Chapter 14. Is (dark) hermeneutics ecological?

Timothy Morton once asked an interviewer if he has a cat? The answer was yes, and the following question was: “do you like to stroke her or him?”¹ The answer again was yes. Morton replied: “Well, so you’re already relating to a nonhuman being for no particular reason. You’re already being ecological.”²

This story resonates with Jacques Derrida’s famous entrance-scene in his book The animal therefore I am. Here Derrida describes how his cat looks at him while he stands in the bathroom naked. While the male philosopher is looked at by a nonhuman being he feels shame. The result is a book. Donna Haraway criticized Derrida for such a dick-move. Instead of stroking his cat, getting in touch and relate to him/her, he turned his back und went straight to his desk, writing a book about that encounter. 

Why do I tell those stories? Because – for me – those cat-scenes raised the question whether (dark) hermeneutics is ecological or not? Does an encounter with a book, a text, poem or a painting, a sculpture, a song, etc. count as an encounter with a nonhuman being? Or are those entities contaminated with “humanism”? Is (dark) hermeneutics relating to a nonhuman being for no particular reason as Morton defines? Or is it a relation but for a specific particular reason e.g. understanding? 

My answer is yes and no or something in-between. And this has something to do with the term “response-ability”, which is coined by Derrida and Haraway. The ability to respond to nonhuman beings is a challenging task because most of the times nonhuman beings do not talk in human languages. It is more an act of decoding signs. Again, I feel trapped in hermeneutics and something what philosophers around 1900 and Morton today called Stimmung/ Attunement³ arises. Do I have to be in tune, attuned to be able to respond, to be receptive for what those nonhuman beings are telling me? Do the tell something at all?

I guess I asked the wrong question. Relating for no particular reason seems to be the key and attunement the mode of perception. It is not intellectual, not cognitive but something that comes before all that. “I think”, Morton writes, “we are already being ecological – we just aren’t consciously aware of it.”² At this point I asked myself if (dark) hermeneutics isn’t exactly what Morton is looking for: a practice of relating whether we are aware of its ecological radiation? But (dark) hermeneutics should be conscious. How?

First one has to take seriously that objects cannot be cleansed “of their ‘abject’ qualities”⁴. Therefore, no artwork can be read/interpretated/understood as itself, as if it would float in vacuum. … So far nothing new … “The artwork can’t simply be a representation.”² … also this added nothing new … 

The ecological part lies within the term “beauty” and Morton works strongly towards a beauty without Kant. Kant seems to be the one who tries to keep beauty sane, recognizable and scalable for the human subject. But ecology shows that this isn’t enough or important. Therefore, any approach to what beauty “means” must count this in and therefore becoming ecological. This results in two hermeneutical applications. The first is kind of a negative hermeneutics, finding in every critical approach towards art, that will define art by non-art discourses, something that transcends this definition. For example, Morton writes: “The normal way is to say that art is only a construct and doesn’t really exist – for example it’s just a bourgeois human ideology reproduction mode based on inherited ideas of taste. But what I’m saying is that art is actually a tiny but still recognizable fragment of the kind of larger world, the mostly nonhuman world of influences and designs that go beyond us und violate our idea ow ho ‘owns’ what and who is running the show, such that causality seems to have something animistic or paranormal about it.”⁵

Isn’t that exactly what hermeneutics always tell: there is something “divine” – or whatever you want to call it – in art. The second hermeneutics is as problematic as the first one and risks hermeneutics as a whole: “ecological entities are contradictory by definition”⁶, that means that the law of non-contradiction which reigned western philosophy since Aristoteles comes to an end. But how to we approach meaning and understanding when everything can truly mean everything – the horror of all hermeneutics towards postmodern theory came true – or at least everything can mean its opposite at the same time. 

… Again, nothing new … as Morton writes that “the difference between what a thing is for and its openness, its virtuality” sustains⁷ while the distinction between art and craft or art and design “breaks down”⁸ …  

But Dark Hermeneutics means to look out for the “futurality” for all that is “leaking out of things”⁹. This is the response-ability of Dark Hermeneutics. Every time one reads, watches, looks, feels or attunes at something, one has to be open to what is leaking not to fix the leaking nor to embrace it, but to engage with it in a struggle of designing and becoming designed. 

… again, this sounds nothing new at all … but is does not mean reception theory nor aesthetics of production, but leaving such ideas behind, because everything is already always produced and received. So, what else can Dark Hermeneutics do?

It can be response-able for/to the in-between of meaning, which is not being reducible to its parts as a poem is not only the sum of its words and being “totally different” of other word-piles like a receipt.¹⁰ This sounds quite similar to Derrida’s term différance I guess. Does it go a little bit further? Can we make différance ecological? 

Klopstock’s epos Der Messias lets me cringe every time I have (or I feel) to read it. I cannot get over the religious theme, the sound it has. But there is, I guess, more to it, than just leaving it for the history books as an example of religious poetry in the 18^th century. It seems as if words mean and do not mean what they are referring to. This is the usual play of différance that signifier and signified are not congruent and signifiers spill into each other.

