Reading Dennett has led me to think that it would be both interesting and useful to produce a sort of taxonomy of different species of hermeneutics. Here’s a start. Perhaps readers can suggest better names and other editions to such a list.
Zoohermeneutics: Intepretation that traces all practices and social formations back to biological and evolutionary principles. Exemplars of this would be Dennett, Dawkins, and roughly anything from evolutionary psychology and sociology.
Theohermeneutics: This is a wide ranging field that requires further subdivisions. One variety interprets historical and political events in terms of Biblical prophecy. Pat Robertson would be an example of this. Other approaches interpret texts in terms of their religious symbolism. Paul Ricoeur would be a good example of this. Clearly Ricoeur and Robertson are doing entirely different things.
Econohermeneutics: This would be a form of interpretation that explains cultural phenomena in terms of economic conditions. Marx would, of course, fall here. As would Friedman.
Ontohermeneutics: The most famous proponent of this heremeneutics would be Heidegger who reads all of Western history in terms of different sendings of being.
Pathohermeneutics: This hermeneutics traces texts back to the lived body. Merleau-Ponty and Lakoff come to mind here.
Aestheticohermeneutics: This form of hermeneutics traces texts back to distributions of sensation. Logical positivism falls here as does Hume and other empiricists. Under one reading, Deleuze would fall under this as well, though in a very different way than logical positivism.
Historicohermeneutics: This interpretative approach traces texts back to their historical conditions of production.
Dunamohermeneutics(?): This would be that hermeneutics that traces texts back to distributions of power. Spinoza, Nietzsche, Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari might be placed here.
Semiohermeneutics: This hermeneutics would look at texts as networks of relations among other texts. Certain aspects of Derrida and Butler fall here. Gadamer would fall here. Basically any intertextual approach would fall in this category.
Sociohermeneutics: Interpretative approaches that explain texts sociologically, e.g., Luhmann, perhaps Latour.
Biohermeneutics: Interpretative approaches that explain phenomena vitalistically, e.g., Deleuze, Bergson.
Any other suggestions?
Larval Subjects . 
April 27, 2007 at 3:52 am
Harmohermeneutics:Derives from the attempt of Sri Aurobindo to harmonize disparate points of view on the anvil of the ageless Vedic vision.
April 27, 2007 at 4:25 am
Playing the game, one might also mention interpretive methods that make desires or drives primary, ones that make geography primary (Braudel), or ones that emphasize new technological developments (similar to Marx and other historicists, but not identical — H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, even Henry Ford).
But wait a moment — many of these thinkers seem to suffer from this schematic, including Deleuze who shows up in several competing categories. I think what you’ve done is interesting, and potentially helpful, but the rhetoric seems titled towards a despairing diagnosis of arbitrary hermeneutics.
April 27, 2007 at 1:34 pm
Thanks for the suggestions, Rene. I don’t think I’m trying to suggest that all these hermeneutics are arbitrary. I do think some are better than others. For instance, I have contempt for theohermeneutics and certain forms of pathohermeneutics (Lakoff), aesthetohermeneutics (logical positivism), and zoohermeneutics (evolutionary sociology and psychology). Mostly I’m just trying to get a catalogue together to have a clearer picture of how these interpretive strategies work.
April 29, 2007 at 12:54 am
Its a good and pretty complete list of *something*, but I am unclear as to the motivations or grounds for such a taxonomy..
Doesn’t the project of classifying hermeneutic projects require some kind of meta-hermeneutics? It really needn’t be said that such a classificatory project (or any) doesn’t happen without a hermeneutic standpoint of its own.
Also, the obvious difficulty of providing a reading which acts *purely* within the domain of almost any one of these ‘hermeneutics’ makes me wonder how useful such a scheme ends up being. Nearly all interesting readings seem to force one hermeneutic through another (like Zizek’s concept of ‘short circuiting’).
One example would seem to be gender hermeneutics. To simply analyze a ‘text’ in terms of ‘gender’ presupposes an understanding of what gender in fact is, a ‘reading’ of the concept of gender itself. An understanding of gender – which is required for said ‘genderhermeneutics’ – is not itself ‘genderhermeneutics’, but is an analysis of gender in terms of something else. Here we could have recourse to a zoohermeneutical understanding of gender, an econohermeneutical one, a semiotic, &c.
Or, for instance, the econohermeneutics of Marxism. To suggest Marx is simply offering a reading of history in terms of ‘economics’ is an absurd oversimplification (and I am certainly not implying you have made this error). To do so would be to fetishize and reify the economic, granting it its own self sufficient ground. Marx is, it seems to me, doing the exact opposite, which is show how the economic is tied up with structures of power and production (more of a historohermeneutics or dunamohermeneutics).
And I think it is an interesting side-note that employing an ‘xhermeneutic’ or ‘hermenutic of x’ isn’t necessarily equivalent to endorsing its validity.
For instance, in The God Illusion, Dawkins consistently assumes that all atrocities committed ‘in the name of religion’, in fact were, instead of focusing on the economic, political, sociological reasons for the crusades (or 9/11, &c.). (The intelligent turn for an atheist to make here, I think, would be to deny the validity of a religious explanation for political action and reduce it to its socio-political and material conditions and demonstrate how the ‘illusion’ itself works/is performed.)
I (a lowly undergraduate) am generally very impressed by your writing, but if I understand it correctly, this list is oddly short sighted in a few ways.
I suppose if anything my argument is that your list is simply too ridiculously long and arbitrary. Depending on one’s own ‘hermeneutic’, the categories seem to collapse into one another in interesting and different ways. i.e, I would tend to collapse most econohermeneutics into dunohermeneutics, as well as (at least on some days) historichermeneutics – but of course this is from my perspective as a ‘dunamohermeneuticist’.
Perhaps a more productive classificatory scheme would be one that focused on method. Such a list would no doubt be much smaller, perhaps along the lines of Ricoeur’s ‘hermeneutics of trust/suspicion’, if not so obviously polemical.
I apologize in advance if I have entirely misconstrued your project.
Eli
April 29, 2007 at 12:56 am
Though I suppose it fares somewhat better as a method of categorizing authors.
April 29, 2007 at 4:50 am
Its a good and pretty complete list of *something*, but I am unclear as to the motivations or grounds for such a taxonomy.
The truth of the matter is that I’m uncertain with the purpose of such a list. I get an idea and I write it down. Some of those ideas are taken up further, while others just fall to the wayside. In my view taxonomies are generally uninteresting as they tell you little or nothing of what to do with them. This, for instance, is one of the problems I’ve had in my own extensive forays into Peircian semiotics. On the other hand, a sorting like this at least affords me the possibility of thinking a bit more clearly about different approaches to textual analysis and what might be at stake. I purposefully left the categories broad to capture as many diverse approaches as follows and to allow for debate within the categories. For instance, a category like genderhermeneutics would include figures like Butler, perhaps Foucault, Irigaray, de Beauvoir, etc. Clearly there would be a number of debates among these theorists as to just what constitutes gender and how it is to be analyzed. Similarly, in the category of econohermeneutics, both Friedman and Marx would be included, yet they certainly would disagree on a number of points. Spinoza’s Theologico-Politico Treatise would, in parts, fall under theohermeneutics, but he would share little in common with Jean-Luc Marion beyond talking about Scripture due to his naturalist stance. Consequently the taxonomy minimally allows me to trace the theme of what’s being discussed without making immediate judgments as to the true or proper methodological approach.