10.13135/2036-542X/7959



What does “emancipation” mean today? A hermeneutical approach to this question tries above all to investigate the significance of emancipation in relation to human praxis. Since capitalist societies today prompt the rethinking of emancipatory practices, this volume sets the task to examine the topic of emancipation through a dialogue between different hermeneutical and aesthetical inquiries, while also opening for broader philosophical discussions of the main question here: “what does it mean for us to emancipate ourselves today?”. Taking the lead from central hermeneutical concepts such as plurality, praxis, non–foundational rationality, history, and the Other, the contributions engage with many different philosophical disciplines as well as philosophical currents.



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Søren Tinning
Trópos
Introduction
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Monografica
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Søren Tinning
2015/07/15
10.13135/2036-542X/7959
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2036-542X
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8
Introduction
https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/tropos/article/download/7959/6689
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                                               trópos • anno VIII • numero 1 • 2015 – ISBN 978-88-548-8594-3
                                                       DOI 10.4399/97888548859431 – pag. 5-8 (giugno 2015)




                                                                       Introduction
                                                S H, S T




What does “emancipation” mean today? A hermeneutical approach to this
question tries above all to investigate the significance of emancipation in
relation to human praxis. Yet, in order to answer this question another
question arises: “emancipation from what?”. Generally speaking emancipa-
tion implies an oppressive or restraining structure, a system of unjustified
constraints from which we have to free ourselves. With Enlightenment,
emancipation emerges on the theoretical horizon first and foremost as the
idea of liberation — through Reason — from the old structures of power
based on dogmatic faith. But if contemporary hermeneutics, primarily with
Gadamer, wants to face critically and in the last instance detach itself from
the tradition of Enlightenment, what then remains from its emancipatory
project? Is it to be abandoned, to be reduced, or rather to be transformed
and concretized according to the new conditions set by history? Other at-
tempts, such as Habermas’, have tried to keep the emancipatory project
of Enlightenment alive by reaffirming the force of the self–reflexion of the
subject and postulate the ideal of the communicative community. Further-
more, the emancipatory movement, besides counteracting the violence of
the status quo, usually implies a direction toward some future horizon of
freedom, some sort of purposiveness or teleological project of an “eman-
cipated state”. If emancipatory praxis contains the utopian horizon of the
overcoming or the abolition of the actual state of things, as it is the case in
Marxist thought, how can hermeneutics contribute in order to better define
this utopian “beyond” towards which emancipation aims?
    Moreover, is the infinite and non–conclusive process of interpretation by
definition an act of emancipation? One possible answer is to think emancipation
together with nihilism as the dissolution of foundations and the abandonment
of every objective and metaphysical order of truth (Vattimo). Can we say,
rephrasing the evangelic message, “Interpretation will set you free”? What
would be a postmodern perspective on emancipation? How to think emanci-
pation: as a linear process of progress or rather as an event, a discontinuity —
the creation of something new or the rearticulation of what already exists?
    Another interesting question to reflect upon is whether the emancipa-
tion of sense from the violence of Truth in the last instance leads to the

                                                                                                          
      Introduction


emancipation from sense itself. All these questions taken together are trying
to outline the space of emancipation in the epoch defined sometimes as
“post–emancipative”: if we do no longer live in the age of emancipation
(Laclau), or, at least, if emancipation has become fragmented in a plurality
of different emancipations, could we still project a common horizon of
emancipatory engagement?
    In this volume, we have not wanted to limit the range of possible an-
swers of these questions to hermeneutics alone. An important contribution
to the “space of emancipation” is found in the arts and contemporary aes-
thetical reflection as well. From Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt to Rancière’s
“emancipated spectator”, only to mention a few examples, we find a vast
variety of studies and practices, which intend to open new perspectives of
emancipation through different aesthetic experiences.
   Since capitalist societies today prompt the rethinking of emancipatory
practices, this volume sets the task to examine the topic of emancipation
through a dialogue between different hermeneutical and aesthetical inquiries,
while also opening for broader philosophical discussions of the main question
here: “what does it mean for us to emancipate ourselves today?”

    Rasmus Dyring’s article, A Spectacle of Disappearance: On the Aesthetics and
Anthropology of Emancipation makes a historical outline of the anthropological
core in the concept of emancipation, before he confronts the results of this
outline with a phenomenological analysis of the self–immolation by Mo-
hamed Bouazizi that set off the recent Tunisian revolution. In the contrast
between a traditional understanding of the human being as the ground of
emancipation by either possessing and producing it, on the one hand, and, on
the other hand, as a primarily responsive being; Dyring sheds new light both
on the concept of emancipation and the concept of freedom.
    In his article, Interpretation and Social Transformation: On the Function of the
Philosophical Profession (in Italian), Giacomo Pezzano discusses the function
of the philosophical education and the role that philosophical hermeneutics
can play in the emancipatory education of subjects. His article compares
three different positions (analytical, Marxist and hermeneutical) as three dif-
ferent paradigms of the philosophical relation between world and subjects.
According to Pezzano, the emancipatory project lies in the critical renewal
of the social character of philosophy and it is in this sense that hermeneutics,
as education for the care of subjects, finds its transformational capacity in
the interpretative resemantization of the subject’s self–reflexion. As con-
clusion, the author proposes a kind of reciprocal convergence between
hermeneutics and pedagogy.
    In his contribution, Nostalgic Freilassen: Emancipation beyond Empower-
ment, Nicolai Krejberg Knudsen takes up the question of emancipation in
                                                               Introduction    


