Preface
Dans sa préface, Iser fait un survol du contenu du livre, comme s'il s'agissait d'un sommaire exécutif.
Chapitre 1: Introduction
Interpréter, c'est toujours traduire: «we have to remind ourselves of what interpretation has always been: an act of translation.» (p.5)
«As long as it is a text that is to be understood, or whose understanding is to be applied, or whose hidden constituents have to be brought to light, the hermeneutic circle in all its variations from Schleiermacher to Ricoeur appears to be an adequate method of dealing with the liminal space.» (p.7)
Iser divise en trois blocs la matière à interpréter: les textes (sacrés ou littéraires), les cultures (par d'autres cultures) et les entités incommensurables (Dieu ou l'humanité). Pour l'interprétation des textes, Iser suggère l'approche du cercle herméneutique.
«In hermeneutics the circle is employed to interrelate the explicit with the implicit, the hidden with the revealed, and the latent with the manifest. It basically sets out to recover what an author has not been aware of when writing, or what lies beyond the historical material to be observed in the present, or what went awry in the human subject on the way to itself. Penetrating behind what is given in order to recuperate what is losts - that is, the author's subconscious, a historical past, or the buried telos of the fractured self - is what structures this type of interpretation.» (p.8)
Des paradigmes d'interprétation: le Marxisme, par exemple. Les contraintes du paradigme fixent les limites de l'interprétation.
Iser réfère beaucoup au livre d'Eco, Les limites de l'interprétation, avec lequel il est d'accord.
Chapitre 2: The Authority of the Canon
En examinant l'utilisation qui est faite de la Torah, Iser montre comment un texte canonique transfert son pouvoir vers ses exégèses officiels qui font dire au texte ce qu'ils veulent. Dans la tradition judaïque, l'interprétation des exégète permet de trouver dans les anciens textes des réponses aux questions d'aujourd'hui (en faisant preuve d'imagination et en s'autorisant une grande liberté d'interpétation).
«From the moment Ecclesiastes became part of the canon, it had to be read in such a way that it would be consistent with the rest of the Scripture. Such an exegesis shows that the meaning of the text is not authoritative; instead, it is the reading given to the text that endows the Book of Ecclesiastes with authority.» (p.17)
Chapitre 3: The Hermeneutic Circle
Sur Schleiermarcher (1768-1834)
«Hermeneutics marks the stage at which interpretation becomes self-reflective. [...] When hermeneutics entered the stage, both commentary and criticism shrank to subgenres of interpretation.» (p.41-42)
L'herméneutique voit le jour une fois que les approches dogmatiques ont été abandonnées et repose sur le texte et sur l'intention de l'auteur.
The hallmark of hermeneutic interpretation: la dualité de l'interprétation qui s'effectue sur deux fronts - le front grammatical et le front psychologique.
«If the focus in grammatical interpretation is on the language system as actualized by the author, the psychological one spotlights the way in which the tools provided by grammar are used; this enables us to find out how the author thinks.» (p.49)
«The basic aim of hermeneutic is to achieve understanding.» (p.55) «Hermeneutics strives to gain its legitimacy by both analyzing and "sanitizing" the procedures of interpretation in order to ensure understanding.» (p.42) «Schleiermacher writes: "We could formulate the task of hermeneutics in negative terms: to avoid misunderstanding at every point.» (p.45)
«It was Schleiermacher's prime objective "to understand an author better than he understood himself".» (p.46)
«The circle of interlinking part/whole, grammar/psychology, and divination/comparison is the hallmark of hermeneutics. It highlights the fact that there is no longer a given authority that can validate what interpretation sets out to achieve. Furthermore, there is no authority dwelling in the text itself; therefore understanding is to be arrived at from within the text by means of manifold circular operations that provide a way of correcting and monitoring understanding.» (p.53)
Iser examine ensuite l'approche de Johann Gustav Droysen (1808-1884) qui a cherché à comprendre l'Histoire (c'est-à-dire bien plus qu'un texte écrit).
«Droysen advances four methodological viewpoints [...]. Each type of interpretation makes its own specific contribution to this process: the pragmatic interpretation generates the coherence of facts; the interpretation of conditions differentiates among them; the psychological interpretation fashions them; and the interpretation of ideas makes them interact. If circularity, operative in the four "artificial ways", endows the given facts with significance, the network of these interdependent "ways" generates history.» (p.64)
«Why is history made to emerge through interpretation? It has no self-presence and therefore is not a graspable entity but can only gain its presence as a continual unfolding.» (p.64)
Enfin, Iser se penche sur les réflexions de Paul Ricoeur dans le domaine de la psychoanalyse, lorsqu'il examine l'approche interprétative de Freud.
