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Journal of Applied December 10, 2011 What is The Author(s) 2011

Diacritical Hermeneutics?

Richard Kearney

What is diacritical hermeneutics? First a brief ogy. Why these? Because each solicited an word on what I mean by hermeneutics gener- interpretation of dual meanings: a) divine and ally, then several words on the qualifier, dia- human (), b) prosecutorial and defen- critical.1 sive (law), c) ancient and actual (philology). All three disciplines called for a method of I understand hermeneutics as an art of de- discriminating between different and often ciphering multiple meaning. In its most basic conflicting readings. would sense this relates to the human capacity to add ‘history’ to the list as a universal human have ‘two thinks at a time,’ as devoted to reading between past and said. More precisely, it refers to the practice present; a science, which he saw as a model of discerning indirect, tacit or allusive mean- for a general hermeneutics of life as it inter- ings, of sensing another sense beyond or be- prets itself. Whence the birth of philosophical neath apparent sense. This special human ac- hermeneutics. tivity may in turn call for a method of second- order, reflective interpretation involving a Later, Heidegger would broaden the defi- process of disclosing concealed messages, nition further in speaking of an ontological either by a) unmasking covered-up meaning hermeneutic committed to understanding the (hermeneutics of suspicion) or b) by disclos- fundamental difference between Being and ing surplus meaning (hermeneutics of affir- beings - a task based on a pre-understanding mation). In short, I understand hermeneutics of our everyday as being-toward- as the task of interpreting (hermeneuein) plu- death. The famous . Finally, ral meaning in response to the polysemy of and more recently, thinkers like Gadamer, language and life.2 Ricoeur, and Caputo have augmented the con- temporary project of philosophical hermeneu- Hermeneutics, thus viewed, is an activity tics in various significant ways (semantic, carried out in the name of its founding , psychoanalytic, deconstructive). But what all Hermes: Messenger of , guardian of these different hermeneutic movements share thresholds, and carrier of cryptic codes. The is a commitment to the task of adjudicating three original disciplines of hermeneutics, formulated by in the , were theology, law, and philol- Corresponding Author: Dr. The Charles B. Seelig Professor in Philosophy Department Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA Email: [email protected] 2 Kearney Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2011 Article 2 between different levels of meaning. cipation does not erupt ex nihilo. It does not start with modern revolutions and the En- So where exactly does diacritical herme- lightenment; rather it draws from a whole pal- neutics fit in? And how might it contribute to impsest of prior narratives of liberation going the hermeneutic legacy described above? back, in the West, to Biblical stories of exo- dus and the Socratic awakening. ad- I have already sketched my project of dia- dresses the question of ethical criteria already critical hermeneutics in the Introduction to when he remarks that if you wish to com- Strangers Gods and Monsters and other relat- municate the meaning of a virtue you recount ed texts.3 But as John Caputo has remarked, the story of someone who embodies it - e.g., this project has, to date, been more performed Achilles for courage, Penelope for constancy, than explained. I will attempt to redress the Tiresius for wisdom. Such narratives - ancient balance here by addressing the question under or modern - provide phronesis with exempla- five main headings: ry paradigms by which to measure, judge, and act. Otherwise how could one tell the differ- 1) In the most obvious sense, dia-critical ence between just and unjust actions? These involves a critical function of interrogation. I differences require careful criteriological dis- mean this in the modern sense of the term criminations. And there are obviously other from Kant’s three down to the more essential criteria apart from the narrative one contemporary movements of mentioned (e.g., rational deliberation of rights, from Horkheimer and Adorno to Habermas virtue , pragmatist judgment, phenome- and Foucault. In this broad sweep, I would nological intuition of values, spiritual exercis- obviously include critiques of race, class, es, feminist and socio-cultural critiques, wis- gender, power, and the unconscious: All criti- dom traditions etc.). In short, pace decon- cal , which carry on the legacy, struction, I am not against criteria as long as amongst others, of the ‘three masters of sus- they involve vigilant discernments and dis- picion’ (Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche). In short, tinctions. I understand here as both a) an in- quiry into the conditions of possibility of 3) Third, in keeping with the more precise meaning; and b) a critical exposure of dictionary definition of dia-critical, I refer to a ‘masked’ power in the name of liberation and grammatological attention to inflections of justice. This latter more ethico-political aspect linguistic marks. In this technical sense, dia- of critique is one I find lacking in most main- critics provides rules for differentiating be- stream hermeneutic methods to date (Dilthey, tween minute units of language (signifiers, Heidegger, Gadamer) until we arrive at Ric- graphemes, accents). Think, for example, of oeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion and the difference, which the following accents - Vattimo’s hermeneutics of subversion. grave, acute, circumflex, and diaeresis - make on the same letter in the French language: é è 2) Second, dia-critical involves the criteri- ê, ë. Or think of how ‘où’ with an accent ological function of discerning between com- (meaning ‘where’) differs from ‘ou’ without peting claims to meaning. This comprises accent (meaning ‘or’). These silent, discreet hermeneutic retrievals of previous testimonies signs distinguish between values of the same as well as future oriented projects - utopian, character. Small graphic demarcations thus messianic, eschatological. ‘Emancipation is serve to avoid confusion between otherwise itself a tradition,’ as Ricoeur says; it is a form identical letters, helping us differentiate be- of ‘anticipatory memory.’ The idea of eman- tween distinct meanings. More generally, in

