Towards a Postcritical Hermeneutics: Reconsidering Tradition and Critique in Gadamer

Abstract

Contemporary scholarship in the humanities increasingly adopts a hermeneutics of suspicion to uncover and criticize coercive ideologies in the European cultural tradition. However, there is a growing recognition that the pervasiveness of such a critical spirit overshadows alternative attitudes that humanities scholars can, and do, adopt towards their objects of study. In this article, I leverage these developments to reconsider the relationship between tradition and critique in Gadamer and post-Gadamerian scholarship. Specifically, I argue that Gadamer’s hermeneutic assessment of tradition should be understood not as uncritical, nor as critical by default, but as ‘‘postcritical.’’ This postcritical stance allows for the exposure and dissolution of dogmatic forces in the process of understanding, while remaining cautious of the absolutization of such a suspicious gesture. I conclude by outlining some of the basic elements of a postcritical hermeneutics, which includes ideology critique as a possibility without excluding other, more affirmative possibilities.

Keywords: hermeneutics, critique, tradition, Gadamer, postcritique, suspicion