Gadamer’s Poetics: A Critique of Modern Aesthetics 9781472545626

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Foreword In an interview in 1994, Paul Ricoeur spoke about Hans-Georg Gadamer in a way that may not comport with our reflexive image of a contemporary philosopher: “The man is rather astonishing. His mind is steeped in poetry: he knows by heart all the German poetry he evokes immediately in conversation: Goethe, Schiller, Grillparzer, Stefan George, Paul Celan. He also has profound knowledge of Greek tragedy. He actually lives in the texts, which he inhabits through recitation.”1 Because Gadamer’s intellectual influence had implications for every disciplinary corner of the academy, the natural and social sciences as well as the humanities, he had to point out that his fundamental orientation was always toward the arts: “My field is the humanities: the classics, art and literature.”2 His professional identification as a philosopher left him continually clarifying that “studying poetry, the visual arts, architecture, music” was what he considered his “own field.”3 His writing specifically devoted to art and literature fills two volumes of his collected works, and the subject of art permeates his thinking. Despite all of this, secondary scholarship almost invariably treats Gadamer’s theory of art as an adjunct to his broader philosophical arguments about understanding, truth, agency, and the like. First and last I wish to speak in this book about Gadamer and art. In approaching this subject, part of my task initially will be to undo some misconceptions and fill in some gaps. It is a striking paradox that Gadamer stood at the vanguard of continental theorists disparaging the cult of genius, savaging the reduction of artistic expression to museum objects, destabilizing authorial intention and agency, and radically reinterpreting the ontology of the work, yet he is suspected as an old-school defender of artistic traditionalism. In addition to being too much of a classicist with an outdated orientation toward normative conceptions of beauty, he spoke a language alien to the analytic discourse that predominates in most English-language aesthetic theory and criticism. Consequently his voice and contributions are markedly absent from mainstream disciplinary aesthetics, musicology, and art theory. This is a pity, because despite the outmoded elements of Gadamer’s writing on these subjects, his underlying theory is exhilarating, profoundly subversive and transformational. Despite the traditional reference points for Gadamer’s

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theory of the work—a painting of Velasquez or Serge Poliakoff, a Greek tragedy, a Beethoven quartet, a poem of Hölderlin or Celan—his poetics is radical; not radical in the avant-garde sense, but insofar as it takes us to the heart of the subject in an unfamiliar way. The guiding concept in Gadamer’s theory is the idea of Gebilde, a term that resists translation and eludes facile commentary. We fall short of understanding it because, with it, Gadamer was trying to get at the most difficult feature of hermeneutic experience; the diffusion of being in the performance and reception of art beyond its embodiment in the work. Art manifests for him the fullest realization of the reciprocity of self, world, being, and history; it is not merely an example but the paradigm of this reciprocity, and it is diminished whenever we reduce it to an object for evaluation. Neglect of Gadamer in traditional disciplinary aesthetics is partly due to the fact that his first polemical target in Truth and Method is in fact aesthetics itself, a relatively modern post-Kantian discipline conceived within the framework of Enlightenment rationalism. To Gadamer’s mind, aesthetics consigned art to a balkanized ghetto of lesser philosophical importance.4 To be sure, aestheticians acknowledge this status marginality themselves: “But aesthetics itself, let us face it, is about as low on the scale of philosophical undertakings as bugs are in the chain of being or mere illustrations are in the hierarchies of art.”5 But the self-limitation imposed on aesthetics by an analytic approach is what has made Gadamer’s theory of art something of a curiosity.6 The most prestigious US academic journal of aesthetic theory, the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, has published two essays devoted to Gadamer in its 70-year history. Although hermeneutics attracts a bit more attention in less formal disciplinary venues, it makes its way into scholarship around the edges.7 Another barrier to fuller appreciation is the one Gadamer himself erected. For readers who do not have intimate knowledge of the philosophical traditions out of which he wrote, his theoretical writings rely on an imposing knowledge of the ancients, the scholastics, and German idealism and historicism. His writing is a kind of palimpsest of this dense history, and he relies on all of its resonances for his key insights. Gadamer had no idea of the scale of his future influence at the time he wrote his principal work, so his writing was pitched to a narrow audience within the German academy. His broader international importance now dictates that we attempt to make his ideas more accessible to practitioners of the arts, for critics, and for theorists who are kept from his work by these and other barriers. My book is aimed at this task. In reversing the focal lens so that I can see what hermeneutics has to say about art rather than art about hermeneutics, I am

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taking seriously Gadamer’s effort to give a privileged role to art as the paideia of the citizen, that is, as the “common language for the common content of our self-understanding.”8 You will read here less about the famous “fusion of horizons,” “history of effect” or the “speculative structure of understanding,” and more about the inner ear, the portrait, the occasional, the decorative, the festival, and the ritual.9 With this different focus, two things happen. First, the single subject allows me the luxury of probing into the more enigmatic parts of Gadamer’s theory of the work that have most resisted explanation—Gebilde, Verwandlung, Wiederholung, Gleichzeitigkeit, and so on. But I want to do this in such a way that people in the arts community not normally taken deep into his writing can find points of access. So I am going to use extended examples from literature and the arts to illustrate the theory. These examples are not nearly diverse enough for the potential scope of the theory, but hopefully I have varied them enough to give some indication of the breadth of application possible beyond their original context. My presentation is in three chapters. The first explains how Gadamer radically transforms the concept of the work of art in part I.II of Truth and Method—the expository theory section of his book I am calling, for ease of reference, the little poetics. The second chapter draws from Gadamer’s essays, lectures, and occasional writings on art beyond Truth and Method to distil what I argue constitute the six major principles of his poetics. The third chapter is an extended illustration of these principles that follows the history of a single thread of artistic expression. My use of the term poetics rather than aesthetics is meant to mark the distinction between Gadamer’s theory of the work of art and the aspects of disciplinary aesthetics from which he wanted to distance himself. His polemic was aimed at the reifying tendencies of aesthetic theory and criticism that treat artworks as artifacts separate from the observer. Gadamer believed the ancient Greeks, for one, never made this mistake, so my attempt here is to recuperate the ancient term as a way to denominate the radical integration of art and life that distinguishes Gadamer’s effort. Lastly, some disclaimers. Gadamer’s poetics, despite his own ambition for it, is untenable as an encompassing universal theory. Art is too many things, serves too many purposes, and acts in too many different ways. Modern aesthetic theory has established this point beyond dispute, and this is one of the places where mainstream aesthetics is clearly superior to Gadamer’s presentation. So his theory needs to be carefully delimited within its range of use. It is, second, tied too closely to a Platonic/Kantian conception of order and beauty, and does not

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take sufficient account of the artistic engagement with degeneration, disease, and disorder, leaving undeveloped the nihilistic dimensions of art that are present even within its own Heideggerian foundation. Third, it repeats Heidegger’s bias toward poetry as the master art: “If all art is in essence poetry, then the arts of architecture, painting, sculpture, and music must be traced back to poesy.”10 And finally, it is conceived too narrowly within the classical Western tradition. My criticisms of these various points are woven throughout the course of the study. I have no interest in safeguarding Gadamer from criticism, but, rather, I want to build on his positive contributions. In the end, Gadamer leaves us a gift, a teaching approaching the complexity of its subject, not frightened of its own enigmas, and boundlessly fascinating as a text in its own right.

Abbreviations BT DD GA GW HLZW OWA OWL PH PLT PS RB TM UZS WM

Heidegger, Being and Time Gadamer, Dialogue and Deconstruction Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke Heidegger, Holzwege Heidegger, “Origins of the Work of Art” Heidegger, On the Way to Language Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit Gadamer, Relevance of the Beautiful Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. edn Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode

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The Little Poetics

The fact that Gadamer’s reflections on the theme of art in Truth and Method are not directed toward the construction of an aesthetics—in fact he wants to undermine the legitimacy of aesthetics—but rather toward a broader inquiry into the nature of truth, does not mean that he fails to provide us with a way to approach art on its own terms. We get a sense of his view in his pronounced rejection of the disciplinary tradition founded by Baumgarten.1 Gadamer would prefer to return to the ancient presupposition that art is of such a piece with the epistemic, ethical, and political fabric of social life that treating it as a collection of objects set aside for appreciation is a misplaced presumption symptomatic of a modern arrogance. Whatever it is that we try to objectify in this way has been reduced. Art seizes us, overtakes us, makes a claim upon us. If we try to categorize it, it “proposes and withdraws . . . before we can come to ourselves and be in a position” to know what it has done to us.2 On its own terms—yes, precisely on its own terms. We do not have to be professional philosophers to appreciate what Gadamer wants us to understand about art. Gadamer wrote a great deal about art after Truth and Method, supplementing, developing, and expanding directions of thought he only started there, but he gives us in the major work a theoretical foundation. The concepts he develops there are strange and difficult—metamorphosis into structure, total mediation, increase of being, repetition and return—they bear witness to the strains he is putting on a theory in a world that has become more complex than the world in which it was originally conceived. My effort in this chapter will be to outline and explicate the movement of Gadamer’s argument in the section of Truth and Method that I will call the little poetics (“The ontology of the work of art and its hermeneutic significance”), and I will follow his argument as it unfolds in the order of the text.3

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Gadamer’s Poetics: A Critique of Modern Aesthetics

The section begins with Gadamer’s famous elaboration of the concept of play (Spiel) as a working figure for hermeneutic understanding as a whole.4 The theme of play is introduced somewhat abruptly in the flow of Gadamer’s narrative. And I want to establish why it occurs where it does and how it allows Gadamer to pivot to the theme of aesthetics.5 To explain this it will be necessary to say something about Gadamer’s style of thinking, speaking, and writing, which is sometimes more like a musician improvising on a theme than a philosopher following a line of argument. Gadamer seems to hold a complex understanding about something in his head with all of its many layers and dimensions of meaning, and he often brings this understanding out in an extended rumination where he is comfortable taking leisurely detours and asides that he knows in their unfolding ultimately will give significance to his exposition. It is not always clear even after the fact how Gadamer’s themes can be integrated into a conventional argument, and this is certainly the case with his long exploration of the truth claim of art in Truth and Method. Although it is manifestly clear how it supports his general argument that scientific truth should not automatically be the privileged standard of truth, the sinuous, labyrinthine path through his rumination on art seems to intimate much more than this claim. In the course of his exposition, what Gadamer sometimes appears to do, much like a musician, is to modulate from one theme to a related theme, and to explore this new theme in a leisurely way as a kind of addition or enrichment, and the reader hears an implied promise that its significance will become eventually clear. When we look for the precise mechanism that Gadamer uses to move from one theme to a seemingly unrelated theme, it is through a kind of modulation, like the common chord that allows a musician to move from one key to another. In the first third of Truth and Method, this modulating chord is the theory of play. In the historical introduction to the theme of the humanities in the modern research culture, Gadamer had been tracing the gradual giving way of the “human sciences” in the German university system into more or less weak copies of the hard sciences, and the manner in which the traditional approaches of the humanities came to be devalued and replaced. Gadamer has the polemical intention of interrupting this devaluation and recovering some of what was being discarded, but he cannot accomplish his purpose by a crude inversion of old and new; he does not live in an ancient world, and he appreciates the genuine maturation of culture in complexity and sophistication. He chooses the concept of play as a starting point for his task because, on the one hand, it was a guiding concept for the very thinkers who helped in the transformation of the humanities

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into the human sciences (Schiller, Kant, etc.), and yet, on the other hand, the concept of play is capable of a series of modal transformations—that is the only thing you can call it—that allow Gadamer to reintroduce some vital elements of the older protocols. You can plainly see the concept of play being used, rather obviously, as a modulating chord in the text of Truth and Method.6 The word play (Spiel in German carries many of the same associations) can reference the relation between an activity and its participants (game/players); as an activity it is typically engaged for its own sake rather than for external, instrumental purposes (in the play of children for instance); and as a phenomenon in the most basic sense—not a subjective experience, but existing in nature as a kind of primal movement or energy (the play of light, waves, forces, words). These are all qualities that are useful to Gadamer in undermining the modern tendency to bifurcate the world into subjective and objective spheres, which is ultimately what the disciplinary divisions of knowledge (e.g. empirical science, aesthetic experience) were encouraging. The most important—and frankly most artificial—modulation of the word “play” is that it can also refer to a play—a drama, and theatrical performance, and this is in fact the modulating point that Gadamer uses to transition to the subject of art: “A complete change takes place when play as such becomes a play.”7 From a logical point of view this transition is a curious strategy for accomplishing the broader ambition of Gadamer’s argument—to arrest and turn around the general momentum of the modern humanities, but it works at least thematically to move Gadamer into a discussion of art as a phenomenon that, properly understood, challenges the privileged criteria of truth resident in the dominant values of empirical proof and instrumental rationalism. If Gadamer’s discursive strategy for bringing about a confrontation between the old and the new is obscure and convoluted, the larger agenda is still clear: Against the modern subjectivist reduction of a humanist education ushered in by Kant’s subordination of doxa and lexis (I.2.a), Gadamer wants to provide an alternative path, a road not taken, that would preserve the legitimate claim of the humanist rhetorical tradition as a valid and robust foundation for the humanities.

From play to a play An important leg of Gadamer’s poetics is to keep art in the broadest sense integral to the knowledge that guides any citizen in judgment, that is, constitutive of the spirit that guides the deliberation of a community. This was an easier task in the

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small Greek polis where civic culture and the arts were genuinely of a piece. So art for Gadamer is broadly inclusive of all the arts and means generically the work of the creative imagination as it relates to experience and understanding.8 Play is as close to a metaphysical term as anything in Gadamer.9 It is as rudimentary as the back and forth of the play of light in the refraction of a water droplet, but extends to the play phenomenon at work in a participant’s absorption in a game. Gadamer develops the word in this way to give himself the means to wed ontology and art. It allows him to move from a subjectivist to a nonsubjectivist aesthetic, and from the performative and ephemeral dynamic of an almost pure energeia to a strange collaboration between energeia and ergon. In the opening to his little poetics, he allows the play/work binary to resonate quietly in his very first example of a “work” of art—the Theaterspiel—a theatrical play or dramatic work. Here is the passage of transition from the energeia of play to the ergon of a play: In general, however much games are essentially representations, and however much the players act out parts, games are not presented for anyone; i.e., are not meant for an audience. Children play for themselves, even if they are acting. And often not even sports that are played before audiences are intended primarily for them. In fact these games are in danger of losing the sense that they are a real competition when they become a show-piece.10 Even the procession in a cultic ritual is more than just a show, since it is a self-contained cultic community, but the ritual act is a genuine representation for a community, and thus its drama is a kind of playing-for that aims essentially at an audience.11

It is not the representational nature of a play that distinguishes it from mere play, but rather the intentional direction of the representation. And the fact that the representation is meant for an audience rather than those directly involved in the play as performers, athletes, or players means that something different happens when the representation is directed at those who sit at one remove from the performance. What is this something? Gadamer has a narrative gift, borrowed from Plato, of foreshadowing his most complex ideas in the textual weave of his introductions, and we see this ability condensed in a remark that seems merely to expand on the thematic shift from the general concept of play to its particular concretion in theatrical drama and literature, but in fact contains the crucial features of the theory he will lay out: “The presentation of a god in a religious rite, the presentation of a myth in a play, are play not only in the sense that participating players are wholly absorbed in the presentation of the play and find in it their heightened self-representation

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[gesteigerte Selbstdarstellung], but also in that the players present a meaningful whole for an audience.”12 In this invocation of the ancient Greek theophany ritual, as practiced, for instance, in the annual festival at Delphi that celebrated the return of Apollo, Gadamer marks three significant features.13 (1) The kind of theatrical presentation Gadamer is referencing here is obviously a form of mimesis, a reflection or mirroring back to the audience something of themselves, because he speaks of it as a heightened self-presentation. The reflexivity of the term touches one of the most complex chords of hermeneutic theory in which Gadamer simultaneously rejects the self-reflexive foundation of Enlightenment rationalism, yet affirms the self-consciousness of hermeneutic understanding (Selbstbewußtsein). Conventional rationalist reflexivity is unmediated—the mind observing itself— whereas hermeneutic self-understanding is the mirror-play of self and world. In good phenomenological fashion, hermeneutic self-understanding gathers history, language, and custom up to create and perform itself; it could not be a ‘self ’ outside of this intermediation. A peculiar feature that theatrical presentation (mimesis) adds to this reflexivity is what Gadamer calls a heightening (gesteigerte) effect. The self-presentation of mimesis purifies or idealizes in a certain way; the popular version of this idea is when someone says that art is more real than life. Aristotle asserts that history recounts what we have been and fiction what we could be, and this distinction is an originating source for Gadamer’s heightening effect. Art, for Gadamer, is weighted on the side of the universal, in the business of negotiating a regulative ideal against which we measure and imagine our own progress. (2) The English translation cannot approximate the wordplay that Gadamer uses to describe the experience of the audience who “go into” (sozusagen aufgehen) the performance, that is, are absorbed by it, and by so doing pass out of and beyond themselves (gehen von sich aus dahin über). By doing this they are initiated into a fullness of meaning (Sinnganze), an epiphany of the whole which their mortal vision would normally lack. This attribute only makes sense if we realize that Gadamer is trying to pinpoint why communities who developed dramatic theater instituted formal representations of life before audiences as distinct from the informal, imaginary role-play of games. It is the community, all that it is and all that it means—the whole—that is at issue. This idea of wholeness will reverberate through Gadamer’s hermeneutics. Shortly he will call this wholeness a closed world, a self-contained reality “where no lines scatter in the void”—that is, even in the case of tragedy, to have the security of knowing what truly is, absent the insecurity of our own incorrigibly indeterminate situations.

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Gadamer’s notion is really a rather Romantic conception—the whole of which we only ever have access to a part, in the way that a whole world can be evoked by a fragment, as when a madeleine evokes memories of childhood, or the potent detail of the good storyteller transports the reader into a different reality. The full arc of the story, or the character of a life, is evoked by the smallest detail. But the philosophical (perhaps even metaphysical) import of this idea, with its strong classical, religious, and Hegelian roots, is a way that Gadamer gets at how the fragmentariness of our comprehension is in its own way a testimony to the completeness that we lack and yearn for.14 The absence of the whole, a permeating condition of our existence, is a felt absence: the engine that drives the temporal emergence of our identity. Hegel adapted Aristotle’s idea that the particular and the universal exist in a dialectical relation, giving it a historical dimension. But precisely how do the virtualities of the fragment and the whole relate to each other in understanding? This is the dynamic of the hermeneutic circle, as Heidegger worked it out, of the structure of a projection that dynamically backfills and impels understanding forward. Art is only one of the more perfect ways that this cognition manifests itself to us. (3) Thirdly, the addition of an audience is the crucial feature that defines the difference between play and a play. This takes us to one of the marvelous paradoxes of Gadamer’s idea of the play of art. The openness of the play to an audience is what creates, for him, the unity and coherence—what he calls the Geschlossenheit (literally “closedness”)—of the play. I have to beg your indulgence here as we pull apart the German, because the translation leaves so much out: “Das Offensein zum Zuschauer hin macht vielmehr die Geschlossenheit des Spieles mit aus. Der Zuschauer vollzieht nur, was das Spiel als solches ist.”15 (“The opening out of the play to an audience is what accounts finally for the Geschlossenheit of the play. It is only the audience that completes what is actually in the play.”)16 Offensein is a neologism that attaches the infinitive of the verb “to be” (sein) to the adjective offen (open), turning the quality of openness into an ontological condition—a condition of being open, of exposing oneself to another. When play turns from the absorption of players in the privacy of their own present moment outward and exposes it to the world—to a public, to alien audiences and critics, to different cultures, societies, and historical periods—whatever it is that happens in that structural shift explains the distinctive working of public art or ritual or ceremony. The “participation” (teilnehmen) of the audience, which is a strong word to use for the act of looking (zuschauer), is now the crucial activity of play, not the moves of the player in the game. The mediation of the jarring

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incomprehension in the meeting of two different perspectives, the bridging of those perspectives, is now what is central to the play. The effort to make sense of what does not make sense, that translation or leap of understanding, is the creation of a new or renewed community of understanding. In the quotation I left the word Geschlossenheit untranslated because Gadamer is depending on its specific range of meanings to make his point in the condensation of his prose. It means literally closedness, although it would obviously be awkward to say in English that audience-openness is what accounts for the closedness of the play. In the context, the primary signification of the word relies on the capacity of Geschlossenheit to mean unity, coherence, or wholeness. But what then is suggested by saying that the openness of the play to an audience is the means for its achieving coherence? We have to borrow from the literal meaning of Geschlossenheit, the idea of closure, to understand the formulation. The play is a whole experience, a closed world, because of the active participation of the audience in making sense of what is presented. The performative event is actually the bringing together of two estranged or not yet familiar halves, the production of the play by the actors and its witnessing by a new audience. That fusion is what closes the circle of meaning and makes the “play” whole. This really points to a solution to the paradox we began with. If the audience acts as essentially a fourth wall, it does so as that permeable element of the structure that continually feeds in new history, experience, and perspective, like the apoplastic wall of the cell that draws nutrients from the outer environment and diffuses them into the cell structure. Gadamer’s language (Das Offensein zum Zuschauer hin macht vielmehr die Geschlossenheit des Spieles mit aus) suggests this kind of structural permeability. The double-“zu” (zum Zuschauer) plays upon the sense of the double movement of the relation, from audience to play and play to audience. The verb ausmachen has a similarly rich ambiguity that can connote both production and reception (recognize, constitute, add up to, etc.), and that sets into motion contradictory flows between “aus” (from out of), “hin” (toward), and “mit” (along with). Openness and closedness here therefore are brought together in an organic collaboration, play and audience feeding off each other. So this initial invocation of the “closedness” of the play will serve us well as we enter upon Gadamer’s explication of the work of art as “Verwandlung ins Gebilde.” It is of course a truism that the audience completes the meaning of the play through its own imagination, but it will become clear that Gadamer is seeing this feature as an ontological condition. The audience is an essential element

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of the structure of the play, an idea that does not comport with our categorial subject-object mindset. This point shows the importance of defining play as a process that takes place “in between.” We have seen that a game does not have its being in the consciousness or bearing of the player, but rather the player is drawn into its space and is filled with its spirit. The player experiences the game as a reality that transcends him.17

This designation of play as a medial process (medialen Vorgangs) is drenched in a background of Hegelian metaphysics, and built on layers of ontological meaning. Gadamer hit on the movement of play as a metaphor for an agency that does not reside in one place—the subjectivity of the artist, for instance—but oscillates, unfolds, and is dispersed across our being-in-the-world. The game itself is the center of gravity, but the play involves a participation that has a hand in this agency as well. It is a distributed agency.18 This comes originally from Hegel. In the introduction to the Philosophy of Fine Art, Hegel positions the work of art, which is a concrete, material thing that nevertheless represents an ideal, as a transit point between the concrete and the abstract. Even through the strange and dense idioms of Hegel’s language you can sense and hear the interplay of agencies crossing back and forth between world, Nature, spirit, art, and consciousness: The world, into the profundity of which thought penetrates, is a supersensuous one, a word which to start with is posited as a Beyond in contrast to the immediacy of ordinary conscious life and present sensation. It is the freedom of reflecting consciousness which disengages itself from this immersion in the “this side,” or immediacy, in other words sensuous reality and finitude. But the spirit is able, too, to heal the fracture which is thus created in its progression. From the wealth of its own resources it brings into being the works of fine art as the primary bond of mediation between that which is exclusively external, sensuous and transitory, and the medium of pure thought, between Nature and its finite reality, and the infinite freedom of a reason which comprehends.19

Hegel focuses here on art’s mediation of the concrete particular and the universal ideal, but the pattern of permeable agency is the same that Gadamer is describing. Using this principle of mediation, Gadamer’s focus is on the meaning that develops at the middle point between play and audience. Such a “middle point” is an obscure figure, a manner of speaking for something we do not actually have language for, so we have to make sure we are clear about what Gadamer is getting at.

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The movement of thought that flows from Hegel to Gadamer is a new way of thinking about our being-in-the-world that is beautifully illuminated in the performance and reception of a work of art. The distance (but also the belonging) of the audience to a play produces a configuration of being that is different from the subject-object split that characterizes our normal thought categories. The fusion or diffusion between audience and work is contained in the adjective Gadamer uses when he describes this in the same passage—gemeint (intended or meant), which he places in quotations to draw attention to its multiple meanings: “The player experiences the game as a reality that surpasses him. This is all the more the case where the game is itself ‘intended’ [gemeint] as such a relation—for instance, the play which appears as presentation for an audience.” (Der Spielende erfährt das Spiel als eine ihn übertreffende Wirklichkeit. Das gilt erst recht dort, wo es als eine solche Wirklichkeit selber “gemeint” wird—und das ist dort der Fall, wo das Spiel als Darstellung für den Zuschauer erscheint, d.h. “Schauspiel” ist.)20 On one level, Gadamer means to say that a show is meant to be something other than itself, a representation. Here the intention regards someone who, in the conceit of theatrical performance, is not present. The audience essentially takes the place of the fourth wall. There is a symmetry here insofar as the reality that the performance represents is unobserved, without audience, while in the representation the performers and the theatrical audience are coconspirators. This collaboration is the second function of gemeint. Gemeinen is a verb of opining and intending, but impinges on words of sociality and association (das Allgemeinen, what is thought in common, and Gemeinschaft, community). Playing is as much about the community that is formed in the playing as the playing itself. The audience does not just happen to be added to the play of theater or ritual; it is the reason for the play. The players perform so that the audience may experience and reflect on what is presented. This presence of a silent third party to the event, distanced from the space of presentation and by a certain conceit not acknowledged to be present, is analogous to the reflecting self that stands a certain distance from the self taken up in thought. This community of awareness combines both meanings of gemeint, the shared intention of a shared fiction. The distance of the audience is not absolute, but in tension with the recognition that the audience experiences in the representation. Gadamer develops this tension with the metaphor of closed and open worlds: However, the show remains play—that is, it has the structure of a game, which is that of a world closed within itself. But a cultic or profane drama, as distinct from a game, even though it remains entirely self-enclosed in its representation, it is open to the audience’s perspective. In fact, in the audience its entire significance

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Gadamer’s Poetics: A Critique of Modern Aesthetics is consummated. The player plays his role as in any game, and so the play comes to presentation, but the play itself is the whole, comprising players and spectators. In fact, it is experienced properly by, and presents itself (as it is “meant”) to, the one who is not acting in the play but watching it. In him the game is raised, as it were, to its ideality.21

Thus a play is both closed and open at the same time. It is entirely closed in the same way that a game closes itself off to the world: The players are entirely absorbed in its goals, constrained by its rules, and protected inside its boundaries. We play games to escape the contingency of the outer world and to live for a while in this safe and perfect structure. But a play is also “open,” in the sense that the addition of the audience, which takes the place of the fourth wall, is not a participant but a spectator, someone from outside, someone looking in. When we are absorbed in a game we are in the ontic realm of (Vorhandene) knowledge, but when we stand apart and observe from a distance, there is a further capacity for reflection about what is happening, even though we are still participating. The kind of openness that the audience brings here can only be unforeseeable experience, because it is of the world that is not controlled within the strict boundaries of the play. Thus, when Gadamer says that the contribution of the audience gives to the play its full significance, he is talking about what is catalyzed by the fusion of what the players do and what the audience brings. You can see how much is implied in ontological terms in this odd image of a world that seals its borders with the ever-porous material of new experience. It is because of the dialectical complexity that I have highlighted here that Gadamer is able to speak of the “ideality” (Idealität) of the work, which is a term he introduces as a key feature of the fictive work of art in the next section. The invocation of such a term, with all its Hegelian resonances, is a challenge and provocation that animates Gadamer’s whole intention in giving us a poetics that sits within a hermeneutic of finitude but that points up the special role of art as a bridge between finitude and infinity. Although we cannot gather the whole meaning of the term from this first expression, we can say how this incursion into Hegelian territory sets a certain cognitive dissonance in motion. Part of the Heideggerian intellectual revolt against traditional metaphysics was the resolute rejection of pure transcendence, and a cultivation of a new paradigm grounded in the inescapability of the finite and material basis for all ideas and concepts. And yet Gadamer, who was a faithful heir to this intellectual revolution, flirts with the Hegelian vocabulary of the ideal and the absolute, not to mention the platonic categories of goodness and beauty, all his life. Partly we have to understand this seeming apostasy as an express intention to exploit the ambiguities of language

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in order to reclaim such metaphysical terms for a philosophy of finitude. But also Gadamer simply wants to salvage elements of Western metaphysics in his appropriation of Heidegger’s revolution. Art is one of the beachheads for this act of abatement. The ideality of the work is the locus of preservation for our metaphysical longings. Perhaps one of reasons for the confusion surrounding the reception of Truth and Method has to be that it put this act of reclamation in front of Gadamer’s embrace of Heidegger’s radicality—Gadamer’s somewhat romantic embrace of the ideality of the work in the first part of Truth and Method precedes his exploration of hermeneutic finitude in the second part. There is another way in which Gadamer’s theory of the work feels somewhat conservative in its conception. Although the play emerges in a sort of “distributed network” between author, text, context, players, and audience, it is nevertheless intended for an audience as the primary locus of its effects. But the audience’s participation has the particular privilege of a critical distance, since the audience, in regard to the truth of the work, becomes the court of last resort. I do not only watch the performance that is before me, I see the play in my imagination as well, and if there is a wrong note I consult my own judgment.22 That was a particularly felicitous, or beautifully rendered, or innovative, or impoverished reading; I want to remember that, or am simply transfixed by what it has revealed to me. The phrase or scene raises itself before me, and a great deal may happen then with the seed it has planted in me. I am surprised or delighted by the interpretation, it offends my ear, I am alert or absorbed by what is taking place, but now it takes on a new existence in my thoughts and feelings. I reflect on it, chew over it, reimagine it, bring it to bear in my experience. “A complete change takes place when play as such becomes a play. It puts the spectator in the place of the player. He—and not the player—is the person for and in whom the play is played.”23

Verwandlung ins Gebilde und die totale Vermittlung24 Despite the more traditional leanings of Gadamer’s theory of the work of art, it is quite radical in its ontological consequences. Art comes into being once play—which in this famous section of Truth and Method must refer to the extemporaneous play of make-believe, the playing out of roles, which is quite literally taken away from the players, who in the context of a game act out their roles for each other and no one else, authors of acts that are consigned to oblivion, expressions of the moment and for the moment—becomes a work. It becomes a work precisely when it is “detached from the representing activity of the players” so that it exists “in the pure appearance of what they are playing.”25

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So, for example, a writer seeing her children playing a make-believe adventure in the yard is inspired to write a children’s adventure story. The children’s adventure entertains them as it disappears into the air; the writer’s story begins its long life after she has posted it in the mail. The children make a hut in the hollow of a great tree, camouflaging the entrance for secrecy, a detail the writer borrows. The children piece together a story in the yard and the writer weaves a story at her desk, and in some sense the two stories are like the circling vines of an old wisteria. Still, there is real loss and gain in the passage of being from the one to the other. That exchange is what Gadamer is interested in. Initially let us establish what Gadamer means by the odd phrase pure appearance (reine Erscheinung). He says that the work establishes itself (besteht), it persists, it becomes available. This quality of permanence is crucial for his idea of the work because what it offers will unite audiences across time. What stands is the thing that is played out. In the context of Gadamer’s description, the purity of the appearance must refer to the fact that it has been detached from the contingency of the particular context of its being played out. The artist (the writer in our example) has found some way to extract the make-believe play from its extemporaneous improvisation and fix it a form that can continue to inspire elaboration: “The improvisation is in principle repeatable and to this extent enduring” (der Improvisation—prinzipiell wiederholbar und insofern bleibend). The tree hut becomes my tree hut. But is there really that much of a difference between the permanence of the repeatable word and the ephemerality of a children’s game? The children might have invented some rules that would be shared and passed down just as a story is. This question takes us to the word Erscheinung, a word that has enormous theological and philosophical resonance—in Christian teaching it means manifestation or epiphany, as when the Christ returns from the grave on the third day; in mythology it means apparition or phantom, as when Aeneas tries to embrace the ghost of his father; in ancient Greek philosophy it is eidolon, the image or appearance, sometimes contrasted with the reality; and in Heidegger’s phenomenology, in a famous effort to reject Kant’s still-overshadowing thing-in-itself (Ding-an-sich), the Sache or Ding emerges only for the first time in its saying.26 We want to contradict Gadamer as he says this because it is not really appearance or manifestation that the writer accomplishes. What she sets down is only an extracted airless thing, a shriveled theft from the beautiful acts of children. Or, at least, it is not yet appearance. It will manifest itself once someone picks up the pages to read what she has written. Since Erscheinung here is contrasted with the particular presentation of the players of a game, Gadamer must mean that a

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work allows the Sache to be preserved, that is, continually played out as the issue which remains significant beyond that original moment. The way he says this is that the work achieves ideality (durch diese Wendung gewinnt das Spiel seine Idealität). I will break down the process of “achieving ideality” in great specificity in Chapter 3, but here I just want to note that ideality is partly the character of the work as text, shorn of its dependence on context—no doubt with significant loss as a result, but with the gain that it is now something that can be preserved and carried down through time and reawakened. The name Gadamer gives to the moment of transition from impromptu invention to the creation of a work is Verwandlung ins Gebilde, a phrase that we must try to understand in its specificity. The phrase Verwandlung ins Gebilde has to be taken as one unseparated concept, a dialectical relation that describes the play structure when it is transposed onto the enigmatic temporality of art as the mediation between being and beings. Verwandlung marks out the unstable pole of this relation, and Gebilde marks out the stabilizing pole, but the phrase is circular; it does not allow Gebilde to be in the conventional sense a fixed structure, nor Verwandlung to be a loose radical in some deconstructive sense, because both are constantly feeding each other, structure yielding to innovation and innovation disciplined by structure. “Kunst” is this reciprocity, this harnessing of play. The German word Verwandlung means something more radical than just transformation, metamorphosis perhaps. Gadamer is at great pains to say that a Verwandlung is not a change within a continuity, as with puberty or matriculation, but rather a complete break and a new identity, as when someone suffers profound amnesia and must start a new life.27 This is a strange attribute to attach so emphatically to the idea of a work, and Gadamer’s explanation for the connection remains puzzling, so we must try to piece together what he is getting at.28 He explains that there are two aspects of play that are subject to a Verwandlung, two things that disappear completely, and the first is the player (the original performer). First, the creator and the actors and all the producers of the drama who do the representing must disappear in order for the fictional world of the play to emerge in their place. The pretense of play depends on that recognition, that willing suspension of disbelief, a willingness to completely abandon the responsibility of an identity anchored in this particular historical time and place. We grant the fictional world this kind of autonomy as the prerogative of mimesis. The second Verwandlung is the transformative relation between the world that exists prior to and outside the work. We think typically that we as an audience enter into the fictional world of the work and leave behind the real world from

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which we came. But a Verwandlung is not simply setting ourselves into a new fictional world. We do not simply set what is real aside to indulge in a bit of play. What happens is something quite different that has to do with a particular type of autonomy granted to the work. We all know the familiar advice to the teller of tales that belongs to the suspension of disbelief: The audience will go along with anything, no matter how preposterous, as long as the story follows the rules it establishes for itself. The audience takes pleasure in the plausibility of the story if the story lives up to its own rules. If you think about it, this is a very complex phenomenon, because the audience is then transposing the sense of plausibility of the truth of anything they have learned in their own lives to this fictional world that has abandoned responsibility to what would normally be plausible in real life. This plausibility-relationship is then an analogy in the truest sense—not a comparison of things (C is to A as B is to A) but of relations (C is to D as A as is to B). Gadamer sees this analogic plausibility as a privilege that art has over life, since art is unburdened by contingencies that cloud the logic of our circumstance, that present us from seeing what is being played out in our own lives, that sit over on top of and confuse our line of sight. The greatest contingency of life is that we do not know how it ends: “The undecidedness of the future permits such a superfluity of expectations that reality necessarily lags behind them.”29 Separated out from this muddle, art can show us more clearly the logic by which our lives are operating: “It produces and brings to light what is otherwise constantly hidden and withdrawn” (112). We know this capacity of art is not a false friend because of the rare instances in which the confusion of our real lives drops away, what we see is actually more like tragedy and comedy. Such experiences sometimes happen when we attend a funeral or witness an historical event or are jarred into recognition by a terrible confrontation. It is at these moments that we are confirmed in the plausibility of great art, because we see then that life actually has this kind of terrible logic. Gadamer describes this phenomenon in one of the most beautiful lines he ever wrote: “Now if, in a particular case, a context of meaning closes and completes itself in reality, such that no lines of meaning scatter in the void, then this reality is itself like a drama.”30 This capacity that life rarely has but that art always has reverses the status privilege of “real life.” The capacity of the fictional world to establish its own rules actually gives it the power to judge the world it has transcended. Such a reversal confounds the epistemic prejudice that art is a mere entertainment lacking the weight of knowledge. This is what Gadamer means by ideality—not an a priori second world which the real world shadows, but a real world constructing its own image by

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this autonomous act and instructing itself in the process. Play is not reductive by removing the contingency of life. It does not cheat by reading the ending first. It “wins” its ideality, which is to say, exists in a kind of stasis, considering an endpoint while still remaining in play. So just as Verwandlung is attached to Gebilde, ideality (Idealität) must remain attached to play (Spiel). A comparison with Hegel will help clarify this dialectic of the contingent and the ideal. As is his wont, Hegel sets the artistic characteristic of ideality in a narrative of progress, a product of the agency of spirit working through history, in which art is a kind of compromise, its medial position temporalized as a “not yet”: For in the sensuous aspect of a work of art the spirit seeks neither the concrete material stuff, the empirical inner completeness and development of the organism which desire demands, nor the universal and purely ideal thought. What it wants is sensuous presence which indeed should remain sensuous but liberated from the scaffolding [Gerüste] of its purely material nature. Thereby the sensuous aspect of a work of art, in comparison with the immediate existence of things in nature, is elevated to a pure appearance [zum bloßen Schein erhoben], and the work of art stands in the middle between immediate sensuousness and ideal thought. It is not yet pure thought.31

Gadamer wants to extract himself from the narrative of progress while retaining the medial character of art, and he does this by setting the dialectic of the contingent and the ideal in art along a different axis. The second part of Truth and Method is devoted to history as an interpretive act, so Gadamer will postpone his engagement with the Hegelian idea of historical progress till then. Instead, here he references Aristotle, who is in some sense a proxy for Hegel. In this engagement with the Poetics, Gadamer appears to accept Aristotle’s distinction between history and poetry in which “one tells what happened and the other what might happen,” the idea being that “a poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could and would happen either probably or inevitably.”32 The axis on which the play of art rests is the interplay of fiction and reality. When we try to understand the truth of things, Gadamer says again in reference to the example of the theater, the distinction between the comedy or tragedy of life and the fiction of the stage starts to lose its salience. Representations of what are true and what we find to be true in our lives interpenetrate one another. Of course, this blurring of boundaries between fiction and reality is now a cliché, as narrative theory has colonized large portions of psychology, sociology, and history, but here it is only a first step. As Gadamer announced at the outset, his quarry is ideality—the permanence of some truth that rises

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above the sad impermanence and imperfection of our daily lives. He is under no illusion that humans are privy to some kind of platonic realm. Art represents rather a regulative ideal, a virtuality with respect to which we can orient our lives. But the reason art has this function and power is because it does something extraordinary and mysterious—one must lean on religious language here to get to this thing. The experience of art provides something revelatory, a vision of things not only devoid of the contingencies of our quotidian experience but with a concentration of what is meaningful. This is why he speaks here and everywhere of the joy of knowledge: Thus the action of a drama—in this respect it still entirely resembles the religious act—exists as something that rests absolutely within itself. It no longer permits of any comparison with reality as the secret measure of all verisimilitude. It is raised above all such comparisons—and hence also above the question of whether it is all real—because a superior truth speaks from it. Even Plato, the most radical critic of the high estimation of art in the history of philosophy, speaks of the comedy and tragedy of life on the one hand and of the stage on the other without differentiating between them. For this difference is superseded if one knows how to see the meaning of the play that unfolds before one. The pleasure of drama is the same in both cases: it is the joy of knowledge.33

To illustrate this principle Gadamer goes even more specifically into the Aristotelian definition of tragedy. The pity and dread an audience feels in the effect of the dramatic action is a concentration like the irradiance of a laser that collects a refracted light and concentrates it on one spot.34 We see play out before us a terrible choice that represents all the terrible choices we have ever made, or hope never to make. The joy of knowledge is the thrill that comes in this concentration, this access of vision, one that is otherwise dissipated in the fragmentation and diffusion of our own fragmented and dispersed lives. This concentration of reality is what is transformed, why the work “no longer exists in the world in which we live as our own.” But then does fiction lose its reality if the transformation is complete and the contingent disappears? Gadamer answers this question definitely a bit later in the text, so for just a moment I want to jump to that point. He repeats the assertion that a work establishes its own world as an autonomous circle of meaning, but then he says that it is this separation that allows the spectator to really see: What unfolds before us is so much lifted out of the ongoing course of the originary world [fortgehenden Weltlinien] and so much enclosed in its own autonomous

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circle of meaning [zu einem selbständigen Sinnkreis zusammengeschlossen] that one is not motivated to seek out any other reality or future [translation modified]. The audience [Aufnehmende = receiver] is set at an absolute distance, a distance that denies practical or goal-oriented participation. But this distance is aesthetic distance in a true sense, for it signifies the distance necessary for seeing, and thus makes possible a genuine and comprehensive [allseitige] participation in what is presented [Heid., apophainesthai] before us.35

The absolute distance of the audience is a distance from the need of practical application. The play or work is wholly invested in the imaginary world, its logic of narrative probability and fidelity, its truth as its own highest end. This has a radical implication, closely related to Aristotle’s commitment to the privilege of nous, that what art creates collaboratively with the audience is not a diversion from life, but its culmination. I think what is implied is not so much that the contingent world stands in service to this higher end, but rather that the ideal completes or makes sense of that imperfect struggle. The autonomy of imagination is not an absolute break, but a necessary distance that removes any constraint on its possibilities. The Gadamerian view of the work’s autonomy should not be misconstrued— there is a constant back and forth between the ideal (the play of work) and the real (the contingent world). Since the ideal is the endpoint, it works as the ideal, that is, inherently related to what it is not. Sometimes it is the consummation devoutly to be wished, as the goal toward which one aims. Sometimes it is simply the completion of the thought—of one’s life, or one’s effort, or one’s situation. Sometimes it is simply recognition of what is. This is why the platonic language that Gadamer uses is probably misleading, and perhaps instead of the word ideal, and the metaphor of the mirror that Gadamer uses later in the text would be more apt. Artistic truth works in the way that Hamlet held the mirror up to his mother, a concentrated image that directs itself back to the viewer and provides the distance for reflection. Such a distance actually takes us back to the world we live in. It is because we as the audience have “the distance necessary for seeing,” and therefore can be abstracted from our own world, that we see for the first time the truth of that world: A spectator’s ecstatic self-forgetfulness corresponds to his continuity with himself. Precisely that in which one loses oneself as a spectator demands that one grasp the continuity of what everything signifies.36 For it is the truth of our own world—the religious and moral world in which we live—that is presented before us and in which we recognize ourselves. Just as the ontological mode

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Gadamer’s Poetics: A Critique of Modern Aesthetics of aesthetic being is marked by parousia, absolute presence, and just as an artwork is nevertheless self-identical in every moment where it achieves such a presence, so also the absolute moment in which a spectator stands is both one of self-forgetfulness and of mediation with himself. What rends him from himself at the same time gives him back the whole of his being.37

Thus we see that the relationship of the closed world of the work and the open world of our lives is dialectical. The world of the work distances itself (aufheben) from our open-ended and imperfect world, but with the result that we achieve “the distance necessary for seeing.” We see our world now not just in relation to the particularity of our situation, but as it stands in a general way. So it is not that we lose a sense of ourselves, but that we break out of our captivity and enter into a truer relationship to the whole. The formula “What rends him from himself at the same time gives him back the whole of his being” indicates that perhaps we were always meant to understand ourselves in relation to the whole but did not have the means. We only truly know ourselves when we can turn around and recognize ourselves from this new vantage point. Recognition is therefore the retrieval of something we never knew we had. Self-understanding in a hermeneutic context is rising to a new level, what Gadamer calls an increase of being. The closedness of the text appears at first antithetical to a hermeneutic perspective; but it is not if we remember that whole and part are the syntax of hermeneutic understanding. We have already mentioned the rarified circumstance in which humans experience a kind of limited perfection in their own lives. In exceptional moments, reality conspires to sequester a piece of itself off from the normal contingencies in what he calls a Sinnkreis, a circle of meaning. This “circle of meaning in which everything is fulfilled” describes a complex and expansive dramatic expression that relates to the moment of recognition. One can imagine here an aesthetic truth playing out in the fullest dimensions of its narrative logic, as when the fate of a tragic figure enacts itself under gathering and unavoidable circumstances. A drama will sometimes have a quality of inevitability as it unfolds that seizes us by the feeling that, at the very moment that it is happening, it could not happen in any other way. We are drawn along with it in the same movement as the tragic figure, and it transpires for us as though in a dream with a predetermined end. The effect then refers not just to the tragic end but to a truth that is actualized only in the whole movement of the plot. The closedness of the imaginative world is a kind of reprieve from the incompleteness and indeterminacy of the historical world we encounter as

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we simply live out our lives. These worlds are not antiseptically insulated from each other, but in fact define each other; human beings are the creation of this interaction. That the work is its own measure, in contrast to the verification that is required by the truth claims of science, establishes a new relationship to truth, to common knowledge. A drama “no longer permits of any comparison with reality as the secret measure of all verisimilitude. It is raised above all such comparison—and hence also above the question of whether it is all real—because a superior truth speaks from it.”38 What is this superior truth and how does it escape referentiality? Gadamer’s answer is very important because by his own acknowledgment it gives the Verwandlung ins Gebilde “its full meaning.” It is because there is not so much a rejection of referentiality as a synthesis which knits together life and representation in a unity that is superior to either separately. In fact, neither exist in any real sense separately, hence the joy of knowledge is a kind of first knowledge. If we go back to my reference to the plausibility of fiction, we can say that it is not just the fact that a representation accords with what we have experienced before, which would then just be a pale shadow, but that it combines with or draws upon experience in such a way that we are altogether taken by the representation and learn something new. An illustration would be useful here. In the classic William Wyler film “The Heiress,” the naïve heroine is jilted by a beguiling but opportunistic suitor, and the betrayal is the fulcrum of the dramatic action, its narrative effect the true center to which every other story element leads. The motives leading to the betrayal are complicated and opaque, the circumstances of its development arranged for maximum effect, the victim’s delayed realization a result of the weakness that invited the exploitation, and the force of the injury a perfect measure of the impact of this law of attraction. The representation is beautifully orchestrated in its dramatic realization as a type of such experiences. The pleasure that Gadamer speaks about, the joy of knowledge, is related to the way in which this representation serves as a touchstone, as though it were giving us the vocabulary to think about such things and deal with them as they are occasioned in our own lives. If it indeed serves this purpose, it is not even as though we could separate the exemplar from the personal experience—as though one were the representation and the other were the thing itself. They are all now part of experience and part of the conversation about a certain type of betrayal. The criterion of rightness is not an ahistorical standard, but precisely the opposite, the emergence of historical understanding. We can see this when Gadamer relates “the supreme criterion of ‘right’ representation” to the classical

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tradition of imitatio, “that by constantly following models and developing them, a tradition is formed with which every new attempt must come to terms.”39 The classical principle of imitatio does not mean slavish adherence to canonic rules. Michael Leff explains the practice as a pedagogy of adaptation, the learning of repertoires as the basis for innovation, embodying the genius of rhetoric as a dialectic of convention and invention.40 This is an important element in Gadamer’s theory of the work that is rarely noted. We see in the principle of imitatio that cultural formation (Bildung) is as much a feature of the tradition of a play, a role, a piece in the musical canon, or a genre, as it is of the character of citizens. Gadamer develops the implications of the principal of imitatio in several different directions in the little poetics, but most especially as it modulates the tension between the lack of a “fixed criterion” of judgment for a work and “the true binding nature of the work, which imposes itself on every interpreter immediately, in its own way.”41 A performer or a musician wants to express something that will win over an audience, and because the audience, in a very real sense, has the power of assent, the effort of interpretation is shared. This is again not just a principal of taste but a fundamental ontological feature that takes Gadamer directly to the heart of the Hegelian claim about the nature of art. Because taste obviously does not mean “conform to a pre-established standard” or “meet a number of determinate criteria,” and because we now know that it must emerge from the reciprocating collaboration of culture and performance at several different levels, the standard of rightness that Gadamer refers to here must be dialogic. How is the work dialogic? How does the work give its voice to collaborative judgment? I offer an example: the traditional example of a concert pianist playing from the repertoire. The musician, having been nurtured by a series of mentors in a teaching tradition, goes with a trained ear to meet an expectant public, brings a life of experience, feeling, talent, and practice to the occasion to speak out the notes that have now become a shared language, that once emerged in a private moment out of a similar set of relationships, and now will be explored for what they have to say on this occasion that is both old and new for everyone. The musician is expected to say something new—to do justice—but to let the audience hear something for the first time, and something that will have the stamp of permanence in their memory. Rightness here, therefore, is not strict adherence to a previous standard, but the unending dialectic of convention and invention that gives to understanding the character of an event.

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At times Gadamer seems to say that ideality conquers contingency: “The being of all play is always self-realization, sheer fulfillment, energeia, which has its telos within itself. The world of the work of art, in which play expresses itself fully in the unity of its course, is in fact a wholly transformed world. In and through it everyone recognizes that that is how things are.”42 But there is one word in this formulation that prevents that conquest, and it is a word that becomes one of the cornerstones of Gadamer’s poetics and of his hermeneutics as well—recognition. This concept is an amalgam of Platonic anamnesis, Hegelian Anerkennen, Kierkegaardian repetition, Nietzschean return, and Heideggerian Wiederholung.43 In the immediate context, the meaning is quite plain, and it resembles nothing so much as Aristotelian mimesis. It refers to the moment the audience of a dramatic representation is struck by the felicity of putting things in just this way rather than that. But recognition works for Gadamer to introduce the temporal and historical nature of understanding into the experience of art. In defining hermeneutic recognition, Gadamer discriminates among the various strands of the conceptual legacy. For him, recognition is the convergence of experiences in memory—buried and unattended, suddenly tied together and illuminated in a flash of recognition, something is crystallized, something of the matter that has been at work is pinpointed: Imitation and representation . . . are not merely repetition, but a “bringing forth,” they imply a spectator as well. They contain in themselves an essential relation to everyone for whom the representation exists. Indeed, one can say even more: the presentation of the essence, far from being a mere imitation, is necessarily revelatory. In imitating, one has to leave out and to heighten.44

Recognition happens between two processes working from opposite sides of representation. From the side of the performance, it actuates experiences and identifies something essential with the force of revelation. This is the “something more” that Gadamer speaks of, the work of the performance to add to our knowledge. From the other end we weigh the representation: Does it comport with our experience, is it true to such things, does it bear the weight of our scrutiny? In other words, we test the representation for its capacity to act as a point of reference. The reception of art is in part a social activity; we are developing a common language of experience for ourselves and each other. What happens for us when something is raised and crystallized like this is that we can then look at it, grapple with it, and understand its place in the order and disorder of our lives. The French classical anthropologist Jean-Pierre

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Vernant identifies this as the precise function of Greek tragedy in its historical emergence. Because the subject dramatized by the tragedy is a fiction, the effect produced by the painful or terrifying events that it presents on stage is quite different from what it would be if those events were real. They touch and concern us, but only from a distance . . . instead of simply arousing the emotions of pity and fear, they confer upon them an intelligibility that would be lacking in real life. Once the opacity that belongs to particular, accidental incidents is dispelled by the logic of a scenario that purifies by dint of simplifying, condensing, and systematizing, human sufferings normally either simply deplored or undergone are now seen in the mirror of tragic fiction and become comprehensible.45

The distance of the play that is introduced by the conceit of the audience’s invisibility is something even more distanced than the bystander because in some sense the audience is not present, but rather something like the god whose dream is the world. When we are in the midst of our lives, it is difficult to sift out experience and confront it, it lacks the distance that makes recognition possible, and the recognition that makes distance possible. Weinsheimer explains Gadamer in this way: “[I]n the surprised double take of recognition we do not merely cognize something again. It is defamiliarized, because to recognize is to know what we have always known as if we had never really known it before.”46 The kind of recognition art allows, the recognition that comes to a presentation that puts things exactly, that finds the expression of an experiential type, is brought home to us only when we are freed temporarily from the pressing contingencies of our lives. To be too much in the particular is to lose our bearings. This is where the festive aspect of the work comes in. Performances are set aside, we honor their ceremonial nature, precisely so that we can enter this space of distance from the quotidian. Then we can hear and see when something is just right. Let me try to illustrate this. Lucien, the uncultured provincial of Balzac’s Lost Illusions, manages on false pretense to get himself into a box at the Paris opera, so that he can be among a class of society well above his station. He is found out, and once identified as a pretender, is, by the requirements of such social circles, ritually ostracized. Wanting nothing so much as to understand the mechanisms of this kind of society, Balzac plays the little social drama out for all it’s worth. The Marquise who has invited Lucien into her box is informed by friends of her mistake, but only after it is too late, so that she has served, sitting in her box, as an object of ridicule for the entertainment of the crowd for some time. The recognition of Lucien as the son of a chemist “had already sent two boxes into

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fits of laughter at the expense of the desiccated mummy that the Marquise called her cousin.” Her friends “recounted a selection from the thousand witticisms that Parisians can compose in an instant and that are forgotten as soon as spoken.”47 When Lucien begins to notice the change in expression around him, he thinks it has to do with the ill trim of his waistcoat, which he has been so afraid will give him away that he becomes absorbed in the possibility, and because he is lost in this consideration he fails to notice that the Marquis and her companion (whom he has become enamored of) have quietly left the box: “He emerged from his reverie to look again at his new idol; but on turning his head, he saw that he was alone; he had heard a slight sound—the door had closed, as Mme d’Espard led away her cousin. Lucien was utterly astonished by their abrupt desertion, but he did not think about it for long, for the very good reason that he found it inexplicable” (183–4). In the mortifying carriage flight from the opera house, the Marquise and her companion anticipate the further embarrassment that she has invited the shop assistant to dine on the following Monday: “‘I shall be indisposed,’ replied the Marquise instantly. ‘You can tell him so, and I shall say that he is to be shown the door, under either name’” (185). The reader projects forward to this moment at the house entrance when Lucien, still operating on a delay, begins to realize his true situation, and suddenly remembers back to the slight sound of the door closing in the opera box. In a series of postponed reactions, Lucien begins now to respond to the embarrassment of his situation, an awareness that mounts by the established rhythm of its miscues, so that when the full implication of his circumstance becomes apparent to him, the delay itself compounds the depth of his humiliation to an absolute perfection of awareness. Part of the reader’s Schadenfreude at Lucien’s precipitous social descent is the magnitude of the embarrassment engineered by the narrative in the rolling disclosure. The awfulness of the situation increases by degrees, so that when its full weight is felt, the false attribution of the waistcoat becomes a kind of unit of measure. Yet, the pleasure also lies in our ability to have the entire canvas before us after it is unrolled tout entière, because we can see the temporal complexity of the revelation as it operates from the various viewpoints. The gift of the writer in bringing this tableau to such a polished articulation salvages it from the inchoate currents of our disordered and mute experience in a narrative syntax that we now have available to us. The unassuming sound of the box door closing will resonate in our ears as a symbol of the delay that characterizes our most extreme humiliations. There is a certain comfort in the distance achieved by the fictional account when we see that such humiliation is not exclusive to us—it is objectified in the common human condition, and we have it now to reflect upon.

