L’esilio della parola e il ritorno al linguaggio. Ermeneutica della scrittura letteraria

The paper aims to investigate the hermeneutic centrality of poetry in Gadamer’s philosophy, starting not from its claim to fulfilment of sense but from its linguistic indigence, which constitutively exposes it to the need for hermeneutic execution and integration. The ‘failure’ of the poetic word in the face of the unspoken and the unspeakable configures, according to Gadamer, the fundamental exodic condition of poetry that differentiates it from the philosophical text: while the latter, through infinite dialogue, approaches the fullness of meaning, poetry, through its specific tone, allows the unspeakable to resound. The decisive confrontation with Paul Celan’s lyric poetry leads Gadamer to deepen the constitutive nostalgic character of the poetic word, which is always reminiscence and nostos with respect to the estrangement and dispossession to which it is destined. Gadamer finds in Celan’s poetry a fundamental character of resistance and witness that derives from its capacity to rise above the semantic univocity required for philosophical writing in order to address itself as a message or announcement to the reader and interpreter. The poetic word’s claim to truth is therefore connected to its ability to speak on behalf of an otherness that always remains unattainable and distant but which, in its disquieting dissonance and extraneousness, essentially challenges and provokes us.