciprocity that
ties them, to speculate about the “wanting” of wanting to say. In daily
praxis, one hears in “I want to say . . .” the echo of “I want to under-
stand . . .,” “I would really like to understand . . .,” “help me under-
stand . . .,” “you do not understand me. . . .” Wanting to say and want-
ing to understand expose the speculative nature of language, demonstrate
the resistance of speakers to the limit of the said and the understood,
and reveal the common will to give in to the other while still over-
coming it every time—one for the other, one with the other.
Wanting to understand does not mean that understanding is possi-
ble in itself—absolutely and unconditionally. It means rather that under-
standing—in an irreflexive and selfless way—is held to be possible and
is presupposed as a condition for speakers. If there were not this con-
dition, even in its finitude and individuality, one would not be able to
continue speaking—to understand and to make oneself understood.
One must absolutely presuppose wanting to understand as the condi-
tion for speaking.
But this in no way implies that up to a certain point in this process
RIPH 34_f6_73-102 10/27/04 9:02 AM Page 83

      83

one achieves a true understanding, one that is adequate and thus

definitive. If it were like this, understanding would have an end and
eventually come to an end. It would wind up with a truth that tran-
scends the very process and the individuals who were the protagonists
in it, a supra-individual truth that would separate and eliminate indi-
viduality, possibly that of the other long before one’s own. To under-
stand would then consist in the appropriating of the alterity of the
other—for love of the truth.

9. Hermeneutics and Self-Understanding

For Gadamer, self-understanding is the place where understanding, in
its forgetfulness, is always already given. In such a sense, every under-
standing (Verstehen) is self-understanding (Sichverstehen).39 One could even
say that every understanding nevertheless returns to self-understanding—
the place where one is always already understanding. But the distinction
at stake here stands between already understanding and not yet under-
standing. Self-understanding does not in fact mean self-consciousness
[autocomprensione].40 Gadamer speaks both of Sichverstehen and also of
Selbstverstehen. The latter, that is Selbstverstehen, was and is “misleading”—
as Gadamer himself observes—because it makes us think of an imper-
turbably certain self-awareness while dealing with exactly the opposite,
that is, an understanding of the self always destined to ruin. There is
not an aÈtÒw that excludes a ßteron. On the contrary, to begin with
self-understanding means that understanding can no longer separate
itself and the other. Understanding is understanding of the self and
the other at the same time. Understanding articulates itself through the
understanding of the other. If it were not so, self-understanding would
expire in the static nature of the self-consciousness from which it can-
not escape. Self-understanding, revealing itself as understanding of the
already understood, while avoiding the insurmountable passage from
nonunderstanding to understanding, necessarily gathers the other in
itself from the beginning. That which is already understood has the
other, the stranger, in itself no less than that which is not yet understood.

10. Understanding is Understanding in a Different Way

For hermeneutics, difference is always a relative difference that relates
itself to the previous unity of understanding and that presents itself
anew to understanding. Different, that is, alien, means unable to be
RIPH 34_f6_73-102 10/27/04 9:02 AM Page 84

84   

understood [non-comprensibile].41 Difference, brought out in the open, inflicts

a “wound” and sets the process of understanding in motion. Thanks
to this difference, the unity of understanding demonstrates a dynamic
nature that unfolds in circularity. This movement, a hermeneutic cir-
cle that describes itself in the constellation of understanding, returns
every time to the already understood and must every time (re-)take
leave of it. Because in the “interactive play” (Ineinanderspiel ) between
the understood and present understanding, that which is understood, no
less than the one who understands, modifies itself and turns out differ-
ent in the very act of understanding.42 Taking leave is thus the identify-
ing mark of understanding. The event of understanding is a continual
modifying and self-modification, or better, a differentiating and self-
differentiating that is without end and for that reason its own end. As
Gadamer famously states: “It is enough to say that we understand in
a different way [anders], if we understand at all.”43
A suum esse conservare does not belong to understanding because of
the act of taking leave. Through its modification and differentiation,
understanding is always other and always in the other; in itself it is
understanding in a different way. Thus, understanding is a continual
exiling, expatriating, emigrating—as is speaking. For that reason, even
the self of the subject is destined to exile. It modifies and differentiates
itself from that which is being understood and does not and cannot
remain unchanging. Understanding does not happen differently due to
the identical and immovable base of the subject. “The focus of sub-
jectivity—writes Gadamer—is a distorting mirror.”44 The subject engages
in play only because it already understands. It is for this reason, regard-
ing the subject who understands, that one resists speaking about a
“non will,” an Unwille—which in German means “not wanting” but
also “unwillingness,” “vexation”—that is, of a renunciation of subjective
identity.45 Understanding does not mean quantitatively augmenting and
accumulating the subject’s own knowledge. Rather, the subject knows,
or better yet, understands differently through a gradual process. Through
understanding in a different way, one finds oneself always different
and not the same, namely, something universal that one understands
as an individual. The self-differentiation of understanding ordains the
self of the subject and brings forth the renunciation and eventual dis-
solution of its own ipseity.
RIPH 34_f6_73-102 10/27/04 9:02 AM Page 85

      85

11. Understanding, Finitude, Death

Thus self-understanding is not self-consciousness, the affirmation and
reaffirmation of the self; on the contrary, it is the abandoning of itself
almost to the point of sacrifice. In this way Hegel speaks of a complete
“sacrifice” (Autopferung) “akin to death.”46 Understanding happens when
one renounces the self, when the self dies. Understanding appears to
be intimately connected with death. The effort, the strain of under-
standing—when for example, Gadamer says: “I will make an effort . . .”—
is here in this factical dimension of suffering, sorrow, and loss. It is
the factical dimension of finitude. That which strains and pushes the
understanding supports this finitude, being always finite, and for that
reason, an indefinite rendering of that which understands. Understanding
means that every understanding is set into play, renouncing the remain-
der of every prior understanding not only of the other but also of the
self. Through understanding, the self recalls its being always other and
for that reason it does not conserve itself. But no longer wanting to
conserve itself in its apparent identity, it is also the self that continu-
ally passes beyond itself into the difference of being other. Understanding,
as understanding in a different way, is thus the path of freedom that
reveals itself to the new self beyond its own finitude.