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Recognition thus functions from two different directions. We certainly recognize the experience, but it also recognizes us. The felicity of the representation spurs reflection, and reflection increases being, both the being of the work and the audience. The former of the two changes is less obviously the case, although common sense says as much.

The consequences of Verwandlung Because the conception of Verwandlung is itself an ontological one, its consequences are broadly ontological. What distinguishes play once it is transformed into a work is that it exists in its repetitions, that is, it is built to be subject to the history of its receptions, and this means that it is a whole being only, with the interaction, in combination; we do not have a work that is then interpreted, but a work that emerges in its interpretations. The performance of a play or a score is the work itself. The author’s creativity is only one phase in the creation of the work. This part of the theory is by now broadly understood, and understood as basic to a hermeneutic perspective; there is no meaning outside the interpretation. But this has an ontologically radical implication—the audience is part of the work, and the world that emerges out of the collaboration is also part of the work. Here we must understand work as both noun and verb, and as the continuing reciprocity of both functions. A note for academic criticism: A subsidiary consequence of this ontological “spread” is that the work of critique becomes appended to the work of audience interpretation. Gadamer has a crucial and extended argument with Ricoeur about this point, but he flags the topic here.48 The investigation of plot sources and authorship, for instance, are secondary and derivative activities that are folded into the audience’s experience. As in every aspect of Gadamerian hermeneutics, expertise is the servant of the amateur, not the master. I have treated this subject at length elsewhere.49 The second ontological consequence of the structure of the Verwandlung has to do with the fact that if work and play are the same thing, they are the same not only in the dimension of text and performance, but also in the dimension of time. A work being the history of its receptions, it comes out of a past and into the present. By presenting itself “differently in the changing courses of ages and circumstances” a work “exists” in its myriad aspects, in their undiscovered dimensions, and through the genius of new understandings, on the scale of time.50 A work is not what hangs on the museum wall, but what it

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becomes.51 The elements of a work that are yet to be discovered are part of the work. Ontologically what this means is that the “work” of art is the building of a common culture across all distances. The easiest case of this embodiment in tradition is classical ballet, which was not capable of inscription in texts and so was literally embodied in the living continuity between teacher and student from generation to generation.52 Thirdly, if the audience of the work has license to bring everything of itself to the work to create something new, Gadamer is not saying that the result is wholly subject to that authority. What is handed down also has its own authority for the audience to discover. In the case of a play, for instance, “the mimetic representation (Darstellung), the ‘putting it there,’ is the bringing into the moment (das zum Da-Sein) what the poetry genuinely asks for and requires [die mimische Darstellung der Aufführung bringt das zum Da-Sein, was die Dichtung eigentlich verlangt].”53 Rhetoric has this principle codified in the office of heuresis, which means both discovery and invention. The deep ontological implication of this distribution of privilege is that tradition has its authority, in fact has a presumption which invention must win from it. The secret of historical continuity is that what is meaningful has the structure of presumption. The past exists into the present because it has something to say, and we cannot make sense of the world by starting from scratch every moment, but must begin with what is given to us. The past has, so to speak, won the right to give direction and set the terms, because it is the past, because it is what has survived for us. There is nothing that prevents us from breaking with the past, but we must break from it. The logic of tradition is at work even in that rupture because it is the heritage that gives us something to break away from.54 So the third consequence of the ontological “spread” of the work is that criteria exist for reception, and that taste and judgment are in the work (of the audience). This is a complicated issue that Gadamer will spend much time working out throughout his career, and I will devote considerable attention to it in the next chapter, but here he states as a starting point that the interpretive work of the audience cannot be arbitrary, even though it is subject to no fixed rules, and is governed by the rhetorical standard of correctness or rightness of fit. If the author’s creativity is only one phase in the creation of the work, it nevertheless imprints constraints on the reception, and these constraints come from the fact that it has survived the test of time. What Gadamer has done is to give the ancient rhetorical dialectic of convention and invention an ontical, epistemic, and political resonance.

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Totale Vermittlung One of the most provocative and curious things Gadamer does in the development of his poetics is to insist on the totality (Totalität) that the work gives access to.55 We have already established that the work is not what we reflexively assume, the scrawled ciphers on the parchment or the fading pigment on the canvas, but instead the ongoing work that these marks inspire—the artist is only one listener and respondent to a community engaged in a conversation. However, the moment when impromptu conversation is transmuted into text or permanent material, Gadamer wants to say, we slip through a wormhole. In that moment there is a radical transmutation, and Gadamer adopts Hegelian language for this change—die totale Vermittlung. Vermittlung is too packed with linguistic, cultural, and philosophical resonances to translate adequately, invoking as it does the subversion of the metaphysics of presence on which Western knowledge is based, substituting for it the ontological interstice, the in-der-Mitte that explodes the binaries of our normal conceptual understandings. The prefix Ver- conveys the never quite finished accomplishment of this being between, and the totale indicates how radical this difference of identity is. Part of the radicality of the transmutation has to do with what Gadamer calls integration. Art is the grant of an expanded vocabulary, of idioms of thinking and feeling and relating to the world. To constitute an audience is to put something to work. When a genre stumbles upon a narrative innovation, that is now something that is given to history, available and empowering for everyone. With the heuresis of the work, an empowering space of freedom is opened up.56 As satisfying as giving oneself over to the rules of a game may be turning play into a representation for an audience means that the content is now perennially exposed to and mixed with the open, contingent world. That change in structure turns play into a medium for constituting the world in which every audience lives. Opening up the closed world of the game to the open world of the audience, and setting those two worlds in productive dialogue, changes the function of play from the pure play of the imagination to the interplay of the creative imagination and practical reality. Of course, this combustion is not exclusive to art. I become a better strategic thinker and actor after I learn to play chess because of getting into the habit of thinking several moves ahead as eminently applicable to complex human and institutional relationships. And of course sports builds character. But art takes this increase of being up a level. When an Athenian audience attended the dramatic festival each year, that experience was part and parcel of their civic life, helping them imagine what

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type of state to build or what legacy to leave behind, what they owed to their city or to their family, to political ambition or to piety. The fifth-century Athenian drama is the paradigm case of this kind of integration: Tragedy is not only an art form; it is also a social institution that the city, by establishing competitions in tragedies, set up alongside its political and legal institutions. The city established under the authority of the eponymous archon, in the same urban space and in accordance with the same institutional norms as the popular assemblies or courts, a spectacle open to all the citizens, directed, acted, and judged by the qualified representatives of the various tribes.57

But it is not only that art is more than an entertainment. Art opens out onto and transforms the whole. It is the burden of Gadamer’s exposition to show that the meaning of art overflows in several directions—from the work to the audience and back from the audience to it, from the work to the experience of life it gathers up, and from each new reception that sheds new light and germinates the soil of that ongoing work, leaving a sedimented tradition that yields new secrets and constantly takes new imprints. This ontological promiscuity is captured succinctly in Gadamer’s phrase “die sinnlich-sittliche Einheit des Kunstwerks” (the meaning-filled, culturally dense unifying effect of the artwork).58 Art not only contributes to but mediates the whole. The push toward total mediation is a most Hegelian idea, since for Hegel only the whole is true, and the driving energy of mental comprehension is toward this totality. Every partial thing is intrinsically partial by way of not being the whole, and so—in Hegel’s way of thinking—longs for that wholeness. Although Gadamer will oppose Hegel’s inescapable historical progress, he wants to preserve the idea that the work provides culture and community a heuristic energy toward its own wholeness. The “all” that interests Gadamer is history as well, but for him the great book that is being written remains full of obscurities and lacunae, inconsistencies and incoherences. The work of integration is, as it is being constituted, a patch-quilt. To be sure, it is for all its imperfection and contingency, one text, both temporally on the scale of history and socially in the breadth of an expanding ecumenical horizon. The world invests the work and the work expands the world. So any individual work is a node in a larger context—it emerges out of that world, contributes to it, and changes it. The inner compulsion of play, once it is inscribed, is to incite its new audiences to imagine new worlds. The part, as the ancient rhetorical principle of the hermeneutic circle teaches, projects a whole, and in this projection a common world takes shape.

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Gebilde In order to achieve a workable conception of this porous identity of the work, Gadamer refers to it as a Gebilde, which allows him to play on the capacity of art to be both a work (ergon) and work (energeia), just as Spiel is both play and a play. Gadamer recognizes the provocation to common sense he has created by this assertion: If the work comes to be only in its realization, how can it be truly a structure? His answer is that we have to hold in mind two distinct things: (1) that play is a configuration (“Das Spiel ist Gebilde”) and (2) that the configuration is play (“Das Gebilde ist aber auch Spiel”).59 Because the audience has such an important role in constituting the meaning of the work, the reception is part of the work’s construction. It is easiest to see this in examples such as Duchamps’ famous urinal, where the contribution on the side of the world is so much more expansive than on the side of the work. But Gadamer’s preferred example, Greek tragedy, shows the general applicability of this unusual conception. Each new historical community that confronts the problems that the tragedies present receives them differently, and because the tragedies were written to provoke these questions, how communities perform these works and respond to them, how they are received in the widening circles of culture that are formed by these encounters and that form that reception, constitute the “Gebilde” of the continually saying word. If Vernant is right that the tension between autonomous choice and destiny that constitutes the central dilemma of Greek tragedy “is never totally accepted nor entirely obliterated,” and that this “makes tragedy into a questioning to which there can be no answers,” then the irresolution that plays feed explains our need for them.60 These plays, like all art, facilitate a larger cultural and historical process always underway, and at the same time are themselves a formable Gebilde that will continually take the impress of that process. The work is not a brute object, because the threads of its weave are as much in us as in the poet’s words. In describing the interpretive contribution of each new generation, Gadamer speaks of a double mimesis, the initial creation and its ongoing performance as two sides of the same coin: “[T]he writer represents and the actor represents. But even this double mimesis is one: it is the same thing that comes to existence in each case.”61 Of course, Gadamer means really a triple mimesis. The interpretation of the performers and the reception of the audience are all contributing to the historical, cultural, personal, political understandings of the work, so that it continually emerges, withdraws, crystallizes, shifts, builds “in the variety of its aspects” (118).62 Once you recognize this extension of the creative input as

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constitutive of the work itself, and you put this mimetic tripling together with the principle of totale Vermittlung, something else happens, because where a work stops and a culture begins is now more difficult to locate. They become in fact part of a dialectical whole. It is not only that the work serves as an iconic reservoir of meaning, but that in its effects, culture itself becomes a resonance chamber. What the artist sets down and how cultures respond are antipodes of an evolving work.

The temporality of the aesthetic In Gadamer’s poetics the beautiful is the mediator between the contingent and the ideal; it sees the particular as a premonition of the unrealizable ideal and an intimation of an unrecoverable recollection. This way of seeing introduces temporality into the heart of the definition of art. Temporality as a constitutive dimension of hermeneutic being is brought out in the last section of the little poetics with the term Gleichzeitigkeit (contemporaneity). In specifying the nature of this idea, Gadamer presents a dialectic that stands in opposition to the disciplinary aesthetics of his time.63 In hermeneutics the temporal and the timeless are set in tension as virtual polarities. What actually exists is only the in-between. The contribution from the side of the tradition that hands down work, and the side of reception that performs and interprets, is a combustion, the event of being. The former cannot anticipate what will follow, and the latter cannot remember except what is passed down. Gadamer works away at the tension between sameness and difference in the work as it travels through history by comparing it to the cultural ritual of the festival.64 The festival demonstrates the “highly puzzling” and “radical” kind of temporality that Gadamer wants to see in the reception of a work, a kind of repetition of the same that keeps its identity despite its transformation. It is “an entity that exists only by being different.”65 Festival, the ritualized celebration of the intervention of the gods, imitates the timeless. It spreads out, making the experience of the beautiful insight a binding experience. A great challenge for this hermeneutic conception of temporality, an obstacle that we should take very seriously in thinking about art which in its Western modernity has plumbed the depths of the inner life as one of its proper themes, is the primacy of subjective consciousness. Despite hermeneutics’ vigorous complaint against modern subjectivism, it is not an enemy of the individual. Despite the fact that the festival does not center its being in the subjectivity of

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the participants, it is “presented for the spectator.” It is first and foremost a social occasion. Thus the holism that we have encountered in the other dimensions of Gadamer’s poetics is present here as well in the codependency of Zuschauer and Fest. This codependency is maintained rigorously. On the one hand, the festival “exists only in being celebrated,” and yet “its being is by no means just the point of intersection of the spectator’s experiences.” The being of the spectator likewise is determined by the fact of participation, a relationship that Gadamer characterizes as being-at-home-there (Dabeisein, Bei-der-Sache-sein). But the relationship itself is what is primary, and Gadamer even speaks of this relationship in quasireligious terms. It is a form of communion (Kommunion). The sacral language is mixed with a cognitive dimension, and with Aristotelian metaphysics: “The theoros is a spectator in the proper sense of the word, since he participates in the solemn act through his honouring of the sacred rites in its inviolability and holiness.”66 Someone who seeks knowledge becomes so involved in the subject matter as to be “carried away by what one sees.”67 Gadamer grants this condition of being pulled into the world of the subject matter and therefore outside oneself as a positive status: “Here self-forgetfulness is anything but a privative condition, for it arises from devoting one’s full attention to the matter at hand, and this is the spectator’s own positive accomplishment” (126). So we can see that Gadamer hardly abandons the personal here, but rather just the narrow Western construction of subjectivity. He pushes against the bias of Western individualism toward the social, so that the personal is understood as a shared social reality. The audience is united in an experience.68 What the audience experiences and how it responds to a work pollinates performance and work. Likewise work propagates itself in the life of the audience, so that the relationality connecting work, performer, and audience is not just one slender thread, but a fertilization and dissemination outward that stains life itself. With this conception we have the strongest sense of what Gadamer meant when he earlier used the phrases total mediation. We have reached the end of the exposition of the little poetics. In his development of a theory of the work as a Verwandlung ins Gebilde, Gadamer has set the dialectical instability and fixity of art on a double axis, first with his description of the play instinct as the cooperation of players in the game, and now with this account of hermeneutic temporality—the dimensions of both place and time. Art was for Hegel and Heidegger, and here for Gadamer as well, the exemplar of the human capacity to see the universal in the particular. For the classic illustration of the universal particular in art we have to turn to Heidegger’s description of the peasant’s shoe in Van Gogh.69 That is the work

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that art accomplishes along the material dimension of our experience and understanding. Along the temporal axis, in the same tradition, art does not just continue to speak to new generations, it helps forge a common identity across time. Before Gadamer concludes his ruminations on art, he offers several illustrations for his theory, first presenting what he considers an emblematic case, and then two further examples to show that his theory extends to all forms of art universally. His analysis of the first case, Greek tragedy, circulates around the seeming contradiction that, on the one hand, the drama presents a unity against which the spectator is held at a distance (“a closed circle of meaning that of itself resists all penetration and interference”), and, on the other hand, a “genuine community” is formed in performance by the spectator’s affirmation of the hero’s tragic situation.70 He does not mention this contradiction incidentally: “[T]he spectator’s distance from the drama is . . . the essential relation whose ground lies in the play’s unity of meaning” (130). What does this enigmatic formula mean? Gadamer is referring, to begin with, to the peculiarity that has always been noted about the spectator’s pleasure in the fictional representation of the tragic. Such a pleasure is not perverse: The distance allowed by the performance is the distance of its fiction. The performance stands in for the real, which means it is simultaneously not real at all and very real. We need this distance in order to reflect upon what we experience. It is because of this distance that we can circle around to the realization that we too in some measure share the tragic fate. That commonality is why we are drawn to the story in the first place. But we want to see and think about something we are otherwise too close to consider. Such a self-knowledge depends on a certain distance. Thus distance and belonging are intimately involved with each other. The closed circle of the play, our imperviousness to the harm it represents, is the passkey to our recognition we are implicated in that harm. In a series of brilliant little appendages to his basic theory, Gadamer extends his poetics to the plastic and decorative arts, which demonstrate, despite their immediate sensuous communicability, the same hermeneutic principles of discursive and contextual interaction, of the performative nature of meaning, and of the constitutive role of appearance. His interpretation of Velazquez’s The Surrender of Breda is a tour de force of theoretical exposition that should be included in every anthology of aesthetic theory. It is in these later sections that Gadamer gives his most powerful explanations for the mediating role of the decorative and the architectural as the unobtrusive medium of continuity beyond subjective and temporal location, and for the indistinction in a hermeneutic

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universe between representation and presentation, whether the fealty politicians owe to their public images or the collaboration of literary creation with its cultural reception.

Taking stock After this exposition we should take stock in a summary way of what Gadamer’s little poetics has yielded. He wants us to return something of the ancient breadth of meaning to art as an activity of broad social formation; to undermine the barriers between the substantive work (ergon) and its actualization (energeia); to fold the audience into this process not as a witness but as a constitutive element; to trace the circular structure of this interplay in the direction of a self-producing mimesis; to locate the irremediable dialectical friction that generates that productivity; to see the whole toward which any particular piece of this work is pointing, which is something that stretches across time and surpasses in its very being our subjective isolation. What I have just attempted to summarize corresponds roughly to the master vocabulary of the little poetics that would work as his shorthand: Spiel, Vollzug, geschlossene Welt, Verwandlung, Gebilde, Sinnkreis, Integration, Wiederholung, Erscheinung, Zuwachs an Sein, totale Vermittlung, die Ganze, Gleichzeitigkeit. Some of these terms will drop away (Integration) or be replaced (Gebilde), some will come to greater prominence (Vollzug, Gleichzeitigkeit), and some will be added (Resonanzboden, das innere Ohr). Gadamer was not very evolutionary in his thinking, since his founding statement was published at the age of 60, and his subsequent work did not break with the founding. But he left things out, did not immediately give us the full picture, and did not give the work of art its own self-contained setting. Another tension that has emerged in this examination of the hermeneutic conception of Gebilde is the nature of Gadamer’s aesthetic radicality. His poetics displays an ontological subversiveness, but at the same time a quite limited critical awareness. Later Gadamer argued successfully that a hermeneutic perspective had no trouble incorporating abstract minimalism or the postmodern fragment, but he never tested the openness of hermeneutics to the broader critical dimensions of the work as an index, or tool, of power and interest. The story of what are now called “African prints” in the world of high fashion, to take an example, shows how inescapable this dimension is to a poetics that defines itself in relation to historical effect.

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Figure 1.1  Wax block print fabric printed by Vlisco in Holland

This durably popular clothing fabric design (Figure 1.1) was originally appropriated by the Dutch from Indonesia and then produced in the Netherlands for West African markets.71 In the mid-nineteenth-century West African mercenaries for the Dutch East Indies army may have brought home batik fabrics which then became popular in tribal cultures. By the end of the nineteenth-century Belgian printers were producing a similar wax-print fabrics which did not market well in the West Indies because the native people did not take to the inferior machine-produced product. The West Africans, by contrast, became eager consumers of these materials, and their use influenced the design patterns and color schemes of the cloth, which is why these fabrics are now called “African prints.” But the Dutch company Vlisco, a purchaser of an original nineteenth-century fabric printer, has attempted to use copyright law to control production and distribution. Let’s review. A European colonial power that copied native Indonesian arts to sell to a West African market created by

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its own colonial exploitation is now using copyright law to monopolize profits in all markets. The fabrics themselves carry the whole complex genetic code of this history in their design—the delicate repeating patterns of the original East Indies batik, the crackled and bleeding imperfections of the resin-print machine process, the brilliant colors and distinctive iconographies of West African culture. A taste for “tribal fabrics” now makes these dress materials highly prized in the haute couture fashion world of Paris and London, which no doubt will further influence their form, color, and use. Suddenly we can see that such a history changes profoundly what the word beauty means in a poetics. But of course the story does not end here. Despite this history of exploitation, African women marketers have gradually “positioned themselves as the intermediaries between European agents and local businessmen,” thereby enhancing local economies and improving their own economic and social positions: “Not resigned to being mere wholesalers, local wholesale dealers or retailers, they also take charge of providing accommodations and arranging transit, logistics, support and finance to their customers, as well as overseeing the coherence and adaptability of the commercial network.”72 However one takes this evolution, it is clear that the role of property, profit, and power is complex and important in the poetics of the work, a dimension missing from Gadamer’s theoretical exegesis. To be clear, the consciousness of a history of effects as a construct not only permits but encourages the distance that would produce critique, so the absence is not a deficiency of the theory. But a critical poetics that responds to this dimension of hermeneutic distance remains to be expressed by us.

2

The “Work” of Art

What unites the complex of concepts that Gadamer develops over a diverse collection of occasional essays, programmatic statements, and thematic writings on art is his effort to explain the hermeneutic significance of the work.1 The special terms he crafts to get at this significance—Gebilde (work), Gleichzeitigkeit (contemporaneity), Zuwachsansein (increase of being), the inner ear, and so on— as well as his potent reimagining of received terms—Totalität (totality), Idealität (ideality), Vollzug (actualization), Wiedererkennung (recognition), Vermittlung (mediation)—emerge like brilliant pointillistic colors on a canvas that suggest an exquisitely rich and subtle theory, but we have to step back to see how they connect. An image does actually begin to emerge, and that is what I will attempt to describe in the six sections of this chapter. I will sketch this broader picture first in broad strokes: Art is a creative process that speaks to the predicament of finite beings who exist in an ambiguous and conflicted relation to the infinite. Rather than being sealed off from the infinite like unself-conscious animals confined to habit and instinct, our finitude feels its own limitation in the face of boundless time and space, struggles to understand its being in this in-between state, and develops as a patchwork of mitigating responses to this predicament. For Gadamer, art is a kind of witness to the self-conscious pathos of our finitude, a coming to terms in reflective openness that feels somehow a pledge of order, and falling short of that order, sees the comedy and tragedy of its predicament. The path that shows itself in his writings begins, on the one end, from the stability of the work as a permanent text that works as a pledge against subjective isolation and finitude—a stability that is severely qualified by the radicality of hermeneutic understanding—and ends, on the other end, with the changing historical cultures that ceaselessly infuse, deepen and transform

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the ongoing meaning of the work. The links that mark the progress between these two ends, and that describe the transformation of the fixed artifact into a hermeneutic process, are nowhere plainly outlined anywhere in Gadamer’s works, but remain, I would maintain, the logic of a theory that places the work of art between the abject finitude from which it flees and the historical self-consciousness toward which it is pulled. If we start by asking in what sense the hermeneutic identity of a work of art is able to persist over time, we see first its dialectical structure as something both “closed” and “open,” as a curious opposition of presence and absence, as a generative capacity that only lives by receiving the life of its participants, and that consequently changes anything that comes into contact with it, and that becomes a constituting interface of the culture, in the way ecosystems form from the elements of nature that are to hand. Gadamer’s poetics is both radical and conservative. It is remarkable the degree to which the salience of certain questions among the early Romantics have persisted among German thinkers, not least of which was what Schlegel described as the “feeling that we are at the same time finite and infinite.”2 Gadamer continues in this current of metaphysical longing that was nurtured by the most sublime of musical, artistic, and literary traditions, and is tied somehow still to the potent mysticism of its origins. His encounter with the Nietzschean strains of modernity and postmodernity were muted by this deeper relation, so his poetics has a distinctive caste that lives within its own cultural limits and possibilities. Where he tends to speak in universal terms (in line with the Romantic tradition out of which he writes), I will attempt to describe his poetics as a perspective, as an option that opens up certain vistas and possibilities. In outlining the larger pattern of Gadamer’s poetics, I begin from one of the most basic and confusing issues: What is the contribution of the author and the original text to what Gadamer means by a work? Although the whole movement of Gadamer’s thought pulls away from the simple attribution of authorial intent and original meaning, this intention labors against the extent to which he carried some rather conventional ideas about the contribution of author and text. What is strange and different about Gadamer’s theory of the work exists precisely in the tension between its most radical and commonplace elements. The rests grows organically out of this conventional starting point, and opens out to the broadest implications of the larger theory. The path I take unfolds progressively by beginning with this most basic hermeneutic question: What is a text?

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Text and context In the little poetics, Gadamer laid out the basic groundwork for a theory of the work, and its themes crystallized in the years following. Gadamer’s polemic against disciplinary aesthetics was targeted at the reification of the work, what he called aesthetic differentiation, and he was guided in this effort by Heidegger’s thoughts, expressed memorably in the opening pages of his seminal lectures on art (“Die Ürsprung des Kunstwerkes,” “The Origins of the Work of Art”) when he said that one could not treat the score of a Beethoven quartet, or any work that had to be performed, “like potatoes in a cellar.”3 What is interesting about Gadamer’s project is that he tried to square Heidegger’s attack on the objectivity of the work with the manifest fact that a score is in some ways inescapably still an object. In typical fashion, Gadamer engages in a dialogue with literary theory to construe art as an exemplar of a revolutionary ontological vision that nevertheless operates within some fairly conventional relationships. So, for instance, on the material character of textuality, Gadamer will not dismiss what the phenomenologist Ingarden describes as “a volume in the real world consisting of a collection of pages covered with written or printed signs,” or at least that more tenuous thing for which an author still has some claim of ownership. Gadamer will take this materiality for granted, leaving us to puzzle out how precisely he has undermined the dualist assumption.4 That is partly what we will be going into in this section. So our first effort will be to clarify what hermeneutics attributes to the fixity of the text. As a foil to this effort, I want first to recall a relatively straightforward instrumentalist theory of textuality in the same period from a neighboring school of literary theory. Wolfgang Iser establishes a stable theoretical terminology based on a polar distinction between text and work, the text being the material inscription of the author, and the work some variable thing midway between the text and its concretization in each reader’s interpretation.5 The author’s text is a collation of techniques, a structure of writerly strategies proffered to the imaginative play of reading (24). Iser speaks plainly about the “structures of the text,” which are “intersubjectivity verifiable instructions for meaning-production” (24–5). To be sure, Iser was at pains to emphasize that the “mixture of determinacy and indeterminacy” at play in the emergence of the work is quite fluid, “a dynamic happening” that mitigates the mechanistic flavor in the language of “instructions” (24, 22). In addition, as a collaborator with the author, there is some evidence that the reader’s act of composition has an ontological dimension, since the reader “sets the work in motion, and so sets himself in motion, too” (9). Nevertheless,

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there is a comforting and limiting instrumentality in Iser’s offering of the fixed text as a “network of response-inviting structures” (34).6 Gadamer’s determinations of the “fixity of the text” are, by contrast, resistant to this construction, difficult to pin down, and not always consistent. He certainly rejects the strongly determinist instrumentalism of the rule-governed text: “This much is clear: drama, and the work of art understood as a drama, is not a mere schema of rules or prescribed approaches within which play can freely realize itself.”7 Gadamer’s view of the fixed text is rather more conventional than this evasion would suggest, and, at the same time, his development of the concept of Gebilde as a counterweight to the text’s fixity raises the ontological stakes of textual engagement to a radicality we have not yet fully appreciated. In this first section I want to stay focused on the more conventional side of his understanding.

The conventional side Gadamer does at various points refer quite plainly to “ein fest fixiertes Werk”8 and “reifications in writing.”9 Part of the materiality of the work is that “it remains always the same”10 and has “a central structure which must be left intact if we are not to destroy the living unity of the work.”11 This is not just a basic generic quality, but also a feature of the specific work, “everything that genuine art is capable of communicating to us by virtue of the power in its consummately wrought form.”12 In a pivotal 1982 statement on textuality, Gadamer does set side by side with some precision the contrast between the basic datum of the fixed script, on the one hand, and the text as a hermeneutic construct, on the other. He describes the minimal aspect of textuality as a series of signs that fixates the unified sense of something spoken even if it is merely something spoken to one’s self as it is being written down. The plaiting of oscillating threads of sound and semantic reference on which the sense of speech is built up is cinched, so to speak, in such fixation. This sense can be understood by everyone who commands the form of writing or language in question.13

One imagines that this fixation could be at the meanest level the note I scribble to myself on the napkin on the hotel nightstand at three in the morning, some desperate effort to hold onto an ephemeral thought. It is important to recognize even here that I know when I make such a scribble it is intended only as a prick to my memory (such scraps become useless very quickly), so even in this instance it is not a transfer of thought to the page, and the action knows its own poverty.

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On the other hand, if this scrap were to be discovered by a child of mine after my death among personal effects, it would serve as an “authoritative datum” (341). From here Gadamer pivots to the literary or poetic text (“a text in still a higher sense”), a distinction that is derived for him from the achievement of a unity of sound and sense: “[I]ts elements have merged into a unified series of words and sounds . . . the unity of an audible construct” (341). The passage from the rudimentary function of fixation is dependent on this achievement, because the sense is concretized in this particular way, that is, as the particular constellation of marks on the page (and not the living voice of the speaker), it stands on its own to be passed down, read and performed, heard in the inner voice, and so on. The text still has an unavoidable and complicated relation to the writer and the context which will have to be worked out, but the function of the text per se is to act now autonomously, and it does this best when it has achieved a perfect marriage of sound and sense. What Gadamer never says directly here or anywhere, and what we have to fill in, is what determines whether this marriage has been achieved. There is a clear assumption on his part that certain works separate themselves out from the rest by a certain eminence, but he does not explain this winnowing process.14 Is the achievement of this unity something to be recognized after the fact? Are there degrees of achievement more or less? And who or what decides? The example of the African wax-prints presses hard on these questions. We will pick up some of these issues later. The question I want to stay with now is this: If art occurs in “the dialectic of address and response”15 so that we are unable to separate cleanly the contributions of cultures, authors, performers, and readers in the magic of the textual experience (think especially here of the bardic tradition), then how much really is to be attributed to the inscription on the page or to the pen of the author? We should not conflate Gadamer’s view of this situation with others that circulated at the time, but because the strong thrust of hermeneutic theory is away from the gravitational pull of authorial intention and inscribed meaning, and on the other hand because this thrust is not an ideological fetish that blinds hermeneutics to the contribution of what remains constant, we want to pin things down as precisely as possible. Gadamer does agree with the Constance School to the degree that the text provides structure to the imaginative work of reading: “[T]he power of imagination is active to complete the ‘leeway’ [Spielraum] which the text or play allows.”16 At times Gadamer comes quite close to Iser, and we start to move away from the radicality of Heidegger’s concept of the open when interpretation is

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characterized as merely “the open space creative language gives us and which we fill out by following what the writer evokes.”17 It would be perfectly in keeping with Iser’s theory to say that “a ‘virtual’ horizon of interpretation and understanding must be opened in writing the text itself, one that the reader must fill out.”18 Gadamer is quite specific about the contours of this activity, its boundaries and its freedoms: “The activity is not arbitrary, but directed, and all possible realizations are drawn into a specific schema.”19 In the case of the novel, we “follow what the writer evokes” (ibid.). In performance art, “the work as such still speaks to us in an individual way as the same work, even in repeated and different encounters with it” (29). In fact, Gadamer defines the writer’s task in relation to this obligation: “Because as a writer one knows all of the problems of putting words in print, one is always steered by the picture [Vorblick] one has of the recipient with whom one wants to reach an equivalent understanding.”20 Although art provides “plans that are characterized by an element of free variability,” there is a limit insofar as the text “refuses to be used in any way,” and “stands for something” that must be discovered.21 The fixity of the text is always the court of last resort: “To be dependent on self-presentation belongs to what it is. This means that however much it is transformed and distorted in being presented, it still remains itself. This constitutes the obligation of every presentation: that it contain a relation to the structure itself and submit itself to the criterion of correctness that derives from it.”22 To this degree, yes, the work of art is in fact an artifact. To be sure, Gadamer does not rest on this point very long, and wants to distance hermeneutics from the idea that the work of art is “a mere schema of rules or prescribed approaches within which play can freely realize itself.”23 Likewise for theatrical drama: “This much is clear: drama, and the work of art understood as a drama, is not a mere schema of rules or prescribed approaches within which play can freely realize itself ” (116). Nevertheless, there is always the structure of the work that serves as a stable starting point. A poem is an “untranslatable balance of sound and meaning upon which reading is built.”24 Gadamer not only acknowledges but emphasizes “the direct expression of the structure of the construct [die Strukturheit des Gebildes] that urgently imposes itself on reader and author alike” (342). Evoking Aristotle’s precept that a thing is beautiful “if nothing can be added and nothing can be taken away,” Gadamer asserts that “every detail or aspect of the picture, text, or whatever it is, is so united with the whole that it does not strike us as something external that has been merely added on . . . the work seems to possess a kind of center . . . a central structure which must be left intact if we are not to destroy the living unity of the

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work.”25 There is an inherency in the textuality of the work “whereby something has emerged and ‘remains,’” and that something is a constructed whole, a temple place that shelters.26 Gadamer suggests something like the “final touch” of the artist, that is, the sense that the creation of a work is at a certain point fully completed: “That the beautiful is such that nothing can be taken from it and nothing added without destroying it was familiar to Aristotle.”27 In the following passage he is clearly interested in the product of the artist’s work before it is handed over to the audience: All writing is a discontinuous temporal figure. Its final form [Endgestalt] is that “it” stands there, released from the process of its production [Herstellung] and only thereby is it the authentic work that it is. Thus the finished being [das Fertigsein] of a literary work is defined by virtue of the fact that it was not possible for the poet to resume work on it again.28

This perfection is, by Gadamer’s criterion, the oneness of “semantic reference and tonal construct [Sinnbezug und Klanggestalt].”29 The weave that has been given an enduring perfection “urgently imposes itself on reader and author alike” as the boundaries of the field of play.

Undermining boundaries But not so fast. Gadamer uses two prominent metaphors to get at the nature of this achievement of sound and sense. The first is the metaphor of text as weave, “an interwovenness of threads that does not ever again allow the individual threads to emerge.30 Gadamer elaborates on the weaving metaphor to get at the idea that this workmanlike process works toward a kind of perfection, on which point it is held fast, “a plaiting of criss-crossing sound-threads and meaning-relations in which the sense of a discourse is built up and a permanent configuration is cinched.”31 The second metaphor is a musical metaphor—the resonance board (Resonanzboden) of the stringed instrument, what he calls elsewhere somewhat more abstractly “ein Klanggebildes.”32 You can see that these supple metaphors in combination suggest that the framework of the initial creation is a genuine achievement, but that it is built to respond, to yield, to resonate, to conform, and also to magnify, enhance, enrich, and augment. From its inception in the seventeenth century, the hermeneutic project was anchored in the problematic of the fixed text, an object that had the virtue of enduring past its originating time and place, but the disadvantage that it became strange as a result. Paul Ricoeur, the other giant of hermeneutics after Heidegger,

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made the fixity of the text the guiding criterion of hermeneutics. For him “text” or “work” is not an object, is not unproblematically a fixed thing. As we have seen, Gadamer acknowledges this defining feature of hermeneutics, but uses this attribute more as a theme to improve on, and he will eventually shift the focus away from it decisively. Immediately as he asserts the permanence of the text, he complicates and undermines the idea. In an important passage in “The Relevance of the Beautiful,”33 Gadamer sets what he clearly says is “the meaning that our understanding dimly senses in the work of art” over against the “in-sight” (Anbild) of the viewer. The intrinsic meaning of the work per se is something we recognize as the product of genius: “Art is the creation of something exemplary.” We have here the evident contribution of artist and author. But Gadamer can hardly get this out without almost simultaneously mixing his description in its opposite. The meaning that our understanding “dimly senses in the work” is something that we recognize “through the import that every encounter has for us.” So it is there, and we sense it, but only because there is something in us that allows us to see it. This gives rise to Gadamer’s next question which seems to undermine the assertion of intrinsicality he has just made: “Where does this meaning come from? What is this additional something by virtue of which art clearly becomes what it is for the first time?” He answers by formulating the relation of artist and audience in the form of a chiasm: “Clearly this definition of art as the creation of genius can never really be divorced from the con-geniality of the one who experiences it.” The creativity of the artist is met by “the creative activity of the imagination.” But at the same time “it is only in the presence of the particular individual work that concepts ‘come to reverberate,’ as Kant says.” This entire interactive structure is the alternative that art provides in Kant’s mind to the categorial subsumption of the regime of the concept. The particular and the general relate to each other in a different way in the case of art. Such are the terms under which Gadamer sees the hermeneutic challenge to rationalism playing out not just in art but in every region of humanistic understanding. The cooperation of the imagination of the audience and artist in the work is an alternative model of knowledge production. The passage I have just summarized complicates and even begins to undermine the quasiconventional part of Gadamer’s theory of the work that I have already brought forward. At this point, Gadamer only grudgingly amends Aristotle’s theory of the final touch by the following disclaimer: “Naturally, this is not to be taken literally, but with a pinch of salt. . . . [W]e may make a range of possible changes, by altering, replacing, adding, or removing something.” The leeway he

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allows here is then further expanded by the example of tempo markings in a musical score. The marks are necessarily vague and indeterminate, and it is the responsibility of the performer to “find the right time as it is demanded by the work,” which is achieved by grasping the work as a whole (ibid.). There is no authentic or definitive performance. Thus the “internally structured unity” that makes the work perfect is a shared responsibility, not only of the artist but of the performer and the audience (ibid.). Ask yourself how often you have, in thinking back over a story well told, or a story not so well told, imagined what adjustments could have been made at this or that point in this or that way to have “gotten it just right.” Gadamer calls on the whole repertoire of such phrases to convey his idea of artistic measure.34 Measure includes both the idea of criterion and the judgment made by virtue of the criterion. The plot adjustment might be that, in order for the fate of the hero in the denouement of the story to be sufficiently complex, neither so free of culpability as to be exonerated of guilt, nor so guilty as to be irredeemable, an earlier action that was pivotal to the course of events needed to have been more ambiguous. The provocation to a rash action should have been more severe, or the motives for an action more confused. The nemesis should have tempted the hero to anger with more cause, or the hero should have been pulled between more complicated allegiances. We make these judgments out of a sense for the usefulness of a story in speaking to our condition, so we want it to be a faithful mimesis, which it can do if it does not cheaply exploit our sympathies or fail to excite them at all. In this example the action works backwards from the audience to the plot, but then this fact is really only a nuance, since the role of creator and audience reverses itself often even within the creation and reception of one work, let alone in an ongoing tradition of creation, performance, and reception. The audience of this performance will be the creator of the next performance. If we think in terms of Ricoeur’s schema of figuration, configuration, and refiguration, we are all of us busy about the process of calibrating the representations that reflect our lives or enact them. This is a collaborative activity that cannot afford to distinguish too strictly between creators and receivers. So Gadamer’s theory so far provides us an amalgam of textual stability, textual eminence, and collaborative reception. We have remained within the harbor of a work’s own lasting presence. Despite the extraordinary transformations and mediations that Gadamer will find intrinsic to the meaning of a work, he acknowledges that a work “still remains itself,” and he insists that this “constitutes the obligation of every presentation: that it contain a relation to the structure itself and submit itself to the criterion of correctness that derives from it.”35 To

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be sure, this is only the beginning of Gadamer’s argument, but it is important to mark this beginning clearly. What is a “correct presentation”? Even though the work of art has an interpretive openness that (1) admits of “no fixed criterion,” (2) is not secured in a definitive performance, (3) is realized only in its ongoing reception, and (4) is perpetually “open to its future,” Gadamer asserts nevertheless that there is such a thing as “a correct presentation” (Darstellung), and that something binding in the nature of the work “imposes itself on every interpreter.”36 Gadamer insists over and over again that works of art “are all subject to the supreme criterion of ‘right’ representation” (118). He is quite emphatic in several places across the corpus that the eminent text or work carries within itself a “standard” which performance can be measured against and judged: “But one fails to appreciate the obligatoriness of the work of art if one regards the variations possible in the presentation as free and arbitrary. In fact they are all subject to the supreme criterion of ‘right’ representation” (118). Recalling the determinacy of the text as source, Gadamer insists that through all its vicissitudes, the text should “still remain itself: This constitutes the obligation of every presentation: that it contain a relation to the structure itself and submit itself to the criterion of correctness that derives from it” (122). He takes Valéry to task for saying that “There is no criterion of appropriate reaction” to a work, an opinion which Gadamer characterizes as “an untenable hermeneutic nihilism” (94–5). How are these two types of claims to be reconciled? Gadamer is over and over again emphatic about the normative criterion of aesthetic judgment, but it is very difficult to find an explanation of what this criterion actually is or how it works, because his insistence has the character of a repeated assertion rather than an argument. If I find any overt explanation, the criterion is related to success rather than quality: “[D]efinitive judgment . . . consists not so much in discriminating between a good and a bad work of art as it does in distinguishing a ‘successful’ work of art from an unsuccessful one or even from a sorry effort.”37 The criterion by which Gadamer ultimately judges the eminence of a work of art has to do with its ability to speak to ever new audiences: “[T]he negative experience which causes the anticipation of completion to fail in the case of literature is . . . the change which does not allow it to speak any longer as a work of art, be it that we find it boring, empty or ridiculous, sentimental, imitative or simply not working” (253). In other words, what gives eminence to a text is that it was constructed in such a way that it can remain evocative for succeeding generations, “a unique value permanence ever emerging into its own presence” (253). This criterion would seem to be similar

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to Richard Dawkins’ meme theory; a meme is only ever judged after the fact by its capacity to survive. From the other side, Gadamer is expansive about the openness of the meaning of the work to new experience, perspectives, and cultural positions, but remains similarly abstract. The work “itself belongs to the world to which it represents itself,” and one cannot “abstract from the work’s relations to the life world in order to grasp the work itself.”38 In the supplementary essays, Gadamer confirms that “in each person who responds to the poetic word, that word is fulfilled in a unique intuitive fashion that cannot be communicated to others” (70). This is made possible because art “demands interpretation because of its inexhaustible ambiguity,” and points “to an indeterminate dimension of possible fulfillments.”39 Gadamer’s summary of the collaboration gives some clarity: “[T]he criterion that determines whether something is ‘a correct presentation’ (Darstellung) is a highly flexible and relative one. But the fact that the representation is bound to the work is not lessened by the fact that this bond can have no fixed criterion.”40 Rightness is more to do with the fact that it is bound to the work than that rules of interpretation apply. But this still does not explain correctness—even if we distance correctness from a criterion-based meaning, it is still referencing something other than the text. If we turn for clarification to Truth and Method, which has an extended treatment of this question moving all the way through the first third of the book, we see that there is a tension between the normative and the open in Gadamer’s struggle for a hermeneutic position. It becomes clear in a beautiful summary question that begins to wind down this part of Truth and Method that the “obligatory correctness” versus “no fixed criteria” polarity I have described is at the center of Gadamer’s ontology of the artwork: “We ask what this identity is that presents itself so differently in the changing course of ages and circumstances. It does not disintegrate into the changing aspects of itself so that it would lose all identity but it is there in them all. They all belong to it. They are all contemporaneous (gleichzeitig) with it. Thus we have the task of interpreting the work of art in terms of time (Zeit).”41 Both sides of the problem are present in this formulation, set next to each other in their dissonance and irresolution. Something in the work “stands” as a perpetual touchstone, and yet it must absorb and reflect the variety of experience that continually comes to it. Gadamer connects this paradox to a discussion in Plato’s Parmenides on diurnal being, which speaks of “not what exists only as it passes away, but the indivisible presence and parousia of something that remains the same, despite the fact that the day is everywhere different.”42 This formula calls to mind Ricoeur’s justly

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famous theory of identity as the dialectic of idem and ipse, and I would find a similar relation at work in Gadamer’s conception of art as a manifestation of identity-in-difference. So we have a schematic structure at least in theory, but as yet no flesh on the bone. How does the criterion of the work absorb and reflect the infinite of variety of experience that comes to it? Gadamer answers this substance issue by introducing the concept of participation (methexis), which he defines as reciprocal transformation. He uses Greek theater as an example. A drama “must be presented for the spectator, and yet its being is by no means just the point of intersection of the spectators’ experiences. Rather, the contrary is true: the being of the spectator is determined by his ‘being there present’ (Dabeisein). . . . To be present means to participate.”43 Then he defines participation in concrete terms: Precisely that in which one loses oneself as a spectator demands that one grasp the continuity of meaning. For it is the truth of our own world—the religious and moral world in which we live—that is presented before us and in which we recognize ourselves . . . the absolute moment in which a spectator stands is both one of self-forgetfulness and of mediation with himself. What rends him from himself at the same time gives him back the whole of his being.44

The work is the medium of self-understanding, which in a hermeneutic context is a social identity formed out of the material of Sittlichkeit, the values, customs, habits, and understandings of a community and an age. Participation means that we respond and contribute in good hermeneutic fashion to this cultural identity. So the answer we are finding for the criterion of judgment question is that correctness is Stimmung in the Heideggerian sense, attunement from both ends. Cultural meaning is building out from the impulse of the work, and the rightness of fit is developed as much in the interpreter as in the thing interpreted. Gadamer works out this attunement-from-both-ends by continuing the example of the tragic drama, and it is no accident that the reference is classical Greek drama, which had a central role in the democratic forms of Athenian self-governance. The suffering of the tragic hero is affirmed as a shared reality, “an insight that the spectator has by virtue of the continuity of meaning in which he places himself.”45 What the spectator witnesses “is his own story . . . it is always his own world, and he comes to belong to it more fully by recognizing himself more profoundly in it” (133–4). The dramatic writer’s “free invention” likewise “is only one side of a mediation conditioned by values already given . . . a common truth that is binding on the writer also” (133). Gadamer says explicitly here that

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this experience provides “a continuity of meaning which links the work of art with the existing world,” so even before we resolve the contingency question, we can say that the resolution of the criterion question does not absolve the work of art from the productive clash of perspective and experience (134). We must imagine the broadened experience of the spectator exposed to this drama as a part of the culture that then produces new interpretations, new works. The hermeneutic circle is not only a technique for interpreting a work, but a description of the circulating identity of culture born out of the constant reciprocation of text, context, audience, and author. We must always read the word criterion in its hermeneutic sense as attunement. This being the case, I think we can now also resolve the seeming contradiction about “contingency” of the work. Gadamer must have in mind two different forms of contingency. One is the detritus of an historical moment or a local perspective that falls away (“you can’t take it with you”) as we ascend to a broader community, a broader lifeworld. The other contingency is the richness of each particular lifeworld that expands the reality of that broader lifeworld—“the work [of the world] explicates itself, as it were, in the variety of its aspects.”46 Gadamer tips his hat to Hegel when he announces this solution at the end of the first part of Truth and Method as a movement from a particular context “with all its conditions and elements” to what Hegel calls rather enthusiastically “a higher way . . . the spirit of tragic fate that gathers all these individual gods and attributes of substance within one Pantheon, into spirit conscious of itself as spirit” (168). It is in the end a “mediation,” a sifting out of contingencies but also an augmentation of reality (169). This movement is, it seems hard to deny here, and regardless of the just observation that Heidegger and Gadamer turn away from the Hegelian resolution of the dialectic, a genuine synthesis. That synthesis is a return to the thing itself, by which I mean the culture modified by the event of meaning: “Whenever we find ourselves in the presence of real poetry, it always transcends both poet and interpreter. Both of them pursue a meaning that points toward an open realm.”47 It is not a permanent synthesis, an absolute end, or a perfection, but it is a dialectical progression within the scope of hermeneutic finitude: “In its original meaning, interpretation implies pointing in a particular direction. It is important to note that all interpretation points in a direction rather than to some final endpoint, in the sense that it points toward an open realm that can be filled in a variety of ways.”48 These last two points about criterion-as-attunement and the two meanings of contingency are significant findings, but we have not fully resolved the mysteries of the criterion issue. To speak of attunement as a mutual adjustment

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of persons and culture leaves out the middle term, which is the specific issue (the Sache) of the work. Despite the integral role of the audience in the determination of the work, Gadamer speaks of “something that is hidden in the work itself and not in whatever we may say about it,” an in-itself that stands outside the standpoint of the audience! I am going to call this the “it” factor. What is “it”? We say that “it” comes forth because something resides within the work, and in a certain sense what comes forth was hidden there. The unconcealment of what comes forth is of something that is hidden in the work itself and not in whatever we may say about it. It remains always the same work, even if with each new encounter it emerges in its own way. We know this well from our experience. The viewer of a painting looks for the right distance from it, a distance from which it truly comes forth. The viewer of a sculpture must go up and down and around it . . . and gain a range of vantage points from many different distances and perspectives. Who dictates the right distance? Does one have to choose one’s own standpoint and firmly hold to it? No, one must seek out the point from which “it” best comes forth! This point is not one’s own standpoint. . . . If an artwork exercises its fascination, everything that has to do with one’s own meaning and one’s own opining seems to disappear.49

Notice here the mutual adjustment takes place with the painting or the sculpture as the point of intersection or object of attention. I think Deniau may overemphasize the role of the specific work at the expense of the culture with which it is codependent, but I do not want to commit the opposite error.50 The specific work of art is a kind of passkey or event horizon between persons and culture, the locus of exchange. Both Hegel and Heidegger agree that the artwork is an exemplary case of the dialectic of particular and universal, a mediating point where this dialectic is negotiated and manifested.51 What Gadamer adds is that something comes to exist as a work of art when it attains this capacity to serve a mediating role. This is the criterion for an eminent text, its criterion of achievement. The “something binding in the nature of the work” that he speaks of is its capacity to serve this role. You must imagine by way of example even the most modest inventional exercise that Bach wrote for his students; these seem to be inexhaustible sources because we can go there and always engage in an effort of discovery that relies on bringing something of ourselves to it. What is binding is that it solicits our fullest participation. When Gadamer uses the metaphor of the viewer’s distance from a painting, echoing Heidegger’s famous example of the picture hanging crooked on the wall, as a way to talk about the attunement

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of art, the metaphor acknowledges a degree of variability and indeterminacy, since there is no a priori position from which to see the painting, no external rule or formula to be applied. Each viewer must try to find the right position on each different time and occasion based upon that particular work. But then what resides in the work that gives it power to fascinate and direction to our understanding? It is, by definition, precisely that thing that gives the work its eminence, that allows it to stand the test of time, and remain a fascination. It will only exist as a work if it is inexhaustible. This seems like a circular definition, but it tells us something. Works of art, so called, are timeless because they hold up over time, which is to say, speak to each new temporal and cultural situation. They have sounded a common chord.52 Now, this is not to say the same thing to each new audience over time, but to continue to say something meaningful over time to many audiences. The very fact that a discourse is fixed in writing (or memory in the case of the oral tradition) does something to the words that is profoundly different from a transcription. The act of recording has its own intentionality. It is given over to a specific task that is not present in spontaneous speech, and this purpose has a series of entailments. It is understood that by setting it down permanently it will lose its original context. But it also loses its cultural, political, social, and personal context. Having been stripped of all these things, it travels light. The good writer, in Gadamer’s view,53 intends to send it off in this way, as a vessel for new contexts. This is in part what he means by the ideality of the text (gewaltige Idealisierung):54 “The remnants of past life—what is left of buildings, tools, the contents of graves—are weather-beaten by the storms of time that have swept over them, whereas a written tradition, once deciphered and read, is to such an extent pure mind that it speaks to us as if in the present.”55 If it is a well-constructed vessel, it will resonate, like a Stradivari or a Guarneri, capable of absorbing new contexts and producing new sounds. The inherency of history built into the very structure from the outset means that such a “structure” itself is intended as malleable, adaptable: “Thus its own original essence is always to be something different.”56 We have to keep this hermeneutic character of “structure” very much in mind against the conventional sense of structure as something immutable. Words that are inscribed in a text to be awakened in a later time and place by an unknown reader, by this very intention, impose certain obligations on the reader. The nature of these obligations depends on the genre of writing (Gadamer shows with some precision the range of variations),57 so he risks generalizing here beyond a delimited purview. To get past the narrowness of

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such a theory, we would have to circumscribe the range of its claims, but the principle is sound. If the text is written for performance, it is both dependent on that performance, and demanding of it an equal faith—it obliges the attempt of a fulfilled reading. In some cases, such as in certain types of lyric poetry or drama, it asks to be restored, mutatis mutandis, to the immediacy and humanity of its actualizing conditions. The transformation in that “mutatis mutandis” is at the crux of the hermeneutic idea of interpretation, but the obligation imposed by the very nature of the transaction is absolute. Ideality, therefore, is a dialectic between application and essence. By definition there is no ideal circumstance in which the text could be realized, and yet the very commitment of the words to text, that is, their being stripped of their accidental context so that they would be immune to the accidents of any context, means that we can only bring them to life for ourselves. This does not place any less of an obligation on us to actualize them for ourselves in a way that honors their potential, “a revival of our total Lebensgefühl, our total ‘life-feeling.’”58 That is why Gadamer can speak, on the one hand, of the perfect fulfillment of the text, and on the other hand, of its permanent incompletion. All this essentialist language must be understood, however, with a crucial stipulation, really the defining element. It is stripped bare of all contingency and distilled to its purity not so as to instantiate a final perfection, but so as to be an instrument of possibilities for application. It goes through this extraction and refinement so that it can travel, and it travels so that it can find material employment in our finite lives. So there is never not an intention that it should blossom in the manifold of life. The eminent text is a midwife, and its necessary purity is in the middle point rather than at the end of the process. But how does this interaction or exchange take place? What is this ideal, and how is it experienced? Let us take another example from a different medium; a Picasso etching (Figure 2.1). Despite the protean variety of his work, there is nearly always something unmistakable about a Picasso. He was in a perpetual reinvention of his way of seeing and creating, yet there is always some vestigial signature of style that both unites the work across the corpus, as though the line traced on the paper, or the paint-splash on the ceramic, or the oddment selected for the collage, bore the peculiar quality of his mind. Whatever that thing is, it is what imitators always lack. There is something in the intelligence of the line, and in the character of that intelligence, that is both unique and inexhaustibly interesting. It does not tire, it does not wear out. The bottomless “fascination” of the work is what binds us to its particularity. The place for genius in the poetics of Gadamer is merely that

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Figure 2.1  “Two Nude Women, One of Them in a Tree,” Picasso etching. ©2012 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

the works that serve this mediating function are rare, and that the artists who “know how” to create the work that serves this purpose are few. The intelligence of Picasso’s (drawn) line is therefore just like the intelligence of Bach’s (melodic/ harmonic) line; it resonates and remains open, it places itself in the precise space of attunement; it needs to be attuned. It feeds our desire and need but allows our contribution. What Gadamer refers to as a “compelling work,” the “great art that shakes us,” is one that addresses us, that takes what we know and want but forces us to see it in another way.59 The criterion of greatness is therefore what animates the dialectic. It looks as though I have articulated two kinds of criteria here, but really they are the same criterion applied to performance or reception on the one hand, and creativity or production on the other. Both are a form of attunement, one of

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finding the locus of attunement in the work, and the other of perpetually finding the attunement in the encounter with the work. A place where we can test my thesis of the double criterion, where we can see the field of play in which interpretation “is both bound and free,” is Wahrheit und Methode 125–6 (TM 119–21). The key to the idea that Gadamer develops here is that all art functions in a way analogous to the performing arts in which “the tradition created by a great actor, director, or musician . . . have become so fused with the work that concern with this model stimulates an artist’s creative interpretive powers.”60 The mediating function of performers and productions is in no way incidental to the creation of the work, and this is so true that the artist who creates new work must build room in for this future creative work, this after-creation (Nachschaffen). In a certain sense interpretation probably is re-creation, but this is a re-creation [Nachschaffen]61 not of the creative act [Schaffensakt] but of the created work [Figur des geschaffenen Werks], which has to be brought to representation in accord with the meaning the interpreter finds in it. Thus, for example, historicizing presentations—e.g., of music played on old instruments—are not as faithful as they seem. Rather, they are an imitation of an imitation and are thus in danger “of standing at a third remove from the truth” (Plato).62

In other words, the ongoing movement of history and culture alters the whole complex of things—audience, performer, and work—and then factors into our sense of the rightness of an interpretation. The performer is responsible not only to the text but to the historical dialogue with the text: We ask what this identity is that presents itself so differently in the changing course of ages and circumstances. It does not disintegrate into the changing aspects of itself so that it would lose all identity, but it is there in them all. They all belong to it. They are all contemporaneous [gleichzeitig] with it. Thus we have the task of interpreting the work of art in terms of time [Zeit].

