The abandonment of hermeneutics and the potentialization of the past

I ‘Being in force without significance’

To understand what is at stake in the contemporary experience of the loss of tradition, we might employ the notions ‘being in force’ and ‘significance’ as they are introduced by Agamben as translations of Geltung and Bedeutung, respectively. ³ These notions belong in the first place to legal and political philosophy, as the reception of Agamben’s thought clearly indicates. Yet, that they also concern the status and the meaning of hermeneutics and the transmissibility of tradition is hardly mentioned in the literature, if at all. In addition, the implication of Nancy’s conception of abandonment, which Agamben relates to his account of ‘being in force without significance’, is often referred to in relation to Agamben’s notion of politics but never elaborated to account for the conception of hermeneutics and the loss of tradition that stems from these notions. ⁴

To show why and how the notions of being in force and significance have an important impact on the question of what hermeneutics is and what it means to have lost tradition, let me begin by introducing them from the perspective of Gadamer’s hermeneutics.

For Gadamer, the interpretation of the law has an ‘exemplary meaning’ for hermeneutics. ⁵ The judge needs to interpret the general law that has been handed down to us in such a way that it can be applied to the singular circumstances of the urgent present-day situation that demands judgement. Despite the difference between the time in which the law was first established and the time in which it is to be applied, the judge’s interpretation is by no means arbitrary:

The judge who adapts the transmitted law to the needs of the present is undoubtedly seeking to perform a practical task, but his interpretation of the law is by no means merely for that reason an arbitrary revision. Here again, to understand and to interpret means to discover and recognize a valid meaning [einen geltenden Sinn]. ⁶

Thus, the possibility to recognize a valid meaning is presupposed in the hermeneutic situation. To emphasize this specific hermeneutic character of the judge’s application, Gadamer contrasts it briefly to the situation in which an absolute monarch or sovereign reigns. Such a sovereign can change the law at will. In this latter circumstance there can be no hermeneutics, since the ‘need to understand and interpret arises only when something is enacted in such a way that it is, as enacted, irrevocable and binding’. ⁸

It is exactly this framework of philosophical hermeneutics that both Nancy and Agamben question when they try to understand what it means that our culture is marked by a loss of tradition. Their critique is raised in the first place and most evidently in relation to the question of the law. Agamben summarizes their common point of view as follows: ‘The originary relation of law to life is not application but Abandonment.’ ⁹ The notion of abandonment (which Agamben borrows from Nancy’s work and which Nancy introduces as a translation of Heidegger’s notion of Verlassenheit) is contrasted to application and belonging, and it serves to provide an alternative account of our relation to the past and to tradition.

What does this abandonment mean? How does it reshape our conception of hermeneutics and transmissibility? Can it provide a genuine alternative to Gadamer’s hermeneutics? Once we have established our contemporary relation to tradition as ban and abandonment, is this enough? Or is it rather the task of thinking to break this ban? Before dealing with these difficult questions, let me briefly recall how Nancy and Agamben assess the situation of the law. The passage from Wahrheit und Methode discussed above distinguishes two accounts of the law: the first, hermeneutic one presupposes a meaningful, binding and valid law that is founded in our belonging to it; the second, non-hermeneutic one concerns an empty law – that is, one without signification – that can be determined at will by the sovereign who is thus not bound by the law. Hence, we have either both meaning and validity or neither meaning nor validity.

Agamben provides a third account inspired by Carl Schmitt’s concept of the state of exception and Benjamin’s reformulation of it. The state of exception describes a situation in which the rule of law is suspended and in which the sovereign decides and sentences. At first sight this seems to be equivalent to Gadamer’s second account of the law in which a sovereign reigns. Yet, the main difference with this account is that the state of exception concerns a suspension of the law that is inscribed in the law itself: the law legitimizes the sovereign to reign in those situations – the exceptions – in which the law itself no longer applies, and it grants the sovereign ‘the power of proclaiming a state of exception’. ¹⁰ This means that the law is still in force despite this suspension since it grants the sovereign its legitimacy, but it is no longer in force with its common rules. It is valid, but no longer as a meaningful law. Or, as Agamben puts it, it is in force by its withdrawal: ‘The rule applies to the exception in no longer applying, in withdrawing from it.’ ¹¹ Prior to Agamben, Nancy described this particular suspension of the law in the state of exception in terms of ban and abandonment:

