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Readings in Interpretation: Holderlin, Hegel, Heidegger (Volume 26)
Readings in Interpretation was first published in 1987. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Readings in Interpretation — a volume primarily on the texts of Holderlin, Hegel, and their interpreter Heidegger—locates itself strategically between literature and philosophy. In keeping with this juxtaposition, it treats the question of self-consciousness and reflection on the levels of "theme" and "text." For both Hegel and Holderlin, selfconsciousness and its relation to knowing are explicit themes, but Waminski's readings show that a more disruptive reflection is operative on the level of text. In an argument that centers on the textual aspects of Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit ,Warminski demonstrates that the negative moment—which is often interpreted as a prelude to a unified self-consciousness—cannot be accounted for by interpretive models drawn from outside the text—by concepts like the self, consciousness, or the subject. Instead, a completely different practice and theory is necessary. The author's "Prefatory Postscript" at the beginning of the book therefore serves as an introduction to sketch the theoretical basis of the readings that follow and as a "postscript" that explains the difference between "reading" and "interpretation" which those readings make necessary.
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1987
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May 22, 2021
There are few books as difficult to review as those that self-consciously anticipate their reviewers and inscribe them within the book to be reviewed as positions that have already been accounted for. Such a “book” - “text” is more like it - is Andrzej Warminski’s Readings in Interpretation: Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger : no matter what I say about it, it will have not only a rejoinder, but, alas, the last word. So be it. It is, in fact, precisely this predicament that Warminski himself confronts, especially in his reading of Hegel and the famous “System” that so powerfully incorporates everything that would oppose it from the outside as an internal moment within it. This is not to say, however, that Warminski isn’t able nonetheless to side-step (bei seite tretan) the System, to join (beitretan) it - since one cannot simply cut oneself off from it - somewhere else it didn’t know it was, bei an other, different Hegel, and do so by means of its own language and examples. Or rather, here, by means of its own language of example (Beispiel), and through the at the times mesmerizing spell or play (spiel) of the preposition bei - whose dissemination is such that one begins to remark it everywhere, rippling through being itself. The result, in any case, is a Hegel met, so to speak, de côté, as Warminski quotes Blanchot as saying (185) - a phrase and a text (Blanchot’s, that is) that is translated and re-inscribed throughout the book. And not just Hegel (as if one could ever read only Hegel!): in addition to exemplary readings of Aristotle, Nietzsche and, of course, Heidegger, one finds running more or less throughout, as a sort of (dis)articulating thread, a sustained - and thus all the more rare - reading of Hölderlin, whose linguistic negative poses, Warminski argues, an inexhaustible défi to both the dialectical negative of Hegel and the ontological negative of Heidegger. And whatever else this linguistic negative might entail, its resources, as Warminski indicates doggedly and with all possible rigor, are not those of, nor are they masterable by, a subject, self, or consciousness.
This latter point is worth re-iterating, if only because it is regularly missed by those, whether “friend” or “enemy,” who claim that, for deconstruction, a text means, as The New York Times frequently puts it, whatever the subject says it means. Not only is this not true - something about which The New York Times has proved, for half a century now, ineducable - it is in fact precisely the subject’s supposed mastery that is visé by any “deconstruction” worthy of the name. To read “deconstructively” - which is to say, to read tout court - leaves us not with an ironic subject lording over the text, but with a disarticulated subject trying to pick up the pieces without altogether succeeding - even if its ultimate failure to do so is by no means immediate. Reading, in short, implicates the subject, precisely by confronting it with its own conditions of (im)possibility. “Small wonder,” writes Warminski, commenting on Blanchot’s reading of Hegel, “that reading is dreadful, for it comes up against a Nothing that does not turn over into Being (nor does it reveal and conceal Being) but rather rereads and rewrites Nothing” (185). As a nothing that does not turn over into Being, it is not a determinate nothing whose borders could be drawn such that one could safely remain on the far side of its perimeter. No, this “nothing” cuts through everything and everyone, leaving nothing and no one unscathed. The attempt to reduce “deconstruction” to subjective fancy or whim - especially regrettable when found, as, alas, is too often the case, among those who mistake themselves for its proponents - is just one more refusal to read, a refusal, moreover, that makes no difference whatsoever.
What difference, then, does reading make? While to answer this question rigorously would require a … reading of Warminski’s book in its own right, it is worth noting that the Hegel, Heidegger and Hölderlin (among others) that one ends up with on the other side, so to speak, of Readings in Interpretation - and thanks not only to the rigor of its readings but also to its exceptional scholarship - are not the ones with which one began, something that, in Hegel’s case especially, suggests that his future (or rather, the future of his text) remains more open than perhaps Hegel himself would ever have imagined. At the very least, then, there is more to read before one can say, properly speaking, the difference reading makes. Warminski’s book is a powerful argument for continuing this work of reading - and an exceptional example of it.
This latter point is worth re-iterating, if only because it is regularly missed by those, whether “friend” or “enemy,” who claim that, for deconstruction, a text means, as The New York Times frequently puts it, whatever the subject says it means. Not only is this not true - something about which The New York Times has proved, for half a century now, ineducable - it is in fact precisely the subject’s supposed mastery that is visé by any “deconstruction” worthy of the name. To read “deconstructively” - which is to say, to read tout court - leaves us not with an ironic subject lording over the text, but with a disarticulated subject trying to pick up the pieces without altogether succeeding - even if its ultimate failure to do so is by no means immediate. Reading, in short, implicates the subject, precisely by confronting it with its own conditions of (im)possibility. “Small wonder,” writes Warminski, commenting on Blanchot’s reading of Hegel, “that reading is dreadful, for it comes up against a Nothing that does not turn over into Being (nor does it reveal and conceal Being) but rather rereads and rewrites Nothing” (185). As a nothing that does not turn over into Being, it is not a determinate nothing whose borders could be drawn such that one could safely remain on the far side of its perimeter. No, this “nothing” cuts through everything and everyone, leaving nothing and no one unscathed. The attempt to reduce “deconstruction” to subjective fancy or whim - especially regrettable when found, as, alas, is too often the case, among those who mistake themselves for its proponents - is just one more refusal to read, a refusal, moreover, that makes no difference whatsoever.
What difference, then, does reading make? While to answer this question rigorously would require a … reading of Warminski’s book in its own right, it is worth noting that the Hegel, Heidegger and Hölderlin (among others) that one ends up with on the other side, so to speak, of Readings in Interpretation - and thanks not only to the rigor of its readings but also to its exceptional scholarship - are not the ones with which one began, something that, in Hegel’s case especially, suggests that his future (or rather, the future of his text) remains more open than perhaps Hegel himself would ever have imagined. At the very least, then, there is more to read before one can say, properly speaking, the difference reading makes. Warminski’s book is a powerful argument for continuing this work of reading - and an exceptional example of it.
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