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Monday, July 11, 2011

Columbia University Press interviews Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala about their new book Hermeneutic Communism.
GV: [P]erhaps it’s more important to emphasize how this is also a book for all those conservative hermeneutic philosophers who still see interpretation only as a variation of phenomenology. We are certain that our good friend the distinguished philosopher Jean Grondin must be appalled by the “progressive hermeneutics” we expose here. But, as many of us believe, hermeneutics is not only Gadamer; there is also Nietzsche, Pareyson, Rorty, and many others. This is the meaning behind the subtitle of the book: From Heidegger to Marx. Today, after metaphysics, we can return to Marx through hermeneutics, that is, a philosophical approach that operates without truth, impositions, and violence, hence a “weakening” of the strong structures of metaphysics, modernity, and ideology. This is why the motto of the book (rephrasing Marx’s famous statement from Theses on Feuerbach) is that “the philosophers have only described the world in various ways; the moment now has arrived to interpret it.”

1 comment:

  1. I hope Iain Thomson has the opportunity to review this book as well! It was a pleasure to read his honest dissection of the Zabala's reactionary "Remains"...

    I think I'm too dense to understand what is novel about inaugurating an interpretation of the world over against a "description" of it. Didn't someone writing around, say, 1927, already propose that any act of such "phenomenological description" always presupposes an interpretation? I guess I will just have to wait and read the book.

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