To abandon is to remit, entrust, or turn over to such a sovereign power, and to remit, entrust, or turn over to its ban, that is, to its proclaiming, to its convening, and to its sentencing…The law of abandonment requires that the law be applied through its withdrawal. ¹²

Clearly, the law that is applied through its withdrawal is no longer a valid law in Gadamer’s sense of the word since it does not derive its authority from a meaningful tradition to which we belong and out of which we understand the world and our lives. The validity or the being in force that presents itself here comes to the fore when a tradition or a law has lost its significance but somehow still burdens us with its presence. This is exactly what the notion of withdrawal expresses and how different it is from a pure and complete disappearance, as John Sallis indicates:

Yet disappearance is not quite the same as withdrawal: whatever disappears is simply gone without leaving a trace of itself, whereas what withdraws may, in its very withdrawing, continue to offer some index of itself. ¹³

II The abandonment of hermeneutics

Another way of understanding Agamben’s and Nancy’s critique of a hermeneutics that departs from belonging, can be found in Agamben’s following critique of Gadamer’s hermeneutics:

[H]ermeneutics is capable of nothing other than positing a horizon of infinite tradition and interpretation whose final meaning and foundation must remain unsaid. It can question itself on how understanding takes place, but that there is understanding is what, remaining unthought, renders all understanding possible. ¹⁵

Both of these criticisms argue that (Gadamer’s and Ricoeur’s) hermeneutics does not inquire into the possibility of a relation to the past that is not marked by the presupposition of belonging. As Nancy notes, ‘Hermeneutics requires…that the “participation in meaning” is unaware of the absolute interruption’. ¹⁸ Yet, it is exactly the actualization of the possibility of an interruption of the horizon of meaning that is experienced in the loss of tradition: what is interrupted in this situation is the meaningfulness of tradition and its understandability. To be banned from tradition means that the very transmissibility of the past is lost. ¹⁹ Two questions impose themselves here. First, which alternative account of hermeneutics can we derive from this abandonment and which transmissibility of the past does it inaugurate? Second, is the focus on abandonment enough to think a hermeneutics without the aforementioned presuppositions? The rest of this section will be devoted to the first question in light of Nancy’s account of hermeneutics. The second question will be discussed in the third section.

When Nancy introduces the notion of the ban, he always uses it in a double sense: ban means banishment as well as enthrallment, both exile and spell. ²⁰ Somehow, in its withdrawal, tradition still enchants us although we no longer have access to its meaning. In fact, what becomes visible only in the loss of the transmissibility of tradition is its very being in force. The concept of ban in this double sense guides Nancy’s reinterpretation of hermeneutics in Le partage des voix, as I will argue now.

In the first part of this text, Nancy argues that Gadamer’s and Ricoeur’s account of hermeneutics is different from Heidegger’s understanding of hermeneutics and ἑρμηνεύειν. Nancy does so by establishing a distinction between a primary ἑρμηνεύειν that concerns the announcement [Kundgabe] Heidegger discerns in it, and a secondary ἑρμηνεύειν that coincides with the practice of interpretation as developed by Gadamer and Ricoeur. This primary ἑρμηνεύειν is nothing less than the very opening-up and disclosure of meaning. Since interpretation can only be practised when the horizon of meaning is disclosed for the interpreter, the second form of ἑρμηνεύειν presupposes the primary one. Hence, in terms of the unthought presupposition of hermeneutics discussed above, it is this primary form of ἑρμηνεύειν – announcement – that remains unthought in a hermeneutics that has belonging as its point of departure.

