Speaker
Description
This paper addresses the “crisis of meaning” not as a slogan, but as a hermeneutic trial in which our ways of reading and evaluating art are decided. Two diagnoses, both lucid about the crisis, will be brought into dialogue: Georges Steiner, who advances a “sacred wager” on the real presence of meaning in the work (Language and Silence, 1967; Real Presences, 1989), and Jacques Derrida, who shows that meaning is constituted through différance and remains without ultimate foundation (Of Grammatology, 1967; “Différance”, 1968; The Other Heading, 1991).
Steiner characterizes deconstruction as a “postulate of absence”, detaching the work from any objective finality, and instead insists on a wager on transcendent significance as the only ground for aesthetic experience. Derrida, by contrast, accepts crisis as structural: it destabilizes the metaphysics of presence but opens a critical and political responsibility of reading. One invites us to read as if each work embodied an ultimate presence; the other to accept a multiverse of meanings that remain open-ended.
We apply this framework to specific poetic cases (Rūmī-Mowlānā, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Rimbaud). These poets -- mythologized and appropriated nationally as well as transnationally -- exemplify the tension between transcendent presence and the endless play of language: figures invoked at times as signs of an “elsewhere”, at times as matrices of cultural reinterpretation.
Our aim is modest and pragmatic: to show how these two hermeneutics, rather than excluding one another, provide concrete criteria of use -- when the “as if” of presence yields a truer description; when deconstruction avoids sacralization and opens relevant meanings. In this sense, the “crisis of meaning” appears not as an impasse but as a field of productive tensions -- a decision (etymologically krisis means “to distinguish, to decide”) -- directly linked to today’s interdisciplinary debates on crisis.
| Keywords | crisis of meaning, hermeneutics, poetry and myth, transcendence, interpretation and appropriation aesthetics, deconstruction |
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| thomas.dalle@ens-lyon.fr |