More Radical Hermeneutics

On Not Knowing Who We Are

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by John D. Caputo

Indiana University Press

Due/Published July 2000, 296 pages, paper

ISBN 0253213878

In these spirited essays, John D. Caputo continues the project he launched with Radical Hermeneutics of building a working relationship between hermeneutics and deconstruction. Caputo claims that we are not born into this world hard-wired to know Being, Truth, or the Good, and we are not vessels of a Divine or other omnipotent supernatural force. We have not been chosen as earthly instruments, and there is no supreme Secret to which some have been given privileged access; we make our way through the world hoping to find meaning and structure in our "factical" lives. But this is not all bad news. According to Caputo, the necessity of interpretation, which arises from lack of access to the Secret, radicalizes hermeneutics, opens interpretations and perspectives, and prevents the dominance of any one point of view. Focusing on the way various contemporary philosophers -- Foucault, Derrida, Rorty, Cornell, Marion, Gadamer, and Heidegger -- unfold aspects of the necessity of interpretation of the life world in areas such as madness, friendship, democracy, gender, science, the "end of ethics", religion, and mysticism, this animated study by one of America's leading continental philosophers shakes the foundations of religion and philosophy even as it gives them new life.