Clearly, the distinction between announcement and interpretation is derived from Heidegger’s later ‘abandonment, after Being and Time, of the term “hermeneutics”’. ²¹ Heidegger discusses this abandonment briefly in ‘Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache’: to avoid the secondary meaning of interpretation, he prefers to focus on language [Sprache] rather than hermeneutics. ²² Although Nancy speaks here first and foremost about the abandonment of a term, it is clear from the second part of Le partage des voix that his true interest concerns an abandonment intrinsic to hermeneutics and which can be traced in Plato’s dialogue Ion.

Thus Nancy introduces the abandonment of hermeneutics in a double sense. Hermeneutics as the practice of interpretation guided by belonging is abandoned – genitivus objectivus – since the quest for the primary form of ἑρμηνεύειν is an inquiry into the domain that precedes the participation in meaning. More importantly, however, as soon as we recalibrate the notion of hermeneutics in light of this original meaning of ἑρμηνεύειν, Nancy’s alternative account of hermeneutics is based on the abandonment of hermeneutics in the genetivus subjectivus.

Let us determine this abandonment of hermeneutics (genetivus subjectivus) in terms of the double meaning of abandonment as spell and exile. It is especially exciting to see how Nancy traces abandonment as spell and enthrallment in his conception of a primary hermeneutics. He does so in the second part of Le partage des voix by providing an intriguing interpretation of the Ion. As is well known, this dialogue of Plato depicts ἑρμηνεύειν as the characteristic activity of the poet and the rhapsode; they are described as the interpreters of the gods and of the poets, respectively. ²³ The poet and the rhapsode are different from the philosopher in one major respect. Whereas the philosopher speaks his words with understanding, both the poet and the rhapsode are excluded from understanding the words they speak. ²⁴ Hence, their ἑρμηνεύειν is marked by the interruption of understanding. In fact, as Socrates ironically notes, as long as a human has its mind ‘in him’, he or she ‘is powerless to indite a verse or chant an oracle’. ²⁵ The poet and the rhapsode speak out of enthusiasm and inspiration. In fact, the communication that takes place in this hermeneutics is not the communication of a particular meaning. To describe the transmission taking place here, Socrates uses the well-known image of the iron rings that transmit a magnetic power: the poet and the rhapsode are like those rings since they communicate a divine power [θεία δύναμις]. ²⁶ Hence, unlike Hermes, the poet and the rhapsode are not so much bringers of a message; they rather transmit a particular power or potential [δύναμις], namely the θεία δύναμις that enthralls the poet and the rhapsode and that is in force without significance through the poetic and rhapsodic articulations.

To indicate how this indeed leads to a different conception of transmissibility, let me recall how Nancy describes the difference between the rhapsode and the poet. The rhapsode is the interpreter of the poet, that is, the interpreter of the interpreter. Given this doubling, one might be inclined to consider the rhapsode to be the one who is further away from the original, poetic inspiration and, hence, shares in the divine power in a lesser way. However, Nancy argues that this is not the case. In the Ion, as he emphasizes, the rhapsode is never depicted as representing a form of decay or ‘debasement’ [dégradation] of the divine power that originally inspired the poet. In fact, the rhapsode is the one who constitutes the chain of iron rings, that is, the one who constitutes the transmissibility and circulation of the divine force as such: ‘the divine force is transmitted intact – but exactly as it is to be transmitted, and it is with the second ring that it manifests entirely this property.’ ²⁷ Hence, the rhapsode is crucial to understand the transmissibility intrinsic to this primary form of hermeneutics. One might even say, as I would like to suggest, that the rhapsode transforms the being in force of the divine power in the word of the poet into the remaining in force of this power in tradition: ‘it is to be transmitted.’

