ABSTRACT
While French, German or Italian philosophers consider that they practise ‘philosophy’, Anglophone philosophers deem them to be engaged in ‘Continental philosophy’. In Paris, in line with the philosophical labels that had come to be attached to their work, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jacques Derrida were perceived to be presenting a confrontation between ‘hermeneutics’ and ‘deconstruction’. Derrida’s express challenge to Gadamer took the form of three ‘questions’. Derrida’s three-pronged retort addressed the following issues. First, Derrida rejected Gadamer‘s basic idea that interlocutors must ‘have the goodwill to understand one another’. Second, Derrida objected to Gadamer’s key idea of ‘dialogue’ and to the accord it pursues that it assumes to be realizable, though ‘mirac[ulously]’. Third, Derrida contested Gadamer’s classical appreciation of ‘understanding’, which relies on the relation between interlocutors, and a text, as being characterized by continuity or seamlessness – to the point where it has been said that, for Gadamer, ‘an understanding of the other becomes a mere instance of understanding ourselves’.
