1. IN SEARCH OF A STRATEGY.

In the preface to his grandiose Phänomenologie des Geistes, in which, like some hired ghostwriter, he narrates the autobiography of the Absolute itself, the archmetaphysician Hegel asserted that philosophy is “serious business.” Unlike the artist or the craftsman who merely toys around with things, the philosopher is a scientist who penetrates to the very heart of die Sachen selbst. In saying this, G. W. F. Hegel was merely reasserting what mainline, serious-minded philosophers—whom I shall simply call “metaphysicians”—have always maintained, from Plato through Descartes and Kant to Husserl and beyond. Philosophy’s claim to the status of Science is, however, one which has always been contested by those thinkers who go to make up what I call the Counter-Tradition: the Greek sophists and rhetoricians, the Pyrrhonian skeptics, Montaigne, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche. . . .¹ And the metaphysicians have always retaliated by accusing the counter-traditionalists of “not being serious,” of, in fact, being frivolous. It certainly cannot be denied that many of them have indeed delighted in being intellectually playful: Think, for instance, of Gorgias’s tongue-in-cheek anti-Parmenedian treatise, On Non-Being, Kierkegaardian irony, Nietzschean wit . . . The principal target of the dialectical fireworks of writers such as these has been precisely what Sartre would call “l’esprit du sérieux” of orthodox philosophy.² However, does being an antimetaphysician, an antifoundationalist, necessarily entail being frivolous? This is in effect the background question I would like to raise in this paper by way of comparing the intellectual endeavors of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jacques Derrida. When Gadamerian hermeneutics is compared to Derridian deconstruction, the answer to the question appears to be a “No”: One can quite well reject metaphysical seriousness without courting frivolity.

A comparative analysis of these two key figures of our postmodernity is by no means an easy undertaking. While, as a result of many years of close personal association, I feel I understand Gadamer fairly well and have a pretty good idea of what he is up to and of the significance and import of his philosophical project, I cannot say the same for Derrida, even though I first encountered both the man and his work back in the late 1960s when I was teaching as an assistant to Paul Ricoeur at the University of Paris (at that time Derrida was interested among other things in finding out more about Peirce). In fact, directly contrary to my experience with Gadamer, I almost feel I have progressively understood Derrida less and less as the years go by, in the sense that each new work of his has been less and less intelligible to me. It may be because (and I do not mean this frivolously) there is less and less to understand in each new work of his. So I do not pretend to know what Derrida means, wants to say, and am not surprised when he intimates that there is nothing he wants to say, that the vouloir-dire is a hopelessly metaphysical notion.³ Not only is Derrida not a “serious” philosopher, his irony is so extreme that in his case it is not, or so it would seem, a matter of saying one thing and meaning something else thereby but, rather, of saying this and that and the other thing and not really meaning anything at all. In any event, I can only say of him what Gadamer himself has said: “I will not say that I was extremely successful in understanding him.”⁴

To be more precise, I believe I understand fairly well the negative or critical significance of Derrida’s deconstructive attack on the “metaphysics of presence.” This is in fact something I sympathize with wholeheartedly. But this aspect of his undertaking is as fully characteristic, as I shall be arguing, of Gadamer’s hermeneutics as it is of Derrida’s own deconstruction. What I fail to understand in Derrida is precisely what I fail to understand in Richard Rorty as well: the positive, philosophical significance of the critique of metaphysics and epistemology. Where does it all get us? What future, if any, is there for philosophy after the end of Philosophy (in Rorty’s sense of the term, which is also that of Derrida, i.e., Platonism)? Is there nothing left for the philosopher to do, after the demise of metaphysical seriousness, but to be an intellectual “kibitzer, ” a concern-free creator of “abnormal ” discourse, an insouciant player of deconstructive and fanciful word games, an agile figure skater on the thin ice of a “bottomless chessboard”?⁵

According to Rorty, the new breed of “intellectuals” who are to displace the traditional “metaphysicians” should not, it appears, have any fixed views on anything. Although Derrida does not quite say this, it often seems to me to be what he implies by his intellectual practice and his approach to texts, as well as by his near-total silence on the ethical and political dimensions of the philosophical enterprise.⁶ Rorty’s distinction between metaphysicians and intellectuals (“intellectual dilettantes”) furnishes me in fact with the interpretive strategy (and the tertium comparationis) I need if I am to make some meaningful comparison between Gadamer and Derrida, which otherwise could be as difficult as comparing apples and oranges. Accepting this distinction, I wish to argue the following: While Derrida embodies the traits of Rorty’s carefree “intellectual,” Gadamer, equally as antimetaphysical as Derrida, does not; he transcends the distinction and in fact provides us with an alternative to it. Whence the title of this paper: “Beyond Seriousness and Frivolity.”