It is in this context that Nancy coins his famous notion of partage as an alternative to the participation of meaning. He introduces it in the expression partage divin, which translates θεία μoίρα or divine dispensation. Socrates uses this expression in the Ion to describe how the poet receives his (limited) ability ‘to compose that to which the Muse has stirred him’. ²⁸ Partage (sharing in/sharing out) describes how the poets and the rhapsodes share in, divide and multiply the divine force by putting their words into circulation. Thus, the poet’s and the rhapsode’s partage are in the mode of abandonment:

That the meaning is given signifies as well that it is abandoned in [abandonner à] the sharing [partage], to the hermeneutic law of the difference between voices, and that it is not a gift, anterior and exterior to our voices and our orations. ²⁹

In his focus on this ‘strange, extra-human power of the word’ at the heart of the poetic and rhapsodic ἑρμηνεύειν, Nancy connects the being in force without significance in the first place to a divine power [θεία δύναμις]. ³¹ Yet, one might wonder why and whether the rhapsode and the poet are compelled to speak. One might wonder whether there is not another potential [δύναμις] at work here as well – one that remains unthought in Nancy’s analysis, namely the capacity of the rhapsode (and the poet) to transmit by speaking and singing. Somehow, the actualization of this rhapsodic potential is taken for granted throughout Nancy’s account of the Ion. This is quite remarkable since the transmissibility Nancy discerns in his account of a primary ἑρμηνεύειν requires not only the divine power but also the actualization of this rhapsodic potential. After all, the divine has no voice of its own; the only voice it has is the multiple voices of poets and rhapsodes that speak on its behalf. What would happen to this voice should the rhapsode prefer not to sing? What would happen when the rhapsode interrupted the transmission of the divine power? What does it mean that this possibility is not taken into account by Nancy? For those acquainted with Agamben, it is clear that these questions, and especially the suggestion of a rhapsode who prefers not to sing, lead us straight into the heart of Agamben’s reflections on potentiality and on Bartleby, the clerk who prefers not to write and to whom we will return in the fourth section.

III The ban of tradition: From Nancy to Agamben

As I noted in the first section, the notions of ban and abandonment invoke the withdrawal of tradition and law. Withdrawal is different from sheer disappearance. This difference indicates that the ban of tradition is accompanied by a certain index of the tradition that withdraws itself. Nancy’s reading of the Ion identifies this index as the divine power that is (to be) transmitted. The being and remaining in force of tradition that occur here are nothing but the continuation of the abandonment of the divine power. It is exactly at this point that one might wonder whether, when an index of tradition is left behind in the empty form of a power, one has truly overcome the presuppositions that mark the hermeneutics of belonging. It is here that Agamben’s questions with respect to the abandonment of hermeneutics find their ground.

With Nancy, Agamben affirms that our present-day relation to the past is marked by the law of abandonment and its accompanying hermeneutics of the ban. Yet, this description of the present-day situation is not enough for him. Although ‘Jean-Luc Nancy is the philosopher who has most rigorously reflected upon the experience of law that is implicit in this being in force without significance’, he does not provide ‘any way out of the ban’. ³² Apparently, although Agamben agrees with Nancy’s characterization of the ban of tradition, he wonders whether this being in force is indeed ‘absolutely impassable’. ³³

In ‘Tradition of the Immemorial’, Agamben deepens these concerns in a terminology that reminds us of Le partage des voix. ³⁴ The very question that inspires Nancy in his inquiry into a primary ἑρμηνεύειν, returns in the question Agamben poses in this essay: ‘How can there be a tradition not simply of a traditum but of openness itself, transmissibility itself?’ ³⁵ Nancy’s explorations of the poetic announcement and the rhapsodic transmissibility provide an answer to this question. Yet, despite this affinity, Agamben argues that Nancy is not capable of truly overcoming the presuppositional structure of the hermeneutics of belonging. Although it is true that the situation of abandonment is emptied of meaning since it interrupts the participation in meaning and thus robs the hermeneutic presupposition of its content, the presuppositional form is still maintained. ³⁶ Hence, although Agamben joins Nancy in his effort to find an alternative to this presuppositional structure of hermeneutics, he doubts whether the alternative provided by the notion of abandonment is sufficient.

