I would like to start by expressing my gratitude to Grzegorz Pertek for his scrupulous response to my article. His essay Prepositions: The Metaphysics of “Closeness” prompted me to contemplate several issues, while revealing the nuances of many matters I discussed only briefly (perhaps to a fault). (...)
In his article Tracking the (Traces of) Sense (Sledzenie (sladow) sensu), Patryk Szaj asserts a radically hermeneutic understanding of text and reading, proposing we practice the latter by: “[…] taking steps1 upon/after 2[the traces of the text]” in “a form of play that generates meaning …” What might we make of this minor and seemingly non-generative “upon/after” (in Polish, “po”) in the above claim, which, for me, is so central to the ontology of text as “trace?” Does the phrase “traces of the text” mean the same thing as “traces upon/after the text?” And if not, then what does it imply to wedge this particle between “traces” and “text?” And what might it suggest, in turn, if we were to displace the particle to another position within the formula “upon/after traces of the text?”
Radical hermeneutics claims to draw from two traditions simultaneously: on the one hand, it maintains a continuous rapport with its own “past,” or with classical hermeneutics, as proposed by Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur (doing so, of course, only to a degree).
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