Donatella Di Cesare
The question concerning the difference between Gadamer’s hermeneutics and Derrida’s deconstruction, which has exploded in contemporary debate during the last years, is a legitimate question since they are philosophies that have grown from common soil.1 Both have pursued the way opened up by Heidegger’s philosophical turn. Both refer to another philosopher whose presence, in both thinkers, is still little discussed, namely, Hegel. Both philosophers, albeit via different paths, go back to Greek philosophy and continually compare themselves with it—a trait that is not at all obvious in the contemporary landscape. The historico-philosophical proximity, and therefore also the philosophico-theoretical proximity, is reflected in the themes they share. It is enough to think of the importance of art, and above all of literature and poetry.2 The proximity is such that doubts have been raised as to the possibility of separating out two different positions behind the names “hermeneutics” and “deconstruction.” Is one perhaps dealing with two labels for the same philosophical item?3
If this were the case, the comparison would make little sense—and one cannot exclude that it appears this way to an external glance, for example, to analytic philosophy. But the question is far more complex. The two main currents in contemporary European philosophy, though so close that they could be considered as two aspects of the same project, represent divergent philosophical options and therefore require their divergence to be shown and their difference, and the import of their difference, to be taken into account. The protagonists themselves, pointing to this difference, outlining nonetheless their own position in relation to the other’s, have in this way confirmed the legitimacy and at the same time the need for this comparison. But neither of the two has taken this comparison to its conclusion. Indeed, the dialogue has been interrupted from the start. Nevertheless, this dialogue has animated contemporary philosophy.
The first meeting between Gadamer and Derrida took place during April 25–27 in 1981, in the “Goethe Institut” in Paris. The aim was a public debate between the main representatives of continental philosophy. But both participants and witnesses were unanimous in speaking of the event as a conversation between deaf people, and the essays published a little later in Germany and France seem to confirm this impression (cf. Forget 1984). Nevertheless, this “unlikely debate”—as Philippe Forget described it—was epoch-making. The 1989 American edition, entitled Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer–Derrida Encounter, contains new essays by philosophers from both parties.4
It seems that the debate at first leaves deeper traces in Gadamer’s thinking, since he accepts Derrida’s challenge and changes his positions, or makes it more detailed and explicit, in several essays: “Destruktion und Dekonstruktion” from 1985; “Frühromantik, Hermeneutik, Dekonstruktion” from 1987; “Dekonstruktion und Hermeneutik” from 1988; and “Hermeneutik auf der Spur” from 1994.5 In these essays, Gadamer clearly expresses how seriously he takes the debate and reveals, above all, his esteem for the French philosopher. In Derrida, he recognizes one of the most important names he encountered after the publication of Truth and Method: “Back in the 1960s, when I had finished up my own project in philosophical hermeneutics and offered it to the public, I paused to take a look at the world around me. At that time, two important things struck me, in addition to the works of the later Wittgenstein. The first of these was that I met the poet Paul Celan, in whose late works I began to immerse myself. The other was the fact that Derrida’s essay, “Ousia et Grammé,” published in the Festschrift for Beaufret, came into my hands, followed later by the several important books that Derrida published in 1967 which I immediately began to study” (GR 377/GW10 149).
For his part, Derrida only occasionally engaged with hermeneutics, and when he did it was especially to emphasize the difference between deconstruction and hermeneutics.6 But one year after Gadamer’s death, on February 15, 2003, Derrida gave a memorial address in Heidelberg entitled “Rams: Uninterrupted Dialogue between Two Infinites, the Poem” (Derrida 2005, 135–164).
From the “strange interruption” of that time, in Paris, Derrida takes up again the “uninterrupted dialogue,” that “encounter” or “clash” between two rams, alluding to the thread of the poem that has joined them. He welcomes the word “dialogue” in his vocabulary in order to announce an unexpected interpretation: that “improbable debate” has been “successful,” contrary to what most believed—and precisely because of the interruption, which has not been an “originary misunderstanding,” but an “epoché that made one hold one’s breath, without judgment or conclusion” (Derrida 2005, 136). Thus, it has left behind a living and provocative trace, promised more than one future. By taking up again the uninterrupted dialogue, Derrida relaunches the topic of “interruption,” which had already emerged in the Paris encounter, but which had afterward remained in the shadows. Thus, he indicates, even if only indirectly, less of the proverbial opposition between orality and writing and more of the question of understanding, that motif which had guided the debate and which could still illuminate the distance and the proximity between both philosophies. Through the topics and the understanding it becomes clear how hermeneutics moves from unity and how deconstruction proceeds from difference.