3 Kearney Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2011 Article 2 structural and post-structural linguistics, dia- dog Argos.5 For if Hermes discloses hermetic critics denotes a way of reading differentially, messages from above, Argos brings animal across gaps and oppositions, in keeping with savvy from below. The former guides our de- the Saussurian maxim that language is a net- ciphering of cryptic masks and messages work of ‘differences without positive terms’. (Hermes appears to Baucis disguised as a In these respects, diacritics is all about micro- beggar). The latter, Argos, imparts a canine reading. And here, I think, I share common flair for recognizing the friend or enemy in ground with John Caputo’s radical hermeneu- the visitor (e.g., Odysseus returned to Ithaca tics and ’s .4 to oust the suitors).6

4) In addition to this technical usage in Diacritical hermeneutics may thus be de- linguistic and semiotic practice, diacritics also fined as both sacred and terrestrial in so far as has the older diagnostic meaning of reading it ranges up and down - in ascending and de- the body. The Greek terms, dia-krinein and scending spirals - from the highest hintings of dia-krisis, referred to the medical or therapeu- the absolute to the lowest soundings of the tic practice of diagnosing symptoms of bodily abyss. While hands reach up, feet reach down. fevers, colorations, and secretions. In this But no matter how high or low hermeneutic sense, the word designated the hermeneutic ‘sense’ goes, it never leaves us totally in the art of discriminating between health and dis- dark. It is not blind but half-seeing and half- ease. Such a skill to read between the lines of believing. It is a sort of incarnate phronesis, skin and flesh - in order to sound the move- which probes, scents, and filters. Something ments of the (homeopathic or allopathic) akin to Wittgenstein’s seeing-as in our most - was often a matter of life and death. Need- ordinary perceptions or Heidegger’s under- less to say, this model of micrological reading standing-as in our most basic moods (see his of somatic and psychosomatic symptoms has analysis of Verstehen-Befindlichkeit in Being deep implications for the practice of philo- and Time). This fundamental form of existen- sophical reading in its own right. I agree with tial sensibility is further radicalized in Mer- Wittgenstein that philosophy is therapy. In leau-Ponty’s more embodied notion of ‘dia- sum, diacritical hermeneutics should do you critical perception’ to which I shall return be- good! low.7

5) These four characteristics – critical, cri- At this stage, and by way of addressing teriological, grammatological and diagnostic - some of the more recent discussions of her- comprise the basis of what I call, finally and meneutics, we might ask how our fivefold most primally, ‘carnal hermeneutics.’ Here model of diacritical hermeneutics compares we are concerned with a hermeneutics that with John Caputo’s method of ‘radical her- goes all the way down. It covers diacritical meneutics’ inspired by Derrida’s deconstruc- readings of different kinds of Others - human, tion. While the diacritical and radical ap- animal or divine. All with skins on. Such car- proaches share a common commitment to mi- nal hermeneutics has a crucial bearing, to take cro-logical reading, there are significant dif- just one example, on how we ‘sense’ subtle ferences. In contrast to deconstructive sans- distinctions between hostile and hospitable savoir, diacritical hermeneutics practices a strangers (the same term, hostis can refer to certain savoir, which goes beyond Derrida’s guest or enemy). And pursuing this example I maxim of ‘reading in the dark.’ Diacritical would say that diacritical hermeneutics has savoir should, I suggest, be understood in its two patron saints - the Hermes and the original etymological sense of tasting: Sa-

4 Kearney Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2011 Article 2 vourer, sapere, sapientia. It is not knowledge, nivorous, hostile and hospitable. Matters of in the purely cognitive or theoretical attitude taste are often matters of inclusion and exclu- (here I agree with deconstruction); but it is sion, even of life or death. And taste here is as some kind of savvy nonetheless. Sense as literal as it is figural (since it subverts the dis- primal interpretation, reading between the tinction); or, more accurately, it is not just a lines of skin and flesh. A sensing, which matter of aesthetic indifference, as Kant held, makes sense in the three connotations of the but of actual savoring upon the lips, tongue French sens: Sensation, direction, meaning. I and palette. Man is what he eats, as the old am concerned here, in short, with a multi- adage goes; but he is also how he eats. The layered sensing which goes all the way up and contents of the menu are less important than down - like Jacob’s ladder - from thought to how one chooses this dish or that, or mixes touch and back again.8 Meaning ascending flavors and savors, or why one sits down to and descending in open-ended spirals. the meal in the first place. Chaqu’un à son goût. * Taste is, perhaps, the primordial sense of By way of elaborating further on the different carnal hermeneutics. The most alimentary is inflections between diacritical hermeneutics the most elementary. For tasting is already, ab and deconstruction let me explore for a mo- initio, a transfiguring of nature into culture. It ment the implications of what I call ‘diacriti- involves a splitting of the world into binaries cal sensation.’ I refer here, most simply, to which may remain opposed or symbolically familiar phrases like ‘I don’t know how to combine.9 A of sundering and salva- read you?’ or ‘your face betrays your feelings’ tion through food is to be found in most wis- or the proverbial ‘the eyes are the mirrors of dom traditions. Adam and Eve taste the apple. the soul.’ Lady MacBeth puts it well to her Abraham and Sarah dine with sacred husband, ‘your face is like a book, my Thane, strangers. Krishna swallows the puff of rice where men may read strange matters.’ Mostly giving fullness back to emptiness. such phrases are used in relation to facial ex- breaks bread in Emmaus restoring his broken pressions - glancing or shading of eyes, wid- body. Isis’s fish consumes the dismembered ening of pupils, raising of eyebrows, altering flesh of Osiris. Each great wisdom tradition is, of complexion, stiffening or loosening of lips, it seems, marked by such moments of inaugu- smiling or grimacing of mouth. But facial vi- ral eating. sion, as bearer of inner moods, deep feelings and moral emotions, is not the only medium Let me say a few words about just one of of expression. In addition to our ability to see these foundational scenes before returning to (or see through) we also have the ability to a more phenomenological account of diacriti- hear, touch, smell and taste. Each sense has its cal sensation. own special savoir/saveur and is deeply struc- tured in terms of body mapping, orientation * and negotiation. Sensing is never neutral. Every sense possesses its particular symbol- One of the oldest records of sacred eating, in ique, as Levi-Strauss demonstrated in his the western Indo-European tradition, is to be of la pensée sauvage. found in the Taittiriya Upanishad. Here we Even the most basic culture of food is a way read how the divine manifests itself in the of- of carving up our universe into edible and in- fering and eating of food.10 ‘Treat your guests edible, raw and cooked, herbivorous and car- like gods’ (1.11.2) when giving food, we are