The intertextual allusions (or “parasitism”) of this title will not fail to be noted, and they in fact provide the reader at the outset with the substance of my argument (which is indeed a Gadamerian response to deconstruction).⁷ With Richard Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism in mind, I wish to argue that while Gadamer successfully leads us beyond both objectivism (metaphysics, epistemology) and relativism, Derrida’s critique of metaphysics lands us, for all practical purposes, in a debilitating relativism, a kind of philosophical nihilism. I would like to say of Derrida what Bernstein says of Rorty, that from a Gadamerian perspective Derrida’s hermeneutics, his handling of texts, is “mutilated or castrated, for it is a hermeneutics without the claim to knowledge or truth.”⁸ It seems to provide only for autoaffectional “supplements,” not the kind of “knowledge” which is achieved through genuine intersubjective intercourse. It is, to use Derrida’s words, the “adventurous excess of a writing that is no longer directed by any knowledge.”⁹ In contrast, what Gadamer’s work shows is that it is not at all necessary to abandon the notions of knowledge and truth, that it is in fact fully possible to extricate them from any and all metaphysical-epistemological contexts. To so extricate them is to point the way beyond both objectivism and relativism, beyond both “seriousness” and “frivolity”^l0

2. HERMENEUTICS.

One of the major motivations of Gadamer’s hermeneutical project is to overcome or displace what he has called “l’ère de la théorie de la connaissance,” the age of epistemology.¹¹ His critique of classical hermeneutics in the person of Dilthey is directed primarily at the fact that it remains caught up in the modern epistemological, foundationalist project.¹² Phenomenological hermeneutics is thus a thoroughly postmodern form of thought which understandably appeals to an antifoundationalist such as Rorty. What is surprising is that Derrida appears unwilling to recognize the postepistemological and postmetaphysical significance of Gadamer’s enterprise.

In Spurs/Éperons Derrida does, however, make a number of pejorative references to “hermeneutics.” It seems that by “hermeneutics” (“le projet herméneutique”) he understands the attempt to get at “the true meaning of the text.”¹³ The implication seems to be that “hermeneutics” presupposes that a text has a definite, in-itself sort of meaning that it would be the business of interpretation to reproduce in as accurate a form as possible, this meaning being the author’s intended meaning.¹⁴ In opposition to hermeneutical naiveté of this sort, “la question de la femme” (as Derrida calls it) reveals that there is no “decidable opposition of true and not true”; “philosophical decidability” falls by the wayside (S/E, p. 106). Just as it cannot be decided what Nietzsche meant when he scribbled on a scrap of paper “ ‘I have forgotten my umbrella,’ ” so it cannot be denied that, “in some monstrous way,” the meaning of the totality of Nietzsche’s text might be undecidable. “The hermeneut cannot but be provoked and disconcerted,” Derrida tells us, by the freeplay (jeu) of the text (see S/E, pp. 132-33), the endless play of signifiers devoid of decidable meaning which makes of reading itelf not interpretation aiming at truth but free, parodying play.

What actually provokes the “hermeneut” and what he finds disconcerting in all this is Derrida’s failure to say what he means by “hermeneutics,” i.e., exactly who or what he is referring to. The text itself leaves the issue undecided. If by hermeneutics Derrida means the classical hermeneutical tradition stemming from Schleiermacher (whom he alludes to) up to Betti and Hirsh, then Derrida is, whether he likes it or not, stating something “true” when he characterizes it as the attempt to reproduce objective, determinate meanings. If, however, the term is a blanket one meant also to cover Gadamer, and phenomenological hermeneutics in general (the various references to Heidegger and “phenomenology” in the text seem to indicate as much), it is manifestly false. Any meaningful confrontation between Gadamerian hermeneutics and Derridian deconstruction would require that this matter be set straight.

