The Drastic Hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Vladimir Jankélévitch

This chapter furthers recent reappraisals of Vladimir Jankélévitch’s music philosophy, working against Carolyn Abbate’s well-known claim that Jankélévitch’s ‘drastic’ thought opposes all hermeneutic methods. To do so, I illustrate how hermeneutic interpretation is itself a drastic act of doing, taking Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics and outlining its drastic components through the prism of Abbate’s Jankélévitch-inspired terms. I then reconsider Jankélévitch’s music philosophy in the light of the drastic aspects of Gadamer’s thought, offering some surprising points of compatibility between the two thinkers. I show how for both philosophers, musical interpretation is a temporal event, one that develops as an interplay between listener and music, perception and preconception. Additionally, both Gadamer and Jankélévitch consider this interpretive process as potentially infinite, given music’s ineffability.Towards the chapter’s end I shift focus slightly, to claim that products of interpretation, like musicological essays and books, are not only formed by the drastic process of interpreting, but are also responsible for further ‘doings’ – entering a meta-drastic process of ‘musical work’. Rather than just act as mere after-the-fact inscriptions of interpretative doing, these texts have an effect on both performance and our general conception of music, and as such, they ‘do’ something. To conclude, I acknowledge Jankélévitch’s regular denunciation of writing, yet also note the important exception he makes for poetry, offering a brief declaration of the important role poeticism must play in a drastic hermeneutics, with both Jankélévitch and Gadamer acting as key exemplars.