5 Kearney Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2011 Article 2 told, for ‘that (food) is .’ (3.1) The be tempted to infer the existence of some true self of mind and vital breath was consid- trans-cultural, or quasi-universal, practice of ered to dwell within food, considered as an gustatory hospitality. And one might be right. interconnection between the cosmic elements But such comparative of the of air and earth. (3.9) The task of the host is to tongue themselves involve a work of diacriti- discern this culinary ‘correspondence’ and cal hermeneutics - a second-order methodical thereby recognize the god within the guest. interpretation of first-order interpretations of Offering hospitality to the guest is a sacred carnal communication between hosts and act in that it reminds us of the integrity of guests.12 All such primal scenes of eating, body and soul illustrated by the equation: across diverse and cultures, bear food-true happiness-Brahman. The Upanishad witness to common practices of tasting the concludes with a resounding paean to the divine in the human and the human in the di- transfiguring power of food. The self becomes vine. They offer us choice ingredients for a sacred in a sacramental identification with gourmet guide to the gods. Delicate dégusta- eating: ‘I am food! I eat him who eats the tions of hidden things. food! I have conquered the whole universe! I am like the light in the firmament.’ (3.10.6) It might be noted, finally, that if gustatory This ancient found classic expression in hospitality is one inaugural practice of civili- the formula: ‘Anna (food) - the first manifes- zations, sexual hospitality is another. Note, tation of Brahman’; and it later became the for example, how in Biblical scripture Sarah basis for a long Vedantic tradition of hospital- and Mary both experience ‘miraculous con- ity where saintly figures offer themselves as ceptions’ (Sarah is barren, Mary a virgin) food and reveal themselves in the act of eat- when they receive strangers into their hearts- ing and being eaten. The unexpected guest (a- wombs (chora), while many heroines of Hel- thiti) who asks to be fed is a god waiting to lenic, Celtic and Eastern mythologies have become manifest. In feeding the guest we carnal congress with guests-become-gods. In greet the divine and taste its food. A primal such founding narratives, touch, smell, sight act of carnal hermeneutics. and sound are often synaesthesized with taste in the meetings of gods and mortals. From the We find clear affinities here with similar beginning divinity becomes flesh in multiple acts of sacred hospitality in Biblical literature. ways. The polysemy of such primal enflesh- Recall again Abraham and Sarah feeding the ment is, I submit, a key task of diacritical three divine strangers at Mamre (Gen); or hermeneutics. Christ offering his body as Eucharistic bread at the Last Supper and at Emmaus; or return- * ing as the stranger (hospes) who asks and re- ceives food from passersby. (Matt 25) I have We do not, however, have to look to the an- treated such inaugural scenes of sacred trans- cient narratives to find evidence for the dia- formation between hosts and guests elsewhere, critical connoisseurship of the senses. We al- so I will not dwell further on them now.11 ready find examples of such carnal hermeneu- Suffice it to note that the sacred sharing of tics in our everyday sensations. Here we food is not confined to Hindu or Biblical tra- might take special heed of the pioneering ditions but is also to be found in Buddhist, phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, and in Greek and other cultural myths of Gods ap- particular his notion of ‘diacritical perception.’ pearing as guests at the table of hospitality. This idea was first developed in his Collège On studying such recurring motifs one might de France Lecture courses, La Conscience et

6 Kearney Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2011 Article 2 l’acquisition du language (1950) and Le This of diacritical perception is alien to Monde sensible et le monde de l’expression the classical approach of difference presup- (1953, henceforth MSME). Borrowing liber- posing identity. On the contrary, writes Mer- ally from Saussure's notion that words only leau-Ponty, the identity of terms emerges in signify by virtue of their differences with oth- the tension of their differences, their contours er words, Merleau-Ponty argues that mean- arising from the encroachment (empiètement) ings are never given as isolated terms or ob- of things on things. And here he coins the jects but always as parts of a mobile interac- term ‘infra-thing’ in contradistinction to the tion of signs involving intervals, absences, old notion of discrete objective substances. folds and gaps (écarts). This is not just a function of language, however, but the very Here Merleau-Ponty departs from the Aris- structure of perception itself. Insofar as per- totelian habit of defining something new in ception is thus structured like language in its terms of a preexisting genre or foundation. nascent state it is diacritical. Here is how Diacritical perception through gaps reveals Merleau-Ponty puts it in an important Note the inadequate character of the traditional from his 1953 lectures: one-to-one correlation between consciousness and object; such derived correspondence aris- Diacritical notion of the perceptual sign. es only in retrospect and ignores the fact that This is the idea that we can perceive differ- there never was an object in the first place but ences without terms, gaps with regard to a only several different infra-things, and at the level (of meaning) which is not itself an very minimum a reversible interplay between object - the only way to give perception a figure and ground (fond). This plurality of consciousness worthy of itself and which infra-things is irreducible to the dualist does not alter the perceived into an ob-ject, framework of an isolated mind faced with an into the signification of an isolating or re- isolated object. Diacritical perception is, Mer- flexive attitude. (MSME, p. 203-204) leau-Ponty insists, the sensing of meaning as it expresses itself in the intervals between In a subsequent note entitled ‘Diacritical such infra-things of our experience. It in- perception’ - no longer merely a ‘notion’ but volves our sense of identity through differen- now a sensible quality of perception itself - tiation rather than differentiation through Merleau-Ponty adds this intriguing example. identity.13 To see another’s visage is to interpret it car- nally ‘as’ this or that form of expression: Our most basic carnal sensations may thus be said to be structured diacritically in so far To perceive a physiognomy, an expression, as they are structured like the phonetic differ- is always to deploy diacritical signs, in the entiations of language. “To have a body capa- same manner as one realizes an expressive ble of expressive articulation or action and to gesticulation with one's body. Here each have a phonetic system capable of construct- (perceptual) sign has the unique virtue of ing signs, is the same thing” (MSME, p. 204). differentiating from others, and these dif- Our body schemas, Merleau-Ponty claims, ferences which appear for the onlooker or operate like phonetic systems which function are used by the speaking subject are not de- according to principles of which they are not fined by the terms between which they oc- conscious (e.g., parole is not conscious of cur, but rather define these in the first place. langue). But to compare carnal perception to (MSME, p. 211) linguistic structure in this way is not to reduce the latter to the former (), nor to

