New Literary History

Up until quite recently, to interpret has meant to spell out what a text means to say, However, over the course of the last century and a half, the word, and the action, of interpreting have expanded remarkably. This new, expanded form of interpretation does not say what things say, but shows how they work, which is to say, how they might be worked out. Interpretation in this sense is not the doubling of a locution, but the realizing of a potential. I recommend that we consider such developments in the light of Peter Sloterdijk’s notion of explizieren, “the making explicit of the implicit,” and his proposal that “[t]he real foundation of modernity is not revolution, but explicitation. Explicitation is for our time the true name of becoming.” The following would be examples of explicitation: the folding of a protein, the development of an embryo, the expression of a gene, the laying out of a proof, the performance of a play. If we follow Michel Serres in seeing the storing and transmission of information as universal, then human interpretation might be seen as a kind of erotic engineeering of a nature that is always at work before us interpreting itself. Such unfoldings ask taxing questions of a critical theory still wedded to the idea of interpretation as a spelling out of mute or repressed meanings. I conclude by considering the forms of responsibility that attach to such forms of interpretation, drawing on the work of Stanley Fish to argue that, despite appearances, they are no freer of the burden of responsibility to their objects of interpretation than before.