When Gadamer holds his opening address in Paris, which was published later with the title “Text und Interpretation,” he seems most concerned to distance himself from French philosophy in general and deconstruction in particular through the concept of the “text” (GR 156–191/GW2 330–360). He advocates the need to give voice to the text, in order to highlight its “unity of sense” and to lead it back to the dialogue from which it originally springs (GW2 355).7 His unquestionable reversions to the “language of metaphysics”—Gadamer speaks, for example, of the “task of understanding”—must have sounded like a provocation to Derrida’s ears. Gadamer reaches the limit when he speaks of the “goodwill to try to understand one another,” and with these words provokes the discussion (GR 174/GW2 343).8
It is not surprising that Derrida responds on the next day with three short questions that aim to call hermeneutics as a whole into question and that converge to a single goal. Behind the efforts of hermeneutics to understand the other, behind its “appeal to goodwill,” lies Nietzsche’s “will to power.”9 Already with his first question, Derrida charges hermeneutics with a relapse into metaphysics. The will to understand, which precedes every concrete interaction between speakers, shows for Derrida the outlines of an ethical axiom that would equate Gadamer’s goodwill to understand with Kant’s “good will.” Would not the good will to understand, which is as axiomatic and unconditioned as the “absolute value” of Kant’s will, be simply a new version of metaphysical “subjectivity,” which would be ready, in accordance with the suspicions expressed by Heidegger, to dominate Being?
With the second question, Derrida appeals to psychoanalysis, which is, of course, a borderline case, but nevertheless paradigmatic for abandoning “good will” and so bears witness to the failure of the “living dialogue.” Habermas had already recognized a problematic limit in psychoanalysis and expressed his doubts about the possibility of integrating it into a general hermeneutics. For his part, Derrida emphasizes that psychoanalytic discourse allows the interpretative context to burst wide open. Therefore, he requires a kind of productive interpretation that would at first occur through a “rupture.”
It is around the concept of rupture, or better, of interruption that Derrida’s third, philosophically decisive question turns. In question here is what Gadamer calls Verstehen, “understanding.” One would have to ask, according to Derrida, whether the condition of understanding might be not the limitless readiness for dialogue, the continuous relation to the other, but instead “the interruption of rapport, a certain rapport of interruption, the suspending of all mediation.”10 The suspicion of deconstruction overtakes hermeneutic dialogue. Deconstruction seems to offer an alternative view, because it prefers the interruption, maintains dissonance, and preserves the difference and the otherness of the other, which cannot be appropriated, as well as the impossibility of understanding.
Gadamer answers with an equally brief paper entitled “Und dennoch: Macht des guten Willens.”11 He lets the contradictions in Derrida’s position appear by using the classic argument against the skeptics. However, this “effort” has nothing to do with metaphysics or with Kant’s “good will.” Gadamer would much rather draw on the Platonic Socrates, who explains in the Gorgias that it would be better to be refuted than to refute.12 This principle, in which hermeneutics recognizes itself, is however not an ethical instance. “Even immoral beings try to understand one another” (DD 55/TI 59). Thus, it is a matter of a phenomenological position describing the everyday practices of speaking and understanding. Whoever opens their mouth to speak would like to be understood—unless the speaker wants to hide something. Derrida and Nietzsche do not constitute exceptions: “Both speak and write in order to be understood” (DD 57/TI 61).13 But this in no way means that non-understanding and misunderstanding could be eliminated. Gadamer agrees with Derrida that there is no unbroken understanding. The psychoanalytic dialogue, which aims to understand not what the speaker wants to say, but what the speaker does not want to say, is an extreme manifestation of such a rupture, of such a break.
Philosophical hermeneutics has often been misunderstood in its attempt to raise the question of understanding within philosophy. According to hermeneutics, understanding would be an appropriation of the other. Animated by a “fury of understanding,” hermeneutics seems to claim that it could and should understand all in a complete and perfect way (Hoerisch 1988). From this perspective, understanding would be obvious. If this were so, however, hermeneutics would have no reason to exist, since if it exists, it is in order to raise the philosophical question about understanding.