For the sake of the record (or to set it straight), let us simply take note of some of the central theses of Gadamer’s hermeneutics. For the sake of the present discussion I shall single out three: (1) To understand is in fact to interpret (“All understanding is interpretation . . . ” [TΜ, p. 350]). Understanding must not, therefore, be conceived of “epistemologically,” as the “correct” representation of some “objective” state of affairs. It is not so much reproductive as it is productive, transformative (“ . . . understanding is not merely a reproductive, but always productive attitude as well” [TΜ, p. 264]). (2) All understanding is essentially bound up with language (“Being that can be understood is language” [TΜ, p. xxii]; “ . . . language is the universal medium in which understanding itself is realised” [TΜ, p. 350]). (3) The understanding of the meaning of text is inseparable from its application (“ . . . understanding always involves something like the application of the text to be understood to the present situation of the interpreter” [TΜ, p. 274]).

These main theses¹⁵ have some important implications, especially in regard to the notions of meaning and truth, as we shall see in the remainder of this paper. Suffice it for the moment to remark on how they entail a decisive break with the logocentric metaphysics of presence in that they render meaningless the metaphysical notion of meanings that would be timeless and invariant, free from the unsettling play of language, and which would simply have to be intuited or otherwise directly reproduced in order to be grasped (for there to be “truth”).

One thing which makes a comparison between Gadamer and Derrida difficult is that they are not out to do the same kind of thing. Whereas Gadamer outlines a general philosophical theory, Derrida mainly presents us with a technique for reading.¹⁶ Derrida’s interpretive tactic or reading strategy consists in showing how what an author actually does in his text tends to subvert in one way or another what he says, what he intends. A deconstructive reading seeks to discover “blind spots” in a text around which it organizes itself (such as the usage of the word “supplement” in Rousseau) with the aim of discrediting the metaphysical and epistemological assumptions held by the author (in particular the assumption that philosophy is a form of pure reason—and not just another form of “writing”—free from the metaphorical and rhetorical play of language), of discrediting, ultimately, the entire metaphysical or ontotheological project. Derrida’s work pretty much exhausts itself in this sort of activity (it is, borrowing his own words, “a strategy without finality” [see Dis, p. 7]. That it should not be able to do any more is understandable, given the fact that Derrida appears to equate philosophy with metaphysics (“Philosophy” in Rorty’s sense), and thus is led to say that deconstruction seeks to determine “from a certain exterior that is unqualifiable or unnameable by philosophy” that which philosophy has dissimulated or forbidden (see Pos, p. 6). It is not too much to speak of nihilism if that on the basis of which or in terms of which we criticize the tradition and seek to overcome it is “unqualifiable or unnameable” by us. It is hard to know where we stand and what we are left with when the deconstructive enterprise turns around and, as we are told it must, deconstructs (“erases”) itself.¹⁷ Deconstruction, as Derrida rightly observes, is essentially a critique. Unlike ordinary, run-of-the-mill critiques (for example, Marxism), it is, however, a critique from, so to speak, nowhere. But because it is from nowhere, it leads us nowhere, and this is precisely why it is basically nihilistic. If there is not a good philosophical reason for deconstructing metaphysics that can be stated and argued for, if, for instance, there is not some justifying theoretical-practical point to it (such as arriving at a less mythical conception of truth or furthering the cause of emancipation), the activity itself becomes purely and simply destructive, a kind of theoretical vandalism.

Although it too is critical (as Gadamer’s Auseinandersetzung with Habermas makes clear), Gadamerian hermeneutics, on the other hand, is not primarily a method or technique for reading and interpreting texts. This, of course, is where it differs from classical hermeneutics as well. As Gadamer is at pains to point out in the foreword to the second edition of Truth and Method, what he is proposing is not (unlike Hirsch, for instance) a new and better method for determining the correct meaning of texts. His phenomenological hermeneutics does not propose a method of understanding to be used in order to avoid misunderstanding or to make the unfamiliar familiar, as Schleiermacher would have said. It is not, indeed, concerned with the epistemological questions of method and methodology at all. Rather, its goal is properly philosophical (whence the term “philosophical hermeneutics”) in that it seeks to determine what is involved in the understanding process itself, what it is that has actually happened whenever we claim to have arrived at an understanding of things, the world, ourselves.¹⁸ Since Gadamer is building on Heidegger’s insight that understanding is not something we “have” but, rather, is what as existing beings we are (an Existentiale), the scope of hermeneutics conceived of in this way is indeed universal. This claim to universal scope is reflected in Gadamer’s literary style, as when he says typically that all understanding is of such-and-such a sort. The purpose of his investigations has been, quite simply, “to discover what is common to all modes of understanding”; it is concerned with “all human experience of the world and human living” (TM, pp. xix, xviii).

