ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on hermeneutics emerged from the crisis in mimetic representation occasioned by the collapse of what might be called specularity as a model of knowledge. It concerns the ancient distinction between two models of light, known as lux and lumen, a distinction ultimately abandoned because of its problematic implications. The crisis of ocularcentrism comes when it is no longer acceptable to oscillate between these two models or to assume a necessary hierarchy between them. The chapter emphasizes the paradoxical typicality of Jacques Ellul's self-described cry in the wilderness and its implications for the recent upsurge of interest in hermeneutics. As for specularity in hermeneutics, Hans-Georg Gadamer himself admits that it remains an inevitable impulse in language. Explicitly taking issue with Merleau-Ponty's optimistic hermeneutic belief in the saturation of the world with meaning, Buci-Glucksmann understands the implications of baroque rhetoric to be the maintenance of opacity and superficiality.
