Literature and the Hermeneutics of Detection

Literature and the Hermeneutics of Detection Herman Rapaport IN “THE TASK OF HERMENEUTICS,” Paul Ricoeurhas acknowl­ edged the centrality of Martin Heidegger’s contribution to the field of hermeneutics and its immense impact on French thought. “Heidegger, who read Nietzsche . . . knows that the other, as well as myself, is more unknown to me than any natural phenomenon can be.”1 Whereas philosophers like Wilhelm Dilthey assumed a hermeneutics in which consciousness is capable of intuiting an other, through empathy, thereby reconstructing a history of motivations and actions achieved by way of investigative reflection, Martin Heidegger develops a her­ meneutics which acknowledges the other as curiously inaccessible. For Heidegger rejects the nineteenth-century heritage of an epistemology which places before the philosopher a ready-made construction available to contemplation and analysis. Rather, for Heidegger, our relation to worldliness is saturated with anticipatory attitudes, feelings, and intui­ tions. Ricoeur summarizes this position, of course, when he writes that “In knowledge we posit objects in front of us; but our feeling of the situation precedes this vis-à-vis by placing us in a world.” Placement, then, is the condition of Dasein which Ricoeur defines as “not a subject for which there is an object, but rather a being within being” (pp. 56, 54). Dasein, in other words, is proximate, attitudinal, attentive to worldly clues through which is achieved both a sense of clarification and occultation. This is what in “Was Ist Das, Die Philosophie?”—the lec­ ture was written for a French audience in Cerisy-la-Salle—Heidegger calls “tuned correspondence.” Wenn wir die Philosophie als das gestimmte Entsprechen kennzeichnen, dann wollen wir keineswegs das Denken dem zufälligen Wechsel und den Schwankungen von Gefühlszus­ tänden ausliefern. If we characterize philosophy as tuned correspondence, then we by no means want to sur­ render thinking to the accidental changes and vacillations of sentiments.2 1. Paul Ricoeur, “The Task of Hermeneutics” in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. J. B. Thompson (London: Cambridge, 1981), p. 55. 2. What is Philosophy? (New York: Twayne, 1958), pp. 76, 78-79. 48 Su m m e r 1986 Rapaport Yet, Heidegger dwells on the point that, as Plato says in the Theatetus, philosophy begins with the feeling of astonishment which arises from pathos (emotion). It is this astonishment (der Erstaunen) or attitude of Dasein towards the revelation and occultation of Being that orients Dasein within a hermeneutics of detection, immer schon (tou­ jours déjà), demystifying the assumption that there is a subject who can truly know. “Im Erstaunen halten wir an uns (être en arrêt)" (Heidegger, pp. 84, 85). In considering the overtones of detective fiction within a French cultural context, it is, indeed, important to recall the influence of Heidegger’s philosophical understanding of a hermeneutics of detection, since one can locate important fiction and philosophy in recent years which develops such an orientation towards hermeneutics without entirely losing elements of the detective genre in its more popular forms. Certainly, it is possible to discuss detective fiction as a genre whose con­ ventions have been subordinated to a mode of philosophical reflection, one through which the conventions themselves are merely suggested as part of a writerly ambience marked by suspicion. In Jean Louis Schefer’s recent Origine du crime, one notices that the “scenes” of the crime are dispersed within an archipelago of textual fragments whose negative spaces allow for the detection and suspicion of crime by the conscious­ ness of the reader.3Again, in Marguerite Duras’La douleur, the day-today recording of thoughts converges on the shocks and after-shocks which accompany Duras’ anticipation of the return of Robert L. from Dachau, an anticipation whose consciousness of crime does not end with the closures history provides.4However, these works, which in large part appropriate bits and pieces of the detective fiction genre, are largely exis­ tential in a Sartrean sense, for they attempt to think through questions of accountability, responsibility, and answerability. In fact, it is this moral perspective that allies such works with the popular detective genre insofar as such a genre often attempts to achieve a proper moral view based on the social codes of law and justice...