Because of its claim to universality, Gadamerian hermeneutics is properly philosophical in its intent, and in this regard it contrasts sharply with the equivocal position in regard to philosophy taken by deconstruction, which does not seem to know quite where it stands (inside still, outside already, or, like Derrida’s own signature, only “on the edge”?). Because it makes universal claims, ones, moreover, which are completely at odds with traditional logocentrism (as we shall see in more detail in what follows), it amounts in fact to a displacement or overcoming of the metaphysics of presence. Precisely because it so displaces traditional foundationalist thinking, it is in its results at least as “deconstructive” as deconstruction.¹⁹ A consideration of the way Gadamer approaches the subjects of “meaning” and “truth” should confirm all of this.

3. MEANING.

Deconstructive freeplay (le jeu), Derrida tells us, “is the disruption of presence.”²⁰ This is to say that it discredits meaning in the traditional metaphysical sense, for metaphysics “considers in a way meaning as a presence (vorhanden) to be exhumed,”²¹ as, in other words, an objective state of affairs of one sort or another that it would be the function of epistemological “knowing” to reproduce, mirror. But for Derrida meaning is nothing other than the ephemeral play of language itself. Language does not refer to anything outside itself; it refers only to itself, in an endless, disseminating deferral of any definite referent.

Derrida arrives at this view by capitalizing on the structuralist notion that the “value” (i.e., meaning) of any given linguistic unit is (like that of a piece in a chess set) determined solely by its differences from all the other units in the language (la langue, the linguistic code). What any given sign “means” or “signifies” (its meaning, the “signified”) is a function solely of its diacritical oppositions to other signs or “signifiers.” Meaning is thus a wholly intralinguistic sort of affair; there is no “transcendental signified, ” something outside the play of signifiers themselves whose function it would be to confer on them their meaning, be this an empirical or ideal state of affairs or a psychological meaningintention. We can never step outside language, and since, moreover, any present linguistic meaning is a function of absent signifiers, meaning itself can never be fully present, determined.²² To Saussure, who said that in language “there is nothing but differences,”²³ Derrida adds: There is nothing but différance (a term which, if it refers to anything at all, must remain without meaning).²⁴ Derrida draws from the semiological view of language²⁵ the conclusion that language is nothing but a differential system of slippage and dissemination and that meaning (as something decidable) is something that is forever deferred: Meaning “is infinite implication, the indefinite referral of signifier to signifier” (WD, p. 25).

Thus for Derrida there is no exit from the labyrinth of a text, no finished, decidable meaning, merely an endless play of signifiers. There is, quite simply, nothing outside the text: Il n’y a pas de hors-texte (G, p. 158). What are the results of all this for the business of textual interpretation, which is, one would think, the attempt to articulate the meaning of a text? What, in this view of things, is there to interpret? Not much it seems.²⁶ Because for Derrida a writer does not dominate his language but can use it only by letting himself be used by it, the aim of reading cannot or should not be that of recapturing, reproducing the author’s signifying intention, of “doubling the text” (see G, p. 158).²⁷ We seem to be faced here with a kind of either-or: Either we are constrained in our interpretations by a preexistent meaning which we seek merely to double (“hermeneutics” in Derrida’s sense) or we are set free to engage in an “active interpretation” (WD, p. 292), one which is, so to speak, déchaînée.²⁸ Freeplay does away with all decidable meaning; the interpretive game engenders an endless series of proliferating interpretations. In our interpretive efforts (our attempt to understand the text, to get at its meaning), we are condemned to an “abyss,” a perpetual oscillation between conflicting interpretations with the impossibility of making a decisive choice.