In fact, as Agamben argues, the formula ‘being in force without significance’ expresses this preservation of the form of presupposition. Although law and tradition are emptied out of meaning, they remain in force; they keep their spell and their ban. More precisely, in the withdrawal of tradition, Gadamer’s valid meaning changes into a power and a force that enthrall and cannot be understood. The distinction between form and content from ‘Tradition of the Immemorial’ thus runs parallel to the distinction between divine power and meaning. Given our reading of Nancy’s Le partage des voix we see why and in what sense Agamben can conclude that Nancy indeed does not interrupt the form of presupposition despite his interruption of the content of presupposition: transmissibility is nothing but the remaining and the keeping in force of the divine, sovereign power. It is within this framework that Agamben insists on the question of whether it is not possible to break the ban of tradition and whether the first ‘interruption of tradition’ that withdraws us from the participation in meaning does not require a second one that interrupts the spell and the ban of tradition. ³⁷ Therefore, he insists that it is the task of thinking to find a way out of the ban.

The question is what this exactly entails. ‘Tradition of the Immemorial’ ends with the Platonic task of finding an account of language and tradition beyond any (empty) form of presupposition but provides no real indication of what such an account without presuppositions might be. Yet, with the analysis of the previous section in the back of our mind, we have at least one indication of where to look: to interrupt the spell one needs to interrupt the activation and actualization of the rhapsodic potential to transmit. To understand more clearly how Agamben provides such an alternative and to which relation to the past this gives rise, I want to return to the opening passages of this article in which I pointed to the Benjaminian inspiration of Agamben’s reflection on the loss of tradition.

IV Breaking the spell of tradition

The importance of Benjamin for Agamben’s discussion with Nancy can hardly be overrated. In Homo Sacer, Agamben stages his discussion with Nancy as a discussion between Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem. The expression ‘being in force without significance’ [Geltung ohne Bedeutung] is used by Scholem to characterize the role of the law in Kafka’s Vor dem Gesetz. ³⁸ In this well-known parable, the man from the country seeks to enter the law but does not find an entrance. Since he is banned from the law, he does not know what the law asks of him. At the same time, although the law is inaccessible, it remains in force as can be seen from the fact that throughout the story the man waits to get in and is thus captured by the law. In fact, as Agamben suggests, it is the open door of the law that represents the being in force (or the spell) of the law as well as, since the man from country cannot enter, the ‘absolutely impassable’ character of this law. ³⁹ Yet, when the open door represents the being in force of the law, the final sentences of Vor dem Gesetz become crucial, as Agamben indicates: at the very end of both the story and the man’s life, the doorkeeper tells the man from the country that he will go and shut the door. This remark suggests that, albeit only at the very end, the ban of the law can be broken and the law’s being in force can be interrupted. Hence, in this sense, the final sentences of Kafka’s story paint a picture of the second interruption that, after the first interruption of meaning, interrupts the ban of tradition.

Agamben subscribes to this suggestion and argues that it also motivates Benjamin’s objections to Scholem’s account of Kafka’s story. Despite the fact that the content of the law is emptied out, Scholem’s characterization maintains a difference between law and life based on the mere form of the law by which it is kept in force. Kafka’s story, however, ends in a situation in which the law is ultimately ‘indistinguishable from the life over which it ought to rule’. ⁴⁰ In this context, Agamben describes it as the task of thinking to accomplish the transition from the law’s being in force without significance to the indistinction of law and life. Yet, what is this indistinction, and how one can accomplish it? Moreover, how is this indistinction related to the question of transmissibility and the loss of tradition we discussed so far? To answer these questions, let me proceed in three steps.

First, let us consider what Agamben means by the transmissibility of tradition. Also here, his reading of Benjamin is of crucial importance. ⁴¹ The work of Benjamin is rooted in the experience that our present time is marked by an irrecoverable loss of tradition. As Agamben clarifies: ‘Loss of tradition means that the past has lost its transmissibility.’ ⁴² Transmissibility is described as follows:

For it is the transmissibility of culture that, by endowing culture with an immediately perceptible meaning and value, allows man to move freely toward the future without being hindered by the burden of the past. ⁴³