relation to Heidegger’s concepts of nostalgia and attunement. Knudsen here
argues that since nostalgia in Heidegger is a kind of attunement, it should
not be understood as a willfull, metaphysical longing for the full presence
of Being, but as a world–disclosing mode of experience. The consequence
of this argument is that nostalgic attunement should not be conceived as
a reactionary current in Heidegger’s thought as e.g. Vattimo and Caputo
suggest, but as a gesture that has a fundamental emancipatory potential.
    The article written by Ilaria Nidasio, “Free From”: Hans–Georg Gadamer
and the Hermeneutic Way toward a Constructive Emancipation (in Italian) in-
vestigates emancipation in terms of dialogical rationality in the context
of contemporary pluralism. Hermeneutics, as it is shaped in Gadamer’s
thought, is seen as a kind of third way between metaphysics and relativism,
which tries to emancipate human existence from the violence of absolute
claims. According to the author, hermeneutical rationality manifests itself
as an ethical search for a peaceful coexistence with Others. In this sense, she
argues, the emancipatory project offered by hermeneutics is constructive
and important for the dialogue between religions and cultures.
    Graziella Travaglini’s article, Paul Ricoeur: The Reception of the Concept of
Catharsis Between Ethics and Aesthetics (in Italian), examines how Ricoeur
develops the Aristotelian concept of catharsis as a key for opening a horizon
of experience emancipated from technical–instrumental interests. In this
horizon of experience, the sensitive moment becomes constitutive of a
model of rationality, the principles of which belong to praxis rather than
to theoria. Catharsis is, accordingly, interpreted as a central concept for
understanding both the ontological and the ethical–practical values that
Ricoeur attributes to the experience of art. In the indomitable tension
between temporal contingency and narrative structure, the imagination
finds the basis to redefine and renovate the world of praxis.
    Yvonne Hütter’s contribution Emancipation from Rationality — Richard
Rorty’s Attempt to Enlighten the Enlightenment from the Spirit of Romantic
Hermeneutics indicates an emancipatory horizon, which goes beyond the
Enlightenment rationality that operates in dichotomies and under the
domination of representational discoursiveness. Arguing this, the article
shows the connection between Rorty’s thought and the Romantic tradition:
what ties Rorty to the Romantic authors (first of all with Schlegel) is a
non–foundationalist elimination of dichotomies. Hütter points out that “the
aesthetical revolution” of the Romantics, aiming at the new use of language
beyond dualist discourse, coincides with Rorty’s ideas, since both have the
idea of emancipation from dichotomously separated subjectivity and ob-
jectivity in common. Furthermore, Rorty’s strategy offers an important
shift: to break with dichotomies but using the same language of dualists
and continuing with traditional modes of writing.
     Introduction


    In her article on The Problems with an Emancipatory Theory Based on an
Aesthetics of Existence, Linda Schaumann analyses Foucault’s works bringing
forward his appreciation of neoliberalism as an emancipatory stance. A
decision–making subject who becomes the entrepreneur of him/herself
(maximizer of profit and strategist on his/her own) is at the core of ne-
oliberal anthropology. According to the author, it is exactly this point that
motivates Foucault’s appreciation. By assuming a critical approach, she con-
cludes that in an asymmetrical power relationship, the subject’s autonomy
turns out to be only the fulfillment of the will of more powerful agents; in
fact, the neoliberal strategy of maintaining individual freedom reproduces
the truth of more privileged agents.
    In the article, Reappropriating Sovereignty — A Critique of Giorgio Agam-
ben’s Abandonment of Sovereignty, Nicolai von Eggers traces the concept of
sovereignty back to Pindar and Aristotle in order to develop an alterna-
tive to Agamben’s understanding of this concept. Von Eggers shows how
sovereignty in Aristotle entails both political and democratic elements —
elements that Agamben has claimed to be essentially missing from the
logic of sovereignty. On this basis, von Eggers criticizes Giorgio Agamben’s
conception of sovereignty for being too legalistic and apolitical and thereby
incapable of identifying its political and emancipatory potential. He illus-
trates this by asserting the need to reappropriate the political legacy of the
French Revolution rather than abandon it, as Agamben argues.

    In outline, the two first articles introduce two comprehensive perspec-
tives on emancipation, the next three develop three classical hermeneutical
positions on this theme (Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur), while the last
three takes up emancipation within more recent and broad perspectives
(Rorty, Foucault, Agamben). More specifically, this volume investigates a
wide variety of hermeneutical and aesthetical perspectives on the concept
of emancipation. Taking the lead from central hermeneutical concepts
such as plurality, praxis, non–foundational rationality, history, and the Other,
the contributions engage with many different philosophical disciplines
(metaphysics, ontology, ethics, history of philosophy, political philosophy,
pedagogy) as well as philosophical currents (e.g. phenomenology, Marxism,
German Idealism, pragmatism, existentialism, analytical philosophy, Ro-
manticism, and antique philosophy). Throughout these many approaches,
the concept of emancipation comes forward as a central issue that highlights
the philosophical relevance and potential of hermeneutics and aesthetics as
important contributors to how we are to conceive of emancipation in the
beginning of the st Century.