12. Understanding and Freedom

Freedom constitutes an unavoidable (and essential) moment within the
event of understanding in a different way. This begins with the space
of play that, under the star of every new understanding, is conceded
to someone able to understand the self and the other in a different
way. Freedom conceded to any individual, as an individual under-
standing in a different way, is a freedom not only in relation to that
which is understood, and in relation to the self as the always different
subject of understanding, but also and above all in relation to other
individuals. In fact, in speaking and in understanding, someone con-
cedes (or grants?) this freedom to the other, even if tacitly, in order to
come to a mutual understanding. And thus they understand each other.
That means that in order to entrust oneself and give oneself over to
understanding always in a different way, individuals gradually find a
common point by which they can orient themselves, one to the other—
one for the other, one with the other. From the moment that difference
RIPH 34_f6_73-102 10/27/04 9:02 AM Page 86

86   

appears in the space opened by understanding in different way—above

all difference between an individual and the other—every individual
who articulates his own individuality through understanding will be like
no other and also for the other. Individuals are not indifferently sub-
stitutable in the freedom of their understanding in a different way. Rather,
in their reciprocal dependence they are one for the other, one with the
other. The other understands in a different way, setting the self and
its understanding into play; provoking it, hitting it, and vexing it, it is
forced to understand in a way that is yet again different. But the hit
is also a push. For that reason, understanding the other in its difference
can be vexing but also liberating. Beyond the finitude that is the worry
and angst of nonunderstanding and misunderstanding, understanding
the other spontaneously discloses the open space of freedom. Freedom
is therefore not only a freedom towards the other but, moreover, a
freedom through the other. This is precisely because this freedom,
through its disclosure, is also limited.47 Difference is therefore the mar-
gin, the boundary, of play, where freedom gives itself to understanding.
If one is free to understand differently, one is no longer free to not
understand. In other words, one cannot escape from understanding.
One can never escape even from the difference that understanding
carries with it. We seldom reflect on the number of times in life when
understanding creeps in, appears, and imposes on us, soliciting and
demanding a fleeting, rapid, and hasty understanding, or even an atten-
tive, profound, and reflective understanding, voluntarily or against one’s
will. The cases would be innumerable: an advertisement, a red stop light,
the sounds of foreign words, a pleasant face, the letters on a book in
an antique seller’s window. In all of these there is already under-
standing, and we are drawn into forced to go along with the game
and understand more, even if it is in a different way.

13. On Agreement and Disagreement

But from the beginning, there is always already an understanding for
hermeneutics that is articulated and differentiated in the movement of
dialogue. Understanding, taken for granted from the beginning, is the
agreement of language and the common tongue that binds us together.
To presuppose community in speaking and in understanding is the
distinguishing trait of classic hermeneutics, where the reflection on com-
munity is indivisible from the reflection on language. Community, for
Schleiermacher, must be traced back to the “community of language”48
RIPH 34_f6_73-102 10/27/04 9:02 AM Page 87

      87

because the spoken word belongs also to the listener who, in his turn,
utters it. Humboldt writes that the word gains power when “it is cre-
ated by the subject and uttered from the mouth of the other.”49 This
community of the word is the condition for speaking and understanding.
That means that the one who speaks, and speaks for the other and
with the other, even if tacitly, has already agreed to share this com-
munity, even if, without awareness, one is already in agreement—more
importantly with the other than with one self. This is the political
dimension of the linguistic community. The word, communal already
from the beginning of dialogue and becoming more communal in the
course of dialogue, shares in the community.
We should take Gadamer’s words in this way when he refers to the
unity of a “common language,” affirming that “understanding never-
theless means coming to agreement” and that “agreement is more originary
than disagreement.”50 This is not optimism. In line with the hermeneutic
understanding of language, speaking articulates the previous community
that the common language ensures. The community is a worldly ori-
entation articulated in language. Speaking-with-others is not therefore
the point where previously formed opinions conflict or converse. In
contrast, moving from the community of language and the world artic-
ulated in language, the communal consideration comes together in
communal speaking. That previous community develops further because
in speaking it renders itself ever more communal. This is the reality of
human communication, that is, of dialogue.51 And nevertheless, every time
that one stops to contest the supposed agreement, one must contest
disagreement, and every time that one seeks agreement in order to
continue speaking, one is unavoidably returned to disagreement.

14. Infinite Dialogue

One needs to continue speaking in order to find agreement. Herme-
neutics’ unlimited capacity for dialogue is motivated by the trust inher-
ent in language and in its ability to share in community [accomunare]. But
this does not mean that dialogue succeeds. On the contrary, agree-
ment is never guaranteed, and understanding is never complete. Dialogue
can never succeed in reaching a tacit, definitive agreement if by suc-
ceed one means bringing to a close. Dialogue is never complete. That
does not mean that, having preserved its infinite potential, dialogue
would not have a unified outcome. That occurs not when one is
appraised of something new, but rather when we happen upon the other
RIPH 34_f6_73-102 10/27/04 9:02 AM Page 88

88   

in something that we have yet to meet in our experience of the world.

This something, that remains in us, changes us and modifies us.
“Dialogue possesses a transformative power.”52 Thus dialogue succeeds
when the I is transformed through the you, but even when the you
is transformed through the I. “Dialogue transforms both.”53 Paradoxically,
the more successful the dialogue, the farther it is from ending—and
the more likely the chance for disagreement. If the word that the I
directs toward the you and that the you directs toward the I leads to
a new opening that leads to new questions and new answers, the dia-
logue continues.54
Every word discloses an infinity of still possible words,55 because there
is always yet another word to say or to let be said. Every word, because
of its potentiality, tacitly returns to the opening in which it continues
to speak. In this manner, speaking proceeds in dialogue. In this dia-
logue, one finds that dialogue “has an inner infinity and no end .”56 For
Gadamer, even in the limit-case of the soul’s inner dialogue with itself,
dialogue is infinite.57
Nevertheless, beginning with the infinity of dialogue, the interrup-
tion that is created does not prejudge the infinite opening for hermeneu-
tics. The interruption occurs in a moment, a suspension that already
hints towards the recovery of the dialogue. One must capture here the
dissonance between deconstruction and hermeneutics: if deconstruction
emphasizes the creativity of interruption, hermeneutics, over and beyond
every interruption, invokes the uninterrupted dialogue.