Second, Benjamin’s analysis departs from the analysis that we are no longer connected to the past as to a source of meaning and orientation for our actions: the culture that used to form us, the Bildungsgut, as he calls it, has become useless to us because it no longer transmits any meaningful experience [Erfahrung] that may guide our thoughts and actions. ⁴⁵ To characterize this contemporary relation to tradition, Benjamin introduces the term ‘poverty of experience’ [Armut an Erfahrung]: the present time lacks experiences transmitted in and by tradition that we can incorporate in our lives. Yet, as he emphasizes, this is not a poverty people yearn to overcome; rather people yearn to increase this poverty and to truly get rid of the tradition and the experiences it hands down and to begin anew. ⁴⁶ Such a new beginning requires, as Benjamin notes, that one first ‘makes a clean sweep’. ⁴⁷ Hence, rather than maintaining tradition, the loss of its transmissibility is accompanied by a longing for a new beginning that requires the destruction of tradition. ⁴⁸ This reference to an active destruction and to a ‘destructive character’ who creates empty space where something new may be begun, indicates that the loss of transmissibility as well as the poverty of experience is a phenomenon with two sides. ⁴⁹ On the one hand, it is an event that has happened and by which tradition has lost its meaning, turning the past into a burden. On the other hand, this occurrence allows for two different attitudes: in contrast to those who hand down or transmit the things of the past, making them untouchable and conserving them, as Benjamin writes, the destructive character is the one who affirms this poverty of experience by bringing it to the limit. ⁵⁰

It is this destructive character that has the capacity to overcome tradition’s being in force without significance. In particular, Agamben finds this destructive capacity in Benjamin’s account of the collector of quotes because the practice both of quoting and of collecting is intrinsically destructive for him. First, the practice of quoting destroys the order in which the quotes were originally found, as Benjamin notes: ‘To quote a text includes to interrupt its context [Zusammenhang].’ The word Zusammenhang refers here to context in the sense of the quote’s original connection to other sentences, meanings and values. ⁵¹ Second, as Benjamin notes, a collector takes an object (which in the case of the collector of quotes is a quote) out of the order of ‘all original tasks’ that were assigned to this object; this original order is rendered inoperative by being collected and brought together with its ‘equals’ in a new context. ⁵²

Agamben adopts these Benjaminian insights when he describes the collector of quotes as follows: ‘The collector also “quotes” the object outside its context and in this way destroys the order inside which it finds its value and meaning.’ ⁵³ Thus, this practice installs a relation to the past that does not respect the order in which texts and objects from the past had their original meaning. Whereas we are already alienated from the past when it is no longer meaningful to us, it is the practice of quoting that destroys the particular order of the past’s meaning that has become inaccessible to us. The burden of the past consists in this order that gives everything that is handed down its place in its original meaningful order, thus obstructing the possibility of new uses and understandings. It is the destruction of this order that therefore makes way for another relation to what the past hands down and thus destroys the spell and binding force of tradition.

The collector thus transfigures the quotes and he does so in such a way that the binding force of tradition is overthrown while the quote does not remain meaningless but rather speaks to the present and in the present by ‘opening for man a space between past and future in which he can found his action and his knowledge’. ⁵⁴ The quote thus has the capacity to speak in the present and open up a space for human action. ⁵⁵ In light of the previous discussions, it is clear that the figure of the collector of quotes can be understood as an alternative to the rhapsode: quoting replaces the careful rhapsodic transmission of the original order that keeps the divine power in force. To understand conceptually how these two can indeed provide such an alternative, we need to understand the specific relation to the past it inaugurates and which Agamben describes as a ‘potentialization of the past’.

