ABSTRACT
Introduction Jacques Derrida has often expressed a reticence towards hermeneutics. This reticence, however, has not meant the rejection of an interpretive endeavour, but its radicalisation and reconfiguration. Compared with the hermeneutical quest for meaning, deconstruction confronts interpretation with potentialities that are yet unknown, incalculable, unimaginable and unplanned. Having rejected the quest for ‘the’ meaning and working within a context defined by a profusion of meanings and signs, the interpretive endeavour of deconstruction can only lead to a ‘hermeneutics without hermeneutics’ or radical hermeneutics (Caputo 2000: 3). Deconstruction as radical hermeneutics is informed by the sense of contingency and the rejection of an outside. It works from within a text, by unpacking its ‘blind spots’, absences and contradictions, ‘by letting the system itself unravel, letting the play in the system loose’ (Caputo 1987: 260). From a deconstructive perspective, any text is constituted through contradictions, alternative readings, remainders and supplements that cannot be transcended within a self-contained structure. Deconstructive interpretation brings a text in contradiction to itself to reveal a position of radical alterity that goes against what the text wants to say (Critchley and Mooney 1994: 369). The remainder that is revealed in any text is unsublatable; it cannot be integrated in a higher dialectical whole.1