Just as language is not about anything, so it would appear neither is interpretation. “For Derrida,” Rorty says, “writing always leads to more writing, and more, and still more.”²⁹ Derrida is one of Rorty’s heroes because he is what Rorty would call a “strong textualist,” who is in the interpretation business “for what he can get out of it, not for the satisfaction of getting something right.”³⁰ Derrida himself is not quite so cavalier about the matter. He does recognize that there must be constraints on reading (one must recognize and respect the “classical exigencies”—although, he adds, these have always only protected, never opened a reading [G, p. 158]), and he does say that although “reading is transformation,” “this transformation cannot be executed however one wishes” and that it requires “protocols of reading” (Pos, p. 63). He does not, however, tell us what these protocols should be (“Why not say it bluntly: I have not yet found any that satisfy me”). Given the way he has misrepresented hermeneutics, and given also his misreading of Peirce (to which I shall turn in what immediately follows), one wonders what usefulness these unspecified “protocols” might have (unless it be that of helping to engender what Harold Bloom would call “strong misreadings”).

Let us consider for a moment Derrida’s handling of Peirce, as this particular “blind spot” in his text can light up for us the way hermeneutics escapes the deconstructionist either-or. Peirce appeals greatly to Derrida (“Peirce goes very far in the direction that I have called the de-construction of the transcendental signified, which, at one time or another, would place a reassuring end to the reference from sign to sign” [G, p. 49]), but Derrida ignores about as many important things in Peirce as Rorty does in Gadamer. What appeals to Derrida is Peirce’s “semiotic,” as he called it, specifically his notion of the “interpretant,” i.e., Peirce’s theory that the meaning of one sign is simply another sign that can be substituted for it.³¹ It all sounds like Derrida’s endless play of signifiers in which meaning is forever deferred (“every signified is also in the position of a signifer” [Pos, p. 20]). But there is, nonetheless, a différence (avec-un-e).

Peirce maintains, as Derrida says he does, that we think only in signs. But he does not maintain, as Derrida says he does, that “there are nothing but signs” (G, p. 50). Derrida has no grounds for enlisting Peirce’s support for his notion of freeplay. The fact of the matter is that in texts that Derrida passes over in silence Peirce speaks of a final interpretant. At first glance this might seem to contradict his theory that the meaning of one sign is another sign (its “interpretant”) and that this interpretive process is without end. But it does not. When Peirce says that the process of interpretation is endless he means that it is potentially endless; no given interpretant can ever be final in the sense that it is not open to further interpretation. This is why Peirce says that the meaning of a sign is something “altogether virtual.” If this were all Peirce had to say, we could no doubt view him as a protodeconstructionist. But he fully realized that to leave things at this point would land us in a form of nihilism; it would mean that at no time do we ever have access to decidable meanings. Peirce realized the need for something which, here and now, at any given moment, will provide meaning, even though this meaning will not be immune to futher change. He called this “the living definition, the veritable and final logical interpretant.” The important thing for us to note is that Peirce locates this “final logical interpretant,” not in the order of language or textuality, but in the order of praxis. He writes: “Consequently, the most perfect account of a concept that words can convey will consist in a description of the habit which that concept is calculated to produce.” This, of course, fully reflects Peirce’s pragmatic bent: his linking of belief to habit, and habit to action. Meaning is not something which is free-floating; if we wish to determine the meaning of a particular belief or concept, and do not wish to get caught up in endless word games, we must take into consideration the kind of action to which it gives rise. It is in habit and action that we discover the true meaning of beliefs (our own as well as those of others).³²

If I have taken the time to recall a crucial element in Peirce’s semiotic, it is because there is a striking parallel between it and a crucial element in Gadamer’s hermeneutic: the latter’s notion of application. While both Peirce and Gadamer reject any notion of a transcendental signified, they do not conclude from this that we have to do only with an endless play of signifiers. They realize quite well that although we are always in the process of producing texts, and that although there can never be any final text, there is nevertheless always something outside the text and the order of textuality, and that it is this which allows for decidable meanings. Let us focus on this crucial difference, on the real difference between deconstruction and hermeneutics.

