Doing Justice to Poetry: Gadamer and Derrida on Reading Paul Celan

A large part of what scholars do in the humanities is reading and interpreting texts, and they must do so in a just and righteous manner. But what does that mean, doing justice to a text? To a philosophical text, but also to a literary or a poetic text? This is the question at stake in the ‘Gadamer-Derrida encounter,’ which remains relevant for our daily interpretative endeavors. Rather than adding another commentary to the already extensive literature on this debate, this paper offers a comparative analysis of two closely related essays in which Gadamer and Derrida read the work of the German poet Paul Celan with a keen eye for differences, as well as similarities, between the hermeneutical strategies of both philosophers. These two essays lead me to specify the guiding question of this paper: what does it mean to do justice to a poetic text, that is, to poetry? To answer this question, the paper discusses several issues, starting with Gadamer’s and Derrida’s shared rejection of the intentions of the poet as the decisive factor in interpreting poetry. This is followed by a discussion of Gadamer’s hermeneutical approach, as exemplified by his interpretation of Celan, and Derrida’s main objections to this approach. Having subsequently discussed the way in which Derrida demarcates his own hermeneutics from that of Gadamer, the paper first concludes that Gadamer’s and Derrida’s positions are sufficiently refined to be considered as complementary rather than mutually exclusive. Second, this paper argues that doing justice to a philosophical, literary or poetic text means seeking to decipher its meaning, as Gadamer argues, whilst accepting that no articulated meaning can ever be final, certain or exhaustive, as Derrida emphasizes.