Gadamer, Nietzsche y Derrida

Cercanías y diferencias

Abstract

Gadamer, born in 1900 –the year Nietzsche died–, was, thanks to his outstanding longevity, witness to the ups and downs of Nietzsche’s work and to the attention it gained during the 20th century. Although Gadamer did not have a nietzschean phase and he was suddenly exposed to Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche, he departed from it understanding that hermeneutics could at last achieve complete universality and depth only through Nietzsche’s “critical radicalism”. Gadamer’s and Nietzsche’s philosophies have, without a doubt, remarkable similarities and differences. Both authors seek to show in the artistic experience the transforming character of the happening so characteristic of the understanding. Both are brought together by the constitutive historicity of the human being, and, above all, by the acknowledgement of the ontological value of interpretation – existence’s essential activity that articulates the flow of the sense of what exists. They are brought apart, however, by the weight of the substantial tradition about the renewal of interpretation and the question of whether interpretation is an endless conversation with history in the horizon of a competition that surpasses all subjectivity or an arbitrary display of the power of will. The similarities and differences between Gadamer and Nietzsche lead us to consider the intense dialogue between Gadamer and Derrida that unfolded in the non-place of Paul Célan’s poems. Deconstruction bets to a game as signification movement that does not cease to différer, while for hermeneutics words speak about their own capacity to resonate an unspeakable background that gives them, by denial, their signifying strength.