NARRATIVE AND MEDICINE 2012

Title of the paper:

“Regressing: From Interpretation to the Desire for Meaning”

Abstract: The academic tradition of studies on the problem of interpretation envisages its problem on the grounds of a silent presupposition: interpretation is anactivity. On the basis of this non-explicit formulated decision, interpretation has made itself prone to the kind of repeated and widespread criticism which in the last decades has turned into open skepticism concerning the explicit mechanisms of hermeneutic work, in particular in the field of the experience elicited by artistic objects.

The road from activity to passivity is regressive – the road taken by the effort that re-directs us from poiein to pathein –, and it may lead us to think the role of the desire for meaning as a type of small configurative operation underlying the large global meaning configurations which are at play in the hermeneutic field. Thus, the desire for meaning could be seen as the seminal factor generating a multiplicity of discourses that genetically show a legitimate tendency to escape from the work of rationalized conceptualization, while all along, from the point of view of their ulterior development, they may also be able to deflect their trajectory – under certain specific circumstances – towards the type of architectonic closing typical of the rationalized hermeneutic procedures.

Biographical information: José Miranda Justo (b. 1951) obtained his Ph.D. in 1990 at the University of Lisbon with a thesis on "Themes of Philosophy of Language in J.G. Hamann and J.G. Herder". He has taught since 1976 at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Lisbon in the following areas: Philosophy of Language, History of Hermeneutics, Translation Theory, Modern and Contemporary Art, and Literary Theory. He is a member of the Research Center for Philosophy at the University of Lisbon where he currently leads a project on the translation of Kierkegaard’s works from Danish into Portuguese. He has published extensively on the above mentioned areas.