Abstract

Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics is interrogated in search of a new conception of "dialectics." Its gradual departure from its Heideggerian foundation is traced, showing Gadamer's movement towards Hegel as Heidegger moves away from Hegel. Parallel to our distinction between Gadamer's "speculative" and Heidegger's "non-speculative" dialectical insights, we distinguish between "open-system" and "closed-system dialectics" and criticize the Hegelian Aufhebung by exposing the repressive sublimation of irreducible differences which accompanies understandings or reconciliations between adherents to antagonistic linguistic frameworks or incommensurable belief and value systems. ;Gadamer interprets Heidegger's "circle of understanding" as the hermeneutic circle, but it can also signify the movement of "Reason" itself, or the "closure of metaphysics" which restricts that movement. In deconstructing Gadamer's speculative dialectic we delimit the circle of understanding, not only Gadamer's "fusion of horizons" but the "effective history" within whose movement all "understanding-events" are alleged to be taken up. ;Dialectical thinking moves on both sides of the circle of understanding. It is both the hermeneutic recovery of alienated projections or semantic possibilities and the rupture of the semantic enclosure, which isn't a reproduction, however revolutionary, of already defined structures , but the creation of new structures , or the redefinition of terms in another idiom, incommensurable with its source. Its major mode is its productive phase where closed systems are instituted. Its minor mode is its reproductive phase where it strategically enters the circle of understanding in search of absent possibilities. ;Although they move on both sides of this circle, the major mode outside, the minor mode inside of it, they constantly meet, all along its borders. This is the enigma of dialectics. Dialectics is the movement common to, and passage between, two fundamentally different and irreducible kinds of changes: the transformations into new structures and the hermeneutic reproductions or reappropriations of already existing structures . ;"Temporilizing" deferrals within "the Same" system, and the "spacing/alterity" between "absolutely other" systems, the two incommensurable definitions of Derrida's "differance," belong together