Introduction

Abstract

Late in their distinguished collaboration, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari wrote that ‘Philosophy needs a nonphilosophy that comprehends it; it needs a nonphilosophical comprehension just as art needs nonart and science needs nonscience.’ (1994, p. 218). We might add to this that every interpretation needs a non-interpretation; every ‘hermeneutic’ needs to be reminded that the god of interpretation is thrice-blessed Hermes: psychopomp of entrances and exits, thresholds and perimeters—genius, charmer, cheat, liar, thief, trickster, dreamweaver, propagandist on behalf of his morally compromised fellow divinities; patron of merchants, teachers, magicians and the dying. The essays in this section of the present volume welcome Hermes in all his ambiguity to the limits of the known and the knowable; to the edges where transgression of the established measures of meaning and measurement is not at all nihilistic (as Nietzsche knew, Apollo the God of Reason is the true metaphysical nihilist, not Hermes), but redounds to the enriching transformation of interpretation as an art of the human imagination applied to the joys and the sorrows, the successes and the failures, of experience and learning.