Breaking the circle

Herman Rapaport’s The Literary Theory Toolkit: A Compendium of Concepts and Methods is an impressive achievement. In less than 300 pages, he gives deft and up-to-the minute summaries of literary theories, describes available literary tools for analyzing narrative, poetry, drama, and for analyzing the systematic and social dimensions of texts. A lot here, explained in unadorned prose, with lots of examples.

Early on, Rapaport discusses the hermeneutical circle, and suggests that various theorists (Derrida, Deleuze, Lacan, Zizek) have found ways to break out. In fact, he thinks that Husserl and Freud had already broken out before the new wave of theory started. In discussing Derrida, he summarizes Derrida’s four explorations of Heidegger’s use of Geschlect , “which means sex, race, gender, family, kin, and stock.” The four essays are about sexual difference, monstrosity and the figure of the hand, Heidegger’s readings of Trakl, and Heidegger’s treatment of Mitsein . Rapaport claims that these explorations “evade the vicious circle of moving from particular to universal and back again.” He elaborates,

Derrida’s essays escape because “they (i) refuse universalization – the reduction of particulars to a central general rationale – and (ii) posit the possibility that there could always be more essays to come, because the particulars are hardly ever exhausted.” For Derrida, “what dictates the viciousness of the hermeneutic circle is simply closure, the positing of a finite limit within which everything out to be made accountable according to a relatively simple rationale that by its very logocentric nature – its circular self-referentiality – is not able to convincingly present the difference between its universalizing claims and its evidentiary particulars, if only because logocentrism forces one to choose between a neat system of relations or all those particulars that won’t fit into the system.” As always with Derrida, it’s finally about finality. It’s all about ecshatological reserve, also about the eschaton’s absence.

Rapaport thinks there is a clear advantage in breaking out of the circle. By doing so, “one exits the thesis trap: advancing a thesis that is merely a point of view in a cavalcade of such views that others can repudiate in the interests of their own counter-claims.” That is, those who break out of the circle outwit Hegel and dialectic. On the other hand, there is a cost to breaking the circle: The circle is much easier, and once one exits “suddenly much more efforts needs to be taken to read, assemble, assess, and hermeneutically process what someone has advanced.”