Third and finally, to understand this latter formulation, let us see how Agamben deals with the notion of potentiality [δύναμις] that Nancy already introduced in the form of a divine power in his account of the abandonment of hermeneutics. Also for Agamben, an intrinsic connection exists between ban and potentiality. ‘Ban’, as he writes, is nothing but a name for

… this potentiality (in the proper sense of the Aristotelian dynamis, which is always also dynamis mē energein, the potentiality not to pass into actuality) of the law to maintain itself in its own privation, to apply in no longer applying. ⁵⁶

As far as I know, Agamben never writes about the rhapsode in this way. Yet, he does write about an analogous figure, namely the copyist or the clerk whose sole task it is to copy already written texts. In his reading of Herman Melville’s creation ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’, Agamben is intrigued by the clerk Bartleby who resists his task to copy the text by his ‘I would prefer not to’. Thus, by not actualizing his potential, he interrupts the continuous handing-down of a law that is in force without significance. ⁵⁷ In this way, by interrupting the force of law and tradition, Bartleby is not only a figure of the destruction of the order of tradition but also a figure of giving potentiality back to the past as Agamben’s essay shows.

The exploration of this latter potentialization is again discussed in reference to Benjamin and this time in relation to a crucial passage on remembrance. For Benjamin, as he, for instance, explains in his famous theses ‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte’, the work of remembrance neither acknowledges the irreversibility of the past nor simply restores or revives the past. ⁵⁸ Rather, remembrance overthrows the order of the past. ⁵⁹ Yet, this overthrow does not make remembrance a purely negative activity. Its destruction is also a restoration, but not of the past as such. It is a restoration of the potentiality of the past, as Agamben writes:

Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again. It is in this sense that Bartleby calls the past into question, re-calling it – not simply to redeem what was, to make it exist again but, more precisely, to consign it once again to potentiality. ⁶⁰

In the case of Melville’s clerk Bartleby and Kafka’s man from the country, this potentialization seems to occur only at the very limit of the stories, if it occurs at all: in Melville’s story, Bartleby dies and in Vor dem Gesetz, the closing of the door is only announced and never actually performed. In this light, Benjamin’s practice of collecting quotes provides a more complete example in which the spell of tradition is broken and potentiality is restored to the words that are quoted. The collector, as we noted above, is for Benjamin the one who removes the collected objects from the order of their original tasks. At the same time, the collector’s anarchism that uproots quotes – or other objects – from their original source is creative, as Benjamin notes: the collector integrates the objects he or she collects in a new context – ‘a newly self-created historical system, the collection’ – that renders their original functioning inoperative and by that offers them the potentiality of another meaning and value than their original ones. ⁶¹ As part of the burden of the past, which offers no meaning or value for the present, the collected quote or object is marked in the present, as Benjamin says, by ‘the complete irrationality of its mere being-present’; yet, this irrationality is ‘overcome’ by the ‘integration’ of the quote and object in a new context offered by the collection. ⁶² By their rearrangement, the collected quotes no longer refer back to their original or earlier use in tradition, but now refer, in the present and in this new context of the collection, to each other. In Agamben’s terminology, the words are given back their potentiality to speak: no longer under the spell of tradition, the quotes restore the capacity of the words to speak in the present. In their new configuration, the quotes show that they do not primarily belong to the past and its horizon of meaning, but rather that they, gathered together, speak together in their present ensemble. The work consisting of quotes referring to each other is thus a work that shows how potentiality is consigned to the quotes again, no longer carrying the index of a withdrawn tradition.

V Concluding remarks: A third hermeneutics?

In distinction to Gadamer’s hermeneutics of belonging and Nancy’s abandonment of hermeneutics, Agamben’s Benjamin provides us with the outlines of a third form of hermeneutics. As we saw, this third hermeneutics breaks the spell of tradition in order to restore the potentiality (of the words) to speak. The difference between the second and the third form of hermeneutics concerns the difference between the rhapsode that sings and the clerk that prefers not to copy. It is the difference between the rhapsode that keeps tradition in force without understanding it, and the collector who destroys the ban of tradition in order to let the quotes from the past speak in the present. In a comment furthering his critique of Gadamer, Agamben indeed suggests the possibility of such a third hermeneutics when he describes Benjamin’s destructive gestures as follows:

For Benjamin, the true hermeneutics of a text is opposite of the one proposed by contemporary hermeneutics. If the interpreter looks toward the unsaid and the infinity of sense, for Benjamin the purpose of doing so is certainly not to preserve them but rather to put an end to them. ⁶³