Identity Construction: Narrative Tension in Saul Bellow’s Herzog

This paper takes narrative ethics as the approach to analyze ethical dimensions of the tensions between self-narrative and other-narrative in Saul Bellow’s Herzog, and indicates that self-narrative represents the protagonist’s appeal of identity construction, other-narrative symbolizes external forces deconstructing his identity, and narrative reconciliation between self-narrative and other-narrative represents possibilities of his identity construction. Representational ethics shows that Herzog’s self-narrative attempts to construct identity through fictionalizing ideal self at the expense of real self, then to consolidate new identities by assimilating the absolute other. However, narrational ethics suggests that other-narrative represents the absolute other’s deconstruction of new identities constructed by Herzog’s subjective intention, and puts all new constructed identities into suspension. Identity reconstruction can be possible only when Herzog faces the gap between real self and ideal self, confronts existence of the absolute other, responds to its ethical call, and actualizes reconciliation between self-narrative and other narrative. Besides, hermeneutic ethics indicates that the reader also has a role to play in Herzog’s process of identity construction due to tensions between self-narrative and other-narrative, which bestows the reader with constantly switched ethical positions and distances from the text, thus makes the reader’s responsibility towards the text an infinite movement.

Conclusion

Drawing together the main lines of argumentation developed in the book, the concluding chapter synthesizes the hermeneutic ethics of storytelling as a framework that provides analytical resources for studying both oppressive and empowering narrative practices and the (ab)uses of narratives in specific cultural contexts. It summarizes narrative hermeneutics as an approach that is attentive to how practices of storytelling expand and diminish a sense of the possible, and it explores narrative fiction as an inquiry into the ethics of being implicated in histories of violence, silence, and dialogue. The chapter sums up how the narratives examined in the book reveal the limits of storytelling from a range of perspectives and how they attest to the ethical potential of storytelling in the six senses articulated in the book, in ways that nuance the theoretical framework. It articulates a fierce commitment to non-subsumptive narrative practices animated by an ethos of dialogue.

Playing with Others

Scholars of hermeneutics have recently taken up the task of elucidating Gadamer’s ethics by studying his work on the structure of understanding and human experience. This article seeks to contribute to that scholarship through an examination of Gadamer’s aesthetics. I suggest that Gadamer’s notions of play and aesthetic non-differentiation provide further resources for understanding Gadamer’s hermeneutic ethics as an ethics of non-differentiation, i.e., a unification of theory and practice (understanding and application). For Gadamer, an understanding of the good is its enactment in the context of the dialogical play we find ourselves engaged in with others. Furthermore, Gadamer’s identification of aesthetic non-differentiation with play reveals that his ethics aims not only to unify theory and practice but also to unite participants in the ethical play as intersubjective elements of a shared experience. Retrieving the ethical import of Gadamer’s aesthetics also helps to unfold Gadamer’s suggestion that hermeneutics itself is an ethical enterprise.

Etyka, hermeneutyka i myśl słaba. Vattimo, Rovatti, Dal / Ethics, Hermeneutics , and ‘Weak Thought’: Gianni Vattimo, Pier Aldo Rovatti, Alessandro Dal Lago

Summary As ethics has acquired an increasingly prominent place in modern hermeneutics, this article attempts to show how ethical aspects of a broadly conceived process of interpretation function in the area of ‘weak thought’ (pensiero debole), which is one of the main developments - not just in Italy - in contemporary hermeneutics. A discussion of the concept of communication (crucial in the hermeneutic ethics of the founder of the ‘weak thought’ Gianni Vattimo, but no less significant in the work of Heidegger, Derrida and Gadamer) is followed by an examination of the contributions of Pier Aldo Rovatti and Alessandro Dal Lago. The latter have developed a distinctly ethical strand of ‘weak thought’ by concentrating on the issues of subjectivity (‘weakening’ of the subject as an ethical gesture) and language (ethical relinquishment of the quest for an absolutely clear and unequivocal manner of expression in favour of eg. metaphors, especially in philosophical discourse).