ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines two crucial differences between the post-Reformation tradition of hermeneutics and the economy of response. It develops an account of response that is embodied and therefore not just historically and culturally determined but both gendered and erotic. Theoretical accounts of interpretation have, under the influence of the architectonics of Kantian reasoning, centred on acts of consciousness, the operations of Bewusstsein, the formation of judgements. This consciousness is reducible to representations, such that the aim of hermeneutics was nothing less than developing a general method of understanding. The chapter discusses different approach to hermeneutics that rejects the dualism of puche and soma, as it rejects the dualism of sign and the reality that is signifies. It also discusses the process of understanding, sign recognition and interpretation, in the wider economies of embodied response to the world. In psychoanalysis, as in literature, the association between interpretation and therapy has been recognised, even theorised.