The idea that a work gathers up and holds its history so that each new performance is in dialogue with that history is what Gadamer calls total mediation: [T]he non-differentiation of the [inter]mediation [Vermittlung] from the work itself is the actual experience of the work. This accords with the fact that aesthetic consciousness is generally able to make the aesthetic distinction between the work and its mediation only in a critical way—i.e., where the interpretation breaks down. The mediation that communicates the work is, in principle, total.

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/ Total mediation means that the medium as such is superseded [aufhebt]. In other words, the performance (in the case of drama and music, but also in the recitation of epics or lyrics) does not become, as such, thematic, but the work presents itself through it and in it.63

It is not true “that one would have to abstract from the work’s relations to the life world in order to grasp the work itself. Rather, it exists within them [Vielmehr ist es in ihnen selbst da].” The ontology of the work thus undermines to a great extent the association of the thing itself (die Sache selbst) with the artist’s initial offering, and this flies in the face of the general practice, so deeply engrained and serving the interests of a cultural economy that depends so heavily on the great artist and the great work, of identifying art with the objet d’art. The identity of a work of art is the attunement of times in the same way that the function of a work of art is an attunement amidst times. Total mediation is the happy meeting of the work from the side of the fixed text and the side of the audience. Total mediation, an obvious echo of Hegel, means that the creative act continues in its receptions to the extent that the inventive insights of the artist, the performer, and the audience are all a part of the creative work itself.64 The mediation of art is a model for the epochal project of breaking down the boundaries between subject and object that had turned nineteenth-century thought toward art in the first place. Gadamer places the concept of identity (Identität) at the heart of his question here: What is this identity that we are speaking of? We can say that the contribution of the artist to the work was seminal, crucial, elementary, requisite, but itself only suggests, half completes, contributes to the task of creation.

Closed and open worlds One element of Gadamer’s conception of the closed world of the work is not at all intuitive: He stipulates that the work is not “another world” into which we are transported so that we may be released from our own imperfect world as though by a spell.65 The world of the work is our world in the sense that its work is our work in active cooperation and dialogue. As Joel Weinsheimer put it, “the days of our lives are won back from alienation and unintelligibility into meaning and being what they truly are.”66 So the closed world of the text is closed in the sense that it presents the complete statement of a life (Vollzug) as a working hypothesis. The work asks us: Do we want our lives to be this way? Is this how things will play out? How would we need to act to get to this point or to avoid this end? This

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is the proper sense of mimesis as mirror—not a pale copy but a challenge to be engaged, as Hamlet challenges his mother with her own reflection. Finite and infinite are set in dialogue in this way. The closed world of the text is the ballast for the contingent historical world. Pinkard glosses Novalis in the same vein in regards to “the necessary incompleteness of human existence as it is lived out: since the ground that we necessarily seek is always receding, always out of reach (even though we always have an intimation of it), we are constantly seeking to ‘pin down’ that contingent, open-ended existence.”67 The world of the work needs to be closed so that it can be in productive tension with the open world of our own lives, placing in circulation the reciprocal constraint of closure and openness. We want to examine how this operative tension between closed and open worlds actually works itself out in the economy of artistic creation and reception. Gadamer speaks often in reference to the art of what he calls a closed world: “What unfolds before us is so much lifted out of the ongoing course of the ordinary world and so much enclosed in its own autonomous circle of meaning that no one is prompted to seek some other future or reality behind it. The spectator is set at an absolute distance, a distance that precludes practical or goal-oriented participation.”68 Of the varieties of unity that hermeneutics invokes, the unity of a narrative logic provides a kind of perfection of meaning that sequesters itself off from the otherwise disjointed flow of life: “Tragedy is the unity of a tragic course of events that is experienced as such. But what is experienced as a tragic course of events—even if it is not a play that is shown on the stage but a tragedy in ‘life’—is a closed circle of meaning that of itself resists all penetration and interference” (130). Although hermeneutics is famous for its insistence on the unfinished and unresolved openness of the text, its rigor in this regard does not preclude experiencing the pleasure of wholeness, which is not an illusion but an intimation or a glimpse into a possible or passing order: Now if, in a particular case, a context of meaning closes and completes itself in reality, such that no lines of meaning scatter in the void, then this reality is itself like a drama. Likewise, someone who can see the whole of reality as a closed circle of meaning in which everything is fulfilled will speak of the comedy and tragedy of life.69

In this last quote we should note that the conditional is limited by the qualifier “in a particular case,” which will undoubtedly be the mechanism by which we can integrate this circumstance into a hermeneutic perspective. But even the chance that a particular case can exhibit this possibility is exciting. We long for the order of such vision “in which everything is fulfilled.” We yearn for insights that would

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deliver us from irresolvable problems “such that no lines of meaning scatter in the void.” This experience, as fleeting as it might be, is what Keats awoke to find. It is an experience that, as Gadamer puts it so emphatically, “leaves behind it everything that is accidental and unessential.”70 Liessmann interprets Gadamer’s ideality as the capacity of art to “perfect” reality: “It is reality comprehended in, as it were, a condensed and exemplary form.”71 This image of perfection is echoed in Gadamer’s description of all the arts: “[T]he transient and insubstantial stuff of which [poetry, music, and dance] are made does compose itself into the compact unity of a creation—one that always remains the same.”72 The “completeness,” “the whole truth,” “the total or perfectionist character,” the “self-fulfilling” nature of the work is what characterizes it as art: “It is a saying that says so completely what it is that we do not need to add anything.”73 A discovery of the ideal is the hallmark of a work: “[A]rt is present whenever a work succeeds in elevating what it is or represents to a new configuration, a new world of its own in miniature” (103). But despite this collaboration, it is a collaboration and not a perfect fusion of identity. Here in the second part of Truth and Method is how Gadamer describes what history is like, as expressed through the age-old metaphor of textuality: “[T]he book of history is a fragment that so far as any particular present time is concerned, breaks off in the dark. The universal context of history lacks the self-containedness that a text has for the critic . . . a complete unity of meaning, a text intelligible within itself.”74 The reconciliation of these disparate perspectives has to do with the way in which the perfection of art relates to the imperfection of reality, and the relation is in the distance: [I]n any encounter with art, it is . . . the totality of the experienceable world, man’s ontological place in it, and above all his finitude before that which transcends him, that is brought to experience. But it does not mean that the indeterminate anticipation of sense that makes a work significant for us can ever be fulfilled so completely that we could appropriate it for knowledge and understanding in all its meaning.75

Clearly then the case of an experience in the world that “completes itself in reality, such that no lines of meaning scatter in the void” is a desideratum. The capacity of art is to evoke an ideal, an ideal that we do not have, an ideal that reveals how much we fall short of fulfillment. The relation between the two, and the energy that is created by the tension between them, is what Gadamer is interested in: “The image built up in the inner act of intuiting lets us look out beyond everything that is given in experience.”76

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If we take this as the operative principle, the phrase “in a particular case” is still interesting. It means that, within the boundaries of a life, it is still possible to experience moments of perfection, and that these localized experiences do not in any way invalidate the general point, and in fact act just as art does to remind us of the difference. And so, though I will elaborate on the dialectical tension that Gadamer wants to establish between the ideal of the work and the imperfection of life, it is worth pausing one last moment over the exception, because it is an exception that has had its own aesthetic. Gadamer distanced himself from the philosophies of experience and the subjectivist sensibilities of literary modernism, but his poetics cannot be wholly divorced from what they accomplished. One of their great themes was the pathos of distance between the perfection of art and the imperfection of life, and Gadamer’s inversion— that a perfect moment in life resembles the perfection of a work—is an irony that lies at the heart of this tradition. The self-indulgence of the artificial world which Huysman’s Des Esseintes constructs around himself serves as the logical endpoint of this sensibility.77 If literary modernism overplayed and exhausted the existential moment as a point of access to the totality of life, there is a vestige of this doctrine in Gadamer’s language. The “self-presenting and authoritative whole” of a work of art is, in Gadamer’s words, an anticipation: “It is what I have called in general the anticipation of completion and belongs to all apprehension of meaning. When it is a matter of poetic realization specifically, this anticipation finds its completion in the fact that it turns the poem into a final self-presenting and authoritative whole.”78 Art is defined as the completion of an anticipation that is—in normal experience— imperfect and incomplete: “Just as the anticipation of completion is due to all apprehension of meaning, something we constantly experience for example when failing to notice mistakes, errors in writing or misprints, so too is each work of art unique insofar as we form a definitive judgment about its completed character.”79 To be specific about the relation we can say that it is one of imperfection to perfection, united through the concept of anticipation, existing as a continuum rather than a binary. It is not life on the one side and art on the other. Life is always anticipation, and art is the sheer possibility of its completion: “Although we do not generate a new independent reality, we nevertheless always seem to be moving in that direction.”80 Gadamer takes this unity even further. Art is a kind of articulation of meaning that finally makes sense of what was always potentially there. We can relate this view to the familiar experience in which we do not really know what we feel until we find words to express it. Often it is only in finding the

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right word that the thing comes into existence, as when we find a name for an inchoate feeling that has been troubling us. This is a lesson from Heidegger: “The word alone gives being to the thing.”81 A work is a more elaborate manifestation of this principle, giving being not just to a thing, but a world: “In and through it everyone recognizes that that is how things are.”82 It is crucial to understand that in this process of articulation we have not just found the word that accurately represents the thing, but really created the thing for the first time. Its potential was only potential, and the actualization is necessary for it to be. Thus when this happens, it is a gratifying experience because it is a creative act: “The joy of recognition is rather the joy of knowing more than is already familiar. . . . With regard to knowledge of the true, the being of the representation is more than the being of the thing represented. . . . [W]hat is represented . . . has come into the There more authentically [eigentlicher ins Da gekommen ist].”83 The pleasure of realization is what Gadamer denominates recognition (Wiedererkenntnis). The term Wiedererkenntnis references an entire philosophical line of thinking and opens up an ontological dimension of the poetics Gadamer is describing. Just as you are happy when you recognize an old friend because the friendship has entered a new phase with the ending of an absence, a new chapter has begun with all the resonance of the past now filling it, so the fulfillment of the work is a celebration of the thing itself, an increase of being: For what is recognition? It does not mean simply seeing something that we have already seen before. I cannot say that I recognize something if I see it once again without realizing that I have already seen it. Recognizing something means rather that I now cognize something as something that I have already seen. The enigma here lies entirely in the “as.” I am not thinking of the miracle of memory, but of the miracle of knowledge that it implies. When I recognize someone or something, what I see is freed from the contingency of this or that moment of time. It is part of the process of recognition that we see things in terms of what is permanent and essential in them, unencumbered by the contingent circumstances in which they were seen before and are seen again. This is what constitutes recognition and contributes to the joy we take in imitation.84

The feature of the essential that Gadamer introduces here sounds a dissonant note in the context of a hermeneutics grounded in the historicality of being. How suddenly is our discursive reality “freed from contingency”? The passage from imperfection to perfection, from our historical reality to the artistic projection of a world, is expressed in an essentialist vocabulary. This vocabulary is very

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much present in Truth and Method as well as “The Relevance of the Beautiful”: “This kind of representation leaves behind it everything that is accidental and unessential—e.g., the private, particular being of the actor.”85 Gadamer connects this ideality to Aristotle’s famous distinction between history and poetry (“one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.”): For Aristotle is quite right: poetry makes the universal more visible than that faithful narration of facts and actual events which we call history can ever do. The “as if ” modification of poetic invention and the formative activity of sculpture or painting clearly make possible a form of participation that is beyond the reach of contingent reality with all its limitations and conditions.86

Here the dissolution of contingency is tied to the commonality that emerges between an imaginary world and one’s own world, except that the linkage “purifies” the shared world, the world in between, of what is not essential in our experience: “[W]hen we are talking about art, it is precisely .  .  . the total identification with what is represented . . . a profound sense of community that dissolves all distance . . . an act of identification, a deep and disturbing encounter with ourselves.”87 The stripping out of contingency is in fact an intentional part of the process of communication: “Thus writing and the reading assigned to it is in this way the result of an idealizing abstraction” [Schreiben und das ihm zugeordnete Lesen sind somit das Resultat einer idealisierenden Abstraktion].88 Gadamer characterizes what results as the highest function of art: The work of art provides a perfect example of that universal characteristic of human existence—the never-ending process of building a world. In the midst of a world in which everything familiar is dissolving, the work of art stands as a pledge of order. Perhaps our capacity to preserve and maintain, the capacity that supports human culture, rests in turn upon the fact that we must always order anew what threatens to dissolve before us [immer wieder ordnen, was uns zerfällt].89

Gadamer connects this process and capacity not only to the work of art, but to the symbol in general, not only to art but to human being in general as a definitive characteristic: The unique process by which man “makes himself at home in the world,” to use a Hegelian phrase, is constituted by the fact that every act of recognition of

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something has already been liberated from our first contingent apprehension of it and is then raised into ideality. This is something that we are all familiar with. Recognition always implies that we have come to know something more authentically than we were able to do when caught up in our first encounter with it. Recognition elicits the permanent from the transient. It is the proper function of the symbol and of the symbolic content of the language of art in general to accomplish this.90

What does it mean to say that recognition “elicits” the permanent from the transient? We know by now that this is not a simple act of extraction: “The work of art cannot simply be isolated from the ‘contingency’ of the chance conditions in which it appears, and where this kind of isolation occurs, the result is an abstraction that reduces the actual being of the work.”91 And there is the example of theater, where “only the performance brings out everything that is in the play, its allusions and its echoes. No one knows beforehand what will ‘hit home’ and what will have no impact. Every performance is an event, but not one in any way separate from the work . . . the occasion of the performance makes it speak and brings out what is in it” (147). Here is the answer: [T]here is more to recognition than this. It does not simply reveal the universal, the permanent form, stripped of all our contingent encounters with it. For it is also part of the process that we recognize ourselves as well. All recognition represents the experience of growing familiarity, and all our experiences of the world are ultimately ways in which we develop familiarity with that world. As the Aristotelian doctrine rightly seems to suggest, all art of whatever kind is a form of recognition that serves to deepen our knowledge of ourselves and thus our familiarity with the world as well.92

In other words, whatever we account the “profit” and “loss” of a work’s moving from one world to another, as for instance when a poem is translated, a work does not lose its strangeness for us, and thus a dialogue ensues in which we expand our perspective in order to take it in and it learns out ways enough to become resonant with us: “In imitating, one has to leave out and to heighten.”93 The fusion of horizons is an accretion of new meanings to the work and to our world. What Valéry describes here is relevant—“well-known things and beings— or rather the ideas that represent them—somehow change in value. They attract one another, they are connected in ways quite different from the ordinary; they become (if you will permit the expression) musicalized, resonant, and, as it were, harmonically related.” Joel Weinsheimer’s description of phronetic experience in Gadamer is a helpful corollary to the temporality of the work of art’s Vollzug,

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and it is a beautiful description of the unfinished project that a work solicits from us: What an experience means is immediate, in the sense of not mediated by a concept; but for that very reason its meaning is not (in another sense) immediately apparent. Rather it constitutes itself in memory and reflection. It takes time to determine the meaning of an experience because this meaning is not exhausted by what was initially given, what it initially meant. An experience is something the meaning of which accompanies one through life, determining that life and being determined by it. It remains fused with the whole movement of life. The meaning of an experience, then, is emphatically not given; and thus experience cannot serve as the datum of research. Its meaning is not given but always to be given.94

If we want to understand sympathetically what Gadamer is saying about contingency, ideality, and the spectator, it is best to think through an example.95 So that we can stay for the moment within the vocabulary of Aristotelian mimesis, I have chosen an example that extends the classical framework to multiple forms of recognition. The 1949 William Wyler film The Heiress, with a score by Aaron Copeland, is an adaptation of Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s stage adaptation of Henry James’s novel Washington Square, the film version actually returning more closely to the text of the novel in details of scene, character, and plot. In the mid-nineteenth century a prominent New York doctor wishes to settle his estate on his daughter and find her a suitable marriage before he dies. The young man she falls in love with is a fortune-hunter attracted to her inheritance, and the father, to prove the point, writes her out of his will. The suitor runs away, she becomes estranged from her father, and the hard self-knowledge of this experience deepens her character. Learning that the father had not carried through his threat of disinheritance before he died, the lover comes back, and the woman, understanding his motives, rejects him in turn. At the end, in all versions of the story, one senses that the burgeoning knowledge earned by this unfathomable series of events—the abject desertions, the cunning manipulations, the craven exploitation of her purity of commitment—will be enough to preoccupy Catherine, who has always had at least a rich inner life, as she retreats into the charitable solitude of her days. We have the opportunity here to consider several dimensions of recognition in relation to issues of translation, medium of expression, audience, and historical context. The intricate interiority of James’s modernist narratives had been a lure and a deterrent to a movie industry self-consciously constructed as a vehicle for

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popular entertainment, and the Hollywood director, Wyler, set about constructing “a motion picture that would appeal to a large percentage of the movie-going public.”96 The dramatic design of the film is unembarressedly conventional, its rhythms, periods, condensations, and turning points a negotiation of the novel’s plot structure and the classical Hollywood narrative form.97 The film observes the unities more carefully than the novel, here perhaps showing the influence of the stage adaptation. It is shot for the most part in a single sitting room, its flow of time is interrupted only once, and it describes a single action—the throwing off of an engagement. It is also ruthlessly efficient: Everything leads toward the single effect of the final scene, which—obeying Aristotle’s formula—fuses an action and a recognition. All of the problematics of an Aristotelian theory of mimesis rise to the surface with this fidelity to the classic structure. What we want to isolate here is the relationship between this unity, what Gadamer calls a closed circle of meaning, and the hermeneutic idea of recognition, which refers not to a repetition but to an increase of being (auxesis in the rhetorical figures or Zuwachsansein in hermeneutic theory). The capstone of Gadamer’s theory of recognition is that an audience does not just recognize a good imitation of life, does not just enjoy a repetition: “The joy of recognition is rather the joy of knowing more than is already familiar. In recognition what we know emerges, as if illuminated, from all the contingent and variable circumstances that condition it; it is grasped in its essence. It is known as something.”98 Gadamer does seem to be flirting provocatively with essentialism here, to the confusion of every reader, but let us give him a chance. What eliminates the contingent and variable circumstances in the mimesis of The Heiress, of course, is its artifice. Watching it, we as an audience know that fictional events are being so arranged and so martialed as to paint a certain picture and create a certain effect. The storyteller deploys all resources of illusion, what Aristotle called spectacular elements, to suture the image to our experience, to hide and distract from the artifice. But this is only a game; we know the rules and we play along, because we want to see what such a story would be like stripped of all wrong notes, undeveloped lines of action, discordant facts, and diminished effects. We want to see what it would be like if Catherine were this much deserted. Few of us, in our imagination, could have put things together this succinctly, cleanly, or brutally, and the pleasure is partly in the skill of the storyteller’s “as if.” So the “essential” here is nothing metaphysical; it is more about improving on our own wandering narrative technique. This is all that Gadamer means when he stipulates that the work is “a closed circle of meaning.”99 When he references the “unity of a tragic course of events,” he is using the Aristotelian criterion that

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the tragic drama is required to be a structured whole, the presentation of a single action pulled out from the stream of life. Aristotle is quite expansive on this point: “Unity of plot does not, as some persons think, consist in the unity of the hero. For infinitely various are the incidents in one man’s life which cannot be reduced to unity; and so, too, there are many actions of one man out of which we cannot make one action.”100 This is a way of saying that our lives are constitutionally contingent and disparate—underdetermined in their excess and superfluity. Thus the selection and representation of a single action is unapologetically a construction. But to the extent that we try to order our lives and shape our ends, that is what our lives are too. We are perfectly aware of the game that is being played on us when we watch Catherine’s fate close in on her. Dramatic staging is a device to permit the audience to consider the unresolved relationship between its own orders and contingencies, the substantive predicament of lives that sit on the event horizon of generative life and nihilation. Engaging in the play of the tragic work is about obtaining a certain relationship to a conversation about this predicament. The tragic effect of eleos and phobos is simultaneously a proximating and distancing strategy that grants the audience, for a moment, a privileged position in relation to itself, and so a kind of insight: “Commiseration and apprehension are modes of ekstasis, being outside oneself.”101 So recognition is not strictly speaking imitation but rather an imaginative exercise that puts these issues before us. The eleos and phobos excited by mimesis are modal connections to a common existential predicament. But what exactly is this distance-proximity effect? It is like any seeing— Ekstasis grants sight in the distance by means of which “one knows and recognizes something and oneself ” (117). Narrative produces a relationship of proximity and distance by placing characters in unsustainable circumstances to force decisions that render their situations visible. Aristotle’s idea is that the tragic drama creates these effects most efficiently by motivating actions through character, forcing a reversal that changes fortunes and in the process reveals the principals to themselves. This is what happens in the novel and in the film. The orchestration and registration of the conventions of dramatic narrative and film syntax are trained on a fairly dense network of identifications, the symmetries of the conflicts produced by the natures of the characters. A series of dramatic imbalances serve as engines to move toward tragedy, both the contradictions within the characters—the father’s will against his honor, the suitor’s pragmatism against his venality, the daughter’s impressionability against her constancy— and the mismatches between the characters—Catherine’s strength being the

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confounding variable in each case. All of these engines of conflict work in service of a single dramatic line, a series of recognition scenes that culminate in a final revelatory paroxysm. A distinctive character of the plot in either case is the way in which multiple little revelations accumulate, a ratcheted series of recognitions that incrementally tear away every concealment of human pretense so that what is left is kind of terrifying exposure, a tragic awareness. The technique observes quite faithfully Aristotle’s axiom regarding the structure of incidents as the product of character, here more efficient than the novel, which is unhurried in its exploration of motive and possibility. The pleasure of the experience in Washington Square is in the lapidary precision of the descriptions of Sloper’s psychological maneuvers, Townsend’s strategic parries, and Catherine’s unpredictable refusals. Missing this and dependent on the necessary economies of the visual form, the film concentrates on creating a structure of impacts that lead forward into the tragic insight. The Heiress is paired down to a kind of ruthless efficiency in what Aristotle called the arrangement of incidents. The narrative meaning is cinched, by the conventions of the form, in a network of rather obvious visual symbols—the father’s gloves and cigars, the embroidery, the doorways, the mounting stairs, the oil lights—but the impact of the film is carried as well in the faces that register the story’s effects. What plays out in James’s Washington Square is a narrative contest between the skills and the limits of instrumental persuasion in which the reader is treated to a master-seminar in the efficacies of the manipulation of interests and cold calculation (Sloper’s logos), the seduction of the image (Townsend’s pathos), and being true to one’s word (Catherine’s ethos). It is in the end both a rather vicious parlor game and an experiment in the human consequences of the sophistic arts. The movie audience of The Heiress makes its way to the same issues along a different path—the experience of a vision, alternating mainly between Dr Sloper and Catherine. Dr Sloper has a rather acute insight into human behavior as an observant student of motive. He is a shrewd judge of character at least up to the limits of his own personal competencies, and so Catherine’s depths elude him. Because pathos and logos and ethos reciprocate in her experience, she learns: taking impressions and gathering their significance. This serves her well in the end, because, even within the narrow limitations of her circumstance, she has the mimetic capacity to negotiate and secure the links between image and truth. Because of the attempt at fidelity to the original, the changes in the stage and film adaptation are quite instructive. Most of the changes were efforts to transpose the same narrative sense to the new media. Sloper’s threat of legal disinheritance is carried through in the novel and not in the film, but Townsend renews his

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proposal to Catherine in either case. This exemplifies a difference exploited here between the interiority of the reading experience and the spectacular mode of the theatrical. In James’s prose the revelations are diffused, dissipated, or subverted, whereas in the film presentation a series of supercharged scenes sound and carry home the revelations. In the novel, Catherine’s realization of her jilting is a study in delayed recognition. Despite her immediate intuition that something terrible had happened—was happening—when Morris Townsend began to talk vaguely of leaving her, the idea will only seep in by increments. By contrast the film funnels the resistant awareness into a terrible scene of recognition—with what is quite literally a jilting scene—the accumulation of knowledge presses down on the dam of her psychological resistance and gives way in an emotional collapse. Interestingly, the camera eye chooses this moment to stand at an extreme distance, as though to observe the proprieties of private grief. Everything is done quickly with interior and exterior crane shots, and we see only Aunt Penniman’s pulling and drawing of shutters, pocket doors, and blinds—the hasty shrouding of an embarrassed life that threatens in this moment of unself-conscious shock to spill out onto the street. The sequel to the revelation scene plays out along similar, parallel lines. In the film, Catherine, who by the shock has acquired a fairly expansive vision of her degradation—both in the degree of her father’s contempt and the venality of her suitor’s motives—throws the jilting in her father’s face when he interrogates her about her suitor: “He deserted me.” The brutality of this utterance carries a tremendous narrative freight—among so many things a turning point in Catherine’s self-knowledge—that despite everything that will yet be relearned and reunderstood, the knowledge she has acquired in a single moment grants her a kind of moral autonomy, both in relation to her father and to the world at large. Those three words carry a structural weight in the narrative development from naïve dependence to tragic autonomy, and they must certainly resound in the audience’s mind as a kind of turning point. In the novel, by contrast, the narrative elaborates a fugue of subtle shifts of thought and feeling in response to the state of affairs put in motion by Townsend’s ambiguous departure. Because Mr Sloper is purposely left ignorant of the nature of the split between his daughter and the suitor, his canny speculations on the matter play out over time, and these suppositions, probings, and deliberations are the discursive texture of the final chapters, throwing a distended backlight on the moral disfigurement of the father’s scheming. The novel has earned this indulgence in ambiguity, a series of subtle emotional adjustments that weave a vibrating filigree of moral sentiment in all directions. The narrator’s speculative voice continues to probe

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equivocations of motive and understanding and rests the dramatic effect on this faceted exploration. Even the unexpected return of Morris Townsend after two decades turns into a kind of extended interrogatory in which Catherine is able to establish for herself with more precision the nature of her situation and what has happened to her in the long interim. She learns a great deal by seeing what age reveals in the man, able to see his reality in its distance from the image that had sustained her. In the film, by contrast, Catherine choreographs the last scene so that she not only does not receive Morris into her home for his renewed proposal, but leaves him pounding on the street door as she disappears into the house. What she feels about all this, a dense texture of contradictory emotions, is telescoped into the few seconds that she reacts to the sounds outside the house as she carries out her plan. In the end it is important to note the possibility that in the case of both the novel and the film, despite the very different manners of storytelling, one could find oneself saying “That is so true.” “That is exactly how it is.” For Gadamer, adaptation and translation stand under the same criterion of evaluation as creation. The medium of expression is only one element in a set of shifting relations that include the audience and the occasion, the traditions of performance, the conventions of taste. In every case the spectator, the audience, the reader use “the supreme criterion of ‘right’ representation” to judge the merit of a work (TM 118). Throughout his writings, Gadamer employs all the conventional formulations of this kind of evaluative judgment: for the lines and color of a painting, “That is just right!”; for the character in a drama, “That is who it is!” (“Poetry and Mimesis,” RB 119); for the vividness of a description, “So true, so full of being.”102 The truth at issue in these judgments is what Gadamer wishes to introduce as a criterion equally valid as any in science. Now, there is something troubling that asserts itself at this point because to speak of criteria would appear to introduce, however faintly, a notion of adequation, which is precisely what Gadamer had set out to reject; the comparison of one thing with another, a word with a thought, a word with a thing. How do we hold on to the constitutive nature of performance if we introduce the evaluative moment? If mimesis is not a copy, what is being compared? If it is a presentation and not a representation, how does one experience serve as a standard for another? Gadamer’s handling of this issue runs in two directions. First is the assertion that the truth of a work is greater than its model: “[T]he being of the representation is more than the being of the thing represented. Homer’s Achilles more than the original.”103 If art is more real, then it is not copying. But if that is the case,

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how do we then recognize the improvement? In response I can only think that we have to resort to something like Heidegger’s notion of attunement, a hearing of the harmonics between; that is, the elements out of which art is constructed and life is experienced are always being arranged and rearranged as variations on a theme, and we have these variations as a basis for comparison, as a growing ground, despite their not being originals. But this leads directly to the second direction of Gadamer’s thought. Mimesis by his own definition exists at one remove from our acting and suffering in life; that is the essence of “play” as it is introduced in Truth and Method. Children play house and war, dramatists stage patricide and courtships and incest. We as an audience are safe behind its fictions, are not directly affected, this even whether or not it is staged: “[I]t is not even important whether the tragic or comic scene playing before one is taking place on the stage or in life—when one is only a spectator . . . it acquires its proper being in being mediated.”104 So given the constitutive difference between the fictional experience and the cold reality, how is the former not a copy of the other? One difficulty in sorting this question out is that most of Gadamer’s attention to the concept of recognition concerns itself with the relation between a work and its performances—thus we can say that this or that interpretation of a Chopin mazurka was impeccable, this or that interpretation of a Hölderlin poem is just. That is the kind of recognition that he concerns himself with in the writings on aesthetics and criticism. But when a reader judges Catherine’s reaction to her father’s insults to be profoundly true, the reader’s pleasure has to do with the sense that the fiction has got it just right, that is, is true to what real life is actually like. Are not these different forms of recognition quite different activities working under different principles? A conductor working from a score is collaborating in a work of art rather than transmuting actual doing and suffering into a fiction. Perhaps when we are reading Washington Square the experiences that we reference from out of our own lives—the doings and sufferings that lack the distantiation of play—are memories that get this distance retroactively by virtue of our encounter with the mimesis. The criterion of rightness confers this distance on our personal experience at the same time that it recognizes the fiction. Perhaps this is what Gadamer means when he says that beauty “gives us an assurance that the truth does not lie far off and is inaccessible to us, but can be encountered in the disorder or reality with all its imperfections, evils, errors, extremes, and fateful confusions.”105 Engagement with art is simply one of the many “ways in which we develop familiarity with” the world (100). This would make sense of the strange thing he keeps repeating about art as “a form

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of recognition that serves to deepen our knowledge of ourselves and thus our familiarity with the world as well.”106 In other place he puts it this way: “[I]t is the living out of what it is with us.”107 This at any rate is part of the rich conversation that Gadamer instigates with his distinction between closed and open worlds, on one side, the world “stripped of all our contingent encounters with it,” and on the other side, “the ambiguity and instability of human affairs” to which we are mercilessly exposed.108 To be sure, the conflict between closed and open worlds at the heart of Gadamer’s dialectic is perhaps more troubled, tensive, and unresolved than he himself allows. He is perhaps too much under the thrall of the Aristotelian standard of the perfect work, and perhaps we have learned something fundamental from the postmodern assault on the privilege of order and beauty. Here I think Béla Bacsó’s careful reading of Gadamer’s theory of art has put the matter well. In his critique, Bacsó establishes a kind of stalemate between what he calls a Nähe zur Sache, an approaching proximity to the matter at issue, and a Sachferne, an unclosable distance from the matter at issue. This equilibrium is present in Gadamer insofar as he appeals to the weakness of the logoi, but is somewhat covered over by his references to the work from which no single piece can be removed without destroying its coherence, “a harmonious whole that is proportioned within itself.”109 Bacsó cites Wachterhauser approvingly in his description of the real state of hermeneutic being. The logoi “themselves are never perfectly unified, conflict-free visions of the issues they reveal.”110 One is put in mind of Piero Pasolini’s film adaptation of the Agamemnon: “In every artistic genre of Pasolini’s late production one can sketch a true poetics of the unfinished: a predilection for notes, projects, fragments, conceived not as preparation for real works, but as new forms that negate and subvert artistic conventions, that is to say the Aristotelian idea of an enclosed organism.”111 Again, it is not that one cannot find this position in Gadamer, but that we need to raise the profile of this tension as the more accurate description of the matter. Gadamer devoted a long essay to the subject of Goethe’s famous “fragments,” and the burden of his thought was that those fragments invoke a larger unity, and that their fragmentariness has everything to do with that relation. Perhaps, this is true of a poetics of the unfinished, insofar as it works because it unsettles our sense of completion, and it is trivially true of any fragment by definition. But it is also true that a fragment retains its identity as a fragment by its failure to find integrity. Classical ruins do not illustrate the problem well because they have developed their own aesthetic wholeness.

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Gadamer is on stronger ground when he approaches the incompletion of the work as an illustration of an ontological condition. Karl Ulmer gets at the Aristotelian origin of Gadamer’s Vollzug, a description that references the performativity of Gebilde as something always caught halfway between work and the work, between the Hervorgang (the thing as the process of emergence itself) and the Hervorgetretene (the thing that steps forward out of the process): “If something is a work, it is so by being revealed without showing itself in its entirety. The work is in fact distinguished by this process of unfolding.”112 We need to note how much Aristotle’s concept of actuality is different from our conventional distinctions between process and product.113 Aristotle contrasts actualization with movement, which he says is incomplete: “For it is not the same thing which at the same time is walking and has walked, or is building and has built, or is becoming and has become, or is being moved and has been moved, but two different things” (ibid.). Actualization therefore gathers up the temporal dislocation of being by being in a way both process and product. It is limited, however, by being itself a temporal phenomenon—it is both process and product only while it is in performance. When Heidegger develops the potential of this Aristotelian concept, he severs its teleological orientation in a most extraordinary way. Having passed through the filters of Kierkegaardian repetition and Husserlian time-consciousness, energeia works itself out strictly within the confines of the lifeworld: The enactment [Vollzug] is in each case and necessarily such that what has been self-worldly meaningful arises again in it; not in such a way that I would transport myself back into earlier situations or that I would feign that I lived something earlier again, rather I seize my own past so that it again and again is had for the first time and that I myself am always affected anew by myself and “am” in renewed enactment. This “like for the first time” undergoes even closer determinations; first, that it is entirely unrelated to the environing world and then that it does not mean a first-time appearing and occurring in an individual stream of consciousness, in this sense, it would occur and occurs in its necessary renewal never again for the first but for the second, third etc. time. This moment of “like for the first time” that lies in the sense of enactment does not lose itself in the renewal, does not wear itself out but becomes with it itself always more surprising. The self-affectedness “grows” in a particular sense and every “like for the first time” is characterized as precursor: the rejection of every trace of finality.114

So the concept of Vollzug that Gadamer appropriates from Heidegger’s ontological ruminations preserves the Aristotelian mediation of process and

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product while sloughing off its metaphysical burden. We are all most of the time beset by the anxieties, insecurities, and inadequacies of lives never fully born or completed, of uncertain outcomes or insufficient attentions, lapsing into distractions and disappearing down rabbit holes. This is what we have. Hermeneutics tries to articulate a structure of human being that accepts this loss of certainties and ends without its post-Enlightenment disillusionment, and it does this by retrieving the phronetic framework of social meaning. By identifying the work with the kind of life whose “goal lies only in itself,” art is positioned as an orienting locus of meaning that works without an external telos.115 Gadamer’s poetics seems at times still to be drawn to the Romantic impulse to find in art a substitute for a divine order. But when he speaks from within the regime of language and of finitude, we see that his world is closer to that of the hero of Attic tragedy who is forced “to orient his activity in a universe of ambiguous values where nothing is ever stable or unequivocal.”116

The work as symbol But I do not wish to arrive at this conclusion too quickly. However much the structure of hermeneutic theory acknowledges the constitutional deficit of human knowing, Gadamer always emphasized the surplus of what is felt over what is known. When Gadamer is writing about art he invokes the dialectic of presencing and withdrawal frequently, but turns the subject quickly toward the Zuwachsansein, the increase of being.117 He focused on the generative energy in the absences of finitude rather than on its pathos. Human finitude is at the core of his theory of horizons. Concealment is the necessary correlate of openness, and the very substance of the structure of the hermeneutic circle. Gadamer is fully cognizant of the Hegelian principle that truth contains “its own error within itself ” (PH 208). He well understood the “essential domination of indefiniteness” of being that holds itself unobtrusively but fatefully out of view (205). But Gadamer stayed out of the shadow of Schopenhauer, of withdrawal as the eclipse of reason or the death of the soul or how badly history may regress. He wanted always to say how the part makes us conscious of the whole, how there is always more to be said—more Bergung than Verbergung. Consequently, he leaned heavily on later Heidegger’s thematizations of the withdrawal of being to suggest its tragic dimensions.118 We must therefore take a small detour through Heidegger to flesh out this lack at the core of Dasein, because so much of the hermeneutic theory of art has to do with such a confrontation.

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In exploring this theme, Heidegger himself left an interesting gap—precisely between the relation of withdrawal and art (das Kunst). This lacuna was probably more accidental, due to the fact that he had been developing his theory of art and his theory of the nothing at a point very close in time (in the 1930s) when he was working many things out, and missed making the connection explicit, so we will draw that connection forward by invoking both sets of writing. The panic and horror of absolute isolation and annihilation, the helpless abandonment to a limitless void; we understand this kind of nothing as something very different from what logic or mathematics calls nothing; a quantification, a zero-point, a nullity. The alienation of Heidegger from analytic philosophy can be dated from 1929 when he contrasted the scientific reduction of nothing to a logical result with the human experience of nothing (das Nichts) as an existential crisis “where there is nothing to hold onto.”119 Rudolph Carnap ridiculed Heidegger’s statements about the negative as “a psychological observation made to pass for logic,” and his reaction “lead indirectly to Heidegger’s banishment from the world of Anglo-American philosophy.”120 Heidegger’s 1929 lecture was a polemical provocation intended to excite the controversy it engendered: “Science wants to know nothing of the nothing. . . . The idea of ‘logic’ itself disintegrates in the turbulence of a more original questioning . . . no amount of scientific rigor attains to the seriousness of metaphysics. Philosophy can never be measured by the standard of the idea of science.”121 Indeed, Heidegger prophesied in 1929 the end of “the reign of ‘logic’ in philosophy,” so that Carnap had good reason to be disturbed.122 Instead of sequestering pathos from the question of truth, Heidegger determined that Stimmung (attunement or affective orientation) acted in human understanding as the “tell” of a situational comprehension, a fairly complex incipient understanding that partakes of, but does not reduce to, psychosocial or cultural-historical schematisms. What Heidegger finds in this formally indicative capacity is that the dread of or awe before das Nichts gives meaning to our lives; when we brush up against it or cower in its anticipation we know more fully who we are and what we have. “Dasein remains shaken by the nihilation of the nothing. Unyielding antagonism and stinging rebuke have a more abysmal source than the measured negation of thought. Galling failure and merciless prohibition require some deeper answer. Bitter privation is more burdensome.”123 The anxiety of annihilation is never really absent, but “only sleeping. Its breath quivers perpetually through Dasein.”124 Gadamer tells us that Heidegger’s influence on the direction of his perspective can be traced to the lectures published as “The Origins of the

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Work of Art” which develop a philosophy of finitude from out of an encounter with the meaning of art, and which introduces a symbolic language based on the tension between presencing and withdrawal.125 So what is the link between das Nichts and das Kunstwerk in Heidegger? In other words, what is the relationship between the dialectic of world and earth and the dialectic of being and nothing? Although these two themes emerged in closely adjacent phases of his thinking, and although there are a few nebulous intimations of their bond, the affiliation is not fleshed out. It seems obvious that the two dialectics are closely related, but there is little explicit textual evidence to establish the nature of the link, despite the fact that the periods of the key texts on the two themes overlap so closely in Heidegger’s development. Recent work on this question remains speculative, and I want to nail this down to the extent possible.126

The appropriation of the not from Hegel Heidegger’s conception of the role of the negative has roots in Hegel, who posits the beginning of everything as a process constituted out of the interaction between nothing and being: “The beginning is not pure nothing, but a nothing from which something is to proceed.”127 Their interrelation is the enigma at the heart of reality, and they stand in relation to each other as in some ways undifferentiated but in other ways an energizing difference. This constitutive contradiction is temporalized as the engine of historical progress: “[T]hat which begins, as yet is not, it is only on the way to being” (73–4). So Hegel from the beginning conceives of being and nothing locked in an embrace of opposition, reconciliation, struggle, and progress. Moreover, the pair being/ nothing runs parallel to the pair infinite/finite. Being propels reality toward the infinite, whereas Nothing holds it back in the finite: “[T]he development of this negation . . . constitutes the finitude of something” (129). For Hegel the negative and the finite are two sides of the same coin: “When we say of things that they are finite . . . non-being constitutes their nature and being” (129). At first blush this idea seems thinly conceptual, but at the level of experience it becomes perfectly intuitive: Boredom is a fundamental attunement of early to middle years when the future unrolls infinitely and cheaply, and mortality is a mere abstraction, but once we begin to realize that everything in our life is on loan with a date-stamp, boredom as a fundamental attunement fades away. A shadow steals over our boredom and becomes pensive reflection as a reflex of immanence. Finitude replaces the infinite. Things that evoked boredom are transformed into the stuff

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of reflection, become poignant, even precious. Nothing becomes the measure of everything. Hegel acknowledges the existential dimension of Nothing as well: “[T]he shock of its nullity is too great not to stimulate the attempt to fix Being and secure it against the transition into Nothing.”128 To be sure, Heidegger doubts how seriously Hegel ultimately takes the threat of nihilation. Heidegger notes that, although Hegel characterizes the negative “as being torn apart and as separation . . . this ‘death’ is not taken seriously, no catastrophe possible; neither hurling down nor overturning possible; everything intercepted and smoothed out. Everything is already unconditionally secured and given its place.”129 Heidegger in fact flatly calls into question the legitimacy of Hegel’s dialectic of being and nothing: “Hegel’s negativity is not meaningful, because it never takes nothing and negation seriously,—Nothing has already been sublated into the ‘yes’ of being.”130 Heidegger reads Hegel’s speculative relation of being and nothing in its unity as a capitulation, and is quite astounded by it: “For metaphysical thought the negative is only absorbed [verschluckt] into the positive” (15). For Heidegger, being and nothing are, at their most fundamental, one.131 What Heidegger regards as an unresolvable struggle, Hegel places in the service of positive progress: “The intimacy of the not (die Innigkeit des Nichts) and that which is at strife within being itself (das Strittige im Sein), isn’t that Hegel’s negativity? It is not, although he has . . . experienced something essential, yet sublated it into absolute knowing; negativity, only to disappear and sustain the movement of sublation” (Beiträge, 264).132 Karin de Boer agrees with Heidegger that Hegel’s “concept of negativity and movement is such that every contrariety between what actually is and what should be appears as a subordinate moment of the movement in which a preceding, albeit formal identity increasingly actualizes itself . . . all the concepts developed in the Logic rest on an expulsion or suppression of a ‘not’ that resists its sublation into the movement of the concept.”133 For Heidegger, by contrast, being “always already shelters an otherness that it has not created and that it cannot overcome” (301). The otherness of the negative is the dark matter or antigravity that reconstitutes the relation between infinity and finitude.134 By contrast, the negative in Heidegger thus shatters the dream of teleological progress: “Not every given possibility engenders its self-actualization—what lies in the seed will not necessarily unfold itself so as to bear fruit. One has to accept, then, that death, suffering, and dividedness can no longer be conceived as granting life the passage to its truth” (303). But the finitude that is counterposed to infinity is not merely an inconvenient barrier to the march of progress. It is as fully constitutive of Dasein as the infinite. The human condition is not infinity

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manqué, but an unresolved strife between infinity and its other, essentially. Although finitude “consists fundamentally in the brokenness (Gebrochenheit) of Dasein . . . the expanse of Dasein’s horizon is broken by the moment which brings it to authentic existence . . . it is precisely its finitude that enables Dasein to attain authentic existence.”135 In Being and Time it was through the fundamental attunement of Angst, the mood proper to an awareness of mortality that Dasein understood in an incipient way the significance of das Nichts. Dasein “does not flee in the face of entities within-the-world; these are precisely what it flees towards . . . we flee in the face of the ‘not-at-home’ that is, we flee in the face of the uncanniness which lies in Dasein.”136 What we sense with anxiety is the presence of an absence, something very real but elusive and unnameable.137 Our realities are formed of this dance between presence and absence, a real and intimate relation that the metaphysical tradition, so Heidegger thought, had been trying to avoid. Much later Heidegger described the fundamental mood or moods that sensed this relation differently, but it remained the cornerstone of his attack on the tradition.