15. Epoché of that Interruption

The Paris encounter, considered by its participants and witnesses to be
a dialogue between deaf men and deemed the “improbable debate” by
Forget, will nevertheless be remembered as a landmark event.58 The
American edition, published in 1989, brought forth contributions from
philosophers belonging to both camps who tried to continue the poten-
tial exchange.59 But even though Gadamer and Derrida met in the
years following the debate, they did not continue the original discussion.
On February 15, 2003, almost a year after Gadamer’s passing,
Derrida honored him in Heidelberg. His speech had a meaningful and
deliberate title: Rams: the uninterrupted dialogue between two infinites, the poem.60
Dialogue, Gespräch, “dialogo,” a word foreign to the lexicon of the French
philosopher, becomes the herald of an unforeseen interpretation. That
“improbable debate” is, in Derrida’s mind, a “dialogue,” and even
RIPH 34_f6_73-102 10/27/04 9:02 AM Page 89

      89

more, “uninterrupted,” even though it began with the strange inter-

ruption of Paris. There is a need to review that judgment, above all
within the new constellation of philosophy after Gadamer.
Derrida resumes from the singular beginning that was and is the
interruption—the argument of his third question. It did not concern
an “originary misunderstanding.”61 Rather, it dealt with a “sort of
interdict,” the “inhibition of a non decision” and “the patience of an
indefinite waiting, of an epoché that withholds relief, judgment, and con-
clusion.”62 Dialogue begins there, destined to be an interior dialogue,
to follow both of them inside, voiceless, silent, seemingly mute. This
destiny has not, for that reason, declared it to be a failure. But it is
an interruption that, more than impeded it, has permitted and favored
it. Each one of the two has cultivated it, saving the “hidden sense” of
that interruption, and has done it without interruption. Interruption,
as Derrida intended it, has revealed itself to be “the condition for
understanding and agreement.”63 The secret of that dialogue was its
Unheimlichkeit: a singular sense of alienation tied to an intimate famil-
iarity. And that dialogue remains unheimlich. Thus, far from having
been an impoverished dialogue, it “succeeded” much more than if it
had been a harmonious and consensual dialogue, leaving an active
and provocative trace, the promise of more to come.64

16. “Die Welt is fort, ich muß Dich tragen.” Dialogue after Death
Gadamer, the philosopher of this epoch and its many movements, is
no longer with us.65 The endless melancholy, already presaged in Paris,
is now infinitely worsened by death. “A jamais.”66 And this A jamais
recalls the Adieu that Derrida gave in honor of Levinas in 1996.67 The
melancholy is also the sad and overwhelming certainty that one day
death will divide us, that one day one of two friends will watch the
other die. “Dialogue, whatever its potential, will be forever cut off by
a final interruption.”68 Dialogue has done nothing other than precede
and anticipate death, enveloping each one of us in the sorrow of a
relentless future anterior. But this final interruption is a separation
unlike any other: the separation between life and death. Without end,
thought will seek to decipher this enigmatic seal. What will pass after
death stamps its seal on dialogue. Will dialogue continue? Will there be
dialogue after dialogue? A dialogue after the interruption of dialogue?
Will there always be an interrupted dialogue? Perhaps an internal dialogue?
Dialogue continues, following the trace in those who survive. The
RIPH 34_f6_73-102 10/27/04 9:02 AM Page 90

90   

survivor lets the word of the lost friend echo within him one more
time. Alone—as it was destined—he will carry the voice in him. Alone
he takes on the burden of continuing the dialogue beyond the caesura and
interruption, through the caesura and interruption. In this way he re-
members.69 The uninterrupted dialogue, beginning with that first “appar-
ent” interruption, will continue to be an internal dialogue—far from
an interior monologue—because it precedes it and makes it possible.70
The promise and commitment are expressed in the gesture of another
friend, a friend in common, a friend who brings Gadamer and Derrida
together: Paul Celan. “The world is gone, I have to carry you.” The
theme of death, of the ultimate interruption, intertwines itself with the
theme of the dialogue in Derrida’s discourse, but also, in the wake of
Gadamer, with that of poetry. Two works by Gadamer, to which
Derrida continually refers, comprise the background here: Gedicht und
Gespräch and the preceding book Who Am I and Who Are You? On Paul
Celan.71 The dialogue continues through the poetry of Celan. Derrida
interprets Celan “in order to speak to him,”72 in order to speak to
Gadamer. The homage of an interpretation is perhaps even an homage
to the way in which Gadamer thought about the poetic text as
Zwischenrede, the discourse that interjects and interrupts, the necessary
“interruption” of dialogue.73
“The world is gone, I have to carry you.” Following a hermeneu-
tic principle applied by Gadamer in his book on Celan, Derrida iso-
lates, via an interruption, the final verse of the poem “Grosse, glühende
Wölbung,” taken from the cycle Atemwende:74 “The world is gone, I have
to carry you.” It is the sentence to which Celan decided to leave the
last word, as if it were a quasi-eschatological signature.75 Separated,
isolated, and insulated like an aphorism, it speaks of the absolute soli-
tude when the world no longer exists, no longer exists here, when it
is gone. One can only pronounce it, at the eschatological edge, at this
extreme limit, after the most marked interruption, after having with-
held and resumed breathing, after a “breathturn.” Derrida, for his
part, after the pause of expiration, almost makes it the sentence of his
commemorative discourse. Between commitment and promise is this,
“the truth of the verdict at the edge of the end of the world.”76
What is the death of the other? The death of the other is the “world
after the end of the world.”77 Every time—and every time in a unique,
insubstitutable, infinite way—death is not the end of something or of
someone in the world, but is rather, and very much more, the end of
the world. Death “marks every time, every time daring arithmetic, the
RIPH 34_f6_73-102 10/27/04 9:02 AM Page 91

      91

absolute end of the one and only world, of that which everyone opens
as a one and only world,” the end of that which is and can present
itself as the origin of the world for that unique living being that no
longer exists.78 The survivor remains alone, beyond the world of the
other, and even above and beyond the world itself. One lacks a world—
within the world and outside of the world. “Die Welt ist fort: the world
has fled, the world has left us, the world no longer exists, the world is
out of reach, the world is lost, out of sight, beyond our vision, the world
is gone, goodbye world, the world is dead.”79 The survivor feels solely
responsible, destined to carry the other and his world, both having fled,
responsible and without world (weltlos), beyond the end of the world.80
Turning also and above all to Heidegger, Derrida asks if one should
not rethink “world” beginning from its Fort-sein, from its no longer
being there, and in its turn, this Fort beginning from Ich muss dich tragen?

