Being struck: Gadamer on the contemporaneity of art
Being struck: Gadamer on the contemporaneity of art

Summary/Abstract: With this article I offer a close reading of Gadamer’s Aesthetics and Hermeneutics. The reason I drawattention to this essay is as a response to criticism aimed at Gadamer’s hermeneutic account of art. Inits reception, it has occasionally been viewed as too hermeneutical, too focused on understanding. Imaintain 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 significanceof the artwork. The main purpose of this article is to clarify this experience. This task I undertake intwo steps. First, I emphasize the aesthetic nature of this experience of “being struck” by the artwork inan 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 argumentintends to show that Gadamer does not “reduce” the aesthetic experience to a hermeneutic experienceof 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 thesignificance of this aesthetic experience for Gadamer’s hermeneutics? Gadamer conceptually clarifiesthe experience of “being struck” in terms of the notion of contemporaneity. In my interpretation, theexperience of art shakes us with a sense of self-implication.

• Details
• Contents