7 Kearney Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2011 Article 2 reduce the former to the latter (). to the displacement of natural cause by cul- Nature does not make the body any more than tural expression. it makes phonetic systems. And it would be a mistake to construe the perceptual capacity to In the 1953 lecture notes, Merleau-Ponty play with principles of which it is not imme- offers one further telling illustration of the diately aware as some kind of ‘unconscious.’ diacritical isomorphism of perception and Perception of figure is not simultaneously language. He compares the perception of perception of ground - but rather ‘impercep- movement to the comprehension of a sentence. tion’: the sensing of the invisible in and We only understand the beginning of a sen- through the visible, a ‘sentir en profondeur,’ tence from its end, he says, just as we only by negations, absences, gaps (écarts). Or as perceive movement in light of its goal. Per- Merleau-Ponty puts it in Gestalt language: ception does not follow something as it dis- “consciousness of the figure is consciousness places itself from one fixed place to another, without knowledge of the ground (fond)” as if one solid object succeeded another; it (MSME, p. 204). proceeds rather as a wave which stretches back and forth across distances in the same We may say therefore that diacritical per- manner as a sentence circulates through a ception witnesses the birth of expression, whole linguistic field. Carnal sensation is a against an unformed background, as a mean- fold (pli) in the moving flesh of the world; ing which begins and re-begins, an awakening there is no world without it and it cannot be which takes the form of a figure that is pre- without a world. “Like signs in language,” figured and refigured again and again, now writes Merleau-Ponty, “the points traversed in fore, now aft, now here, now there.14 Hence movement have only a diacritical value; they the importance of Merleau-Ponty’s metaphor do not function in themselves as places but of modulation: “Consider sensation itself, the rather as passages in the same way as words act of sensing (le sentir), as the intervening of of a sentence are traces of an intention which a figure on a fond. Modulation. As a sound (invisibly) transpierces them” (MSME, p. modulates silence. As a color modulates an 205). Or to put it another way, perception op- open space by varying it. Every sign is dia- erates like language in that it does not con- critical” (MSME, p. 206). And Merleau-Ponty front an ob-ject head on, but senses things adds significantly, “This is Valéry’s idea,” which speak to it laterally, on the side, pro- thereby indicating that his use of the term ‘di- voking one’s ‘complicity’ in the manner of an acritical’ is as indebted to literary poetics as it ‘obsession.’ Less objective than obsessional, is to structural linguistics. Either way, this then, the thing perceived ‘solicits’ us (Valéry). birth of meaning occurs not in the manner of a Like an epiphany that calls for remembrance foundational cause (as in the old ) (Proust); or a poetic word which invites co- but as a diacritical play of visible and invisi- naissance (Claudel); or a pregnancy that ble, an embodied vigilance capable of signal- yearns for birth and rebirth (Bachelard); or a ing and resuscitating full being (l’être total) frosted branch whose every crystal signals a on the basis of a fragment (MSME, p. 204- whole order of emergent meanings (). 205). This diacritical interplay between figure With all these literary analogies, Merleau- et fond represents an endless reversibility - for Ponty is suggesting that each perception of what is one perceiver’s figure is another's the world constructs itself on the basis of an fond and vice versa. The diacritical art of per- emerging part which solicits our co-creation ception, enacted in the advent of sensing, ul- of this world; just as language constructs itself timately amounts, in Merleau-Ponty’s view, in terms of a circular movement between a