According to Heidegger, understanding is the originary way in which the Dasein succeeds. Gadamer maintains, in turn, that “agreement … is more primordial than misunderstanding.”14 This “agreement” is neither a matter of glib optimism nor of simply adopting an ethical task. On the contrary, with this thesis Gadamer describes in phenomenological terms the practice of speaking and understanding. For a more originary understanding is nothing else than the consent of the shared language that communalizes. Whoever speaks in a historical language—and in doing so speaks for the other and with the other—assents, even before any consent, by being ready to attune one’s own voice to the voice of the other, articulating oneself in the meaningful sounds of the common language. In short, whoever speaks has already agreed to share what is common and communicable with the speakers of that language, has already agreed with the other, even before agreeing with himself. It is in this sense that Gadamer interprets the syntheke of Aristotle: “The concept of ‘syntheke,’ of mutual agreement, suggests in the first place the view that language forms itself in the being with one another” (LL12/GW8 354).15 The assent is the prelude of language, and sets in motion every further play of agreement and disagreement. This prelude cannot be avoided: every speaker must enter into the play of language, accepting the originary communality that language assures. To speak means, then, to rearticulate the commonalities of the world articulated in language. This is the reality of human communication, that is, of dialogue.
Yet the flow of dialogue can be interrupted, and agreement can also turn into disagreement. In this context, Gadamer speaks of a “stumbling block” (TM 270/GW1 272). Almost completely overlooked by the reception, the “stumbling block” is a key concept for hermeneutics, because it clarifies the movement of understanding (GR 93/GW2 184). Without it, one might assume that understanding is self-generated. In order to delineate the concept of a stumbling block more precisely, Gadamer returns to the Greek concept of atopon, which means whatever provokes uneasiness and irritation, what seems strange, uncanny, and alien. For hermeneutics, the atopon is the incomprehensible that breaks in on what, once understood, and almost entirely forgotten, has been taken for granted as self-evident. Thus, the atopon strikes language’s apparent familiarity and puts suddenly in question the commonality of the words. The non-understandable, which has still not taken place, gives rise to both non-understanding and misunderstanding. This does not, however, prevent attempts to continue to interpret in order to seek again agreement—without excluding disagreement.
Where then does the distance lie between Gadamer and Derrida, if not in the need for the interruption? For hermeneutics, interruption is not fundamental and originary, because the prelude of language always takes precedence. Thus, interruption is already inscribed in the constellation of language, since it is the difference that engraves that unity. Here, hermeneutics shows its proximity to the critique of ideology.16 A still greater distance from deconstruction is shown in the conception of the rupture. Even where the rupture is more noticeable and the collision more violent, as in works of art and above all in poetic text, hermeneutics takes up this collision but does not strengthen it, just as it also does not deepen it. Rather, it acts in the reverse way: for hermeneutics, the interruption opens the conversation, but does not close it off. Though it may know that the rupture never heals, that non-understanding is never eliminated, hermeneutics destines itself to an infinite dialogue. This is, by the way, the position that Gadamer also takes up in the debate with Derrida. One year after the encounter in Paris, Gadamer writes: “Whoever wants me to take deconstruction to heart and insists on difference stands at the beginning of a conversation, not at its end” (DD 113/GW2 372).
The distance between hermeneutics and deconstruction, in other words, does not lie in the goodwill to understand, but in understanding itself, in the way in which understanding follows from either the unity of the uninterrupted dialogue or from the difference of the interruption. For Gadamer, the one perspective points to the other. After Heidegger’s attempt to dismantle the language of metaphysics, there are for Gadamer only two ways, or perhaps one common path, which could still lead into the openness of philosophical experience: the path of hermeneutics, which goes from dialectics back to dialogue, and the path of deconstruction, which in écriture provokes the laceration of metaphysics (DD 108/ GW2 367–368).
Gadamer’s Truth and Method carries out the turn to language following the model of writing rather than that of orality. But what is for hermeneutics the relationship between orality and writing? What is the place of the voice? And what role does the text play? Gadamer’s complex position on these questions has changed over the years as a result of his debate with Derrida. This also led Gadamer to distance himself from Plato. His position can be summarized in the thesis of an inseparable connection between orality and writing: “In truth there is no real opposition. What is written must be read and therefore all that is written is ‘subordinated to the voice’” (Gadamer 1997, 403–404, 403).