17. Thinking, Carrying, Translating

But what does “carrying” [portare] mean? What is the importance, or
the gravity, of this word? Thinking it requires weighing it and pon-
dering it. The question echoes that of Heidegger: Was heisst Denken?
(What Is Called Thinking?). “ The ‘thanc,’ that which is thought, the
thought, implies the thanks. But perhaps these assonances between
thought and thanks are superficial and contrived. . . . Is thinking a giv-
ing of thanks? What do thanks mean here? Or do thanks consist in
thinking?”81 The proximity of Denken and Danken, of thinking and thank-
ing, underlined by Heidegger, is taken up again by Celan.82 But this
proximity, lacking in French and all romance languages, makes it
difficult to translate questions like those posed by Heidegger.
Derrida, in a way similar to Denken-Danken, compares the French
terms penser and peser ( pensare and pesare)—to ponder, to compare, to
counterbalance, to consider, to examine. The examen in Latin is the
needle of the balance to which one entrusts justice, maybe the justice
of a judgment on that which presents itself to weighing and carrying.
Weighing and thinking therefore require carrying, to carry in itself and to
carry on itself. It is a “friendship” in the romance languages between
thought and meaning, thought and gravity.83
When the world is dead, I have to carry you, you alone in me and
in me alone—on me and in me. There is no longer a mediating world
because there is no longer a world to sustain us, no longer ground,
earth, earthly and worldly territory. Perhaps all that remains is the
RIPH 34_f6_73-102 10/27/04 9:02 AM Page 92

92   

“abyssal altitude of a sky.”84 Thought orientates itself towards the east-

ern sky, rising up from the earth in the future and possibility of the
ought. But one can also overturn the order of the if, then. From the
instant when I speak to you and am responsible for you or in your
presence, the world no longer is, nor can be, a world that is a foun-
dation or an alibi for us. Only the world remains, and that now
depends on me. I must carry you and become you, I must take on
the responsibility of answering in your presence and in your place.
Carrying speaks the language of birth: a mother carries her child
in the womb. But carrying also speaks the language of death: one car-
ries a loss. And with Freud, Husserl, and Heidegger, Derrida sharpens
the value of “carrying” to mean the interiorization of a memory, but
not the including of the other in oneself. It is not appropriation.
“Carrying does not mean ‘to carry with’, to include, to understand in
itself, but to carry towards the infinite inappropriability of the other,
meeting its absolute transcendence within me, that is, within me and
outside of me.”85 I must carry the other, but the other must carry me.
I and you, as Gadamer says, exchange places, as do the author and
reader, all of the protagonists of a poem or potential signers and coun-
tersigners. On account of this strange and foreign carrying, I am dis-
located by the infinitely other in me; and I am alone, alone without
world either as foundation or mediation, alone with the other and for
the other, with you and for you. The immediacy of this abyss enchains
me, impels me and commits me to the other with the “I ought”—“I
ought to carry you.” Another reading of cogito and of sum: before think-
ing, and before being, I carry. Before being myself, I carry the other.
Before, in front of, and in the presence of you, in duty and in debt,
tending to your importance [ portata], I have to carry you. “Always
unique and irreplaceable, these laws and injunctions remain untrans-
latable from one to the other, from ones to others, and from one lan-
guage to another; but this fact does not make them any less univer-
sal.”86 To carry therefore reveals itself as transporting, transferring,
translating—much more as the untranslatable. It is the “violent sacrifice
of the passage beyond.”87 Here more than ever, in the movement, in
the search for an orientation in thinking—and perhaps in a new think-
ing of the world, after which the world no longer exists—there is a
need for the other, a need to carry the other, to be carried by the
other. “No one bears life alone” (Denn keiner trägt das Leben allein).88
RIPH 34_f6_73-102 10/27/04 9:02 AM Page 93

      93

18. The Blessing of the Hand, the Blessing of the Poem

To think of Gadamer nevertheless seems to mean letting him speak
again. The proximity of “thinking and poetizing” indicates the way.89
Derrida opens this path by considering the final verse of Celan’s poem
“Wege im Schatten-Gebräch,”90 a verse already selected by Gadamer.91
Wege im Schatten-Gebräch Paths in the shadow-break
deiner Hand. Of your hand.
Aus der Vier-Finger-Furche From the four-finger-furrow
wühl ich mir den I root up the
versteinerten Segen. Petrified blessing.

The theme of the final verse is blessing: “From the four-finger-furrow

I root up the petrified blessing.” The blessing is not given, but is sought
after and beseeched. Indeed, it seems extorted by hand. It is as if the
blessing, exerting pressure, were to try to open a hand already closed
on itself and on its feeling. Wühlen means to search through and ransack,
to extort. It is a movement on which Gadamer insists and in which
Derrida sees a subversive, curious, and impatient impulse. It wants to
extort a blessing from the hand that blesses precisely because, while it
presents a message to read, it takes it away from the reader. It retains
the blessing in itself. Gadamer then proposes a subversion of the scene
of reading, that is also a subversive scene of reading, that of the poem
itself: “Accordingly, the benefacting hand is inverted boldly into the
hand where palm-reading can reveal a message of beneficent hope.”92
Offered by the hand that blesses, the blessing is sought after with des-
peration. As if a blessing could only ever be extorted. As if a verifiable,
predictable, and reliable blessing was no longer a blessing. Must not
a blessing—as Derrida wonders93—perhaps remain always “improba-
ble” in order to be a blessing? This improbability brings us back to
the debate in Paris, suggesting continuity and perhaps something more.
The blessing is nevertheless that of the poem. The poetic text is a
double blessing because it blesses the other and allows the other to
bless. Under the sign of this blessing Derrida inscribes the moment in
which the philosopher commemorates that he is no more. The blessing
hand that seems to open itself is perhaps that of Gadamer. Gadamer’s
hand confuses itself with that of the poetic text. In both cases the text,
of the hand and of the poem, appears to be a “confusion of fissures
and wrinkles,” of “breaks” that, to the decipherer, are visible as lines,
RIPH 34_f6_73-102 10/27/04 9:02 AM Page 94