Das Nichts und das Kunstwerk How does the dialectic of being and nothing mesh with Heidegger’s theory of art as elaborated in “The Origins of the Work of Art” and the later writings on poetic thought? How does being and nothing relate to the central innovation of Heidegger’s concept of the work, what he calls the struggle between earth (die Erde) and World (die Welt) in the work of art? Heidegger had developed the phenomenological concept of world in Being and Time as the basic hermeneutic structure of meaning for human Dasein, which exists in the push-pull between its having been thrown into the world by fate and its projecting a place for itself in under those conditions. Since it is never able fully to be conscious of the ways in which it is conditioned, even its projections are colored by that involvement. The reflective distance that logos allows Dasein to glimpse the codependency of its own projection and thrownness is an interposing factor that gives dialectical movement to Dasein’s being-inthe-world. Because this construct stops at the door of human subjectivity, what that subjectivity rests on has to be explained. That thrownness itself could not be some kind of fixed and timeless structure; it had to be dialectical as well. Earth (die Erde) is the matrix out of which historical presencing emerges. It follows that if historical culture comes to presence and falls away, it must be to and from

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somewhere that is the privative of its presencing and receptive of its falling away. Anwesen too must be thrown. Heidegger’s turning to the work of art at the point at which he was realizing the necessity for this dialectical counterthrust beyond the preoccupations of subjectivity had the ontological function of identifying a nonsubjectivist location for historical being, a place that was able to carry on the work of being that Dasein shepherded. In this schematism, art is a displacement of being from the ground of subjectivity; it allows the being that Dasein experiences to be carried along with its help. What an artwork “is” essentially is the tip of the iceberg where being happens for a moment before slipping back into the depths. The work is the place where it can happen because the fixity of the text provides a dry spot, an outpost, where otherwise somewhat vacuous subjectivities can jump. We finite creatures leapfrog our way along these communal outposts. This process is what we have fashioned to escape our ephemerality, finitude, temporality, perspective, and subjectivity. The work as the outbreak of (objective genitive) or manifestation of (subjective genitive) the world that momentarily wins itself from the earth is the frail, dependent, limited, partial presencing that we know as our historical reality. But, now, what is the relationship between the dialectic of world and earth and the dialectic of being and nothing? Although it seems intuitively right that there is a close connection between these two dialectics, Heidegger does not chart the connection for us. They are two different idioms at different levels even if they were developing in overlapping periods of his thinking. So if there is a coherence and a logic of connection we have to establish that ourselves. The textual links between the two paradigmatic structures is surprisingly scarce. Where one might expect to find it—in the Beiträge, for instance, or the Introduction to Metaphysics—the subject is approached obliquely. Where one might expect the fullest treatment, “The Origins of the Work of Art,” there is only a passing reference. It occurs in the passage in which Heidegger is listing the various modalities by which truth happens as the opposition of clearing and concealing. Of these “many ways” (mannigfaltige Weisen), Heidegger mentions five: the work of art, the founding of a state, the nearness of the being that is most of all (das Seiendste des Seienden), the essential sacrifice (das Wesentliche Opfer), and the thinker’s questioning. Why the reference to essential Being (das Sein selbst) is inserted in the third place is disconcerting, especially as that suggests a rough equivalence rather than a difference of levels. But at least we have here a textual confirmation that the dialectic of revealing and withdrawal pertains

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both to art and to the more primordial question of Being. This is the one textual anchor that I am aware of. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann confirms this link, invoking the 1929 essay “Was Ist Metaphysik?” and its discussion of das Nichts in reference to this third modality of the opposition of clearing and concealing.138 Anxiety (angst) over the threat of nihilation attunes us to the fullness of being: The development of being in the modality of the nothing [im Modus des Nichts] develops itself not “detached and ‘near to’ the totality of being,” but rather “at one with the totality of being.” In the disclosedness of anxiety we experience existentially such an original impression of revealability [Offenbarkeit] that we experience it as one with the self-disclosing appearance of nothing as being-dist inguishing-itself-from-beings.139

The point Herrmann is making is that, in the Hegelian structure of Heidegger’s ontology, nothing is inextricably a part of our understanding of being. Herrmann then equates this bonded duality with the theme of self-constitution (Sicheinrichten) in “The Origins of the Work of Art,” which is a feature of the artwork. There are problems with this direct equation. Heidegger introduces the special use of the term Einrichten in the following passage in “The Origins of the Work of Art”: “Truth happens only by establishing itself in the conflict and sphere opened up by truth itself. Because truth is the opposition of clearing and concealing [das Gegenwendige von Lichtung und Verbergung], there belongs to it what is here to be called establishing [die Einrichtung].”140 Neither the definition of truth nor the concept of truth at stake in this claim is ever raised in “Was Ist Metaphysik?,” so that is not a link. Furthermore, Heidegger is quite explicit in “On the Essence of Truth” that “concealing” (Verbergung) is not the same as nothing (das Nichts). Truth is a kind of accord, however, “what brings into accord is not nothing [nicht nichts] but rather a concealing of beings as a whole [das Seiende im Ganzen]. . . . Concealment deprives alētheia of disclosure yet does not render it sterēsis (privation) [Beraubung].”141 Thus, a direct link between being/ nothing and clearing/concealing through the middle term of Einrichtung seems problematic. Taminiaux finds a somewhat tenuous but still direct link between art and nothing in the “Introduction to Metaphysics” (1935) in Heidegger’s well-known interpretation of the Antigone. Taminiaux is looking for the shift in Heidegger’s prioritization of art (Gr. technē) in the period between Being and Time and “The

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Origins of the Work of Art,” and he locates it first in the Rectoral Address of 1933 (where Heidegger distinguishes between a lower and higher form of technē), and the Hölderlin lectures delivered shortly afterwards in which Heidegger asserts that the fundamental attunement of a community “is originally instituted by the poet.”142 In the Introduction to Metaphysics (1935) “art is what most immediately brings Being . . . to stand,” not the highest privilege, but a high distinction as a specific modality of being (i.e. in its immediacy).143 In the interpretation of the “ode on man” in the Antigone, Heidegger develops the theme of art in relation to the Sophoclean concept of deinon, which he denominates as a signifier for the essence of Being—in fact, “its decisive aspect” (161). With expansive interpretive license he delineates two cultural attributes of deinon, and then sets these attributes in play against each other. The first attribute is terrible or terrifying (das überwältige Furchtbare), which includes panicked alarm (panischer Schrecken), high anxiety (wahre Angst), and tremulous awe (verschwiegene Scheu), which Heidegger associates with the Greek concept of dikē, the compelling enjoinment of just fate, what he therefore connects to the fitting or proper.144 The second attribute is “overwhelming force (das Gewaltige) in the sense of one who needs to use violence—and does not just have power at its disposal but is the agent of this violence, insofar as using force is the basic trait not just of its doing but of its Dasein . . . it combats the terrifying with the compelling.”145 The English “violence” does not capture the range of associations of Gewalt, which includes the idea of authority, control, power, might, immensity. As with Antigone, human beings in general are unheimlich in the way they resist their own fate. Heidegger associates the first feature with dikē (forms sanctioned by tradition), the second with technē (the creative impulse), and then sets them in a struggle against each other. This struggle takes place in the human being, who is thus unheimlich, a being conscious of its exposure to nihilation and attempting to step out of its way. In Heidegger’s formulation, art (what the Greeks placed under the heading of technē) beats back the threat of nihilation and allows beings to show themselves in their relation to being: “Thus technē characterizes the deinon, the violence-doing, in its decisive basic trait; for to do violence is to need to use violence against the over-whelming: the knowing struggle to set Being, which was formerly closed off, into what appears as beings.”146 The dialectic of dikē and technē is perhaps a distant cousin of the traditional dialectic of convention and invention, the free play of art improvising on and therefore breaking up the stable generic expectations passed down by tradition, but it also has an existential pathos, the recognition of being “thrown this way and that between fittingness

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and un-fittingness, between the wretched and the noble” (172). If art is a means of reflection through mimesis, then technē is needed by a human being who is caught in the path of nihilation: The uncanniest (the human being) is what it is because from the ground up it deals with and conserves the familiar only in order to break out of it and to let what overwhelms it break in. Being itself throws humanity into the course of this tearing-away, which forces humanity beyond itself, as the one who moves out to Being, in order to set Being to work and thus to hold open beings as a whole. (174)

We will get to the strange and problematic association of art and violence, but first we need to secure the concrete structural parallel between being/nothing and world/earth, and ask whether that connection is meaningful. Both pairs now cross at the fundamental attunement of a mood at the midpoint, since art is the response to the terror of nihilation. With this schematization we have confirmation that the struggle between presencing and withdrawal that art reveals is a manifestation of the struggle between being and nothing. Is Heidegger right? Is art a distinctive manifestation of the eternal battle between being and nothing? Is this parallel a useful way to understand art? It is at least plausible that what is genuinely experienced as art is at some level an encounter at or with the limits of experience, a version of the measure that we take when we are “held out into the nothing”?147 Is art always at some level a way of being attentive to the fact that when we “slip away from ourselves . . . there is nothing to hold onto” (103)? Heidegger’s description of art as Gewalt is certainly enmeshed in his political entanglements in the 1930s, and much speculation has attended the reasons why violence drops out of his poetic thought subsequent to this period. In the Introduction to Metaphysics the proximate cause of the association is the link to deinon in Sophocles, so we want to look at how this theme carries over to the pivotal statement on art in this period, “The Origins of the Work of Art.” In this lecture, Heidegger constructs his phenomenology of the artwork around pairs of counterforces—refusal and admission, holding and letting go, sheltering and releasing, breach and trust, inventing and preserving, rift and closure. But the consistent element of all these couplets is conflict (“die Bestreitung des Streites”).148 The earth-world relation has the structure of the chiasm; intersecting, interanimating, interdependent, coproductive. As we have established, the permanent conflict between earth and world is both an analogy and a modality of the dialectic between being and nothing. It is a modality

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insofar as the work of art is one manifestation of the presencing and withdrawal of being. It is an analogy insofar as it is only one modality, one manifestation of the relation between being and nothing. It is a literal analogy insofar as it shares a common relation with the interaction between being and nothing—presencing and withdrawal—but it is a specific manifestation insofar as it works in terms of what Heidegger calls the conflict of earth and world. Why did Heidegger develop the metaphorical duality of “world” and “earth” to describe the work? In common parlance, the former typically designates a sociocultural reality while the later a physical object in the universe, but the lines often blur. We can speak of “the world as we know it” or “this ball of earth” in the same breath.149 This distinction and commonality helps Heidegger evoke a traditional topos—the relation of form and matter, style and meaning, language (Sprachlichkeit) and speech (Sprache), convention and invention—without the metaphysical baggage, freeing him to set the terms of the relationship anew. Heidegger will insist that earth is not pure matter or meaning, but is a source of latent form as well, and world is not pure form or structure, but is a source of meaning as well. Language is never an abstract system existing outside of its performance, nor purely a self-constituting event of meaning; these two always already interpenetrate each other in a way that our dualistic languages do not permit us to conceive. Sache and Sprache are not on opposite sides of the dialectic, but intermingled in potency and actuality. The overlap is a caution to the notion of “Earth” as a formless potency of meaning. Michel Haar actually corrects a prominent Heideggerian who interprets Earth as “a reserve of ‘meanings still to be discovered.’”150 It is rather “an inexhaustible abundance of rudimentary ways and forms.”151 In Heidegger’s words, there already “lies tucked into nature a design, a measure and boundary through which a creative outline is brought into the open.”152 In contrast to the formlessness of Dionysian frenzy (“the rapture of the Dionysian state with its annihilation of the ordinary bounds and limits of existence”), Heidegger’s earth always has ready “a secret sketch of forms.”153 Something like the rhetorical topoi (but anterior to any historical production), it consists of “embryonic but not predetermined” Gestalten—figures, forms, patterns, rhythms. There is thus, unlike Nietzsche, no “primacy of creative forces over forms” (ibid.). Likewise “World” (history, culture) is no set of empty structures waiting to be filled, but rather the inventional adaptations up to that point. The actual comes into creative conflict with the possible, so that the work is the collaborative conflict of this latent anteriority and history, resulting in the particular Gestalt as an

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event. The artist only orchestrates what is already in the process of gathering, thickening, and hence composing itself.154 The potency of Earth is the latent fullness of figural possibilities that engages the solutions the World has already used up. In another place Heidegger speaks of possibility as one’s own element: “Thinking comes to an end when it slips out of its element [das Element weicht]. The element is what enables thinking to be a thinking. The element is what properly enables [Vermögende]: the enabling [das Vermögen].”155 German just as English speaks of being in one’s element, which refers to a whole phenomenological context of acting, experiencing, feeling, being, and thinking. Even more than the idiom of one’s thought, one lives comfortably in one’s element, and is thus able to create out of it. What Heidegger meant by saying “Higher than actuality stands possibility” is that there is no absolute on either end of this negotiation, no absolute presence or absence, an irresolution that both defines finitude and explains it pathos:156 “Only on the ground of the original revelation of the nothing can human existence approach and penetrate beings.”157 What we only ever have is the relation—a relation that substitutes (or reverses) for this ideal essence (traditional metaphysics) its absence as a positive generativity or generative positivity. There is not just nihilation after the fact. There is not just an eventual destruction of what is. The nothing is originary, part of the constituting nature of radical finitude; there never was any perfect presence and never will be. But then there never was any perfect absence either. This takes us full circle back to the tragic nature of finitude. Dasein is able to see and understand the negotiation between possibility and actuality as the only game. If human being is part of the clearing, or at least has found the clearing,158 this being held out into the nothing, its work is then the struggle between possibility and history. Humanity and its work are thus trucking in limits. Unless it is possible to understand possibility as a dimension of the nothing, the opposition of earth and world cannot be a direct analogy with the opposition of being and nothing. On the other hand, it is certainly possible to understand the revelation of art to be at some level a manifestation of that prior relation insofar as art bears witness to what is meaningful. That it improvises out of possibility, out of the idioms of the discourse or the tradition, suggests that it is produced out of a struggle that precedes or underlies it. The opposition of earth and world bears the trace of that first conflict, reflects back to it, and carries its weight. We sense that about it, and move to it for that reason.

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Gadamer’s appropriation Attending the lectures that came to be published as “The Origin of the Work of Art” was a seminal experience for Gadamer’s thinking, and indeed he suggests “the line of questioning of this essay” gave direction to the shape of his thought: Then in 1936 came Heidegger’s three Frankfurt Lectures which are today known as The Origin of the Artwork—Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes. I journeyed to Frankfurt to hear them when they were first given. . . . These three lectures so closely addressed my own questions and my own experience of the proximity of art and philosophy that they awakened an immediate response in me. My philosophical hermeneutics seeks precisely to adhere to the line of questioning of this essay and the later Heidegger and to make it accessible in a new way.159

Just how indebted Gadamer was to Heidegger’s theory of the work is hard to exaggerate. We can get some sense of this by comparing leading themes in Heidegger’s essay with Gadamer’s own major statement on art, the essay titled “The Relevance of the Beautiful,” which acts in some ways almost as a gloss on “The Origins of the Work of Art.” For Heidegger, the symbol is inexhaustible, a deep “reservoir of the not-yet-revealed.”160 For Gadamer, “the longer we allow ourselves, the more it displays its manifold riches.”161 For Heidegger, the symbol gives access to an irreplaceable and unique experience: “The establishing of truth in the work is the bringing forth of a being such as never was before and will never come to be again.”162 For Gadamer, the symbol is “a unique manifestation of truth whose particularity cannot be surpassed.”163 For Heidegger, meaning comes to be in and through its material embodiment: “[T]he temple-work, in setting up a world, does not cause the material to disappear, but rather causes it to come forth for the very first time.”164 For Gadamer, the “symbolic does not simply point toward a meaning, but rather allows that meaning to present itself.”165 For Heidegger, the symbol creates a protected space for truth to body forth in its strong toil of grace: “The work belongs, as work, uniquely within the realm that is opened up by itself.”166 For Gadamer, what is meaningful “is secured and sheltered in the ordered composure of the creation.”167 For Heidegger, this space is self-sufficient: “The work is to be released .  .  . to its pure self-subsistence.”168 For Gadamer, it “bears its center within itself ” and so provides its own “self-preservation.”169 For Heidegger, “there can exist a repose which is an inner concentration of motion.”170 For Gadamer, the nature of art is such that “it should proffer time, arresting it and allowing it to tarry.”171 For Heidegger, each “being we encounter and which encounters us keeps to this

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curious opposition of presencing in that it always withholds itself at the same time in a concealedness.”172 For Gadamer, for whom there was never to be “a total recovery of meaning,” the symbolic in art “rests upon an intricate interplay of showing and concealing.”173 For Heidegger, the artist is not the origin of the work, but “the work is the origin of the artist.”174 For Gadamer, the “creation is not something that we can imagine being deliberately made by someone.”175 For Heidegger, the work “first fits together and at the same time gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of destiny for human being.”176 For Gadamer, “the truth does not lie far off and inaccessible to us, but can be encountered in the disorder of reality with all its imperfections, evils, errors, extremes and fateful confusions” and is yet “one of the greatest intuitions of order to be found anywhere.”177 Still, there are significant differences between Gadamer’s and Heidegger’s aesthetics. As Gadamer points out, Heidegger’s great innovation in “The Origins of the Work of Art” is the metaphorical concept of earth, “the new and radical starting point for all transcendental inquiry.”178 The enigmatic dialectic of world and earth is conventionalized by Gadamer as the tension between historical culture as the present-at-hand and everything behind and beneath it—Gadamer avoided adopting Heidegger’s idiomatic metaphors, preferring to stay closer to common language and the concepts handed down. (One of Gadamer’s great contributions is precisely to have reformulated this epochal thought for the humanist tradition where it can productively engage with the enkyklios paideia.) Among the things it is clear Gadamer rejected in appropriating this dialectic was its violence, the harshly conflictual nature of the dialectic of earth and world. Permeating the section on the chiasm of earth and world in the “Origins” essay is the language of battle: “The conflict between world and earth is a battle.”179 As such it bears in equal measure the solidity and stability of a structure that can bear the weight of the conflict, but also its agitation and instability. The range of expression Heidegger employs to get at the character of the conflict stretches from natural violence (“the hurtling storm . . . manifest in its violence”), geological destruction (the rift of the ground, the jutting of the landmass), the violence of war (“streitig und streitbar”), to the intimate violence of master and slave.180 Heidegger avails himself of this language of agitation and conflict dozens of times, so that there can be no doubt about the character of the relationship: “World and earth are always intrinsically and essentially in conflict, belligerent by nature.”181 He does not allow for it to be even the unwilled destruction of the power of nature, but

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rather it is always an intensely intimate counterfacing struggle: “The conflict is not a rift as a mere cleft is ripped open; rather, it is the intimacy with which opponents belong to each other.”182 More even than a discord (Zwietracht) or strife (Hader), it is personal—a contest of wills, a test of egos: “But we would surely all to easily falsify its nature if we were to confound striving with discord and dispute, and thus see it only as disorder and destruction. In essential striving, rather, the opponents raise each other into the self-assertion [Selbstbehauptung] of their natures.”183 This last description, however, brings Heidegger to another identifying aspect of the conflict—a sudden, strange, almost Hegelian reversal. The struggle between earth and world partakes in the masculinist psychology of competition as a form of intimacy, “the intimacy of striving, and” here Heidegger’s echo of the master-slave dialectic becomes even more resonant.184 Because of his sense of battle as an equalizing force that leads to a grudging equilibrium, Heidegger ends up characterizing the relationship as its opposite, a restful repose: “In the intimacy of the conflict the repose of the resting-in-itself work has its essence.”185 There is thus a perfect transitivity between the one and the other: “The very essence of the intimacy of the strife lies in the repose of the work as it rests in itself.”186 It should be noted that as the vocabulary of restfulness rises to the surface and dominates in Heidegger’s later thought, what is described as conflict is also a being at rest and a self-containedness, the “independence or self-composure of the work [Insichruhen].”187 Despite this amelioration, the dialectic never loses its paradoxical relationship to battle; restfulness is always won from a tension: “The real plight of dwelling is indeed older than the world wars with their destruction, older also than the increase of the earth’s population and the condition of the industrial workers. The real dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell.”188 Gadamer quietly but notably removes the aggressive conflictual nature of withdrawal and concealment in his theory. In his major statement on the work of art (“The Relevance of the Beautiful”), he describes the work as an unending play of self-movement reverberating through time, and this dynamic is the polarity that balances it as a site of rest, repose, and order. What accounts for the different character of the dialectic? Gadamer’s 1960 interpretive essay on the “Origins” lecture (“The Truth of the Work of Art”), a famous essay in its own right, was the first time Gadamer publicly wrote about “The Origins of the Work of Art” despite its enormous influence in his life and its guiding role in Truth and Method,189 and

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there he explicates the conflictual nature of the relation of earth and world in Heidegger. The passage is brief enough that I can reproduce it in its entirety: There is clearly a tension between the emergence and the sheltering that constitute the Being of the work itself. It is the power of this tension [die Gespanntheit dieser Spannung] that constitutes the form-niveau [Gestaltniveau] of a work of art and produces the brilliance by which it outshines everything else [den Glanz erzeugt, durch den es alles überstrahlt]. Its truth is not constituted simply by its laying bare its meaning, but rather by the unfathomableness and depth [Unergründlichkeit und Tiefe] of its meaning. Thus by its very nature the work of art is a conflict between world and earth, emergence and sheltering. / But precisely what is exhibited in the work of art ought to constitute the essence of Being itself. The conflict [Streit] between revealment and concealment is not the truth of the work of art alone, but the truth of every being, for as unconcealedness, truth is always such an opposition of revealment and concealment. The two belong necessarily together. . . . As unconcealed, truth has in itself an inner tension and ambiguity [gegenwendig = counterturning]. Being contains something like a “hostility to its own presence” [Gegnerschaft des Anwesens], as Heidegger says. What Heidegger means can be confirmed by everyone: the existing thing does not simply offer us a recognizable and familiar surface contour; it also has an inner depth of self-sufficiency that Heidegger calls its “standing-in-itself.” The complete unconcealedness of all beings, their total objectification (by means of a representation that conceives things in their perfect state) would . . . represent nothing more than our opportunity for using being and what would be manifest would be the will that seizes upon and dominates things. In the work of art, we experience an absolute opposition to this will-to-control.190

I want to examine Gadamer’s interpretation of Heidegger carefully. It will be best to start at the end of this quotation—full transparency and the vanquishing of resistance. Such a consequence Gadamer warns would result from art that lacks the ability to withdraw from the technological or rationalist efforts to master it. Gadamer’s fear is contained eloquently in Hamlet’s remonstrance when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s ply him to explain his feelings.191 Art’s resistance is the resistance of human truth, which is by definition more complex, deeper, richer, and more ambiguous than the translation that technical rationalism presumptuously and obsessively intends to achieve. Heidegger was of course the great prophet against the sort of domination Gadamer fears. But Heidegger had set earth and world in a great struggle of wills, which is how he explained

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the absence of domination. The closest Gadamer comes to this is tangentially to quote his mentor, but this reference to a Gegnerschaft des Anwesens is hardly the titanic struggle Heidegger imagines. Temperamentally it might be that Gadamer is Mozart to Heidegger’s Beethoven, but the theoretical modification is more considered than this temperamental difference. That play (spielen) is what Gadamer exchanges for Heidegger’s masculinist battle at the origin of the work is confirmed by a 1973 lecture titled “The Play of Art.”192 Gadamer explicitly locates hermeneutic play in relation to the Spieltreib (playdrive) of the unconscious, as a play between invisible compulsions and interests with the autonomous will. To be sure, with the transfer of agency from subject to community, something more than compulsion and interest makes up the hidden source of the work. In an interpretation of Heidegger’s “rudimentary ways and forms,” Gadamer offers generic conventions as a gift of culture that serve as the material for invention: “A certain self-imposed limitation of our freedom seems to belong to the very structure of culture.”193 Also in the Heideggerian key, Gadamer shifts the play of these forces from the province of the Subject to culture and historical community, from artist to audience, and he gives the free variability licensed to artistic play a certain dignity: “Although we do not generate a new independent reality, we nevertheless always seem to be moving in that direction” (127). The limited autonomy of invention possesses an Hegelian element of reflection that plays off of both the unconscious and the social origin of such work: “[T]he play of art is a mirror that through the centuries constantly arises anew, and in which we catch sight of ourselves in a way that is often unexpected or unfamiliar; what we are, what we might be, and what we are about” (130). Thus the work is not balanced at its origin but continues to unfold dialectically as a play of forces distributed across history, the unconscious and freedom. The extended passage I have quoted from the Reklam introduction is also remarkable for the decisiveness and scope of its interpretive commitment, weighing in as it does on all of the questions that I puzzled through in the Heidegger section. Gadamer interprets Heidegger as saying that the tension between being and nothing are at the heart of the conflict at the center of the work of art. Truth as the result of the tension between earth and world is parallel to the tension between being and nothing. The movement between emergence and withdrawal acts as the common vocabulary between them. Moreover, a hierarchy is clearly established with earth and world subsumed under being and nothing as the universal category. The work of art is a subset of the being relation (“The conflict between revealment and concealment is not the truth of the work

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of art alone, but the truth of every being”), an instance of the negative at the heart of being. In this passage we also get a Gadamerian accent with a more literal, direct, and concrete description of art as a symbolic resource of inexhaustible interpretive ambiguity than Heidegger.194 Art’s truth can be self-sufficient because it retains its living relation to the potentiality of meaning. It retains its relation to the negative, in the pull between determinacy and indeterminacy, which does not resolve so much as engage; as Heidegger’s student, that is what Gadamer takes hermeneutic truth to be. Gadamer finds the creativity of language less through conflict than by addition. It is the vertical interaction of particular to universal that “widens” the capacity of language and “enriches” the linguistic field.195 The metaphorical “transfer” is described as “discovering similarities” of “what is common (homoia)” (430), a process that enlarges and deepens by finding “correspondences” (430). Metaphor is a “generative principle” of “transference” that makes apparent “the order of things” (431). What Gadamer calls metaphorical transference is Kantian in origin. In section 59 of The Critique of Judgment, Kant explains the transference of meaning in the symbol as the work of analogy, “transferring the reflection upon an object of intuition to quite a new concept, and one with which perhaps no intuition could ever directly correspond.”196 The pleasure of agreement that comes from this transference leads to “a certain ennoblement and elevation” (224). Gadamer’s approach to the symbol through the ancient ritual of the tessera hospitalis and to the myth of the fragment in search of its other half is described in the Symposium.197 Although the symbol is “an intricate interplay of showing and concealing,” although it shakes us, and leads to an increase in being, nevertheless it is “the invocation of a potentially whole and holy order of things, wherever it may be found” (33, 32). Meaning is preserved in “the containment of sense,” and is “secured in the ordered composure of the creation” (34). The “ontological plenitude” of linguistic invention leads to “an increase in being” (34–5). In “The Relevance of the Beautiful,” Gadamer characterizes the theme of his exposition as “the symbolic in general, and especially the symbolic in art,” which he sets in opposition to the regime of the concept.198 Gadamer defines symbol initially as “indeterminacy of reference.”199 Against the rationalist impulse to discover a determinate language that accurately describes the universe, an impulse that has created both tremendous practical consequences and a paradigm so dominant that other forms of knowledge have receded under its shadow, the older idea of symbol from the traditions of theology and myth is

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a purchase from which hermeneutics launches its epistemic attack. Against the hard edge of the concept that wants sovereignty and conquest, the poetic word resists with ambiguity, opacity, polyvocality, and charged, inexhaustible meaning. In the end I think we have to conclude that Gadamer has removed a good bit of the darkness of Heidegger’s reading of art’s relation to das Nichts, some of which we can certainly be grateful for, but some of which perhaps impoverishes the relation.

Participation We ask after the identity of this self which presents itself so differently in changing times and circumstances. Hans-Georg Gadamer

As a kind of concentration of reality, the work draws the audience to it but also takes its imprint, so that there is an increase of being on both sides, a mechanism of exchange that operates as an open interface that accretes as a cultural record and resource. The work of art in its passage across time and space can quite literally change as it adapts to its new surroundings. A striking example of this is vast history of traditional African tribal art after its encounter with European modernism, which fetishized, appropriated, consumed, and, in a sense, transformed it. What the Western eye once saw as a crude, parochial, primitive vernacular it now sees as an elegant, sophisticated, highly abstract symbolic language.200 This transformation has to do with the fact both that the world that receives it has become different as a consequence of that reception, and the work itself comes to mean differently. Picasso developed his Cubist syntax with the help of Ivory Coast tribal art. He related to friends how a Grebo mask showed him “how to signal a hole in a plane that does not literally exist” by projecting “the hole forward as a hollow cylinder.”201 The obdurate physical invariability of the artifact is really quite deceptive. As Gadamer’s commentator Wischke put it: “The changeable modes of representation of which the work itself is the normative criterion, as well as its changing history of reception, guarantee the potential for the being-otherwise of the work of art.”202 Wischke cautions, however, that, even with this freedom, a dialectic is still in play: “However, this potential that follows the ever-changing horizon of the constant present of its existence is ultimately not unbounded, because the possibilities of representation remain bound to the work, to which it alone can grant the freedom which lies

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ready in it” (40). This wonderful tension is what gives substance and texture to the hermeneutic theory of the work. To be sure, there was something of this dialectical tension already in Hegel’s concept of recollection: “[W]hat distinguishes itself therein and gives itself particular existence, is preserved as something that recollects itself.”203 Recollection, that is, self-preservation or self-knowledge, is the dialectical weight against evanescence, the passing away that makes continuity possible. Recollection as remembering (sich erinnern) is the act of gathering self-protection (er-innern) that belongs to culture. It is to the hermeneutic inheritance of this dialectical tension that we now turn our attention. The concept of “hermeneutic identity” that Gadamer develops in “The Relevance of the Beautiful” has to do with the cooperation (Gr. methexis, L. participatio) between “the text” and “the reader.”204 This contribution from both sides is in the end an ontological attribute: “[T]here is in principle no radical separation between the work of art and the person who experiences it.”205 The special significance of the concept of Wiedererkennung (recognition) for hermeneutics arrives with regard to this as ontological nexus. Text and reader act “to form a single whole in the act of recognition” (31). What Gadamer calls the “after-creation” of the interpreter (Nachschaffen) is the response of the history, experience, and culture of a community to the figural invitation, or rather the mixture or combustion of the two (15). The “us” is the term of equivocation, and art therefore the process of self-construction. The experience of art “allows the whole of a cultural tradition and the historical depth of its present to form along with it” (17).

Symbol The simplest way to understand Gadamer’s ontological threading is to start with his idea of the symbol. Gadamer’s exposition of symbol in “The Relevance of the Beautiful” is straightforwardly ontological. Symbols are mediations of personal relationship as enactments of social memory: Originally it was a technical term in Greek for a token of remembrance. The host presented his guest with the so-called tessera hospitalis by breaking some object in two. He kept one half for himself and gave the other half to his guest. If in thirty or fifty years time, a descendant of the guest should ever enter his house, the two pieces could be fitted together again to form a whole in an act of recognition.206

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The event of recognition facilitated by the symbol is as much about the relationship and the ritual act of recognition as the symbolon itself. Person, language, and meaning are coconstituting. Gadamer reinforces the ontological nature of this relation by referencing the myth in the Symposium of the symbolon tou anthropou in which “the symbol is that other fragment that has always been sought in order to complete and make whole our own fragmentary life.”207 Just as there is no issue that is not an issue for someone, so there is no textual object that is not always already imbricated in emergent human relations and identities. From this perspective, Grondin points out how hard it would actually be to find the line between audience and work: The play of art lies not in the artwork that is played or hangs in the museum, but rather the mixture of existence in the claim it makes against us, the demand upon us, the address to us, with which we are compelled to play along. Who would even know where to make the surgical incision between such an address and response? Is it the work that poses a question to us, or we to it, who recognize our question or hear our rhythm in the work?208

The measure or criterion of judgment lies in the living human relation, which, on the one hand, is an enormous loss in the precision and reliability attached to our normal idea of measure, but on the other hand, grants an almost unsurpassable authority, since it is embedded in the particular existential determinants of the situation for which it is relevant. The coconstitution of work production and audience reception also involves an element of reflexivity that distinguishes hermeneutic understanding as a perspective. Unlike objectivist forms of knowledge, hermeneutic identity is constituted out of the blending of objectivity and subjectivity implicit in its ontological unity. The second-order science of validation of conventional knowledge production gives way to a circular reflexivity: My recognition of the truth of the work is a testimony from my own life that requires no justification. The interlocking relations of production and reception—humans and their issues and the existential intrusion on or expansion of their reality through the intermediation—folds into the human interaction itself.209 The significance of this shift from a second-order to a first-order perspective can be illustrated with the example of legal contracts. Parties to a contract write things down because circumstances evolve, the complex set of circumstances that produced the agreement have gone by the wayside, and so differences of opinion about the original understanding make “it necessary to refer back to the exact text.”210 The text exists because the set of circumstances that lead to the

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terms of the original agreement were crucial to the agreement itself. The authority that is placed in the text as a binding contract is precisely the recognition that changing circumstances may obscure what lead to the agreement, and those complex of circumstances were what lead the parties in the balance of interests and intentions of that moment, to commit to an agreement. The codification in writing is precisely a mutual commitment to be held to the understanding tied to those original circumstances. The act of making the text binding as a legal contract is this valuation. Compare now the interest of hermeneutics in this set of relationships to the linguist who will refer to a legal document as a cultural or anthropological clue to reconstruct a past. The observer in the latter case remains distanced and uninvolved from the interaction. “Hermeneutic identity” includes the identity of the observer. The observer is also a participant, as Heidegger insists: “Only insofar as man takes the measure of his dwelling in this way is he able to be commensurately with his nature. . . . Measure-taking is no science . . . measure-taking has its own metron, and thus its own metric.”211 The “communicative conditions” upon which any text is dependent include, and this will turn out to be importantly ambiguous in one respect as the theory develops in complexity, the audience for whom the meaning of the text is intended. What is written in the text is either written in view of “the other with whom one shared presuppositions and upon whose understanding one relies,” or it is written with the understanding that it must accommodate itself to audiences who do not share the same presuppositions or understandings.212 In this latter case the communicative conditions of the text expand exponentially, but they must nevertheless be taken into account. The foundation upon which the theoretical model rests is therefore a fluid set of codependent relations—writer, meaning, text, audience, and the communicative conditions in which all of these are set. This holism, deeply indebted to the organic structure of Heidegger’s being-inthe-world, lifts the theory out of the linguist’s laboratory of symbolic resources and places it on the level of the living community formed in its meaningful exchanges over issues that are at stake for it. The structural equivocation that exists because of the dependence of the text on an indeterminate audience or circumstance is the hinge of the hermeneutic complexity of “the text.” When Gadamer does finally to define text in its irreducible meaning as something inextricably bound to its context, the creative ambiguity slides over to the hermeneutic meaning of “context.” Context is no longer the original context at the moment of inscription (as it is in Schleiermacher and in all traditional hermeneutics), but rather the context of a text that is intended to survive into the future. Context is thus the full temporal field. What Gadamer

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offers to keep us on track as he makes this difficult transition is to point out that the matter at hand (the Sache), as distinct from the inscription that survives, is what gives the announcement (Kungabe) contemporaneity. The inscription is a floating signifier in the sense that, as its context changes, the issue remains alive. The way the issue remains alive is that a text endures because the issue it engages remains relevant for the present and future. So it is a kind of backwards or reverse engineering that makes a thing a text—it proves itself to be so with the passage of time. What makes a thing a text is its ability to have what Gadamer calls an increase of being. In the presenting, the franchise of a text is extended, its being is magnified. If we are careful, we can think about the contribution on the other side of presentation as its context, in the sense of a set of problems to which the presentation is a solution. The question to which the building provides a happy solution is “the contexts of purpose and life to which it originally belongs,” a question that does not die with the solution, but is rather permanently animated by that solution.213 So, we know that “architecture gives shape to space” (157). If we think about this in cultural terms, architecture seeks a place not for those issues that need to be disposed of, but that need a venue. Thus the Tholos, the Stoa, the Odeon, the Forum. This inalienable relation to context is what Gadamer is referring to in the concept of mediation, Vermittlung. The architecture of hermeneutic understanding is built around this relational process, this reciprocal pull of the matter at issue and its coming to terms. This is perhaps a key to understanding how Gadamer thinks about the function of poetry. We memorize poetry so that it may become part of the architecture of our lives. In this transaction the poetry is not reduced to a tool function because we learn to honor it as much as it comes to our aid.214 The Gadamerian concept of Vermittlung is an extension of the Heideggerian theme of the inextricability of existence and understanding: “The kind of Being which Dasein has, as potentiality-for-Being, lies existentially in understanding.”215 Gadamer’s description of the communication that takes place in the production and reception of art approaches almost a religious quality, as though he were talking about a kind of communion: “Communication takes place when the other person takes part in what is imparted to him—and in such a way that he does not, as it were, only receive in part what is communicated, but shares in this knowledge of the whole matter that is fully possessed by both of them.”216 It is clear here that it is not only the play of the text that is transformed into the Gebilde; the person or the audience is also transformed into the Gebilde. This theme is reemphasized in the summation of Gadamer’s

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essay, “The Relevance of the Beautiful,” as a principle attribute of our encounter with art, which is “something that both expresses us and speaks to us” (52). Art is beautiful not when it confirms what we already know, but when it succeeds in “changing us” (52). This fusion of person and text in work is the principal reason behind Gadamer’s rejection of the descriptive category of aesthetics. The experience of art (of a kind of truth) is ontological, which means that it is not some secondary activity or pastime but rather a first-order experience constitutive of the life of the person and the community, an integral aspect of our ethical, intellectual development, and our constitutive actions. Gadamer sees this outward-constituting dynamic of the text at work right from the start: “No one can read a poem without its infiltrating and invading one’s understanding.”217 Grondin has certainly drawn attention to this double aspect of Gebilde as a forming of the receiver and the work from both ends: “Art thus induces a transfiguration of the real, in the revelatory sense of the word, so much and so well that we can ask what exactly is transfigured: reality, or us? Obviously, both at the same time, because what art reveals is always also the whole of our being, the totality of our being-inthe-world consigned to a form (Gebilde).218 And once we recognize this dynamic in the Gebilde, it is easier to see that this is what Gadamer was talking about all along: The pantheon of art is not a timeless present that presents itself to a pure aesthetic consciousness, but the act of a mind and spirit that has collected and gathered itself historically. Our experience of the aesthetic too is a mode of self-understanding. Self-understanding always occurs through understanding something other than the self, and includes the unity and integrity of the other. Since we meet the artwork in the world and encounter a world in the individual artwork, the work of art is not some alien universe into which we are magically transported for a time. Rather, we learn to understand ourselves in and through it, and this means that we sublate (aufheben) the discontinuity and atomism of isolated experiences in the continuity of our own existence.219

There is no denying that it is a difficult conception that Gadamer is trying to achieve by conflating or fusing author, text, issue, and audience ontologically, and we can see his effort straining after it with sometimes strange language. Here, for instance, is his way of justifying his rejection of great drama as an “unchanging essence” and yet insisting that it is an enduring object [Gegenstand] subject to a strict standard of judgment: “[T]he phenomenon [the unity of the tragic] presents itself in an outline drawn together in a historical unity” (das Phänomen

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darstellt sich in seinem zu einer geschichtlichen Einheit zusammengezogenen Umriß).220 The German word outline (Umriß) is formed from the root Riß, which means tear, rent, or split, which calls to mind Heidegger’s construal of language as furrow: This unity of the being of language for which we are looking we shall call the design [Aufriß]. The ‘sign’ in design (Latin signum) is related to secare, to cut—as in saw, sector, segment. To design is to cut a trace . . . we make a design also when we cut a furrow [Furchen ziehen] into the soil to open it to seed and growth. The design is the whole of the traits of that drawing which structures and prevails throughout the open, unlocked freedom of language.221

But the fact that this Umriß is drawn together into an historical unity suggests that the furrows themselves are being worn and even expanded and connected by usage. An analogy might be the way the neural networks of the brain are given but then shaped by usage. We can see this fusion worked out in the example of the tragic, which comes about in the spectator’s “affirmation” of a common condition in the ritual experience of pathei mathos. The playwright (who is raised in the tradition created by a community, an audience—“For the writer, free invention is always only one side of a mediation conditioned by values already given”—provides the material for the participation of the community in a common experience.222 In this formulation, the agency of enactment lies heavily on the side of the audience. Gadamer tries to stay away from a structuralist vocabulary to refer to the preliminary scaffolding that the artist provides and that audiences subsequently fill in, and instead refers to the “figure of meaning” (Sinnfigur) that is produced by the collaboration of persons and text.223 This usage—“die Figur des geschaffenen Werk”—is a variation that has not been noted to my knowledge by the secondary literature, except indirectly by Risser, and it is a highly suggestive term for what is traditionally distinguished as form and content, but in hermeneutics it has to be some kind of perpetual mixture.224 A figure compels collaboration because it leaves “a space to be filled in”: “[W]e must trace it out as we see it because we must construct it actively.”225 The space or leeway is not the open space of the jigsaw puzzle, but a genuine openness and freedom, the “changing significance which it grants to us” (die Wechselnde der Bedeutung, die es uns zuspricht) (16). This openness however can only be appreciated correctly if we keep in mind that the original contribution, despite the fact that it itself is built from the threads of prior traditions and is itself an answer to a question, has survived for this collaborative work because it has some kind of lasting interest and impetus that

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has stood the test of time. This value, however, exists precisely in the way that it was built for collaboration. Gadamer provides a straightforward example of the collaborative nature of production and reception from fiction. It is the description of a staircase in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Gadamer introduces this example to illustrate, paradoxically, what he takes to be the completeness of a poetic or artistic expression, which he describes as “self-fulfilling,” “total,” and “perfect”:226 Everyone who has read the book will remember this scene and will “know” exactly what the staircase looks like. Not one of us has exactly the same image of it and yet we all believe that we see it quite vividly. It would be absurd to ask what the staircase “intended” by Dostoevsky really looked like. Through the way in which he tells his story and by his treatment of language, the writer succeeds in rousing the imagination of every reader to construct an image so that he thinks he sees exactly how the stairs turn to the right, descend for a couple of steps, and then disappear into the darkness below. If someone else says that it turns left, descends for six steps, and then is lost in the darkness, he is obviously just as much in the right. By not describing the scene in any more detail than he has, Dostoevsky stimulates us to construct an image of the stairs in our imagination. From this example we can see how the poet manages to conjure up the self-fulfillment of language.227

The lesson to be drawn for Gadamer is that the reader requires nothing else than the words of the story to build up an image of the scene. As Gadamer describes this process there is an interesting paradox that has to do with the fact that, on the one hand, everyone “will ‘know’ exactly what the staircase looks like,” and on the other hand everyone will imagine the staircase differently, and yet this does not detract from its self-fulfillment.228 This seeming contradiction works because poetic text229 has no immediate referent—that is, is its own primary referent—is freed to be “exactly” what each reader imagines for it, and this freedom, this space of freedom for the work of the imagination (or in the case of the law, the work of application, or in the case of the religious text, the work of self-understanding) is its communicative function. A law establishes an intention to be interpreted in daily life. A religious oath creates a narrative space for a community. A poetic text gives us a truth that our voice wants to express, our ear to hear, or our imagination to see. The truth of the stairway is in the words, which are this wonderful medial matter of exchange. But this reception practice is only one form of hermeneutic participation between work and audience. The leeway built into the work operates on

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multiple axes, as for instance the axis of subject-object identity and the axis of past-present culture. In the dimension of identity, it does not operate as though the work is by itself a half completed structure, but rather that the audience is incomplete without the work—the work actually creates a variance in the spectator’s being. In the example of tragedy, the eleos and phobos that the drama effects draw the spectators into a state of utter absorption but simultaneously provide the distance by which they might see their own condition in the fate of another. The distance an audience gains from itself is the space for its own transformation. On the temporal axis, the work, after travelling from its historical origins, is a kind of orphan that must adjust as it is welcomed into a new family. But as the work mutates to meet these new conditions it is not divested of its past or its conventions. I will use a musical analogy here. The work operates as a kind of pivot chord in keying the tonal world of the reader. When we say that there is a modulation in a passage of music from one key to another, the chord that serves to pivot to the new tonic changes its key, its tonal center-of-gravity, first only in retrospect, then in memory or anticipation, and so it never really ceases to exist in the original key. This is why Gadamer says the work “is never simply past” (emphasis added). It always retains its relation to the past while it makes itself at home in the present, and it will never be wholly in the present because it keeps its relation to the past and for the future. It serves, as Augustine would say, as “a gathering amidst times.” Gadamer himself uses a musical example that combines these different axes of cooperative work. Where is the rhythm “in” a piece of music? Is it indicated on the page? Gadamer points out that “we can only hear the rhythm that is immanent within a given form if we ourselves introduce the rhythm into it.”230 The “source” of the rhythm, then, is actually from at least three locations. One is what he refers to here as the body of the performer and listener. We lend our sense of and our desire for rhythm to the musical event. A waltz gratifies the desire to dance, is written for it, and taken up by it.231 The writing and the performance of the music are also embedded in a broader temporal and cultural horizon of innovations and expectations. Bach wrote from out of the living tradition of the saraband or the gigue, and in the pianist’s performance and the audience’s reception of a Bach partita, those traditions are taken up and passed on. The shock of what is unfamiliar would initially cause an audience the disorientation of the alien, a distance from it, and then, in turn, the distance from oneself as one learns to become open to what is old and new. And finally the mimetic function, like the imagination of the staircase, occurs in the way that performers interpret a score,

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bringing all of themselves to the task, learning about themselves in the task, and adding to the knowledge of the work in the process.

Metron One of the more perplexing aspects of Gadamer’s theory of participation is its insistence on the work’s providing a standard. The truth of the poetic word is what Gadamer describes as Unverhohlenheit (undeceiving)—when something comes to be a kind of epitome, in the way that a true friend is known to be reliable, or a precious stone is what it appears to be.232 The poetic word rings true. Just as one uses a precious stone to test a metal, the poetic word is a word that one returns to again and again because it has found a way to say something that one wants to understand. We go back to recite or hear a poem or a piece of music because it lives in the expression, because it exists only in the expression. It has found a way to say something nearly perfectly. Gadamer coins the phrase “eminent text” in such a case. He does not mean canonic in the sense that a tradition has established certain texts as epitomes. Rather, he is trying to establish the artistic characteristics by which certain texts come to have a life beyond their original context. The text’s leeway is part of the perfection of the art. We are familiar with how this often works in the case of the short story. It often seems as though the breathing space, particularly the silence generated after the last word of a short story is spoken or read, is where the story begins for us. It is at that point that in a very real sense it sets-to-work for us. Because in the economy of the form so much must be left unsaid, a good story constitutes the unexpressed by dependance on our resonance with it; its absences create a kind of wake that we want to fill. But in this process of backfill the story becomes a single substance, we and it. Gadamer borrows a metaphor from Kant to describe the capacity of a work to set this kind of activity in motion—a musical instrument is a Resonanzboden, a structure that “comes to reverberate”: This fine phrase originated in the musical language of the eighteenth century, with particular reference to the favorite instrument of the time, the clavichord, which created a special effect of suspended reverberation as the note continued to vibrate long after being struck. Kant obviously means that the concept functions as a kind of sounding board capable of articulating the free play of the imagination.233

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Paul Ricoeur describes this process with the beautiful French word retentissement, reverberation.234 The sounding of a work has a widening circle of effects. In his exegesis of this aspect of Gadamer’s poetics Wischke elaborates on the enharmonics of a text, which “plays with gathered sense-relations across the filaments of its web of meaning,” and so “becomes richer and ever more hauntingly able to speak to us, notwithstanding our growing familiarity with it.”235 This metaphor helps Gadamer elucidate his sense of structure as something that attains the permanence of an artistic achievement and yet is receptive to the free play of the imagination: The web of connections between meanings is never exhausted in the relations that exist between the main meanings of the words. In fact, precisely the accompanying play of relations of meaning .  .  . gives the literary sentence its volume. Certainly, these relations of meaning would never come to appearance at all if the whole of the discourse did not, so to speak, “hold onto itself ” [an sich hielte], inviting the reader or hearer to tarry, and impelling the reader or hearer to listen and listen. This process of becoming a listener nevertheless remains, of course, like every listening, a listening to something, something that is grasped as the pattern or totality of meaning of a discourse [die Sinngestalt einer Rede].236

In a hermeneutic context, this structure is a reference point and an actuation. “Becoming a listener” in this respect means allowing the voice of the text to resonate in us. But does the resonance stay within this closed relation? Much of what is original and significant about hermeneutic theory is what it says about the constructive work of the reader in assimilating the “text fixed in writing.” How the reader contributes to the wholeness of the work is a slippery point in Gadamer. He says suggestively that structure is “unzerstörbaren (und so leicht gestörten),” indestructible and yet easily destroyed (GW 8, 291). What does he mean by this? Dieter Teichert in particular isolates Gadamer’s lack of clarity on the location of art’s Vollzug between production and reception: Gadamer seems to approach the thesis that the artwork achieves its genuine, full reality only in reproduction and reception, and yet exists independent of the act of reception as an autonomous entity, radicalizing a conception that sets the being of art above the subordinate determinations of production and reception. The first thesis makes the case for a constitutive reception relation of the artwork. The second creates a problem. Once having superceded the categories of production and reception, it places art’s way of being in a zone of speculative darkness where it is no longer reachable.

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Teichert illustrates his point: “If the artwork is basically consigned to its reception, then whoever burns Raffael’s portrait of Baldassere Castiglione can say has not destroyed an artwork, but merely a piece of canvas.”237 The readerly construction is both a reconstruction, in the sense that the reader traces the figure the poet has left, and an invention, in the sense that the reader is taking this construction over in ways that are genuinely new. We can say for sure, given that the text is written for the reader, that the creative construction is collaborative: “The creation of genius can never really be divorced from the con-geniality of the one who experiences it.”238 But I say here “the reader,” an odd deictic evasion, since there is no such thing, only readers, and one of the abiding questions for hermeneutics is how to account for the various experiences of a work in its reception, which it regards not simply as an aesthetic question, but as an ontological one.239 If the world constituted hermeneutically is the passing on, recognition, elaboration, and transformation of the word—the text and the living word being permutations of the same thing—what is the relation between the subjective experience of each individual reader and the culture formed and performed by all the readers who are formed by the very same texts? This is still unresolved in hermeneutics because Gadamer was so elliptical, ambiguous, and contradictory on this point. As a first clue Gadamer tells us that the varieties of experience and perspectives that engage with the work create an interaction that augments meaning. Hermeneutics understands the phenomenon of repræsentatio as the fact “that increase in being that something acquires by being represented .  .  . always demands constructive activity on our part.”240 The work is always “capable of yet further fulfillment,” and that comes from the constant input of new experience and differing perspectives. Reception brings a new and specific occasion to the text. The work’s “unique relation to the occasion can never be finally determined, but though indeterminable, this relation remains present and effective in the work itself.”241 Occasionality is the obverse of the deictic relation—because the work is inherently dependent on its performance it is unavoidably colored by its setting. Conversely, the text does not yield entirely to the occasionality of the reception. The work “does not remain closed in the subjectivity of what they [the audience] think but it is embodied there. Thus it is not at all a question of a mere subjective variety of conceptions, but of the work’s own possibilities of being that emerge as the work explicates itself, as it were, in the variety of its aspects.”242 What is particularly confounding in this explanation is that what the work brings and does not yield is not the form or structure of the work! Gadamer

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is quite explicit here that it is “in this presentation the unity and identity of a structure emerge.”243 So what exactly does “structure” mean here? Does the reception build on the work, its Gebilde, in a permanent way, or is it perpetually unbuilt and rebuilt in each new circumstance? Gadamer provides one answer with the example of the theater: “Here there is no random succession, a mere variety of conceptions; rather, by constantly following models and developing them, a tradition is formed with which every new attempt must come to terms.”244 The performing arts in particular “visibly hold the identity and continuity of the work of art open towards its future” (119). These two delimitations suggest that the structure of the work as Gebilde is forged in the history of its performance. Tradition provides to the realization of the work a form of continuity; that is, a variety of its aspects persist in their effects, its ongoing realization is indebted to its history, and its myriad articulations constitute a memory or spirit that bodies forth as the faceted, living, breathing topography of a culture. That is one possible interpretation of the hermeneutic aesthetic. So to say that the structure emerges in the presentation does not mean that the structure is built ab ovo in the presentation, as though the artist built a foundation and performers and audiences were free to raise a cathedral or a casino on the site. The work “does not disintegrate into the changing aspects of itself so that it would lose all identity, but . . . is there in them all” (121). What we are hitting up against here is the much larger puzzle of what the relation of consciousness and tradition is in hermeneutics. Manfred Frank thinks Gadamer actually never resolved the problem: Gadamerian hermeneutics can thus far be considered a modification . . . of the model of “dialectic” or “speculative” self-relation. This explains the consistent ambiguity of its argumentative style: on the one hand (emphasizing the finiteness of consciousness, namely its inability to become fully transparent to itself), the narcissism of specular and unhistorically conceived self-presentation .  .  . is humbled and the subject is placed under the “event of tradition” as its historical a priori. On the other hand, in order to salvage the possibility of reflexivity in “self-understanding,” either the history of reception itself must be thought of as subjectivity, or one must concede that tradition realizes itself first in the act of an understanding self-relation, which would then be attributable to a single subject.245

Frank wants the last option, and faults Gadamer for denying just that possibility. He thinks Gadamer by default may be underwriting a discursive version of Hegel’s supraindividual spirit: “The way language as a subject subsumes its relata

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is analogous to how ‘spirit’ in Hegel subsumes being-in-itself and being-for-itself,” so that we are left with a “uniform ‘essential self ’ or ‘general self-consciousness’ that always already lies beyond the apparent alternatives between the I and you, or what is ours and what is foreign” (172–3). The work of art, in this interpretation of Gadamer, would be a special or privileged case of language, where “consciousness” would presumably gather and reside. I am not at all won over to this interpretation. Even though Gadamer does not recognize the subject in the Enlightenment or modernist sense of the term, he also steers clear of the idea of a collective spirit; in fact it is remarkable how, while leaning in the direction of Volk all through his career, he never goes so far. He rebuked Karsten Dutton on this very subject: “Spare me all this talk of a collective subject.” It is clear that Gadamer is trying to assimilate more of the ancient Greek perspective for which the idea of subjective individuality is foreign. The decisive statement on the matter, I would suggest, is in an as-yet untranslated lecture on the subject of intelligence where Gadamer notes the diversity of forms of self-consciousness, and shows a distinct preference for the self-consciousness of practical knowledge.246 Individuals develop a kind of reflective distance from themselves as they try to master a competence, or emerge from sickness, or in developing a friendship. In all these cases, the reflexivity is prompted by an ongoing relation to the world rather than to an abstracted and pure self-relation. Moreover, the reflexivity has a kind of back-and-forth motion that keeps the world always in play as a partner in the exchange, and keeps reflexivity bound to its world and secondary to the Lebenssituation.247 What seems to be the presupposition for the role of hermeneutic reflexivity is the inextricable phenomenological relation of world and reflection, of the cocreation and codependence of what we think of as subjectivity and objectivity. Gadamer works very hard at this intrinsic relationality in his theorizing about art. Here, for instance, he draws on the German word Anbild as an inherently chiasmatic description of work and reception: In order to understand our experience of art, we are tempted to search the depths of mystical language for daring new words like the German Anbild—an expression that captures both the image and the viewing of it. For it is true that we both elicit the image from things and imaginatively project the image into things in one and the same process. Thus aesthetic reflection is oriented above all toward the power of imagination as the human capacity of image building.248

I nevertheless still see a genuine dilemma for hermeneutics on this point, insofar as it does not help us understand how truth or beauty is appreciated

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outside reflective consciousness, and how reflective consciousness escapes subjectivity. Certainly tradition flows on, and that is some comfort, but for whom? For communities, for cultures, yes, but is what Gadamer calls Erfahrung not a false alternative to Erlebnis? In the late section on the speculative in Truth and Method after Gadamer has taken the ultimate step past Plato and Hegel into the Heideggerian realm, he does say that each appropriation of tradition represents “the experience of an ‘aspect’ of the thing itself.”249 But what in fact does that mean? Since there is no hive mind that sees the collective whole to which each aspect contributes . . . but perhaps this is the opening. Each person who experiences an aspect knows it to be an aspect and not the whole, and intimates the whole toward which it is a contribution. Perhaps just as there is always already a relation between meaning and context, subject and object, thing and word, there is also a reciprocal relation between the aspect and the whole in a way that no aspect is ever really only an aspect, and no whole is ever really the whole. My conscious experience is in a primal sense metonymy. My reflective consciousness is therefore a crucial contribution to the whole. In lieu of the hive mind, my isolated conscious awareness contributes from its own vantage point in a way that will never be directly perceived by another reflective consciousness, but nevertheless innervates the entire network of cultural meaning. We can see immediately how the entire hermeneutic theorization of discursivity, narrative meaning, tradition, and the like provides us with a structure that can animate and be animated by this awareness. Seen in this way the fact that the Zusammenhang works through the barrier of the isolated consciousness is less onerous. What the Western detour into subjectivity and its hermeneutic escape by way of the work of art has made clear is that Gadamer’s poetics asks us to understand our relationship to art differently. Art is a form of invitation to a belonging that is much broader than to an individual work or author or period. Rather, our encounter with the work is at the event horizon of culture itself, in which the identity of the work and ourselves is in a reciprocal process of metamorphosis. There is something almost insidious at work in this seduction; as though the circulation created by the movement, an almost imperceptible draft of air, a molecular rearrangement, is pulling away the fabric that binds us together and is turning us around without our knowing. I began this second section on methexis from the side of the reader by asking what is the relation between the subjective experience of each individual reader and the culture formed and performed by all the readers who are formed by the very same texts. At a distance of 30,000 feet we know in advance that this relationship is going to be circular because that is the basic structure of any

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hermeneutic experience. But what this more particular examination has shown is that Gadamer performs a fairly subtle subversion and reconstruction of the idea of structure to take account of, to embed in, the ontological contribution of the reader. This emendation necessarily involves a transgression of our ordinary linear, temporal sense of the interaction between structure and reception. The genre is not so much the flexible form that allows for innovation in the traditional rhetorical sense as a formal impulse waiting upon its own determination, and the emergent “thing” is not a genre, but rather subject and object together. It is not only that reception is a delayed part of production, but that art and its audiences are never not coconstituted. Having said this, I must note a limit to the participation of the one in the other. The work advances against the fugitive status of temporal being because insofar as it is repeatable, it is enduring. There is a pathos at the edges of this phrase on its reverse side—the fact that individual human lives are not repeatable. There is only a very thin line between the structural coherence of hermeneutic finitude and the tragedy of finitude. Culture is a gesture against death. How we understand the strength of that gesture is beyond the competence of hermeneutics.