Gadamer does not share Plato’s “one-sided” condemnation of writing in the Phaedrus and in the excursus of the Seventh Letter (GW 7 228–269).17 He takes Plato’s argument about the peculiar “weakness” of all written language to be an “ironic exaggeration.” Nor does he accept the thought, expressed in the Protagoras, that written language is resistant to dialogue (TM 393/GW1 396). For Gadamer, the text speaks in responding to the questions a reader puts to it. Gadamer does not give up the idea that the text is a partner in a dialogue. Hermeneutics itself is just this “coming into conversation with the text” (TM 368/GW1 374). Without ignoring the asymmetry between a written and an oral dialogue, when an embodied other is present, Gadamer nevertheless emphasizes the continuity between the oral and the written. The boundaries are fluid: what is written is voice-like and can at any time become oral again; what is oral, insofar as it is language, can always potentially be written, or is always “destined for writing,” as Gadamer argues in his 1983 essay “Unterwegs zur Schrift?” (GW 7 258–269). In other terms: orality is potentially always already given in writing, and writing is potentially always already given in orality.
The transition from the oral to the written occurs through reading. Here, the distance from Derrida emerges clearly. Lecture, reading, becomes a paradigm that is implicitly opposed to écriture, writing. And it is not by chance that the paradigm of reading, which is described as letting-speak or giving-voice-to, is ultimately expanded so far that it coincides with hermeneutics. “What is writing, if it is not read?” (DD 97/GW10 141). Gadamer poses this question to Derrida. “Writing is a phenomenon of language only insofar as it is read” (GW8 264). Writing is just as voice-like (stimmlich) as speech is potentially writing (schriftfähig). How can one avoid vocalizing the writing while reading or articulating it with the voice?
In 1981, Gadamer published an essay with the programmatic and significant title, “Voice and Language” (GW8 258–270). Here he answers Derrida’s objections and develops his own conception of the voice, which therefore comes to play a key role in the debate between hermeneutics and deconstruction. The voice is, in a certain sense, a bridge launched to the écriture. If writing is not an “image of the voice,” then the voice is not an image of writing (GR 388/GW10 159). But what do articulated writing and voice have in common?
Plato had already asked this question in a passage of the Philebus, which will be decisive for dialectics, because it concerns the relation between the one and the many.18 Both the sounds articulated by the voice and the letters of the alphabet are given as examples. In the end, however, it becomes clear that both, far from being mere examples, are precisely what reveal the unity of the many and the multiplicity of the one in the lógos. The voice reveals our incompleteness and finitude, because we cannot master it, and we are thus referred back to the méson, to what is in the “middle,” that is, to those “elements,” articulated sounds and written signs, that mark the limits in the phonic continuum and so enable us to speak and to write. Both are constants that open up a “field of play” (Spielraum) which is bound nevertheless to the articuli, to the limits carved into the boundlessness of phonic and graphic material (GW8 259). Articulation is therefore the reciprocal link between voice and writing, a link that sheds light on the passage accomplished by reading. In contrast to every natural form of expression, speaking and writing are, in fact, an assenting in what is held in common, starting with the shared fields of play both of the letters and articulated sounds in any language.
Yet the voice for Gadamer has “both the first and the last word,” and here lies his distance from Derrida (LL 34/GW8 419). But this does not mean that the voice has for Gadamer a superiority. The voice is the continuous unity of speaking, whereas writing is characterized by the difference of interruption. It is “a phase in the event of understanding,” which is fixed in the text (DD 21–51, 30/GW2 330–360, 341). This fixity is, however, not definitive, and the text becomes that “between” which interrupts the continuity of the voice (cf. Risser 1991, 93–105, 102–105). This finds an echo in the figure of the reader, who as inter-pres is the interlocutor. The “eminent text” of literature is no exception (DD 40/GW2 351). It demands to achieve again a voice. In the circular continuity of the voice, the text traces the discontinuity. Since hermeneutics is a philosophy that emphasizes unity over difference, continuity over discontinuity, it favors the voice.
