Hermeneutics of Emergency
Filippo Minelli copyright
Hermeneutics of Emergency
According to the theoretical position of Gianni Vattimo and Richard Rorty we should understand hermeneutics as a postmetaphysical philosophy that moves beyond the limiting dialogic ambitions given to it by Hans-Georg Gadamer. This hermeneutics is not concerned simply with dialogue, but rather, it centres on the anarchic character that conversation gives to both politics and aesthetics. Contrary to dialogue, where truth is presupposed by one of the two interlocutors, conversation does not know where it is going to end up. This indeterminacy of conversation is what makes it anarchic. Its origins can be found in the story of the god Hermes, who was often accused of treachery in altering the content and meaning of messages. As Jean Greisch pointed out, although the translations of these messages were always incorrect, Hermes’ contribution lies precisely in the “truth” of these errors. As such, hermeneutics’ specific contribution to knowledge is reflected in those new meanings that emerge precisely in the alterations of meaning that characterise translations and conversations. One of our goals is to attempt to hermeneutically understand the political and social transformations created by the technological Ge-Stell. It is with this “framed” feature of technology, as Heidegger already explained in the 1930s, that emergencies were set to disappear. Today we find ourselves, as the German thinker had predicted, in a condition where “the greatest emergency is the absence of emergency.” In order to understand these absent emergencies we not only need a postmetaphysical philosophy, but also a philosophy which is able to detect these absences. In this condition interpretation turns into an invitation to take heed of warnings, that is, to take heed of the possibility that something “emerges.” The oeuvre on emergencies of Giorgio Agamben, Bonie Honig, and Emily Apter will be our starting point to propose a “hermeneutics of emergencies” that can serve, as Michel Foucault said, as an “ontology of actuality.”
Among those emergencies such as climate change and socio-economic and gender inequality our research will explicitly focus on an issue that has become central in the framework of philosophical debate, namely, the question of animality.
From this research’s perspective, one of the prevailing approaches in the Western philosophical tradition has been to think of animality as a peculiar mirror—a mirror through which humans could see their own image inversely reflected in the projected image. In this way the animal became the most adequate analytical object with which to contrast the human essence and its nature. If the animal could be defined by the pre-eminence of its instincts and irrationality, the human could determine itself by language and rational thought; if the animal was necessarily linked to a natural process then the human was identified with his historical and cultural freedom; if the animal was always associated to its bodily materiality, the human was related to its immaterial spirit. Against this anthropocentric and speciesist perspective our task is to suggest that the realms of the natural-animal and human-historical can be understood as ontologically intertwined, instead of being conceived as irreducible to one another and so mutually exclusive.
Therefore, what we propose in our research is not only to examine the theoretical consequences of emergencies, but also its anthropological, political, and social consequences; aimed at extricating the animal from the human, of exorcising the biological-natural in the cultural-historical.
Understanding the link between the human and the animal also concerns the still open problem of human animality, and so we are of the opinion that it represents one of the most pressing milestones for contemporary philosophical interrogation.
This research is part of the “UPF Center for Gianni Vattimo’s Philosophy and Archives” activities.