Deconstruction maintains that because writing exceeds the signifying intention of the author, the object of reading should not be that of rediscovering and reduplicating this meaning. This, it says, is what “hermeneutics” seeks to do. Consider, however, some of the things Gadamer has to say: “ . . . the sense of a text in general reaches far beyond what its author originally intended” (TΜ, p. 335). “The mens auctoris is not admissible as a yardstick for the meaning of a work of art” (TM, p. xix). “Does an author really know so exactly and in every sentence what he means?” (TM, p. 489). “Not occasionally only, but always, the meaning of a text goes beyond its author” (TM, p. 264).

For Gadamer, understanding is not only thoroughly linguistic in character, it is also transformative, productive of new meanings (“It is enough to say that we understand in a different way if we understand at all” [TM, p. 264]), and in insisting on these two characteristics of understanding, his hermeneutics overlaps with deconstruction. However, the act of reading is not for him a form of free-floating play. It is always tied to a concrete situation. This is why, unlike Derrida, he also maintains that understanding is inseparable from appplication, i.e., from the reading subject’s reaction to and appropriation of the text. While all understanding is ultimately linguistic in character, yet in a very important sense writing does not simply give rise to more writing (“ . . . there will never be anything but texts” [G, p. 29, n. 38]) but has its fulfillment (end) outside itself, in the realm of the existential-practical, in the transformation it produces in the reading subject (in his or her world orientation). The task that phenomenological hermeneutics sets itself is not, contrary to what Derrida would have us believe, that of reconstituting a past, originating meaning but is, instead, that of explicating the possible senses that a text has for us today, what it says to us, here and now.

Gadamer’s central thesis that meaning is inseparable from application is thoroughly postmodern and is at least as anti- or nonmetaphysical as anything to be found in deconstruction (it is one of Hirsch’s main targets for criticism), for it is one of the central tenets of the metaphysics or epistemology of language (one that Derrida has sought expressly to deconstruct) that there is a radical distinction between sense and reference, between meaning (what words invariably mean) and application (how they are applied in particular situations). However, we do not find in Gadamer the blind spot which is so salient in Derrida’s work. Derrida quite simply omits to take into account in his theorizing (if it can be called that) the fact that texts have readers.³³ And these readers are always particular individuals existing in particular situations, in the light of which and by application to which the text assumes, by means of what Gadamer calls a “fusion of horizons,” a particular, decidable meaning. Given his animus toward the “subject,” it really is no wonder that Derrida can find no decidable meanings in texts, for it makes no sense to speak about the meaning of a text apart from our reading of it. No reading, however, is context-free, and it is precisely this phenomenological fact that there is always a context that serves to anchor the text in our actual living and to allow it to have a decidable meaning.³⁴

Deconstruction tends to issue in relativism, interpretive arbitrariness, because while it maintains (as Gadamer himself does) that there is no meaning present in the text, one that it would be the task of interpretation simply to re-present (there is no original, fixed, hidden meaning to be uncovered), it maintains, at the same time, in accordance with its structuralist inspiration, that there is nothing but texts, that meaning is nothing but the interplay of signs which are themselves without instrinsic meaning. The deconstructionist project is a hopeless venture because it cannot, in accordance with its anti-phenomenological bias against “subjectivity,” allow for the moment of appropriation (to use the term favored by Paul Ricoeur)—no doubt because it links this to the supposedly metaphysical notion of the proper, i.e., that which is “absolutely proximate to itself” (G, p. 50).³⁵ There is no reason, however, why subjectivity should be viewed, metaphysically, as pure self-presence (and accordingly rejected en bloc), and, indeed, it is one of the positive accomplishments of phenomenological hermeneutics to have decentered the subject, to have, so to speak, desubjectivized subjectivity.³⁶

To the deconstructionist notion of undecidability should be opposed the quite different hermeneutical notion of inexhaustibility (see TM, p. 336). In contrast to deconstruction, hermeneutics maintains that there is always the possibility of meaning, but, in contrast to logocentrism, it maintains that it is never possible to arrive at a final meaning: “the discovery of the true meaning of a text or a work of art is never finished; it is in fact an infinite process” (TM, p. 265). Unlike “undecidability,” “inexhaustibility” points not to the eternal vanity of all human endeavor but, rather, to the limitless possibility of interrogation, expression, and understanding.³⁷ “Inexhaustibility” means that in the already acquired we can always find that which can serve to renew our lives and to break the metaphysical circle of the eternal repetition of the Same.³⁸ Nor does the fact that we never have access to a transcendental signified mean that our interpretations are free-floating and “groundless”; they are anchored in our effective history, which they also serve to reshape and which, although it is a ground without a ground (i.e., not a foundation in the metaphysical sense, a Cartesian fundamentum inconcussum), is yet sure and stable enough to allow for a viable and enduring human community.