94   

interrupted and internal, destined like the text to refuse, to escape, to dis-
appear.94 Without the risk for interruption, without this “improbabil-
ity,” without this impossibility of a final proof that must remain infinite,
there will be neither reading, nor giving, nor blessing.95 One must rec-
ognize the right of the text to remain in indecision, to let that which
cannot be decided remain indecisive and undecidable. Defended by
Gadamer, the “right to indecision” is taken up with force by Derrida.96
The “immediate illegibility” of the text is the “resource” that allows
it to bless, to give, to give by thinking, reading, understanding—that
allows it to speak.97 It is the “resource”—or the blessing—of hermeneu-
tics, no less than of deconstruction.
The deconstructive and disseminating reading of Derrida thus carries
itself towards the trace of the poetic text. This irreducible remainder
of illegibility is destined to survive the decipherings of all the underwriters
and readers yet to come through an uninterrupted process that is both
infinite and finite. This excess and remainder of illegibility makes
hermeneutics possible and is made possible by hermeneutics. Thus,
with the same move that brings it towards the trace of the poem’s
illegibility, Derrida moves towards hermeneutics. By attempting to be
“faithful” to the hermeneutic demand, but also to that unique alterity
that this has in itself and that it carries in itself beyond itself, Derrida
tries to decipher the constellation of Celan’s poem “Grosse, glühende
Wölbung,” the configuration of the stars in that “great, glowing vault.”98
On one level, in the Hebrew landscape through which Derrida trav-
els, there is the ram with his “stony face,” the animal of sacrifice and
holocaust—image of infinite return of all the scapegoats, all the sub-
stitutes, of the rams of all the holocausts—whose horns are the instru-
ments of the shofar sounded on Rosh Hashana, the first day of the
year, and on Yom Kippur, the day of atonement and of the Great
Forgiveness: between these two fateful days, the scripture of God can
carry the ones and not carry the others in the Book of Life. On these
days, one recites: “Remember us for life, and inscribe us in the Book
of Life. . . .” Every Jew then senses the border of everything, between
death and life, between rebirth and the end, between the world and
the end of the world, between the sorrowful annihilation of the other
or of oneself. In this Hebraic sense, which also seems to be the mean-
ing followed by Derrida, to carry means to inscribe, to write.
RIPH 34_f6_73-102 10/27/04 9:02 AM Page 95

      95

19. The Poem’s Passing over from Finitude to Infinity

The poem writes, supports, and prescribes from the heart of its “soli-
tude.”99 As regards all that is transitory and fleeting, like existence, the
poetic word proclaims and bears witness to itself, “stands firm in itself ”
in its inimitable uniqueness and its absolute solitude. But its solitude,
self-guiding and self-referential, does not exclude the other while speaking
of itself. That reference to self is always an appeal to the other —even
if the other is inaccessible in itself. In this way “remains the reference
to that which resists appropriation.”100 There is no need to raise the
question again: “who am I and who are you?” “Your irrefutable tes-
timony” is already mine, because it is as little its own as it is another’s.
The poem is the subjectum, and there is no other subjectivity. For
Derrida, it is similar to the way Gadamer speaks of the play of art:
“The ‘subject’ of the experience of art, that which remains and endures,
is not the subjectivity of the person who experiences it but the work
itself.”101 The work’s sovereignty, which makes the poem the saying of
a dictation or of a Diktat, is nonetheless the sovereign authority of a
question that, requesting a responsible response, opens up a dialogue.
The Gedicht returns to the Gespräch. And here Derrida returns to
Gadamer. Returns in the sense that he restores the word in order to
take it up immediately. It is a means of gaining access and passing
through, the possibility of building a bridge connecting the two banks
of hermeneutics and deconstruction. This sovereign and eminent pas-
sage is the poem. And not just any poem, but that which bears the
signature Paul Celan.
Even though it is underwritten and signed, the poem pre-scribes a
poetic dictation to which living speaking can never correspond, because
it “stands alone” and is autonomous in a way that is free from the
conscious and intentional meaning of the signer. The poem is excised,
separated, and abandoned like a trace, just as every trace is aban-
doned to its destiny. This trace is left to itself, deprived of its origin
and also of its end, orphaned by means of the interrupted derivation,
and for that reason emancipated through a double interruption. The
trace is errant, unforeseeable, untranslatable, and nearly illegible, and
thus destined because of its “immediate illegibility” to survive, passing
from one to the other, to the deciphering of all the readers to come,
of all the signers and countersigners in an “infinite process.”102
For Gadamer, the infinite is found in dialogue. Gadamer insists on
this infinity even in his later essays, above all where his reflection sheds
RIPH 34_f6_73-102 10/27/04 9:02 AM Page 96

