Blackwell Reference Online

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The art or technique of interpretation. The history of hermeneutics goes back to the ancient Greeks. The name was (via a probably false erymology) thought of as deriving from that of the messenger god Hermes. The development of a defined area of modern theory termed hermeneutics out of the practice of scriptural interpretation was predominantly the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), Martin H eidegger (1889–1976), and Hans-Georg G adamer (1900-). In recent theory hermeneutics has often been regarded as an approach to T exts that is no longer methodologically defensible. Poststructuralism sees itself as renouncing hermeneutics’ metaphysical goal of finding the text's original meaning. Jacques D errida contrasts “two interpretations of interpretation”: one -hermeneutics – “seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin that escapes the play and the order of the sign, and lives the necessity of interpretation like an exile”; the other – a deconstructive conception informed by N ietzsche 's claim that truth is the repressive reduction of the infinite diversity of particular intuitions to forms of identity – “affirms play and tries to go beyond man and humanism” (Derrida, 1967b, p. 427). Meaning for Derrida is not a stable origin prior to the signifier, or a goal beyond it, but is dependent upon the inherently unstable signifier. ... log in or subscribe to read full text