The Hermeneutic Impulse

How to do hermeneutics after deconstruction with Sharon Hayes, Mary Kelly, Omar Mismar and Kerry Tribe. - A revived form of hermeneutic thought - one negotiating the horizon line between historical events and contemporary interpretation - beats at the heart of today's critical aesthetics. In both artistic practice and theoretical writing, historical interpretation is embodied by two impulses - one to commune, the other to disrupt - both of which contingently hinge an untethered past onto our present. To say tha the past is "untethered" is to refute history's universal meaning in advance of its site-specific "grounding", in the hands of artists and theorists, within any given moment or discursive context. In so doing, the act of "hinging" historical events onto the present performatively manifests a critical, allegorical commentary of the political world within the space of art.