If “knowledge,” once deconstructed, is reconstructed in a nonfoundational way to mean “understanding” in the hermeneutical sense (the generation and possession of viable meaning), then hermeneutics gives us what deconstruction cannot give us and does not even claim to give us (“we know something here which is no longer anything, with a knowledge whose form can no longer be recognized under the old name” [Dis, p. 21]), namely, knowlege. That is, it leaves us with something more than the cacophony of everyone’s parodying, fanciful interpretations of things, and it allows us to contruct a society which is something more than a deconstructed Tower of Babel.

4. TRUTH.

As philosophy has always maintained, the notions of meaning and truth are intimately related. In Gadamer’s case, if interpretation does not work with the expectation of encountering both meaning and truth in that which is to be interpreted, understanding is quite simply impossible (see TM, pp. 261-62). Thus what was said above about Gadamer and Derrida in regard to the subject of meaning contains implicitly most of what needs to be said about them in regard to the subject of truth. Here, too, the crucial difference, “the difference that makes a difference” as Bernstein would say,³⁹ has to do with Gadamer’s notion of application. Just as the meaning of the text is realized in the reader, in the history of its effects, so also is its truth.

Although the notion of truth is perhaps the least explicated of Gadamer’s key concepts, it is nevertheless one of, if not the most, central of them, as is instanced by the appearance of the term in the very title of his magnum opus and by the fact also that it forms the very last word of the book (there is a parallel here with Proust’s monumental À la recherche du temps perdu, which, in a similar fashion, posts its key term in its title and which ends with the words “dans le temps”). We can say of it, however, what we said of meaning. Just as it is meaningless to speak of meaning if there is nothing outside the play of signs (Derrida is, like Lévi-Strauss, quite right on this score),⁴⁰ so also is it utterly vacuous to speak of truth if, as Gadamer indeed has, one has abandoned the metaphysical-epistemological conception of truth as the representation of an “objective” state of affairs and if one maintains that all there is is the freeplay of signs. Then, indeed, we enter into “the epochal regime of quotation marks” (S/E, p. 107), in which everything, being without “reference,” is also without truth, and philosophy, seen now to be a form of fiction, reaches its end. There can be truth only if there is something outside the linguistic code and outside “quotation marks,” and only if there is something more than just “a play of traces or differance that has no sense” (Dif, p. 154). And indeed, as we have seen, there is, in a sense, an “outside” for Gadamer, although this is in no way a Derridean, metaphysical Origin. Language, for Gadamer, is not, as it is for the (post)structuralists, a kind of self-enclosed, self-subsisting entity, even if this entity which has no outside has, as it is said, no internal self-centeredness, either (see Dis, pp. 35-36). While it is all-encompassing and, as he says, “ubiquitous,” language nonetheless is not a prison (however much an internally decentered and Kafkaesque hall of mirrors this may be).⁴¹ It is nothing other than the universal medium of our experience of the world, the form in which the play of experience realizes itself.⁴²

The notion of play (Spiel, jeu), which is as central to Gadamer as it is to Derrida, is one of the more notable instances of the overlap between hermeneutics and deconstruction. And yet, as is to be expected, it is one in which is revealed most clearly the crucial difference between these two instances of postmodern thought. Derrida joyfully embraces a “Nietzschean” notion of play, a groundless and aimless play in which all standards and distinctions are meaningless, a form of play which rules out in advance any notion of “progress” (progression) and in which meaning is forever deferred in an endless supplementarity.⁴³ Derridas’s “jeu” is “the Nietzschean affirmation, that is the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation” (WD, p. 292). It is a form of play which is both pointless, i.e., without goal, and meaningless. For Gadamer, however, the play of linguistic experience is, to borrow a phrase from Huizinga, zwecklos aber doch sinnvoll.⁴⁴ It is “goal-less” in that, unlike metaphysical progression, it does not aim at a final, ultimate meaning or understanding in which would be revealed the ultimate truth of things. It is not, however, without meaning, this meaning lying in the enhanced self-understanding the player receives as a result of the play of understanding.