Hermeneutic identity Aristotle distinguished the activities of poesis and praxis as a difference between ends: Activity in the sphere of praxis constructs the habitus of the citizen, whereas technē produces a work (ergon) separate from the maker. This distinction becomes undone in hermeneutics. The most radical implication of the phenomenon of coconstitution that the last section ended with is the instability of identity (of self or community) and the function of the work in actively producing this identity. This idea has been a prodigious theme for hermeneutic thought, leading, for instance, to Paul Ricoeur’s richly developed theory of narrative identity. In this section, I will trace the use of art as an exemplum for the diffusion of agency beyond the subject to the work as full partner in the identity of self and community. Moving away from the subjectivism of modernity has at least two dimensions, the first being the repudiation of individualism as the privileged structure of identity. It should be noted that Gadamer did not follow Heidegger in the turn to a language that marginalized or suppressed the language of selfhood. Although it was to cause him much trouble,250 Gadamer continued to use the conventional language of self-understanding: “That which led Heidegger to his famous ‘turn’

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I for my part sought to describe in terms of our self-understanding coming up against its limits, that is, as the ‘historically affected consciousness’ which is ‘more being than consciousness’—mehr Sein als Bewußtsein.”251 Gadamer acknowledged that he had not been clear enough in Truth and Method that the self-understanding that he wished to promote “entails showing that the otherness of the Other is not overcome in understanding, but rather preserved,” that is, that the self he was referring to here had the full amplitude of hermeneutic identity.252 Such self-understanding “neither starts at a zero point nor ends in infinity.”253 When Donald Verene opined that “the ghost of ‘reflection’ remains” in Gadamer’s position, Gadamer responded that Verene “imputes to me the concept of reflection taken in a very narrow, modern, Kantian sense. Thus, he apparently is not willing to follow my intention of renewing the concept of the speculative from Hegel’s early days explicitly against Hegel’s own, later, dialectical self-stylization of that concept. The speculative is much more a matter of mediation than reflection.”254 Gadamer ultimately did concede that it “would have been better if I had avoided the concept of reflection entirely, or if I at least had added that I meant a kind of performance knowledge [Vollzugswissen]” (154).255 The second dimension of the move away from the modernist subject involves a move toward some conception of collective identity that has ontological weight. Scholars have often suggested that Heidegger’s acknowledgment of the social was perfunctory in comparison to Gadamer’s embrace of the social, and Gadamer himself offered this critique. Gadamer’s antipathy to the abstract distancing of the subject as “the root disease of Western culture” was attached to his inclination toward the social as an antidote to the vices of Western individualism. To the extent that Heidegger approached sociality it had more to do with notorious beliefs in the destiny of a people.256 To be fair, it is also important to consider whether Gadamer’s substitution of the sensus communis for the isolated self in Truth and Method had any roots in the reactionary or elitist strains of German academic culture. This consideration has had less impact on Gadamer studies, but it nevertheless is taking place.257 Gadamer’s radical commitment to what he called “the other” in his descriptions of dialogic exchange is important for this question. In this matter the distance he puts between himself and Hegel becomes relevant. In Truth and Method Gadamer rejected Hegel’s absolute mind because “it leaves no room for the experience of the other and the alterity of history.”258 Gadamer averred in contrast that “the other must be experienced not as the other of myself . . . but as a Thou” (343). This radical openness to the other becomes in fact the defining

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characteristic of Gadamer’s conception of community: “In human relations the important thing is, as we have seen, to experience the Thou truly as a Thou—that is, not to overlook his claim but to let him really say something to us. . . . Without such openness to one another there is no genuine human bond” (361). So alterity in Gadamer has both a personal (i.e. ethical) and perspectival (i.e. epistemic) dimension. It rejects the appropriative and colonizing character of absolute knowledge and embraces a fundamental humility of perspective. In Gadamer’s poetics, the ethical dimension of the sensus communis takes center stage. That art shares in this diffusion of agency away from the subject is the central theme of Gadamer’s essay “The Festive Character of Theatre.” The eventfulness of art promotes “the communal spirit that supports us all and transcends each of us individually.”259 This capacity of art has its source in the cultic ritual that “raises the participants out of their everyday existence and elevates them into a kind of universal communion” (58). In “The Relevance of the Beautiful” Gadamer gives this notion of social identity its most emphatic expression: “If there is one thing that pertains to all festive experiences, then it is surely the fact that they allow no separation between one person and another” (39). In Heidegger’s theory of art, the epistemic dimension is front and center. The work of art is centrally involved in the ontological upturning of the subjectivist prejudice, and this is clearly marked in Heidegger’s theory of the work. Right at the outset of his seminal lecture “The Origin of the Artwork” Heidegger asserts the reverse of the conventional relation of work and artist: “It is the work that makes the creator in his nature possible.”260 To assure his audience that this is not stylistic exaggeration he expresses the assertion more bluntly: “The work is the origin of the artist.”261 This reversal signals the broader programmatic shift of Heidegger during this period that recast Dasein as the midwife of being. Against the misimpression caused by his focus on human Dasein in Being and Time, he was sailing now more directly against the headwinds of a subject-centered culture. In doing so he was drawing out a dimension of Hegel’s legacy that had been overshadowed by the narrative progress toward absolute consciousness in the Phenomenology and the Logic. Hegel’s “I” had always ever “meaning only in the relation,” a radical attack on the rationalist cogito that laid the ground for undermining the sovereignty of subjective agency.262 Heidegger was tipping the scales even further against the persistent conceptual-linguistic categories of the tradition.263 Art exemplifies the diffusion of agency, acting not as a product of the product of subjects but as a donation of the culture which subjects received.

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Gadamer explains Hegel’s role as the intermediary between Aristotle and Heidegger: In view of the experience that we have of another object, both things change— our knowledge and its object.  .  .  . Whether experience moves by expanding [Sichausbreiteten] into the manifoldness of the contents or as the continual emergence of new Gestalten des Geist, the necessity of which is understood by philosophical science, in any case it is a reversal of consciousness.264

Gadamer picks up on Heidegger’s epistemic emphasis and develops the theme of emergent identity in relation to art: “[T]he genuine reception and experience of a work of art can exist only for one who . . . performs in an active way himself.”265 Tying this blending of work and self-identity to Plato’s theory of methexis, Gadamer asserts that the participation is a sharing of agency. Again he illustrates this ontological process with the example of rhythm. Music excites participation through rhythm, but “where exactly is this rhythm?”266 In the music of tribal ritual and ceremony it is clearly something communal and without origin; it resonates in the performers-audience-instruments; it the feeds from and flows into the rhythms of daily life. Jean Grondin draws the ontological lesson from the example: “Is it the work that puts us in question, or we it, or is it we who recognize in the work our questions or our rhythms? This is what fascinates Gadamer about the experience of art: that here such objectivizing distinctions are misplaced, since truth is experienced as one truth to which we belong in myriad [angehauchte] ways.”267 To a certain extent common sense already accepts the point Heidegger and Gadamer are making. We know when something significant has happened in a relationship—something is said that will alter the terms of that relationship forever and we know it at the time even if we don’t know exactly what happened. The change is marked in that moment and those words. The same is true of the performance of a work. We know when we have heard something that will inform our understanding of Bach, or the baroque, or Partita #6, and we feel at the time how it has changed us. The work invokes a world that we may inhabit. But the language Gadamer uses to describe the unifying experience of art is not just this. When he says that “the genuine reception and experience of a work of art for one who ‘plays along,’ that is, who performs in an active way himself ” (indem er tätig ist), what does he mean by sidelining the audience (“along with”), or turning the reflexive pronoun into an objective accusative?268 Hermeneutic identity is not simply that the work changes us, but that to a degree we are our works and days, and are not without them. In invoking the game/play metaphor

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(Spiel) to counter “the primacy of self-consciousness” Gadamer was thus going right back to the root problem of the Romantic movement in its revolt against the dogma of subjectivism, and the philosophical revolutions that ensued on the continent over the next two hundred years. Thus the ontology of the social over the individual is not the fulfillment of hermeneutic identity; more radical still is the disturbance and undermining of ontological boundaries between subject and object. It is not simply that human beings change and grow when an encounter with a work of art is transformative. What hermeneutic identity means is that we do not use symbols primarily as tools, but are discursively constituted by symbols, symbol structures, and symbolic interactions; that we are in our identity and our being configured symbolically. The displacement away from the subject as the seat of agency and toward language and the work as the fulcrum of cultural being has the important consequence that we—the addressee of the word, the audience of the work, the respondent to the voice of being—are an interanimation with logos. Are we anywhere near accepting the radicality of this discovery? Heidegger says flatly, in an obvious reference to Aristotle, that when we genuinely experience something, “it transforms us into itself.”269 Gadamer says this initially in more conventional way. The work of art which is “integrated into the self-understanding of each person . . . into the whole of one’s own orientation to a world and one’s own self-understanding.”270 Poetry is not merely heard or read, but soaks in, penetrates, invades, and advances into one’s life and experience: “No one can read a poem without it penetrating into his own understanding ever more” (Niemand kann ein Gedicht lesen, ohne in sein Verständnis immer mehr einzudringen).271 This is ultimately what Gadamer means when he explains what recognition is, which “does not simply reveal the universal, the permanent form, stripped of all our contingent encounters with it. For it is also part of the process that we recognize ourselves as well. All recognition represents the experience of growing familiarity, and all our experiences of the world are ultimately ways in which we develop familiarity with that world. As the Aristotelian doctrine rightly seems to suggest, all art of whatever kind is a form of recognition that serves to deepen our knowledge of ourselves and thus our familiarity with the world as well.”272 Thus, Gadamer refers the reciprocity of being to the recognition of the truth of the work: “[H]ow true it is” means “to what extent one knows and recognizes something and oneself.”273 The use of the conjunction here is quite striking. The truth of the encounter is not just a judgment, but an experience in the real sense. We must think of a time when we encountered something shattering, an act of

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betrayal, an unexpected vista, an unknown masterpiece, and we ourselves are elevated by the experience; that is, are taken out of our quotidian and changed. We know something now that we had not known before, and it changes us irrevocably. The work of art “stands there before us and addresses us directly as if it showed us ourselves.”274 An important omission in Gadamer’s theory should be noted here having to do with the audience’s role in the determination of what he calls the eminent text. A text becomes eminent through the collective judgment of communities over time. It stands to reason that other texts drop by the wayside. We have learned with granular precision that this process of privileging texts is not innocent. The distinction or lack of distinction between a literary text and a text (per se) was one of the primary inflexion points of the canon wars of the 1980s. On the specific distinction, Gadamer’s writings could only now serve as a naïve witness. But on the other hand, the broader principle of tradition as dialogue, about which there is no greater authority than Gadamer, is still highly relevant to this discussion. The fact that eminence can be a result of interest, ideology, power, and position, instead of or in addition to inherent merit, relevance, cultural value, and so on, does not diminish the fact that communities of all types from the beginning of history carry art and literature through time as a means of establishing cultural coherence, identity, and direction, and that the work that serves this function is part of the ongoing self-constitution of a community. Because this self-constitution includes the covert force of ideology and interest, and the overt “conversation” community formation, it must be subject to what Gadamer called consciousness of effect. But the theory is not a simple authorization of a canon either. If, in the ontology sustaining a hermeneutic perspective, the work of art is “constructed,” so to speak, from both the side of the text and the side of the receiver, the receiver has a similar instability and a similar reciprocal identity. The subversion of the subject-object relation treats what is conventionally the “subject” partly as an effect of the text. This does not mean, in the reduction of once-fashionable theory, the total disappearance of the individual or person, but rather a different understanding of what it means to be a discursive being. We are as much constituted out of our culture, language, and texts as by our choices and intentions, and we are shot through with this constitution before we are aware or can ever be fully aware of it. Gadamer’s notion of Gebilde ultimately has this breadth of application, encompassing not just the protean meaning of the work of art itself but of the community formed by that work. In the reception or re-cognition, the contribution comes from both directions, changing it, changing us, and Gadamer

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wants to say that in this living engagement, as distinct from the prevalent models of consumption or utility, our humanity is a reflux of that exchange. If the work of art is regarded in an objectivist frame of reference as an object, for hermeneutics the work is the pivotal locus of cultural formation. German has a wonderful word for this locus of identity, die Mitte, which means both medium and middle, and as in Heidegger, is close to the scholastic conception of medium as the midpoint of a circle. The reciprocity of art and self or community works not just in particular encounters but as an historical event. The work that survives the test of time acts transhistorically for audiences who appropriate it to their lives, both as the encounter extends their identity back to it and they expand its meaning out to them. The building structure of the art’s work is thus a blending of its language and their lives; their lives being permeated by its language, and its language being progressively inflected by their lives. This reciprocity gets us to a genuine ontological subversion of the subject-object split, giving us instead a relation, a radically temporalized event. Consciousness, even self-consciousness, is a function of the ongoing dialogue of individuals or collectives with culture and history. The dialogue of the soul with itself is here exchanged with the long dialogue of cultural formation. This is not meant primarily as a supraindividual activity—Gadamer’s standpoint is pragmatic in this regard. Individuals, persons, groups, communities are all engaged in all manner of dialogic interaction: face-to-face, in the reception of historical texts, in the constitution of laws, in the practice of rituals, in the founding of communities. This more conventional conception of the whole, though, still has the Hegelian sense of a gathering process, and this radicalizes aesthetics in the sense that any individual work is fundamentally a contribution to a larger whole. This is the theme to which I now turn.

The truth is the whole Across the entire range of Gadamer’s writings on the work of art, the invocation of a unity or totality of meaning persists. It is a challenging claim, typical of Gadamer’s more provocative and oracular statements. Is it rhetorical exaggeration? Is it philosophical irony? Sometimes this whole refers to the filling out of the local boundaries of a textual world, sometimes it is invoked in an unqualified way. What Gadamer refers to this unity as “the whole of what gives shape to life” appears to be more than a regional category in the experience

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of art.275 He states categorically that “in any encounter with art, it is not the particular, but rather the totality of the experienceable world, man’s ontological place in it, and above all his finitude before that which transcends him, that is brought to experience.”276 This is a remarkable claim that will take some work to unpack. The problem is that the assertion of totality is stated typically without either justification or explanation, and yet it is hardly a self-evident attribute. Since hermeneutics founds itself on its resistance to Hegel’s vision of an absolute comprehension, is Gadamer’s assertion of totality not inconsistent? If not, what does it mean, and why is it so omnipresent? The thesis I will be putting forward in this section is that the assertion of totality in Gadamer is an ironic invocation because his commitment to hermeneutics, on the one hand, is a commitment to radical finitude, to the denial of Hegelian fulfillment, and on the other hand, recognizes a sense of the whole as a projection as the structure of hermeneutic understanding. Gadamer often invokes totality without being explicit about this background, but his philosophy does not make sense without it, and so we want to see if his conception of totality conforms to it. We can say provisionally that wholeness and unity is precisely what the human condition lacks. As creatures of finitude blessed or cursed with self-awareness, the distance between the immediate environment of survival and the infinite is a hollow in our self-understanding. That we have fashioned makeshift tools to bridge this gap is not a dilettantish diversion, but a felt need, an existential imperative. The work of art has the privileged capacity to give us access to the whole, but it does so in a way that is bound by and realized in the hermeneutic structure of understanding. The context for the invocation of totality in German philosophy is fairly deep. In a late statement, Gadamer himself out this context, and issued an important disclaimer: “Totality, in my view, is not some kind of objectivity that awaits human determination. In this respect, I find Kant’s critique of the antinomies of pure reason to be correct and not superseded by Hegel. Totality is never an object but rather a world-horizon which encloses us and within which we live our lives.”277 This is a very helpful elucidation of the philosophical provenance that we will have to keep in mind. Yet, we have to do some archeology to unearth the degree of Gadamer’s indebtedness to Hegel’s conception of totality because Hegel is the undertext of Gadamer’s theory of art, despite the above-stated disavowal. The path Gadamer took in developing his poetics from Heidegger still lies in the wake of the revolutionary patterns of thought first intimated in the Romantic and Idealist

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reaction to Kant, and Heidegger and Gadamer are following out some of the furthest consequences of those impulses. The way Gadamer himself acknowledges this is to say that Heidegger liberated the principle of Hegel’s dialectic from Hegel’s failure “to listen to himself.”278 Is not the Aufhebung precisely the theme of Gadamer’s poetics? It is there at the outset of the Verwandlung section of Truth and Method in the concept of ideality, where art rises above contingency and expresses the order that we wish would govern our lives. It is there in his Zuwachs an Sein, the increase of being that characterizes our encounter with art. It is there in Gadamer’s conception of Gleichzeitigkeit, the capacity of art to draw together distant histories and cultures. For Hegel Geist was mind/spirit (indiscriminately) the permeation of a generalized consciousness resident in culture as the idealist amelioration of Fichte’s synthesis. It was not that individual subjectivity was to be elided, but that it was to be removed from the seat of privilege. Reflective consciousness was somehow to manifest itself in the play of spirit beyond any one person’s individual awareness. The discursive reregistration of reflexivity becomes a manner of speaking (e.g. “spirit conscious of itself as spirit”) characteristic of idealism, a manner of speaking that falls into disuse until Heidegger begins once again moving toward the language of impersonal agency.279 The active reciprocity of subject and object that Hegel is working out—“[Geist] ist die Er-Innerung des in ihnen noch veräußerten Geistes” (Spirit is the interiorizing remembrance of the externalizing mind of a people)—Gadamer calls “integration,” the living interlacing of history and culture into one ongoing living becoming/being. Moreover, Hegel then connects this synthesis of the subjective and objective to art: “Nothing is actually real but that which is actual in its own independent right and substance, that which is at once of the substance of Nature and of spirit, which, while it is actually here in present and determinate existence, yet retains under such limitation an essential and self-concentrated being, and only in virtue of such is truly real. The predominance of these universal powers is precisely that which art accentuates and manifests.” In the crucial summation to the first third of Truth and Method, the section devoted to the ontological function of art, Gadamer asserts that it is Hegel who provides the correct theoretical foundations for the hermeneutic approach Gadamer is developing, because Hegel and not Schleiermacher pointed the way to the proper registration of subjectivity and objectivity, what Hegel called “the historical self-penetration of spirit,” and it is on this solution of the problematic of dualism that Gadamer’s poetics is based. Gadamer’s poetics is not just a

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recapitulation of Hegel’s aesthetics, but it is fundamentally in accord with its ontological direction. The text of Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics proclaim that in “works of art the nations have deposited their richest inner intuitions and ideas,” and this really means that intuitions live in that deposition. It is not that art is exclusively (as in Nietzsche) or primarily (as in Schelling) the ultimate truth of reality, but, as in Gadamer, one of its principal manifestations. The work of art is not be encased in a museum, nor its value retrieved from its original context, nor its meaning discovered in the author’s intention, but the encounter with the work serves as the actualization of the truth of a community: “But just as the girl who presents the plucked fruit is more than Nature that presented it in the first place with all its conditions and elements—trees, air, light, and so on—insofar as she combines all these in a higher way in the light of self-consciousness in her eyes and in her gestures, so also the spirit of destiny which gives us these works of art is greater than the ethical life and reality of a particular people, for it is the interiorizing recollection of the still externalized spirit manifest in them.” Art as the medium of exchange of spirit, an ontological mediation of subject and object, a mediation that surpasses them in their separateness, is an Hegelian conception that Gadamer recasts in the light of Heidegger’s confrontation with Idealism. Hegel’s explanations for the centrality of art have the virtue of directness. In contradistinction to the subtlety of Gadamer’s explications, Hegel says very plainly that art functions as the middle term between the virtual extremes of abstract universal and sensuous appearance. In a way that is more typically of the nineteenth century, Hegel depicts this historical spirit as an active agency that uses art to accomplish this reconciliation: What is thus displayed is the depth of a suprasensuous world which thought pierces [dringt] and sets up at first as a beyond over against immediate consciousness and present feeling; it is the freedom of intellectual reflection which rescues itself from the here and now, called sensuous reality and finitude. But this breach to which the spirit proceeds, it is also able to heal. It generates out of itself works of fine art as the first reconciling middle term between pure thought and what is merely external, sensuous, and transient, between nature and finite reality and the infinite freedom of conceptual thinking.280

Likewise Hegel provides a bald statement of the ideality of art that leaves no doubt as to the origins of Gadamer’s conception. Despite the denunciation of Hegel’s invidious habit of conceiving the unfolding of art’s truth as a linear progress forward through cultural history, we see here the clearest origins of the

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Zuwachs an Sein, the increase of being that wends its way as a leitmotif through all Gadamer’s thinking on art: Only beyond the immediacy of feeling and external objects is genuine actuality to be found. For the truly actual is only that which has being in and for itself, the substance of nature and spirit, which indeed gives itself presence and existence, but in his existence remains in and for itself and only so is truly actual. It is precisely the dominion of these universal powers which art emphasis and reveals. In the ordinary external and internal world essentiality does indeed appear too, but in the form of a chaos of accident, afflicted by the immediacy of the sensuous and by the capriciousness of situations, events, characters, etc. Art liberates the true content of phenomena from the pure appearance and deception of this bad, transitory world, and gives them a higher actuality, born of the spirit. Thus, far from being mere pure appearance, a higher reality and truer existence is to be ascribed to the phenomena of art in comparison with those of ordinary reality.281

Gadamer’s strangely discordant invocation of totality (Totalität) is more than anything a qualified echo of Hegel’s concept, which itself was a feature of Hegel’s response to a Kantian dualism. The timeless essentialism of the a priori structure of synthetic universals leaves finite comprehension still somewhat after the fact. Hegel counters that Spirit is not “an essence lying in abstraction beyond the objective world,”282 but rather shared as a production of history and reason. Particularity implies its other, that is, everything that it is not. Once you historicize the unfolding of “a totality of necessary differences” as a kind of dawning realization, the particularity of art’s embodiments are simply the historical revelations of an unfolding infinite (73). Hegel calls the instantiations of artistic expression Gestaltungen, configurations, which we can now understand as the ways in which the Idea is “shaped forward into reality” (73). But Kant and Hegel are not the whole story. Humboldt may actually be the thinker closest in spirit to Gadamer’s sense of totality, and perhaps the voice that instructs his own sense of it. For Humboldt, totality is neither simply an abstract metaphysical category, nor a biological concept, but something that bridges both. Language gives human finitude historical being, activating anticipatory intuition and latent memory in a collaboration that we might call an ontology of finitude: What is heard does more than merely convey information to oneself; it readies the mind also to understand more easily what has not yet been heard; it makes clear what was long ago heard, but then half understood, or not at all . . . and it

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enhances the urge and capacity to absorb from what is heard ever more, and more swiftly. (58)

Humboldt conceives not only the diachronic reciprocity of language from both temporal directions, but the social interanimation of the individual and the social within a linguistic system’s synchronicity: The individual man is always connected with a whole, with that of his nation, of the race to which the latter belongs, and of the entire species . . . the outer subordinate viewpoint and the inner superior one lead to the same point. . . . For the intimation of a totality, and the endeavor towards it, are given immediately with the sense of individuality.283

This is not all. Humboldt translates Hegel’s logic of the negative—the reciprocal compulsion of part and whole—into the linguistic sphere: “Nobody means by a word precisely and exactly what his neighbor does, and the difference be it ever so small, vibrates, like a ripple in water, throughout the entire language. Thus all understanding is always at the same time not-understanding, all concurrence in thought and feeling at the same time a divergence” (63). As Heidegger acknowledged, no one would surpass Humboldt’s grasp of language’s relation to finitude and infinity, but the hermeneutic structures he found in language were not lost to later thinkers. The same kind of holism informed the hermeneutics of Schleiermacher, who wrote that “every utterance is to be understood only via the whole life to which it belongs,” and he meant this not just in relation to the individual lives of speakers but to “their nationality and their era.”284 The overarching concept of Zussamemnhang (interrelated connectedness) underlies Dilthey’s vision of nature and humanity bound together in a single web of relations, with each point relating however distantly to every other point: The person who seeks the connecting threads in the history of his life has already, from different points of view, created a coherence in that life which he is now putting into words. . . . Every life has its own significance. This lies in a context of meaning in which every comment that can be remembered has an intrinsic value and, yet, in the context of memory, it also has a relation to the meaning of the whole.285

Dilthey’s vision is of an intricately interconnected system of social life along a scale from the smallest human gesture to the largest historical epoch, which theoretically could be touched at any point and it would resonate out to every other point: “The individual is on the one hand an element in the interactions

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of society, a point of intersection of the various systems of these interactions.”286 Individual, society, culture, and history interact with and build each other up across homologous systems: “Every individual is, also, a point where systems intersect.”287 Dilthey turns the Hegelian concept of objective spirit into an experiential principle that passes back and forth between the broadest historical world and personal understanding like a sensitive resonance instrument: “I am involved in the interactions of society because its various systems intersect in my life. . . . To impenetrable depths within myself, I am a historical being” (66–7). Just as with Humboldt, this reciprocity informs Dilthey’s conception of totality: The totality of understanding reveals—in contrast with the subjectivity of experience—the objectifications of life.  .  .  . Every word, every sentence, every gesture or polite formula, every work of art and every political deed is intelligible because the people who expressed themselves through them and those who understood them have something in common; the individual always experiences, thinks and acts in a common sphere and only there does he understand. Everything that is understood carries, as it were, the hallmark of familiarity derived from such common features. We live in this atmosphere, it surrounds us constantly. We are immersed in it. We are at home everywhere in this historical and understood world; we understand the sense and meaning of it all; we ourselves are woven into this common sphere.288

The smallest personal experiences are thus “woven into wider social-historical contexts; these are nations, Ages, historical periods.”289 However great was Gadamer’s antipathy to Dilthey’s orientation to individual agency and experience, its passion for method, its dream of objectivity, it is hard to imagine a better argument for Gadamer’s own preoccupation with the “totality of understanding.” Gadamer only returns Dilthey’s nexus between historical and personal to the Humboldtian sphere of language: [E]very word breaks forth as if from a center and is related to a whole, through which alone it is a word. Every word causes the whole of the language to which it belongs to resonate and the whole worldview that underlies it to appear. Thus every word, as the event of a moment, carries with it the unsaid, to which it is related by responding and summoning. . . . All human speaking is finite in such a way that there is laid up within it an infinity of meaning to be explicated and laid out.290

Gadamer asserts a strong connection between art and Dilthey’s conception of Zusammenhang: “[W]hen we say that the work of art says something to us

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and that it thus belongs to the matrix [Zusammenhang] of things we have to understand, our assertion is not a metaphor, but has a valid and demonstrable meaning.”291 In Gadamer’s hands the whole of which we only ever have access to a part becomes the text that is always being woven. That it is a fragment is a testimony to its being a part of a whole, and that whole is simply the unfinished business of the temporal dimension we inhabit.292 Gadamer’s Gleichzeitigkeit, the temporality of the work of art, is the temporal side of this weaving of the text that is in a sense already a great book, a splendid tapestry that we are all at work on.293 The embodiment of the theory of totality was not an abstraction for Gadamer. He cultivated the habit of memorization and recitation of poetry, and it is clear not only that he lived with texts through recitation, but that this Verweilen had a quasireligious force for him that centers his claims for textuality. He describes here in some detail this mode of habitation: When we utter or read literary texts, we are thrown back on the meaning and sound relations that articulate the framework of the whole, not just once but each time. We leaf back through the text, begin anew, read anew, discover new dimensions of meaning. What stands at the end is not the secure consciousness of having understood the matter so that now one can leave the text behind, but rather just the opposite. One goes deeper into the text the more the charges of meaning and sound in it enter into consciousness. We do not leave the text behind us but allow ourselves to enter into it. We then are in the text like everyone who speaks is in the words he says and does not hold them at a distance as if they were tools that one uses and puts away.294

We construct our identities discursively, the promises we make, the lies and curses we tell; they color the world of our relationships. We live into the narratives we invent for ourselves. Verweilen is not just the time we enter into at a museum spent with a favorite work—It is the tapestry of our discursively constructed lives. Virginia Woolf described this what I will call “the remote effect” by differentiating the role of the common reader from that of the critic, who enters directly into the bloodstream of the textual tradition: “We must remain readers; we shall not put on the further glory that belongs to those rare beings who are also critics. But still we have our responsibilities as readers and even our importance. The standards we raise and the judgments we pass steal into the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work.”295 It is just this gossamer effect Woolf says steals into the air that I am invoking now,

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fully conscious of how slender a reed, but also that it is probably at the end of the day the most important effect of the work of art. Woolf captures both of these disparate attributes: “[P]erhaps one of the invariable properties of beauty is that it leaves in the mind a desire to impart. Some offering we must make; some act we must dedicate, if only to move across the room and turn the rose in the jar, which, by the way, has dropped its petals” (33). We must imagine that the act of turning the rose in the jar is multiplied out in infinite directions, and collected on the ground in accumulating layers, and is, just as much as the discovery of the right turn of phrase in the most perfect work is what builds up what Ricoeur calls “a world I could inhabit.”296 That hermeneutics refers to the work as metonymy for the whole, as an invocation or passkey to a wholeness that finitude lacks, and that hermeneutics therefore lives in the felt absence of Hegel’s dream, is not an interpretation found in the secondary literature about Gadamer’s theory of art. Scholars tend to focus on the work per se as the focal point and singular pole of attraction that creates at best its own world, its own relative wholeness. My claim, and one that will need consideration, is that for Gadamer even the work is only a relay point—a privileged one—in the web of meaning that human beings perpetually strive and fail to catch sight of, the eternal negative that underlies every positive expression we encounter. It is Heidegger actually who says this most directly: Every great poet creates his poetry out of one single poetic statement only. The measure of his greatness is the extent to which he becomes so committed to that singleness that he is able to keep his poetic Saying wholly within it. / The poet’s statement remains unspoken. None of his individual poems, nor their totality says it all. Nonetheless, every poem speaks from the whole of the one single statement, and in each instance says that statement. From the site of the statement there rises the wave that in each instance moves his Saying as poetic saying. But that wave, far from leaving the site behind, in its rise causes all the movement of Saying to flow back to its ever more hidden source.297

What Heidegger calls Saying is, just as with Humboldt, the word that speaks being, a word that is never capable of being fully sounded and yet is perpetually ringing in our ears. Let me offer an example of this reverberance. Ferdinand von Schirach’s short story “The Cello” tells of a wealthy man, himself deformed by the loss of a wife he adored, who for some unaccountable reason (the story has the quality of fable) decides to raise his two children in penury as an object lesson in privilege. Under his supervision, their life in the home is an unrelenting abasement and humiliation. The varieties of puritanical cruelties

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he practices upon them as they grow up strengthen the two children’s love and care for each other. At a certain moment in their teen years, he regrets what he has done, and tries to make up for it by giving them an immediate bequest of money and complete freedom. The two fly off on a world tour, and the girl begins a career as a performance artist—she had learned to play cello before her mother died, and so she now begins to play in public. However, as if fate were catching up with them, the two are involved in a random car accident, and the boy is left mangled and brain-injured with profound amnesia. He is reduced to a ghost of himself, consigned to a bed to waste away. The father is unable to bring himself to make contact with the children in the circumstance, and so remains out of touch. The girl gives up touring and devotes her life to nursing her brother. Stylistically the story reads more like horror than melodrama because the details are narrated as though from a legal case file; a pure recitation of facts for the record. After a time infection begins to eat away at the boy’s bodily organs and his ability to communicate ebbs away. Before he has lost all capacity and dignity, the sister drowns him in the bathtub. She immediately makes a full confession to the police, is taken to prison, writes a note to her father, and, without ceremony, hangs herself in the cell. The story is told with clinical spareness, and reads like a fairy tale, so that we see with unalloyed clarity that the desperation these two children feel is the total and inescapable condition of their lives. The implacability of their fate is somehow resident in the narrative. We do not question the passivity of the children because we are held in its rhythm too. Everything rebels against the conjunction of such innocence and such harm, but nothing obviates its inevitability, and because nothing can, I think we do not escape our implication in the passage of events. It is for this reason I think that the reader cannot, as Gadamer expresses it, put the story away. Although the narrative functions obviously to put the morality of mercy killing in a challenging light, the story exceeds this purpose. Something in the tone of the accounting engages us in the movement of fate that renders other issues trite. We are caught up in its movement and held in its sway. If we are haunted by it, if its stays with us, it sits just out of sight, attributable neither to the facts of the case nor the outcome. My sense of Gadamer’s theory of the structure of the work has to do with what he means by “not putting the text away.” Hermeneutic time, he tells us, is like “the full identity of life with itself, which fills the present through the abiding virtuality of its possibilities.”298 In the theory of the work (Gebilde), these possibilities are the cooperation of reader and text—it is not just the possibilities discovered in the configuration of sounds of the particular poem or song or

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short story that we revisit when we perform or recite them, but their resonances as they play out in our lives as well. The possibilities of our lives become the possibilities of the text, and the possibilities of the text become the possibilities of our lives. The reverberations of the story of the two children, for instance, will stretch back into my own personal and communal histories and forward into my own personal and social interactions. I understand the story in the first place; it is unbearable to me because I know of such things and wonder if I myself am capable of such cruelty or could endure such absolute debasement. The story embeds or insinuates itself into my experience, my responses to new situations, my sensibilities and insights.299 I will read it differently as a young person and an older person, because youth will feel the rejection more profoundly and age will feel the cruelty more closely. Gadamer does not say here that these works are like the furniture that we bring into our homes as equipment for living, but rather that these works are the home into which we enter. These poems and songs and paintings are, to borrow the title of Hesiod’s poem, our works and days. They constitute our lives. The works are part of us and we are part of them. After a while my memory of the short story will fade away, but only after it has sedimented itself into the character of my being, and affect how I deal with others who will never read the story. And so I want to follow the train of this retentissement to know what hermeneutics makes of it in its swelling and diminution. The circular relation of the part (“The Cello”) to the whole (the life of the reader, the life of the community) remains the dominant relation of hermeneutics and its most resilient explanation. Like figure and ground, art only makes sense in a context, and the context is alive in our attention to the work: In its origins, is not a work of art the bearer of a meaningful life-function within a cultic or social context? And is it not within this context alone that it receives its full determination of meaning? Still it seems to me that this question can also be reversed: Is it really the case that a work of art, which comes out of a past or alien life-world and is transferred into our historically educated world, becomes a mere object of aesthetic-historical enjoyment and says nothing more of what it originally had to say?300

What absorbs Gadamer is the communication of part and whole across distances of time and place: “This harvest of meaning is the whole of meaning, the meaning-structure that builds itself out in the same way that a sound-structure forms.”301 Gadamer does not underplay its work in identity: “Every work that captivates us takes us along with it and enters into us.”302 We go along, we respond, we become its host (Gebilde → gebildete).

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The “meaning” of art in this sense does not seem to me to be tied to special social conditions as was the meaning given to art in the later bourgeois religion of culture. On the contrary, the experience of the beautiful, and particularly the beautiful in art, is the invocation of a potentially whole and holy order of things, wherever it may be found. If we think along these lines for a moment longer, we see that the significant thing is precisely the variety of this experience, which we know as a historical reality as much as a contemporary one. Amidst the variety of art, this same message of the whole addresses us over and over again. Indeed, this seems to provide a more precise answer to our question concerning the significance of art and beauty. This means that in any encounter with art, it is not the particular, but rather the totality of the experienceable world, man’s ontological place in it, and above all his finitude before that which transcends him, that is brought to experience.303

By this conception art has the power to both form and reveal ourselves to ourselves, the rarified experience of coming face-to-face with our boundary condition, our predicament, our destiny, the vastness of the universe we inhabit, the arc of our lives, the merciless tragedy, the exquisite beauty, and degradation. In his explanation Gadamer seems to be reaching for the limit experiences of art, and we should note his qualifications (“in this sense,” “If we think along these lines”), which have the effect of a disclaimer in case we should accuse him of a totalizing definition.304 In the end do we sufficiently acknowledge and follow to its conclusion the profundity of our transformation in the circulation of the part and the whole? Paul Ricoeur will later schematize this process into the triple movement of mimesis, a continually circulating process whereby the constructs of our imagined worlds feed into the structures of our practical lives, which serve as improvisatory laboratories for these thought experiments, and this goes some ways toward a properly hermeneutic structure of reception.305 The pollination, assimilation, generation (the Plotinian language is not accidental), and sedimentation of meaning in this back and forth of part and whole leads us to the vision of art that Hegel proposed from the beginning, and that was undoubtedly behind all this: The most general thing which can be said in a merely formal way about the ideal of art . . . comes to this, that, on the one hand, the true has existence and truth only as it unfolds into external reality; but, on the other hand, the externally separated parts, into which it unfolds, it can so combine and retain in unity that now every part of its unfolding makes this soul, this totality, appear in each part.306

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My hypothesis is that the reciprocation of part to whole, however distant or muted, like the background vibrations that Tesla saw permeating the universe, has a strong relation to the hermeneutic bearing of the work. Although Gadamer would strain the completionist idealism of progress from this construct, what he retains is the communication—attenuated, deferred, indirect—of each to every part. As noted, Gadamer’s use of the term whole has a considerable contextual flexibility and range: It can refer to the world that a poetic or fictional text evokes, or to the period or culture that resonates in the harmonics of the text. But this variability is something akin to the concentric rings that circle outward from the proverbial pebble in the lake. Any work is a contribution to that whole that “can so combine and retain in unity that now every part of its unfolding makes this soul, this totality, appear in each part.” Gadamer says in The Relevance of the Beautiful that “the intuition of the world that every work of art presents” (RB 166). If the context of each new audience lends new insight to the work in its historical reception, and so forms the work, the history of the work is a cultural history, a building of horizons. Indeed, Gadamer characterizes the writing that belongs to the “world of letters” as “part of a unique, enduring existence which embraces everything that matters.”307 The work as Gebilde always overflows its particular boundaries to engage us in the larger meanings that it is informing and absorbing: “But what is really established here is more or less integrated into a contextual nexus of life [Lebenszusammenhang].”308 The hermeneutic circulation of work and world describes the open parameters of our existence: “Beyond being, but not out of its way; rather before it, where something happens otherwise.”309 In Heidegger this permeating relation, the relation between being and beings, is close to the scholastic idea of incarnation. Just like light, which is everywhere and nowhere, the appearance of the particular being creates a lighting (Lichtung) which is a center (Mitte), a kind of event horizon between the particular and the general: “This open center is therefore not surrounded by what is; rather, the lighting center itself encircles all that is, like the Nothing which we scarcely know” [Diese offene Mitte ist daher nicht vom Seienden umschlossen, sondern die lichtende Mitte selbst umkreist wie das Nichts, das wir kaum kennen, alles Seiende].310 The attribute that distinguishes the Christian theory of consubstantiation from others is the extent to which the singular event and the history of a people interanimate one another (the body of Christ, the Church, human history as revelation)—that is, the history of a people become, in a sense, that moment of embodiment, and vice versa; the one passes into the other in a meaningful reciprocity. The metamorphosis of history and word is a denial of the rationalist model of time and space. The particularity of

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the act of love becomes a contract with a people, who then become the fulfillment of that act, sharing in its identity. The instant and the unfolding are one. The act of salvation is anticipated and repeated in the history, unfolding backwards to the event, so to speak. Despite the breathtaking conception of this interchange, it is disciplined— or rather defined—by the fundamental hermeneutic commitment to finitude. In hermeneutics die Ganze is not something attained by mind but rather the guarantor of our finitude; the instruction in finitude. Gadamer is admirably precise about this paradox in Truth and Method, in comparison to the late essay “The Artwork in Word and Image,” where he speaks, I would maintain, with an ironic oversimplicity, using the term Gleichzeitigkeit as something akin to the absolute and as something more like a place-marker for the careful elucidation of the earlier work. The position Gadamer must work out is how our dispossession and retention of the whole coexist. In the end it has to do with the fact that we are creatures of limited perspective who recognize that fact. In Truth and Method Gadamer elucidates the case by highlighting the dilemma that “we still have no point of view which would allow us to see, from outside, what limits and conditions us from itself and ourselves, as beings that are limited and conditioned in this way.” Then Gadamer establishes the criterion to be developed in the face of this limitation—“the formulation of the need of preserving, in spite of this discontinuity . . . the continuity which constitutes our being.” Finally he articulates a workable reciprocity. Rather than indulging in the cynicism of utter alienation, we face what is alien and “learn to understand ourselves in it, and that means that we preserve the discontinuity of the experience in the continuity of our existence.”311 The work of art turns out to be a privileged site for negotiating this problematic relationship between discontinuity and continuity, because, whether in the tragic or comic mode, it is a place to confront the discontinuity, and to fashion our continuity out of that interrogation. Heidegger’s performative energizing of the substantive Werk as im-Werk-setzen—the work setting-itself-to-work—was a way to conceptualize art not just as a rumination on finitude, but as an active intervention. The work is the active-reflective space where limitation finds its measure. The work reflects the whole by embodying particularity, Hegel’s concrete universal.312 Art gives access to a vision of the whole through the scrim of finitude, not as a qualification but as a constituting feature. It negotiates the whole as an exchange between presencing and withdrawal. This exchange is a double response to a double finitude. The fissures that threaten or prevent continuity constitute the impossibility of both history and

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community. Art is one of the human practices that sit in the middle of this double exchange, testifying, documenting, negotiating, enacting, and problematizing. Die Ganze, the whole, is only ever an effort to see if a community is possible, and if a history would even be creditable. Art can perform this function on either the axis of history or community. On the question of community, art can wage its own viability as an experiment in community. Parastou Forouhar’s installations challenge state terror and interrogate displacement in a way that demands and questions the very legitimacy of community.313 The Surveillance Camera Players simultaneously goad the police state and challenge the somnolent public into awareness.314 Brecht’s theater pricks at the illusion of spectacle to awaken his audiences to their own complicity in the illusion of community. For history, art can wage the possibility of its own legacy. How does the character of Medea, by any account a looming presence in our cultural imagination, pass down to us? How far does it ramify in history before it loses its own particularity? We can say that Ernest Legouvé’s production of Medea was “a French version of an ancient Greek play being performed in Italian on the London stage,” still clearly in a direct line of contact with Euripides’ text.315 (We should also remember that Euripides’ text is still only an inflection point in a long narrative dialogue that preceded him and that makes it difficult to speak about origins.) But what of cultural expressions that have no such clear line of descent that are still produced out of the resonances of earlier works? What kind of (intertextual) kinship exists between Lady Macbeth and Hedda Gabler to Clytemnestra and Medea? Hegel’s cultural metonymy posits an interrelation that is quite radical—“the externally separated parts, into which it unfolds, it can so combine and retain in unity that now every part of its unfolding makes this soul, this totality, appear in each part”—and Dilthey’s concept of Zusammenhang, at least in theory, supports this radically contiguity. In a web of cultural expression, does every part touch every other part? What is the relation of forgetting to memory in Gadamer’s poetics? This is the question I take up in the last section of this book.

