Listening Carefully to the Unspeakable: Interpretation. Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction

Abstract

The poetic work of Paul Celan provides an opportunity to display how Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics
dialogues with texts. The article reconstructs Gadamer’s reading of some of the poems of Celan and contrasts this interpretative approach to that of Jacques Derrida, representative of a trend of hermeneutics known as deconstruction and which is inspired by the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Derrida, who is also reader and admirer of Celan, stresses the open, secret, and unspeakable nature of the poem in contrast to the hermeneutic
principle of Gadamer that emphasizes the recovery of meaning. Despite the differences of both approaches, the
article argues that they address some form of negativity within the poem, whose silence questions and motivates
both readings, though they go in different directions. Being able to listen carefully to the negativity of the
poem, to what is unspeakable within the poetic work of Celan, reveals itself as a common motivation in these contemporaneous philosophers, which turns out to make them look closer than they appear to be at first sight.