8 Kearney Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2011 Article 2 present part and absent whole. (Merleau- inwardly prepared, in the same way the Ponty also uses here the analogy of a film sensible has not only a motor and vital montage where each frame functions in the significance, but is other than a movements between gaps across an invisible certain way of being in the world suggest- background). ed to us from some point in space, and seized and acted upon by our body, pro- But it is important to remind ourselves vided that it is capable of doing so, so that here that the diacritical model of carnal inter- sensation is literally a form of commun- pretation is not a matter of voluntarist inven- ion.15 tion (à la Sartre). It is not a question of read- ing into something but of reading from (à par- What we have here is a basic analogy of tir) something. We are solicited by the flesh proper proportionality: A is to B what C is to of the world before we read ourselves back D. Namely, the sacrament of transubstantia- into it. Carnal attention is as much reception tion is to the responsive communicant what as creation. We are far from . And the sensible is to the capable perceiver. Mer- this is why I think Merleau-Ponty insists that leau-Ponty goes on to delineate this quasi- the solicitation of our body functions eucharistic power of the sensible as follows: symbolically, laterally, indirectly, like a sexu- al or ontological surprise. Diacritical sensa- I am brought into relation with an external tion, across distances and intervals, comes not being, whether it be in order to open my- just from us but from another person or thing self to it or to shut myself off from it. If that meets us ‘like a stranger in the dark.’ the qualities radiate around them a certain Merleau-Ponty again cites Paul Valéry to mode of existence, if they have the power make his point. “A man is nothing so long as to cast a spell and what we called just now nothing draws from him effects and produc- a sacramental value, this is because the tions which surprise him” (MSME, p. 205). sentient subject does not posit them as ob- But to be surprised one must be ready to re- jects, but enters into a sympathetic rela- ceive, open to solicitation and seduction, pre- tion with them, makes them his own and pared to partake of the thing sensed and sym- finds in them his momentary law.16 bolized. Every sense, as Merleau-Ponty con- cludes, has its own symbolique. Every carnal In other words, each sensory encounter act and organ inscribes its own imaginaire. with the strangeness of the world is an invita- From sexual expression to the act of eating tion to a ‘natal pact’ where, through what we itself. Nature is already culture as soon as we might call ‘diacritical sympathy,’ the human sense it as this or that. Sensation is expression self and the strange world give birth to one and expression sensation. Flesh is word and another. Sacramental sensation is a reversible word flesh. Hence the significance of Mer- rapport between myself and others, wherein leau-Ponty’s description of perception in the sensible gives birth to itself through me. terms of a diacritical Eucharistic communion: A fine example of carnal hermeneutics. Just as the sacrament not only symbolizes, Everyday perception as exquisite empathy. in sensible species, an operation of Grace, but is also the real presence of God, which it causes to occupy a fragment of space * and communicates to those who eat of the consecrated bread, provided that they are

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Let me add, finally, that because diacritical lonnes , L'Herne, Paris, 2004); ‘Eros, Diacrit- hermeneutics is carnal - in the first and last ical hermeneutics and God’ in Philosophy instance - it fulfills itself as applied.17 To say Today, vol. 55 special SPEP issue (edited by that understanding is incarnate is to say that it Cynthia Willett and Leonard Lawlor, 2011); answers to the life of suffering and action. Its and ‘Diacritical Hermeneutics’ in Maria Luisa application to human embodiment is its origi- Portocarrero, Luis Umbelino, and Andrzej nal and ultimate end. And here we return to Wiercinski, ed., Hermeneutic /La its diagnostic role as a caring for lived exist- rationalité herméneutique (Münster: LIT Ver- ence - a listening to the pulse of suffering and lag, 2011), p. 177-196. I find my thinking on solicitation between one human being and diacritical hermeneutics resonates, at times, another. And, at times, between human being with the recent work of Jean Greisch, Merold and that which precedes and exceeds it. It is Westphal, Peter Kemp and David Tracy. in the passages ‘between’ that the dia of dia- critical takes on its full meaning. Diagnosis 4 I am particularly indebted to John Caputo calls for endless : between disciplines, and Jacques Derrida on this question of mi- between text and action, between word and crological reading and the attendant notion of flesh, and above all between human persons our textured experience as a basic form of who give and receive wisdom, attention, and écriture, which for me rejoins in interesting healing. ways the old medieval idea of the liber mundi (‘semiological ’) and the earlier Greek idea of the logos of nature as a primary Notes tacit language (logos endiathetos) calling for a more articulate verbal language (logos pro- 1This is a development of a talk deliv- phorikos). and the stoics were ob- ered to the Canadian Hermeneutics Institute at vious proponents of this notion of logos-in- the of Calgary in June 2011. phusis which, of course, was later retrieved in the Christian notion of the ‘Word made flesh’ 2 This outline of a general philosophical her- (see Augustine’s reworking of the Stoic logoi meneutics is particularly indebted to Paul spermatikoi) and the Kabbalistic notion of the Ricoeur, in the wake of the prior formulations world as traced by the secret letters of Crea- of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Martin tion (Sefer Yetsirah). In his late work, The Heidegger. See also note 8 on Ricoeur below. Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty of- fers an interesting hermeneutic retrieval of the 3 For my previous descriptions of diacritical logos prophorikos/ endiathetos distinction hermeneutics see the Introduction to my from the point of view of what I am calling a Strangers, Gods and Monsters (London: carnal-diacritical phenomenology. See also Routledge, 2003); interview in my Debates in his on embodied language in Signs (in (New York: Ford- particular ‘Indirect Language and the Voices ham University Press, 2007, p. 249- 250); ‘A of Silence’) and our discussion below of his Dialogue in Diacritical Hermeneutics’ in Le notion of ‘diacritical perception’ in his Souci du Passage, essays in honour of Jean Collège de France Course Notes of 1953. Greisch (edited by Philippe Capelle, Edition du Cerf, Paris, 2004); ‘Entre soi-meme et un 5 The name of the dog, Argos, who recognizes autre: l'herméneutique diacritique de Ricoeur’ Odysseus in Bk 17 of the Odyssey is derived in Ricoeur: Cahier de l'Herne (edited by from the Greek word argos meaning gleam- Francois Azouvi and Myriam Revault d'Al- ing, shining (from which the Latin term for

