ABSTRACT
The excess of language, found in literary inventions, fictions, and discourses, thus borders on a deficit or absence of language. Excessive language exceeds what the human ear can hear and makes language withdraw in a particular muteness or murmur on the threshold of speech. The figure of the threshold is marked by a basic ambiguity. Nancy offers a particular sense of hermeneutics or interpretation modelled on the poet’s activity. The reader of Heidegger has to wait until Nancy’s “Sharing Voices” to find a genuine account of this Heideggerian hint. Nancy fully acknowledges that hermeneutics understood as the unfolding or the deciphering of a particular signification has its own epistemological significance, but it cannot reach into the sense of hermeneutics that is attained in the ancient Greek understanding of poetic speech.