And of course, it is not an accident that Klopstock’s messiah resembles Derrida’s term “l’arrivant” which plays an important role in Morton’s ecological argument and for what he calls “future future”¹¹. But it also resembles to Walter Benjamin’s thoughts about the Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, flanked by Rilkes famous words: “Jeder Engel ist schrecklich” (every angel is terrifying). Yes, yes indeed, but that’s the point. 

Klopstock’s epos was not a piece of art which could be easily digested: For his contemporaries as well as for me it was terribly boring. But again, that is the point, because all angels are terrifying except for the one who writes that sentence (Rilke) and the reader¹². Benjamin instead gets a little bit closer, because as Sigrid Weigel states, “Denn der Text handelt von nichts anderem, als wovon er spricht.“¹³

How? Weigel writes, that he gets his „Denkbild“ „Engel der Geschichte” (angel of history) through a dialectical approach. He combines a poetic quote of Gershom Scholem with Paul Klee’s painting. Poetry and painting resonate so Benjamin can think through pictures as well through words to conceptualize his approach to a philosophy of history. 

And as Morton writes that “per-ver-sion” and “en-vir-onment” contain the “verb to veer”¹⁴ which means “to swerve towards” Benjamin’s method is also a swerving between the gravitational points of Sholem’s poem and Klee’s painting, between theology and secularization. Is this dialectical? Or is dialectics a perversion? The dialectical method here is a bit different because it does not distinguish between the two parts. Both parts seduce, and they can become more parts as we go further, because dialectic is not straight, it veers.² The poem as well as the painting get distorted by Benjamin’s text as well as his text is distorted by the poem and the painting and so on. So, Benjamin’s philosophy of history is a philosophy and a history of distortion. 

This is what one has to keep in mind when one enters the hermeneutical circle, everything is already distorted, everything veers. For Dark Hermeneutics the hermeneutical circle is a vortex, “a darkness that cannot be dispelled”¹⁵. Don’t be afraid. Klopstock`s epos is untimely in its timeframe in the second half of the 18^th century. It veers time and space of the 18^th century distorting the discourse of enlightenment, because it talks of something which is clearly undated. It uses religious words and rhetoric to articulate something else. It uses the Greek hexameter swerving it away of its originally function. It is a dialectical perversion. No wonder it counts as an artwork of the so-called period of “Sentimentalism”, which can be easily attached to the discourse if attunement making it ready for ecology. 

And what about Dark Hermeneutics? Can or should it be an ecological practice? First it is already ecological where the method engages not only with the horizon of a human subject but with nonhuman entities. Just as stroking a cat Dark Hermeneutics is interpreting nonhuman beings without any reason but not without a cause. Because causality is beauty we are already entangled in causation and causes. 

Here comes the dark part of Dark Hermeneutics in handy. As Morton describes everyone has a dark spot in their inner space, which is not a cancerous tumor but the dialectical veer of oneself not quite the other or the Other, but something that is different from oneself, kind of différance, something that arrives and to what we have to be response-able. Something we have to learn to “appreciate” especially in its ambiguity.¹⁶

And what is called “mantics” (which is the practice before hermeneutics) resonates with “your indifference to ecological things” and this “is exactly the sort of place where you will find the right kind of ecological feeling.”² So the next step is to practice that feeling – that is Dark Hermeneutics. 

This is as Morton writes not “the same as being religious”¹⁷ just like Klopstock’s epos does not aim at being religious at all. It isn’t “the same as being an atheist […] either” just as Benjamin’s philosophy of history implies.¹⁸

Weigel calls it an “gegenstrebige Fügung” (opposed coincidence), something that complies while opposing each other. Derrida would call it cutting together apart (as in Karen Barad’s philosophy of quantum mechanics). It is also the specter (in deconstructivism, quantum theory/philosophy, and ecology) which haunts that echos in the “Denkbild”. Rember: every angel is terrifying. Angels haunt us. But we shouldn’t care, they do it anyway. And we are attuned to that haunting anyway. Just breathe and let go. 

1. Morton 2018, 42 [↩]
2. Ibid. [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩]
3. Ibid. 43 [↩]
4. Ibid. 72 [↩]
5. Ibid. 75f. [↩]
6. Ibid. 76 [↩]
7. ibid. 77 [↩]
8. ibid. [↩]
9. ibid. 78 [↩]
10. Ibid. 82 [↩]
11. ibid. 84 [↩]
12. Morton 2018, 87 [↩]
13. Weigel 2011, http://www.cms.fu-berlin.de/geisteswissenschaften/v/drehmomente/content/1-Weigel/Drehmomente_Weigel.pdf [↩]
14. Morton 2018, 88 [↩]
15. ibid., 92 [↩]
16. Ibid., 96 [↩]
17. Ibid., 98 [↩]
18. Weigel 2011 [↩]

---

---