10 Kearney Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2011 Article 2 silver, argentum, is derived). The word enar- pleasure and (Ibid., chapter 3) - a form of geis is used by Homer in Bk 16 to mark the radical carnal ‘contact,’ ‘proximity,’ and ‘ex- ‘shining’ of the Goddess Athena which trans- posure’ prior to intentionality and conscious- forms Odysseus from a beggar-stranger back ness. “The exposure to another is,” he writes, into himself, but unlike the dog Argos, his “proximity, obsession by the neighbor, an ob- own son, Telemachus, does not at first recog- session despite oneself, that is, a pain” (Ibid., nize his father, mistaking him instead for a p. 55). Levinas does not deny this is already a god. It is telling, I think, that this connection form of language: but it is language in its between argos/enargeis and diacritical her- most primordial expression/obsession: an eth- meneutics occurs in one of the oldest texts in ical ‘saying’ before the ‘said’ of thematization Western literature: A lesson in how to discern and representation, a language where the self between mortal and immortal strangers does not give signs but is itself a sign of say- through our carnal senses; indeed a lesson ing (Ibid., p. 47). This is what Levinas means which, Homer suggests, dogs may well have when he says that sensing is ‘saying’ (le dire) to teach men! I am grateful to Richard or pre-thematic ‘signifying’ (signifyingness or Capobianco for bringing this passage from the signifiance). I am indebted here to James Tay- Odyssey to my attention in , lor’s essay, ‘After the Modern Subject: Be- ‘On the Question Concerning the Determina- tween Activity and Passivity in Heidegger, tion of the Matter for Thinking’, trans. Rich- Levinas and Gadamer’ in Maria Luisa ard Capobianco and Marie Göbel, Epoché Portocarrero, Luis Umbelino, and Andrzej 14(2) (Spring 2010) p. 213-23. Wiercinski, ed., Hermeneutic Rationality/La rationalité herméneutique (Münster: LIT Ver- 6 It is telling that the first thing father and son lag, 2011). See also the recent phenomenolog- do in the moment of mutual disclosure is to ical work of Jeffrey Bloechl on Levinas’ no- eat a meal, the two ‘strangers’ (hospes) be- tion of sensibility as well as the recent phe- coming host (hospes) and guest (hospes) to nomenological writings of Jean-Luc Marion each other. One finds a similar polysemy at on the erotic phenomenon, Jean-Louis Chré- work in the Greek term xenos (stranger, guest, tien on the mystical-poetic body and of enemy). A good example of diacritical her- Michel Henry’s phenomenology of life. meneutics as hospitality (xenizein). See our Michel Serres’ work on the five senses, discussion of these terminological and etymo- though not directly of the hermeneutical- logical variations of hospes, hostis and xenos phenomenological tradition, is also of rele- in Anatheism: Returning to God after God vance here. (Columbia University Press, New York, 2010, pp. 27-28, 47-49). 8 For earlier sketches of a carnal hermeneu- tics of discernment see our Strangers, Gods 7 We could also include here Max Scheler’s and Monsters, chapters 3-5 and 7; Anatheism, account of embodied ethical feeling in Forms chapters 1-2 and 5; and ‘At the Threshold: of Sympathy, Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic Foreigners, Strangers, Others’ in Richard reading of semiotic unconscious experience in Kearney and Kascha Semonovitch, eds., Phe- Desire in Language and later work; and Em- nomenologies of the Stranger: Between Hos- manuel Levinas’ ethico-phenomenological tility and Hospitality (New York: Fordham analysis of pre-conceptual ‘sensibility’ in University Press, 2011, pp. 3-29). One might Otherwise than Being. See, for example, how also mention here the seminal work of my Levinas describes the relation of mentor, Paul Ricoeur, and especially his as one of ‘sensibility’ and ‘vulnerablity’ to sketch of a phenomenology of the body in

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Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the neutic turn in the Sixties. Involuntary (1960). In this volume, Ricoeur Ricoeur’s early phenomenology of the states that human existence is torn between body remains, however, largely a promissory “two fundamental projects”, namely “the or- note. After his embrace of a hermeneutics of ganic life” searching for immediate comple- signs he rarely returns to an exploration of the tion and “the spiritual life” of thinking aiming flesh, though it is tempting to see his preoc- at the perfection of the whole. This ‘most cupation with the relation between force and primordial conflict’ epitomises “the dispro- sens - that is between an energetics of portion of βίος and λόγος”. The site of this drive/desire and a philosophy of interpretation conflict between βίος and λόγος, he writes, is in Freud - as a gesture in this direction (Freud ‘my body’ and it is unbridgeable. The govern- and Philosophy, 1965). His engagement with ing principle between the animal and the hu- Aristotle’s notion of cathartic passions in man is “my body” - a point that is analysed in Volume I of Time and Narrative (1983) and three sections of Freedom and Nature, i) “In- Proust’s world of involuntary sensations and troduction: corporeal existence within the lim- embodied epiphanies in volume 2 of Time and its of eidetics”; ii) “Body and the total field of Narrative (1984) might well have been fur- motivation: the level of history and the level ther occasions to sound a carnal hermeneutics of the body” (4); and iii) “Life: Birth”. In the of taste, smell and touch (Proust’s own fa- context of his subsequent work, Fallible Man vored senses); but Ricoeur opts instead for an (1960) - while perhaps still under the forma- ‘apprenticeship of signs’ which largely ig- tive influence of both Edmund Husserl’s phe- nores the deeper opacities of the carnal un- nomenology of Leib and of ’s conscious. And his sustained fascination with existential notion of ‘incarnation’ - Ricoeur Spinoza’s conatus does not alas connect the takes “my body” to be “an originating media- ‘desire to be’ with an incarnate bearer of this tor ‘between’ myself and the world”. And, he desire. It is desire without skin. Finally, claims, it is precisely this body which pro- though one’s hopes are revived somewhat vides the means for both acting in the world when one comes to Ricoeur’s mention of our and distancing myself from the natural: ‘corporeal/terrestrial’ condition in Study 6 of Oneself as Another (1990) and his dialectic of It opens me onto the world, either allow- embodiment and alterity in the final Study 10 ing perceived things to appear or making of Oneself as Another, this turns out to be me dependent on things I lack and of minimalist - a five page adjudication between which I experience the need and desire Husserl and Levinas on the Other. It is more a because they are elsewhere or even no- mediation between two rival positions on the where in the world…In a word, my body flesh as action/ - too much activity in opens me to the world by everything it is Husserl, too much passivity in Levinas - than able to do. a serious diacritical engagement with the enigma of enfleshment per se. (And this in- This analysis he concludes with the claim: spite of his invocation of ‘flesh’ in his sum- “[My body] is implicated as a power in the mary list of imponderable Others’ in the final instrumentality of the world, in the practicable paragraph of the book). Work remains to be aspects of this world that my action furrows done on bringing Ricoeur’s phenomenology through, in the products of work and art.” of the body/bios/eros into fertile dialogue This shift from “my body” to the more lin- with Merleau-Ponty’s radical analysis of ‘dia- guistic functions of work and art (poetic lan- critical perception’ and la chair. (I am indebt- guage) already anticipates Ricoeur’s herme-

