Phenomenology of the book and hermeneutics of the text : touching and interpreting space

Abstract

Abstract: Books are an essential part of our daily literate culture. In them we find the places where the histories and thoughts of both individuals and societies endure. In them, imaginary subjects and different generations meet. In them, the transmission of knowledge and ideas take place. These are roles that are determined more by the textual content than by the book itself. A book whose text cannot be read is apparently a worthless space. In the realm of philosophy, hermeneutics stresses the primacy of the text over the book. One of its creators, Hans-Georg Gadamer, considers all interpretation as a dialogue whose interlocutor model is the text: “The most important thing is the question that the text puts to us” (Gadamer 2004, 366). The text is a Socratic interlocutor that bursts in with a questioning voice and speaks to the reader, so that he stops listening only to himself. Its alterity resists the reader’s immediate comprehension of it and suspends his previous expectations of interpretation. It opens him to dialogue. It both transforms the reader and makes him a co-player of the game of interpretation, generating, as well, a place for this playful encounter to happen.1 Thus, philosophical hermeneutics ensures the textual primacy. The text—published or not in a book—is the privileged referent of interpretation because it is both the visible presence of the language of words and the audible presence of its voice. Comprehension and interpretation apply to the content that is decipherable for the reader (that appears to his eyes and speaks to his ears). Hermeneutics, thus, rarely applies to the materiality of the book.