Gadamer’s concentration on play as a metaphor for the understanding process is not meant as a Nietzschean rejection of rules or of the subject; its purpose is, rather, to enable us to conceive of subjectivity anew, in a postmodern, postepistemological fashion. Differing in a salutary way from his mentor, Heidegger, in this regard, Gadamer does not direct his deconstructive critique against subjectivity and traditional humanism as such. His purpose (certain illchosen remarks of his notwithstanding) is not to abandon subjectivity, as if it were some dreadful metaphysical construct which gets in the way of the advent of Being (Ereignis), but to arrive at a less “subjectivistic,” less Cartesian conception of it. Play for Gadamer, whose thinking is fully a part of the classical tradition of humanitas, is not, as it is for Derrida and other such contemporary antihumanists, an attempt to “pass beyond man and humanism” (WD, p. 292). Play for Gadamer is most definitely not eine Spiel ohne Spieler.⁴⁵ The very meaning of Gadamer’s notion of the fusion of horizons is that what we have to do with in the play of understanding is the transformation of one subject in his or her encounter with another. We have to do with a self which, in and by means of the dialogical encounter with the other, comes to a greater realization (in the concrete sense of the term) of itself, becomes, as Kierkegaard would say, who or what he or she is. In this context, truth does not mean correspondence with reality (truth as presence)—what possible meaning could that have?—but refers rather to the disclosure of possibilities for being and acting that emerge in and by means of the playful encounter. Truth refers not to a static, mirroring relation between a subject and an object but to the transformation process which occurs in all instances of genuine understanding. Truth refers to the self-enrichment and self-realization that occurs as a result of the play of meaning.

This process of “realization” must not, however, be understood in a Hegelian, i.e., metaphysical, sense. Metaphysical parousia, the final possession of the truth (Derrida’s “full presence”), is not even an ideal for Gadamer, not even in the mode of nostalgia. There is absolutely no place for the metaphysical notion of “totality” (or totalization) in his thinking (“the idea of the whole is itself to be understood only relatively” [TM, p. xxiii]). He deliberately seeks to avoid “a metaphysics of infinity in the Hegelian manner” (TM, p. 433). Instead, he resolutely insists on “the constitutional incompletion (Unvollendbarkeit) of experience.”⁴⁶ Gadamerian self-realization is not a Hegelian Bildung. If there is a teleology of truth and becoming for Gadamer, it is, as Merleau-Ponty would have said, a teleology without a telos.⁴⁷ “The dialectic of experience,” he writes, “has its own fulfillment not in definitive knowledge, but in that openness to experience that is encouraged by experience itself” (TM, p. 319).

I could perhaps sum this all up by saying that for Gadamer play is not just ‘mere” play. In contrast to Derrida’s jeu (his “pure play”), it must, in Gadamer’s case, be said: Il y a quelque chose qui est en jeu dans le jeu; il y a un enjeu au jeu. There is something that is at stake, at issue (en jeu), in the play of understanding, something, as in the Pascalian wager, that is to be won or lost, and this is nothing other than our being itself, the never-to-be-completed realization of our own utmost possibilities of being.⁴⁸ This is why, of course, there is no trace of Nietzschean fatalism in Gadamer’s hermeneutics, a kind of nihilism that would have to be masked by a heavy dose (pharmakon) of Dionysian gleeful exuberance over the “innocence of becoming” (“amor fati”).

Unlike Derrida, who is (through no fault of his own) unable to specify what a postmetaphysical culture might look like, Gadamer can and does.⁴⁹ His Ueberwindung der Metaphysik, his overcoming of the tradition, does not exhaust itself in a vain and sterile (i.e., “disseminating”) protest against its untenable, idealist presuppositions. This is because Gadamer finds in the tradition itself the wherewithal productively to overcome it.⁵⁰