12 Kearney Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2011 Article 2 ed to Timo Helenius for several of these ref- tality. Note the detailed description of the cul- erences). inary preparation and offering of each dish, Another missed dialogue that could be comprising a good portion of Ovid’s short mentioned here is that between Ricoeur and text: the feminist hermeneutics of the body running from Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva to Ju- The old woman (Baucis), her skirts tucked dith Butler and Elizabeth Grosz. See the time- up, her hands trembling, placed a table ly essay, ‘Understanding the Body: The Rele- there, but a table with one of the three legs vance of Gadamer’s and Ricoeur’s View of unequal: a piece of broken pot made them the Body for Feminist Theory’, Louise equal. Pushed underneath, it countered the Derksen and Annemie Halsema, in George slope, and she wiped the level surface Taylor and Francis Mootz, Gadamer and Ric- with fresh mint. On it she put the black oeur: Critical Horizons or Contemporary and green olives that belong to pure Mi- Hermeneutics (Continuum, New York, 2011). nerva, and the cornelian cherries of au- Amongst other texts, they discuss Ricoeur’s tumn, preserved in wine lees; radishes and little known essay, ‘Wonder, Eroticism and endives; a lump of cheese; and lightly Enigma’ in Cross Currents, vol. 14, 1969. roasted eggs, untouched by the hot ashes; all in clay dishes. After this she set out a 9 See Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthro- carved mixing bowl for wine, just as cost- pology (New York: Penguin, 1968). ly, with cups made of beech wood, hol- lowed out, and lined with yellow bees’ 10 See Francis Clooney, ‘Food, the Guest, and wax. There was little delay, before the fire the Taittiriya Upanishad: Hospitality in the provided its hot food, and the wine, of no Hindu Traditions’ in Richard Kearney and great age, circulated, and then, removed James Taylor, ed., Hosting the Stranger: Be- again, made a little room for the second tween Religions (New York: Continuum, course. There were nuts, and a mix of 2010), pp. 139-146. dried figs and wrinkled dates; plums, and sweet-smelling apples in open wicker 11 See chapters 1, 4 and 5 of Anatheism. baskets; and grapes gathered from the purple vines. In the center was a gleaming 12 For comparative cultural/religious exam- honeycomb. Above all, there was the ad- ples of gustatory hospitality see also the re- ditional presence of well-meaning faces, cent essays of Kalpana Seshadri, Andy Rot- and no unwillingness, or poverty of spirit. man, Joseph Lumbard, and Marianne Moyaert Meanwhile the old couple noticed that, as in Kearney and Taylor, ed., Hosting the soon as the mixing bowl was empty, it re- Stranger: Between Religions. The example of filled itself, unaided, and the wine ap- the classic Graeco-Roman myth of Baucis and peared of its own accord. They were fear- Philomen is also relevant here in that it tells ful at this strange and astonishing sight, how this old poor couple became hosts to and timidly Baucis and Philemon mur- Zeus and Hermes who first appeared as beg- mured a , their palms upwards, and gars and only revealed themselves as gods begged the gods’ forgiveness for the meal, when Baucis offered them her best herbs and and their unpreparedness. They had a Philomen his precious goose. Here is a pas- goose, the guard for their tiny cottage: as from Ovid’s Metamorphoses book VIII hosts they prepared to sacrifice it for their which shows the central transformative role divine guests. But, quick-winged, it wore of ‘food’ in this primal scene of carnal hospi- the old people out and, for a long time, es-

