Week 5 Lecture 3

Structuralism-Hermeneutics: Hidden Meanings

Hermeneutics is derived from a Greek word, meaning to interpret, and its derivative meaning is interpretation. The first step of understanding is to untangle its multiple layers. In its barest sense, hermeneutics can be understood as a theory, methodology and praxis of interpretation that is geared towards the recapturing of meaning of a text, or a text-analogue, that is temporally or culturally distant, or obscured by ideology and false consciousness.

Structuralism could be seen as a method of interpretation and analysis of aspects of humans life's, their behaviour ,culture and experience that focuses on their relationships with each other.A human person, as another, or as a text, is certainly viewed as a decentred person by the post-structuralist. But the human person, as the self, or as the reader, or as the post-structuralist critic, is viewed in a slightly different light. In the bottom-line, the post-structuralist philosophy of the subject wavers between the Cartesian and the existential paradigms of subjectivity. As heirs of the philosophies of suspicion of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, post-structuralist hermeneutics also adheres to a philosophy of the object that is similar to that of the critical hermeneutics: texts are warped by power and ideology according to their work and views.