A Rebel Against Hermeneutics: On the Presence of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

Stanford Comparative Literature Professor Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is one of the most prolific writers in the Humanities today. He has authored about 20 books (more are forthcoming) and edited even more than that. He has published hundreds of academic essays and at least as many journalistic articles and reviews. Writing primarily in German and English, his work has also been widely translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Hungarian, and several other languages. This prolific record poses serious problems for the traditional review essay. On the one hand, it seems illegitimate and counter-productive to limit the discussion to just one of Gumbrecht’s works, while, on the other, it would be impossible to do justice to his entire oeuvre. Mindful of this dilemma, the following review concentrates mostly on his latest book in English, Production of Presence. What Meaning Cannot Convey, yet also makes frequent reference to his forthcoming In Praise of Athletic Beauty (Harvard UP, 2006), which has already appeared in German under the title Lob des Sports.

This contextualizing approach mirrors Gumbrecht’s own: Production of Presence situates his recent publications in the broad historical framework not only of his previous works (in chapter 1), but with regard to the “pre-history” of metaphysics as well (in chapter 2). His survey account of Western metaphysics focuses on, among other things, the subject-object split that emerged during the Renaissance period (or “Early Modernity”) and became increasingly established through Descartes and 19^th century positivism. His major aim is to highlight the fact that although “Hermeneutics” as a philosophical discipline only developed in the early 19^th century, “interpretation” had already been, for many centuries, “the predominant — and soon afterward, the exclusive — paradigm that Western culture made available for those who wanted to think the relationship of humans to their world” (Production 28).

But the price for this (exclusive) reliance on interpretation has been a “loss of world,” meaning that “we are no longer in touch with the things of the world” (Production 49). “What meaning cannot convey,” Gumbrecht argues, is the “effect of presence” or what he also calls the “presence effect.” And yet, he repeatedly emphasizes that his recent project about the “production of presence” is not simply “anti-hermeneutical” nor is it directed “against interpretation” in general (Production 2). Rather, he seeks to challenge “the enthronement of interpretation as the exclusive core practice of the humanities” (Production 52; emphasis in the original). For those familiar with Gumbrecht’s work, this position presents a slight — but important — shift away from his radically anti-hermeneutic rhetoric during the 1980’s and early 1990’s, when he was still eager to bid “A Farewell to Interpretation,” as indicated by the title of an essay of his from 1994. A former student of the reception theorist Hans-Robert Jauss and well trained in the art and history of interpretation, Gumbrecht broke with his “doctor-father” well before he went to Stanford University in 1989. Gumbrecht himself has “interpreted” his rebellion against Jauss as a strong oedipal reaction that led him to denounce everything the father stood for: hermeneutics, meaning, and, above all, interpretation.

Starting in 1985, Gumbrecht and his collaborators instead began to advocate “Schrift” (“writing”) as one of the key-terms for their own “non-” or “post-hermeneutic” form of literary criticism. They conceived of “writing,” however, less in the Derridian sense of “differance,” but primarily in terms of its physical properties as the material basis for modern communication. The overall goal was to break free from the confinement of interpretation forever caught in the endless circle of presence and absence, signifier and signified, meaning and non-meaning that sustains both deconstruction and traditional hermeneutics. This was indeed a breaking free, but where was one to go? To the letter proper, that black mark on a white surface traditionally charged with...