96   

light upon the “limits of language” in connection with the limits of

human finitude. On the one hand, no dialogue reaches its end before
coming to a real agreement; but on the other hand, dialogue never
actually reaches its end, because a real agreement contradicts the
essence of individuality. These are the limits of human finitude, of
temporality, of the discursivity of our saying that thwart the end of
dialogue.103 Thus “the dialogue that we are is the one that never ends.
No word is the last word, just as there is no first word.”104 Every word
is always already a response, because for Gadamer the question initi-
ates the suspension and marks the interruption. In that sense “questioning
opens up possibilities of meaning.”105 Even the highest form of poetry,
that of Celan, poses a question, for Gadamer the question par excel-
lence: “Who am I and who are you?”106 But the question, even the one
posed by the poetic text, always appears precisely within the dialogue.
It appears as the interruption from which the infinite process of dia-
logue resumes its own movement. In other words, for Gadamer, the
dialogue of poetry is always dialogue. The poetic text inscribes itself
into the constellation of dialogue and shines as a new interpretation.
For Derrida, things differ and even seem the opposite. The process
is infinite, but it cannot not interrupt itself. The trace of the poem,
untranslatable, translates itself infinitely —until it takes its last breath, its
last gasp, like the shepherd-poet of Celan who panting and inhaling,
reaches the “breathcrystal” of the poetic word. The process is inter-
rupted because up to a certain point one remains without breath. The
break that could be infinite is the break that precedes the “breath-
turn,” the Atemwende. Once again the infinite is brought back to finitude.
The human incapacity to speak without taking a breath, the inability
to hold one’s breath, precedes the temporal and discursive finitude of
saying that, according to Derrida, is a natural finitude, neither artificial
nor intentional. This finitude, that has interruption in itself and that
interrupts, reclaims the infinite process.107 But at the same time, it
traces it and delineates it in a discontinuous way—with twists and
turns and spirals. How could one not think of the elevated sounds of
the shofar? How could one not think of the breath that passes and
twists through the intricate folds of the ram’s horn? How could one
not think of the “melody of the spirals,” another inversion, or perhaps
the “breathturn” before all the turns?
RIPH 34_f6_73-102 10/27/04 9:02 AM Page 97

      97

20. Stars and Constellations

Thus the process and its infinity are not important; nor is retaining
the infinity of dialogue. For Derrida, retaining the interruption is of
primary importance because interruption, as occurred in Paris, maintains
that secret of Unheimlichkeit, that foreign and distant proximity that is
the condition for dialogue. The event of every new interpretation, that
is, of every new movement in dialogue, is tied to interruption that is
meditative and suspensive in itself. The suspension is part of the inter-
ruption and is read as indecision. “Interruption is indecisive and avoids
deciding.”108 Since it interrupts and suspends, the indecision holds atten-
tion with the suspended breath, keeps it alive, awake and watchful,
ready, while lending an ear, while it is suspended in the whisper of
the other word and the word of another, where all of the other begin-
nings begin. Gadamer already recognizes the right to indecision, and
recognizes it as the poem. It is the poem that avoids decision.
The poem avoids decision due to its immediate illegibility through
which it also speaks the illegibility of the world. The illegible is not
opposed to the legible. By remaining illegible, the poem discloses infinite
possibilities for reading. In this remainder, in this irreducible surplus,
Derrida points out the difference between hermeneutics and the dis-
seminating “reading-writing” (lecture-écriture).109 Hermeneutics, aiming to
unravel the implicit and explicit wrinkles of meaning, the misunder-
standings, the semantics and rhetoric, the idiomatic resources of language
and the intended meanings of the latter, strives to not let that remain-
der be unread and unreadable—the remainder that nonetheless escapes
from every hermeneutic contest. If, on the other hand, one were to
eliminate the remainder, one would in the process eliminate hermeneu-
tics itself. The disseminating “reading-writing” therefore comes to the
rescue and aids hermeneutics by protecting that remainder and direct-
ing itself towards that remainder. Without the “singable remnant,”110
the Anspruch and also the provocation that sings and makes every poem
sing, the latter would not even be able to survive. The remainder is
the trace of the poem. The errant trace articulates, and even inter-
rupts, the response that hermeneutics gives to the question of the poem,
and that continues from meaning to meaning, truth to truth. The dis-
seminal experience makes and assumes here, in hermeneutics itself, the
test of an interruption, of a caesura, almost of a wound, the hiatus in
the poem itself of a wound whose lips could never close. The word
RIPH 34_f6_73-102 10/27/04 9:02 AM Page 98

98   

remains “circumcised.”111 Although it continues infinitely, that process

now appears discontinuous, both infinite and finite. More than infinite,
beginning from the interruption, it is un-interrupted.
But the interruption is not a new “star,” good or evil, under which
a dialogue is born.112 The interruption tears open the sky and discloses
a new “constellation.”113 The trace of the poem, which carries the hia-
tus, the caesura, and the ellipse inscribed in itself, opens unforeseen
and unforeseeable constellations; it multiplies the horizons and the skies,
studding them and scattering them with stars, and promises an infinite
multitude of stars, under which the poem is read and re-read—a mul-
titude like that of the descendents promised to Abraham after God
interrupted the sacrifice of Isaac (Gn 15:5).
Unity and difference, difference and unity, reassert the secret of
their bond and the elusive cross-reference between hermeneutics and
deconstruction. Between the two infinites, and for that reason infinitely
other, beyond the finitude and because of finitude, above and beyond
the end, beyond the final interruption, dialogue continues, uninterrupted
in the poem and along with the poem. The trace left by Celan keeps
the dialogue open. His words and interruptions disclose unforeseen
openings and inaudible passages. But the breath of the poet does more
than sustain the bridge suspended in the air between two infinites. The
“breathturn” is for both much more. It is a turn towards the other
side yet to come, beyond hermeneutics and beyond deconstruction. As
a privileged interlocutor, an elected witness of the one and the other,
Celan bestows his words upon us because the one should speak to the
other. One finds both here “in the environs of the poetic,” where
poetry can, in dialogue, trespass into philosophy and provoke an oscil-
lation that, beyond metaphysical oppositions, is not that of a synthe-
sis.114 Celan is this tertium datur. More than the point of convergence,
he is a point of orientation. Both point to the orient in different ways,
the morning star that still rises up in the sky. Its Schibboleth, the sign
of alliance, of division and sharing, looks after this passage to a new
philosophy.

