The Agon of Interpretation: Towards a Critical Intercultural Hermenuetics ed. by Ming Xie (review)

The Agon of Interpretation is a collection of fourteen essays devoted to the increasingly important topic of communication and understanding across cultures. The collection brings the resources of Western hermeneutic traditions to bear on the problem of interpretation and understanding of cultural differences, in particular, across the differences between Western and non-Western cultures. In her introduction and afterword, Ming Xie emphasizes that intercultural hermeneutics must necessarily be critical. That is, the work of cross-cultural understanding has to include critical self-reflection on the cultural elements each party brings to the process and an openness to recognizing and appreciating alternative points of view.

The collection is divided into three parts. Part One reviews the various theories of interpretation offered by the leading European and North American philosophers who have addressed the topic, including Heidegger, Husserl, Gadamer, Ricouer, Habermas, Levinas, Derrida, Jauss, Rorty, Taylor, and Bernstein. Part Two explores complications that arise with more concrete approaches to interactions across cultural difference. Part Three considers additional topics, such as violence, empathy, human rights, and the conditions for the legitimacy of critical intervention.

The essays in Part 1 address familiar debates and issues, and as a group they offer a concise and cogent introduction to Western theories of interpretation. However, all the contributors, except R. Radhakrishnan, are European (or, at least eurogenic); the same is true for all the texts discussed, except for brief, tantalizing references to Gandhi and to the Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitaro. Part One is clearly a conversation among Western writers from within their own cultural traditions, addressed primarily to readers who are expected to be conversant with that tradition. Reading the essays in this section, it occurred to me that theoretical abstraction does not transcend the cultural context. On the contrary, abstraction exacerbates the problem to the extent that it facilitates the universalization of latent cultural intuitions and prejudgments and identifies its specific logic with human reason itself.

The considerable time and labor invested in producing and reproducing the Western traditions is evident in the essays in this section, as is the minuscule investment in the acquisition and presentation of knowledge about and from other cultural traditions. In The Racial Contract (1997), Charles Mills has asserted that an “epistemology of ignorance” about race is a key element of the American “racial contract.” Something like an epistemology of ignorance about other cultures is evident in the Western hermeneutical theories represented in the first section of The Agon of Interpretation. The effects of this negative epistemology can be counteracted only by the application of due diligence in acquiring and incorporating knowledge about and from other (non-Western) cultures.

However, some essays in Part 1 do reach out in the direction of non-Western knowledge. In “The Commonality of the World and the Intercultural Element: Meaning, Culture, and Chora,” Suzi Adams ends her essay with a brief discussion of Nishida Kitaro’s (1870–1945) concept of basho. The “logic of basho” or “place” can be understood as an “early version of a-subjective phenomenologically sensitive philosophy.” “Kitaro’s logic was accompanied by an ontology of ‘absolute nothingness.’ ‘To be’ for Kitaro means ‘to be within.’” The “absolute nothingness” is not an absence of being, but a “field of dynamic, creative, active movement that is world creative” (77). Alas, that is the extent of Adams’s gesture toward Kitaro.

The “main subjects” of R. Radhakrishman’s “World, Home, and Hermeneutic Phenomenology” are Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, but Radhakrishman begins his essay by citing Gandhi’s image of India as a “house with open windows all around so that the winds of influence may flow in from wherever” but adds his warning “that he would not be left a beggar in his own house” (99). Gandhi’s words suggests the role force and unequal power often play in intercultural exchanges: “How . . . are we to balance phenomenological openness in the name of all Being, or Being with a capital B, with the need...