A RESPITE FROM HISTORICISM: ON A HORIZON OF A POTENTIAL (MIS)UNDERSTANDING

Abstract

The paper deals with Nietzsche’s insights into the concepts of history in terms of his explicit criticism regarding the institution of a collective consciousness implying its abstract mode of (self)establishment, whereby individual life is disregarded. Nietzsche’s memento vivere is further to be associated with those hermeneutical horizons evoking the need for life itself inscribed into a work of art which is to be interpreted in the light of artistic and historical phenomena directed towards the act of a creative understanding of expression, deeply rooted in the human unconscious itself, thus calling for its fulfillment in terms of its own self-expression through the process of interpretation as a process of a contextually produced meaning. The deconstructive turn within the classical hierarchy thought / language - language / thought, precisely indicates the unattainable position held by universalistic concepts of meaning, as well as those concepts claiming the absolute truth in the interpretation of both, a work of art and historical tenets. Thus, the affirmation of life, art and poetry, as creative processes, represents the only possible denouement within the Dearridean theory promoting no final outcome in grasping the overall horizon of a (literary) text.