Translated by Robert Valgenti

DePaul University
RIPH 34_f6_73-102 10/27/04 9:02 AM Page 99

      99

NOTES
Except where indicated otherwise, throughout this essay, insertions by the author are
enclosed in parentheses; insertions by the translator are enclosed in brackets.
1. Gadamer has insisted on this shared derivation. Cf. H.-G. Gadamer, “Destruktion
and Deconstruction,” in Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter, ed.
D. P. Michelfelder and R. Palmer (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), 108–9; ibid.,
“Hermeneutics and Logocentrism,” 114–25; and ibid., “Letter to Dallmayr,” 93–101.
Also “Hermeneutik auf der Spur,” in H.-G. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke (Tübingen:
Mohr Siebeck, 1999), 10:157 (hereafter cited as GW followed by volume and page
number)
2. Cf. G. W. Bertram, Hermeneutik und Dekonstuktion. Konturen einer Auseinandersetzung der
Gegenwartsphilosophie (München: Fink, 2002), 11.
3. Posing the question in a dialogical manner, while already anticipated in the intro-
ductory essay by Michelfelder and Palmer, has not been greatly followed. Cf.
Dialogue and Deconstruction, 2.
4. H.-G. Gadamer, “Text and Interpretation,” in Dialogue and Deconstruction, 27.
5. J. Derrida, “Three Questions to Hans-Georg Gadamer,” in Dialogue and Deconstruction,
52–53. The plural “good wills” chosen by Derrida (cf. the original title, “Bonnes
Volontés de Puissance”) indicates a connection between this text and the talk held
immediately after entitled “Interpreting Signatures (Nietzsche/Heidegger): Two
Questions,” in Dialogue and Deconstruction, 58–71.
6. Cf. Josef Simon, “Good Will to Understand and the Will to Power: Remarks on
an ‘Improbable Debate,’ ” trans. Richard Palmer, in Dialogue and Deconstruction,
162–75; Philippe Forget, “Leitfäden einer unwahrscheinlichen Debatte,” introduc-
tion to Text und Interpretation: Eine deutsch-französische Debatte mit Beiträgen von Jacques
Derrida, Philippe Forget, Manfred Frank, H.-G. Gadamer, Jean Greisch und François Laruelle,
ed. P. Forget (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1984), 7–23.
7. H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. J. Weinsheimer and D. Marshall (New
York: Crossroad, 1992), 297.
8. Cf. in particular H.-G. Gadamer, Gadamer on Celan: “Who am I and who are you?”,
translated and edited by R. Heinemann and B. Krajewski (Albany: SUNY Press,
1997). Also J. Risser, Hermeneutics and the Voice of the Other. Re-reading Gadamer’s
Philosophical Hermeneutics (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), 159–208. In Gadamer’s encounter
with Celan, Risser sees a rejection of Truth and Method because the voice of the
poet shows that the voice of the other can never be assimilated.
9. Cf. J. Derrida, “Three Questions to Hans-Georg Gadamer,” 53.
10. Ibid., 52.
11. Ibid., 53.
12. Ibid., 53.
13. Cf. H.-G. Gadamer, “Reply to Jacques Derrida,” in Dialogue and Deconstruction,
55–57. Originally published as “Und dennoch: Macht des Guten Willens,” in Text
und Interpretation.
14. “Reply to Jacques Derrida,” 55 (my italics).
15. Plato, Gorgias 458a.
16. “Hermeneutics and Logocentrism,” 119. But also Truth and Method, 385.
17. “Reply to Jacques Derrida,” 55.
18. Ibid.; for the German version, cf. “Und dennoch: Macht des guten Willens,” 59.
19. Cf. J. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs,
trans. D. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 22.
20. H.-G. Gadamer, “Grenzen der Sprache,” in GW 8:353.
21. “Reply to Jacques Derrida,” 56; “Und dennoch: Macht des guten Willens,” 60.
22. Ibid., 57.
RIPH 34_f6_73-102 10/27/04 9:02 AM Page 100

100   

23. Cf. the critical position assumed by Habermas in his encounter with Derrida, in
J. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. F. Lawrence (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1993), 161–84; cf. also Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1992), in particular, “The Unity of Reason in the Diversity of
Its Voices,” 115–48. Gadamer refers in particular to this latter work, speaking of
the “excellent critique” Habermas makes of Derrida (GW, 2:3–23, 23n.).
24. Cf. M. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings, ed. D. F.
Krell (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1977), 149–87.
25. The limit of infinite dialogue is life itself. Cf. Plato, Republic 450b. On this, cf.
D. Di Cesare, “La Paroloa Salvifica della Filosofia,” in Incontri con Hans-Georg Gadamer,
ed. G. Figal (Milano: Bompiani, 2000), 100–107.
26. “Destruktion and Deconstruction,” 113 (translation altered).
27. [Translator’s note: In order to emphasize the author’s philosophical point, I have
translated “voler dire”, which is idiomatic for “to mean,” as “wanting to say” and
“vuol dire” as “wants to say” throughout the essay.]
28. H.-G. Gadamer, “Sprache und Verstehen,” in GW 2:198.
29. H.-G. Gadamer, “Man and Language,” in Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. D. Linge
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977), 64.
30. In “voler dire” resounds the impossibility of saying everything one means or wants
to say; and here rests the difference intrinsic to the “voler dire.” “Derrida insists on
this ‘difference’ ”—writes Gadamer—“and I fully agree with him” (“Hermeneutics
and Logocentrism,” 118; cf. also “Hermeneutik auf der Spur,” 153).
31. [Translator’s note: I have elected to translate “remettersi” as “giving oneself over to”
in order to capture the reflexive verb’s diverse meanings. In the final chapter of
The End of Modernity, Gianni Vattimo provides a short explanation (an explanation
that is omitted in the English translation of the text) of the various uses of “remettersi,”
particularly as it pertains to his discussion of Heidegger’s term Verwindung: “it is
something from which one recovers, to which one gives oneself over, that
to which one returns again. Beyond these meanings there is still the sense of dis-
tortion that one reads in the meaning of convalescence and resignation” (La fine
della modernità [Milan: Garzanti, 1999], 181) (my translation—R.V.)].
32. Cf. H.-G. Gadamer, “Phänomenologie, Hermeneutik, Metaphysik,” in GW 10:107,
and “Zwischen Phänomenologie und Dialektik—Versuch einer Selbstkritik,” in GW
2:5.
33. “Man and Language,” 66.
34. Truth and Method, 103.
35. H.-G. Gadamer, “Verstehen und Spiel,” in GW 2:121–32.
36. Cf. Speech and Phenomena, 33–34.
37. Cf. Ibid., 71–73.
38. Speech and Phenomena, 74. Cf. also J. Derrida, “Form and Meaning: A Note on the
Phenomenology of Language,” in The Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982), 155–73.
39. Cf. Truth and Method, 260–61. But also in M. Heidegger, Being and Time, §4.
40. Cf. “Letter to Dallmayr,” 97; cf. also “Hermeneurics and Logocentrism,” 119.
41. The relativity in hermeneutics that characterizes difference, and therefore foreign-
ness, in no way leads to a reduction or devaluing of it. Those who advance an
absolute and absolutely external concept of “foreign” seem unjustified. Cf.
B. Waldenfels, Der Stachel des Fremden (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990) and Topographie des
Fremden (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997). On this point, cf. also G. W. Bertram, Herme-
neutik und Dekonstruktion, 75–77.
42. Truth and Method, 295.
43. Ibid., 297 (author’s brackets).
44. Ibid., 276.
RIPH 34_f6_73-102 10/27/04 9:02 AM Page 101

