Abstract
The paper seeks to demonstrate that self-consciousness is a constitutive aspect of interpretation and that it is thus key for thinking about what interpretation is. The argument proceeds in three steps. First, a critical discussion of Donald Davidson’s thought experiment of radical interpretation is used to support the claim that interpretation qua translation is always bound up with language games that make differences between languages explicit, thus bringing these differences to the fore. Second, the argument demonstrates that the translational mode of making things explicit does not proceed through representation, but through performative transformation: Thus, it develops and changes the very practices that it makes explicit. Third, the argument expands on this claim by putting forward the thesis that explication understood in this way is essential for the human form of life in general, which is to say that making things explicit is an essential element of the realization of self-consciousness. Thus, interpretation is a constitutive element of the realization of self-consciousness and, in turn, interpretation itself has a constitutively self-conscious dimension.
