BEING STRUCK: GADAMER ON THE CONTEMPORANEITY OF ART

Abstract

With this article I offer a close reading of Gadamer’s Aesthetics and Hermeneutics. The reason I draw attention to this essay is as a response to criticism aimed at Gadamer’s hermeneutic account of art. In its reception, it has occasionally been viewed as too hermeneutical, too focused on understanding. I maintain that Aesthetics and Hermeneutics can be considered exempt from this critique. Here, Gadamer offers us the hermeneutic experience in its most aesthetic guise: in being struck by the significance of the artwork. The main purpose of this article is to clarify this experience. This task I undertake in two steps. First, I emphasize the aesthetic nature of this experience of “being struck” by the artwork in an answer to Figal’s critique. As a supplement to Gadamer’s theoretical remarks in Aesthetics and Hermeneutics, I consider the performance piece Faust by Anne Imhof. The second step of my argument intends to show that Gadamer does not “reduce” the aesthetic experience to a hermeneutic experience of meaning but grounds the experience of art hermeneutically. I will argue for my thesis by closely reconstructing Gadamer’s argument in Aesthetics and Hermeneutics. The guiding question is, what is the significance of this aesthetic experience for Gadamer’s hermeneutics? Gadamer conceptually clarifies the experience of “being struck” in terms of the notion of contemporaneity. In my interpretation, the experience of art shakes us with a sense of self-implication.