Nietzsche’s great influence on contemporary French philosophy, especially during the last decades of the twentieth century, might be considered as the main inspiration for the emergence of the so-called «philosophy of difference». This paper retraces the key moments of that influential presence, relating the event of Nietzsche’s revival in the late sixties with the effect generated in France by the powerful interpretation offered by Heidegger. An interpretation, whose hermeneutical research for the foundation and definite unity of the nietzschean thought, seemed (...) to overlook, according to the young generation of French philosophers, the untamable plurality of meanings within Nietzsche’s texts, as well as the potentiality that his radical thinking entailed in creating new ways of philosophizing. (shrink)

The poetic work of Paul Celan provides an opportunity to display how Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneuticsdialogues with texts. The article reconstructs Gadamer’s reading of some of the poems of Celan and contrasts this interpretative approach to that of Jacques Derrida, representative of a trend of hermeneutics known as deconstruction and which is inspired by the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Derrida, who is also reader and admirer of Celan, stresses the open, secret, and unspeakable nature of the poem in contrast to the (...) hermeneuticprinciple of Gadamer that emphasizes the recovery of meaning. Despite the differences of both approaches, thearticle argues that they address some form of negativity within the poem, whose silence questions and motivatesboth readings, though they go in different directions. Being able to listen carefully to the negativity of thepoem, to what is unspeakable within the poetic work of Celan, reveals itself as a common motivation in these contemporaneous philosophers, which turns out to make them look closer than they appear to be at first sight. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s great influence on contemporary French philosophy, especially during the last decades of the twentieth century, might be considered as the main inspiration for the emergence of the so-called «philosophy of difference». This paper retraces the key moments of that influential presence, relating the event of Nietzsche’s revival in the late sixties with the effect generated in France by the powerful interpretation offered by Heidegger. An interpretation, whose hermeneutical research for the foundation and definite unity of the nietzschean thought, seemed (...) to overlook, according to the young generation of French philosophers, the untamable plurality of meanings within Nietzsche’s texts, as well as the potentiality that his radical thinking entailed in creating new ways of philosophizing. (shrink)