If it is impossible, after Derrida, to rethink writing, that which remains problematic is the voice. In the 1960s, Gadamer was powerfully impressed, as he himself pointed out, not only by Ousia and grammé, but above all by the little book Speech and Phenomena (GR 377/GW10 149). Derrida had “rightfully criticized Husserl in this book,” by putting into question the self-conscious cogito that presumes it can think without signs (LL 33/GW8 418). Gadamer expresses his doubts which do not put into question the charge of “logocentrism” that Derrida had launched against Western metaphysics—and in this case it would be better to speak of “monologocentrism.” However, Gadamer’s doubts concern rather Derrida’s condemnation of the voice and, more precisely, the link that he believes he sees between the voice and the self-presence of consciousness (DD 112/GW2 371). Even though Gadamer has never developed a deep critique, his objection to Derrida is easy to summarize. Voice, so readily denounced for its presumed metaphysics of presence, is the phenomenological voice, the “spiritual flesh” that hears itself in the absence of world (Derrida 1973, 59). But it is incomprehensible why this should be worth for the voice in its link with the articulation, that is, with writing. This voice should indeed be a form of exile not less than writing. In other words, for hermeneutics, difference engraves the voice also. The possibility that what is evoked may regain a voice in no way eliminates the reference to its absence (DD 112–113/GW2 371–372). This reference is the space of difference in the voice. On the other hand, the hermeneutic voice is first of all the voice of the other, the voice I hear before I hear my own. This voice carries the difference of the other, that is, of the you, into what would only be the identity of a self-presence. Nor should it be forgotten that presence is also simultaneously an absence, both for hermeneutics and for deconstruction; it is never a pure, full, and perfect presence which could suddenly occur without past or future. It is the presence of an absence, that it is pronounced by the voice or testified by the writing.
It remains an open question whether the hermeneutic voice can be accused of relying on the metaphysics of presence, or whether, by contrast, deconstruction, with its critique of phenomenology, in its turn succumbs to an objectivistic conception of presence understood mainly as permanence. Certainly, Gadamer has been moved, after Derrida, by the aim to let the voice reemerge from its concealment, that is, not in order to restore its central position, but to emphasize the co-belonging of voice and writing through articulation.
There are other points in which Gadamer’s later hermeneutics appears almost to overlap with Derrida’s deconstruction. In the last subsection of Truth and Method, which concerns the universal aspect of hermeneutics, Gadamer addressed the meaning of “the turn” from being to language with one of his most famous and widely cited passages: “Being that can be understood is language” (TM 474/GW1 478). This is also, however, among Gadamer’s most misunderstood statements, because it has been read as an identification of being with language. Yet Gadamer never argues such an identification. It is not by chance that Heidegger’s famous metaphor of language as “house of Being” does not appear in his work. More than house of Being, language is for Gadamer that human dwelling that is often a cramped shell. The mother tongue, for Gadamer, is the most familiar being-by-oneself, but starting from an even more fundamental uncanniness (GW8 366–372). For language appears so “uncannily near” (unheimlich nahe) that it belongs among the “most mysterious questions that man ponders” (TM 378/GW1 383). The most well-known version of hermeneutics is the most urbanized one, which emphasizes the familiar. But to this should be added the more disquieting version, which emphasizes the unfamiliar, the uncanny. The fleeting and ephemeral home that language offers us can be achieved every time from that homelessness which defines our finitude in the language, even before our finitude in the world.
“Language is dialogue” (GW8 369). Gadamer formulates this thesis as early as Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, returns to it in Truth and Method, and takes it up again in his late works (PDE 35–65/GW 5, 27–48; TM 446/GW 1, 449; GW 2, 207; GW 8, 360). The hermeneutics of language unfolds as hermeneutics of dialogue. If language arises from the openness of a historical language and realizes itself as individual speech, which for its part is always a speaking for or with the other, then the existence of language lies in dialogue. This is the secret core of Gadamer’s philosophy which, both in its theoretical aspiration and in its practical aim, is a philosophy of dialogue.
At the basis of this thesis there lies, however, a philosophical motivation that should not be overlooked. Gadamer offers here a radical interpretation of Hölderlin’s verse: “Since we have been a conversation …” (Hölderlin 1992, 1, 341) We do not simply participate in a dialogue. We are always already in dialogue, and we speak from that infinite flow, in that infinite flow. Even more: we are dialogue. Not only is each of us in a dialogue, but in our turn we are, in our most intimate nature, dialogue. For dialogue is the hermeneutic universe in which we breathe, in which we live.
But what does it mean to say that dialogue is an infinite flow? Every word (Wort) opens up to an endless number of possible further words (Antworte), of answers that it calls for (GW8 38). Since it speculatively reflects the unspoken, every spoken word cannot be the last word. Because of this virtuality, every word points toward that openness in which we continue to speak. Thus, it can be said that “speaking proceeds from dialogue” (GW2 198). The endlessness opened by the virtuality of the word is the endlessness of the dialogue. Hence, dialogue has “an inner endlessness and no end” (GW2 152).
