Risk and Responsibility: Ancient and Modern Dialogues on Interpretation

Abstract

This dissertation intervenes in debates about the ethics and politics of interpretation by articulating a phenomenology of the interpretive process rooted in the concepts of risk, responsibility, error, and complicity. In order to consider how the interpreter incurs risks and responsibilities by participating in a conversation both with her object and with other interpreters, this dissertation explores how two modern authors, Brecht and Arendt, have interpreted and shaped the disparate legacies of two classical authors, Sophocles and Plato.

The first chapter examines how Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus defines the power of interpretation as a power of mobility, and shows how the systematic disruption of locative language connected to Oedipus poetically expresses the risks and responsibilities of the interpreter as one who is perpetually “out of order.” Turning to the modernist revolt against classical drama, the second chapter uses Brecht's Life of Galileo (1938-39) and his theoretical writings to explore how Brecht's resolutely anti-tragic dramaturgy actually reinstates the risks and responsibilities of the tragic attitude towards interpretation on the level of historical time rather than cultural space. The third chapter returns to antiquity to trace the beginnings of the philosophical response to tragedy in Plato's Apology, where Socrates embraces the plurality and indeterminacy of interpretation by consciously cultivating these aspects of his literary voice. In the fourth chapter, Socrates' philosophical affirmation of risk is revived in the thinking of Hannah Arendt, in whose later writings both the life of thought and the life of action take on a distinctly Socratic cast in their common connection to a realm of phenomenal appearance inherently bound to interpretation. This shared form of life overcomes the traditional division between thought and action by affirming interpretive risk and responsibility as essential to a life that is properly human.

This dissertation contributes to debates in classical reception studies, ancient and continental philosophy, and German and ancient Greek literature, as well as theories of tragedy and of its relationship to philosophy. Most importantly, it aims to give new impetus to conversations on the theory and practice of interpretation, the future of poststructuralism, and the future of the humanities.