3

Clytemnestra

The first time I heard veterans responding to these ancient plays, it was as if a veil had been lifted, it was as if the plays were written in a code that I as a translator had no access to, that I needed the military to translate for me. . . . Those people who live lives of mythological proportions, who face life and death stakes, who have faced the darkest aspects of our humanity, they have no problem understanding or relating to ancient Greek plays; in fact, these are their stories.1 We cannot know what it was like to sit in the Eleuthereus for the premiere of the Oresteia in 458 BC. We cannot hear the cultural overtones of the Aeschylean verse for that audience, so carefully crafted to sound the harmonics of its mythopoetic context. We cannot feel the political and religious resonance of that moment for the civic questions it evoked in an audience so directly responsible for their answers. So distanced in the strange formalisms of its austere darkness, so starkly alien in its choric rhythms,2 so stark in its elemental brutality, it resists us and we it.3 Its central obscurities are deepened by the loss of the great bulk of its literary context, the force of its allusions, the strangeness of a tongue no longer spoken, and its seriously corrupted text. And as devoted as its translators have been, one feels the impoverishment and the alienation of language in the verse. To be sure, there were barriers for a contemporary audience too. Aeschylus’ purposely arcane and compacted Greek was difficult in its own day.4 His plays sat at the unstable and uncomfortable interstice between a dying religious faith and the dawning rational faith, both haunted with antecedents and prophetic of their own destinies. Indeed, even this medial place was short-lived. The structures of familial relations and customs as well as the traditional institutional structures and economic relations of the city-states were in a state of profound historical

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flux,5 and by the fourth century Greeks “no longer understood tragic man, who had, so to speak, become a stranger.”6

Resonanzboden Consequently, the Agamemnon is well positioned for the challenge of Gadamer’s metaphor of art as resonance chamber (Resonanzboden). On the one hand, the text repels at the touch. On the other hand, its images, motifs, plot elements, characters, language, meter, stagecraft, and story construct a magisterial architectonic resonance that speaks to us beyond that strangeness. The particular historical moment of Greek tragedy, suspended between a determinist mythology of fate and a confident self-determination of deliberative community discovered itself within this rich symbolic tension, and Aeschylus made that tension his material of construction. He fashioned an idiom that functions at the intersection of multiple axes of conflict—from the historical and mythological down to the thematic,7 symbolic, and lyrical—that produce a dense poetic reverberation that feeds on itself: In the language of the tragic writers there is a multiplicity of different levels more or less distant from one another. This allows the same word to belong to a number of different semantic fields depending on whether it is a part of religious, legal, political, or common vocabulary or of a particular sector of one of these. This imparts a singular depth to the text and makes it possible for it to be read on a number of levels at the same time.8

Goheen notes that the symbolic organization is worked out both “in the order of language, or in the embodied action of agents, or as a matter of the setting accorded to the action,” and this may understate the matter.9 At a genealogical level, the intermingling of myth and history permitted the close social and interfamilial relations of gods and humans in the descent of kings, and so their narratives, preoccupied with themes of familial treachery and retribution, amplified Aeschylus’ theme of the poisoned relation of inheritance and justice to cosmic terms. Pelops, king of Pisa in the Peloponnesus, founder of the house of Atreus, was himself victim of an act of infanticide when his father Tantalus offered him up in pieces to the gods, only to be pieced together and resurrected by a jealous god. The human side of the story mirrors this history. After his death, Pelops’ two sons Atreus and Thyestes warred over the succession. When Atreus was triumphant, Thyestes entered into an adulterous relationship

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with Atreus’ wife. When Atreus learned of this, he butchered Thyestes’ children and served them to him in a feast. Thyestes was driven into exile for eating human flesh, but exacted his revenge by fathering a child who eventually killed Atreus. The sons of Atreus, Agamemnon and Menelaos, inherited this cursed history, and married two sisters, Clytemnestra and Helen, who played their famous parts in extending the curse. The tribal kinship system (the family of Aeschylus, for example, belonged to the clan of the Eupatridai), its genealogies, its histories, its customs, and their violations, are the narrative backbone of Greek myth. Its narrative structure is the inescapable cycle of pollution and redemption in which the perpetual imbalance of injustice is repaid with injustice. Its principle narrative account is fate as an inescapable history of effects.10 The Agamemnon engages in some of the most complex forms of what is called, in biblical hermeneutics, recapitulation. The play is constructed as a layered series of recapitulations that heighten the symbolic resonance of the play like a series of mirror reflections. The dramatic irony of the play is driven by its principle recapitulation, the siege of Troy. The journey’s long deferral and doubt of achievement is the coiled narrative spring in both cases. Just as duplicity and skillful persuasion overcome suspicion and resistance to letting the Trojan horse into the city, so Clytemnestra’s rhetorical skills overcome Agamemnon’s reticence to walk the red carpet into the palace: “His first reaction to her proposal that he should walk upon the tapestries is the correct one; but presently, by a series of shrewd and penetrating questions, Clytemnestra will overcome his resistance.”11 Just as Cassandra prophesies the danger of the gracious departure gift, so here she prophesies the danger of the gracious welcome. This through-the-looking-glass recapitulation builds on the ancient Greek fascination with rhetoric, juxtaposing the impotence of the truth with the power of the lie. Likewise Clytemnestra plots human sacrifice in perfect symmetry, balancing betrayal and revenge in a narrative repetition.12 Clytemnestra’s nightmare inversions of the siege triumph of the Greeks, and the sacrifice of her daughter are staged as narrative reversals to even out the balance of justice.13 The exaction of justice expressed in the seesawing narrative symmetry on this larger scale is rooted in the Greek idea of justice itself. Thalmann summarizes this conception succinctly as an idea firmly rooted in early Greek thought: that the world-order is an equilibrium of separate parts each with its own circumscribed place and function (moira), and that in parallel fashion man’s experience consists of a regular alternation of events, fortunes and conditions. The principle of reciprocal restraints on one

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another by the moirai of different things, by which this order is maintained, is dike [justice]. Since it designates the observance or enforcement of limits, this term not only applies to the physical world but also can take on legal and ethical meanings. When limits are transgressed, the powers that exact punishment and restore order are the Erines [furies].14

The play’s narrative energy emanates from this typology. The disequilibrium that sets the story in motion is the inheritance of a curse of familial violence and usurpation directly traceable to the Greek mythology of dynastic descent as narratives of patricide and fratricide—Ouranus by Kronos, Kronos by Zeus, Chrysippus by Thyestes and Atreus, and Agamemnon by Aegisthus. The original violence introduces a disequilibrium that plays itself out in a dialectical reand overbalancing of justice, one misdeed invoking the next. The continuity of familial enmity over divine and human history mirrors and feeds the interplay of civic, religious, tribal, dynastic, and domestic tragedy. Unlike Pindar’s offering of alternative motives for Clytemnestra’s impious act, Aeschylus assembles her motives together—the vengeance of a mother, the jealousy of an abandoned wife, the guilt of an illicit love, and the ambition for state power.15 So when Clytemnestra says “I am the ancient cruel curse” she is by no means denying her materiality or her suffering, but rather acknowledging that her action embodies fate as well (line 1478). With her mastery of discursive irony, she plays consciously on the polysemy of her situation. For instance her strategic confusion of the forms of political office with the idioms of personal relation mix the speech genres, giving her poetry an “eerie resonance” in its transgression that vibrates with the dissonance of the larger situation.16 When I use the word typology I am borrowing anachronistically from a later tradition. Typology was developed in Gaul by the church father Ireneaus in the second century AD. He wanted to demonstrate the unity of scriptures by showing how Christ was the fulfillment of history prefigured in the Old Testament, and he did this by talking about personages, symbols, and narratives of scripture as being recapitulated types—The Greek word typos meant both the seal or the impress of the seal, except in this case Christ was the seal and his “Christlike” predecessors were the impress. The grace of his life narrative is metonymy for the universal history of salvation, extending backward from the origin of time until the final days. Whereas nothing so expansive or systematic is present in Aeschylus, the force of repetition for him has the same resonance as the recapitulation of scriptures for the early Christian.17 The ways in which myth, narrative, and poetry collect and concentrate their collective power into

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the polysemy of Agamemnon’s fate or Clytemnestra’s words is in the design of the play a nexus of these recapitulative echoes. Lebeck affirms that Aeschylean ambiguity “compressed the greatest number of meanings into the smallest possible space” (3). That compression depends to a great degree on the ability of the audience to hear its mythical, dramatic, and poetic resonances. For example, as Zeitlin points out, the murder of Iphigenia serves as the “prototype” for all the other murders in the Oresteia, both “those preceding it and those following it.”18 In another example, Conacher offers the famous metaphor of the eagles’ feast at 131–45: “The poet is concerned first of all to provide a portent in which we can see, in a flash of the mind’s eye, without rational analysis the sack of Troy, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, and the awful feasting on Thyestes’ young—three horribly related events which we, the audience, already know have happened.”19 The figurative and the historical cross-pollinate in the narrative event that anchors the revenge plot. The symbolic resonance of Iphigenia’s sacrifice activates a whole network of historical events in relation to which Agamemnon’s act becomes a relay point. The Athenian audience would have been far more attuned to those echoes as their birthright, and would have been correspondingly more struck by their harmonics. But this is not a unidirectional movement. New resonances will continue to gather and sound with the accretions of cultural traditions that receive the work, so that there will be continual loss and gain in the harmonics of the text. The typological imagination is not captive to time and history as a linear historical sequence, since Christ, for instance, recapitulates and in a sense expresses every figure of the type. Aeschylus’ characters likewise belong to a constellation of persons, acts, and meanings that spread across time, and these networks are not rigidly bound to time’s arrow. As Robert Chodkowski points out, the chorus in the Agamemnon occupies a compressed/expanded temporality out of all relation to linear time—the parodos symbolizes the passage of time in which the ships signaling victory travel the seas from Troy to Argos, and yet the temporal reality that the chorus depicts poetically is the vast expanse of history from before the beginning of the Trojan war and far into the future. This hallucination of time has a further dimension as it lives in the mythological imagination. The grudge of Artemis, protector of animals, against Agamemnon for sacrificing a sacred hare explained presumably the withholding of the winds that sped the ships to Troy: “To the logical mind Artemis’ anger is rather a consequence than a cause of this terrifying cleft in nature. But to the mythological mind the goddess stands first in the sequence because the gods are inresident [sic] in our acts, revealing what already is.”20

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At the level of the text, the play “speaks, and evidently thinks, through an elaborate set of symbols.”21 Its figural clusters resonate within their own harmonic registers, building a complex and cohering meaning-structure that carries the weight of the play. The famous similes of the eagle and the hare as they appear in the opening parodos of the Agamemnon illustrate this. The first comes in the famous opening lines of the parodos: Ten years since the great contestants of Priam’s right, Menelaus and Agamemnon, my lord, twin throned, twin sceptered, in twofold power of kings from God, the Atreidae, put forth from this shore the thousand ships of the Argives, the strength and the armies. Their cry of war went shrill from the heart, as eagles stricken in agony for young perished, high from the nest eddy and circle to bend and sweep of the wings’ stroke, lost far below the fledgelings, the nest, and the tendance. Yet someone hears in the air, a god, Apollo, Pan, or Zeus, the high thin wail of these sky-guests, and drives late to its mark the Fury upon the transgressors. (Lines 40–59)

The first resonance to note in these verses is intertextual; their debt to two Homeric similes, one from the Iliad and one from the Odyssey, and to a lyric of Archilochus. The simile from the Odyssey first: [A]nd Telemachus threw his arms around his great father, sobbing uncontrollably as the deep desire for tears welled up in both. They cried out, shrilling cries, pulsing sharper than birds of prey—eagles, vultures with hooked claws—when farmers plunder their nest of young too young to fly.22

Part of the power of Homer’s simile stems from the incongruity built into the image; the ruthless rapacity of a predatious species made salient by its physical features juxtaposed against wrenching cries of parents over their suffering progeny. In the compactness of the simile Homer expresses this one contradiction, whereas Aeschylus expands the simile to express the narrative logic of grief and vengeance, sounding the fundamental narrative motif of the Oresteia, the irresolvable disequilibrium of the dialectic of revenge. But the commonality predominates here—the contradiction of interest at the source of every seeming injustice. Fraenkel credits Schulze with noting that in Aeschylus “the summoning of the host . . . starts from the cry for help of the man suddenly attacked, but .  .  . the cry for help and call to arms merge into one another,” returning to something like Homer’s compacted contradiction.23 Only 60 lines later in the opening parados, the chorus speaks of eagles again, but this time in their role as predators: “They lighted, watched by all tore a hare,

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ripe, bursting with young unborn yet, prevented from running her final course” (lines 118–20).24 Juxtaposed in such proximity, the inconsistency of the figures is their most powerful symbolic meaning effect. Their dissonance foreshadows the entire problematic of the Agamemnon and The Libation Bearers. The double identity that such ambiguous symbolic discourse wears suits this problematic, where any one god or human is alternately prey or predator, the one passing to the other like the oscillation of an electrical charge from positive to negative. Thus Artemis is wronged spirit and avenging angel or agent of disruption; likewise Thyestes; likewise Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. Motive is equally fluid. The cause of Artemis’ wrath is a matter of conjecture because it can have arisen from three distinct grievances—the murder of Thyestes’ children, the sacrifice of the innocent Iphigeneia, and the slaughter of the innocents in the final conquest of Troy. But in the moral economy of the play any one or all of these motives can circulate through the action via the symbol. The second simile, the harvesting of the pregnant hare, as Peradotto points out, is an organizing image for the entire trilogy, emblematizing the moral predicament of a society caught up in serving blind justice: “The whole trilogy is structured on this incident; images and verbal motifs from this scene recur again and again throughout the work. It sets the ‘problem’; the remainder of the trilogy develops a solution.”25 The symbol of the eagle and hare belongs “to a broader network of symbolic events and images, whose parts illuminate one another only gradually” over the course of the course of the trilogy (239). We can link it, for instance, to the famous red color (porphyreos poros) of the royal carpet. The color “forms a recurring motif, carefully articulated and impressively sustained . . . through the trilogy to form one of the more patent lines which bind the three plays into a single whole.”26 Its symbolic functions, “reiterated and modulated like a motif in music,” evoke “a pervasive, general feeling” within and against which the other effects of the trilogy are developed (119). The carpet foreshadows Clytemnestra’s bloody deed and turns the palace into an illicit scene of ritual sacrifice, activating all the symbol systems of predator and prey that have been gathering up in the verse—the lion and cubs, the net and the yoke, eagle and hare, and so on: “The images of the Oresteia are not isolated units which can be examined separately. Each one is part of a larger whole: a system of kindred imagery.”27 Lebeck calls this kind of repetition “associative or reminiscent” as distinct from literal repetition, and explicates its unique character:28 The form which repetition or recurrence takes in the Oresteia is that of proleptic introduction and gradual development. The word “prolepsis” here denotes a

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brief initial statement of several major themselves en bloc. The full development toward which each repetition builds may not occur for several hundred lines. . . . In its early occurrences the image is elliptical and enigmatic. . . . Prolepsis and gradual development of recurrent imagery, along with the corollary, movement from enigmatic utterance to clear statement, from riddle to solution, dominate the structure of the Oresteia.29

From a hermeneutic point of view, the inner structure of the play that I have just touched on, what Ricoeur calls, after Frege, its sense (sens), is in a perpetual circulation with its reference (référence) to the world “outside” of its symbolic structure or symbolic system. That circulation is the theme of interpretation, the constitution of meaning that takes place in the act of reception down through history. The tension between sense and reference, that is, between what is fixed in the text and what is made of the text, is the tension that gives hermeneutics its subject matter. I want to examine this tension in our example by focusing on the character of Clytemnestra.

Clytemnestra The success of a work as a Resonanzboden for present and future audiences depends on whether it creates an effective field of play—Gadamer uses all variations of this term: Spielplatz, Spielwelt, Spielraum—that lends itself to the creative imagination of players.30 Nothing should be said against an ephemeral text that disappears after its first use, because that may be its purpose, and a text that stands the test of time, that is, a work, may do so for reasons outside any inherent artistic merit. But the play-work relationship that hermeneutics illuminates is a constituting mechanism of culture as a temporal human phenomenon. Works that wear this purpose well have the triple function of constituting, receiving, and reflecting the surrounding culture, feeding it and being fed by it as a work in progress. Works that “take” in this way have a kind of reduplicating momentum, absorbed into the fertile ground of cultural discourse. The figure of Clytemnestra has clearly had this effect in the cultural imagination of the West. Even more than the play itself she has risen above her role in a festival drama of the fifth century to achieve a kind of iconic stature in the pantheon, but more than this, she is a high-water mark on the field that negotiates and produces our cultural politics and identity. She has acted as a lightning rod and a Rorschach, appropriated in representations as often to mute

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her power as celebrate it, present as much in the efforts to suppress and contain her meanings as mine them. For the long sweep of late antiquity, Renaissance and early modernity, Seneca’s tamer theatrical version of the Agamemnon acted as a kind of mannerly substitute for the disquieting implications of Clytemnestra’s hegemonic challenge.31 When the Oresteia was performed, only two possibilities of production presented themselves: In my view it is likely that by the fourth century, at least, the first play was often dropped from performances of Libation Bearers and Eumenides, whether separately or together, and, moreover, that it was ideologically virtually impossible to perform Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (or any imitation with a similarly androgynous, autonomous, proactive, amoral, and politically triumphant queen) in isolation, without the other two plays of the trilogy. These are actually required if Clytemnestra is to be punished for her insurrection, and formally subordinated.32

The neoclassical and medieval Clytemnestras were repurposed as a lascivious temptress who lured Agamemnon to his death with her wiles, an interpretation well suited to the requirements of the Christian morality tale.33 Clytemnestra was also marginalized in the historical reception by being made a subsidiary character in dramas that focused on more conventional characters within the close network of plots that constitute Greek mythology—for example, Racine’s Iphigénie (1674), Gluck’s Iphigeneia in Aulis (1774), Richard Strauss’ Elektra (1909). An epochal shift in culture had to occur before the titanic figure of the Agamemnon made its way back into the repertoire.34 A cultural symbol with a long reception history acts as a cipher. It soaks up, reflects, challenges, and up-turns conventional expectations. It is used as an ideological club, as a surreptitious code, or as a provocation. Clytemnestra began her life doing this, tapping into an unsettling possibility deep in the configuring relations of a society, and she lives now probably because the buried threat she represents is still alive. Thus, my approach to Clytemnestra follows Aya Betensky’s contention that “What is crucial is not that Clytemnestra represent one attitude or the other in the sexual battle, but that her dramatic character be as rich as possible.”35 The resonance of a work or a narrative symbol references some nexus of possibilities, some meaningful thematic or engine of thought that has to be worked through; that lives because the need exists within a culture and because the symbol creates a field of play for this interrogation.

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To be sure, the sensational, the melodramatic, and the faddish also feed audiences by the formulaic indulgence of pregnant cultural fetishes and taboos. These entertainments are also valuable indices of the cultural unconscious, and cannot be dismissed away. Gadamer certainly showed a cultural bias by minimizing all of this. The difference between the ephemeral and the enduring is not what is meaningful and not meaningful. The eminence of what tradition saves and passes on, even if we could control for the effects of hegemony and ideology, is still a very limited story, and exposes an important limitation to Gadamer’s poetics. The encounter between Clytemnestra and Gadamerian poetics asks us, before we enter too deeply into a reading of her history of effects, to state clearly how we will watch our own effect on this reading. An enduring work is fired out of momentary preoccupations that touch the ongoing concerns of the cultural imagination. Its formal innovations and its substantive questions feel their way along the oscillation between the particular and the universal. This does not protect it from the enormous influence of power and ideology, but it contributes to its endurance. In any case the formal structure of the work is built for the long journey. Art becomes a work of art in Gadamer’s sense when it is constructed in a way that allows audiences to take a theme that continues to worry it and “try on” its possibilities (mit Möglichkeiten spielt), or adjust its “play” to the right tension—a certain freedom balanced by a certain constraint. A hermeneutic sensibility is not simply a lesson in avoidance, but rather engagement in the constraints and possibilities of the text that are opened up by new perspectives. So when Rachel Wolfe reads Clytemnestra in the vein of a Hollywood “bad girl” she is a bit incautious in simply pressing passing cultural frames over Clytemnestra’s persona, but she discovers dimensions of the character that are resident in the cipher, and this is as much to Wolfe’s credit as to the genius of the original form.36 A hermeneutic reading is keyed to issues of reception because to discuss a work hermeneutically is necessarily to speak about effective history and the history of effects. What this means is that to speak of a work is to attempt to mediate one’s own response with the developing consciousness of history. What we do here is to reverse Sainte-Beuve’s question—“while speaking our own language, and submitting to the conditions of the times in which we live, whence we derive our strength and our defects, let us ask from time to time, . . . what would they say of us?”—that is, What can we say of her?37 This is not to replace one privileged perspective by another, but rather to engage in a reading that remains sensitive to one’s own place in the reception.

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The rain of blood To guess at why the resonance effect of Clytemnestra has remained so potent I want to focus on a single image in the play, one that seems to gather up and hold something of the force of her iconic power. One might start from any number of points, since from a hermeneutic perspective any image or constellation of images, any poetic expression or act or character, leads back to every other, and outward to the larger history of effects that coruscate from it, but it somehow feels as if this image seems to sit closer to the center of the resonance effect.38 The image I refer to is the appearance of the figure of Clytemnestra standing over the bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra with the opening of the palace doors at line 1371. (The doors of the palace open, disclosing the bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra, with Clytemnestra standing over them.) [Stage instruction, lines 1371–2]

It is an image that is designed to have an effect—the play leads up to it and concentrates its meanings there. As a symbolic moment, it catches and throws off so many facets of meaning—personal, political, religious, dramatic, and cultural. DeForest captures something of the scope of its mythical resonance: “Invested with an aura of divinity, Clytemnestra stands at the door immensely powerful both as Orestes’ mother and, by transference, as Earth herself, mother of all, who must be respected by all. Her stage presence forces us to view her in archetypal terms.”39 Conacher speaks of its familial dimension, “the overpowering physical impact of the imagery in all matters connected with the murder and its executors, Clytemnestra and the daimon of the house of Atreus.”40 What I want to emphasize is the extent to which the presentation scene works as the still point at the center of a revolving wheel of action. This tragedy was fomented in the first place by stillness and the need to move, and it returns to stillness in a frozen tableau that depicts the vanity of departures and returns. The structure of the play concentrates itself on the presentation of this still image at line 1371.41 Even more than the deed, the presentation of the deed is most germane to Clytemnestra’s purpose.42 Every dramatic element leads to this moment, this image, and every dramatic effect radiates out from it. The action of the play is otherwise really nothing more than a series of exits and entrances (the arrival of the fleet, Agamemnon’s grand reception, Clytemnestra’s surreptitious appearances, Cassandra’s reluctant entrance/departure, Aegisthus’ pathetic entrance and departure, as brief as the waxing of male power typically is).43 The

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opening of the palace door is neither a coming nor a going, but an exposure of the liminal space between public and private, the privileged inner chamber of power now exposed to public shame. Clytemnestra’s proud act of exposure is a purposeful transgression that mirrors the original conflation of public and private good. Lines 1–82 (or 257)

The watchman reports the imminent arrival of Agamemnon. Lines 83 (or 258)–354 (or 502) Clytemnestra appears to ready the welcome.44 Lines 503–86 Herald announces arrival of the fleet. Lines 587–613 Clytemnestra sends welcome. Lines 614–781 Herald and chorus wait in anticipation. Lines 782–905 Agamemnon (with Cassandra) enters and is greeted by the queen. Lines 905–74 Clytemnestra takes Agamemnon into the palace on the red carpet. Lines 975–1033 Chorus stands outside in dread. Lines 1034–68 Clytemnestra attempts to persuade Cassandra to enter the palace. Lines 1069–331 Cassandra relents. Lines 1332–71 Chorus stands outside helpless at the death cries of Agamemnon. Lines 1371–2 Clytemnestra appears with bodies. Lines 1373–7 Clytemnestra comes out to meet the chorus. Lines 1578–673 Aegisthus’ triumphal entrance and departure with Clytemnestra.

To bring about this one most public showing Clytemnestra has had to disguise her intentions by secretive and deceptive machinations which she skillfully clothes in symbolic ambiguities (that are at some level also brazenly public acknowledgments, meanings-as-time-bombs). The revelation at 1371 is the hermeneutic key to the obscurities of the previous narrative codes, a lighting thrown on the scene that she has orchestrated from the beginning. All of the symbolic appurtenances up to this point—the torch-flames, the red carpet, the rituals of welcome, and so on—are staging particulars of her final set-piece. Its power lies in its publicity, in its final brazen showing, reverberating back through the long silent procession which it turns out was of her own invention. It is meant to create and leave an impression. The success of the impression is plural: (1) a moral tale of retributive justice—As ye sow, so shall ye reap, (2) the tragedy of a familial curse, (3) a display of uncanny human design, (4) a sign of diabolical

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genius, (5) the fearsome danger of the monstrous feminine, (6) the cost of war, (7) the working out of fate, and so on. Clytemnestra herself is thus a kind of master of ceremonies. Her purpose is to shock, and the way that she finds to shock most severely is in this moment of showing. The rogue’s gallery that appears around and in service of Clytemnestra’s tableau works like the setting of a diamond, each successive character engineered in an ascending order of impotence to augment each feature of her power, each character progressively contributes to a negative space that magnifies her sublime intention. The Watchman who opens the play personifies servility within the social order, grousing in his subservience, groaning under his responsibilities, and resenting his place in life. His quasicomic stature and performance marks the social distance between himself and the royalty that will soon appear. Agamemnon, the titular hegemon, seems, in retrospect, to have known and accepted a priori his diminished stature within the narrative logic of the circumstance, as though he anticipated in some vague intimation, outside the obscuring lumination of his pride, what lay in store. He knows his wife, and he has had ten years to anticipate this moment. Cassandra’s comportment in some ways is the photonegative of Clytemnestra. Her agency, which is just as powerful (and this is an interesting feature of a play in which the privileged male characters simply do not rate), is the inverse quantity, a sublime dignity of submission,45 which, like a negative charge, lights up and illuminates Clytemnestra’s fearsome agency. In her predicament, Cassandra is an active passivity that excites injustice in direct proportion to its submission. And then of course the chorus. If there is one image that competes in the imagination with the revelation scene, it might be the one just before it in which the chorus comes undone, breaks apart like loose ions, and circles in impotent anarchy around madness. Their disorder functions in the design of the drama at this point to augment the decisiveness and implacability of the queen just as every other character has done. Aegisthus at the end bookends the play with almost comic relief, throwing out insults from behind the skirts of his wife. Clytemnestra wants Cassandra in her gallows’ staging, and so she comes out of the palace herself to persuade Cassandra at 1035. If I am right about the visual intention, the most powerful reason for the inclusion may be the least obvious. In her ghoulish set-piece the queen can now stand at the apex of a family portrait. Cassandra is an ironic stand-in for a domestic tableau; the marker of a war fought for the subjugation of women and the ironic substitute for a broken and haunted family scene. One senses that, just as Clytemnestra has so carefully planned every detail of the entrapment, she has composed this display to represent that

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history just as much as to represent the anguish and hatred of her compacted years of impotent solitude. This depraved picture that sums up the pathology of its family history, absorbs into itself every incident of the whole sordid tale, and compacted thus, acts for us as a cipher, our own buried traumatic histories now to be worked out from its distorting mirror—recognition.

“This curious opposition of presence” The focusing question that hermeneutics asks of a work is why it continues to speak, and so in this case the question is, why does Clytemnestra continue to speak? We have begun to say how this is—that by her example she poses a question that we need to answer and have not answered. Medea calls us to reflect on the limits of revenge, Delilah on the nexus of sexuality and power, Lady Macbeth on the gendering of evil, the Marquise de Merteuil on the deep resources of cunning and malice. The registers of Clytemnestra’s challenge to us seem to center around the issue of hegemony. Preeminent as an example of a woman who, despite her eventual reception of her “just deserts” by the standards of the genre, nevertheless vanquishes her enemies, seizes her personal and political ends, satisfies her thirst for retribution, upends the forces that had enslaved her, and towers as a dire warning to her enemies. The trilogy as a lesson in cosmic justice hardly measures up to the image of her triumphal grandeur in that explosive instant, and it is her paroxysm of malevolent retribution that continues to resonate in the imagination, whether by imitation or evasion. Swimming in the mythological background of this play, the Furies are the original of her dark strength, of her threat as an instrument of revenge of the irrational powers. Rather than being fully realized characters they are simply shadowy possibilities, the subconscious underside that fertilize her symbolic power. Rosenmeyer describes them as “the forces, the vital presences that, according to Thales, Hesiod, and others, could be encountered in almost any realm of experience, if only one’s sensibilities were open to the stimulus.”46 The symbolic difference between the Furies and Clytemnestra is analogous to the difference between the Furies and the gods: To say that both Apollo and the Furies are symbols may be correct but is not very helpful, for the symbolism is not the same. Apollo is a person, and acts on behalf of another person, Zeus. . . . The Furies are more like abstractions. To the extent that they have a personality, it is a direct consequence of the idea incorporated in

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them: the righting of the balance after its violent internal upsetting. In essence, they are emblems rather than persons.47

Ernst Neustadt describes the eerie presence of the chthonic powers as the subliminal substrate of the play: There is no extant Greek tragedy as shot through with the daemonic as Aeschylus’ Oresteia. Unshaped and ungraspable, unnameable and indescribable, yet in spiritual-material effect the daemonic weaves itself palpably through this primal poetry as the very atmosphere of waking and sleeping, acting and suffering. . . . In the midst of this supernatural world of daemons stands man—But the daemonic is no alien externality here. Over the boundary between human and spiritual it undulates back and forth. The daemonic power constrains humans in its thrall, impregnates it with its desires, and binds it to its goals.48

This is an example, I think, of what Heidegger means in putting what he calls earth and world into dialectical struggle: “The earth juts up within the work because the work exists as something in which truth is at work and because truth occurs only by installing itself within a particular being.”49 The particular being in this case is Clytemnestra, and behind her, jutting up through her persona and acts, is the demonic “earth.” If “art is the fixing in place of a self-establishing truth in the figure,” then Clytemnestra’s horrific revenge is a manifestation of the power of the moira that lies below the surface of civilization (71). The Furies, the “divinities underground,” are literally “daughters of Earth.”50 They are ultimately very close to chthonic force itself, “part of the matrix, the very stuff of life.”51 Thus the struggle embodied in Greek art of the fifth century, the struggle to understand and accept a world that is neither wholly directed by the gods or rational human agency, is an exemplary site for what Heidegger called the strife between earth and world. The world that the Agamemnon creates exists in a dialectical relationship with the hidden-preserving “earth” that juts up through its symbolic structures: “But as a world opens itself the earth comes to rise up.”52 Clytemnestra takes fate into her own hands, but in consequence stirs up all of the uncontrollable dark forces that are normally kept subdued beneath the surface. Just as the relationship between earth and world emerges as a chiasmatic tension, so Clytemnestra’s act of revenge that opens a space of play for considering the distortions of hegemony derives its force from oblique powers that stir in the shadows of her act. In the fear of the chorus, the prophesies of Cassandra, and the rhythms and imagery of the lyric itself we sense the released fury that we see standing on the firm land of civilizations

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(world) staring out over the primordial abyss (earth)—we see the rage of the mother goddess, the piercing of the monstrous womb, her avenging harpies released from the pit. This struggle between world and earth is a source of continuing fascination and relevance. What Heidegger calls the “curious opposition of presence” is etched by the crystalline poetry, dramatic imagery, and blazing acts of a drama written at a very particular moment, yet reproduced on a stage that is never the same, mounted epoch after epoch with new attempts at imaging an ineradicable conflict. The play absorbs these attempts into its practice, into its traditions and conventions, throwing some off like used clothes and harboring others as guiding instruction, like the accretions of sea anemones and corals in tropical waters.

Tessera hospitalis To recall a critical feature of the hermeneutic theory of reception, Gadamer defines text as an “intermediate product [Zwischenprodukt], a phase in the event of understanding that, as such, certainly includes a definite abstraction, namely, the isolation and reification involved in this very phase.”53 The structural equivocation that exists because of the dependence of the text on an indeterminate audience or circumstance is the hinge of the hermeneutic complexity of “the text.” Gebilde, the fusion between the receiver and the text, is the actual structure of the work, fraying the categories of subject (audience identity) and object (work of art): “There is in principle no radical separation between the work of art and the person who experiences it.”54 I would like to use this aspect of the theory to look at the image in the Agamemnon that I have brought to the center of focus—the opening of the doors of the palace at line 1371. Above I described already the structural role of the revelation scene, but that was from the side of the playwright’s intention. The image has a power that has been set loose for 2,500 years, and it does this as a result of the genius of the construction, but also because of its ability to transform itself and so to respond, to absorb, reflect, to transform our own needs and concerns. The way that Gadamer explains the interaction of audience and symbol is by means of a ritual practice in Roman tradition of hereditary recognition called the tessera hospitalis that had both sacred and legal weight: Originally it was a technical term in Greek for a token of remembrance. The host presented his guest with the so-called tessera hospitalis by breaking some object in two. He kept one half for himself and gave the other half to his guest.

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If in thirty or fifty years time, a descendant of the guest should ever enter his house, the two pieces could be fitted together again to form a whole in an act of recognition.55

There is a straightforward way to understand this metaphor about art in the way that audiences, readers, and listeners take a work or an artist to heart as a completion of their experience, as a dimension of their lives, as a construct from which they build. The advantage of this metaphor is that it describes an obligation on both ends. Audiences must be respectful of the text—it does not mean just anything, and a performance should strive to be “just right” in interpreting it. A Bach performer must know the traditions and schools of thought concerning adherence to the directions of the score—the interpretation of trills and ornaments, the tempo markings, the use of rubato, and so on, even the choice of texts—but the latitude of interpretive freedom has as strong an imperative on the side of what one can bring to the text oneself. An awareness of the reception tradition, and of the scholarship that aids in the reading of the text, acts as a useful pressure against inventional license. Conversely, the continuing relevance of the text depends on the extent to which it has established a field of play that remains open to new audiences. It seems hard to argue the continuity of history in the case of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. The fact that we still have the text at all is almost an accident of history,56 and Seneca’s version of the play displaced the original almost immediately and became the canonical text for the next two thousand years. Although the philhellenic Germans brought a revival of interest in Greek drama in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, it was only in the twentieth (at least in public theatrical production) that the figure of Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra came roaring back onto the scene. But then the fact that the persona described by one critic as “the most majestic female dissembler in the chronicles of myth and history” had to be almost actively suppressed as a threat to the boundaries of cultural propriety might suggest a more supple version of the Gadamerian assertion of continuity, which employs the metaphor of dialogue and incorporates the Hegelian negative.57 If we track her strange reception history we will have a rich example of this more supple version.58 Edith Hall makes the argument that the cultural preference for Seneca’s much tamer heroine is a testimony to the continuing presence of Aeschylus’ iconic invention: “Reaction against an archetype can reflect an even stronger form of influence than direct imitation.”59 The Aeschylean version was clearly

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not unknown—references to it can be found throughout the long period of its exile. In general we can assume the greater the threat, the greater the effort of suppression, and the threat Clytemnestra posed struck at the heart of male cultural hegemony: “[Clytemnestra] represents a challenge to patriarchy unparalleled in Greek tragedy, even by Medea, who does not aspire to political power. From the middle of the nineteenth century, social theorists already recognized that nothing less than the violent subversion of rule by men is at stake in Aeschylus’ Argos.”60 So we can think about the presence of the Aeschylean Clytemnestra as the shadow-negative of her more palatable stand-in, a woman more sex-obsessed than androgynous, more easily contained within the topology of irrational gender behavior. This present absence presses against representations of Clytemnestra over time in different ways, reflecting the needs and biases of the times. The Christian poem Orestis Trageodia of the late fifth century AD follows the Senecan reading of Clytemnestra, as does James Thomsons’s influential play Agamemnon (1738) over a thousand years later. But the former looks toward the imperial Roman version of Clytemnestra as a character operating solely within the moral economy of sexual fidelity, whereas the latter, emerging out of the context of struggles for national identity, places sexual politics within the ambit of political intrigue.61 In Racine’s play Iphigénie (1674), which is more indebted to Euripides than Aeschylus, the dramatic focus is displaced to the moment of Agamemnon’s decision, and Clytemnestra’s reaction is confined to the initial traumatic moment of discovery, so we do not see the sublime transformation wrought by time. Clytemnestra is a wholly conventional figure within the moral economy of a patriarchal aristocracy, a mother and wife expressing lacerated pain and impotent rage. Her anguish is internalized: “Must I so often die while still alive?” (line 1673), and her threats are empty: “Where shall I find a victim for my wrath?” (line 1682).62 Agamemnon’s initial assessment of the fallout says it all: “This fury was the least I could expect” (line 1317). Racine’s play Bazajet, liberated from convention by an exotic setting in a fabulous Turkish court of the imagination, introduces a female character (Roxanne) closer in her power and independence to Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra. In a palace intrigue without redeeming characters, the Sultaness is ruthless, scheming, manipulative, and ambitious; with a towering assurance she dominates the field, and although captive to a debilitating obsession in a web of infatuations, she arranges for the death of her beloved when it comes to survival. Severed from humanity in this amoral universe, her sublime assurance and cold calculation rises above the field, and in this splendid isolation she resembles her ancient sisters, Clytemnestra and Media. But in the

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last scene Racine was killed off by a servant of the Sultan, who himself has never appeared in the play, so that this lurking evidence of his power is all the more frightening, and the order of male privilege is restored. That Racine must pull back just at the end testifies to the power of gender prohibitions. Perhaps, it was only fortuitous that Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra escaped this constraint because of the fragmentation of the trilogy, but the historical fact is that her power was let loose. A critic will say something similar about William Mackpeace Thackeray’s Becky Sharp, who not coincidentally plays Clytemnestra in Vanity Fair: “Thackery, the Victorian gentleman, may tone down her rebellion by ambiguous adverbs and a scandalized titter, but the energy he has put into her is more profound than his morals or his philosophy and she sweeps him along.”63 Clytemnestra rattled around in the basement of the Western imagination for centuries, and eventually escaped its confinement, but even in its suppression it served as a limit-case of the moral imagination.

The way diffusion works Briefly I am going to sketch out the cultural environment in which Thackeray’s satirical allusion to Clytemnestra occurs as an illustration of the process of cultural diffusion that lies behind Gadamer’s theory of social understanding. For this I rely on Hall and Macintosh’s exceptional work of historical scholarship, Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre: 1660–1914. By a series of subtle adjustments and initial compromises, the transgressive female heroine of Greek tragedy finds its way slowly back into the literary canon in the period leading up to the so-called New Woman of fin de siècle British society.64 The reappearance of Greek drama as a whole waited upon the various impulses of German philhellenism to infect British high culture. While public performance of ancient Greek plays did not gain steam fully until the 1880s, school performances began much earlier. From the time of the Renaissance, recitation of ancient texts, as distinct from performance, was a common pedagogy, initially of Latin comedies and then by the eighteenth century of Greek tragedies. Out of this practice developed school-sponsored public performances in Britain by the early nineteenth century.65 In 1845, there occurred a seismic shift in the reception history of Greek tragedy with the English-language production of Antigone. Regarding the impact of this Covent Garden Antigone, Hall and Macintosh judge that it is difficult “to overestimate its subterranean impact on the social vision” of the British literary scene, since

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it brought Greek tragedy “into the forefront of the Victorian psyche” where it remained for over half a century (331–2). Antigone had not been performed in Great Britain for over two centuries. Partly this is because the French dramatists who served as the model for serious drama to the British public had never adapted the Sophoclean story. So it was Goethe, Schlegel, and Tieck who promoted Sophocles as the classical ideal of Greek drama, and Mendelssohn wrote music for the choral odes to the Antigone, which was performed in Potsdam in 1841, and then carried to London in a Covent Garden production in English translation, who fostered this link. It is perhaps no surprise that the more accessible Sophoclean drama should take fire prior to the dense, archaic Aeschylean verse. The character of Antigone was also better attuned to the sensibilities of a Victorian audience: “She offered the early Victorians the possibility of reconciling maidenly Christian piety with brutal pagan mythology” (329). Her demonstration of piety, filial duty, and virtuous self-sacrifice matched the Victorian ideal of womanhood despite her political challenge to male hegemony. Her heroic victimhood as an individual against the system resonated with growing antagonism toward the cost of colonial empire and the grinding, soulless machinery of the industrial revolution supporting it. Another vibrant tradition with which the sudden popularity of Greek theater productions collided was that of burlesque theater. A pretentious New York production of Antigone in 1845 unintentionally revealed an unsuspected potential of Greek tragic drama for the modern moment, the possibility of self-parody, and burlesque took up the themes of Greek drama with great success. One of the early burlesque send-ups that set the tone was James Robinson Planché’s The Golden Fleece, or, Jason in Colchis and Medea in Corinth in 1845.66 The Golden Fleece wove together elements of the Medea story into a broad parody of Greek theatrical conventions and the highbrow pretensions that had been so much on display in the Covent Garden Antigone. So burlesque was itself a self-reflexive doubled interpretive exercise that engaged its audiences in an alien performance practice and its reception history, a hermeneutic tour de force. Satire acts as a mechanism for approaching thematically what a public is not yet fully ready to encounter in earnest self-reflection, and this is a pattern we see repeated often during this period. Exaggerating the high emotion and formal solemnity, Greek burlesque was a theater of excess that featured a 59-voice male Chorus, outlandish costuming, over-the-top verbosity (“polysyllabic loquacity”), and an elaborate stage machinery that included “Medea rising ex machina from Corinth in a chariot ‘drawn by two Fiery Dragons amidst the clouds.’”67 Folded into this ancient framework were allusions to hotly contested

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current issues such as divorce legislation, and custody rights as targets of ridicule and critique (435). Burlesque humor requires familiarity with the conventions of the genre, so even this lowbrow burlesque theatre lead to a broadening of the cultural reach of Greek tragedy. Burlesque served as a mechanism for exposing the classical idioms into classes of British society that otherwise would have had no contact.68 Although not directly confrontational in its ideological positioning, the classic burlesque drew audiences from across the class spectrum, and the shows waded into complex cultural dialogues: The subversiveness of the genre . . . was expressed more by its tone and stance than by its explicit content. To burlesque any ‘classic’ text is of course slightly subversive. But to travesty the very content of the education which divided the classes and fostered the elite, in front of a distinctively cross-class audience, was a complex procedure of some ideological potency. (374)

The proliferation and success of the genre of classical burlesque, with many new productions added each year, occurred in inverse proportion to the production of the original stage plays, which were quite rare during the middle of the nineteenth century. The genre developed its own rich repertoire of conventions, of song and spectacle, of comedic sensibility and social commentary. In all these ways—iconic augmentation, exposure of the unsaid, cultural adaptation, penetration, and fusion, the burlesque served as an instrument simultaneously of distancing reflection and integration.

Under cover of satire69 A notable anticipation of this public return was Thackeray’s portrayal of Becky Sharp as Clytemnestra in Vanity Fair published in 1848, during the same period as the classical burlesque theater in Britain. Her striking reemergence as burlesque was perhaps the way she could present herself after such a long sleep of cultural repression. Of all the later visitations of the figure of Clytemnestra in the reception history this is still perhaps the strangest, a hallucinatory refraction of that tragic character, meaning, and effect in the person of Sharp, one of the great parodic creations of Victorian fiction. For the reasons noted, Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra had wandered in a cultural penumbra like the shades of the pagan dead, and so her irruption onto the public stage in this outrageous gesture of comic exposure, however brief, is like a lighting flash that illuminates all that

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Clytemnestra evokes against the dark lining of a repressive social propriety. Even in this parodic semblance her threat flashes forth as a kind of liminal image of subconscious anxiety. Thackeray famously commented that “the unwritten part of books . . . would be the most interesting,” and his deviously coded allusion to a perverse social structure suggests an unwritten conversation that was as relevant as ever after two thousand years. Although the appearance of the figure of Clytemnestra in Thackeray’s novel is hardly more than an allusion—5 or 6 paragraphs in an 800-page novel—it has had an outsized impact on critical commentary. In fact there is something eerie about its lingering effect, as though Becky’s perspicacious dumb show manages surreptitiously—under the disguise of a comic diversion—to lift the veil of hypocrisy of her social set, and, at a deeper level, to concentrate the novel’s searing indictment of its social world into an ineradicable symbol. It is also a revealing illustration of the ramified and refracted effect of a distant text—the Agamemnon—hallucinated under the pressure of altered cultural circumstance, but in some ways also energized and augmented by the distance. A barefaced effrontery that acts as a kind of comic shield (its very eccentricity constructs a space of social tolerance, like the court jester to the king) allows the aspiring orphan Becky to muscle her way into the high society of her time, to don the role of reigning socialite, and entertain her new circle with lavish dinner parties and entertainments. The social highpoint of these decadent affairs is an elaborately staged game of charades in the gaudy custom of the time that mimics sensational fictional-historical events as a set-piece for the entertainment of the party guests. The charade serves Thackeray well as a fictional device. His discursive idiom is already a collecting medium of Western cultural references, and the party charade is a kind of collecting magnet of social memes. The scenes of Becky’s amateur production move quickly from a tale of slave-merchants with Sultans and harems, a musical Egyptian caravan with a disembodied speaking head, to a sensational incident of British maritime history. So the selection of Agamemnon’s murder from out of the entire classical canon is itself a commentary, and the pantomime isolates the precise feature that marked Aeschylus’ version of the Agamemnon for suppression—Clytemnestra’s enthusiastic consummation of the deed for which her male partner Aegisthus lacked the mettle to pull off. Becky’s masquerade disguises a searing social indictment as an evening’s entertainment, relying on the self-aggrandizing obtuseness of its audience to prevent its discovery. Thackeray’s satirical method must have performed a similar distraction strategy for a reading public in the time of Queen Victoria, a public who was not yet ready to hear the unadulterated critical version.70 I am

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suggesting that this was the way Clytemnestra’s subversive cultural threat could sneak back into the cultural conversation in the seemingly implacable hegemonic circumstance. Becky’s use of charades, “a mode of verbal double-dealing that involve and often implicates the actors or spectators,” echoes Clytemnestra’s deceptive exploitation of the forms of welcome, and the people around her, to orchestrate the drama of her vengeance (629). The capaciousness of Thackeray’s prose diffuses a vision that is, in the view of some critics, a stinging condemnation of “a morally sick civilization,” a “pervasive cultural pathology.”71 Becky’s mime both hides and channels “the terrible project of Clytemnestra to revenge herself against a power both envied and resented.”72 That Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra is returned to the general discourse through comedic irony only reinforces the possibility that she is otherwise too hot to handle, and that Thackeray treated her, as he did the danger of his own material, in the one way that the taboo subject can break to the surface: “It is part of the controlling conceit of Thackeray’s novel to present history as an extended sequence of performances (‘puppet shows’) enacting a moral so dark that to illuminate it fully might be politically or spiritually perilous” (828). A charade is, as DiBattista points out, opaque by design: They attempt to communicate a hidden meaning, usually symbolized by a single word [Clytemnestra] that assumes fetishistic properties because its meaning and form are shrouded in an often guilty secrecy. In charades the word is divided into its constituent sounds—the words within the word—and each opponent is dramatized. The audience, reader, or spectator must then recombine these “floating signifiers” to discover the whole word, whose original and primary significance is again dramatized at the end of the charade in the tableau of the Whole. (828)

Buried like a figure in the carpet, the repressed symbol is the ultimate hermeneutic prize: “[T]he secret word representing the Whole denominates not only a sum greater than its constituent parts but the exact reverse of those parts” (829). Becky’s invocation taps into and borrows something of its dark power. DiBattista maintains “that beneath England’s treatment of women .  .  . abides an unregenerate barbarity,” and that the coupling of the two characters in one image, Becky and Clytemnestra, effects a subtle and “damaging penetration into the dark and tumultuous instincts underlying the civilized structures of sexual conduct and the social institution of marriage” (830, 829). Van Ghent finds the connection even deeper: “The depths which are suggested . . . are the depths of Greek tragedy and, still further back, of Freud’s

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dim, sub-human, imagined ‘primitive horde.’” The spectral presence of the Furies is not too far beneath the surface of Thackeray’s vision, “a deliberately concealed evil, an ignored social danger, or an obscure eternal menace of private horror” (DiBattista 829). Thackeray’s mimetic repetition of Clytemnestra’s act in Becky’s portrayal of a secret malice is a repetition that is intended to have its primary ironical effects in the reading audience rather than the characters in the story: “Characters thus assume roles in a play whose meaning is made transparent through them but is not necessarily made transparent to them” (829). If DiBattista is right that in “her two appearances as the murderous queen, Becky becomes pure icon, an unspeakable and speechless image of demonic womanhood,” we have to conclude that the potency of Clytemnestra’s iconicity is hardly diminished over the millennia, innervated and amplified in its contact with new situations like a radio signal at a booster station (827). Repetition for hermeneutics is not repetition in the strict sense, but appropriation and application. Gadamer appropriated the term repetition from Kierkegaard, Hegel, and Heidegger to the conceptual nexus he was developing in his mimetic theory of recognition in Truth and Method, collapsing the Platonic idea with this newer more Hegelian and Nietzschean concept, wedding a temporal mode of retrieval with the anticipatory ontology of repetition forward.73 This combination is so pivotal for Gadamer that, as John Caputo asserts, “everything in hermeneutics turns on its possibility.”74 Kierkegaard isolates the kernel of the idea of repetition initially as a Christian variation of Platonic recognition, exploiting the interpretive practice of typology as prefiguration: “[F]or what is recollected has been, is repeated backwards, whereas repetition properly so called is recollected forwards.”75 The potentiation of the Sache is something given to history as it unfolds. Aeschylus gave us Clytemnestra, a figure whose power he himself perhaps only dimly intuited, but the work—the representation of her action—is a space within which our understanding of her can grow.76 If Clytemnestra had to appear veiled by a filter of burlesque at mid-century, feminist winds began to alter the reception climate for Aeschylus in the last half of the nineteenth century. His Clytemnestra began to make her appearance in the last half of the nineteenth century in a variety of ways. In 1865, the prominent women’s rights activist Anna Stanwick translated and published the Oresteia. In 1886, the Ladies’ Department at King’s College, London put on George Warr’s abridged version of the trilogy, a production that reflected the emancipationist context of the time.77 These first appearances occurred alongside other theatrical representations of strong, complex, and transgressive

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women—Ibsen’s A Doll’s House was produced in 1879 and Hedda Gabler in 1891. Clytemnestra also began to appear in prominent paintings of the time, suggesting that her image was now percolating up into the cultural imagination, and the transgressive, emancipatory possibilities of the Aeschylean character were finding their audience.

Turning Clytemnestra inward: Virginia Woolf ’s notebook As a work radiates out from its origins, its Verwandlung is simultaneously more concentrated and more oblique; on the one hand, brought within the careful analysis, conservation, and canonization of the historical impulse, and on the other hand, subject to an insensible uptake, diffusion, and sedimentation over the general culture. Gadamer saw the former impulse as secondary to the living dialogue that culture is, and so the inventional appropriation of artistic work becomes central to his theory. The example of classical music is instructive here. From the distance of time we argue furiously over the slightest variances in the Urtexts of the canonized classical composers from Bach to Chopin, but in their own time these musicians and their audiences privileged their improvisational skills, and their scores were regarded as the foundation for further improvisation. Gadamer did not draw out fully the consequences of this privilege, but we can begin to imagine its implications. He certainly would not have claimed that the scholarly impulse has mainly a deadening effect, only that it is a secondary activity. On the other hand his thinking on the nature of the interpretive dialogue between text and audience became absorbed in working out the interaction of freedom and judgment, and he left open the broader question of a work’s effect resident in the hermeneutic principle of Wirkungsgeschichte. If, as Gadamer maintains, “Art demands interpretation because of its inexhaustible ambiguity,” if it has “an indeterminate dimension of possible fulfillments,” and in every case “is fulfilled in a unique intuitive fashion that cannot be communicated to others,” then should we not follow its resonance as far as it extends?78 Gadamer’s understanding of the enigma of recognition carries this implication: “For what is recognition? It does not mean simply seeing something that we have already seen before. . . . It is part of the process of recognition that we see things in terms of what is permanent and essential in them” (RB 99). But what is essential is something that grows rich with repetition. So if Becky Sharp’s satirical performance of Clytemnestra’s act is a truer recognition and closer to the meaning of Aeschylus’ text than the more faithful

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theatrical staging of the Agamemnon at King’s college, we can track the ramifying effects of Aeschylus’ work in its widening circles of appropriation as it resonates in the cultures it encounters, and the standard of recognition is not how faithful these events are to the Urtext but how true they are to the truth unleashed by the encounter. We can test the limits of this understanding of recognition by following progressively more distant echoes of the Aeschylean vision as it ripples outward. Virginia Woolf noted the paradox of ancient Greek society in which “a respectable woman could hardly show her face alone in the street, and yet on the stage woman equals or surpasses man.”79 Woolf showed a special devotion to Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, and to Clytemnestra in particular: “It is partly, too, that we know in the same way that Clytemnestra is no unmitigated villainess . . . no murderess, violent and unredeemed.”80 Woolf attributes this power instead to the maternal instinct—her translation of the Greek: “there is a strange power in motherhood.” Although we could explore productively Woolf ’s interest in the Agamemnon as an instance of the changing receptivity to Clytemnestra during this emancipatory moment, I would like to track another aspect of Woolf ’s reading that illustrates an equally momentous issue for a hermeneutics of reception. For a period in her forties Woolf devoted herself to learning Greek, and she chose this text in particular as the focus for her studies. Her encounter with Aeschylus is preserved in a remarkable notebook that contains a facing-page translation of the Agamemnon, “an extraordinary object to behold, with its hand-word cover and yellowed pages covered in Woolf ’s distinctive handwriting, part manuscript and part collage.”81 Woolf ’s reading of the Agamemnon is therefore a kind of creative performance, but one should also note the radically different relation she assumes to the work; not as a script mediate to a public presentation, but as a text for a reading experience as an end in itself. The state-sponsored ritual of a public festival is transformed into a private moment for an individual sitting by a window. At first blush Woolf seems to treat this alteration as the most natural thing, as a fitting end for the text, a measure of the deep cultural changes that had transpired in the two millennia in which an oral culture had given way to a literary one, a change intensified even more in this moment of high modernism that indulged the privacy of personal experience and reflection. In Woolf ’s world, play-going had not the civic and religious significance as it did for the Athenian audience, but conversely the little ritual of the notebook, its meticulous construction and observance, had something of the same religious aura; the intimacy of

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this personal experience, its rhythms, its closeness, its physicality, and its individuality: It is, indeed, an atmosphere, not only soft and fine, but rich, too, with more than one can grasp at any single reading. / So that, if at last I shut the book, it was only that my mind was sated, not the treasure exhausted. Moreover, what with reading and ceasing to read, taking a few steps this way and then pausing to look at the view, that same view has lost its colours, and the yellow page was almost too dim to decipher. So the book must be stood in its place, to deepen the brown line of shadow which the folios made on the wall. The books gently swelled neath my hand as I drew it across them in the dark.82

Woolf does at a certain point contrast “the cloistered disciplinarian mortifying himself in solitude” with “the well-sunned nature, the man who practices the art of living to the best advantage,” but not to draw out the hermeneutic implications of this difference.83 At another level, this private turn is less a turning inward than an expression of the politics of culture and Woolf ’s position within the sexual economy of her tribe.84 In the first place, she was forever catching up to the elusive dream of mastering Greek, a goal she never achieved.85 She was denied the educational opportunities of her male peers who began to recite Greek in school at an early age. Leonard Woolf and his male circle had learned Greek at Cambridge, and could have performed it for the stage, since at the time Greek plays were performed regularly at university in the original.86 Woolf began learning Greek in the Ladies’ Department of King’s College, and even there her father put constraints on her learning program owing to “concerns for her health.”87 As a result she struggled for two decades to make up for the slow start. Not only foreign languages, but the division between oral training and composition remained gendered in the educational system. Rhetoric as a school subject had immemorially emphasized regular public speaking training for the men and the domestic art of letter writing for the women. So the turn to the text had also this political dimension that must have gone very deep into Woolf ’s experience with Greek. Having said this, the oral culture of the Greeks as a form of social organization had long given way to a culture of print, and what Woolf calls the experience of reading Greek reflected also both long-standing and recent transformations in the patterns of social organization that redefined the relation of the social and the individual. What is this new subjective relationship to a text that was once exclusively a playbook for a troop, a performance script for a public event? What cultural shifts does this reversal signify?

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Interestingly, the history of the shift is actually inscribed into the history of modern hermeneutics itself, which was essentially a response to the Guttenberg revolution, the wider availability of written texts, the shift from an oral to a writing culture, the changes in education corresponding to the growing individualism of bourgeois economies, the increasing strangeness of scripture to a modern sensibility, and so on. When the humanist Melanchthon came to work under Luther, he adopted the traditional rhetorical curriculum of speech invention and production to a reading curriculum for the protestant priests in training under his tutelage, who in turn would instruct their parishioners in how to be faithful readers of their own bibles. The more personal relationship of the person of faith (the “universal priesthood of believers”) to the scriptures constituted the new more private orientation to an interpretive practice. So Woolf, in her gentle (genteel) secular ritual, manifests the tail end of a great revolution that still has us in its thrall, this now fraught relation of the public and the private that the citizens of Athens would have found strange. Woolf was drawn toward Aeschylus in particular for the eccentricity of his Greek style, an attribute which she regarded positively: “[I]n the obscurity of the language lies its dramatic merit.”88 She felt its ambiguity to be intrinsic to its meaning: For words, when opposed to such a blast of meaning, must give out, must be blown astray, and only by collecting in companies convey the meaning which each one separately is too weak to express.89 Connecting them in a rapid flight of the mind we know instantly and instinctively what they mean, but could not decant that meaning afresh into any other words. There is an ambiguity which is the mark of the highest poetry; we cannot know exactly what it means.