Certainly, the dialogue can be interrupted for many reasons: one might have nothing more to say, become irritated, or not want to continue speaking. But for hermeneutics, the interruption is only a suspension, the prelude to the restart of dialogue. An interruption from outside might occur, but it in no way undermines that endless openness. According to Gadamer, even the limit-case of the soul’s inner dialogue with itself is endless (TM 547–548/GW1 200–201). This is one of the most significant points of dissonance between hermeneutics and deconstruction: whereas Derrida underlines the creativity of the interruption, Gadamer invokes and solicits—beyond all interruption—on the endless, or better, the uninterrupted dialogue. This adjective “uninterrupted,” suggested by Derrida, seems to be the right one in order to designate Gadamer’s dialogue. Even if the process of dialogue continues endlessly, it is discontinuous, that is, both ending and endless. Rather than endless, we might say from the perspective of interruption that dialogue is un-interrupted.
Hence, the unlimited readiness for dialogue which characterizes hermeneutics and which is philosophically justified by the trust in language and its ability to establish community. This does not mean that dialogue will always succeed. On the contrary, agreement is never certain, and understanding is never perfect. The dialogue cannot succeed, if success means conclusion, ending in a wordless, ultimate agreement. Dialogue never closes. Of course, this does not mean that dialogue in its potential infinity does not reach a successful unity. But when can one then say that a dialogue has succeeded? Certainly not when we have learned something new, but rather when we learn through the other something new that we have not met before in our experience of the world. This something new changes and transforms us. Dialogue has a “transformative power” (GW2 211). It is not a surplus of information. Important in the dialogue is the encounter with the you. Dialogue thus succeeds when the I has changed through the you, and the you has changed because of the other. “Conversation transforms both” (GW2 188). After the dialogue, one is no longer the same person as before. Paradoxically, a dialogue succeeds all the more, the less it comes to a close: the more the disagreements come to light, the more misunderstandings and non-understandings reemerge. Hence, the dialogue does not conclude, if the word, which the I addresses to the you and the you to the I, leads to a new openness, from which, through new questions and answers, the dialogue can go further (GR 393/GW10 162). Even after death. Insofar as it destines itself to an infinite dialogue, it is not surprising that hermeneutics, also in its eschatological aspiration, declines itself in the word and conjugates itself in the dialogue.
In his memorial speech, “Béliers,” Derrida takes up again the topic of interruption, which this time refers to a final interruption, the separation of life and death. What will become of the dialogue, after death has stamped its seal on it? Will there still be a dialogue after death? The dialogue continues, according to Derrida, and follows the traces in those who survive, who in the future will bring the voice of the dead friend to be heard. The promise and the obligation find their expression in the verse of the poet who brought the two philosophers together: Paul Celan. “The world is gone, I must carry you” (Celan 1986, 97). The topic of death is interweaved here with the topic of dialogue, but also with the topic of the poem. Two works by Gadamer stand in the background: Poem and Conversation and Who am I and Who are You? The death of the other is “the world after the end of the world” (Derrida 2005, 140). The surviving one remains alone, robbed of the world of the other, remains in the world outside of the world, responsible alone and thereby determined to carry both the other and her/his world further. As Heidegger had pointed to the nearness of “thinking” (Denken) to “thanking” (Danken), Derrida draws together “thinking” (penser) and “weighing” (peser). In order to think and to weigh, also in the sense of bearing a weight, one must therefore carry, carry within oneself and on oneself. Yet “to carry now no longer has the meaning of ‘to comprise’ (comporter), to include, to comprehend in the self, but rather to carry oneself or bear oneself toward (se porter vers) the infinite inappropriability of the other” (Derrida 2005, 161). It means, above all, to transmit and translate what is untranslatable, what will remain as such, as an irreducible surplus, if that remainder of “unreadability” (illegibilité) will be preserved which hermeneutics has made possible and which makes hermeneutics possible. The commitment of deconstruction thus consists of carrying hermeneutics, and in the process perceiving what is common to them and preserving the remainder of the difference.
Unity and difference, difference and unity, reassert the secret of their bond, of their elusive cross-reference. Between the two infinites, and therefore infinitely other, dialogue continues, uninterrupted, in the poem, and with the poem. The trace left by Celan keeps the dialogue open. His words, like many interruptions, disclose unforeseen openings and unprecedented passages. But the breath of the poet does more than just support the bridge suspended between the two infinites.