      101

45. Cf. J. Simon, Philosophie des Zeichens (Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 1989), 152.
46. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit.
47. Cf. T. Borsche, “Freiheit als Zeichen. Zur zeichenphilosophische Frage nach der
Bedeutung von Freiheit,” in Zeichen und Interpretation, ed. J. Simon (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1994), 117.
48. F. D. E. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik und Kritik, ed. M. Frank (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1977), 78.
49. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues, ed. D. Di
Cesare (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1998), 182–83.
50. Truth and Method, 406, 180; “Sprache und Verstehen,” 187 (my italics). Cf. also
“Phänomenologie, Hermeneutik, Metaphysik,” 100–109.
51. “Sprache und Verstehen,” 188.
52. “Die Unfähigkeit zum Gespräch,” in GW 2:211.
53. “Sprache und Verstehen,” in GW 2:188.
54. “Hermeneutik auf der Spur,” 162.
55. Cf. H.-G. Gadamer, “Von der Warheit des Wortes,” in GW 8:38.
56. “Man and Language,” 67.
57. “Wie weit schreibt Sprache das Denken vor?” in GW 2:199–206.
58. Taken indirectly from the encounter with J. Derrida (“Three Questions for Hans-
Georg Gadamer,” 52), the expression is used by Forget in the title of his intro-
duction: P. Forget, “Leitfäden einer unwahrscheinlichen Debatte,” in Text und
Interpretation, 7–23.
59. The number of new contributions in Dialogue and Deconstruction attests to the last-
ing effect of the debate in America.
60. J. Derrida, Béliers. Le dialogue ininterrompu entre deux infinis, le poème. Paris: Galilée,
2003. [Sections I and II of Béliers, translated by Thomas Dutoit and Philippe
Romanski under the title “Uninterrupted Dialogue: Between Two Infinities, the
Poem,” appear in this volume of Research in Phenomenology. —Ed.]
61. Béliers, 15.
62. Ibid., 10.
63. Ibid., 21.
64. Ibid., 14.
65. Ibid., 9–10.
66. Ibid.
67. Cf. J. Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael
Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
68. Béliers, 20.
69. Ibid., 22.
70. “One often speaks far too casually of an interior monologue. An interior dialogue
precedes it and makes it possible.” Cf. Béliers, 19, and also Speech and Phenomena,
78.
71. Cf. H.-G. Gadamer, Gadamer on Celan: “Who Am I and Who Are You?” and Other
Essays, translated and edited by R. Heinemann and B. Krajewski (Albany, NY:
SUNY Press, 1997). Also, Gedicht und Gespräch (Frankfurt: Insel, 1990).
72. Béliers, 26.
73. “Hermeneutik auf der Spur,” 173.
74. Cf. Béliers, 29–30; P. Celan, “Great, glowing vault” in Breathturn, trans. P. Joris
(Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1995), 232–33; cf. “Who Am I and Who Are
You?”, 94.
75. Cf. Béliers, 67.
76. Béliers, 53.
77. Ibid., 23.
78. Ibid.
RIPH 34_f6_73-102 10/27/04 9:02 AM Page 102

102   

79. Ibid., 46.

80. Cf. Béliers, 79–80; M. Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. World,
Finitude, Solitude, trans. W. McNeill and N. Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University
Pres, 1995).
81. M. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper
and Row, 1968), 139.
82. Cf. P. Celan, “Ansprache anlaüasslich der Entgegennahme des Literaturpreises
der Freien Hansestadt Bremen,” in Paul Celan, Gesammelte Werke in fünf Banden
(Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1983), 3:185.
83. Béliers, 28–29.
84. Béliers, 68. A passage when Celan speaks of Lenz comes to mind: “He who walks
on his head, Ladies and Gentlemen,—has the sky below him.” (P. Celan, “Der
Meridian,” in Gesammelte Werke in fünf Banden, 3:195).
85. Béliers, 76.
86. Ibid., 77.
87. Ibid.
88. Derrida ends his commemoration with this verse by Hölderlin.
89. Cf. “Dekonstruktion und Hermeneutik,” in GW, 10:138.
90. P. Celan, “Paths in the shadow-break,” in Breathturn, 68–69.
91. Cf. “Who am I and Who are You?”, 95–96.
92. “Who am I and Who are You?”, 95.
93. Béliers, 36.
94. “Who am I and Who Are You?”, 95.
95. Béliers, 36.
96. Ibid., 37.
97. Cf. Béliers, 40.
98. P. Celan, “Great, fiery vault”; cf. Béliers, 57.
99. Béliers, 51.
100. Ibid., 40.
101. Truth and Method, 102.
102. Cf. Béliers, 39. Cf. also “Hermeneutics and Logocentrism,” 123–24.
103. “Grenzen der Sprache,” 359.
104. “Letter to Dallmayr,” 95.
105. Truth and Method, 375; “Hermeneutics and Logocentrism,” 124.
106. H.-G. Gadamer, “Der ‘eminente’ Text und seine Wahrheit,” in GW 8:294.
107. Béliers, 39.
108. Ibid., 38.
109. Ibid., 47.
110. P. Celan, “Singable residue,” in Breathturn, 100–101; cf. J. Derrida, Schibboleth pour
Paul Celan (Paris: Galilée, 1986), 68–69.
111. Schibboleth, 101–5, 109–10.
112. Cf. Truth and Method, 383.
113. Béliers, 57.
114. Schibboleth, 80; “Hermeneutik auf der Spur,” 149.