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caped them, at last appearing to take ref- asked nothing, indeed he needs nothing... uge with the gods themselves. Then the He is again blessed. (Kalpana Seshadri, heaven-born ones told them not to kill it. “Departures: Hospitality as Mediation” in ‘We are gods,’ they said. (Ovid, Meta- Richard Kearney and James Taylor, eds., morphoses, Bk VIII: “Philomen and Bau- Hosting the Stranger: Between Religions, cis,” trans. Anthony S. Kline, University p. 52). of Virginia, 2000) It might also be interesting to do a compara- In ‘Departures: Hospitality as Mediation’, tive analysis of the role of the goose as a sa- Kalpana Seshadri offers a hermeneutic com- cred bird in other cultural-religious myths, for mentary on an analogous story in the Bha- example, the “Paramahamsa” in both Bud- ghavata Purana (Bk 10, cantos 80-81). It re- dhist and Hindu scriptures, referring to the lates how a poor man Kuchela offers a mea- divinely enlightened sage. For Kabir, the ger bowl of puffed rice to his friend Krishna Sihk-Sufi-Hindu poet, the Hamsa or Himala- who gleefully eats the mere nothing and re- yan Goose, was considered to be a wandering turns the gift of a nothing that is the ultimate migrant soul who bore secret messages and fullness. This emptiness in fullness recalls the we also find the Goose-Swan playing a key emptying/filling wine bowl of Philomenon role in the Rig Veda story of Puru Ravas and and Baucis, as well as the Buddhist notion his wife Uruvasi. The goose that flies over that ‘emptiness’ is the highest form of fullness. Mount Kailash, and bathes in the lake of Ma- Seshadri offers this commentary: nasarova (the lake of the mind, Manas) re- mained a recurring poetic theme. The goose- The poor scholar (Kuchela) gathers to- swan also plays a key role of 'transformation' gether, in a piece of clean sari torn from in the popular story of Nala and Damayanti his wife's shoulder, a heap of puffed rice, from the Mahabharata as well as in the Celtic itself borrowed from a kindly neighbor and Greek mythologies and popular folktales emptiness itself, rice with kernels re- like Grimm’s Goose Girl. I am indebted to my moved, with nothing inside. And this he colleagues, Francis Clooney, Jyoti Sahi, Jo- sets out to give to him, the friend who had seph O’Leary and Kalpana Seshedra for this the great capacity to receive...The friend and related information on Buddhist and Hin- sinks his palm in the heap of rice and du narratives of hospitality. opening his mouth wide eats a fistful with sheer delight, of the emptiness and the 13 I am indebted to Emmanuel de Saint Aubert nothing, and reaches for more, and yet for bringing these passages to my attention, more...and as the friend empties the emp- and especially those from Merleau-Ponty’s tiness within the puffed rice, the scholar Collège de France Lecture Notes of 1953, Le feels himself filling up. His satisfaction is monde sensible et le monde de l’expression immeasurable. Incalculable happiness and (Metispresses, Geneva, 2011). In his “Intro- fortune accrue to him, the more he gives duction,” 19 f, de Saint Aubert offers a very of what he does not have, the more he illuminating commentary on the important- finds himself receiving what he could not ance of ‘diacritical perception’ in the later imagine. Can something come out of work of Merleau-Ponty. See also here Mer- nothing? Is it possible to give, eat and be leau-Ponty’s essays on embodied language in full of the nothing? Is this the meaning of Signs (in particular ‘Indirect Language and grace? And is this also the time of hospi- the Voices of Silence’). I would also like to tality? ...Later Kuchela recalls that he had express deep gratitude here to my close col-

14 Kearney Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2011 Article 2 league and friend, Kascha Semonovitch, who John Manoussakis, Anthony Steinbock and first introduced me to the later Course Notes Jean-Luc Nancy (in particular Corpus and of Merleau-Ponty, especially those on ‘Na- Noli me Tangere: On the Raising of the Body, ture.’ both Fordham University Press, 2008-2009). For a more feminist hermeneutics of embod- 14 See our development of this play between iment, drawing from the Continental move- prefiguration and refiguration in our Poétique ment of thought, see the seminal writings of du possible (Paris: Beauchesne, 1984) and Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva; and more The God who May Be (Bloomington, Ind.: recently the work of Kelly Oliver, Karmen Indiana University Press, 2001). See also Paul McKendrick, Virginia Burrus, Judith Butler Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, chapter 3 and Elizabeth Grosz. There are interesting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). opportunities opening up here for dialogue between a hermeneutics of flesh and recent 15 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of pioneering work on notions of embodied in- Perception (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 246. telligence - beyond the traditional sensa- One finds a moving poetic metaphor for this tion/ divide - by thinkers like Anto- idea of sacramental sensing as transubstantia- nio Damasio, Evan Thompson, George Lakoff tion in George’s Herbert poem ‘Love bade me and Mark Johnson (see in particular Lakoff welcome’ which concludes with the very car- and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The nal line: “You must sit down, says Love, and Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western taste my meat. So I did sit and eat.” See Thought, Basic Books, New York, 1999). Kascha Semonovitch’s essay on this subject in ‘Incarnate Experience and Keeping the 17 This idea of ‘hermeneutic application’ was Soul Ajar’, and the Arts, vol. 14, no. originally formulated by Hans-Georg Gada- 5, Special Issue: “Hospitality: Imagining the mer and later developed in an ethical direction Stranger”, ed. Christopher Yates (2010), pp. by Paul Ricoeur and Peter Kemp (refiguration 515-690. See also the commentary on this po- and attestation), in a political direction by em as a phenomenology of the embodied and Santiago Zabala (subver- stranger in our joint essay, ‘At the Threshold: sion and emancipation), in a religious direc- Foreigners, Strangers, Others’, in Richard tion by David Tracy, Kevin Hart and Merold Kearney and Kascha Semonovitch, eds., Phe- Westphal (fragmentation and community), in nomenologies of the Stranger: Between Hos- an eco-environmental direction by David tility and Hospitality (New York: Fordham Wood, Brian Treanor and Edward Casey University Press, 2011), pp. 25-29. (earth works and borders) and in a therapeutic direction by James Risser and Nancy Moules 16 Merleau-Ponty, Ibid. For further elabora- (healing, grief, and compassion). tions of a phenomenology of flesh see the re- cent work of Didier Franck, Renaud Barabas,