Paul Ricoeur, whose thought looms large in Rowan Williams' recent lecture on Scripture, offers this on hermeneutics:A work of discourse, as a work of art, is an autonomous object at a distance from the authorial intention, from its initial situation.. and from its primitive audience. For this very reason it is open to an infinite range of interpretations. There is room for interpretation because the recovery of the initial event of discourse takes the form of a reconstruction starting from the structure and the inner organisation of the specific modes of discourse. In other words, if hermeneutics is always an attempt to overcome a distance, it has to use distanciation as both the obstacle and the instrument in order to reenact the initial event of discourse in a new event of discourse that will claim to be both faithful and creative.
So, this process, of both using and overcoming the hermeneutical gap, is generative of the new event of discourse, namely interpretation: which of itself, for Ricoeur (as for Williams), is potentially revelatory.
2 comments:
Is there a connection here? I feel like the ideas are dancing just over my head, like the little birds in a warner bros. cartoon that circle around after someone has been caught under an anvil. There is certainly scent of connection.
Distantiation I think of as "breaking the spell"... used particularly in theatre and cinema when the directors deliberately remind you of the artifice of the medium: using jump cuts or strange mixes of sound and image in cinema to unsettle the audience for generally political ends: don't believe the fairytale... this is not the truth!
But in hemenutics it also inevitable because of the cultural divide. We must never forget that Paul's texts are ancient, and weren't written directly to us. So its both a technique of alienation as well as a recognition of alienation.
And we come to the profound shock, perhaps, of realising Williams might be saying something correct but unsettling to evangelicals. Breaking our spell? The Romans passage assumes homosexuality is wrong, but its actual point is to shatter the delusions of the law abiding. A distanciation of sorts to its original readers who presumably thought of themselves as morally above homosexuals. And also, is it to us, in the context of hermenutics in the modern day struggles of the Anglican church?
And those birds keep circling...
We ought perhaps to take these words from the great sage in conjunction with other writings on Biblical narrative. Ricoeur also held that the Gospels were interpretive narratives - that is they were written in such a way as to form a world view (as are all religious texts). "These are narratives in which the ideological interpretation these narratives wish to convey is not superimposed on the narrative by the narrator but is, instead, incorporated into the very strategy of the narrative."The Book and the Text, p.237)
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