Both refer to another philosopher whose presence, in both thinkers, is

still little discussed, namely, Hegel. Both philosophers, albeit via different paths, go back to
Greek
philosophy and continually compare themselves with it—a trait that is not at all obvious in the
contemporary landscape. Derrida only occasionally engaged with hermeneutics, and when he
did it was especially to emphasize the difference between deconstruction and hermeneutics.
Thus, he indicates, even if only indirectly, less of the proverbial opposition between orality and
writing and more of the question of understanding, that motif which had guided the debate and
which could still illuminate the distance
and the proximity between both philosophies. Through the topics and the understanding it
becomes
clear how hermeneutics moves from unity and how deconstruction proceeds from difference.
When Gadamer holds his opening address in Paris, which was published later with the title “Text
und Interpretation,” he seems most concerned to distance himself from French philosophy in
general
and deconstruction in particular through the concept of the “text” (GR 156–191/GW2 330–360).
He advocates the need to give voice to the text, in order to highlight its “unity of sense” and to
lead
it back to the dialogue from which it originally springs
For his part, Derrida emphasizes that psychoanalytic discourse allows the interpretative context
to burst wide open. Therefore, he requires a kind of productive interpretation that would at first
occur through a “rupture.” It is around the concept of rupture, or better, of interruption that
Derrida’s third, philosophically decisive question turns. In question here is what Gadamer calls
Verstehen, “understanding.”
The suspicion of deconstruction overtakes hermeneutic dialogue. Deconstruction seems to offer
an alternative view, because it prefers the interruption, maintains dissonance, and preserves the
difference and the otherness of the other, which cannot be appropriated, as well as the
impossibility of understanding.
Gadamer agrees with Derrida that there is no unbroken understanding.
The psychoanalytic dialogue, which aims to understand not what the speaker wants to say, but
what
the speaker does not want to say, is an extreme manifestation of such a rupture, of such a break.
Philosophical hermeneutics has often been misunderstood in its attempt to raise the question of
understanding within philosophy.
According to Heidegger, understanding is the originary way in which the Dasein
succeeds.Gadamer maintains, in turn, that “agreement … is more primordial than
misunderstanding.”
The distance between hermeneutics and deconstruction, in other words, does not lie in the
goodwill
to understand, but in understanding itself, in the way in which understanding follows from either
the
unity of the uninterrupted dialogue or from the difference of the interruption. For Gadamer, the
one
perspective
points to the other. After Heidegger’s attempt to dismantle the language of metaphysics,
there are for Gadamer only two ways, or perhaps one common path, which could still lead into
the
openness of philosophical experience: the path of hermeneutics, which goes from dialectics back
to
dialogue, and the path of deconstruction, which in йcriture provokes the laceration of
metaphysics
Gadamer’s Truth and Method carries out the turn to language following the model of writing
rather
than that of orality. His position can be summarized in the thesis of an inseparable connection
between
orality and writing: “In truth there is no real opposition. What is written must be read and
therefore all
that is written is ‘subordinated to the voice’”
Without ignoring the asymmetry between a written and an oral
dialogue, when an embodied other is present, Gadamer nevertheless emphasizes the continuity
between
the oral and the written In other terms: orality is potentially always already given in writing, and
writing is potentially
always already given in orality.
The transition from the oral to the written occurs through reading. Here, the distance from
Derrida emerges clearly. Lecture, reading, becomes a paradigm that is implicitly opposed to
écriture, writing. And it is not by chance that the paradigm of reading, which is described as
letting‐speak or givingvoice‐ to, is ultimately expanded so far that it coincides with
hermeneutics. “
In 1981, Gadamer in , “Voice and Language” develops his own conception of the voice, which
therefore comes to play a key role in the debate between hermeneutics and deconstruction.
The voice is, in a certain sense, a bridge launched to the écriture. If writing is not an “image of
the voice,” then the voice is not an image of writing . Articulation is therefore the reciprocal link
between voice and writing, a link that sheds light on the passage accomplished by reading. In
contrast to every natural form of expression, speaking and writing are, in fact, an assenting in
what is held in common, starting with the shared fields of play both of the letters and articulated
sounds in any language. Since hermeneutics is a philosophy that emphasizes unity over
difference, continuity over discontinuity, it favors the voice.
However, Gadamer’s doubts concern rather Derrida’s condemnation of the voice and, more
precisely, the link that he believes he sees between the voice and the self‐presence of
consciousness.
In other words, for hermeneutics, difference engraves the voice also. The possibility that what is
evoked may regain a voice in no way eliminates the reference to its absence . This reference is
the space of difference in the voice.
Gadamer has been moved, after Derrida, by the aim to let the voice reemerge from its
concealment,
that is, not in order to restore its central position, but to emphasize the co‐belonging of voice and
writing through articulation.
 In the last subsection of Truth and Method, which concerns the universal aspect of
hermeneutics, Gadamer addressed the meaning of “the turn” from being to language with one of
his most famous and widely cited passages: “ The mother tongue, for Gadamer, is the most
familiar being‐by‐oneself, but starting from an even more fundamental uncanniness . For
language appears so “uncannily near” that it belongs among the “most mysterious questions that
man ponders” . The hermeneutics of language unfolds as hermeneutics of dialogue. If language
arises from the openness of a historical language and realizes itself as individual speech, which
for its part is always a speaking for or with the other, then the existence of language lies in
dialogue.
Thus, it can be said that “speaking proceeds from dialogue” . The endlessness opened by the
virtuality of the word is
the endlessness of the dialogue. Hence, dialogue has “an inner endlessness and no end” (GW2
152).
But for hermeneutics, the interruption is only a suspension, the prelude to the restart of dialogue.
An interruption from outside might occur, but it in no way undermines that endless openness.
According to Gadamer, even the limit‐case of the soul’s inner dialogue with itself is endless.
This is one of the most significant points of dissonance between hermeneutics and
deconstruction: whereas Derrida underlines the creativity of the interruption, Gadamer invokes
and solicits—beyond all interruption—on the endless, or better, the uninterrupted dialogue.
Hence, the unlimited readiness for dialogue which characterizes hermeneutics and which is
philosophically justified by the trust in language and its ability to establish community.
As Heidegger had pointed to the nearness of “thinking” (Denken) to “thanking” (Danken),
Derrida draws together “thinking” (penser) and “weighing” (peser). In order to think and to
weigh, also in the sense of bearing a weight, one must therefore carry, carry within oneself and
on oneself. Yet “to carry now no longer has the meaning of ‘to comprise’ (comporter), to
include, to comprehend in the self, but rather to carry oneself or bear oneself toward (se porter
vers) the infinite inappropriability of the other” (Derrida 2005, 161). It means, above all, to
transmit and translate what is untranslatable,
what will remain as such, as an irreducible surplus, if that remainder of “unreadability”
(illegibilité) will
be preserved which hermeneutics has made possible and which makes hermeneutics possible.
The commitment of deconstruction thus consists of carrying hermeneutics, and in the process
perceiving what is common to them and preserving the remainder of the difference. Unity and
difference, difference and unity, reassert the secret of their bond, of their elusive cross-reference.
Between the two infinites, and therefore infinitely other, dialogue continues, uninterrupted, in the
poem, and with the poem. The trace left by Celan keeps the dialogue open. His words, like many
interruptions, disclose unforeseen openings and unprecedented passages. But the breath of the
poet does more than just support the bridge suspended between the two infinites.