Aeschylean verse is formally dense and ornate, straining in its packed figurations at the limits of sense, and this dark potency provided a model for Woolf ’s own creative aims, a prose in which sound and sense were less and less tied to conventional reference. Indeed the boundaries between her encounter with Greek, her notebook, and her own fictional work start to fray: Woolf wrote her “Greek chapter” and Mrs. Dalloway “side by side,” sometimes writing “fiction before lunch & then essays after tea” (D II:310). Since she shuttled back and forth between the novel and her Greek studies, it is not surprising that “On Not Knowing Greek” cleared the way for an altogether larger consideration in Mrs. Dalloway of the significance of the Greeks in postwar British society.90

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Of course one wonders the extent to which this effect was created as much by Woolf ’s distance from the ancient tongue itself, but in a way that is also a legitimate feature of her encounter, since the charm of that distance was real for her, and it translated into the stylistic effects of her own prose. Of these issues Woolf was acutely aware: For it is vain and foolish to talk of knowing Greek, since in our ignorance we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys, since we do not know how the words sounded, or where precisely we ought to laugh, or how the actors acted, and between this foreign people and ourselves there is not only difference of race and tongue but a tremendous reach of tradition. All the more strange, then, is it that we should wish to know Greek, try to know Greek, feel for ever drawn back to Greek, and be for ever making up some notion of the meaning of Greek, though from what incongruous odds and ends, with what slight resemblance to the real meaning of Greek, who shall say?91

What this question implies, though, is that the strangeness of the encounter does not disqualify it, and here she is back firmly on hermeneutic ground. The modesty that she displays in recognizing the limitations of her reading position constitutes what Gadamer means by Wirkungsgeschichte, but this awareness of distance is what allows a genuine communication to take place.92 In her rhetorical question she pinpoints the Zug, the compelling force of the text in drawing us back toward it, despite the incongruity of the encounter, and she suggests that something survives the veil of ignorance that is as much in the audience as in the text.

The literalization of a simile In following out further the reverberations of our mythical figuration, I now want to bring forward Katherine Anne Porter’s participation in the reception dialogue with Clytemnestra. Porter comes at this conversation from an odd angle. A literary generation after Woolf, her fictional exploration of the theme of gender seems altogether more inwardly troubled, as though she had inherited Clytemnestra’s inescapable predicament. The social scene depicted in her short story “The Grave,” the text I am going to focus on, echoes Clytemnestra’s ironic position, a “social arrangement in which women are the dominant figures, controlling their own lives and, in varying capacities, exerting control in their relationships with others,” but as a response to the dysfunction which

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is rectified by their sacrifice after the fact.93 The dominant figure in the tale, Miranda, is a child discovering how she is embedded in a conventional ecology of gendered relations. Porter herself was nurtured in a traditionally coded social world in which, as she herself described it, “women artists are monstrosities,” so her own decision to become a writer echoes Miranda’s coming to terms with this fate.94 Within its own narrative structure the story, which is filled with recapitulations, repeats the predicament at the heart of Clytemnestra’s tragedy, “the seemingly inevitable movement from nurturing and fulfillment to violence and loss.”95 This nexus between childbearing and death, as Mary Titus points out, is worked out in a series of symbolic echoes that include a wedding ring found in a grave and a mother’s body as a grave. In the course of the tale Miranda is memorably disabused of an innocence she had perhaps never really had: “Having seen, she felt at once as if she had known all along.”96 Her dancing in the grave of a family member, her “shocked delight” in the spectacle of the infant deaths, her repeated suppression of a dangerous memory, have to do not with personal character but with a kind of social destiny and inextricable implication. Although the story has an internally recursive structure, “according to which everything happens both repetitively and progressively, and in which events are returned to again and again until their proper meaning has finally been understood,”97 it is itself, as a fable, a conscious repetition of Clytemnestra’s predicament marked by an intertextual recapitulation of a dominant symbol. The extraordinary moment of Miranda’s and Paul’s discovery of the content of the rabbit’s womb awakens in all its narrative force and ambiguity the great perturbations of ensnarement in the terrible knowledge of destiny, gender, death, and filiation. The image of the rabbit’s womb in the Agamemnon is itself a famous simile that has an organizing function in the symbolic structure of the play. To figure the ruthless pillage and extermination of the Trojans by the Argive host, the Chorus used an animal simile that itself hearkens back intertextually to the Iliad. Agamemnon and Menelaus were like eagles who “watched by all, tore a hare, ripe, bursting with young unborn yet” (lines 118–20).98 It is a tremendous image that, as many commentators have explicated, works on many different narrative and symbolic levels to advance the design of the play.99 The simile is literalized in Porter’s twentieth-century rural American fiction. Transposed to the modest discursive vernacular of the Southern short-story genre, Porter tells the story of two rural children brought up in the ways of scavenging and hunting who accidentally bag a pregnant mother hare. They are

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normally both complacent about the death of animals, lacking any aversion to the rituals of killing and skinning, but they are “amazed” by this discovery: Very carefully he slit the thin flesh from the center ribs to the flanks, and a scarlet bag appeared. He slit again and pulled the bag open, and there lay a bundle of tiny rabbits, each wrapped in a thin scarlet veil. The brother pulled these off and there they were, dark gray, their sleek wet down lying in minute even ripples, like a baby’s head just washed, their unbelievably small delicate ears folded close, their little blind faces almost featureless.100

Miranda has “a kind of shocked delight in the wonderful little creatures for their own sakes, they were so pretty. She touched one of them ever so carefully, ‘Ah, there’s blood running over them.’” No guilt or moral censure is expressed, and the event is buried and forgotten, until almost 20 years later an innocent sight jolts the memory out for the girl and “the dreadful vision” arises before her. But just as quickly it is replaced by another memory, suppressed for a second time. The story details the callous normalcy and clinical brutality resident in the normative behaviors of tribal custom, a domestication of violence that finds naïve expression in this particular incident, and because Miranda and Paul are children, unable to absorb or conceptualize its dissonance, it is experienced in a kind of shocked delight, a conflicted response in the face of the incomprehensible. Because they are unable to resolve it, it buries itself, and the memory only escapes its suppression momentarily, decades later, as such memories often do. In the Agamemnon there is no such trucking with the subconscious. The Chorus extends the horrific simile in a fulsome commentary: “Artemis the undefiled is angered with pity at the flying hounds of her father eating the unborn young in the hare and the shivering mother. She is sick at the eagles’ feasting. Sing sorrow, sorrow” (lines 133–6). Miranda and Paul are several layers removed from all of this, and their story, focused instead on a slender incident of youthful thoughtlessness, actuates only the slightest tremor of that legacy. Porter has isolated from among the multiplying levels of the Aeschylean symbolism— political, personal, moral, religious, generational—the single theme of incidental cruelty, how much it is of the order of things, how it intrudes and traumatizes or is suppressed and transformed. Her account is bravely elliptical, neither morally cynical nor hopeful; it creates its own reverberant space in its refusal to indulge the outrage of the Chorus, oddly closer to Homer’s divine indifference to human indifference, but marking its own distance in other ways. Porter’s story is of course an act of reading, not just of writing. Gadamer expanded Heidegger’s philological lesson on the German word for reading

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(lesen) which rings with the language of harvesting—Zusammenlesen (collect), Auflesen (pick), Auslesen (cull), Verlesen (sort)—in order to analogize the act of reading with the eternal rhythms of the land in the cycles of cultivation, nourishment, growth, and sustenance.101 Intertextual reverberance is therefore circular. For instance, Porter’s appropriation at first reliteralizes the simile. There is no “like” here; a predator hunts down a pregnant hare. But then, congruent with Gadamer’s belief in “the fundamental metaphoricity of language,” the literal act becomes transformed into something figurative. The inability of the grown woman to hold in her mind for more than a few seconds the terrible possibility of her own cruelty takes us right back to Agamemnon’s predicament on the island of Aulis. Clytemnestra’s interpretation of his terrible choice was only one possible response. So we play this trauma out in our own stories perpetually. Finally, we may note the lack of a direct reference to the Agamemnon in the Porter story. The inspiration is in the truest sense allusive, and the power of the reference is increased by the indirection, in the way that when a person doesn’t speak openly of something they are clearly referencing, the absence is notable, an absent presence. There is a terrible silence all through the story of “The Grave.” For Amanda, procreation and the womb probably always touched some amorphous relation to the suppressed memory. Perhaps a learned silence, like the silence of the allusion, of learning to speak in allusions when violence and childbirth are so intimately woven. The attenuated relationship between the Agamemnon and “The Grave” begins to intimate the kind of spread that I want to suggest exists in the diffusion of a work in the Diltheyan universe of interacting webs of meaning.

To the stage In the United States, the appearance of Clytemnestra on the theater scene was delayed far longer than in Britain. To be sure, Greek theater itself in the United States arrived not long after its appearance in Great Britain. An Oedipus in classical Greek was performed at Harvard in 1881, and then in 1882 in English translation on a commercial stage in New York.102 The history of noncommercial performances of Greek drama in the United States has yet to be written, and it is primarily for the commercial stage that records have been easily accessible. So we know that the Choephoroi and Eumenides were performed in ancient Greek in 1961 by the Piraikon Theatron at the City Center in New York, but the Agamemnon was left off the schedule. It was only in 1966, according to Karelisa

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Hartigan, that the first commercial theater production of the complete Oresteia trilogy was performed in English translation.103 I happened to have attended this production myself as a child. The Ypsilanti Greek Theatre staged the drama outdoors in a theater-in-the-round stadium with Dame Judith Anderson as Clytemnestra.104 It is not surprising of course that Clytemnestra should command center stage at this point in American history, when the narrative shackles that had held her down for so long could be removed. Likewise, academic scholarship turned its attention avidly to the long suppressed interpretive possibilities of Clytemnestra’s iconic status. The touchstone essay came in 1978 with Froma Zeitlin’s critique of the Oresteia.105 Zeitlin reads the trilogy as a cultural charter of Greek sexual politics that simultaneously reinforced its gynococentric mythology and reinforced an architecture of male hegemonic control: “The Oresteia .  .  . gives voice and form to the social and political ideology of the period at the same time as it actively shapes the collective fantasies of its audience and its own authoritative vision.”106 Zeitlin appropriates a phrase from Malinowski to describe how the plays act culturally as “a pragmatic charter” that even in their broader historical reception has contributed to the formation of social custom and perspective.107 Zeitlin sees Clytemnestra’s excess of retributive justice, in the narrative logic of trilogy, as an expression of the hysterical female disciplined in the end by the institutional intervention of the Athenian state. This denouement reaches a final equilibrium in the reassertion of male hegemony: “Clytemnestra, the female principle, in the first play is a shrewd intelligent rebel against the masculine regime, but by the last play, through her representatives, the Erinyes, female is now allied with the  archaic, primitive and regressive.”108 In Zeitlin’s judgment the Oresteia’s narrative of hegemonic order “provides the decisive model for the future legitimation of this attitude in Western thought” (151). But we should note that by making us conscious of the play’s cultural function, Zeitlin as critic is intervening in its legitimation by preserving the continuity of the text as partner in a conversation. We begin to see Clytemnestra with a kind of doubled vision, our own consciousness of the history of effects. By a cultural trick of fate, the Agamemnon rises through this ideological scrim to become a “gynococentric document” of a different kind, when the power of the image escapes its parochial cultural function and works instead in service of a feminist critique, and even more generally as a temporary if ultimately tragic subversion of hegemony.109 It does not change its semiotic value as a lesson in the vehemence of retribution, but its symbolic function is recirculated in the historical shifts of cultural discourse.

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Dark radiance Having traced the reverberations of Clytemnestra as an iconic figure and cultural trope this far, I want to push the idea of effect an additional level in order to test the outer limits of Gadamer’s theory. The improvisation of the organist which Gadamer writes about in “The Relevance of the Beautiful” is something like the boundary he explicitly recognizes for the interpretive play of the work, because the criterion of interpretation is bound to the expectation of recognizability.110 A jazz improviser has the same responsibility to speak to the initial theme to which it must return for the coda. The recapitulation of the theme will contain the memory of all that has transpired in the interim, so its repetition will be enriched by all that has transpired. What Gadamer calls “something like a hermeneutic identity” therefore “is bound up with variation and difference,” but is limited by what makes that difference possible (25). Gadamer establishes this limit very clearly, even though he uses a positive construction to describe it: “Every work leaves the person who responds to it a certain leeway, a space to be filled in by himself ” (26). The improvisatory contribution is circumscribed by what we have called, if metaphorically, the fixed text, which acts as a fixed pole of gravitation: “There is constant cooperative activity here. And obviously, it is precisely the identity of the work that invites us to this activity. The activity is not arbitrary, but directed, and all possible realizations are drawn into a specific schema” (27). The term “schema” with its Kantian resonance, and the term “direction” with its Heideggerian resonance, is suitably vague for Gadamer’s purposes. Hence my effort now is to push my reception history one step too far so as to test and understand these outer limits. To do this I will focus on a contemporary work lacking that “constant cooperative activity” with the original text and ask if it still sits within the ambit of Gadamer’s poetics, and test whether, in the Diltheyan universe of reciprocal effects, Clytemnestra is reverberant in the cultural imagination even in those places where she is lost to cultural memory. Is the oblique resonance of the butterfly effect, rather than the rebound effect, part of the whole (die Ganze) that feeds back into the hermeneutic of the work? Might we be still living “inside” the image of Clytemnestra, are being born still in her monstrous shadow? In early twentieth-century popular cinema, the “violent woman,” according to Hilary Neroni, seems to “have sprung into existence as if shot out of a cannon, taking the cinema-going public completely by surprise.”111 The Serial Queen Melodrama of the 1910s and 1920s featured hard-bitten women investigators

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who resorted to violence to conquer their enemies. Likewise film noir of the 1930s and 1940s featured cynical, ruthless, and violent women who got their way at any cost. The type emerged again in blaxploitation and horror movies of the 1970s and 1980s, as well as in iconoclastic films such as Alphaville (1967) and THX 1138 (1971).112 Neroni maps these iconic irruptions onto periods of cultural instability and ideological crisis: “Ideology works to produce clear gender distinctions in order to provide stable symbolic identities for both male and female subjects. Without this kind coherence, identity loses its guarantees. . . . [P]opular culture often responds by producing cultural images that work through, contain, or expose, this destabilization.”113 This ideological breakdown effect certainly echoes the period of high Greek tragedy that produced Clytemnestra and Medea.114 Post-civil rights feminism continued to reverberate through popular culture in this way with movies such as Thelma and Louise (1991) and Girlfight (2000), but one of these irruptions turned into a profitable franchise of enormous popularity on the strength of a character who became something of a pop culture icon—Sigourney Weaver’s Lt Ripley in the Alien series produced from 1979–97.115 Her striking androgyny and the complex gender symbolism of the alien world she “penetrates” caused a stir that spilled over the boundaries of entertainment into the general culture. Despite the absence of direct reference or allusion, it is striking the extent to which the alien creatures seems to occupy the same universe as those of the Greek plays.116 The symbolism that evolved in the movie series revolved increasingly around the archetype of the devouring mother, the monstrous female, the threat of the womb, the rape of the gods, and monstrous birth. Each of the films in the series played on archetypal descent myths symbolic of the repressed unconscious, the tropes of pollution, and human sacrifice. The creatures of the original artist’s conception (H. R. Geiger) resembled nothing so much as the Greek Furies.117 For the sake of comparison here is Aeschylus’ description of the gorgon-furies: “[T]hey are black and utterly repulsive, and they snore with breath that drives one back. From their eyes drips the foul ooze.”118 And here is Hesiod’s description of the Keres: [T]he dusky Fates, gnashing their white fangs, lowering, grim, bloody, and unapproachable, struggled for those who were falling, for they all were longing to drink dark blood. So soon as they caught a man overthrown or falling newly wounded, one of them would clasp her great claws about him, and his soul would go down to Hades to chilly Tartarus. And when they had satisfied their souls with human blood, they would cast that one behind them, and rush back

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again into the tumult and the fray. . . . And they all made a fierce fight over one poor wretch, glaring evilly at one another with furious eyes and fighting equally with claws and hands. By them stood Darkness of Death, mournful and fearful, pale, shrivelled, shrunk with hunger, swollen-kneed. Long nails tipped her hands, and she dribbled at the nose, and from her cheeks blood dripped down to the ground. She stood leering hideously, and much dust sodden with tears lay upon her shoulders.119

When Neustadt described the poetic atmosphere of the Oresteia “as thoroughly permeated by the daemonic” he might just as well have been describing Geiger’s vision: “Unformed and inconceivable and yet palpable in every material and psychic space, in primal poetry as the very atmosphere of waking and sleeping, acting and suffering.”120 By the fourth Alien installment, the parasitic relation of alien to human had developed into a far deeper codependence (Soldier: “Who are you?” Ripley: “I’m the monster’s mother.”), echoing the same demonic colonization of the human that Neustadt finds in the Agamemnon: “Still more inwardly does the human fuse with the daemonic until it is entirely possessed by that appetite, and the consciousness of the personal expires.”121 In the Eumenides, the Furies threaten to annihilate Orestes “by absorption into themselves,” uncannily like the propagation techniques of the aliens in Ripley’s nightmare.122 Marilyn Katz describes the spiritual universe of alien space in a way that feels very close to the discomfiting alienation of the tragic universe: “[T]he individual exists most fully as such in a state of radical alienation, detached from all social, familial, and cultural relationships. For it is only the individual fate to face with the loneliness of existence who is fully self-aware, who is capable that is, of taking himself or herself as the sole object of mental reflection.”123 This continuity in the texture of myths can work in both directions— Pasolini’s productions of Greek tragedy, in comparison with eighteenth-century translations of Greek drama, amplified the varieties of terror, the savagery and offensiveness of its imagery, the depths of its psychological menace, and indulged in its horrific detail. It seems likely that as a result we can know with more precision the monstrous underworld described in the parodos of the “The Libation Bearers”: Terror, the dream diviner of this house, belled clear, shuddered the skin, blew wrath from sleep, a cry in night’s obscure watches, a voice of fear deep in the house .  .  . under earth dead men held a grudge still and smoldered at their murderers. . . . Sunless and where men fear to walk / the mists huddle upon this

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house. . . . Through too much glut of blood drunk by our fostering ground / the vengeful gore is caked and hard, will not drain through. The deep-run carries away / the man of guilt. Swarming infection boils within.124

A hermeneutic temporality thus depicts an ebb and flow of access to the Aeschylean vision of horror, drenched in the idioms of nightmare horror, vile creatures, monstrous deformities, shadowy terror, and the insidious encroachment of the lower worlds. The fascination and horror of the monstrous female is deeply embedded in Geiger’s sinuous art, a baroque indulgence in the nightmare fantasies of sexual violence, perversion, and the elegance of evil. The visual syntax impressed into every element of the design, from the alien planet to the corporate vessel itself, is variously clitoral, vaginal, penile, slithering, wet, dark, devouring, penetrating, and rapacious. As this visual syntax is transposed into the scene, character and action of the films, sexual ambiguity is interlaced with narrative ambiguity; enemies, heroes, predators, and prey are commingled; and a thin overlay of social critique is impressed into the mise-en-scène. Despite the thinning of the aesthetic palette, there is something shared here with the uncomforting moral universe of the Agamemnon. Excepting Cassandra, the lead characters exhibit the same moral ambiguity, and yet the same undiminished authority and presence. Perhaps it is this unblinking barrenness of Aeschylus’ vision that endures for us while the sentimental versions of the tale fall away. The sequels to Alien did not sustain the integrity of vision of the original, but the hard nihilism of the first had a potency that overflowed into the iterations. As the franchise progressed from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, the improvised accretions of ideological messaging in the narratives reflected changing cultural mores as well as the compounded effect of the series itself, which became a kind of cultural phenomenon. Jeff Gould noted the resilient idea of the symbol as something that was able to absorb these accretions and modifications: “Thus the different stages of the Alien’s life cycle are capable of bearing essentially unrelated signification, united only in their common evocation of the organic.”125 In a major studio film franchise in which men are regularly being penetrated through every orifice, inseminated and brought to term, in which sexual hybridity is unremarked, and in which a woman’s leadership is the central organizing principle of the plot, gender becomes a deeply ambiguous signifier reflecting the agitation and confusion of its time. But as Janice Hocker Rushing and others point out, the encoding of the narrative is simultaneously and at different

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levels antipatriarchal and patriarchal, responding to the social recognition of emerging feminist norms while serving deeper phallocentric imperatives.126 This schizophrenic promotion/subversion dynamic seems to be less intentional than simply one of the side effects of a carelessly underdetermined symbolic structure. The series accrued its density of mythical tropes, Freudian signifiers and cultural subtexts as a commodifiable product for its franchise identity at the same time that it genuinely reflected suppressed anxieties and latent social desires beyond the commercial. A creative indulgence in multiplying symbol systems—the mélange of sexual reproduction tropes, of lying with mutant, pollution, eternal return, deviant parasitic, uncontrolled annihilation, rape fantasies, nightmare chambers, and parasitic horrors was thus sanctioned by the profitability of the enterprise.127 If, as Zeitler maintains, the Oresteia functions narratively to subvert “the mastery of the female to higher social goals,” it is hard to see the narrative arc of the Alien franchise as anything other than the battle for the womb of a deeply invested corporate hierarchy.128 We can speak of the narrative progress of either trilogy in the same way: “Through gradual and subtle transformations, social evolution is posed as a movement from female dominance to male dominance.” And if “the cornerstone of [the narrative] architecture is the control of women” in the hegemony of social practice, the battle of “The Company” for the possession of reproductive organs is the goal of intergalactic conquest (150). In the Agamemnon “the massacre of the male” stands for “the threat of extinction to human society as a whole,” but in the Alien series extinction is what is actually happening (153). Rushing traces the archetypal roots of Ripley’s divided mother, monstrous and nurturing, deep into world-historical mythology, and it is just as Ripley says: “Nothing new.”129 Most of the symbolic gains made for feminism in the first movie are contained and managed in the second. Ripley’s subversive feminine is reinscribed safely within the boundaries of domesticity. Because the narrative arc of the Alien franchise was improvised in the process of the telling— the telling of the story now being determined by box office receipts—Ripley’s character development manifest a regression roughly parallel to the growing control of the studios. The calculating insouciance of the character in the first film—a worker unsexed by a culture of pure exploitation, absorbed into and mirroring its dehumanized norms of expedience, magnetic in its iconic potential as a stripped-down, nihilistic emblem of a society that has simply become incorporated—could not have developed the richer implications of her symbolic critique in a production machinery with roughly the same ends. So the sequel would be reconformed to the consumerist function of narrative pleasure, which

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meant that Ripley would have to be damaged and redeemed by her mothering instincts. The ambivalence of the feminist reception of this cultural phenomenon stems from that curious birth, and this ambivalence remained because of the fact that something survived for a counterhegemonic reading of Ripley. Much like the accidental power of Clytemnestra in a trilogy that was designed to reassert the order of hegemony, Ripley’s powerful androgyny in the first film was a cypher that resonated powerfully with an emergent vision of the strength and independence, an iconic possibility quickly disciplined by its reinscription in a narrative of loss. Here is perhaps the strongest parallel to Clytemnestra. Enough brazenness survived in the narrative telling, in Sigourney Weaver’s charismatic strength, and in the generic exigencies of action thrillers, that the surplus of Ripley’s cultural meanings could not be stuffed back into the bottle.

The conversation that we are Clytemnestra’s appearance is only a peculiarly potent expression of something in human culture that periodically bubbles up and is carefully suppressed. It is hard not to feel that she stares at us accusingly, and we stand before her with the ineffectual posture of the justly accused. Her sublime rejection of convention and propriety, her irresistible confidence towering over her Argive subjects and her Athenian audience, and towering too over the centuries as an icon of a certain kind of unbowing resistance and rejection. Has she changed us? But the question is really: How could she not have? Culture is not a system of inputs and outputs, but rather a kind of radiant energy, and probably also, a dark sinkhole, but what survives is probably much more like sound-wave transmissions, travelling unknowable distances, creating strange harmonics, intermingling with other transmissions, inspiring new ones. We cannot always know what interminglings will occur or how they combine, but it is not likely we can go very far without running into them, we are always navigating around them, reflectors of them, or magnified by them. When we speak from out of a cultural landscape—of say, for instance, a certain horror, a certain unforgivable injustice, a certain refusal—it helps us know what can be said, and we hear ourselves against that pitch or exceed or correct it. It might therefore be better understood as a cultural real-estate. Gadamer won the point that, whether we think of cultural continuity as a virtue, it is to one degree or another inescapable, since ruptures and aberrations define themselves only on that account. If Pasolini created “a true poetics of the

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unfinished,” that is, “a predilection for notes, projects, fragments, conceived not as preparation for real works, but as new forms that negate and subvert artistic conventions,” it is only against the more conventional standard that his aesthetic gains purchase.130 One needs to ask if Gadamer broke free entirely from the Hegelian sense of historical progression, if there is any residue, within his theory of the eminent text, of the desire to transform “documents into monuments,” and if he is entirely free from “the general model of a consciousness that acquires, progresses, and remembers.”131 Where does he stand in comparison with Foucault’s radical insistence on discontinuity and the “thresholds, mutations, independent systems, and limited series” that Foucault saw as the topography of historical movement? (12). Is he guilty of living in “the safer, less exposed shelter” of historical continuity? (14). Gadamer did address himself to the question of discontinuity in terms of epochal time that is subject to periodization and divided by turning points.132 His thought here is so rich and complex that I recommend becoming familiar with the primary text.133 Beyond this theme, his sense of history in general is more one of simultaneity, seeing the multiple currents of influence at work at any point in time, and so he does see “the Other in the time of our own thought.”134 My own reconstruction of the influence of the figure of Clytemnestra certainly rides the bias of continuity, and it too must be placed under the same suspicion. On the other hand, the diffusion I am describing demonstrates nothing like a “locus of uninterrupted continuities” or “the sovereignty of consciousness” (12). One always has to keep in mind that hermeneutic recognition is always the discovery of something new. Often it is the fact that what is important is that something is said, is spoken out loud. Certain things only need to have been said once, and some things have been said for a culture so powerfully that subsequent efforts to say those things speak from that initial saying. In this respect, the history of a culture is like the history of a life. If, in the course of a life, in a family or a relationship, I make a promise or speak a criticism, that speaking bears on my subsequent life; I am not free to ignore what I myself have spoken. An artist is not indebted to tradition in the same sense, and yet how much can an artist speak to a public outside of history? The dark radiance of Clytemnestra’s image certainly continues to vent charged meanings and cast a prodigious shadow, if only in the subconscious recesses of a disenchanted culture. The ringing truth contained in the depth of Clytemnestra’s pain and the simplicity of her response is its awful singularity. To ask why the representation of such a response is so rare in our culture is

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to open up a panoramic view of a truth about the culture, so that her action becomes a benchmark by which to measure that culture. The strength of her temerity, its uncompromising quality, raises itself against the background of her gender, which is a thing constructed out of the woven tapestry of the culture itself—the piquancy of the contrast, the fascination with the incongruity, that reaction comes from ourselves, and its incongruity acts thus as a kind of mirror by which we can see ourselves. The tension that produces the cultural conversation that we are, insofar as that conversation is elicited from the words and images that come down to us from out of the past, because they have been fixed in writing, or because they have been passed along in an oral tradition, or because they have been transmitted from master to pupil, the tension that emerges from the friction of time, since values and perceptions change, since language develops different meanings, since cultural practices develop different valences, is the reason why the preceptive tradition of hermeneutics developed. Gadamer continues this tradition, and it is very much present in the principles he enunciates in a section of Truth and Method toward the end where he writes extensively about how this friction is to be understood and addressed. The alienness that time and distance introduces is “a gap that can never be completely closed” since what is handed down “must be understood within a new language world,” so that a genuinely full understanding is always going to be “disrupted or impeded.”135 The effort to understand what comes to us out of a distant past is therefore “a constant renunciation,” a solution that “can never be more than a compromise,” and a communication that will lack many “of the overtones that vibrate in the original” (386). Despite this rupture, what happens in the mediation is paradoxically “not a defect,” because what survives in this way is “immediately clear to every reader who can read them,” thus instituting a new community that is now “contemporaneous with each present time” (389–90). The loss is compensated by a gain of a different kind—the widening of community, like the blessing of the addition of new family member. The separation, disruption, and renunciation is the cost of an increase of being: A written tradition is not a fragment of a past world, but has already raised itself beyond this into the sphere of the meaning that it expresses. The ideality of the word is what raises everything linguistic beyond the finitude and transience that characterize other remnants of past existence. It is not this document, as a piece of the past, that is the bearer of tradition, but the continuity of memory. (390)

As distant as its echo in a popular culture many times removed from the resonant ambiguities of a lyric verse that contemplated the meaning of a myth, something

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of the awesomeness and majesty of a damaged queen persists in the cultural memory. And if we can regret the loss of a particular cultural achievement, the accretion of a deepening cultural legacy is a compensating gain. When the attendants who sat in the prohedria of the Athenian theater gathered at the annual festival, they were not there for high culture. They were not there for entertainment isolated from the cares of everyday life. The annual festival was an integral part of the calendar of ritual events that solidified the community and gave it an opportunity to become reflective about itself. The thoughts and feelings engendered by the practice would carry through to the maintenance and promotion of the polis itself as a civic project, the fruits of the imagination of that ritual now dedicated to those energies that would guide the state and its destiny: “From this point of view, tragedy could be said to be a manifestation of the city turning itself into theatre.”136 One can recollect the feeling of renewal that attends the formal ritual of any performance of this kind even now, the time set aside for considering at a distance who we are and where we are going. So, let us conceive an answer to the question I posed at the end of Chapter 2 about the limits of a textual inheritance. Katherine Anne Porter’s evocation of the story of the fall of Troy was a narrative remembrance without an express acknowledgment, but the link was traceable. In what sense could the Alien franchise be understood as a reading of the same text? A crowd-driven movie product is a somewhat impoverished demos; its readers are 20th Century Fox, weekend moviegoers, an industry that supports a system of profitably self-indulgent commonplaces, celebrity culture, advertisers, the popular culture industry, a self-referential self-amplifying echo system that reflects and refracts into a dinning machine of cultural amnesia. But occasionally something gets through, something pierces the murk. It may be just an image. In the director’s comments on the original movie you can hear an awareness of a number of influences that he wanted to inscribe into the set-dressing, the performances, the plot-devices, the music. In other words, he was a better reader than the system he was owned by, and he wanted very much to read into the text some potent and unused tropes that would enliven his story. He argued stubbornly with the studio on many of these points, a number of his choices survived, which may account for some of the film’s piquancy. “The studio” in this cultural apparatus typically operates as an enforcer of self-referential commonplaces, so that the readings Scott smuggled in were indeed alien. But for the most part he simply read off from the rich traditions that gathered and lay fallow just behind him, ready to innervate the dead commonplaces of our current narratives into something

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living. This is where the writer acts as a reader and picks up the echoes in the ambient space of culture, and this is how, though even twice and thrice removed, Clytemnestra’s bloodcurdling screams might be heard. The first movie poster for Ridley Scott’s Alien proclaimed that in space no one can hear you scream. No compelling story is ever written in space. Hermeneutic scholars have made much of Gadamer’s use of the term Vollzug to describe how a work lives, which means among other things actualization or performance. The concept certainly is a part of the theoretical turn toward performativity as a way out of the reifying straightjacket of dualist epistemology. But if you look carefully at how Gadamer elaborates the meaning of Vollzug (which means more literally drawing out the fullest consequences of something in its inexhaustible potential), what he is saying is that the text is formed by its consequences.137 Its Mannigfaltigkeit, its plurivocity and potential for meaning so much, is an energy that plays out in its readings, to the last syllable of recorded time. The metaphor of the woven text is apt, because we can imagine a tapestry that is woven out of the strands of culture into the indefinite future, like the crimson carpet leading into the palace. My interpretation of this Vollzug is that it is a patch-quilt, that the text that is being woven does not follow a strict linear path. I have used the metaphor of sound waves as a way to picture the variability, indirectness, and multiplicity of reading energies that are constantly being picked up and coalescing around cultural meanings. The metaphor allows some textual impulses to vanish irretrievably into the depths of space, and others, so weakened as signals that they can hardly be detected, to be caught by sensors at pickup stations and amplified for new transmissions. The metaphor introduces a certain randomness and destruction that is not contained in the metaphor of the carpet, but I do not know how to imagine a culture that does not include this creative destruction. Gadamer says someplace that culture is nothing more than all of its texts, and I take the further step of saying that culture is one malleable, evolving, nihilating text that is never the same for anyone at anytime, but that in its constantly shifting, forming, and breaking apart is a repository and cauldron of resonances. My claim goes a step beyond Gadamer’s explicit theory, but the claim that he makes explicitly about a work’s reception history—that it gathers up and passes down its accreted history in its ongoing reception (e.g. “All interpretation comes to share in the being of the poem”) is in its own way at least as insecure as my assertion of indirect reception, insofar as performances of the ninth symphony or translations of the Bhagavad Gītā or stage performances of Berenice forget as much as they remember of the reception tradition.138 This point is precisely

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where Hegel and Heidegger square off.139 Perhaps, the indirect reception of a work in its intertextual resonances is really just the corollary of direct reception history, insofar as an intertextual resonance, however unconscious, remembers as much as it has forgotten. Moreover, the whole category of works that pass down as self-consuming artifacts, works lacking fixed texts or nominal ones— bardic epics, the Mandala sandpaintings of Tibetan monks, the improvisations of classical jazz musicians—are more purely hermeneutic in their radical commitment to an unfolding identity and a divestment of authorship. The value of the whole in these cases is truly everything ephemeral and lasting.

Afterword: What is Gebilde?

For Gadamer, art answers to the possibilities and predicament of a finite being who exists in an ambiguous and conflicted relation to the infinite. Art is of a piece with the pathos of our finitude, a testimonial witness, a coming to terms, and a space of openness in which that finitude is worked out. In its most rudimentary function the enduring work is something that acts as a pledge against time and dissolution, standing between the parochialism of any one audience and the culture formed in the accumulated history of its receptions. We began this inquiry by asking what kind of permanence belongs to the work, and were lead to the paradox that the work achieves permanence by yielding to a perpetual adaptation; that in its conciliation of the rupture of mortality and subjectivity, it resists annexation or consolidation, but then is subject to perpetual loss and gain, in turn stripped of its richest accretions of cultural meaning, and at the same time metaphorized into something rich and strange. We also discovered that “it”—the work—scrambles our habitable agency, since it elaborates or collaborates identity across our temporary sense-of-self and our embedded materiality; the work is really just the tension between the illusion of permanence at either extreme. It forms itself and us in the creative destruction of all those comforting categories. The ontology of time and the phenomenology of place describe the two axes of this distributive process. Gadamer figures the material axis in a metaphor of worlds. The formative tension between the two poles of continuity and difference, between closed and open worlds, is an exchange between the ideal world of our imagination sealed from imperfection, and the open, unfinished, contingent world against which we are always having to adjust. The work as emissary, as mediator, oscillates between the two, neither completely of the one or the other, and does its best to achieve a truce. The axis of time pushes identity out from the native egoism of our biological, environmental isolation. In the hermeneutic context, the boundaries of history, culture, symbol, and person are fluid and interpenetrating: “There is no difference

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between the intention and the intended. That I and what I know are the same has its most compelling proof in the work of art.”1 Gadamer touches Foucault at this point at the assertion that we are an effect of the work’s agency rather than its master. Because the initiative and momentum of cultural production emanates from culture as expressed in its works, and its works work themselves out in their reception, the work, to use Heidegger’s nomenclature, speaks us. Thus, the modern idea of the work as an “object” looks to Gadamer as the residue of an impoverished, instrumentalized worldview. His antipathy is targeted at our presumptive desire for mastery over something that in fact carries us along in its wake that speaks out of an immensity that we only catch of sight of at our best moments. The virtuality of the work’s objectivity and the audience’s subjectivity is thus distributed among three interanimating moments of the “work” of art—the work-text itself, the responding audience, and the history of their interaction. Gadamer resorts to a Kantian concept—the symbol—to explain the nature of this mediation. The crucial feature of symbol is that it remains constitutionally ambiguous, lacking the hard edges of the concept, in its equivocity modulating between the particular and the general, “a definite-indefinite being” hovering between the perfected worlds of the imagination and the open worlds of our unfinished experience. The process of exchange that constitutes the work is a metamorphosis from both ends, the identity of human being taking on the imprint of its historical embodiment, and the plenitude of culture shaping itself to the form of this engagement. Gadamer speaks of the work as a text, relying on the sense of “text” as, literally, the plaiting of threads (textum). The hermeneutic text is like a text being woven with no hem or border; that is at any rate what the ongoing process of cultural production would look like if it were an image. It is not so much that there is nothing outside the text as that text and context merge, as do persons and histories, into one great text, the dark book of history. Thus, the symbol or work or text is not the middle term in the exchange but the encompassing medium of exchange itself. This triple transformation is thus an ontological event that leaves neither person, nor work, nor world unchanged. It is the signature of hermeneutic understanding generally, and the crux of Gadamer’s poetics. The great contrast between Gadamer’s poetics and disciplinary aesthetics is bound up in the idea of the work as an ontological category—the work’s structure is so interwoven with the structures of the lives that engage it, that process, product, history, and identity become parasitic on and inextricable from one another. If we define the work by this capacity for metamorphosis, we have redefined it as

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its tradition, but tradition as much rupture as continuity, as much repression as enlightenment. Where I have pushed Gadamer’s poetics a bit is to bring out the extent to which a hermeneutic understanding of the work of art is never just about the encounter of audiences with a single work. In hermeneutics the part is always a metonymy for the whole (die Ganze); the part is always only ever comprehensible as a piece of the whole that is projected from that part in order for the part to make any sense at all. As I have interpreted it, the work is the occasion for the invocation of a world, a world that is being built up constantly by our collisions with these fragments that invoke a world. A work is automatically a conversation that we are drawn into, and our participation becomes a part not only of that conversation but of that tapestry. Gadamer’s poetics does not allow us to opt out of this process. We are all a part of the history of being as it bodies forth in our works and days. I have also introduced a critical note to expand Gadamer’s poetics beyond its initial statement. We are more confirmed now than ever that the work’s structure is being eaten away from both ends, the frail ties of subjectivities to their fractured communities, the patch-quilt so blurred with accretions, desecrations, and blight, its fragments excreting all over this yearning for order. We are by now so thoroughly schooled in the rot inside the covers of the great dark book—less a book than a mottled carpet, one died red with blood, and underneath, as many horrors and broken bits as dreams and universes.

Notes Foreword 1 2 3 4

5 6

7 8 9

10

Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, 33. Gadamer, “Interview with Hans-Georg Gadamer,” 31. Gadamer, “A Conversation with Hans-Georg Gadamer,” 125. A good summary explanation of Gadamer’s hostility to modern aesthetics may be found in Grondin, “Gadamer’s Aesthetics: The Overcoming of Aesthetic Consciousness and the Hermeneutical Truth of Art.” Danto 272. There are of course exceptions. Leo Treitler, Roger Savage, and others have attempted to extend hermeneutics into aesthetics, musicology, art criticism, and so on, but most of the trending interest in hermeneutics in the area of aesthetics is happening outside of the United States. I will be citing some of the more exciting transdisciplinary appropriations of Gadamerian poetics throughout the book. RB 4. Some have argued that art serves only as an overture to Gadamer’s real philosophical interests. See Liessmann; and also Teichert 194–5. But to make such a claim is to adopt a very un-Gadamerian view of language, truth, and experience. Ruth Sonderegger argues for a double focus of Gadamer’s writing on art, “(1) an art theory and (2) a truth theory” consequence, and she wants to preserve the distinction (253, my translation). OWA 184.

Chapter 1 1 This is not an original point with Gadamer. As Julian Young points out, the reductionist effect of modern aesthetics was a cardinal point with Heidegger: “That ‘aesthetics’ has displaced ‘philosophy of art’ reveals, Heidegger believes, that we have abandoned the ethical conception of art. Art, he holds, no longer provides, nor is expected to provide, guidance as to how to live. Rather, it is designed to provide ‘aesthetic experiences’” (Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, 9). This is the origin of Gadamer’s diatribe against Erlebniskult. Young references in particular Heidegger’s

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6 7 8

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Notes statement that aesthetics “takes the work of art as an object, the object of aisthesis, of sensuous apprehension in the wide sense. Today we call this apprehension experience. . . . Yet perhaps experience is the element in which art dies. The dying occurs so slowly that it takes a few centuries” (PLT 79). TM 490. In Wahrheit und Methode it is Erster Teil, II, 1. The first four small subsections— “The Concept of Play,” “Transformation into Structure,” “The Temporality of the Aesthetic,” and “The Example of the Tragic”—are the heart of the little poetics. The next three subsections extend the theory beyond the paradigm of the tragic drama, and the final subsection connects the little poetics to Gadamer’s larger narrative. In the most complex attention to Gadamer’s play that I know, Deniau works out an ontological syntax as a relation between the inexhaustibly productive ambiguity of the phenomenological relation and its straining after a unity. See Deniau, “Bild und Sprache,” 66. Deniau interprets Gadamer’s “play” as a Platonic-Heideggerian hybrid (66). Symbol or image or work is always a coming-to-be contextually realized (Anwesenheit von etwas für jemanden) (72). Gadamer scholars have noted the indebtedness of Gadamer’s concept of play to Kant and Schiller, and his departure from their conceptions, insofar as they underwrote a subjectivist orientation and a divorce of the aesthetic from the practical (e.g. Grondin, Von Heidegger zu Gadamer, 118). TM 101–10. TM 110. Ironically it is Aristotle—the Aristotle who originated the categorizations that lead ultimately to the balkanization of the disciplines—who provides in the Poetics an important model for Gadamer’s conception of art, a theory of art based on audience effect. The eleos and phobos effected in tragedy through the mimesis of an action is a paradigm for Gadamer of the event of artistic meaning as the interaction of text and players—the players on the stage and the participants in the audience acting together as mediators of the text. This productive encounter transpires neither in the text that has been passed down nor in the present cultural moment of the players and audience, but in the interaction between them. See Aristotle, Poetics, 1449b, pp. 22–3. One of the very best explications of the ontological function of play is in Deniau, Cognitio Imaginativa, 66–88. We might argue the point, but the reference is to the difference between a genuine wrestling match and the theatrical wrestling spectacles that are put on as popular entertainment. The distinction has a renowned critical legacy starting with Roland Barthes’ “The World of Wrestling”. “Im allgemeinen werden Spiele, so sehr sie ihrem Wesen nach Darstellungen sind und so sehr sich in ihnen die Spielenden darstellen, nicht für jemanden

Notes

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dargestellt, d.h. die Zuschauer sind nicht gemeint. Kinder spielen für sich, auch wenn sie darstellen. Und nicht einmal diejenigen Spiele wie die sportlichen, die vor Zuschauern gespielt werden, meinen dieselber. Ja, sie drohen ihren eigentlichen Spielcharakter als Kampfspiel gerade dadurch zu verlieren, daß sie zum Schaukampf werden. Erst recht ist etwa die Prozession, die ja ein Teil einer Kulthandlung ist, mehr als eine Schaustellung, da sie ihrem eigenen Sinne nach die ganze Kultgemeinde umfaßt. Und doch ist der kultische Akt wirkliche Darstellung für die Gemeinde, und ebenso ist das Schauspiel ein Spielvorgang, der wesenhaft nach dem Zuschauer verlangt” (WM 114). TM 109. “Die Darstellung des Gottes im Kult, die Darstellung des Mythos im Spiel sind als nicht nur in der Weise Spiele, daß die Teilnehmenden Spieler im darstellenden Spiel sozusagen aufgehen und darin ihre gesteigerte Selbstdarstellung finden, sondern sie gehen von sich aus dahin über, daß dies Spielenden für die Zuschauer ein Sinnganzes darstellen” (WM 114). Grondin points out that it is only in the lectures of 1974 that Gadamer fully elaborates on the relation of ritual to his theory of art, but it is clear from the statement in Truth and Method that the insight into this structural relationship was already realized in his mind. See Grondin, Von Heidegger zu Gadamer, 118. Gadamer thematized the nature of the poetic fragment in a study of Goethe, “Vom geistigen Lauf des Menschen,” in the ninth volume of the Gesammelte Werke, 80–111. WM 114–15. TM 109, modified. TM 109. “Das ist der Punkt, an dem sich die Bestimmung des Spieles, als eines medialen Vorgangs in seiner Wichtigkeit erweist. Wir hatten gesehen, daß das Spiel nicht im Bewußtsein oder Verhalten des Spielenden sein Sein hat, sondern diesen im Gegenteil in seinen Bereich zieht und mit seinem Geiste erfüllt. Der Spielende erfährt das Spiel als eine ihn übertreffende Wirklichkeit” (WM 115). Grondin uses vivid language to describe this diffusion between subject and work— einflechten (interlaced) and blended or mixed being (Angerührtsein). Grondin, Von Heidegger zu Gadamer, 119, 120. Hegel, “Philosophy of Fine Art,” 161. TM 109; WM 115. Gadamer repeats the scare quotes once more just below this: The play is “experienced properly by, and presents itself (as it is ‘meant’) to, one who is not acting in the play but watching it” (Ja, es wird von dem am eigentlichsten erfahren und stellt sich dem so dar, wie es ‘gemeint’ ist, der nicht mitspielt, sondern zuschaut) (115). TM 109. “Auch das Schauspiel bleibt Spiel, d. h. es hat die Struktur des Spiels, eine in sich geschlossene Welt zu sein. Aber das kultische oder profane Schauspiel, so sehr es eine ganz in sich geschlossen Welt ist, die es darstellt, ist wie offen nach der Seite

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Notes des Zuschauers. In ihm erst gewinnt es seine ganze Bedeutung. Die Spieler spielen ihre Rollen wie in jedem Spiel, und so kommt das Spiel zur Darstellung, aber das Spiel selbst ist das Ganze aus Spielern und Zuschauern. Ja, es wird von dem am eigentlichsten erfahren und stellt sich dem so dar, wie es ‘gemeint’ ist, der nicht mitspielt, sondern zuschaut. In ihm wird das Spiel gleichsam zu seiner Idealität erhoben” (WM 115). Gadamer develops this feature in his later work via the concept of the inner ear. WM 110. “Es ist eine totale Wendung, die dem Spiel als Spiel geschieht, wenn es Schauspiel wird. Sie bringt den Zuschauer an die Stelle des Spielers. Er ist es—und nicht der Spieler—für den und vor dem das Spiel spielt” (WM 115). TM part I, II, 1 (B); WM, Erster Teil, II, 1. B. TM 110. “wie abgelöst von dem darstellenden Tun der Spieler und besteht in der reinen Erscheinung dessen, was sie spielen” (WM 116). In the Republic, Plato relates the term to the shadow appearances the demiurge creates (book 10, 598B and 599D, pp. 430–1). Plato explicitly relates these phantom creations to mimesis and to sophistry. TM 112–13. In a late interview, Gadamer says something that sounds like a correction. The interviewer asks, “Husserl once wrote that every independent thinker ought really to change his name at the end of every decade because by then he will have become a different thinker. Do you agree with that?” and Gadamer responds, “nobody can change themselves totally” (Gadamer, “Interview: Hans-Georg Gadamer,” 28). Of course the metamorphosis Gadamer is referring to in Truth and Method initially is between the actor and the character, but Verwandlung has a broad ontological meaning, so this late observation is significant. TM 112. “das Ganze der Wirklichkeit . . . in dem sich alles erfüllt” (TM 112; WM 118). Aesthetics 38; Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik 60. Aristotle, Poetics, 1451b, p. 35. TM 112. “So ist die Handlung eines Schauspiels—darin gleicht sie noch ganz der Kulthandlung—schlechterdings als etwas in sich selbst Beruhendes da. Sie läßt kein Vergleichen mit der Wirklichkeit als dem heimlichen Maßstab aller abbildlichen Ähnlichkeit mehr zu. Sie ist über allen solchen Vergleich hinausgehoben—und damit auch über die Frage, ob denn das alles wirklich sei—, weil aus ihr eine überlegene Wahrheit spricht. Selbst Plato, der radikalste Kritiker des Seinsranges der Kunst, den die Geschichte der Philosophie kennt, redet gelegentlich, ohne zu unterscheiden, von der Komödie und Tragödie des Lebens wie von der der Bühne. Denn dieser Unterschied hebt sich auf, wenn einer den Sinn des Spieles, das sich für ihm abspielt, wahrzunehmen weiß. Die Freude an dem Schauspiel, das sich bietet, ist in beiden Fällen die gleiche: es ist die Freude der Erkenntnis” (WM 117–18).

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34 Gadamer translates this dynamic into an ontological phenomenon that he will dub an increase of being (Zuwachs an Sein). 35 TM 128; WM 133. 36 The word means both the sense of the thing and what it signifies. Farrell makes the following distinction: “Sinn differs from Bedeutung, as ‘sense’ does from ‘meaning,’ in that Bedeutung is more objective and more exact, whereas Sinn is more subjective and often refers rather to one interpretation of a word or phrase amongst a number of possible others” (294). 37 TM 128, modified. 38 TM 112. 39 TM 119. 40 Leff, “Hermeneutical Rhetoric,” 201–4. 41 TM 119. 42 TM 113. 43 Plato develops this concept most famously in the Meno and the Phaedo; PS 111–9l; PG 127–36; Nietzsche, The Gay Science; Kierkegaard, Repetition, 131; BT 388, 437–8. Ricoeur asserts that Heidegger’s concept of repetition “is the turning-point for his whole analysis of historicity” (Ricoeur, “The Human Experience of Time and Narrative,” 111). 44 TM 114–15. 45 Vernant, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, 246. 46 Weinsheimer 109. 47 Balzac 182. 48 Gadamer, “The Conflict of Interpretations.” 49 Arthos, “The Scholar and the Pub Crawler.” 50 TM 120–1. 51 This was a principle polemical point for Gadamer, and he coined a phrase for the aesthetics of objects or artifacts, which he called “aesthetic differentiation” (ästhetische Unterscheidung) (TM 85; WM 91). 52 This unwritten tradition of apprenticeships is described by Homans xv–xxiii. 53 TM 117; WM 122. 54 Gadamer made this theoretical point at a restless time when people wanted a more thorough break and radical freedom from the past, so it had to be disentangled from any tendency toward traditionalism, but it is hard to argue the basic point. 55 Paul Ricoeur explicitly commits himself to a philosophy that “gives up the dream of a total mediation,” an assertion which lets us know that Gadamer is using strong literary irony in his invocation of the term or has reverted to a strong form of Hegelianism (Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 18). My explication will lay out how it is the former.

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56 Also, it is worth asking whether this distinction places out of view for Gadamer the experience of the athlete, for whom we would concede that sublime understanding is also possible, but rather as the direct and absorbed participant in play. 57 Vernant, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, 33. 58 Gadamer, “Von der Wahrheit des Wortes,” GW 8, 45. 59 WM 122. 60 WM 38. 61 TM 117. 62 The commentator who brings out this ever approximating and never finishing aspect of the work most forcefully is Bacsó, “Logos und Kunst: Die Auslegung der Kunst bei Hans-Georg Gadamer.” 63 He points to Hans Sedlmayr here as a typical example, a founding member of the Vienna school of art history (TM 121). 64 This is a theme and a relation that Gadamer gets directly from Heidegger, who gets it from Hölderlin. Much of Gadamer’s thought about Verweilen and festival time comes out of Heidegger’s interpretive ruminations on Hölderlin’s “Andenken.” See Heidegger, “Hölderlins Hymne ‘Andenken,’” GA 52, 59–96. Julian Young writes that Heidegger equates the festival with the artwork: “This makes it clear that ‘the festival’ is nothing other than a more developed description of what ‘The Origin’ calls ‘the artwork’” (Young 89). 65 TM 123. 66 TM 124. “Der Theoros ist also der Zuschauer im eigentlichen Sinne des Wortes, der an dem feierlichen Akte durch Dabeisein teilhat und dadurch seine sakralrechtliche Auszeichnung, z. B. seine Unverletzlichkeit, gewinnt” (WM 129). 67 TM 125. “das hingerissene Eingenommensein” (WM 130). 68 In Gadamer’s writings on death, one sees that he confronts the terrible loss that beings bound to their own subjectivity must honestly attempt to grasp, and in this connection he may have felt some solace in the power of culture to carry the resonance of its works beyond the boundaries of the subjective. See Gadamer, “Der Tod als Frage,” GW 4, 161–72. See in particular pages 163 and 168. 69 PLT 32–7. 70 TM 130, 132. 71 I am relying for this history on Sylvanus, “The Fabric of Africanity,” and Felsenthal, “The Curious History of ‘Tribal Prints.’” 72 Sylvanus 210.

Chapter 2 1 These lectures, essays, and occasional writings are collected in volumes 8 and 9 of the Gesammelte Werke.