«If there are still traces of circularity to be discerned in Ricoeur's proposed means of interpreting the human subject, the familiar back-and-forth movement of the circle now operates in transactional loops.» (p.80)
Chapitre 4: The Recursive Loop
«The methodology of the hermeneutic tradition shows how interpretive procedures change according to the subject matter to be interpreted.» (p.83)
Dans ce chapitre, Iser se penche sur «the type of interpretation ethnographers apply when trying to elucidate the interconnection between the evolution of Homo sapiens and the rise of culture.» (p.87) Il admet d'emblée que «for such an entreprise, the hermeneutic circle, for all its sophisticated variations, no longer works. There is no text to be understood, no understanding to be applied, and no hidden text to be deciphered.» (p.87)
Son hypothèse de départ: «The starting point is the human confrontation with entropy. This requires two things: (a) establishing control over entropy; and (b) establishing equilibrium between humans and the contingency of their environment.» (p.87)
«The gap between what is to be interpreted and the register into which it is translated is of a different dimension, which has repercussions on the methods designed for bridging it. The circle functions as a relay when the subject matter is given (Schleiermacher); it changes into a nesting of circles when the subject matter has to be constituted (Droysen); and it turns into transactional looping when the subject matter has to be brought out into the open (Ricoeur). The wider the gap, the more complicated the circle tends to become.» (p.83)
«The term "cybernetics" was coined in 1947 by Norbert Wiener, who derived it from the Greek "steersman", in other words, the man who controls. Wiener combined this designation with what Clerk Maxwell called the "governor", a feedback device on a machine or engine used to provide automatic control for speed, pressure, or temperature.» (p.84)
Wiener: "Certain kinds of machines and some living organisms - particularly the higher living organisms - can, as we have seen, modify their patterns of behavior on the basis of past experience so as to achieve specific anti-entropic ends. In these higher forms of communicative organisms the environment, considered as the past experience of the individual, can modify the pattern of behavior into one which in some sense or other will deal more effectively with the future environment." (p.85)
Wiener: "We have already indicated that effective behavior must be informed by some sort of feedback process, telling it whether it has equalled its goal or fallen short. The simplest feedbacks deal with gross success or failures of performance... However, there are many other forms of feedback of a more subtle nature." (p.90)
Iser termine le chapitre 4 en se penchant sur l'approche de Francisco Varela et la théorie des systèmes de l'école de Santiago, théorie (the systemic recursion) utilisée pour circonscrire les fondements de la biologie. «Living systems such as the immune system or the nervous system are Varela's principal paradigms». (p.100)
Chapitre 5: The Traveling Differential: Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption
«Interpretation - as we have seen - is an act of translating something either verbal or nonverbal into a register that is linguistic in nature. This applies not only to the transposition of a text into another type of text but also to the translation of a past into a present or a hidden life into transparency. It applies as well to the control of entropy, the processing of a heritage, all encounters between cultures, and the telescoping of different cultural levels.» (p.113)
Dans ce chapitre, Iser s'intéresse au cas où des notions plus abstraites (Dieu, l'humanité, l'existence du monde) doivent être interprétées: «A different problem poses itself when something experienced as immeasurable is to be grasped through an act of interpretation. [...] As interpretation is a cognitive enterprise, transposing something immeasurable into cognition requires a different operational mode from those discussed thus far.» (p.114)
À propos du "liminal space" (cet espace que l'acte d'interprétation dégage entre le sujet de l'interprétation et le résultat de sa transposition): «Recursive looping as a structure of translatability reveals that the liminal space between the foreign and the familiar, between the input and the output, [...], cannot be eliminated, although recursivity is powered by the drive to eliminate it. Consequently, the liminal space highlights a residual untranslatability». (p.114)
Chapitre 6: Configurations of Interpretation: An Epilogue
«To sum up, I will highlight the main points that this discussion of interpretation has yielded. Interpretation is an act of translation, the execution of which depends on the subject matter to be interpreted as well as on the context within which the activity takes place. Consequently, there are only variables of interpretation, conceived as iterations of translatability, and there can never be such a thing as the interpretation.» (p.145)
«It must be borne in mind that for the sake of analysis I have emphasized distinctions among hermeneutics, cybernetics, and differential realizations as types of interpretation. The differences between their operational modes, however, are by no means as rigid, and indeed the hermeneutic circle, the recursive loop, and the traveling differential actually shade into one another whenever interpretation occurs.» (p.146)
«A basic reason for the differentiation of the register is the residual untranslatability that -as we have seen- is not a feature of the subject matter to be interpreted but is produced by interpretation itself.» (p.153)
«Interpretation, as we have seen, always makes something emerge, so that we might be justified in saying that emergence is its hallmark.» (p.154)
Appendix
Deux appendices: «The Emergence of a Cross-Cultural Discourse: Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus» et «Enfoldings in Paterian Discourse: Modes of Translatability»