Notes 2 3 4 5 6

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Friedrich Schlegel quoted in Pinkard 160. OWA 18. Ingarden 19. Iser, The Act of Reading, 21. Cryle develops a contrast between Iser and Gadamer of another sort, the contrast between a visual (Iser) and oral/aural (Gadamer) understanding, and (therefore) between a subject/object relation (Iser) and a dialogic exchange. My argument is that Iser’s theory remains mainly instrumentalist, Gadamer’s is primarily ontological, but there is a link between these readings. Cryle believes Gadamer rejects the theoretical model “which dominates the phenomenological reflection.” The Gadamerian exchange involves “two people who already know one another, and not one individual subject who seeks to know another or the world” (128). Furthermore, Gadamer’s concept of horizon is not Iser’s “standpoint,” but rather “a certain moment in the process of comprehension, a type of linguistic experience. This is the good fortune of someone who, in the midst of a flurry of disorienting words, has the chance to stop and get oriented” (Cryle 120, my translation). TM 116. Gadamer, “Zwischen Phänomenologie und Dialektik,” GW 2, 17. DD 35. “Es bleibt auch immer dasselbe Werk” (GW 8, 390). RB 43. RB 52. Gadamer, “The Eminent Text and Its Truth,” 339. He speaks of it indirectly in the section of Truth and Method on the Kantian concept of taste, which Konrad Liessmann points out is “above all a process of exclusion: ‘When something is negative in matters of taste, it is not said why it is felt to be so. But one experiences it with the greatest certainty. Certainty regarding the tasteful is also certainty regarding the tasteless’” (Liessmann 215). The passage in Truth and Method is to be found at TM 36. Grondin, The Philosophy of Gadamer, 42. Gadamer, “Philosophy and Literature,” 252. The same phrase is used in “The Relevance of the Beautiful”: “Every work leaves the person who responds to it a certain leeway, a space to be filled in by himself ” (RB 26; GW 8, 117). RB 27. DD 34. RB 27. DD 34. RB 125, DD 34. TM 122. TM 116. “kein bloßes Schema von Regeln oder Verhaltensvorschriften, innerhalb derer das Spielen sich frei verwirklichen kann” (WM 122).

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Notes Gadamer, Gadamer on Celan, 147. RB 42–3. Gadamer, “Philosophy and Literature,” 250. TM 136. Gadamer, “The Eminent Text and Its Truth,” 342, modified; GW 8, 290. GW 8, 290. “das Verwobensein von Fäden zu einem Gewebe . . . das sich selbst zusammenhält und den einzelnen Faden gar nicht mehr hervortreten läßt.” GW 8, 289; Gadamer, “The Eminent Text and Its Truth,” 341. GW 8, 287. Gadamer, “DerAktualität des Schönen,” GW 8, 112; “Der ‘Eminente’ Text und seine Wahrheit,” GW 8, 290. GW 8, 111–12; RB 20–1. Wischke develops an even more differentiated vocabulary for the reader’s operations on the text: Reshuffling (Umbildung), appropriation (Aneignung), rejection (Verwerfung), selection (Auswahl), and rejuvenation (Verjüngung) (22). TM 122. TM 119. Gadamer, “Philosophy and Literature,” 253. TM 116, 120. RB 69, 97. TM 119. TM 120–1; WM 126. TM 123 (footnote). TM 124. TM 138, emphasis added. TM 132. TM 118. RB 72. RB 68. Gadamer says that there are something like regional or provisional moments of perfection (“closed worlds”) within the indeterminate open world of hermeneutic experience—formally indicative, virtual, and regulative intimations of order. Gadamer, “The Artwork in Word and Image,” 214. “Es besteht darin, daß ein Werk der Kunst sich so darstellt, indem es sich ebenso verbirgt, wie es sich zugleich selbst verbürgt. . . . Die Unverborgenheit dessen, was da herauskommt, ist nun aber in dem Werk selbst geborgen—und nicht in dem, was wir darüber sagen. Es bleibt auch immer dasselbe Werk auch wenn es in jeder neuen Begegnung auf seine eigene Weise herauskommt. Wir kennen das wohl. Der Betrachter eines Gemäldes sucht den rechten Abstand, wo es richtig herauskommt. . . . Wer hält da Abstand?

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54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

65

66 67 68 69

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Hat man seinen eigenen Standpunkt nach eigenem Belieben zu wählen und dann festzuhalten? Man muß doch den Punkt suchen, von dem aus ‘es’ am besten herauskommt. Dieser Punkt ist nicht der eigene Standpunkt. . . . Solchen Abstand gibt es da nicht. Wenn ein Kunstwerk seine Faszination ausspielt, ist alles eigene Meinen und Gemeinte wie verschwunden” (GW 8, 390). Deniau, Cognitio Imaginativa, 29–55. In the third section of this book I will test how far we might go in this direction by purposely overshooting the mark. They learned this at the foot of Hegel, for whom this was one of the principal themes: “For everything genuine in spirit and nature alike is inherently concrete and, despite its universality, has nevertheless subjectivity and particularity in itself ” (Hegel, Aesthetics, 70). Julian Young points out that this theory of cultural legitimation is common as well to both Heidegger and Hegel. Heidegger agrees “with Hegel that nothing less than the reception of the artwork by a culture (‘people’) as a whole is sufficient to establish its ‘greatness’” (Young 7). My own critical note here is that Gadamer’s theory, with its claim to universality, only describes one important theoretical framework for textuality, and he does not speak about this delimitation. There are numerous other ways to conceive of textuality and also artistic works, and so this theory notes its own constriction. GW 8, 287. TM 163. TM 123. Gadamer, “Philosophy and Literature,” 247. Gadamer, “Philosophy and Literature,” 250. RB 37. TM 119. The English word lacks the flexibility of the prefix structure of Nachschaffen— “nach” can mean “re-,” “after-,” “according to.” TM 119–20; WM 125. TM 120. Wischke 15. I will discuss the concern with Gadamer’s theory of total mediation at the end of Chapter 3. It is precisely the ground on which Heidegger and Hegel square off. TM 112. “It is not enchantment in the sense of a bewitchment that waits for a word to break the spell and transform everything back, but quite the opposite it is itself the spell-breaking transformation back into true being” (107/101). Weinsheimer, Gadamer’s Hermeneutics, 108. Pinkard 146. TM 128. TM 113.

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70 TM 114. 71 “[E]s die Wirklichkeit noch einmal, in gleichsam kondensierter und exemplarischer Form nachvollzieht,” at the same time that art is not separate from reality but works in relation to it: “sie aber dennoch nicht von dieser Welt zu trennen, sondern durch einen Kunstgriff für diese zu retten: weil aus dem Kunstwerk eine überlegene Wahrheit spricht” (224–5). 72 RB 126. 73 RB 110. 74 TM 199. 75 RB 33. 76 RB 166 77 Huysman, Against Nature. 78 Gadamer, “Philosophy and Literature,” 252. 79 Gadamer, “Philosophy and Literature,” 253. 80 RB 127. 81 Heidegger, “The Nature of Language,” OWL 62. 82 TM 113. 83 TM 114–16; WM 119–20. 84 RB 99. 85 TM 114. 86 RB 129. 87 RB 212. 88 Gadamer, “The Eminent Text and Its Truth,” 339; GW 8, 288. 89 RB 103; GW 8, 36. 90 RB 47. 91 TM 116. 92 TM 99–100. 93 TM 114–25. 94 Weinsheimer, Gadamer’s Hermeneutics, 88. 95 Nominally poetry, painting, or music could serve, but narrative works best for this set of constraints. In a rare reference to narrative, Gadamer himself turns to a character in the Iliad for an illustration (TM 114). Gadamer’s conception of recognition here is founded primarily on Aristotle’s theory of mimesis, so he has shifted the theoretical frame a bit from the resonance of the poetic text. 96 William Wyler quoted in Garnett 299. 97 Theory on the relation of classical Hollywood movie narrative and its relation to the novel is of course an immense subject. See, for instance, Gunning; Bordwell 156–204; Mitchell; Chatman. 98 TM 114. 99 TM 130.

Notes 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109

110 111 112 113

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Aristotle, Poetics, 1451a, p. 33. TM 130–1. “so wahr, so seind!” (GW 8, 373). TM 114. TM 117. RB 15. Gadamer, “Art and Imitation,” RB 100. Gadamer, “Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, Ideology-Critique,” 324. In German, this is: “die Auslebung dessen, was es mit uns ist” (GW2 243). RB 99–100, 14. TM 482. In this passage Gadamer refers explicitly to Aristotle’s view of the “well-formed work” as something “that nothing can be added to” or from which nothing can be “taken away” (482). Wachterhauser 110. Fusillo 227. Ulmer 12. Here is an example he gives for energeia: “[A]s we call even a man who is not studying ‘a scholar’ if he is capable of studying. That which is present in the opposite sense to this is present actually.” This is at Metaphysics IX, 6. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 447. Heidegger, Phenomenology of Intuition and Expression, 64–5. “Der Vollzug ist jeweilig und notwendig ein solcher, daß das, was selbstweltlich bedeutsam gewesen ist, in ihm wieder wird; nicht so, daß ich mich in frühere Situationen zurückversetze oder daß ich fingierte, ich lebte Früheres wieder, sondern eigene Vergangenheit reiße ich an mich, so daß sie immer wieder zum ersten Mal gehabt wird, und daß ich selbst von mir selbst immer neu betroffen bin und im erneuten Vollzug ‘bin’. Dieses ‘Wie zum ersten Mal’ erfährt noch nähere Bestimmungen; einmal, daßes umweltlich ganz unbezogen ist, und dann, daß es nicht ein erstmaliges Auftreten und Vorkommen in einem individuellen Bewußtseinsstrom besaft,—in diesem Sinne käme und kommt es in seiner notwendigen Erneuerung nie wieder zum ersten, sondern zum zweiten, dritten usf. Mal vor. Dieses im Vollzugssinn liegende Moment des ‘Wie zum ersten Mal’ verliert sich nicht in der Erneuerung, schleift sich nicht ab, sondern wird mit ihr selbst immer überraschender. Die Selbstbetroffenheit ‘wächst’ in einem bestimmten Sinne, und jedes ‘Wie zum ersten Mal’ ist charakterisiert als Vorläufer: die Absage an jede Spur von Endgültigkeit” (GA vol. 59, section 10, p. 84). WM 191. “Die einzigartige Möglichkeit des Werks, zu vermitteln, daß sein Ziel nur in ihm selbst liegt, und bringt uns in die Gefahr, dies verborgene Ziel zu verfehlen. Aber bei solcher Angelegenheit verfehlt man selbst auch, weil man nur das versteht, was man schon verstanden hat” (191).

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116 Vernant, “The Historical Moment of Tragedy in Greece,” 26. 117 For instance, he says in “Image and Gesture” that every gesture is also opaque in an enigmatic fashion. It is a mystery that holds back as much as it reveals” (RB 79). See also RB 68. 118 For instance, Heidegger vividly thematizes the dystopic destiny of technological domination in “The Age of the World Picture,” The Question Concerning Technology, 121–35. In connection with this theme he developed the theme of alienation as a condition of human existence, and said famously: “Homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world” (“Letter on Humanism,” Basic Writings, 219). These themes are narrowed in Gadamer to a focus on the excesses of scientific method. 119 Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?” Basic Writings, 103. 120 Quoted in Polt 122. 121 Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?” Basic Writings, 98, 107, 112. Hegel too ridicules this kind of barren logic. “[M]y home, my property, the air I breathe, this city, the sun, the law, mind, God . . . once mention something substantial, and you thereby create a connection with other existences and other purposes which are ex hypothesi worth having. . . . Barren abstractions, like Being and Nothing . . . are utterly inadequate to the nature of these objects” (Hegel, Hegel’s Logic, 129–30). 122 Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?” Basic Writings, 107. 123 Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?” Basic Writings, 107. “das Dasein vom Nichten des Nichts durchschüttert bleibt. Abgründiger als die bloße Angemessenheit der denkenden Verneinung ist die Härte des Entgegenhandelns und die Schärfe des Verabscheuens. Verantwortlicher ist der Schmerz des Versagens und die Schonungslosigkeit des Verbietens. Lastender ist die Herbe des Entbehrens” (Heidegger, “Was Ist Metaphysik?” 117). 124 Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?” Basic Writings, 108. 125 Gadamer, “Reflections on My Philosophical Journey,” 46. 126 The recent work in English that has most directly touched on this would be Taminiaux, “The Origin of ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’”; Capobianco 75–119, 132–3; Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, 39–43; de Boer 297–304; Herrmann, see especially 285–9. 127 Hegel, Science of Logic, 73. 128 Hegel, Hegel’s Logic, 127. “. . . so scheint es als zu auffallend, daß er nichtig sey, als daß man nicht versuchen sollte das seyn zu fixiren und es gegen den Übergang zu bewahren.” Enzyklopädie der Philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse, 123. 129 GA 68, 24. 130 Heidegger, “Die Negativität: Eie Auseinandersetzung mit Hegel aus dem Ansatz in der Negativität,” GA 68, 47.

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131 “Das Seyn ‘ist’ das ‘Nichts,’—nicht weil sie gleichwenig unbestimmt und unvermittelt, sondern ‘grund’-verschieden das Eine sind!” (Heidegger, “Die Negativität,” GA 68, 47). 132 “Heidegger attempts to no longer conceive increasing self-actualization as the highest kind of movement” (de Boer 304). 133 de Boer 302. 134 “[W]hile Hegel lets knowing become increasingly conscious of its own infinity, Heidegger by contrast brings Dasein to understand that every movement which is enacted meta logou is radically finite” (de Boer 282). 135 Stambaugh 3. Stambaugh is working here from Heidegger’s 1929–30 lecture course The Basic Concepts of Metaphysics. 136 BT 233–4. 137 “The nothing itself does not attract; it is essentially repelling. But this repulsion is itself as such a parting gesture toward beings that are submerging as a whole. This wholly repelling gesture toward beings that are slipping away as a whole, which is the action of the nothing that closes in on Dasein in anxiety, is the essence of the nothing; nihilation” (Heidegger, Pathmarks, 90). 138 Herrmann, Heideggers Philosophie der Kunst, 285–6. 139 Herrmann 287. The internal quote is Heidegger, “Was Ist Metaphysik?” 33. 140 OWA 61; HLZW 49. 141 Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth,” Basic Writings, 132; “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit,” 193. 142 GA 39, 144, translated by Taminiaux 397. 143 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 170. 144 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 159; Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik, 114–15. 145 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 160, modified. 146 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 170–1. 147 Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?” Basic Writings, 105. 148 UKW 45. 149 Shakespeare, The Second Part of Henry the Fourth, “Introduction,” line 5. 150 Vattimo quoted by Haar, Song of the Earth, 109. Vattimo’s full statement is this: “Se chiamiamo Welt, mondo, ciò che l’opera, nelle varie interpretazioni, esplicitamente dice, la terra (Erde) nell’opera sarà la sua permanente riserva di significati sempre ulteriormente, e mai definitivamente, esplicitabili” (Vattimo 116). 151 “kein einförmiges, starres Verhangenbleiben, sondern es entfaltet sich in eine unerschöpfliche Fülle einfacher Weisen und Gestalten” (HLZW 34). 152 “Gewiß steckt in der Natur ein Riß, Maß und Unmaß durch den schaffenden Entwurf ins Offene gebracht wird?” (HLZW 58). 153 Nietzsche, “The Birth of Tragedy,” 59; Haar, Song of the Earth, 110.

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154 “Dichten means, etymologically, ‘to condense,’ ‘to thicken,’ ‘to gather together,’ hence ‘to compose’” (Haar, Song of the Earth, 98). 155 Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” Basic Writings, 196; Heidegger, “Brief über den ‘Humanismus,’” 316. 156 BT 63. 157 Heidegger, “Was Ist Metaphysik?” 105. 158 “Being held out into the nothing—as Dasein is—on the ground of concealed anxiety makes man a lieutenant [Platzhalter] of the nothing” (Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?” Basic Writings, 108; “Was Ist Metaphysik?” 118). 159 Gadamer, “Reflections on My Philosophical Journey,” 47. 160 OWA 180. 161 RB 34. 162 OWA 181. 163 RB 370. 164 OWA 171. 165 RB 34. For Gadamer this is “to experience in an immediate way that unity of form and content that clearly belongs to the essence of all true artistic creation” (RB 11). 166 OWA 168. “To hold [halten] originally means to take into protective heed [hüten]” (178). 167 RB 34. This concept of tarrying or whiling that Gadamer appropriates from Heidegger becomes even more important in the later essays on art. See, for instance, “The Artwork in Word and Image,” 213–17, where “whiling” becomes the specific form of contemporaneity (Gleichzeitigkeit) in the actualization (Vollzug) of the work of art. Here there is an interesting dialectic that Gadamer develops between the sudden encounter with the work, which was a hallmark of his earlier theory, and the staying with it. 168 OWA 167. 169 RB 43. 170 OWA 48. 171 RB 42. 172 OWA 175. 173 RB 33–4. 174 OWA 17. 175 RB 33. 176 OWA 42. 177 RB 15, 14. 178 This is Gadamer’s description. See Gadamer, Heidegger’s Ways, 99. Heidegger had devoted significant part of Being and Time to a phenomenology of what he called world. “The new and startling thing was that this concept of the world now found a counterconcept in the ‘earth’” (Gadamer, Heidegger’s Ways, 99). 179 HLZW 35.

Notes

185

180 “Dastehend hält das Bauwerk dem über es wegrasenden Sturm stand und zeigt so erst den Sturm selbst in seiner Gewalt” (HLZW 28, my translation); geological— HLZW 51; OWA 63; war: slavery—OWA 43; HLZW 29. 181 OWA 55. “Welt und Erde sind je in sich ihrem Wesen nach streitig und streitbar” (HLZW 42). 182 OWA 63. “Der Streit ist kein Riß als das Aufreißen einer bloßen Kluft, sondern der Streit ist die Innigkeit des Sichzugehörens der Streitenden” (HLZW 51). 183 HLZW 35; OWA 49. 184 OWA 49. “Weil der Streit im Einfachen der Innigkeit zu seinem Höchsten kommt, deshalb geschieht in der Bestreitung des Streites die Einheit des Werkes. Die Bestreitung des Streites ist die ständig sich übertreibende Sammlung der Bewegtheit des Werkes. . . . In der Innigkeit des Streites hat daher die Ruhe des in sich ruhenden Werkes ihr Wesen” (HLZW 36). 185 HLZW 36, my translation. 186 HLZW 36. 187 PLT 58; HLZW 46. 188 Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” 161. 189 Heidegger asked him to write the preface for the Reclam edition of Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes. 190 Gadamer, “The Truth of the Work of Art,” 107–8; “Die Wahrheit des Kunstwerks,” GW 3, 259–60. 191 HAMLET Will you play upon this pipe? GUILDENSTERN My lord, I cannot. HAMLET I pray you. GUILDENSTERN Believe me, I cannot. HAMLET I do beseech you. GUILDENSTERN I know no touch of it, my lord. HAMLET ’Tis as easy as lying: govern these ventages with your fingers and thumb, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most eloquent music. Look you, these are the stops. GUILDENSTERN But these cannot I command to any utterance of harmony; I have not the skill.

186

192 193 194

195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204

Notes HAMLET Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass: and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ; yet cannot you make it speak. ’Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me. (Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 3, scene 2.) Gadamer, “The Play of Art,” RB 123–31. This text is based on transcription of a radio talk published in Kleine Schriften, vol. 4, 234–40. Gadamer, “The Play of Art,” 124. In his autobiography he is even more direct and emphatic: “This was really the starting point of my whole hermeneutical theory. The artwork is a challenge for our understanding because over and over again it evades all our interpretations and puts up an invincible resistance to being transformed into the identity of the concept.” Gadamer, “Reflections on My Philosophical Journey,” 44. TM 429. Kant, The Critique of Judgment, 223. RB 32–3. RB 33. RB 31. Picasso said, famously, that “primitive sculpture has never been surpassed.” Quoted in Rubin 5. (See Rubin 75 note 20, for original sourcing.) Rubin 19. Wischke, Die Schwäche der Schrift, 40, my translation. PS 28. RB 25–31; GW 8, 115–22. Gadamer uses the Latin term here (participatio) where he normally refers to the Platonic concept of methexis (RB 24). Gadamer attempts to describe hermeneutic identity as the point between these two sides in several ways: “The work issues a challenge which expects to be met” (26). “Every work leaves the person who responds to it a certain leeway, a space to be filled in by himself ” (26). “What is it that is so distinctive about form? The answer is that we must trace it out as we see it because we must construct it actively [aktiv aufbauen]—something required by every composition, graphic or musical in drama or in reading. There is constant cooperative activity here” (27). “This is the open space creative language gives us and which we fill out by

Notes

205 206 207 208 209

210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221

222 223 224 225 226 227

187

following what the writer evokes” (27). “The identity of the work . . . is secure by the way in which we take the construction of the work upon ourselves as a task” (28). RB 28. RB 31. RB 32. Grondin, Von Heidegger zu Gadamer, 121, my translation. The conventional linguist treats the text as a separable object of classification, while for the hermeneut, the text qua text needs to be forgotten: “I believe that what makes understanding possible is precisely the forgetfulness of language, a forgetting of the formal elements in which the discourse or the text is encased” (DD 33). A text is only something one must refer back to in order to understand the situation which gives rise to the text. Here Gadamer agrees with Derrida that “the extension of the concept of the text to include oral discourse is hermeneutically well grounded” since what is said or written is “dependent upon communicative conditions,” “the situation of understanding,” the absence of which in either case—the dropping out of context—is what creates the issues for which hermeneutics emerges as a field (33). DD 33. Heidegger, “Poetically Man Dwells,” PLT 221. DD 34. TM 156. This may be a bit of an improvement over Burke’s still useful phrase, equipment for living. BT 183. RB 128. “Niemand kann ein Gedicht lesen, ohne in sein Verständnis immer mehr einzudringen” (GW 8, 289). Grondin, The Philosophy of Gadamer, 43. TM 97. TM 129; WM 134. Heidegger, “The Way to Language,” OWL 121; “Der Weg zur Sprache,” UZS 251–2. The Heidegger quote is heavily dependent on multiple wordplays in German which would have to be unpacked. TM 133. TM 129. GW 8, 15–16. RB 26–7. RB 110–11. RB 111.

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228 In the subsequent paragraph, Gadamer glosses the term “self-fulfillment” as something that does not require confirmation or verification (RB 111–12). 229 It is important to note that one of the few examples Gadamer offers of a poetic text is a prose passage from a Dostoyevsky novel, so he is using the term poetic loosely. 230 RB 45. 231 Bakhtin extends this idea with his idea of genre contact: “The speaker ends his utterance in order to relinquish the floor to the other or to make room for the other’s active responsive understanding” (“Speech Genres and Other Late Essays,” 82). Olick has glossed this capacity of genres to absorb and pass on the affective experience of communities. 232 RB 108. 233 RB 21. 234 Ricoeur borrows this word from Gaston Bachelard, who borrows it from Eugene Minkowski. See Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 172. 235 “die aus dem Geflecht der Sinnbezüge geschöpften Bedeutungsrelationen mitspielen” (Wischke 18); “als dieselben an Sinn- und Bedeutungsgehalt reicher werden und dabei immer eindringlicher zu uns sprechen, ungeachtet der wachsender Vertrautheit mit ihnen” (19). 236 DD 44. 237 Teichert 216–17, especially note 53. 238 RB 21. Also: “There is a constant cooperative activity here. And obviously, it is precisely the identity of the work that invites us to this activity” (RB 27). 239 The explosion of scholarly attention focused on to the identity of “the” reader in the last part of the twentieth century would have escaped Gadamer’s experience. The depth and complexity of this scholarship, which is concentrated in literary studies, is a necessary extension of any hermeneutic theory of reception. Perhaps a good place to start to get into this literature would be Goldstein and Machor. 240 RB 37. 241 TM 148. 242 TM 117–18. 243 TM 122. 244 TM 118–19. 245 Frank, “The Universality Claim of Hermeneutics,” 171. 246 Gadamer, “Philosophische Bemerkungen zum Problem der Intelligenz,” GW 4, 276–87. 247 GW 4, 280–2. 248 RB 17. 249 TM 473. 250 Gadamer defended his language choice in this way: “The fact that I make use of the concept of consciousness at all, a term whose ontological bias Heidegger

Notes

251 252 253 254 255

256

257 258 259 260 261 262 263

264 265 266 267

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had clearly demonstrated in Being and Time, to me only represented an accommodation to what seemed a natural usage of language” (“Reflections on My Philosophical Journey,” 46). GW 2, 247; PH 38. Gadamer, “Reflections on My Philosophical Journey,” 41. Gadamer, “Reflections on My Philosophical Journey,” 31. Gadamer, The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, 155. Some Heidegger scholars have noted that Heidegger disavows the philosophy of reflective consciousness by remaining close to many of its motives, since “his scenario remains deeply indebted to the narratives of transcendence constructed by his post-Kantian predecessors, whose hero they could conceive only as a reflective subject. . . . [T]he work temporality does in his thinking is much like what reflectivity did in theirs” (Seigel 594). This is because of the dialectic of distance and belonging that marks the tension of Da-sein, being thrown into a particular existence but winning a limited, provisional, and always vanishing distance from it: “What the analysis of Dasein as being-in-the-world does is not to eliminate such moments of distance-taking from its formation but to predetermine the direction they impart” (595). Ek-stasis is the hermeneutic revision of Kantian transcendence, not its utter cancellation. “So, more and more I found that Heidegger’s inability to acknowledge the other was a point of weakness in him, and even by then I had already been talking out about this” (Gadamer, A Century of Philosophy, 22). Herf, Reactionary Modernism; Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins. TM 346. Gadamer, “The Festive Character of Theater,” RB 63, 58. “Aber das Werk ist es, was die Schaffenden in ihrem Wesen ermöglicht” (HLZW 58). OWA 17. PS 481. Jerrold Seigel locates the decisive turn in the exchange between Nietzsche and Heidegger. Although “Nietzsche announced the end of the era of which the cogito marked the beginning,” defining the world “as a fluid, undefinable sea of relationships between forces, subject to constant reinterpretation,” still it invited “humans to determine for themselves the terms under which their transactions with the world would take place,” and it was Heidegger who hit upon “language as the active agent of thinking, the voice of being” (Seigel 568–9). TM 354. Gadamer explicates this ontological reciprocity in the terms of Hegelian logic. See TM 467. RB 25–6. RB 45. Grondin, Von Heidegger zu Gadamer, 120–1.

190 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279

280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290

Notes RB 25–6; GW 3, 116. OWL 73. PH 100–1. GW 8, 289. RB 100. TM 114. RB 11. “The Artwork in Word and Image,” 223. RB 32–3. Gadamer, “Reflections on My Philosophical Journey,” 37. Gadamer, Hegel’s Dialectic, 113. Here is the full quote: “But just as the girl who presents the plucked fruit is more than Nature that presented it in the first place with all its conditions and elements—trees, air, light, and so on—insofar as she combines all these in a higher way in the light of self-consciousness in her eyes and in her gestures, so also the spirit of destiny which gives us these works of art is greater than the ethical life and reality of a particular people, for it is the interiorizing recollection of the still externalized spirit manifest in them. It is the spirit of tragic fate that gathers all these individual gods and attributes of substance within one Pantheon, into spirit conscious of itself as spirit” (PS 168). [Aber wie das Mädchen, das die gepflückten Früchte darreicht, mehr ist, als die in ihre Bedingungen und Elemente, den Baum Luft, Licht usf. ausgebreitete Natur derselben, welche sie unmittelbar darbot, indem es auf eine höhere Weise dies alles in den Strahl des selbstbewußten Auges und der darreichenden Gebärde zusammenfaßt so ist der Geist des Schicksals der uns jene Kunstwerke darbietet, mehr als das sittliche Leben und die Wirklichkeit jenes Volkes denn er ist die Er-Innerung des in ihnen noch veräußerten Geistes,— er ist der Geist des tragischen Schicksals, das alle jene individuellen Götter und Attribute der Substanz in das eine Pantheon versammelt, in den seiner als Geist selbstbewußten Geist]” (Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 174). Hegel, Aesthetics, 21. Hegel, Aesthetics, 8–9. Hegel, Aesthetics, 101 Humboldt, On Language, 41. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism and Other Writings, 9. Dilthey, Pattern and Meaning in History, 86. Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, 89. Dilthey, Pattern and Meaning in History, 78. Dilthey, Pattern and Meaning in History, 191. Dilthey, Pattern and Meaning in History, 197. TM 458.

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291 PH 98. “Jedenfalls ist es für das Kunstwerk keine Metapher, sondern es hat einen guten und aufweisbaren [presentable, manifestable] Sinn, daß es damit als etwas, das etwas sagt, in den Zusammenhang all desen gehört, was wir zu verstehen haben” (Gadamer, Kleine Schriften, vol. 2, p. 3). 292 Vernant finds this movement toward the whole as a distinctive characteristic of Greek tragedy: “But perhaps the essential feature that defines [Greek tragedy] is that the drama brought to the stage unfolds both at the level of everyday existence, in a human, opaque time made up of successive and limited present moments, and also beyond this earthly life, in a divine, omnipresent time that at every instant encompasses the totality of events, sometimes to conceal them and sometimes to make them plain but always so that nothing escapes it or is lost in oblivion” (Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, 44). 293 It was Merleau-Ponty’s skill in phenomenological explication that best articulated this interchange as an ontological process of exchange between person and text: “I start to read a book idly, giving it hardly any thought; and suddenly, a few words move me, the fire catches, my thoughts are ablaze, there is nothing in the book which I can overlook, and the fire feeds off everything I have ever read. I am receiving and giving in the same gesture. I have given my knowledge of the language; I have brought along what I already know about the meaning of the words, the phrases, and the syntax. I have also contributed my whole experience of others and everyday events, with all the questions it left in me—the situations left open and unsettled, as well as those with whose ordinary resolution I am all too familiar” (Merleau-Ponty 11). 294 DD 48. 295 Woolf, “On Not Knowing Greek,” 10–11. 296 Ricoeur, “On Interpretation,” From Text to Action, 18. 297 OWL 160. 298 “die volle Identität des Lebens mit sich selbst, die die Gegenwart erfüllt durch die beständige Virtualität ihrer Möglichkeiten” (GW 4, 148, my translation). 299 This is what Gadamer means, I think, when he prefers Erfahrung to Erlebnis as the experience of art. 300 PH 97. 301 “Diese Ernte ist das Sinnganze, das sich aufbaut, im Sinngebilde, wie im Klanggebilde zugleich” (Gadamer, “Bildkunst und Wortkunst,” 101). 302 “Jedes Werk, das uns ergriffen hat, läßt uns mitgehen, ja, es muß geradezu in uns eingehen” (Gadamer, “Bildkunst und Wortkunst,” 100). 303 RB 33. “Die Wahrheit der Kunstwerke scheint mir bei Gadamer durch mindestens die vier folgenden Aspekte charakterisiert: (1) Sie bezieht sich auf die Totalität eines ‘Sinnganze[n]’ (114) bzw. einer ‘Welt’ (vgl. z.B. 133), (2) die eine in sich geschlossene Ordnung, ein ‘geschlossene[r] Sinnkreis, in dem sich alles erfüllt’

192

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305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312

313 314 315

Notes (118) sowie (3) etwas radikal Neues und Schockierendes ist: Indem dieses Neue den Rezipienten ‘aus allem herausreißt, gibt es ihm zugleich das Ganze seines Seins zurück’ (133). (4) Schließlich spricht Gadamer auch immer wieder von einer ‘überlegende[n]’ (117) oder wesenhaften Wahrheit—Kunst ist ‘Erkentnis des Wesen’ (120)—, wobei nicht klar ist, inwiefern diese letztere Charakterisierung den drei erst-genannten noch etwas Neues hinzufügt” (Sonderegger 260). For Gadamer, art does both evokes the whole and constructs it: “The pantheon of art is . . . the act of an historical self-gathering and regathering mind and spirit” (TM 102). Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, 52–87. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics, 153. Gadamer, “The Eminent Text and Its Truth,” 340. Gadamer, “Bildkunst und Wortkunst,” 104. “Und dennoch: über das Seiende hinaus, aber nicht von ihm weg, sondern vor ihm her, geschieht noch ein Anderes” (HLZW 39). PLT 53; HLZW 40. These quotes occur at TM 96–7, although I am using the 1975 translation (p. 86), which is clearer in this case. The original passage is at WM 101–2. On Hegel, art, and the concrete universal, see Desmond 22–4. Žižek explains the exchange this way: “This, then, is the Hegelian ‘concrete universality’: at every stage of the dialectical process, the concrete figure ‘colours’ the totality of the process, i.e. the universal frame of the process becomes part of (or, rather, drawn into) the particular content” (The Fright of Real Tears, 23). See Popova; Tietenberg. See Surveillance Camera Players, “1984”; We Know You Are Watching. Hall and Macintosh 430.

Chapter 3 1 Bryan Doerries has translated and read Sophocles’ Ajax and Philoctetes at numerous military sites including Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in a performance project titled “Outside the Wire.” 2 Brian Vickers made an attempt to deny this inaccessibility, but it seems to me that there is a lack of modesty in simply discounting the cultural strangeness that inhabits the text. 3 “[T]he incest and cannibalism which is at the root of the familial conflict of the house of the Atreides” . . . . “All these acts add up to a sort of compendium of the dreaded (and thus tabooed) deeds that threaten the very possibility of civilization itself.”

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4 Aeschylus’ language “was meant to seem archaic even to its original audiences” (Lloyd-Jones 4). 5 Although dated, George Thomson’s anthropological account of the social origins of drama and the context of Aeschylean tragedy gives a panoramic sense of the historical movement from tribal customs to emergent state structures, and the underworkings of unfamiliar cultural values that lie beneath the text that we read. 6 Vernant 29. “Greek tragedy appears as a historical turning point precisely limited and dated. It is born, flourishes, and degenerates in Athens, and all almost within the space of a hundred years” (25). Vernant’s thesis is that the Greeks of the fifth century found themselves at an inflexion point between a religious society controlled by the gods and a secular society determined by human agency. By Aristotle’s time the tension had already resolved. 7 Thalmann notes, “the wonderful unity of idea and theme in the Oresteia” is achieved in the way that “a single passage, or even a phrase, will often have complex connections with other passages throughout the trilogy and cannot be considered in solution” (221). 8 Vernant 42. 9 Goheen 113. 10 Thomson 245. 11 Lloyd-Jones 65, n. 914. 12 Richard Seaford plots out this repetition in Clytemnestra’s ritual sacrifice point by point. 13 Lidell and Scott have the root meanings of dike as (in origin), custom, usage, manner; second, order, law, and right; and third (in the plural), judgments. 14 Thalmann 104. 15 Lattimore 12. 16 Stephen Halliwell notes that Clytemnestra’s speech at lines 895–913 “derives a crucial part of its eerie resonance from the way in which, at its very opening, it seems to confound public and private, political and personal, by mixing a sense of an official occasion with the professions of an ostensibly faithful wife” (Halliwell 132). 17 The Agamemnon is replete with examples of this type. It is built of them. So, for example, Conacher explains the figure of Paris: “(in the case of Paris and the Trojans) it is Zeus who is described as both decreeing and fulfilling, but the line anticipates (as so much of Paris’ tale will anticipate) Agamemnon’s fate, when a decree of another sort is soon to be fulfilled). So, the Chorus’ initial description of Paris’ situation is generalized in such a way, and in such language, as to be applicable to that other situation as well” (19). 18 Zeitlin 489. 19 Conacher 10. 20 Finley 253.

194 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41

42 43 44 45 46

Notes Finley 95. Book 16, lines 245–8, p. 345. Fraenkel, II, 30. For reasons of clarity I combined the Lattimore translation here with the Fraenkel. Peradotto 237. Goheen 118. Lebeck 1–2. Lebeck’s description of associative repetition is roughly analogous to the hermeneutic principle of formale Anzeige. Lebeck 1–2. WM 112–13. See particularly WM 109 for examples of the linguistic possibilities. A similar fate had met Euripides’ Medea, whose threat to normative conceptions of motherhood “was until the twentieth century found so disturbing as largely to prevent unadapted performances” (Hall and Macintosh 391). Hall 60. Hall 68–9. For a historical analysis of Thackeray’s Clytemnestra, including of the original woodcut, see Macintosh 147–50. Betensky 11–12. See Wolfe 698–703. Sainte-Beuve 11. Hermeneutics is indebted in particular to Wilhelm Dilthey for this aspect of hermeneutic understanding. He elaborates endlessly on the web of meaning that builds from experience to history and back again, and that is accessible at every point along the way, just as the nodes of a spider’s web tremble every other node. DeForest 130. Conacher 53. Vernant argues for a different moment in the play, although making the same structural point: “The moment Agamemnon sets foot on the carpet the drama reaches its consummation. And even if the play is not quite over, it can introduce nothing that is not already accomplished once and for all the past, the present, and the future have fused together with a single meaning that is revealed and encapsulated in the symbolism of this action of impious hubris” (47). It is hermeneutics above all that insists on the inextricable nexus between being and appearance, between the thing itself (Sache) and its expression. The assumption of state power is certainly an act, but Aegisthus treats the transfer of power as a fait accompli accomplished by the assassination. See Lloyd-Jones note, p. 20, p. 43 line 480, p. 62 line 854. Agamemnon’s acquiescence seems to be a foolish blind pride. His submission has been the subject of much interpretive disagreement. See, for instance, Meridor. Rosenmeyer 67.

Notes 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

70

71 72 73

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Rosenmeyer 271. Neustadt 243, my translation. OWA 113. Rosenmeyer 259. Rosenmeyer 260. PLT 63. DD 31. RB 28. RB 31. For a good summary of the extraordinary adventure of the textual evidence, see Rosenmeyer. DiBattista 827. I am heavily indebted to the scholarship gathered in Macintosh and colleagues’ marvelous anthology on the performance history of the Agamemnon for this brief overview of the reception history. Hall 74. Hall 56. Hall 68–9. Racine 49. Kettle 21. The phrase was a term of ridicule used by house organs of mainstream culture in the 1890s, an index of discomfort with rising emancipatory sentiment. The Oedipus Tyrannus was performed in 1806 by the Reading School in the Berkshire town of Reading. Hall and Macintosh 250. Hall and Macintosh 327–46. This is a note from Planché’s acting edition of The Golden Fleece, quoted in Hall and Macintosh 343–4. As Hall and Macintosh point out, “even if they were ostensibly repudiating Classics, burlesques were simultaneously appropriating the subject for their audience” (377). I omit a discussion here of the Clytemnestra woodcuts that Thackeray himself had originally drawn for the serialization. The second illustration is used in chapter 67 to strengthen the inference that Becky had a hand in the death of Jos Sedley. Fiona Macintosh discusses the interpretive issues around this version of Clytemnestra, which only further supports what I am saying here about Thackeray’s appropriation. See Macintosh 149–52. Van Ghent believed Thackeray did not even fully grasp the depth of his own critique, since the parallel plot of the virtuous Amelia is meant to balance off the amorality of his heroine, but perhaps that too is a ruse. See Van Ghent 143–4. Descriptors of, respectively, Van Ghent (152) and DiBattista (828). DiBattista 827. This is originally Kierkegaard’s phrase, 131.

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Notes

74 Caputo 343. 75 Kierkegaard 131. 76 I have developed the hermeneutic link to typology in a previous work. See Arthos, The Inner Word in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics, 84–5. 77 Macintosh 141, 154, 158–9. 78 RB 69, 70. 79 Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 43. 80 Woolf, “On Not Knowing Greek,” 4. 81 Prins 164. 82 Woolf, “Reading,” 21–2. 83 Woolf, “On Not Knowing Greek,” 9. 84 “Although she did not and could not attend Cambridge, the university attended by her father, her brother, her husband, and several of her family and friends, she supported the notion that Greek was the center of humane study. It is ironic that although denied a university education, she was tutored in the language that was mandatory for all students at Oxford and Cambridge” (Dalgarno 41). 85 “Mastery of the Greek language was a compelling if unattainable ideal which left Woolf permanently in the position of the amateur” (Dalgarno 34). 86 The Agamemnon was performed in Greek at Oxford and Cambridge at regular intervals during the period that Woolf was attempting to learn Greek. See Prins 167. 87 Leslie Stephen wrote to her instructor that because of her “nervous state” it would be best to “let her off with light work” (quoted in Dalgarno 41). 88 In this section I am especially indebted to Prins for culling these Woolf quotes from the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. 89 In Bakhtin’s words, the “spreading ripples of verbal responses and resonances form around each and every” word (“Marxism and the Philosophy of Language,” 52), and each word “enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgments and accents, weaves in and out of complex interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from others, intersects with yet a third” (“The Dialogic Imagination,” 75–6). The “companies” of words communicate what “each one separately is too weak to express” (Woolf, “On Not Knowing Greek,” 7). 90 Dalgarno 62. 91 Woolf, “On Not Knowing Greek,” 1. 92 Prins describes Woolf ’s difficulty with Greek as “a love of Greek logoi that would leave the language unpronounced, unspoken, and unknown. . . . Woolf turned to Greek to perform ‘not knowing’ as a movement of thought” (172). 93 Brandon 18. 94 This statement from “The Life of St. Rose” in a manuscript at the University of Maryland Libraries is quoted in Titus 7. 95 Titus 90. 96 Porter 379.

Notes 97 98 99 100 101

102 103 104 105

106 107 108 109 110 111 112

113 114 115

116

117 118

197

Rooke and Wallis 64. See Hafen for several such allusions to the Agamemnon in Porter’s “The Grave” (1–2). See, for instance, Peradotto. Porter 379. Gadamer, “Bildkunst und Wortkunst,” 101. Grondin adds beautifully to this: “Das Lesen behält bei Gadamer den Nebenton des Aufsammelns (recueillement), des Auslesen- und Gärenlassens.” Untranslatable, but the idea here is the complex aural resonances between the German words for reading and fermenting. It suggests that the augmentation of meaning that the reader brings to a text is more than just an addition of perspective, but a kind of organic self-multiplication within the text itself. Hartigan 7. Hartigan used newspaper reviews to establish the chronologies. See Hartigan 4–6. Hartigan 68–9. Zeitlin believes that the male-female conflict in the play subsumes the other dominant conflictual motif as “the central metaphor which ‘sexualizes’ the other issues and attracts them into its magnetic field” (149). The issue of gender and Clytemnestra is its own vast literature because of the way that Clytemnestra so powerfully challenges gender norms and the question of how this sits within the overall narrative purpose of the trilogy. See, for instance, Foley 201–42, and also McClure, chapter 3. Zeitlin 149. Malinowski 19. Zeitlin 151. Zeitlin 150. RB 25. Neroni 15. Strong female leads also became more prominent in mainstream science fiction movies such as Katharine Ross in The Stepford Wives (1975), Julie Christie in Demon Seed (1977), Genevieve Bujold in Coma (1978). Neroni 18–19. Vernant 32–8. Critics have noted that “somewhere in the confusion” elicited by Ripley’s ascendency in the cultural imagination of the 1980s and 1990s, “Ripley became something more than a quaint footnote in cinematic history” (Gallardo and Smith 23). Ridley Scott, the director of the original Alien, affirmed that the world he had imagined for this science fiction nightmare drew inspiration from a generalized mythology. See Giger. Aeschylus in The Eumenides, lines 52–4. Zeitler comments here: “In the primitive portrayal of the Furies there is a regression to the deepest fantasies of buried

Notes

198

119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127

128 129 130 131 132

133 134 135 136 137 138 139

masculine terrors. They are paides apaides, children who are no children because they are old and also because they are children who have no children. . . . [T]hey inhabit the depths of the earth” (159). Attributed to Hesiod, “Shield of Heracles,” lines 246–70, pp. 236–9. Neustadt 243. Neustadt 244. Zeitler 159. Katz 85. Aeschylus, “The Libation Bearers,” lines 32–70, p. 94, Oresteia. Gould 284. Rushing 10–19. Ripley becomes closely associated with the Alien creature in ways that are strangely biological, existential, and mythical, but this works in tension with her equally strongly humane and maternal instincts toward animals, children, and robots. Likewise this tenderness works in a constant tension with her hardness, ruthlessness, and cold-blooded calculation. Zeitler 150. Alien 3. Fusillo 228. Foucault 7, 8. The Western intellectual history survey course was a staple of Gadamer’s teaching, and his lectures did indeed see history as “articulated into great units—stages or phases—which contain within themselves their own principle of cohesion” (Foucault 10). Gadamer, “The Continuity of History and the Existential Moment,” 235–40. Foucault 12. TM 184. Vernant 185. A useful text in this regard is Gadamer, “Bildkunst und Wortkunst,” 100–4. RB 72. “The history of European civilization for Hegel is a continual transcendence of alienation and realization of human freedom, for Heidegger it is a continual covering over of the original truth or a continual forgetting of being” (Dottori 18, my translation).

Afterword 1 GW 3, 74.

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Index Aeschylus  123–66 African wax prints  33, 39 Alien (film franchise)  157–61 appearance (manifestation)  9–15, 78, 111, 146 appropriateness  see the criterion of rightness of fit architecture  80, 90, 98 Aristotle,  and action vs. character  61–3 and energeia  68 and fear and pity  172 and history and poetry  5, 15, 58 and the perfect work  40, 42, 61–2, 181 and poesis and praxis  101 and tragedy  16 audience (spectator, reader, receiver)  4–11, 17, 24–7, 30, 43, 46–7, 89, 92–4, 123, 138–9, 168, 172 Augustine, Saint  94 Bach, Johann Sebastian  48, 94, 139 Balzac, Honoré de  22–4 being-in-the-world  8–9, 189 Bild (image)  12, 14, 17, 35, 41, 55, 63, 65, 93, 99, 129, 133, 135, 138, 147, 152, 155, 156, 162, 168 Bildung  20, 154 Brecht, Bertolt  121 burlesque theater  142–3, 146 Carnap, Rudolph  70 circle of meaning  7, 16–18, 31, 54, 61 closure and openness of the work  6–7, 16–18, 45, 53–69, 92, 167 convention/invention, dialectic of . . .  46  Copeland, Aaron  60 criterion of rightness of fit, the (correctness, attunemet)  19–21, 44–9 Dilthey, Wilhelm  112–15, 121, 154, 156, 194 distance  9–10, 17–18, 22–3, 31, 34, 48, 54–5, 62, 65–7, 73, 94, 108, 144, 151, 163, 189

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor  93 Duchamps, Marcel  28 eminent text  44, 48, 50, 95, 106 energeia and ergon  4, 21, 28, 32, 68, 181 ephemerality (transience)  12, 38, 59, 130, 132 Euripides  121, 142, 194 event of meaning  47 finitude  35–6, 55, 69, 71–4, 79, 101, 108, 111, 120, 167 fixity of the text  12, 37–42, 49, 74, 132, 167 Forouhar, Parastou  121 fragment (the postmodern fragment)  6, 55, 67, 169 Gebilde (work)  viii, 13, 28–9, 32, 68, 90–1, 106, 116–17, 120, 138, 167–9 Geiger, H. R.  157–9 Gluck, Christoph W.  131 Goethe, Johann W. von  67, 173 Grondin, Jean  88, 91, 104, 173, 198 Hegel, G.W. F.,  and aesthetics  8, 110–11, 192 and the concrete universal  6, 113, 120, 179 and dialectic  9, 47 and Geist  98–9, 109, 111 and history  118 and idealism  10, 15 and the negative (or Nothing)  71–2, 182 and recognition  21 and the speculative  102–4 and totality  27, 108 Heidegger, Martin,  and art  11, 71–81, 103, 120, 171–2, 176, 179 and attunement  46, 48–9, 66–76 and being-in-the-world  73, 89, 101–5, 189 and earth and world  78, 83, 137

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and essence vs. presencing  6, 12, 69, 79, 121 and nothing (the negative)  71–9 and the open  39 and the poetic Saying (Sprache)  12, 57, 92, 115, 153–4 and repetition  21, 175 and the social  102 and subjectivity/objectivity  37–8, 107 and the symbol  80 and technē  76, 182 and the universal/particular  30, 48, 119 and violence  77, 81–4 and withdrawal (forgetting)  69–70, 75, 83, 198 Heiress, The (also Washington Square)  19, 60–6 hermeneutic circle  6, 27, 47, 69, 117 Hesiod  157–8 history of effect  147, 151 Hölderlin, Friedrich  176 Homer  65, 128 Humboldt, Wilhelm von  111–15 Huysman, Joris-Karl  56 Ibsen, Henrik  142 ideality  5, 10–17, 20–1 imitatio  49–50, 55, 58–9, 109–10 individual, the (vs. the community)  29–30, 98–9, 101–7, 103, 109, 112–13, 149, 158 insight  42, 63 Iser, Wolfgang  37–40 James, Henry  60–6 Kant, Immanuel,  and the a priori  111 and the Ding-an-sich  12, 108, 111 and the productive imagination  42, 95, 156 and the symbol  85, 108, 168 and taste  ix, 177 and transcendence  10, 189 Kierkegaard, Søren  68, 146 Leff, Michael  20 measure (metron)  19, 23, 43, 88–9, 95–101 Mendelssohn, Felix  142

mimesis (imitation, imitatio)  5–6, 21, 54, 65, 118, 172, 180 musical performance and interpretation  20, 41, 94 Nietzsche, Friedrich  21, 189 nothing (nothingness, nihilism)  71–9 opennness of the work  see closure part/whole (general/particular, metonymy)  8, 30, 42, 47, 58, 85, 100, 107–21, 126, 169 participation (methexis)  6, 8, 30, 46, 86–7, 92–5, 104, 186 Pasolini, Piero  67, 158, 161–2 performance (as an ontological category)  28, 31, 52, 66, 68, 78, 97, 102 Picasso, Pablo  50–1 Pindar  126 Planché, James R.  142 Plato,  and beauty  ix, 10 and methexis (participation)  104, 186 and presence (parousia)  45 and recognition (memory, anamnesis)  21, 146 and the truth of art  16, 52, 174 play  2–11, 28, 39, 84, 105, 130, 132, 173 see also Spiel Porter, Katherine Anne  151–4, 164 Racine, Jean  131, 140–1 recognition  17–18, 21–4, 35, 57–62, 66–7, 87–8, 105, 136, 146–7, 162, 180 recollection (memory)  87, 109–10, 110, 190 reference (referentiality)  38, 41, 85, 130 representation  4, 9, 19, 21, 25, 44, 57–8, 65, 86 Resonanzboden (resonance chamber)  32, 41, 95, 113, 124–30, 133, 196 rhetoric  3, 20, 25, 27, 78, 125, 149, 150 rhythm  88, 94, 104 Ricoeur, Paul  24, 41–3, 45–56, 96, 115, 118 ritual  4, 16, 29, 104, 164, 173 Sache (matter, thing, Ding)  12–13, 30, 48, 53, 78, 90, 194 Sainte-Beuve, Charles A.  132

Index satire  142–7 schema  156 see also Kant Schirach, Ferdinand von  115–17 Schlegel, Friedrich  36 Schleiermacher, Friedrich  89, 109, 112 self-consciousness  5, 99, 107 Seneca  131, 139–40 speech (Sprache, language)  78, 85, 88, 92–3, 98, 111–13, 163 Spiel (game/play)  2–11, 6, 9, 28, 84, 130, 173–4 Stanwick, Anna  146 Strauss, Richard  131 Surveillance Camera Players  121 symbol  87–95 technē  76–7 temporality  29–32, 45, 59–60, 116, 127, 159, 184 textuality  37–50, 56 Thakeray, William M.  141, 143–7 totality (total mediation)  26–30, 52–3, 107–21, 108, 111, 113 tragedy (Greek)  27–8, 54, 70, 141, 157, 164, 191 see also Aristotle transformation  13–14, 24–9, 50, 94, 118, 147, 168, 174 typology  126, 146

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uncanny, the (unheimlich)  73, 76–7 Valéry, Paul  44, 59 Velásquez, Diego  31 Verene, Donald  102 verisimilitude  16, 19 Vernant, Jean-Pierre  21–2, 28, 191, 193, 194 Verwandlung (transformation, metamorphosis)  13–14, 19, 24–8, 147 violence (Gewalt)  76 Vollzug (actualization, energeia, performance)  32, 68, 96, 102, 165, 184 Weinsheimer, Joel  22, 53, 59–60 whiling (tarrying, Verweilen)  80, 82, 114, 176, 184 wholeness  5–7, 18, 27, 32, 40–1, 54, 56, 62, 67, 69, 75, 87, 100–1, 107–21, 145, 156, 169 withdrawal (concealment, covering over)  71–9 Woolf, Virginia  114–15, 147–51, 196 Wyler, William  60–6 see also The Heiress Zeitlin, Froma  127, 155, 197 Zuwachs an Sein (Zuwachsansein, increase of being)  32, 35, 61, 69, 109, 111, 175